Poetry & Prose

 In his interview- later down the page,  Bill O' Connor describes the making of the napalm used at Catonsville: “I did the resarch on napalm, which was made . at night in the basement of my house at 27th and St. Paul. “Me and another guy” (meaning Dean Pappas) made it. Then after they saw it we came up here and did some kind of ritual with it but I don’t remember that.” Meaning they said a prayer I suppose (DE)

 Contrast what George writes in August of 2009, preparatory to a presentation of the C-9 play at the University of Md. by the Actors Gang:  "However,  what concerns the Melvilles and I, is the fact that so much will be said  about our action by others, rather than by any of the living participants."

Hey George- have you talked with Dan Berrigan? He's still living (11/17/09). What would he say?

George goes on (and on and on and on):  "Tom raised the concern, that I share, about the panel on planning  the action.  Dean, Brendan and Willa  (who all have been life-long respected friends of mine) had nothing whatsoever to do with planning or organizing the Catonsville Nine action.  Dean entered the picture after all the organizing and planning decisions had been made at meetings prior to his and Gren Whitman's important logistical assistance began." True enough. George seems to be worried that some one is going to take the action away from him? He needs to "grow up"!

For more on George's opinions after 2000, when he spoke with me about his differences with Phil and Dan and Tom and Liz and his opinions on the Plowshares Actions- please fast forward to my chapters entitled "Farewell to Phil,  and The C 9 Play"- a sad developement, in my opinion! He seemed to have turned against his old comrades - "full of venom"- as Liz says (Phil's wife).

(DE- I think to myself: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?- isn't the most important thing to do more actions that can change the state of things?) After long pondering- turning over the "origins of the 9" over and over like some stone with facets, I concluded that Tom and George didn't want to be forthcoming about it- maybe it was George but my guess is that Phil played a strong role. Who cares. Well- a historian would rise here and say "I care". And I have to admit- who sets history in motion, gives it a spark- and why- AND HOW- that's important!!!!!

 When he vistited me w George in 11/'07, Tom stated that George WAS the key organizer for the C 9. While attending our Baltimore 4 trial, one of the prosecutors jacked up the damage done to the files by the blood so that it would be a felony- (I believe it had to be over 500 dollars). Our lawyer asked- "couldn't the files have been washed off? " And then, "you mean to say you don't have duplicates of these files?" No. "You mean that if I took a match to a file it would be gone forever?"

 "One of those cartoon light bulbs went off in my head"- George says. This has the ring of authenticity!

Tom (again, 11/'07) describes a meeting where the C-9 action was discussed and a vote taken and out of  some 40 persons, many raised their hands. Tom came in late and asked afterwards: "What were you guys talking about? Holy smokes that's great!" He then agreed to join, He told Margee and she got mad! "You've got a helluva nerve! Don't you know what it is to be married? You're supposed to consult with your partner! Margee goes over to DuPont Circle where, she later tells Tom, she cried for several hours. She comes back to say, "Count me in too!" Tom joined the action providing that they related the action to Guatamala- which the 9 were glad to include as well as Mary Moylan's experiences in Africa. Tom has written eloquently on Guatamala- Through a Glass Darkly

 John Hogan’s version of the instigation of the C 9. , Before his death, John tells me probably the best version to date- better than George’s or …maybe…just different. George led him and others up to Baltimore to meet w Phil and Tom at Bill O’C’s house. The action wasn’t specified but it was to be a continuation of our Baltimore 4 action. John signed on and there was a meeting in the basement of the house in DC where hands were raised. Whose idea was it? “I always thought it was Phil’s, “says John. He also tells me "not to worry about it".

 Liz tells me the instigation of it was “the Baltimore 4”. Touche. She is trying to be nice. Helene- best so far (9/14/9)-

this is the place for all versions of the organizing of the 9 and details of the action

  Over the years I learned more and more of the details of the action- as I attended many reunions, and watched the play and discussed same: Brendan Walsh's role as driver although an impatient Phil took the keys and drove- at least on the way out (Phil rode back in a paddy wagon!); Dean Pappas' role as phone liason, Willa Walsh and Mailyn O'Connor's role as press relase distributors, why George's pants ripped, how Mary Moylan held the phone button down so that the clerks could not call out, how Dave Darst was look out, the fact that it took a long time for the police to come- they could have all walked away, easily! The 9 were actually tried by the state as well as the feds- although any sentences (were there any?)  were run concurrent.

 I find it humorous  that George Mische is adjusting his pants as the draft board file flames rise in the WBAL TV footage. Marjorie Melville stands behind him, "fixing him up". Typical of the tricks time plays on memories- when I ask how this happened- George says that the draft board clerk, Ms. Murphy, pulled at his pants w such force that they split. Marjorie Melville tells me that George's pants caught on a corner of a table.         

 Tom Melville takes the most active part in the actual burning, turning the wire basket of files over and scattering them out so that they burn more thoroughly. At a later reunion- his wife, Marjorie, tells me that she sees the Israeli/Palestinian situation as the flash point now- us as the oppressor. Marjorie talks to me about the Palestinian problem.

 Did the 9 really disrupt Selective Service (any more than ours did in the Baltimore 4, except that the 9 had burned files and in our action- since I had been a draft counselor- I actually knew to go to files that were marked I-A Qual Ind- (qualified for induction) (which Phil and Tom would not have known (nor did we discuss it). If only 4f files were destroyed at Catonsville?- see Narowski's comments) the only thing accomplished was symbolic!  And yet it DID disrupt the SS in that it inspired so may other actions, and you can be sure some were very much more destructive. Remember the lady who was at the earlier meeting (when Lynn discussed the action at the Catonsville library) who was from Pennsylvania and said the draft board in her town was burnt to the ground? Then too, the 9 helped the Vietnamese people by ending the U.S. participation in a bad war- but how much did we help them by ushering in the North Vietnamese regime? Let's ask some hard questions,

                                                   Back to the 4

Because of the Catonsville action, the court made an effort to separate me from Tom and Phil, offering me probation as opposed to their prison sentences. The judge was giving them more punishment because they had acted again at Catonsville. In one of my braver moments, I informed the court that there were several activities I intended to continue‑ e.g. organizing against and speaking out against the war, activities I knew probation forbade. Since I found the restrictions "onerous", the Judge intoned, I'm giving you three years at an institution of the Attorney General's choice." "An institution of the Attorney General's choice", I wondered naively. That sounds mild enough ... does he mean a bakery, a laundry? What he meant was prison. I got three years, while Tom and Phil got six. Judge Northrop found us "barren of remorse" and accused us of aiming to "bring down this society".

  After our Baltimore 4 sentencing, I resumed by role as movement organizer although limpingly so. Many times I wondered about the action, what it meant for me at the time, what would it mean for me in a continuing way, and more broadly what it meant in the general scheme of things. The action is still with me. It reminds me of this spot in the Mozart Requiem, in measure 32 of the "Offertorium", the "Domine Jesu" where the soprano soloist takes off in a hair raising, spine tingling way with notes stepping upwards and the words "Sed signifer sanctus Michael" i.e., "but let the holy standard bearer Michael lead them into the holy light" (my underline). Bear in mind that this call is only an idea in my head. It does not necessarily motivate me to direct action.

