Sweden, September 2019
50 years ago as of May 2019, two friends of mine and I demonstrated in a dramatic and non-violent way our heartfelt desire to help end the war in Vietnam. We defaced draft files, the paper files that were used to record the names and other personal details of those 18-year old boys/men who had signed up for the draft at that board, ie the ones who risked being sent to an illegal war in Indochina, to kill or be killed. Little could we then understand the repercussions of that act, reverberating through the decades since.
In practical terms it seems to me that our act in May of 1969 can have had little to no real effect on the number of soldiers actually sent to the war, and any local "shortage" due to our interference with the day-to-day business of the draft-board in Jesup Blair Park in Silver Spring, at the edge of Washington, DC, was certainly made up for by increased call-ups by other draft boards - somewhere else. Certain individuals were replaced with certain other individuals: ever hungering for new blood, the draft system was one weapon among many in the war machine, and that relentless hunter would not be deterred - until the People made it clear they would no longer tolerate that particular war.
Indications are that ours was the last in a series over several years of "stand-by actions": "stand-by" meant we waited for the police and FBI to arrest us, in order to attract attention to our anti-war protest and to the issues that drove us to act. From later in 1969 most or all draft-board actions were designed to palpably interfere with the draft law by literally eliminating all draft files, both locally held ones and centrally held copies in the state boards. As far as is known the draft system had all local files at local draft boards, and centrally held 3-by-5 cards - in each state - yet no federally held copies. Several of the actions from late 1969 on took on the task of eliminating not only the locally held original draft files of one or more boards but also the 3-by-5 cards held in the state board, and it is known that this effort succeeded in a few places. Regarding the effectiveness of this strategy, while it is also known that several million individuals' names were literally erased from the draft system, the elimination of every single local and central file in a particular place resulted once again in a redistribution of the manifold spectre of being sent off to war. The war machine’s hunger knew no bounds, and can always find new blood - as long as everyone else simply looks on.
Was it worth it? For myself it cost most of a year in prison, and exile for 50 years and counting. For most of our number, the cost was years spent in prison, and for most the lifelong elimination of many ordinary civil rights, for example the right to vote. For myself there have been unexpected costs as well, several of them alluded to in earlier (and yet-to-come) posts in this so-called blog. Speaking for myself and many others, and after many years as a physician and psychotherapist (recently as medical chief at Crisis and Trauma Center in Stockholm, Sweden, a small clinic - recently eliminated in Sweden's headlong and tragic rush to New Public Management - where we treated victims mostly of rape and torture) meeting, examining, understanding and treating victims of trauma including severe neglect, physical assault, rape, imprisonment and life-threatening torture, the personal hells and unwelcome teachers in our lives bend and shape us in ways that only the survivor can ever truly know. And the answer to the question is Yes it was worth it.
It is soon 45 years since the war in Vietnam ended - still the only one of America's constant wars that was stopped by the American population. Would it have been better to protest the war in some other way? Maybe. But the non-violent heart of most anti-war protest was and is the key to effective antiwar protest, ranging from point-tax-refusal (not paying the nationwide telephone-bill-surcharge that went to the Defense Department budget during the Vietnam war), to refusing induction into the military, to mass demonstrations, to the even more massive late-Vietnam-war-era Moratorium, to actions such as those of Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers, together with journalists and publishers such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, Wikileaks and many others who reveal wrong-doing - and the list could be much longer.
My mother-in-law, federal judge for many years, often says - even regarding acts that contravene current law, including civil disobedience - What's important is the price. While the price was high, finding the cost of freedom burns an indelible trail, an often phantasmagorical and intentional journey in every sense worth the fears and the failings and the sacrifice.
I was recently asked, nearing my 8th decade, if I would do it again. And my reply was: well of course not. I'm nearly 70 and would no longer dare what I once did. But in 1969 we were young and not afraid of risking our lives. The same person wondered if I thought my participation in an act of civil disobedience helped stop the war. And although the price is not yet paid-in-full, the answer is of course: maybe in some small way it did.
Wednesday, September 11, 2019
Monday, January 1, 2001
01. Key to the Pardon Me Blog
02. Exiled American Refused Pardon
03. Forcing Pardongate
04. Just the facts please
05. How I spent my summer vacation06. Time, time, time...07. Close call08. Rats in a maze and other sorrows09. S
10. Man Without a Country11. Happy 40th
A recent reader pointed out that this "blog", no blog at all of course, lacked structural elements that would make it more palatable, in particular making it possible to skip the more demanding diatribes. So with this in mind, herein follows the new and hopefully improved pardonmeblog. Edited from time to time, as new facts come to light.
Missing parts, so far, are tentatively Singing Man, The Mikado and other Monstrosities, Stir Lingo, Looking for Michael, Conflagration, Landings, Anaconda Friend, Poetic Excursions, Other Delights - and other delights. Stay tuned.
Click on one post/link at a time - that'll get you there. Bon appétit!
03. Forcing Pardongate
04. Just the facts please
05. How I spent my summer vacation06. Time, time, time...07. Close call08. Rats in a maze and other sorrows09. S
10. Man Without a Country11. Happy 40th
A recent reader pointed out that this "blog", no blog at all of course, lacked structural elements that would make it more palatable, in particular making it possible to skip the more demanding diatribes. So with this in mind, herein follows the new and hopefully improved pardonmeblog. Edited from time to time, as new facts come to light.
Missing parts, so far, are tentatively Singing Man, The Mikado and other Monstrosities, Stir Lingo, Looking for Michael, Conflagration, Landings, Anaconda Friend, Poetic Excursions, Other Delights - and other delights. Stay tuned.
Click on one post/link at a time - that'll get you there. Bon appétit!
Copyright © 2008 Michael Bransome
02. Exiled American Refused Pardon
Associated Press, March 14, 2001
STOCKHOLM, Sweden -
Michael Bransome figured the harshest penalty for breaking the law to protest the Vietnam War would be a few years in jail, not a nearly lifelong separation from his mother, his family, his country.
On May 21, 1969 — a day he recalls was bathed in warm sunshine — he and two companions poured black paint over draft registration papers at the draft board in Silver Spring, Md. No one was injured. They politely waited to be arrested. He was six days past his 18th birthday.
Tried and jailed, Bransome fled prison while on a furlough, in fear, he says, of death threats from other inmates. He fled his country, too, and now wants to go home. But appeals to the government have been rejected, and then-President Clinton — whose pardons of higher-profile figures have raised controversy — never answered his plea for forgiveness.
"I had listened to Martin Luther King in person. I understood that civil disobedience was breaking the law for a purpose," says Bransome, now a 49-year-old physician. "I understood there would be punishment and I was ready to go to jail. ... I was willing to sacrifice part of my life if that meant some other young men wouldn't be sent to a war they didn't believe in."
Convicted of mutilating public records, Bransome was sentenced to three years in prison. In 1970, he was granted a furlough months ahead of a possible early release and ran away, making him a federal fugitive until that charge was dropped two decades later.
At 19, he sneaked into Canada, and a year later flew to Sweden. In Sweden, which offered sanctuary to hundreds of American war objectors, the dropout from Albert Einstein High School in Kensington, Md., learned a new language, started a business, studied and became a doctor, married, raised a family — and dreamed of returning home.
"My mother has been here once. One of my brothers has been here once," Bransome said. "I'm almost 50 years old. ... Being offered the possibility to go back to my own country is like being offered a trip to the moon."
He's afraid to go back because he doesn't know if he would be arrested and sent back to jail.
Soft-spoken, trim and energetic, Bransome has tried for years to get his sentence commuted by the Justice Department or be pardoned by the president — as were 176 people, including fugitive financier Marc Rich and convicted drug dealer Carlos Vignali, during Clinton's final days in office.
The Justice Department has a long-standing policy of not accepting pardon applications from nonresidents because it would be too hard to do the required background check, said a department spokeswoman, Susan Dryden.
Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark said he filed a 1995 pardon request for Bransome and argues it should have been evaluated on its merits, not rejected simply because he was outside the country.
"The Michael Bransome story is a powerful story of justice and injustice, of war and peace and a young kid who got caught up in it all," Clark said.
Bransome wrote to Clinton seeking clemency in December.
"I have followed your own path when it comes to Vietnam and would like to say that your words and ideas on the tragedy and the promise of Vietnam are very inspiring," the letter said. "With your help, I can follow your entreaty to come home and offer my hands 'to help bind the wounds, to heal and to build.' ... Please, Mr. President, please bring me home."
In the years since the Vietnam War, conditional amnesties have been granted for thousands of deserters and draft dodgers, and U.S. diplomatic ties have been renewed with the communist regime in Hanoi.
Prominent Swedish and American colleagues have written letters on Bransome's behalf, saying his life in Sweden has amply made up for his youthful act.
"After knowing Michael ... professionally and personally, it seems absurd to me that he still cannot go back to the United States," said Urban Oesby, Bransome's supervisor at a research project on possible genetic roots of alcoholism.
Bransome says a pivotal event that shaped his life was the threat of violence in prison that he thought authorities could not prevent.
"If I had not been threatened, I would have returned" to jail, he says. "And my life would have turned out completely different. ... I wouldn't have come to Stockholm, or met my lovely wife, or have our two beautiful children. I wouldn't had had to wait 20 years to become a doctor."
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The writer of this blog has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article, nor is this blog endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
STOCKHOLM, Sweden -
Michael Bransome figured the harshest penalty for breaking the law to protest the Vietnam War would be a few years in jail, not a nearly lifelong separation from his mother, his family, his country.
On May 21, 1969 — a day he recalls was bathed in warm sunshine — he and two companions poured black paint over draft registration papers at the draft board in Silver Spring, Md. No one was injured. They politely waited to be arrested. He was six days past his 18th birthday.
Tried and jailed, Bransome fled prison while on a furlough, in fear, he says, of death threats from other inmates. He fled his country, too, and now wants to go home. But appeals to the government have been rejected, and then-President Clinton — whose pardons of higher-profile figures have raised controversy — never answered his plea for forgiveness.
"I had listened to Martin Luther King in person. I understood that civil disobedience was breaking the law for a purpose," says Bransome, now a 49-year-old physician. "I understood there would be punishment and I was ready to go to jail. ... I was willing to sacrifice part of my life if that meant some other young men wouldn't be sent to a war they didn't believe in."
Convicted of mutilating public records, Bransome was sentenced to three years in prison. In 1970, he was granted a furlough months ahead of a possible early release and ran away, making him a federal fugitive until that charge was dropped two decades later.
At 19, he sneaked into Canada, and a year later flew to Sweden. In Sweden, which offered sanctuary to hundreds of American war objectors, the dropout from Albert Einstein High School in Kensington, Md., learned a new language, started a business, studied and became a doctor, married, raised a family — and dreamed of returning home.
"My mother has been here once. One of my brothers has been here once," Bransome said. "I'm almost 50 years old. ... Being offered the possibility to go back to my own country is like being offered a trip to the moon."
He's afraid to go back because he doesn't know if he would be arrested and sent back to jail.
Soft-spoken, trim and energetic, Bransome has tried for years to get his sentence commuted by the Justice Department or be pardoned by the president — as were 176 people, including fugitive financier Marc Rich and convicted drug dealer Carlos Vignali, during Clinton's final days in office.
The Justice Department has a long-standing policy of not accepting pardon applications from nonresidents because it would be too hard to do the required background check, said a department spokeswoman, Susan Dryden.
Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark said he filed a 1995 pardon request for Bransome and argues it should have been evaluated on its merits, not rejected simply because he was outside the country.
"The Michael Bransome story is a powerful story of justice and injustice, of war and peace and a young kid who got caught up in it all," Clark said.
Bransome wrote to Clinton seeking clemency in December.
"I have followed your own path when it comes to Vietnam and would like to say that your words and ideas on the tragedy and the promise of Vietnam are very inspiring," the letter said. "With your help, I can follow your entreaty to come home and offer my hands 'to help bind the wounds, to heal and to build.' ... Please, Mr. President, please bring me home."
In the years since the Vietnam War, conditional amnesties have been granted for thousands of deserters and draft dodgers, and U.S. diplomatic ties have been renewed with the communist regime in Hanoi.
Prominent Swedish and American colleagues have written letters on Bransome's behalf, saying his life in Sweden has amply made up for his youthful act.
"After knowing Michael ... professionally and personally, it seems absurd to me that he still cannot go back to the United States," said Urban Oesby, Bransome's supervisor at a research project on possible genetic roots of alcoholism.
Bransome says a pivotal event that shaped his life was the threat of violence in prison that he thought authorities could not prevent.
"If I had not been threatened, I would have returned" to jail, he says. "And my life would have turned out completely different. ... I wouldn't have come to Stockholm, or met my lovely wife, or have our two beautiful children. I wouldn't had had to wait 20 years to become a doctor."
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The writer of this blog has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article, nor is this blog endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
Copyright © 2008 Michael Bransome
03. Forcing Pardongate
Some reactions to Exiled American:
-You makes you choice. You pays you price.
-Stay there and rot forever, germ.
-What this schmuck wants is a free pass.
-I am a Vietnam Veteran as well. This was 30 years ago. Give the guy a break. He poured some paint on some papers. Big deal.
-Obviously Bransome failed to include a sizable check with his letter to Clinton.
-Yeah, sure. Forgive him and let him come home. Looks like the democRATs would have their draft-dodging presidential candidate for 2004. American sheeple seem to like traitors as presidents. They give them TWO terms! (sigh)
And so on. More (much) of the same could be read March 14, 2001 on a conservative news forum that like a few thousand other news sources and websites, from mainstream media to porno sites, on radio shows, classified ad forums, civics class websites, had reprinted or commented on AP's article, a couple months too late to matter (to me). AP’s writer had his eye on post-inaugural publication, having pegged my story as being about one who Clinton didn’t pardon, an article that in subtle but crucial and characteristic ways sculpted the issues it appeared to be reporting. But, by this time, the Decider and his neo-con handlers were in and smiling, Clinton out and hurting.
On the vicissitudes of digging up 50,000 clams
The litany of jabs on the site quoted above was longer and nastier than shown. Some were insightful, all things considered. Six months before, going into what we hoped might be the home stretch for a pardon, after 35 years, we were handed a short-cut, via Little Rock, to the Oval Office: my application for presidential pardon would be presented directly to Bill Himself. We were told there were no guarantees, but it was a pretty sure thing. The President was a busy man, altering his schedule, getting “access”, was going to cost 50 thousand greenbacks. We were incredulous, and out of luck: maybe, if like Marc Rich we'd had piles of cash lying around, we might have considered it, but the idea of money opening the door seemed so unlikely, that we were convinced the offer was a scam.
Little did we know that we were wrong – and right: Pardongate was still a few months off... But this may well have been the ticket, since what the Framers were on about, granting all that royal juice to the top goose, was exactly this: anyone with access (that was the magic word we kept hearing - "access"), no matter how it was gotten, might grip the head or the heart (or the whatever) of the Main Man, regardless of what the Dept of Justice may or may not have said. But: I'm getting ahead of myself...
PARDONGATE: the Constitution and its scholars
The funny thing is, ever since Clinton's handiwork the 20th of January, 2001, finally exploded, journalists (not famous for concise precision) have uniformly ducked one main point of this whole business, though had they consulted their pocket Constitutions they'd have understood. The exact wording is in Article II Section 2, which says the president "shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment."
In February of 2001, as Pardongate was playing to full houses, the House Subcommittee on the Constitution took testimony from Professor of Law Daniel Kobil from Capital University Law School in Columbus, Ohio, where he’d been teaching constitutional law for many years, and whose main research dealt with presidential clemency. Kobil had been asked to recount the history of the President's "pardoning power", and the reasoning of the Framers of the Constitution regarding checks and balances.
In his testimony, Kobil said "Although it is common to refer to any executive act that ameliorates punishment as an exercise of the “pardoning power,” I believe that the term “clemency” more accurately describes the plenary constitutional authority of the President ... under Article II to diminish punishment."
Kobil uses the term "plenary" (meaning “absolute”) to describe the President's power, yet he points out that it isn’t absolute at all, the key limitation being “in cases of impeachment”.
Kobil mentions that among the issues in the debates regarding pardons in 1787, a large one regarded treason: some said pardons for treason should not be allowed unless ratified by the Senate, others that the President shouldn’t be able to issue a pardon at all in case of treason.
Both ideas were rejected. The side that won (8 to 1 in the final vote) held that the Congress already had too much power, and as Kobil said "if the President had been required to share the clemency power with the Congress, the efficacy of clemency as an essential counterbalance on the law-making and law-interpreting branches, would be diminished." The side that gave in, that held that treason including high treason should be an exception, warned that the President himself might be guilty of the very treason he might pardon in others. To this the side that won said Big deal! since "If he be himself a party to the guilt he can be impeached and prosecuted."
This crucial idea has by the way been long forgotten: the Framers expected that a President who issued a pardon to others for a treason to which he (or she) was a party would thereafter be impeached by Congress. Yet when was a President who might have been involved in crimes for which he pardoned others later impeached? Past candidates who come to mind are Gerald Ford (who pardoned Nixon) and the elder Bush (who pardoned his Secretary of Defense and a host of other co-conspirators).
The Framers never got a lot of mileage out of their corollary to the pardon power: that a President who pardons bad guys with whom he or she has also been bad had better look out, since Congress will catch up with him or her later on, via impeachment. So Congress’ power of impeachment is to be used not only to remove someone in power, it can be exhumed after the endgame of particularly seamy pardoners, wrecking their pension plans, lecture careers and so on.
Bottom line: the Constitution guarantees the President the power to issue a pardon, or clemency, a commutation, amnesty, etc for any reason, to anyone, regardless of formalities, whether they are in custody, or fugitive, whether they spent jail time, escaped, never spent a day, and so on, and obviously regardless of whether or not they have ever filed an application, except in cases of impeachment, and the President need never explain the reason. A pardon may be issued because a President likes someone, or because he or she wants to make sure this someone keeps quiet about something, or because he or she (or someone else) has gotten some money, or because he or she digs the person's politics, religion, facial features, derriere, sexual proclivities, favorite sultan, favorite baseball team - whatever. That's why Kobil uses the term "plenary" – it (almost) is.
Consulting Article II Section 2 in my own pocket Constitution, I still wonder how Nixon, who resigned after a showdown with three Republican Congressional heavies who made it clear he was going to lose the impeachment vote, who in other words was days from impeachment, could still get a pardon. How come Congress didn’t go ahead and impeach him anyway, once he’d resigned? Nobody that sat in that Congress can claim that due process was served by not following through – according to the guys who crafted the Constitution, he should have been impeached on schedule, a few days after resignation, regardless of his employment status. Ford said he wanted to patch things up for the nation. Not knowing enough about Constitutional law, I haven’t discovered whether Ford’s pardon was issued or timed in such a way that impeachment proceedings against Nixon were effectively and permanently derailed.
Short-circuiting the Constitution
Back in 1787, they didn’t have blogs, online access to the Dept of Justice’s website etc - town criers were hi-tech back then. Explaining how the present technical process supposedly required to get a Presidential pardon came to be, after the Constitutional Congress's easy take on an executive with nearly absolute "pardoning power", is not easy. If you look around you may find a link to the Office of the Pardon Attorney, where you may read about the conditions said to be required, together with documents also said to be required, in order to initiate the pardon process. There are links to download a formal application form, rules for filing it, descriptions of supporting documentation including letters of recommendation. Nowhere does it say that this process is not required by the Constitution, nor does it say how to go about it otherwise, like where to get 50 extra thousand bucks when needed, just to get “access”, not to speak of whose hand to put the 50 thousand into.
While it is probably rare for a President to know, before taking office, about most of these details, in fact it turns out that each President is met by a wide range of done-deals, for instance with regard to Presidential clemency. Read Article II Section 2 again, and - recalling Kobil's testimony regarding the background to this nearly absolute (one might say royal) power - see if you think the Justice Department's information on the site noted above has anything to do with the plans of those who wrote the Constitution.
On the one hand is a very real Justice Department, which has set itself up as a hurdle of nearly insurmountable proportions, and on the other is the skin and bones of the Constitution, a spartan document, which states in plain terms that with regard to pardons, the President is the Decider. For anyone interested in being pardoned by the President, it would make better sense to skip the Dept of Justice and simply turn to the President directly and ask if he or she could please do that.
Getting the President on the phone!
Forget it. Upon contacting the White House, you will not be connected to the President, nor the President's assistant, secretary, or anyone else. You might be referred to the Office of the Pardon Attorney at the Department of Justice. The bottom line is that for about a century, every President has been effectively denied a great deal of the power granted by the Constitution, since in fact a President need not listen to anyone's advice, including that of (as the site says) "The Pardon Attorney [who] prepares the Department's recommendation to the President for final disposition of each application."
All you need is Love
Margaret Colgate Love, Pardon Attorney from 1990 to 1997, appointed originally by Bush the Elder and retained by Bill Clinton, testified in 2001, at the same Congressional hearings as Kobil. Ms. Love also sent me a letter back in 1996, in response to my 1995 application for a pardon, recounted here. According to my reading of Ms Love’s testimony to Congress in 2001, regarding the history of the pardon power, one of her main problems with President Clinton’s last minute pardons, and even his earlier ones, was that he was digressing from the historical sphere of the pardon process as defined by the Dept of Justice.
Power to interpret
Legal hermeneutics shares with other interpretive disciplines the core problem of defining the object of interest: is it the text of the law as understood when written (in 1792 for instance), or is it the law’s meaning as understood when written, or is it these (text, or interpretation) as understood by later readers and interpreters, or is it to discover the legal repercussions intended by a law-making body as it pens a particular text, for instance Article II Section 2 of the Constitution?
Although Ms Love has a respectable stake in the issue, she is not relieved of a basic fault my slanted view discovers, which is that in this field, she was - aside from being a legal scholar and a humanist – at last a bureaucrat, clearly miffed by having been systematically, even programatically, deprived of some of the power earlier holders of her office had established - un-Constitutionally - as her rightful purview. Love was quite simply livid, that most of her recommendations for clemency were ignored by her Deciders (Bush I and Clinton).
In her testimony regarding the steps “required” for a pardon, Ms. Love describes a process rooted in the mid 19th century, and well established by the turn of the 20th: since then, rarely has a President touched clemency without specific advice from the DOJ. She mentions exceptions (Nixon, Bush I, Clinton), but forgets the clemency extended to Civil War deserters, draft resisters, and soldiers of the Confederacy, based on the same royal power to forgive that those Constitutional Framers granted to the President. Thus we have to include Carter, Ford, Truman, Coolidge, Johnson, Lincoln, and Washington. In all of these cases, the President skirted the pardon process as described by today’s Dept of Justice, and certainly nearly none of the amnesty recipients ever applied for anything.
Jimmy Carter keeps his promises
On his first day in office, Jimmy Carter declared an unconditional amnesty for (almost) all Vietnam War resisters including draft offenders and military deserters, thus fulfilling a campaign promise, and while he may have consulted his Attorney General-to-be, he was going to do it no matter what. Historically, the majority of people who have been given some form of executive clemency according to Article II Section 2 of the Constitution never filed an application with the Dept of Justice, even though all were guilty of "offenses against the United States".
A great number of individual pardons have also been issued without any application having been filtered by the Dept of Justice. Ms. Love addresses the matter with regard to Clinton’s exit-pardons: she points out that he had begun to move outside of established protocol. This is true also of other high profile pardons: how about when all those Iran-Contra guys got theirs that Christmas - remember their smiles? Remember what they were smiling about? Remember what they did? [The story has been told in many places, but here's a short but pithy version: in The Humanist 3/1/93, Gerry O'Sullivan wrote "...The pundits have expressed a great deal of outrage over George Bush's blatant disregard for the law. But missing from many post-mortems has been the international dimension of Bush's yuletide amnesty. Weinberger and his confederates did indeed hijack the Constitution and arrogate untold powers to the National Security Council, CIA, Pentagon, and State Department. But how many hundreds (yes, hundreds) of thousands of people died at the hands of mercenaries and proxy forces armed and aided by these now-pardoned thugs?"]
Remember Marc Rich? Remember what he did? Do you figure all these guys had formal applications in place? Apparently a few did, but do you think it mattered? And even when there were formal applications, DOJ recommendations were - often as not - ignored. Yet, as Ms. Love points out, sticking now not to her bureaucratic guns, but - paradoxically - to the letter of the Law: this is as it should be, at least if what we want is for the President to have the power accorded by the Constitution.
Access is the all
So in the end, it still does come down to “access”: that magical key to having one’s application literally viewed by the only person the Constitution granted the power to Decide: a regal power, retained for the chief executive, as part of the guarantee of the system of “checks and balances” that supposedly keeps the ship of state sailing on an even keel.
Today, the DOJ, through the Office of the Pardon Attorney, filters each individual at many steps along the way. Each application which fulfills conditions stipulated by the Dept of Justice (but not by the Constitution), conditions such as not being filed by a person in prison, nor filed by a person who is a fugitive, and so on, results in a recommendation to the President from the Pardon Attorney for or against a pardon.
Recall the outcry when those Iran-Contra guys got theirs, against the advice of important figures in government, including some (among them independent counsel Walsh) in the Dept of Justice. Same goes for Marc Rich.
And where did the whole outcry against Clinton's pardons peter out a few months later, after congressional committees and subcommittees, after hundreds if not thousands of articles, editorials, talk-shows, demonstrations, legal proceedings? Easy - everyone agreed: the President's pardoning power is (almost) plenary/absolute. Period. And the new occupants of the White House realized that one day they might find themselves in the same position as a Cisneros, a Weinberger, a Nixon, soon a Libby*, so - they let it slide.
Presidential pardon, 3rd application?
In 1995 I learned that President Clinton would soon re-establish diplomatic relations with Vietnam. I contacted the Washington Post, hoping to make my case high-profile at the same moment Clinton’s Vietnam move became known. Even getting through to anyone who could make a decision at a paper like the Post was turning into a major hurdle.
I happened to mention this on the phone with my step-father Dr. Sid Siegel in Washington, DC. He recalled the name of a reporter that had worked with him on a project regarding his work at the Environmental Protection Agency. She had worked at the Washington Post, but was no longer there, yet somehow I managed to find her. It was not easy: she was lying in a hospital bed in Maryland, dying of cancer. She asked me to tell her my story, and then offered me private telephone numbers to Thomas Lippman, who besides being a member of the Council on Foreign Relations was at that time reporter (later editor) at the Washington Post.
So I called Lippman, who at first wouldn't even believe my story. He got back to me by phone the same day however - July 11, 1995, after checking the Post archives for May 21, 1969, and the interview took about an hour. My hope to put the case for a pardon in the spotlight couldn't have been more successful: the headline on the front page of the Washington Post on July 12, 1995, reads “Clinton Opens Diplomatic Ties with Vietnam”, above two columns of text: the one on the right describes the president’s decision and speech, and the one on the left describes my exile: “Long after the war that altered America, deep divisions persist” – Michael Bransome's name is not among the 58,196 engraved on The Wall... His name is on an arrest warrant going back to the draft-protest days of the late 1960s...". That's Lippman's editor describing me, a persistent division…
Electrified by this exposure, I followed through with yet another formal application for Presidential clemency. This time I asked an old acquaintance, Ramsey Clark, to help me put the application in correct legal order. Two earlier applications (to Carter and Reagan) had been turned away at the door, the Dept of Justice in its replies holding that there was precedent for ignoring any application of a fugitive.
One of these DOJ replies (during Reagan’s era) went so far as to detail conditions of an acceptable application: surrender myself to U.S. Marshals in NYC, and then throw myself on the mercy of the President, or the federal court system. At that point (this was probably 1980) there were not only 2 years of the original 3 year sentence remaining, there was also an outstanding charge for escape from a federal prison, entailing 5 more years in federal prison. Understandably I passed.
In a letter from my lawyer accompanying the pardon application that we filed in 1995, we held that if the DOJ through the Pardon Attorney (Margaret Colgate Love) again refused to look at the application, the matter would be referred to federal court, based on our claim that Dept of Justice protocol was depriving the President of his Constitutional rights according to Article II Section 2. In other words, since the Constitution accords the President the right to pardon anybody for anything under any circumstances, with the sole exception as pointed out above, by refusing to alert him regarding most applicants the Dept of Justice was depriving the President of his right to be the sole Decider.
Love-letter
Unbelievably, instead of simply denying the application out of hand, Ms. Love followed through - sort of. In 1996, after 9 months of deliberation she sent a reply, in which she pointed out that two circumstances had been discovered, in her view ("apparently” as she put it) obviating the need for any application for clemency. One was that the 5-year charge for escape from a federal prison, brought in the District of Northern West Virginia in 1975, was dropped in 1993, for “administrative reasons”. My lawyer said the charge of escape was dropped “with prejudice”, a technical term that he said means that the charge can be brought again*. The judge’s reasoning was that they couldn’t get hold of me anyway, which legal scholars advise means that if they could, maybe they would. The other circumstance Love noted was that they could discover no outstanding warrant for my arrest anywhere in the United States, and thus were closing my case.
* [Most of this main section was written in 2007-2008, but these bracketed paragraphs are from April 2024. I recently went to the trouble to finally disentangle the phrase that I believed I heard Ramsey use regarding the escape charge: "dropped with prejudice". According to my best lights today this phrase means the exact opposite of what I heard Ramsey say on the phone to me. But a charge that is dropped with prejudice is dropped permanently. The charge cannot be brought again regardless of the circumstances.
The next order of business would be to find out which document Ramsey Clark was referring to when he said these words to me back then. I have recently seen a copy of a letter Clark sent to Margaret Love in which he referred to her note in her letter to him to the effect that she had attached two further documents, showing under which circumstances the charge had been dropped - in his letter he wrote that the documents she referred to were not included in the original letter. This seems to show that the letter-copy (of interchanges between Love and Clark) that Ramsey later sent to me is a different letter from the one in which she reportedly mentioned that there were two documents attached to her letter. I have never seen that document.
There are further complications to disentangling this "dropped with prejudice" matter. I have met Ramsey Clark twice in my life. Ramsey and Senator Edward Kennedy toured the federal prison (Robert F Kennedy Federal Prison in Morgantown, W.Va) where I was imprisoned from 1969 to 1970. I got to shake Ramsey's hand, we exchanged some pleasantry, and I got a handshake from Senator Kennedy. The only other time we met was when we were in the middle of planning my legal defense and attempt to get me back home, as far as I can recall sometime right after the turn of the millennium. He had asked me to meet him at a hotel in Paris, and I complied. There in Paris, he said that he would not work pro bono for me and required a retainer of USD5000. I was still in my training to become a psychiatrist, money was tight. But I/we complied. But I also recall that Ramsey had a couple of relatively subtle speech impediments, and it is entirely possible that he used the phrase "dropped with prejudice" but perhaps explained not that it meant could be brought again (the charge) but that it meant it "could not be brought again" – or, instead: he may have said "dropped without prejudice" and "could be brought again" (though I believe this is less likely). We will maybe never know...
Bottom line: there is very likely no way or at least no simple way to find out what Clark received (and didn't receive, though promised) from Ms Love in the form of letters and other documents.]