 In 2005 a friend in the Spark organisation, Dave Harding, added a couple of interesting stories about his experiences during the same period.  He had been part of a demonstration with other Hopkins students at a Recruiting Office in which they held up photos of atrocities and demanded that they be posted so that potential recruits could see what they might be getting into in Vietnam. Since this was federal property the cops had to call U.S. Marshals- and the group, some 6 or 7, were arrested. The cops had not bothered to ID the students, so about about 4 AM in the morning, Dave says, they came into the cell block at the District holding station, and called out names in a blatant attempt to learn identities so that their court case would hold up. This pissed Dave off so that, on a freshly painted wall, he wrote by scratching with the pointed end of his keys: “Cops Hurt People, F ck the Cops”. He then passed the keys to some one in the next cell, but the cops were wise to it and he had to spend another 8 days in jail and then go to court on the new charge of destroying property.

 As his case came up in the courtroom, the audience strained to figure out what was going on;  Dave'’ lawyer, Elspeth Bothe- later to become a Judge, asked one of the police witnesses: “You don’t arrest everybody who writes on Jail house walls do you? Doesn’t it happen all the time? “ The Judge ended up laughing and throwing the case out.

Dave told me that Fred Weisgal, who had been Dave’s lawyer as well as ours, when he moved to Israel, told him that he had given up trying to change American capitalism by going through the courts- waiting for that big case to take before the Supreme Court. Fred had that kind of ego.

Dave tells me that his record might have kept him from getting his State of Md. job but that he had appealed and the Hearing Judge for the State turned out to be a young, black woman who, when she saw what Dave’s arrests had been- for civil rights and peace- also threw the case out. I could not have worked at the Jail, probably, although they might have overlooked it, without my pardon from President Reagan.

It could be pointed out that a lot of my material has also been written about by Phil-  in Prison Journals of a Priest Revolutionary and The Lamb's War . I don't know what makes my do do any more readable or special- let's just say it's my point of view- a bit more poetic/secular?

            George is kind of a crazy Dostoyesvskian maverick. He can set down and drink a bottle and a half of whisky and he’s rude and he’s lewd and he’s a chauvinist number one. I think Dand and Phil were paying him money and he was hitting different parts of the country trying to bring people together. He opened a place up on S or P St. in D.C. and planning meetings for the Catonsville 9 took place ther. Many of these meetings I chaired. Not withstanding that I was not going to be in the action…faintly flirted with coming into the actions. Didn’t like the moral tone, one.

                Two, didn’t particularly want to see myself in jail, I’ve been in jail a couple of times, Felt I could do other things, make other contributions. And said that I would hang in because the actions were real. I thought the priests could use their celibacy for a change.”

               Interviewer: “How involved were you with the action in Catonsville”?

            O’C: Involved enough that they finally charged me, “  (DE- I never knew about this- I was pretty much out of it at this later point (in one of my “funks” as Bill pointed out to me  around the time of the Catonsville trial). Bill goes on: “Flyers had been put out referring to the violent Democratic Convention in Chicago- If you like Chicago- you’ll love Baltimore”. Film star,  Tim Robbins, in an interview with Amy Goodman on "Democracy Now"- discussing the play, the "Trial of the C 9", wisely points out that after Chicago and the Jerry Rubins and the Abbie Hoffmand and long haired weahtermen and DSD ers- the "trial of the nine might open some otherwise closed minds-- the clerical garb- the reasoned arguments. I realized that, despite all the arguments by prosecutor, Sachs, about the sanctity of the law- the rule of law- he failed to realize that the 9 were staying within the law! they actually showed up for court- they WERE honoring the law.  

          Bill describes getting the blood for the blood pouring from the Gay Street Market)  and how we met at the Bill Moore House to do it- near Greenmount in Baltimore.  Bill had walked through the South ( with a sandwich board reading  “Black and White- Eat at Joe’s” and had been shot by a sniper. A friend of ours from the Civil Rights movement- Hal Smith had set up a foundation in Bill’s honor.

       Back to the interview- Bill speaks of flying out to Milwaukee and helping to organise the “Milwaukee 14” action (in which they burned files. “Then I flew back to Baltimore because I was handling most of the press. I did that for the blood pouring and Catonsville. I did it for Milwaukee. I did a lot of it for the Women against Daddy Warbucks”. DE I note he doesn’t mention the “DC 9” Dow Chemical action.

Interviwer: “What was hoped to be gained by the actions against draft boards?”

B: “ You mean how did people think that was going to put an end to the war?”  I.: “Idealogically”  B:   “We wanted to broaden the base-  we saw that at least around the Catonsville 9 we were able to build a community, which went from the Interfaith Peace Mission to the Baltimore Defense Committee.” (DE- I remember feeling a bit left out of the Defense Committee- in which Gren Whitman played a large role- but then, I was in a blue funk anyway. Thank God Louise took care of me.)

B: “That’s when it really did involve lots of Catholic, but pardon me, not a disproportionate number. This was really kinda grass roots stuff. People were really moving. The elitism was no longer there. But what began to develop is I found myself in two movements- the grass roots movement with many people who made enormous sacrifices (DE- not compared to ours- we faced 50 years in prison and a great deal of money if fined!), giving up jobs. Supporting themselves on a little bit of money. Working hard as hell around the clock. Just wanted to end the war and they didn’t care how long it was going to take.

And it was pretty damn brutalizing. Looking back everybody talks about that. Broke up marriages and I think some of those marriages might have stayed together. Very hard to live with one another. Marilyn and myself went through some hell. In one scene Berrigan and I were here endlessly. Marilyn came down and I heard- Bill! I went to the kitchen, M had all the bed clothes, the sheets, the pillow and said, ‘I’m going down stairs and sleep. You want to sleep up there with Phil Berrigan, that’s alright.’  I found it very difficult. Increasingly difficult to reach Phil..until I said to him: ‘we have to talk.’ I don’t know if you want to hear the nitty gritty of those talks or what was discussed.” (DE= sounds like B is a bit defensive here.)

Bill proceeds to describe actions at Fort Myers and picketings at homes of Rostow who was considered the architect of the Vietnam policy. At one of the Fort Myers demos- (not one that I was on-DE)- “Some of us managed to get in. That’s when they wrote out we would get three years in jail for each one of us and a thousand dollar fine if we returned. Berrigan looked like Moses who had just come out with the Decalog, saying, ‘Bill, Bill we have ‘em by the balls’ (DE- a favorite saying of Phil’s)- but we weren’t arrested and I suggested to P that we’ re not getting arrested because of the priestly collars so why not let me put together a small contingent of people and we’ll get arrested but he was never interested in that. That’s the first kind of doubt that I had of what Phil might be into. His own ego problems. Very stubborn sort of guy you know. (DE- sounds like Phil might have weighed the effectiveness of such arrests and that Bill is being too critical – the way Bill was.)