Ms. Love’s letter clearly did not dismiss the pardon application out of hand (she attended to the matter for 9 months before replying), though she does end with an explanation that since there were no arrest warrants for me active in USA, my application file was being closed. This signals the only time in several decades of applications for Presidential clemency that the DOJ has demonstrated an awareness of the President’s essentially plenary right to forgive. And in her testimony at Congress’ 2001 Pardongate hearing, Ms. Love (remember: she was appointed by Bush the Elder) uses long forgotten terminology when describing what she holds will be required to renew and modernize the pardon process: “an open mind and an open heart”! Unprecedented in recent times, though in her testimony she also points out that there are too few involved in carrying out the President’s task as Forgiver.
Now I wonder how broad a smile we will see on little Scooter’s face when his debt to society is erased by the Forgiver*. Bets are already being taken on the date - Ms. Love is said to have weighed in with Christmas Eve 2008. Noting historical antecedents, a good time to ease this into the body politic will be about 9PM EST, Friday the 26th of December, 2008: provided not only that the Republicans lose the presidential election (again), but also that they don’t “win” it anyway. (Was that clear enough?)
* This was originally written early in 2007, and "Scooter" of course got his presidential clemency already the 3rd of July that year, when Bush II commuted his sentence from 30 months to zero months, thereby shutting little Scooter's mouth for the interim. The judge that gave him the 30-months was obviously disgusted when he ordered both sides to help him understand what should come of Scooter's 2 year post-imprisonment supervision, now that the imprisonment part was no more. I'd be smiling too...
Copyright © 2008 Michael Bransome
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04. Just the facts please
From late summer 2000, hoping that Clinton’s exit might include some high-profile pardons, I had put a lot of effort into trying to get my story told in the Oval Office. One route appeared to be via mainstream media.
Persistent divisions
News media have on the whole erected insurmountable hurdles to anyone wanting to advertise anything not already on their agendas. AP's reporter, a trim and energetic man, was very serious about his work, and pushy in that stressed-out successful reporter kind of way. Like any writer he smelled a story. Presumably, being at AP, he was going to tell it like it is. He said straight out he needed to know if what I was telling him had ever transpired, which didn’t make sense at the time, since we had been put together by mutual friends.
It took a long time for him to establish the facts, he said. Getting the story onto the international wire – our only shared goal – met with endless hurdles. Ooops – the Dept of Justice had never heard of me. Well, maybe he could contact Ramsey Clark. Ramsey (who I met the first time when he and Senator Edward Kennedy were touring the Robert F. Kennedy Youth Center in West Virginia, an experimental facility for federal offenders between 18 and 26) told it like it is, but our reporter was still not sure. Understandably, we were at cross-purposes: I saw him or any other journalist as a pivotal step on my way to a pardon. He saw me as a penny-ante reason to fill a few inches of column, as it turned out doomed to hit the wire well after Clinton’s exit.
On the wire
Finally, with Clinton safely out of his regal slot in history, AP’s story went out on the international wire. On March 14, 2001, it was picked up by a few thousand papers, and within a few days showed up all over the net as well, from the New York Times, to car sales sites, porno sites - you could read about me anywhere. Radio talk shows, for instance on Oliver North's first station in Virginia, had folks call in and say what they thought, or at least make talk. One important point AP's March 14, 2001 article failed to mention was that I didn't have the bundle of cash (50,000 George Washingtons would open the door, we were told) to trade for the “access” Clinton's Little Rock friend was offering.
Jimmy Carter might have helped
Needless to say, AP’s article also neglected to mention Jimmy Carter's reply to me in the fall of 2000. I had miraculously managed to reach him at the Carter Center with a plea of help, where, a few weeks before Clinton’s departure, according to a medical colleague there, at the time one of Carter’s senior assistants: "The chief said 'Tell him he doesn't need my help, this case is cut and dried, he can count on a pardon'. The former President’s well-meaning note was unfortunately off the mark, even though Carter, who reportedly brought Patty Hearst to Bill's attention (successfully), would probably have been able to deliver a miracle.
AP's reporter wrote that we poured black paint on draft registration papers; he forgot to mention we spilled our own blood there as well - 3 bags full – drawn a few days earlier by a rebellious and amiable Mary Moylan. Well, it couldn't have been proven one way or the other, no more than the paint come to think of it, though in these AIDS-conscious days it might have drawn a few more eyes. I remember pouring those three bags into a single container the night before we walked into the draft board – spooky, in retrospect.
Shake it up baby
AP's reporter wrote "Bransome fled prison while on a furlough, in fear, he says, of death threats from other inmates." This is not bad reporting, this is twisting and shouting. Here’s what happened: shortly before my first unescorted furlough, to prepare for parole in DC a few months later, I was accosted one day by two other inmates (living in the so-called "psychotic cottage") who informed me that they planned to kill me, graphically describing the act, in which field they planned to bury me, etc.
AP's reporter again: "...in fear, he says..." - how low can you go? One of the few who I was told heard about this threat before I left the US died a few years ago: Phil Berrigan, though I don’t recall if I told Phil directly or if it went to him from Dan – Dan and I had spent one jittery evening together while we were both underground in the summer of 1970. In fact, Dan was taken by the FBI a day or two after we sat together in Massachusetts, which spooked me full tilt, since Dan and I were being coached by the same man: Eqbal Ahmed. He had supposedly disobeyed one of Eq’s rules - "Avoid islands" - but Dan's capture spooked me enough to make me shift itinerary, and get to Canada as soon as possible, via Cleveland, which is another story.
Anyway, while putting the pardon application (the 2nd time? third?) together back in 1995, Ramsey mentioned that Phil had told him about me having told him and others about the death threat in the summer of 1970, while I was being spirited around the Catholic underground in the months after my escape. So Ram relaxed a bit about it, since he also thought that wherever it all ended up, in a court scene I might have a good chance to beat any escape charges because of the death threat.
AP's reporter again: "Bransome says a pivotal event that shaped his life was the threat of violence in prison that he thought authorities could not prevent." He makes it sound like some sort of generic "threat of violence in prison" was hanging in the air, when in fact, as I told him (a fact he could have fact-checked), violence was rare in the prison (Robert F. Kennedy Youth Center in Morgantown, West Virginia) where I was threatened. But here I was faced by two guys with real faces and ugly histories (one of them supposedly a Minuteman, both supposedly incarcerated for something to do with deadly weapons), both dead serious about me becoming seriously dead. So who can prove what? This threat took place, it was a real threat made by real wackos on a real morning in a real prison: it would have been stupid to not return from the furlough otherwise, when parole was a few months off.
Then there are details the reporter can be excused for not getting straight. Like how many children I have (not two - six, but maybe he wanted to skip wife #1 and wife #2). Like that I was a high-school dropout (nope: expelled for truancy, for spending too many afternoons riffing on a bass, rather than a slide-rule)...
Persistent divisions
News media have on the whole erected insurmountable hurdles to anyone wanting to advertise anything not already on their agendas. AP's reporter, a trim and energetic man, was very serious about his work, and pushy in that stressed-out successful reporter kind of way. Like any writer he smelled a story. Presumably, being at AP, he was going to tell it like it is. He said straight out he needed to know if what I was telling him had ever transpired, which didn’t make sense at the time, since we had been put together by mutual friends.
It took a long time for him to establish the facts, he said. Getting the story onto the international wire – our only shared goal – met with endless hurdles. Ooops – the Dept of Justice had never heard of me. Well, maybe he could contact Ramsey Clark. Ramsey (who I met the first time when he and Senator Edward Kennedy were touring the Robert F. Kennedy Youth Center in West Virginia, an experimental facility for federal offenders between 18 and 26) told it like it is, but our reporter was still not sure. Understandably, we were at cross-purposes: I saw him or any other journalist as a pivotal step on my way to a pardon. He saw me as a penny-ante reason to fill a few inches of column, as it turned out doomed to hit the wire well after Clinton’s exit.
On the wire
Finally, with Clinton safely out of his regal slot in history, AP’s story went out on the international wire. On March 14, 2001, it was picked up by a few thousand papers, and within a few days showed up all over the net as well, from the New York Times, to car sales sites, porno sites - you could read about me anywhere. Radio talk shows, for instance on Oliver North's first station in Virginia, had folks call in and say what they thought, or at least make talk. One important point AP's March 14, 2001 article failed to mention was that I didn't have the bundle of cash (50,000 George Washingtons would open the door, we were told) to trade for the “access” Clinton's Little Rock friend was offering.
Jimmy Carter might have helped
Needless to say, AP’s article also neglected to mention Jimmy Carter's reply to me in the fall of 2000. I had miraculously managed to reach him at the Carter Center with a plea of help, where, a few weeks before Clinton’s departure, according to a medical colleague there, at the time one of Carter’s senior assistants: "The chief said 'Tell him he doesn't need my help, this case is cut and dried, he can count on a pardon'. The former President’s well-meaning note was unfortunately off the mark, even though Carter, who reportedly brought Patty Hearst to Bill's attention (successfully), would probably have been able to deliver a miracle.
AP's reporter wrote that we poured black paint on draft registration papers; he forgot to mention we spilled our own blood there as well - 3 bags full – drawn a few days earlier by a rebellious and amiable Mary Moylan. Well, it couldn't have been proven one way or the other, no more than the paint come to think of it, though in these AIDS-conscious days it might have drawn a few more eyes. I remember pouring those three bags into a single container the night before we walked into the draft board – spooky, in retrospect.
Shake it up baby
AP's reporter wrote "Bransome fled prison while on a furlough, in fear, he says, of death threats from other inmates." This is not bad reporting, this is twisting and shouting. Here’s what happened: shortly before my first unescorted furlough, to prepare for parole in DC a few months later, I was accosted one day by two other inmates (living in the so-called "psychotic cottage") who informed me that they planned to kill me, graphically describing the act, in which field they planned to bury me, etc.
AP's reporter again: "...in fear, he says..." - how low can you go? One of the few who I was told heard about this threat before I left the US died a few years ago: Phil Berrigan, though I don’t recall if I told Phil directly or if it went to him from Dan – Dan and I had spent one jittery evening together while we were both underground in the summer of 1970. In fact, Dan was taken by the FBI a day or two after we sat together in Massachusetts, which spooked me full tilt, since Dan and I were being coached by the same man: Eqbal Ahmed. He had supposedly disobeyed one of Eq’s rules - "Avoid islands" - but Dan's capture spooked me enough to make me shift itinerary, and get to Canada as soon as possible, via Cleveland, which is another story.
Anyway, while putting the pardon application (the 2nd time? third?) together back in 1995, Ramsey mentioned that Phil had told him about me having told him and others about the death threat in the summer of 1970, while I was being spirited around the Catholic underground in the months after my escape. So Ram relaxed a bit about it, since he also thought that wherever it all ended up, in a court scene I might have a good chance to beat any escape charges because of the death threat.
AP's reporter again: "Bransome says a pivotal event that shaped his life was the threat of violence in prison that he thought authorities could not prevent." He makes it sound like some sort of generic "threat of violence in prison" was hanging in the air, when in fact, as I told him (a fact he could have fact-checked), violence was rare in the prison (Robert F. Kennedy Youth Center in Morgantown, West Virginia) where I was threatened. But here I was faced by two guys with real faces and ugly histories (one of them supposedly a Minuteman, both supposedly incarcerated for something to do with deadly weapons), both dead serious about me becoming seriously dead. So who can prove what? This threat took place, it was a real threat made by real wackos on a real morning in a real prison: it would have been stupid to not return from the furlough otherwise, when parole was a few months off.
Then there are details the reporter can be excused for not getting straight. Like how many children I have (not two - six, but maybe he wanted to skip wife #1 and wife #2). Like that I was a high-school dropout (nope: expelled for truancy, for spending too many afternoons riffing on a bass, rather than a slide-rule)...
Copyright © 2008 Michael Bransome
05. How I spent my summer vacation
Running
I spent my last summer in the United States running - sometimes literally - from the FBI. After carefully considering the risk that the two federal inmates that threatened to bury my 18-year old bones in the hills of West Virginia might really be capable of carrying out their threat, and considering a story that preceded my arrival at the short-lived experimental federal penitentiary Robert F. Kennedy Youth Center in Morgantown, to the effect that an inmate had been killed a few months earlier in the "psychotic cottage" during a "pool party" (more terminology in "Stir lingo"), I elected not to return to prison from an unescorted furlough to my home in D.C., even though parole was a few months off.
Sunny days
The summer of 1970 on the east coast of the United States was paranoid and sunny. Maybe it really was that sunny, but even more so, juxtaposed to the waves of government poisonthink, not unlike terror alerts in our time, hammered, radiated, transmitted deep into the minds of all of us by the architects of the Amerikan war-machine. Not only those of us forced by gender and age to strike one deal or another with conscription (go to Vietnam and kill or die, or pay a price, if you have the money, and get a deferment, or go to jail for 5 years, which for many meant forfeiting all civil rights for the rest of your life, or leave the country, possibly forever), but all of us in the United States in those years found ourselves sinking or swimming in an ocean of hardly believable history. Lying, power-junkie, criminal war-makers were calling nearly all the shots: bleeding the poor of our own country, dealing low cards to blacks, chicanos, Native Americans, poor whites - they forced any man they could get their hooks into to kill or be killed in Vietnam, but now that more and more tax-payers and voters were saying no, the power-junkies were starting to keep a few back, so as to kill the rest of us off here in the States. Cointelpro's tentacles were supposedly growing among us all, and want it or not, our 18, 19, 20 year old lives were on the line, they had declared war on us, we were forced to dance to their tune, move against them, or do a vanishing act.
Escape velocity
A furlough from federal prison took most of a year to "earn" (read about Skinnerism and Timothy Leary's Interpersonal Behavior Circle Personal Inventory in "Stir lingo") - my first one was intended to prepare for the practical details of a parole. This meant a new place to live - since they wouldn't let me live at St. Francis House, home as it was to public acts of non-violent civil disobedience such as ours and that of the DC 9, who helped us learn how Dow Chemical's napalm was not only burning children in Vietnam, but also helping United Fruit keep its advantaged position in Guatemala. It also meant school - I'd started studying at university while in prison. And it meant a job - I'd already had a few, and this was a time when jobs were easy to find, money easy to make. I even managed to find time to visit my local draft board in Washington, D.C. - I had no choice - where I finally did register.
They knew I was coming! Incredible - I walked into this place where I'd never been, in downtown Washington, not far from 16th and S where I lived, nearly a year after having poured out paint and blood on 1-A files at the draft board in Silver Spring, and they're like "Hello Mr. Bransome". Vaguely I recall some silly joke about me "not pulling that stunt again"... I was issued a draft card which must have sported the regalia "4-F", issued as far as I knew to all commy pinko terrorist fags, as I had recently come to be, approximately, known.
A day before the furlough was to end, I went to see my mother where she still lived in Kensington, Maryland. I laid the cards out for her, and she agreed that the death threat looked like a serious matter, and we both imagined the difficulties it would entail for me to successfully alert authorities to the threat, eliminate the risk and above all not get killed. She gave me some money, and said she would support me whatever I did - which was a sea change from a few months before the action in 1969, when she adamantly declared "My country right or wrong!" She could hardly be blamed: two older brothers in the armed forces, both pilots and war heroes.
The Fugitive
I spent several months "underground" on the east coast of the United States, mostly in or around Boston and New York City. But what was this "underground": was there really some vast dark subterranean network of interconnecting tunnels? I of course had no experience of anything quite as exotic, though in high school history class we had all learned about "the underground railroad" for the northward transport of black people escaping slavery, and while at Newport Junior High I did some research and produced a report (unfortunately lost) about the underground adventures of one of my mother's brothers, Charles Voigt, U.S. Navy pilot shot down over Normandy on D-Day, and his incredible escape, despite serious shrapnel wounds, with the help of the local French Resistance, the Maquis. At the time, in the middle 60's, I actually managed to find someone in France directly involved in Uncle Chuck's rescue and return to England. It's a pretty good bet that some of the adventure element in his experience, together with the bravery of the people who helped him while "underground", was turning the screws on my future already in junior high.
I moved effortlessly into a new phase as The Fugitive. My own "one-armed man", that famous one behind the deed, a famously tricky, now dead, fellow, named Richard Nixon, was still busy directing a blanket of terror onto the heads and lives of villagers and lawful enemy combatants throughout Southeast Asia.
While with regard to our demonstration at the draft board, I never saw myself as innocent, although defacing papers with blood and paint is undeniably less destructive than any single act of war, and while part of the civil disobedience equation is that unfortunate human state called imprisonment, to perform a relatively peaceful act of civil disobedience, even with minor property destruction (the FBI claimed the damage to be worth 12,000 1969 dollars, while the local board staunchly claimed our act gummed up the works a mere few hours) should not necessarily entail risking let alone losing one's life.
Because those two inmates at KYC that morning, in late March or early April of 1970, appeared to mean business when they described my execution at their hands, the civil disobedience equation I learned at Newport Junior High in Kensington (Thoreau, Gandhi, King) was breaking down, and my path was being skewed by unseen forces: I wasn't the one that put those inmates where they were at KYC the day they accosted me.
Fugitive: for how long?! You don't ask that when you believe you are running for your life: you just run, and you keep on running until you no longer need to. Fugitive how far?! Canada? Would they turn me over to the US? Sweden? (I saw Siberia in my mind's eye...) I was definitely in way over my head, and it made sense to listen to people older and more experienced: I was still 18, back when that meant young, inexperienced etc.
All aboard
I consulted some forbidden contacts among my mostly Catholic friends in Washington, D.C. and from there I was transported, a city at a time, by men and women often wearing religious garb, to New York City. My arrival there entailed a happy jolt: I was taken to Jesuit Missions, which in Manhattan at the time was a large apartment high above upper Broadway, not far from Riverside, where the door was opened by a dark-haired guy with a priest's collar, and a face I somehow knew. He introduced himself as Ned Murphy, and he somehow knew me too, and we spent a while trying to figure out why.
Loch Raven School For Boys
In 1966, I was 15 years old, and was made an offer I couldn't refuse: several months, courtesy of the Maryland State Youth Corrections Authority, in Loch Raven School for Boys, a euphemism for the Maryland state youth prison in Loch Raven, Maryland. I spent about six months there, due to my proclivity, demonstrated a handful of times during childhood, to leave my family home in the example of characters made famous by the inimitable Samuel Clemens, to strike out on my own adventure in the world: I was an "incorrigible runaway". Tom and Huck and Mark Twain's riveting world took me for a ride more than once.
During six brutal months at Loch Raven (see "Rats in a maze and other sorrows"), I helped plan three and took part in two mass-breakouts. After each of these, I was put in solitary confinement, the second time for about a week. During that week of no cigarettes, nearly no food or drink, I was visited regularly by a young seminarian from Woodstock College, a Jesuit seminary in rural Maryland. This was Father Ned Murphy, dear friend and as it turned out in the summer of 1970 in Manhattan - co-conspirator.
Map to the Underground
From soon after I got to New York, my whereabouts, movements, means and frequency of communication and many other details conformed strictly to the advice of a man named Eqbal Ahmed, who I met a couple times, and knew before this only as a veteran of the Algerian war of independence from France. Like many in my generation, I had read my Franz Fanon, had been entranced and enraged by the 60's film The Battle of Algiers. The film shows the French using torture and other terror methods to win the Battle of Algiers against an urban guerrilla network, yet soon after this losing the war to the entire Algerian people.
Interestingly, I just read that the film was shown more recently at of all places the Pentagon - a few months after the invasion of Baghdad in 2003 - to a vastly different audience, for reasons very different from the reasons we had for watching in the 60's. Eq as we called him had also helped coordinate Dan Berrigan's activities underground that summer of 1970 - arguably far more difficult, since the FBI by the time of his arrest was said to have 200 agents on Dan's case. Dan was said to have ignored a single rule - "avoid islands" - only much later did it come out that he was actually turned in by an informer.
Eq was accused a year later, together with Dan's brother Phil and others ("The Harrisburg Seven"), of conspiring to dynamite (!) a secret network of tunnels under Washington, D.C., to attack even more draft boards (and violently this time), and ultimately to kidnap not-yet Nobel laureate Henry Kissinger, then widely hated aide to Tricky Dick, the scourge of SE Asia. All the main charges against the "Harrisburg Seven", having probably issued from the booze-addled sicko brain of the arch-imbecile Hoover himself, were of course finally dropped, though Phil, a Catholic priest, and Liz McAllister, a Catholic nun, were found guilty (having, unknown by most of us, already exchanged one set of vows for another) of smuggling letters in and out of federal prison.
While I found myself in the summer of 1970, excluding the odd evening in a "priest-hole, in unexpectedly comfortable surroundings most of the time "underground", even considering the air of paranoia that infused much of where I was and with whom, it was a pretty scary way to spend a summer vacation. Crucial to my sense of balance, periods of a couple weeks each were spent in glorious countryside in Maine, Massachusetts and upstate New York, paddling canoes, fishing, picking berries, reading stories to children, playing guitar. Arguably not your typical underground experience.
Retreats: the Catholic Resistance
During that summer I also took part in retreats - gatherings of peace-makers, mostly Catholic priests and nuns, for the express purpose of planning further "actions" against the war machine, acts of civil disobedience often directed at offices of the Selective Service System, but also at some of the more obviously guilty corporate partners to America's war of aggression against Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.
Civil disobedience, by which is meant voluntary, purposeful, open, non-violent non-compliance with the law, for stated political or spiritual reasons, traditionally entailed remaining after one's illegal act, accepting apprehension by the authorities, arrest, imprisonment and the rest, to demonstrate and continue demonstrating the political or spiritual wrongness of the law one has broken, and that one is paying for having broken. Our examples were righteous and somehow close at hand: Martin Luther King, who electrified us with the power (and the price) of straight-backed non-violent determination to follow the truth wherever it leads, whatever the cost, and Gandhi, whose movement of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience brought a poor country to its feet and an empire to its knees.
The Selective Service System
The Selective Service System was by modern standards a primitive organization, designed as World War II came to a close. According to the Selective Service Act, a man was required to register for the draft between his 18th birthday and 5 weekdays later. That was the sole legal requirement. This resulted in the creation of a physical "draft file" for each registrant, who was issued a "draft card", to be carried at all times, a primitive mind-implant ("Your body is ours, when we say the word...") to be stored in his wallet with his money and other valuables. The draft file was stored in a filing cabinet in a local draft board. Each state had a number of local boards, full of filing cabinets and little else, and for each registrant, a pair of simple 3x5-cards were made, one of which was kept by the local board, while its copy was sent to the state's central draft board where it was stored for statistical purposes and as backup.
This was essentially the whole system: everything was done by hand, and as far as was known at the time, and events seem to have borne this out, there were no other backups kept of the original registrations. Thus we discovered that the act of destroying a draft file and its 3x5 cards locally and in the central state board effectively erased a potential draftee from the system, which according to the law had no legal way in which to recover the lost registrations, except perhaps to publicly implore "lost" registrants to re-register - I don't know if that ever took place.
Stand-by or hit-and-run
There was a new item on the agenda at the retreats in the summer of 1970, and it cut to the core of the civil disobedience ethos that was one strand in the skein of connections between us all. This was a discussion of the relative merits of "stand-by" and "hit-and-run" actions. The main issue was to do with the open face of the one as opposed to the hidden, according to some even diabolical, face of the other. An act of non-violent civil disobedience had always meant visible persons, acting visibly: here is my face, this is my name, I am a person who takes responsibility, I am ready to stand up and say I did this, and I am ready to pay, this is my reason. A hit-and-run action by its very nature could easily be misrepresented as terrorism - shameless acts of faceless criminals moving darkly in the night.
But civil disobedience, we were discovering, was fraught with problems: one was that those of us willing to put our lives on the line were not in endless supply, and prison time meant - prison time. During the Vietnam war era, there were only about 2-300 of us "crazy" enough to do what we did - deface or destroy draft files or other files, for instance those at Dow Chemical (napalm), General Electric (B-52 bomber technology), Dupont (phosphorus bombs), and then face the music, and if we all ended up in jail, who would carry out the next actions?
What's important is the price
Refusing induction, like refusing illegal orders, is the bare-bones archetype of civil disobedience, straightforward more or less one-on-one acts for which many tens of thousands of young heroes had the right stuff, even in the face of draconian punishment. For soldiers openly refusing illegal orders, at the worst, even surviving (say in the sticky Mekong heat) might be a gamble, while for refusing induction, the going price was 5 years of your young life in federal prison, being stripped of many of your civil rights, such as the right to vote - people I tell this in Europe say I'm making it up. Each option was more than enough to make you think twice about putting your money where your mouth is.
Consensus
The retreats came to a consensus regarding actions against draft boards, since it was the boards and their files we were concentrating on, essential as they were to the waging of the illegal war. The hit-and-run model, if meticulously planned, in particular respecting the need for failsafe precautions so that no one could ever get physically hurt, offered two positive qualities. First was the fact that all essential documents could be efficiently and utterly deleted, and second was the fact that participants could be more efficiently recycled. To "take out" a draft board in the dead of night - given the level of technology at the time - turned out to be a piece of cake (notwithstanding the off chance of an action being derailed by an informer, which also happened), and it also turned out for a while to be nearly as easy to "take out" not only a draft board, or two, but 5, or 10, or 45 boards (the record), in fact all the boards in an entire state, including the central state board with its crucial copies of the 3x5's.
We had discovered empirically that the "stand-by-action" model had no hope of literally erasing the identities of all the potential draftees - it was simply a high-profile way to make our protest heard. This was simple mechanics, or chemistry, and try as we might - and we did experiment: acid baths, bleach, napalm, shredding - there was just no way to completely destroy all that information in the short time it ordinarily took for the FBI to show up at a "stand-by" action. So the hit-and-run model turned out to be a hot topic.
The topic was even hotter since a couple of hit-and-run actions turned out to be very successful: "The Beaver 55", who apparently took out most of the Selective Service System in the state of Indiana, and an action in New York City, which apparently took out most of the Black and Puerto Rican draft registrants in Brownsville, Queens and other parts of New York City.
Every destroyed draft file, provided its centrally stored backup had been destroyed, meant that one more living soul was erased from the system, thus relieved of the opportunity to choose between killing, prison, or exile. These acts were making the illegal war that Nixon, Kissinger and the rest of their bandit pack had tricked the country into waging in Vietnam literally harder to wage, and this fact could simply not be ignored by the civil disobedience purists among us.
A further hot topic regarded the less appetizing end of the civil disobedience equation: prison itself. The Catonsville 9 were to have begun their sentences in federal prison on April 9, 1970, but as I learned during the first day of my furlough, several of them never showed up. And during that summer, Dan's very visible sojourn underground (showing up at mass in well-known churches, for instance) was inspiring an entire country and obviously infuriating the powers that be. The reasoning behind not showing up was not in the purist civil disobedience vein, and that reasoning was: if it was right to try to stop their illegal war then it was equally right to not support their immoral imprisonment of us.
Meeting with Dan in Boston
During the second week of August in 1970, after some very hairy close calls in Boston and New York, I was starting to freak out a bit, and finally got a chance to sit down for an evening with Dan Berrigan, just outside of Boston. Dan was staying with a famous writer, and we got to talk for a few hours. We touched on many subjects: one was that while Dan had much to offer what then was a mass popular movement (with a couple hundred FBI agents hunting for him, Dan could show up in a church in Philadelphia and give a sermon during Sunday High Mass, then slip away), I had little of practical value to offer - I was a fugitive and not a lot more.
Another subject was my abiding feeling that I was not cut out for keeping my eye on my back, learning three escape routes from every building, memorizing addresses and telephone numbers, having no contact with my own family, and the rest. The final straw was the discovery that together with a part Cherokee lady from Kentucky, I was in the process of becoming a parent! Dan's take was that our take was probably right, and we might consider alternatives to my being underground, for instance applying for asylum somewhere, or perhaps emigrating to Canada.
Best laid plansThe first plan was to go west young man, then head north via California and possibly to Vancouver, but events in Cleveland nearly overtook me. Much later I learned that Angela Davis had connections in Cleveland, and she was being hotly pursued by the FBI in Cleveland the very day I got there. It also turned out there were only two "movement" houses in Cleveland: one was the Black Panther headquarters, and the other was the house where Ned and I managed to visit at on our way west.
Shortly after arriving it was noticed that a number of unmarked black Ford sedans with a couple suited gentlemen in each was slowly patrolling the street we were on. I was shepherded into a "priest hole" in the cellar, and spent about 8 hours there. The all-clear was sounded after dark, and I crawled across the lawn and into the back seat of a vehicle which took me to another Ohio city - maybe it was Cincinnati, or Toledo. Close call.
Call of the collar
I spent the next day dying my hair and eyebrows, trying out priest's garb, and trying out my new identity: Jesuit seminarian, student at Fordham University: Richard Lee Murphy, from the Bronx. We caught a plane to Detroit and from there flew onward to Toronto - I last stood on American soil on Wednesday the 12th of August, 1970, and what a long strange trip it's been...
I spent my last summer in the United States running - sometimes literally - from the FBI. After carefully considering the risk that the two federal inmates that threatened to bury my 18-year old bones in the hills of West Virginia might really be capable of carrying out their threat, and considering a story that preceded my arrival at the short-lived experimental federal penitentiary Robert F. Kennedy Youth Center in Morgantown, to the effect that an inmate had been killed a few months earlier in the "psychotic cottage" during a "pool party" (more terminology in "Stir lingo"), I elected not to return to prison from an unescorted furlough to my home in D.C., even though parole was a few months off.
Sunny days
The summer of 1970 on the east coast of the United States was paranoid and sunny. Maybe it really was that sunny, but even more so, juxtaposed to the waves of government poisonthink, not unlike terror alerts in our time, hammered, radiated, transmitted deep into the minds of all of us by the architects of the Amerikan war-machine. Not only those of us forced by gender and age to strike one deal or another with conscription (go to Vietnam and kill or die, or pay a price, if you have the money, and get a deferment, or go to jail for 5 years, which for many meant forfeiting all civil rights for the rest of your life, or leave the country, possibly forever), but all of us in the United States in those years found ourselves sinking or swimming in an ocean of hardly believable history. Lying, power-junkie, criminal war-makers were calling nearly all the shots: bleeding the poor of our own country, dealing low cards to blacks, chicanos, Native Americans, poor whites - they forced any man they could get their hooks into to kill or be killed in Vietnam, but now that more and more tax-payers and voters were saying no, the power-junkies were starting to keep a few back, so as to kill the rest of us off here in the States. Cointelpro's tentacles were supposedly growing among us all, and want it or not, our 18, 19, 20 year old lives were on the line, they had declared war on us, we were forced to dance to their tune, move against them, or do a vanishing act.