I: “How do you see your own philosophy of a revolution?”

B: “I saw Phil as a pretty gung ho guy, I knew that he was kind of a war hero. I intuited considerable violence in the man, “ (DE: so did I and Phil admits as much in Lynn Sachs- that, at the time he was very judgmental. And yet I never sensed physical violence- just commitment top the cause. The same commitment comes through in the photos of John Brown- although Brown was in favor of violence. Bill also came across as violent- but not with the fine-ness of Phil. I never agreed with Bill and George’s critique of Phil, and I think Phil knew it).

Bill goes on: “He (Phil) certainly didn’t have the soft A.J. Muste (I don’t think Bill knew squat about  A.J. M. - AJ's approach was any thing but soft!!! note by dme) or Ghandhi (not was Gandhi's) kind of approach. We were raising some basic questions- what  revolution means in an advanced industrial society. What finally developed between Phil Berrigan and myself is the way that Phil abused his charisma to trap people on guilt trips. And I could tell you numerous episodes about that but I…” breaks off. (DE- this I think Bill got from George but maybe George got it from Bill- it’s bs if you ask me. Makes me wonder if Bill was an informer (me the paranoid).

I wanted him to examine the manipulations, the guilt trips, the moralizing to trap people to make ‘em feel inferior and yet bring ‘em into the actions. (DE- I think B here underestimates those of us who took part in actions)- psychological violence and what it does to people (DE- I guess B would say I was one of the victims)- and I was going to present this to him one night but I saw clearly that he was adamant- not that he was going to defend the viable position but it was closing in on him. His options were becoming less and less. Finally it worked up to a show down. Phil just couldn’t deal with that. Brutalizing Tom Lewis at that point…. Bill then gives a portrait of Tom Lewis that adds nothing.

   Bill continues, “We all knew it. Tom Hogan said to Phil that night: ‘Look Phil, if you say something is blue and a hundred people say it’s red, that does mean it’s red, and certainly you should entertain the possibility that it might be red.’ That’s when Phil threw a book against the wall and put his jacket on and left. Mary Moylan was scrambling eggs…they said, ‘What’s going to happen now?’ I said it’s obvious. He’ll be on that phone tomorrow calling saying, well, come on, let’s get together.

here is where I cut some very revealing material

 I still thought I could work with the man” (DE- he was only a prophet of the stature of a Jesus, after all). “Then there was this big meeting in New York- they were talking about developing a real kind of National Liberation Front” (DE I was thrilled to read this- although it smells a bit of Bill’s hyperbole- when you read about the real NLF and the sacrifices they were making under John McCain style bombings- you have to admire them).( the five pointed star of Vietnam’s flag =’s workers, farmers, intellectuals, traders and soldiers).  “There are details of that I couldn’t possibly go into. But it involves…some very big people. Black and white. I had a lot of misgivings bout it. (As did Carl Oglesby if you read his memoir- Ravens in the Storm especially the part where he is arguing with Bernardine Dorhn). I thought it was premature- people talking over their heads, but we went ahead with it.

   This particular meeting was a kangaroo court in which Phil had finally gotten the message, that Mische was going to hurt the movement, and wanted him out. So we met in this unoccupied church, freezing our asses off in an out of the way place in New york (DE I remember Gun Hill Rd.). And agin, Phil sat there and could not confront Mische.  Mische’s a tough mother-f  ker. It was five of us there, four of us. I had to do all the talking. It was one of the most difficult things I’ve had to do in my life.” (DE- aw gee).

 I “You ran the entire meeting?”

  B Yeh- I had to do all the talking. Phil did not have it in him to stand up to Mische…I had to tell M, ‘Look George, we can no longer work with you…and then after we got G out of it, we had this series of big meetings that we back and forth, New York, Baltimore, maybe one or two in Washington with more and more people coming into it. Meeting with many blacks that are now dead, blown up ( DE-Ralph Featherstone?) One of the big ones now in prison. “

 Bill goes on to say how “particularly whites were looking to Phil to say things. Jim Harney would say: ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about’ and I would say, this is what he’s talking about” ( DE-as if B were the translator)…”and still Phil was for getting actions, actions and organizing actions. And of course he himself is not an organizer” (DE- debatable), but he would use his charisma” (DE- what’s wrong with that?). “There were other people that would go around making all the great sacrifices” (DE- but P was also making ‘great’ sacrifices). Driving a God da m automobile you know like a jack-leg preacher all over the country, picking people here, picking people there, and then maybe after they’d got so many people together, Phil would fly out and talk to them…and some of them didn’t really have the conviction and I objected to that”.

  I “What kind of things were important after Milwaukee?”

   B “Dow Chemical, I put that together.” (DE- need to talk to Jo Ann Malone about that- I believe she told me at Tom Lewis’ funeral that George was not the instigator- I don’t think we talked about Bill). “It was at that point when I was breaking with Phil. I couldn’t work with him any more but there were two actions to go off at the same evening, one in the draft board, one Dow Chemical (the DC 9), Dow Chemical went, the draft board didn’t because somebody had leaked it and they were there waiting for them”

   I “Is that the 18 in New Jersey? (Camden 18- it was actually 28)  Were you involved?”

  B “Yeh but I wasn’t involved…at that point I told Phil I don’t want to work with you any longer, you’re not giving me anything. Your position is hardened and rigidified. At that point John Grady was kinda the brains in that whole thing- Camden, Buffalo….He had five kids and I knew John. He knew what he was getting into.

   DE  I have tried a couple of times to see if any one had a recording of John laughing. He had the most inspired, insane, guffaws- his laughter was  infectious, hilarious- you would hear him across a room and just want to hear what was going on. He had curly hair that seemed Irish to me- he reminded me of Dylan Thomas or some kind of leprechaun- just seemed like a wild man- although of course he wasn’t- he was creative his spirit often “occurs” to me when I think back to those days… but he came to a bad end, tho- as I remember- drink? Divorce?

   The Camden 28 action is superbly documented in a documentary that actually played on Public Television. It was an action fraught with drama- especially with the story of the informer. It is available as a dvd for purchase.

  Bill goes on: “I felt that up to Dow, the actions were important; after that I thought we needed to withdraw for a period of months, break down into small meetings and really hit many of the questions that we had been avoiding,” (DE- this smacks of hindsight).

  B “We had 25 people here, AFSC kind of people==college professors, college students, house-wives,  gathering in the dark here, who were going to go down to the Customs House and handcuff ourselves with Japanese handcuffs and we had chains to go through the doors so that they could’t draft anybody that day……..that’s the kind of thing we wanted to build…and you know…we couldn’t do it as long as Berrigan kept hammering on these draft actions in which there could not possibly be growth.”  (DE- this is bs- they could have gone ahead with such an action and Phil would have loved it).