Escape velocity
A furlough from federal prison took most of a year to "earn" (read about Skinnerism and Timothy Leary's Interpersonal Behavior Circle Personal Inventory in "Stir lingo") - my first one was intended to prepare for the practical details of a parole. This meant a new place to live - since they wouldn't let me live at St. Francis House, home as it was to public acts of non-violent civil disobedience such as ours and that of the DC 9, who helped us learn how Dow Chemical's napalm was not only burning children in Vietnam, but also helping United Fruit keep its advantaged position in Guatemala. It also meant school - I'd started studying at university while in prison. And it meant a job - I'd already had a few, and this was a time when jobs were easy to find, money easy to make. I even managed to find time to visit my local draft board in Washington, D.C. - I had no choice - where I finally did register.
They knew I was coming! Incredible - I walked into this place where I'd never been, in downtown Washington, not far from 16th and S where I lived, nearly a year after having poured out paint and blood on 1-A files at the draft board in Silver Spring, and they're like "Hello Mr. Bransome". Vaguely I recall some silly joke about me "not pulling that stunt again"... I was issued a draft card which must have sported the regalia "4-F", issued as far as I knew to all commy pinko terrorist fags, as I had recently come to be, approximately, known.
A day before the furlough was to end, I went to see my mother where she still lived in Kensington, Maryland. I laid the cards out for her, and she agreed that the death threat looked like a serious matter, and we both imagined the difficulties it would entail for me to successfully alert authorities to the threat, eliminate the risk and above all not get killed. She gave me some money, and said she would support me whatever I did - which was a sea change from a few months before the action in 1969, when she adamantly declared "My country right or wrong!" She could hardly be blamed: two older brothers in the armed forces, both pilots and war heroes.
The Fugitive
I spent several months "underground" on the east coast of the United States, mostly in or around Boston and New York City. But what was this "underground": was there really some vast dark subterranean network of interconnecting tunnels? I of course had no experience of anything quite as exotic, though in high school history class we had all learned about "the underground railroad" for the northward transport of black people escaping slavery, and while at Newport Junior High I did some research and produced a report (unfortunately lost) about the underground adventures of one of my mother's brothers, Charles Voigt, U.S. Navy pilot shot down over Normandy on D-Day, and his incredible escape, despite serious shrapnel wounds, with the help of the local French Resistance, the Maquis. At the time, in the middle 60's, I actually managed to find someone in France directly involved in Uncle Chuck's rescue and return to England. It's a pretty good bet that some of the adventure element in his experience, together with the bravery of the people who helped him while "underground", was turning the screws on my future already in junior high.
I moved effortlessly into a new phase as The Fugitive. My own "one-armed man", that famous one behind the deed, a famously tricky, now dead, fellow, named Richard Nixon, was still busy directing a blanket of terror onto the heads and lives of villagers and lawful enemy combatants throughout Southeast Asia.
While with regard to our demonstration at the draft board, I never saw myself as innocent, although defacing papers with blood and paint is undeniably less destructive than any single act of war, and while part of the civil disobedience equation is that unfortunate human state called imprisonment, to perform a relatively peaceful act of civil disobedience, even with minor property destruction (the FBI claimed the damage to be worth 12,000 1969 dollars, while the local board staunchly claimed our act gummed up the works a mere few hours) should not necessarily entail risking let alone losing one's life.
Because those two inmates at KYC that morning, in late March or early April of 1970, appeared to mean business when they described my execution at their hands, the civil disobedience equation I learned at Newport Junior High in Kensington (Thoreau, Gandhi, King) was breaking down, and my path was being skewed by unseen forces: I wasn't the one that put those inmates where they were at KYC the day they accosted me.
Fugitive: for how long?! You don't ask that when you believe you are running for your life: you just run, and you keep on running until you no longer need to. Fugitive how far?! Canada? Would they turn me over to the US? Sweden? (I saw Siberia in my mind's eye...) I was definitely in way over my head, and it made sense to listen to people older and more experienced: I was still 18, back when that meant young, inexperienced etc.
All aboard
I consulted some forbidden contacts among my mostly Catholic friends in Washington, D.C. and from there I was transported, a city at a time, by men and women often wearing religious garb, to New York City. My arrival there entailed a happy jolt: I was taken to Jesuit Missions, which in Manhattan at the time was a large apartment high above upper Broadway, not far from Riverside, where the door was opened by a dark-haired guy with a priest's collar, and a face I somehow knew. He introduced himself as Ned Murphy, and he somehow knew me too, and we spent a while trying to figure out why.
Loch Raven School For Boys
In 1966, I was 15 years old, and was made an offer I couldn't refuse: several months, courtesy of the Maryland State Youth Corrections Authority, in Loch Raven School for Boys, a euphemism for the Maryland state youth prison in Loch Raven, Maryland. I spent about six months there, due to my proclivity, demonstrated a handful of times during childhood, to leave my family home in the example of characters made famous by the inimitable Samuel Clemens, to strike out on my own adventure in the world: I was an "incorrigible runaway". Tom and Huck and Mark Twain's riveting world took me for a ride more than once.
During six brutal months at Loch Raven (see "Rats in a maze and other sorrows"), I helped plan three and took part in two mass-breakouts. After each of these, I was put in solitary confinement, the second time for about a week. During that week of no cigarettes, nearly no food or drink, I was visited regularly by a young seminarian from Woodstock College, a Jesuit seminary in rural Maryland. This was Father Ned Murphy, dear friend and as it turned out in the summer of 1970 in Manhattan - co-conspirator.
Map to the Underground
From soon after I got to New York, my whereabouts, movements, means and frequency of communication and many other details conformed strictly to the advice of a man named Eqbal Ahmed, who I met a couple times, and knew before this only as a veteran of the Algerian war of independence from France. Like many in my generation, I had read my Franz Fanon, had been entranced and enraged by the 60's film The Battle of Algiers. The film shows the French using torture and other terror methods to win the Battle of Algiers against an urban guerrilla network, yet soon after this losing the war to the entire Algerian people.
Interestingly, I just read that the film was shown more recently at of all places the Pentagon - a few months after the invasion of Baghdad in 2003 - to a vastly different audience, for reasons very different from the reasons we had for watching in the 60's. Eq as we called him had also helped coordinate Dan Berrigan's activities underground that summer of 1970 - arguably far more difficult, since the FBI by the time of his arrest was said to have 200 agents on Dan's case. Dan was said to have ignored a single rule - "avoid islands" - only much later did it come out that he was actually turned in by an informer.
Eq was accused a year later, together with Dan's brother Phil and others ("The Harrisburg Seven"), of conspiring to dynamite (!) a secret network of tunnels under Washington, D.C., to attack even more draft boards (and violently this time), and ultimately to kidnap not-yet Nobel laureate Henry Kissinger, then widely hated aide to Tricky Dick, the scourge of SE Asia. All the main charges against the "Harrisburg Seven", having probably issued from the booze-addled sicko brain of the arch-imbecile Hoover himself, were of course finally dropped, though Phil, a Catholic priest, and Liz McAllister, a Catholic nun, were found guilty (having, unknown by most of us, already exchanged one set of vows for another) of smuggling letters in and out of federal prison.
While I found myself in the summer of 1970, excluding the odd evening in a "priest-hole, in unexpectedly comfortable surroundings most of the time "underground", even considering the air of paranoia that infused much of where I was and with whom, it was a pretty scary way to spend a summer vacation. Crucial to my sense of balance, periods of a couple weeks each were spent in glorious countryside in Maine, Massachusetts and upstate New York, paddling canoes, fishing, picking berries, reading stories to children, playing guitar. Arguably not your typical underground experience.
Retreats: the Catholic Resistance
During that summer I also took part in retreats - gatherings of peace-makers, mostly Catholic priests and nuns, for the express purpose of planning further "actions" against the war machine, acts of civil disobedience often directed at offices of the Selective Service System, but also at some of the more obviously guilty corporate partners to America's war of aggression against Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.
Civil disobedience, by which is meant voluntary, purposeful, open, non-violent non-compliance with the law, for stated political or spiritual reasons, traditionally entailed remaining after one's illegal act, accepting apprehension by the authorities, arrest, imprisonment and the rest, to demonstrate and continue demonstrating the political or spiritual wrongness of the law one has broken, and that one is paying for having broken. Our examples were righteous and somehow close at hand: Martin Luther King, who electrified us with the power (and the price) of straight-backed non-violent determination to follow the truth wherever it leads, whatever the cost, and Gandhi, whose movement of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience brought a poor country to its feet and an empire to its knees.
The Selective Service System
The Selective Service System was by modern standards a primitive organization, designed as World War II came to a close. According to the Selective Service Act, a man was required to register for the draft between his 18th birthday and 5 weekdays later. That was the sole legal requirement. This resulted in the creation of a physical "draft file" for each registrant, who was issued a "draft card", to be carried at all times, a primitive mind-implant ("Your body is ours, when we say the word...") to be stored in his wallet with his money and other valuables. The draft file was stored in a filing cabinet in a local draft board. Each state had a number of local boards, full of filing cabinets and little else, and for each registrant, a pair of simple 3x5-cards were made, one of which was kept by the local board, while its copy was sent to the state's central draft board where it was stored for statistical purposes and as backup.
This was essentially the whole system: everything was done by hand, and as far as was known at the time, and events seem to have borne this out, there were no other backups kept of the original registrations. Thus we discovered that the act of destroying a draft file and its 3x5 cards locally and in the central state board effectively erased a potential draftee from the system, which according to the law had no legal way in which to recover the lost registrations, except perhaps to publicly implore "lost" registrants to re-register - I don't know if that ever took place.
Stand-by or hit-and-run
There was a new item on the agenda at the retreats in the summer of 1970, and it cut to the core of the civil disobedience ethos that was one strand in the skein of connections between us all. This was a discussion of the relative merits of "stand-by" and "hit-and-run" actions. The main issue was to do with the open face of the one as opposed to the hidden, according to some even diabolical, face of the other. An act of non-violent civil disobedience had always meant visible persons, acting visibly: here is my face, this is my name, I am a person who takes responsibility, I am ready to stand up and say I did this, and I am ready to pay, this is my reason. A hit-and-run action by its very nature could easily be misrepresented as terrorism - shameless acts of faceless criminals moving darkly in the night.
But civil disobedience, we were discovering, was fraught with problems: one was that those of us willing to put our lives on the line were not in endless supply, and prison time meant - prison time. During the Vietnam war era, there were only about 2-300 of us "crazy" enough to do what we did - deface or destroy draft files or other files, for instance those at Dow Chemical (napalm), General Electric (B-52 bomber technology), Dupont (phosphorus bombs), and then face the music, and if we all ended up in jail, who would carry out the next actions?
What's important is the price
Refusing induction, like refusing illegal orders, is the bare-bones archetype of civil disobedience, straightforward more or less one-on-one acts for which many tens of thousands of young heroes had the right stuff, even in the face of draconian punishment. For soldiers openly refusing illegal orders, at the worst, even surviving (say in the sticky Mekong heat) might be a gamble, while for refusing induction, the going price was 5 years of your young life in federal prison, being stripped of many of your civil rights, such as the right to vote - people I tell this in Europe say I'm making it up. Each option was more than enough to make you think twice about putting your money where your mouth is.
Consensus
The retreats came to a consensus regarding actions against draft boards, since it was the boards and their files we were concentrating on, essential as they were to the waging of the illegal war. The hit-and-run model, if meticulously planned, in particular respecting the need for failsafe precautions so that no one could ever get physically hurt, offered two positive qualities. First was the fact that all essential documents could be efficiently and utterly deleted, and second was the fact that participants could be more efficiently recycled. To "take out" a draft board in the dead of night - given the level of technology at the time - turned out to be a piece of cake (notwithstanding the off chance of an action being derailed by an informer, which also happened), and it also turned out for a while to be nearly as easy to "take out" not only a draft board, or two, but 5, or 10, or 45 boards (the record), in fact all the boards in an entire state, including the central state board with its crucial copies of the 3x5's.
We had discovered empirically that the "stand-by-action" model had no hope of literally erasing the identities of all the potential draftees - it was simply a high-profile way to make our protest heard. This was simple mechanics, or chemistry, and try as we might - and we did experiment: acid baths, bleach, napalm, shredding - there was just no way to completely destroy all that information in the short time it ordinarily took for the FBI to show up at a "stand-by" action. So the hit-and-run model turned out to be a hot topic.
The topic was even hotter since a couple of hit-and-run actions turned out to be very successful: "The Beaver 55", who apparently took out most of the Selective Service System in the state of Indiana, and an action in New York City, which apparently took out most of the Black and Puerto Rican draft registrants in Brownsville, Queens and other parts of New York City.
Every destroyed draft file, provided its centrally stored backup had been destroyed, meant that one more living soul was erased from the system, thus relieved of the opportunity to choose between killing, prison, or exile. These acts were making the illegal war that Nixon, Kissinger and the rest of their bandit pack had tricked the country into waging in Vietnam literally harder to wage, and this fact could simply not be ignored by the civil disobedience purists among us.
A further hot topic regarded the less appetizing end of the civil disobedience equation: prison itself. The Catonsville 9 were to have begun their sentences in federal prison on April 9, 1970, but as I learned during the first day of my furlough, several of them never showed up. And during that summer, Dan's very visible sojourn underground (showing up at mass in well-known churches, for instance) was inspiring an entire country and obviously infuriating the powers that be. The reasoning behind not showing up was not in the purist civil disobedience vein, and that reasoning was: if it was right to try to stop their illegal war then it was equally right to not support their immoral imprisonment of us.
Meeting with Dan in Boston
During the second week of August in 1970, after some very hairy close calls in Boston and New York, I was starting to freak out a bit, and finally got a chance to sit down for an evening with Dan Berrigan, just outside of Boston. Dan was staying with a famous writer, and we got to talk for a few hours. We touched on many subjects: one was that while Dan had much to offer what then was a mass popular movement (with a couple hundred FBI agents hunting for him, Dan could show up in a church in Philadelphia and give a sermon during Sunday High Mass, then slip away), I had little of practical value to offer - I was a fugitive and not a lot more.
Another subject was my abiding feeling that I was not cut out for keeping my eye on my back, learning three escape routes from every building, memorizing addresses and telephone numbers, having no contact with my own family, and the rest. The final straw was the discovery that together with a part Cherokee lady from Kentucky, I was in the process of becoming a parent! Dan's take was that our take was probably right, and we might consider alternatives to my being underground, for instance applying for asylum somewhere, or perhaps emigrating to Canada.
Best laid plansThe first plan was to go west young man, then head north via California and possibly to Vancouver, but events in Cleveland nearly overtook me. Much later I learned that Angela Davis had connections in Cleveland, and she was being hotly pursued by the FBI in Cleveland the very day I got there. It also turned out there were only two "movement" houses in Cleveland: one was the Black Panther headquarters, and the other was the house where Ned and I managed to visit at on our way west.
Shortly after arriving it was noticed that a number of unmarked black Ford sedans with a couple suited gentlemen in each was slowly patrolling the street we were on. I was shepherded into a "priest hole" in the cellar, and spent about 8 hours there. The all-clear was sounded after dark, and I crawled across the lawn and into the back seat of a vehicle which took me to another Ohio city - maybe it was Cincinnati, or Toledo. Close call.
Call of the collar
I spent the next day dying my hair and eyebrows, trying out priest's garb, and trying out my new identity: Jesuit seminarian, student at Fordham University: Richard Lee Murphy, from the Bronx. We caught a plane to Detroit and from there flew onward to Toronto - I last stood on American soil on Wednesday the 12th of August, 1970, and what a long strange trip it's been...
Copyright © 2008 Michael Bransome
06. Time, time, time...
Looking at 76 years...
For my part in our demonstration at the Jesup Blair Draft Board, which was: walked through the front door which had just been unlocked by a worker who went off to mow the grass, opened filing cabinets, and poured black paint into the drawers (our blood had been less than artfully splashed on a wall by one of our number) and tried to spread it - uh-oh: no gloves! no brush! - into and among the draft files, the State of Maryland and the United States brought charges including interference with the Selective Service Act, destruction of government property, mutilation of government records, conspiracy, aiding and abetting each other, breaking and entering, crossing state lines with intent to commit a felony, defacing a national monument, defacing Maryland park property, defacing U.S. government property, and who knows what else, altogether amounting to 76 years in prison.
During the action, Montgomery County police officers arrived on the scene, but they ducked out pretty much at once. I vaguely recall some other level of police - perhaps state troopers - showing up and being similarly non-committal. Shortly after, FBI agents showed up, and we were asked to immediately cut that the heck out. We were hand-cuffed and moved out to police cars, and driven from there to the Silver Spring police station. There was an appearance before a judge there, and charges were brought, though I can't recall which ones - in any event they were later to be dropped.
Stir
After a short rest in a cell in Silver Spring, we were driven to the Federal Building in Baltimore where another ceremony was performed, presumably all the main charges were brought, bail set, and then we were separated and transported to different parts of the federal lockup of the Baltimore City Jail.
The week at the BCJ before bail was made was mostly uneventful, though the legal machinations due to the action were being launched with a not-guilty plea to both state and federal charges. Early on my lawyer Harold Buchman had talked about and later that summer convinced me to leave the path of moral rectitude and cop a plea - thus shamefully personifying the preposterous phrase "pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order", immortalized by that insidious idiot not to say insipid ignoramus of law and order felon Richard Nixon's venally vainglorious not to say vacuously vapid and equally felonious Vice Pres Spiro T. Agnew, who claimed to have discovered said tendency in the likes of your author.
Copping a plea
Thus my plea was changed from not-guilty to 76 years worth of charges, to nolo contendere to a single federal 3-year charge (mutilation of government records), which is tantamount to granting the prosecution victory by walk-over. Come to think of it, Spiro Agnew himself copped the same plea, when he entered a nolo contendere plea in federal court to charges of federal tax evasion, part of a complex plea bargain which cost him his chunk of the White House, three years probation and a $10,000 fine.
The upside of the plea bargain for Agnew was that all other criminal charges including state charges for taking bribes while governor of Maryland were dropped. Still, eight years later, during a civil suit in Maryland, he was made to repay the quarter-million dollars in bribes it was proven that he took while governor of that great state - one wonders how much he really took, both as gov and Vice Pres. Certainly it can't compare to the riotous fortunes being assembled by the present (2008) veep...
Ups and downs of the nolo plea
Like Agnew, I had been made to understand that a nolo contendere plea entailed ups and downs: the only up I can recall was that the other 73 years worth of state and federal charges were dropped, while the downsides included eliminating the courtroom process as a forum in which to work against the war. Years later another untoward side effect became apparent, in that by not having been convicted of interference with the Selective Service Act (a 5-year charge), I was not a potential recipient of President Jimmy Carter's first official act as President, i.e. his unconditional amnesty to (most) draft offenders.
In a deposition made by the Dept of Justice, probably in 1980 or '81, to the office of the Pardon Attorney, occasioned by my clemency application to Reagan, it was argued that the wording of Carter's amnesty ("...This pardon does not apply to ... persons convicted of or who may have committed any offense in violation of the Military Selective Service Act, or any rule or regulation promulgated thereunder, involving force or violence...") precluded my even being considered for clemency, since pouring blood and paint on draft files is a forceful, yea a violent act.
Yes, you read it here first: pouring paint onto draft files, potentially preventing real deaths of real persons (American draftees, or their Southeast Asian targets, or both), is a forceful not to say violent act. But of course the papers I defaced were worthless in comparison to the precious bodies of SE Asian children that, thanks to actions like ours, might be spared the lifelong curse of napalm. The same goes for those 3x5 cards and other files we defaced: worth zero compared to the draftees they represented, draftees whose lives and sacred honor we were trying to save, in my case armed with paint and my own blood. And no brush and no gloves: what a mess!
Tricking us into war - again
In any event, my change of plea would appear to have made it even theoretically impossible to use the courtroom to discuss the relative priorities of a government which had tricked its own people into one more illegal war, which by the middle of 1969 had spiraled, together with the rest of American reality, completely out of control. Concerning the so-called Bay of Tonkin incident which was the pretext for the war itself, and regarding the unofficial-official version, already in 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson declared: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there". And as we learned after NSA-files were made public in 2005, the Gulf of Tonkin incident was not relative spin, it was entirely made up.
Summer of love, on the run
The summer of 1969 was, put simply, strange: Strange Days had tracked us down. A review of any time-line of the period will show that half our generation was literally trapped into taking sides in what has been proven to be an illegal war, and we found ourselves spinning in a cultural maelstrom. Resistance to the draft was getting way out of hand: actions against draft boards were multiplying, and they were becoming effective: potential draftees were finally disappearing, leaving the system altogether, and with the wording of the law at the time, a draftee whose information was expunged from the system really disappeared, and there was no legal way to require him to re-register for the draft. At the same time, a whirlwind of induction refusals were jamming city jails, federal courts and federal prisons; and tens of thousands of draft-age men, often with their entire families, simply pulled up roots and re-located north of the Canadian border.
Exactly how many ever fled to Canada ("sneaked into Canada", as my AP-reporter had put it) is an issue which many would apparently like to discuss. Certainly Canada has official figures, though there are reasons to believe they may have been sanitized in recent years. In the past few days, I have found internet sources with widely differing claims as to how many fled to Canada, ranging from 2,500 to over a hundred thousand.
Only a small percentage of the total number of draft resisters/evaders/dodgers and deserters ever made it to Sweden, and the official figure given me by the Swedish Immigration Board in 2001 is that exactly 800 Americans were accorded some sort of permission to stay in Sweden for Vietnam war related reasons.
Not until 20 or 25 years after the Vietnam war had ended did I discover that a single one of our number (your author) was actually accorded political asylum by Sweden - probably the Swedish authorities were not interested in advertising the fact. Regarding numbers in Canada, the figure I heard in American exile circles while I was living there - mostly in Toronto, with short periods in Ottowa and Montreal - in 1970-71 was that there were supposedly 60,000 draft resisters in Toronto alone, a smaller but not small number in Vancouver, altogether perhaps around 100,000, a figure I imagine to be more accurate than the ridiculously incorrect figure 2,500.
Federal Bureau of Intimidation: COINTELPRO
The summer of 1969 saw Hoover declaring the Black Panther Party the single most important threat to freedom, followed closely by all the rest of us. The notion that the Nixon administration might be systematically committing illegal and even violent acts (otherwise known as terrorism) against the antiwar movement (and the Panthers, and the American Indians, and the feminists, and the Young Lords, and Women's Lib, and the civil rights movement, and the student movement, and the Chicanos, and United Farm Workers, and so on) - in fact doing many of the things presently allowed under the Patriot Act - figured wildly in the paranoid visions of some of us, your author included, yet this was denied vehemently by Hoover, Nixon and the rest of their criminal gang.
However, as Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing once wrote: paranoids usually have every reason to be. The FBI got away with their denials, too, on the whole, until their covert bubble burst as the first proof of the existence of the COINTELPRO conspiracy turned up a couple years later when an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania was broken into by a group calling itself the Citizen's Commission to Investigate the FBI, none of whom were ever apprehended. Downwind, FBI agents began to resign from the Bureau, and some blew the whistle on COINTELPRO's illegal operations.
The group that on March 8, 1971 invaded the Media FBI office reportedly removed all its documents, including a large number of official not to speak of top-secret ones, sending copies to news media around the country. Much of the news media had its own groove though, then as now, as more recently described by more honorable journalists including Robert Parry, Greg Palast and others, and many editors and broadcasters turned the material over to the authorities without blinking an eye.
The material they so readily abandoned included documentary proof that the FBI, together with other U.S. Government agencies, had been breaking a wide range of laws since the 1950's at least, in order to combat what they saw as the forces of subversion, chaos and anarchy, in other words me and my friends.
Not until Congress investigated the matter in the middle '70s was official confirmation of COINTELPRO given, with barely a glance at the sort of venomous chicanery Hoover and his minions were dealing. There are many links on the web describing COINTELPRO, replete with details regarding its methods, including forged correspondence, mail-theft, identity theft, warrantless wire-tapping, media manipulation, assault and battery, planting drugs, planting bombs, even planting bullets in sleeping people, otherwise known as assassinations.
In a terse public communique upon what was claimed to be formal termination of the program, the government made it clear that similar operations would continue to take place, though not systematically like COINTELPRO, but only "on a case-by-case basis", and while not without oversight, yet under even stricter security - this time nothing would be left to chance.
Most likely the COINTELPRO effort never so much as wavered, but simply changed its name, its camouflage, its organizational status, its funding, more recently its brazenness, since now, the same figures that populated that seamier side of American politics are or have been in or near power in Washington, D.C. for several decades.
The FBI is everywhere (if you believe it)
Among the documents supposedly found in Media was one from Hoover which tried to impress on field agents the director's belief in the importance of convincing Joe Public that the FBI was everywhere, literally: agents were to be seen lurking behind every telephone, inside every mailbox, right across the street, sitting in that car over there, hiding behind that curtain across the way.
Most of mass media's willing participation in the COINTELPRO programs, for instance by not outing the conspiracy once documentary proof was provided, lends further credence to the reporting of Parry, Palast and a small number of other fearless journalists and writers, to the effect that a substantial part of the mainstream news media (not only Fox, which never looked like a fair and balanced news organization, but never intended to) is and has for a long time been under the control of clandestine elements of the less pleasant powers that be.
Facing the music, changing key
After an amazing summer, spent for my part in New York, Washington, Boston, Cleveland, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Glacier Nat'l Park (where I heard on the radio about Nat'l Guard units being called out to help deliver food and medical supplies to something going on in a place called Woodstock), I headed back to Baltimore, and prepared to face my own music.
In the middle of September, 1969, 4 months after our action at Local Board 53 in Jesup-Blair Park, I returned to what I expected to be the beginning of my trial at the Federal Building in Baltimore, MD, where my lawyer Harold Buchman met me on the way into the court-room. In accordance with Buchman's advice, earlier that summer I had entered a nolo-contendere plea as detailed above, but in the interim I had seen the ethical error of my ways, in one respect: I had decided to withdraw the nolo contendere plea and face the original charges with a not-guilty plea. I had spoken by phone with the judge (Roszel C. Thomsen) ahead of time to confirm that he would allow the change of plea.
In retrospect, my own lawyer Buchman didn't seem able to get his head around what I was saying on the phone, and I was obviously unable to get my head around the fact that he was missing my point, and I was certainly missing his, as events would show. It may be that Buchman was acting out of concern for me, believing that to change the plea would be to open me up to the risk of a far harsher sentence than 3 years. Judge Thomsen had responded to my telephone query in such a way that I understood the trial would unfold as originally planned, and so the appearance in Baltimore would be a formality, and I expected a date would be set for a proper trial.
Party time (not)
Regarding my own state of mind in the courtroom that day, a planning party was to take place that evening in D.C., where a few friends and I would sketch out strategy for a more out-front trial. Instead, a very few minutes into the proceedings in Baltimore, it all appeared to my beginner's legal mind to have been suddenly interrupted by the judge, who in a stern and rather formal voice pronounced my sentence: 3 years in federal prison. Buchman was not a bit riled by this, which was disconcerting to say the least.
"Three years in federal..." - say what?! The shock of this sound-bite, together with Buchman's attempts to calm me down, made it difficult for me to see my way clear to what was transpiring, and while they dragged me out, I shouted out questions of the Court regarding recourse, appeal and so forth, but the stark reality of what had happened didn't hit home until I found myself back in the Baltimore City Jail federal lockup. What I gleaned on the way through various holding cells, including a short talk with Buchman, who "would get back to me" with details on the future, was not a lot, but something to the effect that the nolo contendere plea had been made somehow indelible and there was no turning back, and specifically there was no route of appeal.
Heavy music
A long-lost factoid that recently came back to me (found in a letter I wrote from prison in October 1969, a copy of which my mother recently showed me), was that I had gotten the highest sentence so far of any of the draft-board raiders with the exception of Phil Berrigan, who had taken part in two actions. This I apparently knew already in the courtroom that morning.
Another long-lost factoid, re-discovered in the same letter, was that I was apparently informed upon sentencing and now and again afterward that I had been subjected to adult sentencing rules. In fact, a few months later, it turned out I had been sentenced under the Federal Youth Corrections Act. I don't yet understand the reasons for the discrepancy, but as I have understood it, under the FYCA the ordinary rules for parole didn't hold, so there was no reason to expect release after 1/3 time for good behavior. During my time at KYC, I didn't know this. As later events would show, counselors and others including the warden at the prison in which I spent the most time (Robert F. Kennedy Youth Center in Morgantown, West Virginia) held that I would be released after 1 year, i.e. 1/3 of the sentence). But in the Baltimore City Jail that day in September 1969, all I knew was "three years", and "no right of appeal".
Baltimore City Jail, Federal Lock-up
I freaked. A few hours later, after the mandatory butch haircut, strip search, donning of a surplus state police uniform which served as prison garb, I found myself in a cell together with a very large and not very friendly African American man who'd been there in the federal lockup during a long hot summer for interstate flight after having shot a man during an armed bank robbery. Can't recall his name, but I do recall thinking archetypally "Blackman", and I do recall his tone: he was not only very big and very black, he also informed me Honkycracker that he was calling the shots Whiteboy Muthafucka: my ass was his - literally.
Boy did I freak. What's your beef Honkycracker Whiteboy Muthafucka? I tried to explain our act of, um, civil disobedience ("sir" might have felt appropriate...), but I was not getting real far. In fact, so far, the whole scene was really getting very un-real. He was looking at 10-15 years, maybe more, and hears I attacked the government itself and didn't even get "a nickel" - typical Honky judge, give a Honky Whiteboy Muthafucka less than a nickel.
I didn't know this could be in the cards. I was in a state of extremely high alert, and heard a radio later on recount the result of my "trial". I was losing it. Here I was, tricked out of a trial, tricked into a federal prison sentence, stuck here sweating my head off on a hot September night, inside a claustrophobic cell with a huge black psychotic killer who owned my ass: where was there to go?! After having gotten commissary funds and a pack of Lucky Strikes, and in a relatively calm frame of mind, toward midnight, I chanced upon a razor blade hidden between my mattress (top bunk) and the wall. A few hours later, I slipped into sleep, blood running out of both arms.
Suddenly, something's wrong: Blackman's face is next to mine, or at least his eyes are, shining in the gloom of a Baltimore City Jail morning. He is standing there, shaking me awake, hissing at me, there's blood all over his clothes, even on his hands, all over his mattress, and moreover: I'm still here! As I came to understand, this was a new ball-game for him - he was pretty shaken up: here his lair is invaded by a honky freak with a cause, a cracker who gets himself into stir on purpose, then tries to off himself, using Blackman's personal and exceptionally illegal contraband razor-blade.
I underwent immediate transformation, from Blackman's meat to his private patient. During the week I spent in his cell, before being moved out to a federal penitentiary, Blackman managed to smuggle his razor blade out and bandages in, managed to sneak me past The Man for showers, showed me how to hide the bandages in my sleeves. The wounds weren't discovered until the next full strip search, at the federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky, a week or ten days later. I imagine Blackman was happy to see me go - I dunno: I wasn't going to miss him.
Lunacy on the road
Leaving the Baltimore City Jail, I was transported by two United States Marshals (note that the U.S. Marshals answer to the Executive and not the Judicial branch, thus these guys worked directly under Tricky Dick!), a father and son team it turned out, from Virginia, deer and partridge hunters when they got the chance.