  B goes on to talk about building a mass movement, saying it “never took hold” he talks about Nixon’s first election and a counter inaugural, how the draft actions, starting with the blood pouring and Catonsville did "bring people in"”and he mentions the fact that Berrigan and Lewis- "Why would these two guys who had already gone to jail and were going to serve a long time go into another action? Plus Dan’s coming in lent some weight….the Milwaukee 14 because it was more of a grass roots action without any charismatic, elitist figures in it.”  (DE- a good point).  Bill says he felt at about the time of the Dow Chemical action in ��, “I felt certain that things should not proceed in that vein. We needed things where we could turn on masses of people.”

 “It was effective when the Vietnam Vets came into Washington with their wheelchairs and their crutches and threw their medals over the White House fences and on to the lawn. Even when they took over the Statue of Liberty…”

  Bill quotes Dorothy Day, “everything that’s wrong with us is what’s wrong with the filthy system.”  He quotes Gramsky, the Italian communist who said “when you are a revolutionary what is demanded is pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”

  “I’m saying that Phil Berrigan will use anything, the moral pressure, the psychological manipulation to get people to do things. Consequently he often surrounds himself with very weak people, or people who are just naïve. Well-intentioned, well meaning and they may go in and do any action or two, But ultimately they’re going to see that he’s not building community. If he were building community we would be with him.” DE- and here I feel fairly certain Bill was talking about a me. The stuff he says about building community is bs- Phil did build community- it continues to this day- Bill never built jack s  t.

 All this being said, my IO (Intimate Other) and partner- CP for Comunist Party says- what movement came out of the sixties- you built nothing- you were angry and you at least paid a price. I counter that SDS had an analysis. Yes, but SDS broke into the factions- one being the Weathermen and the other leading no where- RYM. Our own Catholic left had no real over all analysis of society, although, counter to what Bill O’C said, a small community continues and has its supporters- just as the group to which CP belongs- SPARK. They’re both miniscule groups- but I would say Jonah House and VIVA House (part of a Catholic Worker) network- draw more youth and volunteers than SPARK does.

 In Aug. of 2008, a few of us met in the same room where this interview had taken place to go over details of publishing Bill’s poetry- enough money had been raised at his memorial service to do it. I found it mawkish, amateurish, sentimental. But I had to give Bill the credit of his work for the 9 and for being a forceful individual- and basically for the good. He HAD done a lot of work- as a meeting chairman- he was great.   

Jerry Elmer writes interestingly of this period in his book Felon for Peace- two reviews by Joe Tropea me for the Amazon site follows:

A crucial work, November 18, 2009 By  Joseph Tropea - See all my reviews    Memoirs are a mixed-bag. Some, like Bill Ayer's Fugitive Days are filled with pages of anecdotes and passion. They're endlessly interesting and entertaining, but may leave the reader feeling more like they've just read a novel rather than a memoir (read: history). They may even leave the reader with more questions than answers--not necessarily a bad thing. With Felon for Peace, Jerry Elmer has offered an analytical work that manages to be highly personal, entertaining, and informative. It leaves the reader with a perhaps more useful set of questions. Elmer is a fearless writer: He takes on antiwar movement/scholar heavyweights like DeBenedetti and is not afraid to criticize his fellow activists. And he does not hesitant to criticize himself or admit when his own thinking was flawed. Felon for Peace is an important work, as historians interested in the Vietnam War era well know--activists from the period need to offer up their versions of their history. They would do well to use Elmer's work as model (or inspiration). And despite that it lacks foot- or endnotes, any class on American history, peace studies, or activism would be better for using this excellent text.

a review from a fellow peacenik and draft board attacker, October 21, 2009 review by david eberhardt-aged 68-poet and member "baltimore 4" (poured blood on draft files in 1967 with Father Phil Berrigan)- web site is google david eberhardt then poetry and prose- i discuss many of the same issues that Jerry does. I feel priviledged to review Jerry's book.I began to read it on 9/21/9. Jerry goes over a lot of the ground that I covered as undoubtedly would George Mishe (of the Catonsville 9) when he got around to writing his book. Jerry knows or mentions many of the people George does- Joe O' Rourke, Jo Anne Malone. He draws some of the same conclusions about "elitism" about Phil Berrigan as does George. Jerry discusses (on pg.88- a debate between WRL 's Jim Peck vrs Joe O Rourke of the draft actions and his remarks are priceless viz a viz "elitism".... it's worth quoting: "The gist of Joe's attack was, You have not done what I have done; therefore you have made no contribution whatsoever to the peace movement (can Joe have been that ignorant about Jim Peck and general peace movem,ent history?-de). I have found the one right tactic to end the war, raiding draft boards; nothing else has any value. This was elitism at its most outreageous, but it was highly typical of the attitude of many (I would say- some (de) in the Catholic Left. To Phil Berrigan, the entire world was devided into two parts- actors (those what had taken part in draft board actions) , and everybody else. If you were not an actor" (and I, de, might point out- if you had only acted in one action and not more)- Phil had little use for you, unless he thought he could recruit you to be an actor. A word that Phil frequently used was "serious". People were only serious about anti war work if they took part in a draft board action." How true! But you could say that about protest in general- that the world is deivided into actors and non- actors. We need more actors! Me? I didn't see a bad side to Phil- (and I poured blood with him and spent time at Lewisburg Prison in the same cell and knew him at various times all his life); maybe I was blind- yes, Phil, had that single focus side- but I still thought of him as gentle enough- I knew he was after we got out of prison and while we were in it. We all have our faults. Certainly Dan is gentle. Jerry has a devastating passage re Phil being catty about Eqbal and his own brother Dan in his letters to Liz from Lewisburg re Harrisburg (I can only imagine what he said in private about me?!?!). Jerry was a precocious anti-warrior- active in high school at 16 years old. Jerry's book seems to contain good shades of grey- he is aware of the complexities. In his book, Jerry gives a good rationale for what we draft action protestors did and a good history as well- e.g., in Feb. 1947! The "WRL and FOR organized Break with Conscription demonstrations in 36 states- among the organizers were A.J. Muste, Dave Dellinger, Bayard Rustin and Jim Peck". As a lawyer, Jerry has a great sense of legalities and legal precedents- dating back to his high school days- he was filing motions even at the age of 16! I realized reading Jerry that my movement memoirs need a lot of editing and are anecdotal, lacking the connective tissue or skeleton or muscle to make a body- his book has it. He well discusses the most important issues- whether draft actions are a proper non violent tactic in the first place (old War Resisters League hands like Dave McReynolds (apparently Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton did not for the same reasons) did not apporve) (Jerry concluded "OK" because it is the property that is taken, not human life); whether to stay around like we and the C- 9 or to split- hit and stay? or hit and split?- whether to claim responsibility (a la Gandhi) or surface or just disappear-; the value of prison and the particul.ar Catholic view of suffering (the "suffering servant" that is Christ) and how he disagrees. George M's criticism of the Plowshares and Berrigans hinge on this very point- unbeknownst to George. When George reads Jerry's book- it will be a revelation- Jerry has already written George's book and mine!! to a degree. I could see why my history of the actions, scanty as it was, became so much more murky after the Harrisburg 8 and Camden 28, because actions like the N Y and Boston 8 (let alone the Beaver 55?) werea actions where the perpetrators purposefully made it difficult for any one to have to be nailed for responsibility.. The Boston 8 would have been the Boston 9, but Jerry didn't surface. Jerry's book is must reading- along with the Polner Disarmed and Dangerous (where is the underline feature?), and the books by Phil Berrigan- Prison Journals, and The Lamb's War, and the book on Plowshares actions by Art Laffin!