In downtown Baltimore I got stupid, dreaming of an escape hatch: I asked them how they would react if at the next light my friends surrounded the vehicle with machine guns and asked them to please let me go. The son was riding shotgun - he instantly dropped the door of the glove compartment and raised a heavy-looking revolver and replied that I would be the first one to go down. I backed down and said that luckily nothing of the sort was planned. Must have been all the bad vibes in the city jail, I'm not usually that rude.
Can't recall exactly where they took me on the way to Ashland, but it took two or three days and nights to get there. I vaguely recall Roanoke, Virginia, maybe Charleston, W. Va. - three different jail cells on the way to Kentucky. One of them was across the street from a dance hall or a bar with live music - it was a hot September night, warm and muggy, good country music was slipping in past the bars, I could even see stars.
Funny, though - ending up in Kentucky: I had no family there, no relations or contacts, and these guys took many driving hours to get there. As it turned out, after the war, after so many of us had spent sizeable chunks of our lives in prisons and stockades and in exile, we understood the government was not only bad news in big things, they were bad news in petty ways as well. Nearly anyone that had to spend time in prison due to an antiwar crime ended up far enough away from family that visits became difficult if not impossible.
Stir-craziness in Ashland, Kentucky
Image from Ashland: the barracks I ended up in housed probably 80 guys, all living in a single dormitory. There were maybe 30 or 40 draft resisters in all at Ashland. Many were educated and had managed to get jobs in the library, the infirmary. My vague memory is that Ashland had a license plate manufacturing facility, and perhaps manufactured postal bags. I was only there a few weeks, and during that time worked in the kitchen. The dorm radio was playing pieces by bands that had been at Woodstock, a few weeks in the past, Come Together was rising on the charts, Leary was running for governor in California.
One day we got an idea: how many tiles are there in that bathroom? The bathroom was something like ten toilets, as many sinks and showers, with these little tiny tiles. We were maybe 10 draft offenders in that "cottage" who really got into the project - kept us occupied for hours, totally freaking everyone else out, including the guards. Folie à dix has still not made it into the DSM, but we did our best. Redefining reality, making something ridiculous - our imprisonment for wanting to stop the killing - into something even more ridiculous. Escaping in a sense.
Somehow my mother's husband got the ear of someone at the Bureau of Prisons, and they moved me within weeks from Ashland to the experimental Robert F. Kennedy Youth Center, a minimum security facility just outside Morgantown, West Virginia. It housed federal offenders between the ages of 18 and 26, and my recollection is that a stipulation was that one's sentence could be no longer than 3 years, and no draft offenders allowed. I have no idea how he pulled that off.
Morning Morgantown
During my time in federal prison, I got a handful of visits from family and friends in D.C., New York, Cleveland - most of them entailed traveling time on the order of 8-10 hours each way. Some had it better at Morgantown, like "Dud" - his beef was holding a nickel bag of grass - whose rich parents flew their own plane down from Indianapolis to see him twice a month, or Ralph - an extremely pleasant and brilliant young Quaker who'd gotten time for refusing induction - his parents lived in Morgantown and met him as often as they were allowed, which was weekly.
Obviously the government had no intention of easing our time, in particular taking boys (we were all boys, both those who'd refused induction and spent time in prison, and deserters who spent time in stockades) from the north and sticking us together with a lot of total weirdos from the south, some of them KKK, some worse, if you can imagine...
The Robert F. Kennedy Youth Center was apparently an incredibly expensive experiment - about 200 inmates (we were "students", the prison was our "campus") and nearly as many staff. We were segregated in accordance with the results of a diagnostic workup that took nearly a month to complete. There were a few guiding principles, and one was that segregation according to diagnostic category could improve the rehabilitative aspect of one's stay in prison, and all were to be provided therapy suitable for their supposed frame of mind.
Oddly, one of the theoreticians behind the Morgantown experiment was Timothy Leary, whose map of interpersonal relations (Leary, T., 1957. Interpersonal diagnosis of personality. New York: Ronald Press) was taken as bible by the people running KYC. Leary, who had already been fired from Harvard, was winning in the polls in his contest for governor - against Ronald Reagan - just before his arrest for a marijuana cigarette, for which he got a ten year prison sentence.
I ended up in a "cottage" for "immature-subcultural" types. I never figured out if this meant I was not yet fully "subcultural", or belonged to an immature subculture... Other groupings were "psychotic", or it may have been "psychopathic", "neurotic", "simply immature", etc. Everyone in our cottage was offered transactional analysis. Another principle used in Morgantown was "behavioral modification". We got "points" for everything, and lost points for things as well - it was like getting fined. Points could be converted to commissary cash, or used for privileges, like town visits.
Honor, death and rumors of death
After having made "honor", highest of three status levels at KYC, with privileges such as home furloughs, on the way to the electronics shop where I spent half of my weekdays, I was accosted by two guys from the "psychopathic" or "psychotic" cottage - can't recall what it was called for sure, only that it was in a separate end of the prison grounds from the other cottages and had no windows visible from the outside. They explained that they had learned that I was a commie, and they averred that commies were for killing, and explained that I would be killed by them shortly, and suggested I relax since there was no way I could stop them. They pointed out the general direction of the field in which they planned to plant my 18-year-old body.
What a bummer! Here I was having done more than half of the time I would have to do - counselors and others were certain their support for my parole at 12 months would go through - but release was still several months away. There was no telling "the Man". There were rumors of a death that had taken part earlier in another cottage, and we all believed them, and nobody had supposedly been charged, so as far as I could tell it was entirely reasonable to assume they could pull this off. What a bummer!
I was actually still unsure, when I left on the furlough, whether or not I would return or go through with splitting, since I knew that an escape conviction usually meant the maximum sentence = 5 more years. Just to up the ante on the freakiness quotient of everything going on around me at the time, a few nights before I was to leave on the furlough, I noticed one of these huge luna moths we saw in our valley from time to time, beating on my window. I started to get out of bed to go and check it out, but it brushed past my head - then I heard that high-pitched squeak: a bat!
Like lightning in under the sheet: "Guard! Guard! There's a bat in my room! Guard! Guard!" I managed to muster the wherewithal to get out from under the sheet and flee the room, where I noticed about 20 of my fellow prisoners, as wide awake as I was. Inside of a minute, we were everywhere, trying to bash that bat, poor thing. Someone finally managed to down the death image, and we got to go back to bed. He survived a couple days in a cardboard box, little tiny guy causing all that trouble.
Then came the day of the furlough, and not five minutes before I was to be driven to Morgantown's miniature airport, a cloudburst exploded onto our valley, and the furlough got called off! The warden Roy Gerard changed his mind when the sun came out after a few minutes, and they drove me out quick. Then another cloudburst on the way! Sunshine when we got there, quickly paid for the ticket, and managed to get to the plane not a full minute before take-off.
The plane had two stops on the way - they may have been Charleston, W.Va. and Winchester, Va. On one of the landings, in the middle of an absolutely torrential downpour, I catch the eye of the stewardess as we both turn our heads to peer out the window through the rain at the runway - straight down at it! We were close to 90 degrees from horizontal, and the wing looked to be a couple of feet from the tarmac! As we both visibly whitened, a sickly feeling in our bellies (in mine at least), the pilot must have leaned way back on that stick, as the plane zoomed straight back up into the sky.
The rest of the journey was uneventful, but by the time I stopped shaking in Washington, when my perspective shifted to one of relative freedom and especially relative freedom from the fear of being killed by a couple of right-wing wackos in a prison in the hills of West Virginia, I bolted - I was sure I would be killed if I returned, and reporting them to the Man would probably just hasten that. Thus as I saw it I really had no choice but to not return. It was the middle or end of April, 1970 - not until the middle of April 1975 did the government finally charge me for escape from a federal prison, worth those 5 more years...
For my part in our demonstration at the Jesup Blair Draft Board, which was: walked through the front door which had just been unlocked by a worker who went off to mow the grass, opened filing cabinets, and poured black paint into the drawers (our blood had been less than artfully splashed on a wall by one of our number) and tried to spread it - uh-oh: no gloves! no brush! - into and among the draft files, the State of Maryland and the United States brought charges including interference with the Selective Service Act, destruction of government property, mutilation of government records, conspiracy, aiding and abetting each other, breaking and entering, crossing state lines with intent to commit a felony, defacing a national monument, defacing Maryland park property, defacing U.S. government property, and who knows what else, altogether amounting to 76 years in prison.
During the action, Montgomery County police officers arrived on the scene, but they ducked out pretty much at once. I vaguely recall some other level of police - perhaps state troopers - showing up and being similarly non-committal. Shortly after, FBI agents showed up, and we were asked to immediately cut that the heck out. We were hand-cuffed and moved out to police cars, and driven from there to the Silver Spring police station. There was an appearance before a judge there, and charges were brought, though I can't recall which ones - in any event they were later to be dropped.
Stir
After a short rest in a cell in Silver Spring, we were driven to the Federal Building in Baltimore where another ceremony was performed, presumably all the main charges were brought, bail set, and then we were separated and transported to different parts of the federal lockup of the Baltimore City Jail.
The week at the BCJ before bail was made was mostly uneventful, though the legal machinations due to the action were being launched with a not-guilty plea to both state and federal charges. Early on my lawyer Harold Buchman had talked about and later that summer convinced me to leave the path of moral rectitude and cop a plea - thus shamefully personifying the preposterous phrase "pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order", immortalized by that insidious idiot not to say insipid ignoramus of law and order felon Richard Nixon's venally vainglorious not to say vacuously vapid and equally felonious Vice Pres Spiro T. Agnew, who claimed to have discovered said tendency in the likes of your author.
Copping a plea
Thus my plea was changed from not-guilty to 76 years worth of charges, to nolo contendere to a single federal 3-year charge (mutilation of government records), which is tantamount to granting the prosecution victory by walk-over. Come to think of it, Spiro Agnew himself copped the same plea, when he entered a nolo contendere plea in federal court to charges of federal tax evasion, part of a complex plea bargain which cost him his chunk of the White House, three years probation and a $10,000 fine.
The upside of the plea bargain for Agnew was that all other criminal charges including state charges for taking bribes while governor of Maryland were dropped. Still, eight years later, during a civil suit in Maryland, he was made to repay the quarter-million dollars in bribes it was proven that he took while governor of that great state - one wonders how much he really took, both as gov and Vice Pres. Certainly it can't compare to the riotous fortunes being assembled by the present (2008) veep...
Ups and downs of the nolo plea
Like Agnew, I had been made to understand that a nolo contendere plea entailed ups and downs: the only up I can recall was that the other 73 years worth of state and federal charges were dropped, while the downsides included eliminating the courtroom process as a forum in which to work against the war. Years later another untoward side effect became apparent, in that by not having been convicted of interference with the Selective Service Act (a 5-year charge), I was not a potential recipient of President Jimmy Carter's first official act as President, i.e. his unconditional amnesty to (most) draft offenders.
In a deposition made by the Dept of Justice, probably in 1980 or '81, to the office of the Pardon Attorney, occasioned by my clemency application to Reagan, it was argued that the wording of Carter's amnesty ("...This pardon does not apply to ... persons convicted of or who may have committed any offense in violation of the Military Selective Service Act, or any rule or regulation promulgated thereunder, involving force or violence...") precluded my even being considered for clemency, since pouring blood and paint on draft files is a forceful, yea a violent act.
Yes, you read it here first: pouring paint onto draft files, potentially preventing real deaths of real persons (American draftees, or their Southeast Asian targets, or both), is a forceful not to say violent act. But of course the papers I defaced were worthless in comparison to the precious bodies of SE Asian children that, thanks to actions like ours, might be spared the lifelong curse of napalm. The same goes for those 3x5 cards and other files we defaced: worth zero compared to the draftees they represented, draftees whose lives and sacred honor we were trying to save, in my case armed with paint and my own blood. And no brush and no gloves: what a mess!
Tricking us into war - again
In any event, my change of plea would appear to have made it even theoretically impossible to use the courtroom to discuss the relative priorities of a government which had tricked its own people into one more illegal war, which by the middle of 1969 had spiraled, together with the rest of American reality, completely out of control. Concerning the so-called Bay of Tonkin incident which was the pretext for the war itself, and regarding the unofficial-official version, already in 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson declared: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there". And as we learned after NSA-files were made public in 2005, the Gulf of Tonkin incident was not relative spin, it was entirely made up.
Summer of love, on the run
The summer of 1969 was, put simply, strange: Strange Days had tracked us down. A review of any time-line of the period will show that half our generation was literally trapped into taking sides in what has been proven to be an illegal war, and we found ourselves spinning in a cultural maelstrom. Resistance to the draft was getting way out of hand: actions against draft boards were multiplying, and they were becoming effective: potential draftees were finally disappearing, leaving the system altogether, and with the wording of the law at the time, a draftee whose information was expunged from the system really disappeared, and there was no legal way to require him to re-register for the draft. At the same time, a whirlwind of induction refusals were jamming city jails, federal courts and federal prisons; and tens of thousands of draft-age men, often with their entire families, simply pulled up roots and re-located north of the Canadian border.
Exactly how many ever fled to Canada ("sneaked into Canada", as my AP-reporter had put it) is an issue which many would apparently like to discuss. Certainly Canada has official figures, though there are reasons to believe they may have been sanitized in recent years. In the past few days, I have found internet sources with widely differing claims as to how many fled to Canada, ranging from 2,500 to over a hundred thousand.
Only a small percentage of the total number of draft resisters/evaders/dodgers and deserters ever made it to Sweden, and the official figure given me by the Swedish Immigration Board in 2001 is that exactly 800 Americans were accorded some sort of permission to stay in Sweden for Vietnam war related reasons.
Not until 20 or 25 years after the Vietnam war had ended did I discover that a single one of our number (your author) was actually accorded political asylum by Sweden - probably the Swedish authorities were not interested in advertising the fact. Regarding numbers in Canada, the figure I heard in American exile circles while I was living there - mostly in Toronto, with short periods in Ottowa and Montreal - in 1970-71 was that there were supposedly 60,000 draft resisters in Toronto alone, a smaller but not small number in Vancouver, altogether perhaps around 100,000, a figure I imagine to be more accurate than the ridiculously incorrect figure 2,500.
Federal Bureau of Intimidation: COINTELPRO
The summer of 1969 saw Hoover declaring the Black Panther Party the single most important threat to freedom, followed closely by all the rest of us. The notion that the Nixon administration might be systematically committing illegal and even violent acts (otherwise known as terrorism) against the antiwar movement (and the Panthers, and the American Indians, and the feminists, and the Young Lords, and Women's Lib, and the civil rights movement, and the student movement, and the Chicanos, and United Farm Workers, and so on) - in fact doing many of the things presently allowed under the Patriot Act - figured wildly in the paranoid visions of some of us, your author included, yet this was denied vehemently by Hoover, Nixon and the rest of their criminal gang.
However, as Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing once wrote: paranoids usually have every reason to be. The FBI got away with their denials, too, on the whole, until their covert bubble burst as the first proof of the existence of the COINTELPRO conspiracy turned up a couple years later when an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania was broken into by a group calling itself the Citizen's Commission to Investigate the FBI, none of whom were ever apprehended. Downwind, FBI agents began to resign from the Bureau, and some blew the whistle on COINTELPRO's illegal operations.
The group that on March 8, 1971 invaded the Media FBI office reportedly removed all its documents, including a large number of official not to speak of top-secret ones, sending copies to news media around the country. Much of the news media had its own groove though, then as now, as more recently described by more honorable journalists including Robert Parry, Greg Palast and others, and many editors and broadcasters turned the material over to the authorities without blinking an eye.