As chronicled on a site called "HippyLand" and in a list by filmmaker Joe Tropea in 2009 as he prepared for his documentary film on the draft actions: starting in 1968- Sept. 24- Milwaukee 14;

1969: 3/22- DC 9;  May 20, -Pasadena 3; May 21, Silver Spring 3 (Les Bayless?); May 25, Chicago 15; Julyق, Women against Daddy Warbucks- NYC;  New York 8; Aug. 1st; Oct. 31, Beaver 55- where?  Akron?; ("who were not 55 but only 8 and were named whimsically by Tom Trost"); Nov. 7, Wash. Dow Chemical offices hit again; Nov. 7, Boston 8;  Nov. - Akron 2; 

1970: Feb 6, East Coast Conspiracy; May 19- We the People; June 13-14-Rhode Island Offensive for Freedom (RIPOFF- Jerry Elmer); Jul 10- Minn 8, Jul.- New Haven; summer- Delaware actions; Pontiac 4; Sept. 6- Rochester Flower Coty Conspiracy; 12/18--Hoover Vacuum Conspiracy; 12/24- San Jose 1.

1971: Jan- Harrisburg; Mar. 8- Media Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI; Apr. 29- The 4 of Us; Apr. 30- 2nd Harrisburg; June- Citizens arrest of Curtis Town; Aug 21- Buffalo 5; Aug 22- Camden 28;

1972: 3/2-Hickam 2; 3/ 27- York 5; July- Great Lakes Conspiracy; Nov.- CREEP 17;

1973: Aug. - White House Prayer Raids;

1974--Mar.- VOPRO 4; Apr. UN4 

Believe me, there were plenty of draft boards destroyed with no one taking credit!   many, many more.

But me? I was on my way to the , once you got used to it of course, peace and quite of prison. The din around me was subsiding. We had hurled ourselves against the trundling, sh t filled behemoth of America long enough- it was time to curl up in the belly of the beast- safe from it's blandishments and assaults.

                                                Prison- Up Against the “Wall” 

We were in a model police state. The police, indeed, let you in and out of your "house" or cell ("crib" in the lingo). I shuddered to think of the electronic devices coming for tighter prison control. But 25 years later as I worked on this book, the techniques of electronic monitoring proved mild enough. They consisted of bracelets you plugged into a device on your phone when the computer from hq called you, or electronic perimeters beyond which you couldn't go without alerting the command center.  These devices actually allowed minor criminals to spend their sentences at home rather than in jail.

The Lewisburg staff treated us like children or numbers.  Most of the rehabilitation personnel shuffled papers, fitting given jokes about Lewisburg as a place for "paper hangers" (those with such charges as bad checks, embezzlement, fraud, etc). The staff hung paper too. We looked scornfully down on them, they were doing life bits, were lifers after all, that is they would be coming in and out of prison every day until they retired. (As it turns out, I later became a lifer also, spending most of my career working for Offender Aid and Restoration at the Baltimore City Jail.) 

After "R and D" came "A and O, Admissions and Orientation". We got one five minute lecture on brushing your teeth and the standard institutional battery of I.Q. tests, but nothing on prison life or regulations. They wanted you to find that out knock by hard knock.

 After two weeks in A and 0 Phil and I were moved, not to a minimum custody camp as we expected, as were other draft cases, but into the "population" of the wall itself. We were considered escape risks, they told us, we had become fugitives, hadn't we? They claimed it was routine.

 Meanwhile, outside the wall in "the world", Dan Berrigan continued to embarrass the F.B.I. richly during his time underground, giving interviews, writing articles, traveling widely, popping up here for a speech, there for a sermon.

 I was moved into a two man cell with Phil and into a rather cushy job up in the front of the prison away from the bulk of other inmates, inscribing desk plates. I was not heartened to hear an explanation that this was "for my own protection". Protection from what?

 In his 1970 book In the Service of their Country, War Resisters in Prison,  Dr. Willard Gaylin had written in detail about resisters exactly like me some one or two years earlier. They had been in the wall, at the farm camp and at Allenwood, although Gaylin had changed all the names of the institutions and the resisters so that, I believe, he could get the Bureau's permission to interview freely and publish. A psychologist, Gaylin spent considerable time analyzing resisters' motives, backgrounds as well as describing life at Lewisburg. His book would have made a very good manual had I known about it at the time.. Part of the book covered a protest by a small group of resisters at a federal prison which sounded very much like Lewisburg, (Gaylin tried to disguise the locale). It was eerie to read about these unidentified men and their actions so similar to ours and not know who they were. Dave Dellinger had written about resisters at Lewisburg in the 40's in his book From Yale to Jail.  (I had yet to read Whittaker Chambers (or was it ?) book also about Lewisburg). The Communist labor organizer, John Williamson, had been here in '51.

Another draft resister friend on his way through the "big house" to the minimum security camp at Allenwood had spent a night out of the receiving section in general population and had been solicited by a homosexual. He complained and the Associate Warden called us both in for a chat.

"Since the C case," (that of a conscientious objector twice raped the preceding winter) he said, "we want to be very careful for your protection, such an unfortunate incident, another such and I think I'd have to resign". They moved the other resister out of the wall quickly, but had no intention of moving me. In fact, after they searched our cell and found some radical writing, they moved me to the hot bed, allegedly, of fags, the laundry, claiming they "didn't want me around government records", they wanted me to "see the other side of life". Actually, for me, all of prison was the "other side of life".

Also, the Associate Warden told me, my youthful looks, my wire rim "hippie" glasses set me apart so they had assigned me the cell rather than the open dorms, the "jungles" where all the homosexuality allegedly took place. I was glad to move in with Phil for the company as well as the safety. I wondered later if they had bugged our cell in some way to see if they could catch Dan. As to the homosexuality, always a major topic among men in prison, what I didn't know was that much of the aggressive homosexuality was rumor. If you carried yourself in a macho way, you'd be left alone (maybe it also helped if you carried a shank). Maybe the prison authorities played on the inmate ignorance and fears in this regard.

The strong inmate was the admired one among other cons. He kept to himself and his small circle of friends. He never informed on another inmate or "snitched them out". Thus the weak inmates were the fags and snitches.