The material they so readily abandoned included documentary proof that the FBI, together with other U.S. Government agencies, had been breaking a wide range of laws since the 1950's at least, in order to combat what they saw as the forces of subversion, chaos and anarchy, in other words me and my friends.
Not until Congress investigated the matter in the middle '70s was official confirmation of COINTELPRO given, with barely a glance at the sort of venomous chicanery Hoover and his minions were dealing. There are many links on the web describing COINTELPRO, replete with details regarding its methods, including forged correspondence, mail-theft, identity theft, warrantless wire-tapping, media manipulation, assault and battery, planting drugs, planting bombs, even planting bullets in sleeping people, otherwise known as assassinations.
In a terse public communique upon what was claimed to be formal termination of the program, the government made it clear that similar operations would continue to take place, though not systematically like COINTELPRO, but only "on a case-by-case basis", and while not without oversight, yet under even stricter security - this time nothing would be left to chance.
Most likely the COINTELPRO effort never so much as wavered, but simply changed its name, its camouflage, its organizational status, its funding, more recently its brazenness, since now, the same figures that populated that seamier side of American politics are or have been in or near power in Washington, D.C. for several decades.
The FBI is everywhere (if you believe it)
Among the documents supposedly found in Media was one from Hoover which tried to impress on field agents the director's belief in the importance of convincing Joe Public that the FBI was everywhere, literally: agents were to be seen lurking behind every telephone, inside every mailbox, right across the street, sitting in that car over there, hiding behind that curtain across the way.
Most of mass media's willing participation in the COINTELPRO programs, for instance by not outing the conspiracy once documentary proof was provided, lends further credence to the reporting of Parry, Palast and a small number of other fearless journalists and writers, to the effect that a substantial part of the mainstream news media (not only Fox, which never looked like a fair and balanced news organization, but never intended to) is and has for a long time been under the control of clandestine elements of the less pleasant powers that be.
Facing the music, changing key
After an amazing summer, spent for my part in New York, Washington, Boston, Cleveland, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Glacier Nat'l Park (where I heard on the radio about Nat'l Guard units being called out to help deliver food and medical supplies to something going on in a place called Woodstock), I headed back to Baltimore, and prepared to face my own music.
In the middle of September, 1969, 4 months after our action at Local Board 53 in Jesup-Blair Park, I returned to what I expected to be the beginning of my trial at the Federal Building in Baltimore, MD, where my lawyer Harold Buchman met me on the way into the court-room. In accordance with Buchman's advice, earlier that summer I had entered a nolo-contendere plea as detailed above, but in the interim I had seen the ethical error of my ways, in one respect: I had decided to withdraw the nolo contendere plea and face the original charges with a not-guilty plea. I had spoken by phone with the judge (Roszel C. Thomsen) ahead of time to confirm that he would allow the change of plea.
In retrospect, my own lawyer Buchman didn't seem able to get his head around what I was saying on the phone, and I was obviously unable to get my head around the fact that he was missing my point, and I was certainly missing his, as events would show. It may be that Buchman was acting out of concern for me, believing that to change the plea would be to open me up to the risk of a far harsher sentence than 3 years. Judge Thomsen had responded to my telephone query in such a way that I understood the trial would unfold as originally planned, and so the appearance in Baltimore would be a formality, and I expected a date would be set for a proper trial.
Party time (not)
Regarding my own state of mind in the courtroom that day, a planning party was to take place that evening in D.C., where a few friends and I would sketch out strategy for a more out-front trial. Instead, a very few minutes into the proceedings in Baltimore, it all appeared to my beginner's legal mind to have been suddenly interrupted by the judge, who in a stern and rather formal voice pronounced my sentence: 3 years in federal prison. Buchman was not a bit riled by this, which was disconcerting to say the least.
"Three years in federal..." - say what?! The shock of this sound-bite, together with Buchman's attempts to calm me down, made it difficult for me to see my way clear to what was transpiring, and while they dragged me out, I shouted out questions of the Court regarding recourse, appeal and so forth, but the stark reality of what had happened didn't hit home until I found myself back in the Baltimore City Jail federal lockup. What I gleaned on the way through various holding cells, including a short talk with Buchman, who "would get back to me" with details on the future, was not a lot, but something to the effect that the nolo contendere plea had been made somehow indelible and there was no turning back, and specifically there was no route of appeal.
Heavy music
A long-lost factoid that recently came back to me (found in a letter I wrote from prison in October 1969, a copy of which my mother recently showed me), was that I had gotten the highest sentence so far of any of the draft-board raiders with the exception of Phil Berrigan, who had taken part in two actions. This I apparently knew already in the courtroom that morning.
Another long-lost factoid, re-discovered in the same letter, was that I was apparently informed upon sentencing and now and again afterward that I had been subjected to adult sentencing rules. In fact, a few months later, it turned out I had been sentenced under the Federal Youth Corrections Act. I don't yet understand the reasons for the discrepancy, but as I have understood it, under the FYCA the ordinary rules for parole didn't hold, so there was no reason to expect release after 1/3 time for good behavior. During my time at KYC, I didn't know this. As later events would show, counselors and others including the warden at the prison in which I spent the most time (Robert F. Kennedy Youth Center in Morgantown, West Virginia) held that I would be released after 1 year, i.e. 1/3 of the sentence). But in the Baltimore City Jail that day in September 1969, all I knew was "three years", and "no right of appeal".
Baltimore City Jail, Federal Lock-up
I freaked. A few hours later, after the mandatory butch haircut, strip search, donning of a surplus state police uniform which served as prison garb, I found myself in a cell together with a very large and not very friendly African American man who'd been there in the federal lockup during a long hot summer for interstate flight after having shot a man during an armed bank robbery. Can't recall his name, but I do recall thinking archetypally "Blackman", and I do recall his tone: he was not only very big and very black, he also informed me Honkycracker that he was calling the shots Whiteboy Muthafucka: my ass was his - literally.
Boy did I freak. What's your beef Honkycracker Whiteboy Muthafucka? I tried to explain our act of, um, civil disobedience ("sir" might have felt appropriate...), but I was not getting real far. In fact, so far, the whole scene was really getting very un-real. He was looking at 10-15 years, maybe more, and hears I attacked the government itself and didn't even get "a nickel" - typical Honky judge, give a Honky Whiteboy Muthafucka less than a nickel.
I didn't know this could be in the cards. I was in a state of extremely high alert, and heard a radio later on recount the result of my "trial". I was losing it. Here I was, tricked out of a trial, tricked into a federal prison sentence, stuck here sweating my head off on a hot September night, inside a claustrophobic cell with a huge black psychotic killer who owned my ass: where was there to go?! After having gotten commissary funds and a pack of Lucky Strikes, and in a relatively calm frame of mind, toward midnight, I chanced upon a razor blade hidden between my mattress (top bunk) and the wall. A few hours later, I slipped into sleep, blood running out of both arms.
Suddenly, something's wrong: Blackman's face is next to mine, or at least his eyes are, shining in the gloom of a Baltimore City Jail morning. He is standing there, shaking me awake, hissing at me, there's blood all over his clothes, even on his hands, all over his mattress, and moreover: I'm still here! As I came to understand, this was a new ball-game for him - he was pretty shaken up: here his lair is invaded by a honky freak with a cause, a cracker who gets himself into stir on purpose, then tries to off himself, using Blackman's personal and exceptionally illegal contraband razor-blade.
I underwent immediate transformation, from Blackman's meat to his private patient. During the week I spent in his cell, before being moved out to a federal penitentiary, Blackman managed to smuggle his razor blade out and bandages in, managed to sneak me past The Man for showers, showed me how to hide the bandages in my sleeves. The wounds weren't discovered until the next full strip search, at the federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky, a week or ten days later. I imagine Blackman was happy to see me go - I dunno: I wasn't going to miss him.
Lunacy on the road
Leaving the Baltimore City Jail, I was transported by two United States Marshals (note that the U.S. Marshals answer to the Executive and not the Judicial branch, thus these guys worked directly under Tricky Dick!), a father and son team it turned out, from Virginia, deer and partridge hunters when they got the chance.
In downtown Baltimore I got stupid, dreaming of an escape hatch: I asked them how they would react if at the next light my friends surrounded the vehicle with machine guns and asked them to please let me go. The son was riding shotgun - he instantly dropped the door of the glove compartment and raised a heavy-looking revolver and replied that I would be the first one to go down. I backed down and said that luckily nothing of the sort was planned. Must have been all the bad vibes in the city jail, I'm not usually that rude.
Can't recall exactly where they took me on the way to Ashland, but it took two or three days and nights to get there. I vaguely recall Roanoke, Virginia, maybe Charleston, W. Va. - three different jail cells on the way to Kentucky. One of them was across the street from a dance hall or a bar with live music - it was a hot September night, warm and muggy, good country music was slipping in past the bars, I could even see stars.
Funny, though - ending up in Kentucky: I had no family there, no relations or contacts, and these guys took many driving hours to get there. As it turned out, after the war, after so many of us had spent sizeable chunks of our lives in prisons and stockades and in exile, we understood the government was not only bad news in big things, they were bad news in petty ways as well. Nearly anyone that had to spend time in prison due to an antiwar crime ended up far enough away from family that visits became difficult if not impossible.
Stir-craziness in Ashland, Kentucky
Image from Ashland: the barracks I ended up in housed probably 80 guys, all living in a single dormitory. There were maybe 30 or 40 draft resisters in all at Ashland. Many were educated and had managed to get jobs in the library, the infirmary. My vague memory is that Ashland had a license plate manufacturing facility, and perhaps manufactured postal bags. I was only there a few weeks, and during that time worked in the kitchen. The dorm radio was playing pieces by bands that had been at Woodstock, a few weeks in the past, Come Together was rising on the charts, Leary was running for governor in California.
One day we got an idea: how many tiles are there in that bathroom? The bathroom was something like ten toilets, as many sinks and showers, with these little tiny tiles. We were maybe 10 draft offenders in that "cottage" who really got into the project - kept us occupied for hours, totally freaking everyone else out, including the guards. Folie à dix has still not made it into the DSM, but we did our best. Redefining reality, making something ridiculous - our imprisonment for wanting to stop the killing - into something even more ridiculous. Escaping in a sense.
Somehow my mother's husband got the ear of someone at the Bureau of Prisons, and they moved me within weeks from Ashland to the experimental Robert F. Kennedy Youth Center, a minimum security facility just outside Morgantown, West Virginia. It housed federal offenders between the ages of 18 and 26, and my recollection is that a stipulation was that one's sentence could be no longer than 3 years, and no draft offenders allowed. I have no idea how he pulled that off.
Morning Morgantown
During my time in federal prison, I got a handful of visits from family and friends in D.C., New York, Cleveland - most of them entailed traveling time on the order of 8-10 hours each way. Some had it better at Morgantown, like "Dud" - his beef was holding a nickel bag of grass - whose rich parents flew their own plane down from Indianapolis to see him twice a month, or Ralph - an extremely pleasant and brilliant young Quaker who'd gotten time for refusing induction - his parents lived in Morgantown and met him as often as they were allowed, which was weekly.
Obviously the government had no intention of easing our time, in particular taking boys (we were all boys, both those who'd refused induction and spent time in prison, and deserters who spent time in stockades) from the north and sticking us together with a lot of total weirdos from the south, some of them KKK, some worse, if you can imagine...
The Robert F. Kennedy Youth Center was apparently an incredibly expensive experiment - about 200 inmates (we were "students", the prison was our "campus") and nearly as many staff. We were segregated in accordance with the results of a diagnostic workup that took nearly a month to complete. There were a few guiding principles, and one was that segregation according to diagnostic category could improve the rehabilitative aspect of one's stay in prison, and all were to be provided therapy suitable for their supposed frame of mind.
Oddly, one of the theoreticians behind the Morgantown experiment was Timothy Leary, whose map of interpersonal relations (Leary, T., 1957. Interpersonal diagnosis of personality. New York: Ronald Press) was taken as bible by the people running KYC. Leary, who had already been fired from Harvard, was winning in the polls in his contest for governor - against Ronald Reagan - just before his arrest for a marijuana cigarette, for which he got a ten year prison sentence.
I ended up in a "cottage" for "immature-subcultural" types. I never figured out if this meant I was not yet fully "subcultural", or belonged to an immature subculture... Other groupings were "psychotic", or it may have been "psychopathic", "neurotic", "simply immature", etc. Everyone in our cottage was offered transactional analysis. Another principle used in Morgantown was "behavioral modification". We got "points" for everything, and lost points for things as well - it was like getting fined. Points could be converted to commissary cash, or used for privileges, like town visits.
Honor, death and rumors of death
After having made "honor", highest of three status levels at KYC, with privileges such as home furloughs, on the way to the electronics shop where I spent half of my weekdays, I was accosted by two guys from the "psychopathic" or "psychotic" cottage - can't recall what it was called for sure, only that it was in a separate end of the prison grounds from the other cottages and had no windows visible from the outside. They explained that they had learned that I was a commie, and they averred that commies were for killing, and explained that I would be killed by them shortly, and suggested I relax since there was no way I could stop them. They pointed out the general direction of the field in which they planned to plant my 18-year-old body.
What a bummer! Here I was having done more than half of the time I would have to do - counselors and others were certain their support for my parole at 12 months would go through - but release was still several months away. There was no telling "the Man". There were rumors of a death that had taken part earlier in another cottage, and we all believed them, and nobody had supposedly been charged, so as far as I could tell it was entirely reasonable to assume they could pull this off. What a bummer!
I was actually still unsure, when I left on the furlough, whether or not I would return or go through with splitting, since I knew that an escape conviction usually meant the maximum sentence = 5 more years. Just to up the ante on the freakiness quotient of everything going on around me at the time, a few nights before I was to leave on the furlough, I noticed one of these huge luna moths we saw in our valley from time to time, beating on my window. I started to get out of bed to go and check it out, but it brushed past my head - then I heard that high-pitched squeak: a bat!
Like lightning in under the sheet: "Guard! Guard! There's a bat in my room! Guard! Guard!" I managed to muster the wherewithal to get out from under the sheet and flee the room, where I noticed about 20 of my fellow prisoners, as wide awake as I was. Inside of a minute, we were everywhere, trying to bash that bat, poor thing. Someone finally managed to down the death image, and we got to go back to bed. He survived a couple days in a cardboard box, little tiny guy causing all that trouble.
Then came the day of the furlough, and not five minutes before I was to be driven to Morgantown's miniature airport, a cloudburst exploded onto our valley, and the furlough got called off! The warden Roy Gerard changed his mind when the sun came out after a few minutes, and they drove me out quick. Then another cloudburst on the way! Sunshine when we got there, quickly paid for the ticket, and managed to get to the plane not a full minute before take-off.
The plane had two stops on the way - they may have been Charleston, W.Va. and Winchester, Va. On one of the landings, in the middle of an absolutely torrential downpour, I catch the eye of the stewardess as we both turn our heads to peer out the window through the rain at the runway - straight down at it! We were close to 90 degrees from horizontal, and the wing looked to be a couple of feet from the tarmac! As we both visibly whitened, a sickly feeling in our bellies (in mine at least), the pilot must have leaned way back on that stick, as the plane zoomed straight back up into the sky.
The rest of the journey was uneventful, but by the time I stopped shaking in Washington, when my perspective shifted to one of relative freedom and especially relative freedom from the fear of being killed by a couple of right-wing wackos in a prison in the hills of West Virginia, I bolted - I was sure I would be killed if I returned, and reporting them to the Man would probably just hasten that. Thus as I saw it I really had no choice but to not return. It was the middle or end of April, 1970 - not until the middle of April 1975 did the government finally charge me for escape from a federal prison, worth those 5 more years...
Copyright © 2008 Michael Bransome