Prison authorities used the cons' racism to divide and conquer them. Veterans of the civil rights movement, we were surprised to find so much old style segregation. We ate in the black section of the dining hall for a while as if to integrate it, actions which may have seemed strange to cons and prison staff alike. We intended to make them think by transgressing the long accepted taboos. The prison farm camps, one at Allenwood and one right outside the wall, were integrated enough but not the wall. Some inmates may have known the stands we'd taken for civil rights. I doubt that any mistook the tall, angular Berrigan for a "fairy" kept by some powerful black, the only reason a white generally would be eating with the blacks. Me with the hippie glasses? A different story. Maybe they thought I was Phil's little mistress. Endless speculation surrounds each gesture in prison and analysis and characterization are pastimes. Had I gone into the black section alone, I might have been labeled gay and attracted marriage interests. An integrated marriage, black "pitcher" and white "catcher" would be quite the vogue.

The segregation was tragic to those of us who had been in the civil rights movement. There were few black officers when we arrived. "Yahms?" you say, I asked an Italian acquaintance. "What do you guys mean by yahms"'? "Mool yahm," he pronounced it in full for me, "for eggplant, the purple‑black skin." I tried to find it later in an Italian‑English dictionary but couldn't.

The blacks or "brothers" were generally less prejudiced.  But they had their own divisions of their own. The Muslims, for example, kept aloof.

 (what is missing here?) circle. It seemed quite a privilege to sit down at a table with north Jersey mobsters without an eyebrow lifting Despite my fears I settled in calmly enough, making some friends beyond the draft resister or to play an amiable game of ping pong with an alleged murderer. There was little violence noticeable.  Out on the yard on balmy days you might note the homosexual couples, some weight lifting, others stroking each other on the grass like any park lovers.

Things started well enough for me on the new job in the laundry. For awhile I worked on the "sheet mangler" with a black Muslim who also had a draft "rap" (like "beef" meaning charge). He addressed me sneeringly as "Sir". "Sir" was a very common way that prisoners addressed each other in general, but this had the connotation of blue‑eyed devil and white oppressor. Another co‑ worker was one of the prison's foremost characters, a hashish smuggler from Beirut who was a talented jokester. The legend went that he had once drawn pin stripes on his blue prison suit with a magic marker and walked off the minimum custody job he had held outside the wall. He got as far as downtown Lewisburg but was immediately spotted (by his nose alone) and re-arrested. He told me that he had planned to jump into the Susquehanna River. As if that have carried him out to sea back towards his beloved Lebanon?

I moved "up" in the laundry into the position of laundry clerk, "dogged" by my WASP appearance and college degree. I became somewhat isolated from friends in a back room with one white and a few black cons. One day the white approached me in a confidential way in the mess hall. He had overheard two blacks scheming to "take me off" which meant rape! I was alarmed. My confidante wouldn't specify the attackers, following the honored prison code.  He just dropped his poison pellet, then withdrew, leaving my imagination to work overtime amidst the steam and the clanking presses. I tensed and the whole atmosphere tensed. These persecutor/victim situations would develop at any time in prison, as they do anywhere, organically, without a word spoken, through glances and gestures alone.

Was I really in danger? It isn't easy to "corn hole" an unwilling victims, I reasoned to myself. Easier if a gang is involved, I worried, but ... maybe I'd push them into one of the vats of melting soap. Probably my informer had made the whole thing up just to see how I'd react. That's what persons who were on the scene told me later. "Just prison talk," they said. I had a slight reputation as a poet. One giant frightening black guy wanted to recite a poem to me that he'd written about "reefer" (he was in on a narcotics charge). Another guy asked me to write a "nice" poem he would send to his girlfriend. There was unquestionably more appreciation for poetry inside of prison than there had been outside. It was a society of conversationalists, forced to spend time close to each other. There were less diversions than on the street. Story telling, insult trading, jokes and verbal embellishments were appreciated, as perhaps among some primitive tribes in the rain forest. Also, whether because they had more extreme experiences to describe or were describing them in prison where description was an art, and the prison characters seemed earthier or more dramatic than the white middle class circles in which I'd grown up.

The laundry worried me and I tried to get a transfer.  It wasn't easy; inmate requests were generally ignored. I tried to get help from the chaplain and got "shot" or arrested for being out of bounds as I went to see his assistant. Prison movement was carefully regulated. Once in the prison "court" I explained my situation and the job change was accomplished.  

How much of a fog was I in? George M in his version tells me he told me I was in danger and I poo pooed it.  He went to Charly Allen, one of Hoffa's fixers and got me the transfer. dave tell abt the nxt job in the warden's office

But generally I learned that the "asshole bandits" didn't pick on unwilling victims. If you seemed weak they'd approach you. If you were weak, they might try to rape you. Some cons, after all, would never hold a woman again. Generally, there were enough willing partners to go around. If masturbation by "Rosy Red Palm and her five calloused daughters" or ole "Miss Fist" got boring, a bl w job was fairly readily available for all, draft resisters included, because you could pay to get one or find someone who would do it.

My mind had dwelt on homosexuality and violence since we entered prison. As with the homosexuality, the violence was nearby just out of the corner of your eye. Fights could flare up over very petty, ridiculous issues, a box of corn flakes on the chow line for example, or choice of television programs.

There were killers around but if they were after you, you'd probably be aware of it and they would have their reasons. As with the homosexuality, things were complicated, the usual gray, the usual in‑between. There wasn't that much blatant or irrational violence (at least that was true of Lewisburg at that time). The homosexuals I met were the gentlest of inmates.

Lewisburg was a gentle place compared to state joints where the inmates were poorer and less educated. There, maybe you would have to carry a razor in your soap when you showered, or be careful how you looked at another inmate. Lewisburg had less of "fools" (a very derisive word of the period), I thought (as if I were proud of the place). Maybe these types were at the worse federal institutions. As the century wore on, Lewisburg became worse and worse. A documentary on it in the early 80's showed that it had become a much more violent place.

Some of the killers, like Carmine Galente whom I met later at the farm camp, were calculating hit men, but most of the murderers I met were not. R, whom I met later at the farm camp, had entered prison in 1941 just after I was born. He had killed an F.B.I. agent on an army post. He had never given up hope and was a model prisoner. He was a Warden's houseboy and spent spare time attending "Yokefellow" (a religious group active in prisons at that time) meetings or tending sunflowers in a little patch out by the fire engine garage. He was the prison's chief softball umpire. He had already made parole on his life sentence and was now working on another 12 year bit. He hoped to be paroled finally to work at a half way house in Harrisburg.

 I had not suffered much physical violence for my views. The gas station attendant had pushed me around and the draft clerk at the Customs House had bopped me on the head with a paperback bible. Later, when I got to the farm camp, another inmate gave me a glancing blow on the chin because he disagreed with my choice of T.V. programs. I was on the T.V. committee that decided which programs played on the first floor day room set and which played in the basement. It was no big thing.

One ex‑prizefighter's (according to him) playful greeting to me was, "I'll crush Eberhardt's fingers so he won't be able to play the piano anymore." It was his way of saying hello. And at the time of the Kent State killings of four students by national guardsmen, some right wing inmate posted a sign on the bulletin board‑"Guard 4, Hippies O".

It occurred to me that more violence came from the feds than from the criminals. The feds were the ones bombing Vietnam back to the Stone Age. They were the ones manufacturing H bombs. Society and its government were the violent ones, their conditions of poverty driving my fellow inmates to their stupid and desperate acts (not to ignore their own responsibility). The government and society, those hallowed abstractions, were inhumane killers in most bureaucratic, corporate and abstract ways. They killed on a larger scale.

We met the famed union organizer and leader, Jimmy Hoffa, in the wall while we were there and engaged him on the issues of violence and non‑violence. You might see him most often in the visiting room and it was alleged that he conducted much Teamster business through his lawyer there. I think the prison officials had him tucked out of the way from influencing other prisoners by giving him his job in the bowels of the prison basement stuffing mattresses. He stuffed them so full and hard, how could any one sleep on them; they were rounded like giant culvert pipes.

Jimmy had a lot of experience with violence, and to judge by the number of other teamsters at Lewisburg, a lot of experience with organized crime. He would bang his yardstick down on the counter as he made a point: "You pacifists, whadda you know about organizing and picket lines? Goddamn, you're never gonna get anywhere. You need fists and guns!" Looking back I wish I'd talked with him about the Kennedys. Probably would have gotten an earful of bile, but nothing too revealing. Some later conspiracy buffs cited Hoffa as a player in the assassination.

My greatest prison story: I thought I'd play a little joke on Jimmy one day and snuck up behind him as he was walking down the main corridor. I grabbed his shoulder from behind and told him to "watch out for that nonviolence, Jimmy." A little later one of his giant goon squad members approached me as delicately as he was able in the dining room and drew me aside, confiding in his best Jersey accent: "Hey kid, Jimmy doan like being touched an, uh, doan do that again." Jimmy had enemies from struggles out on the street who were also doing time at Lewisburg, so the rumor went. Supposedly that was the reason that Vinnie "the Pro" Provenzano was at the farm camp and not inside the wall where Jimmy could get at him.

When I think of the questions I could have/should have asked Jimmy, himself an author (Hoffa-The Real Story), my interchange seems a bit juvenile. We know so little of the labor struggles- what was the role of the Communists, how do you feel about Farrell Dobbs of the Minneapolis Teamsters (some of the Minnieapolis organisers had also gone to Federal Prison- although becuase of their principles, not because- like Jimmy- of jury tampering). John Williamson was one Communist who went to Lewisburg in '51.

One of Jimmy's union buddies told me later when I got to the farm that he shared Jimmy's poor opinion of Phil. Phil had mentioned Hoffa in his Prison Diary of a Priest Revolutionary, describing the prestige Jimmy enjoyed in prison and the favors he might do friends. "Berrigan was a stool pigeon," this inmate allowed, "you doan go carrying stories outta here; you come in here, you're a convict first!"

 Contrasting my brief interchange w Jimmy was Phil's more extended conversations- he discusses the same in two books:  Prison Journals of a Priest Revolutionary and Fighting the Lamb's War. I get the feeling that Phil was as ignorant of the Hoffa history with the left and the Minneapolis teamsters under Farrell Dobbs as was I- maybe a bit naif about the corruption and  violence and  ties to the mob. Of course, Dobbs may have been a generation earlier than Jimmy.

      The movie "Hoffa"- with Jack Nicolson as Hoffa and Danny Devito as one of his close aides- is fascinating  as it relates to all of this. Hoffa is shown as the master of violenct tactics- he fire bombs- Detroit Wheel Works- he meets with Italians to arrange a coalition- the film smacks of "Once Upon a Time in America"- the love affair with violence- it makes you wonder; as Jimmy talks about "negotiating", in the film, one of his helpers has just put a gun to Devito's head- and then makes a comment about "negotiating". It's all very convincing and comical. To think I had touched the hem of the garment of this history? It thrills me. And then perhaps to have "made history" myself- or know those who did- (in a good way of course)...there's something that draws persons like myself- and not just in a self aggrandizing way.

       How far could Hoffa have gotten w the Teamsters without violence?  My thought is: it rather depends on the circumstances.  The movie makes clear Jimmy's connection with the Italians and the mob- which I experienced first hand at Lewisburg! (my "rendevouz w history" moment (of course I had tried to make history of a different kind) - imagine if one of the mobsters had said- "Hey, kid- we wuz part of the labor movement- u iz part of the peace movement"- who's gonna win kid?") In the movie "Hoffa", starring Jack Nicolson and Danny Divito- it comes time for Jimmy to report to Lewisburg- the prison is a model- somewhat realistic- but in the movie it is in a valley in the distance with no trees. Huge tractor trailer trucks line the way as Jimmy's van approaches with the marshalls- all the teamster drivers honking their horns. Did this happen? ..the movie is fabulous, in many ways....screen play by David Mamet!

                                Poem: in mem. James Hoffa-(chek Di Vito movie "Hoffa")

Labor Day, 9/7/9

altho- when i think of it- was Jimmy really a friend of labor (in the long run)- with those tactics?-this is the essential discussion re tactics and philosophy and  violence and all the rest- but Jimmy was NOT a philosopher

 In the features section of the DVD of the movie "Hoffa", Danny DiVito tells one of the funniest literary jokes I have ever heard: a snobbish British patron of the theatre comes out of a Broadway production and a bum approaches to ask for money. The patron says haughtily: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be"- Shakespeare.

Carmine Galente, whom I was to meet at the farm, the bona fide mob hit man, later became a "godfather" after he got out.  He'd "whacked" many on the streets, to hear the story, and I imagined I could see it in his eyes: they were cold and black.  But in the context of the farm camp he seemed harmless enough, mixing up evening cocktails, playing handball or tending cantaloupes and eggplant in his little garden. Galente may have killed the Italian anarchist, Carlo Tresca, in the early days, but at that time I had no knowledge of this part of Galente`s past.

I mused on these who lived by the sword as, one by one, they met violent ends on the street, Jimmy, Vinnie and Carmine. Perhaps Jimmy was compacted along with automobiles at a mob run junk yard or sunk deep into some bay or buried at the meadowlands or as was popularly believed in the end zone at the Giants football field there- although it seems likely that after he was abducted from the Machus Red Fox Restaurant, he was shot and then cremated- the Detroit News printed the final FBI summary- Hoffex.. After he got out, Carmine was blown away by a shotgun blast was it  as he sat smoking his De Nobili cigar, or at the barber shop?. Pace Carlo Tesca.

Phil's thoughts about the  Weathermen?  were.... "I pointed out to them that violent means never justify nobel ends. They laughed at me." Fighting the Lamb's War. About the left? Phil told me he was a leftist or on the left- but I never saw much of an analysis on it from him. (why is this colored blue?)

The subjects of murder and rape worried me less after my transfer from the laundry. They floated off behind me as we approached new rapids. Politics again. Unbeknownst to me, Phil was regularly corresponding with outside friends to plan a new action.  Unbeknownst to the both of us, the government was working with an inmate informer to catch Phil with evidence of a conspiracy/plot to put bombs in heating ducts under Washington D.C. and to kidnap presidential adviser Henry Kissinger. Phil was not above speculating about such a scheme. The inmate, a certain "Boyd Douglas" was the only con at Lewisburg who was allowed to go outside the wall to attend classes at the nearby college of Bucknell. He had a weird career of arrests and, to hear him tell it, had earned the privilege of college after submitting to medical experiments in prison which somehow went awry, leaving large scars on his arms. He'd sued the government and won ten grand and the agreement for college.

Boyd was not the sort of person we were used to; he was a clean cut, articulate confidence man. (Maybe like Whitaker Chambers?) He was easy to get along with, had a sense of humor and suited Phil's purpose well acting as a courier for messages going out related to a actions being carried out by a group which came to be called the Harrisburg 8. I can't speak for Phil, but it took me a while to realize that well dressed, middle class looking, knowledgeable guys could also be total liars and poseurs. There were more of these guys in the federal than the state prisons. Boyd may have been an F.B.I. employee, set up at Lewisburg prior to our arrival for the purpose of surveying Phil's activities or helping to capture Dan.

Phil was "drawing heat". He was arbitrarily searched several times. They ransacked the chapel vestry where he dressed three times a week for the private mass he was allowed to say. They were looking for contraband wine, the associate warden told us. They wouldn't let us go to the minimum security camps, Allenwood or "the farm".  Phil may have realized why this was happening, I didn't. The planning for the alleged actions indeed existed and probably went so far as a couple of overt acts, which was all they needed to make a conspiracy charge out of it.

One Sunday after mass, a hack warned us not to accompany friends of ours from the nearby minimum security farm camp to the exit to the yard. We returned to our cell block but not all the way to the cell and waited for the chow line to open with some of the other guys who'd attended mass. When we got to the dining hall, a lieutenant approached: "I'm putting you two on report," he said, meaning we would have to undergo a trial within the prison's disciplinary process. "You were in the wrong chow line, you should have gone all the way back to your cell."

Phil exclaimed, "We've got 'em now ... by the short hairs". This was one of Phil's favorite sayings. "Let's plan our moves well." There were few acquittals from the prison court and Phil felt we would refuse the punishment we'd be sure to get, then issue a press release, go to the hole, fast and draw attention to our demands for minimum security.

Boyd took our releases out to the all important media, undoubtedly stringing Phil along to get more information on Dan and the Harrisburg 8 plans. All went according to plan and the next day found us up on the third floor of the segregation wing, the "hole". These were cells stripped down to a mat on the floor and the usual metal sink/john combo. I concentrated on writing, meditation, the Bible, bowels (because of the fast) and the window. The window was fabulous, framing prisoners going by to the yard by day and during the evenings the prison's castle style tower from which a hawk dove to catch pigeons or swifts.

The hole came with its own special set of prison games. For example, my cell door opened onto a corridor with cells to each side and a cell directly across. There was an elaborate communications network: if you wanted to send a note down the hall, your correspondee would extend his arm straight out the window in his cell door and you would throw a weighted string over it as if casting for fish. Sometimes two or three lines were out in this fashion. If the hack's keys rattled in a door up the hall, the packets came scuttling back to their senders.

To contact inmates on the next floor down we would knock on the pipe that came up through the floor and speak down along it at the seam. At night you could squeeze notes through the steel mesh over the outside window and drop them down on a fish line. In this manner, I met Richard Chandler, a resister and non-cooperator who had been in the hole a half a year, practicing non‑violent resistance and civil disobedience devoutly every step of the way.  If they let him out he promised to march towards the nearest exit from the penitentiary and they'd have to drag him back to his cell. He might keep his food tray from them once they'd shoved it through the hole in the door, or he would hide from the count behind his door or his sink. While we were there, he had reached through the hole in the door and tore the number off of his cell, replacing it with the message "I am not a number". He'd suffered several beatings and been sprayed with Mace for such actions, and had been often taken to the basement part of segregation, the worst part. He had first been brought to the hole for refusing a job assignment. When I met him he was debating, since his release time neared, whether to leave on his own or non‑cooperate further and make them carry him out.

This kind of resistance was radical to me. Few movement people went as far as Richard; it's hard to live, in prison, the society, the world without this or that compromise. Some might put Chandler down, describing his personal hang‑ups or lack of tactical wisdom. I found him admirable and courageous. It sorrowed me to think that no one was publicizing his protests. He would just have to remain a word of mouth legend.

Regarding Richard's departure, Phil advised him if he wanted to reform prisons he ought to get back out on the streets. Richard signed his notes "PLUFT" for peace, love, understanding, freedom and truth.  It struck me that J for justice would be good to add, but where, for pronunciation's sake, would I put it?

In the rarefied atmosphere of the hole, the humorous and painful stood out as well as the courageous. I wanted to check out the guy in the cell beneath me before I spoke through him to Richard. I yelled down to him, "What are your politics?" After several tries he seemed to hear and his answer filtered back..."interstate transportation", the charge against him.  Exactly! That was his politics.

One day we could hear an inmate all the way from the basement hole where he was bellowing crazily; this reminded me of an inmate at West Street who would throw his head back and howl like a wolf. They spoke for all of us.

There were some newspaper articles about our situation, and friends and supporters were visiting the Bureau of Prisons in D.C. and writing the Warden. A group from Baltimore and Washington came up and held demonstrations outside "the wall". The day after we went into the hole, the Associate Warden came up to persuade us to quit with a promise of no reprisals. After a week they moved us into the prison hospital because we were fasting. After a week of that, we decided we'd made our point; the administration had agreed to talk.

Soon we got the move we'd worked for, me to the Lewisburg Farm Camp which was just outside the wall and Phil to the federal facility at Danbury, Connecticut. Probably, it wasn't solely due to our protest, for Dan Berrigan had finally been caught and putting him and Phil together at Danbury might facilitate the federal's new case against them. Or maybe they felt that the new conspiracy case (developed through Boyd Douglas) was adequate.  Maybe pressure from Senator Gooddell, of New York state, had carried the day.

Norman Carlson, then Director of the Bureau of Prisons wrote me in 1992 (I met him as he did consulting work, having retired, on overcrowding at the jail where I worked). He stated "the Bureau of Prisons was not told by anyone in the Department of Justice or the White House how to handle the situation."

While fasting, a psychologist and writer, Robert Coles, had come to visit us and written an article protesting our treatment. He concluded that I was in imminent danger of mental collapse- total b s. The Bureau sent one of their own psychiatrists up from D.C. to interview us. "You people are like salmon", he told me, "trying to jump Niagara Falls. You can't take on the whole prison system. It's like lying down on the railroad tracks; the train is going to crush you!" (It was the usual anti‑idealism bit). In 1987, to protest U.S. policy in central America, a friend of mine, Brian Willson, was sitting on tracks to stop an arms shipment and actually was run down by an oncoming train. (I had worked in 1974 and 1975 with Brian after getting out of prison; we manned the headquarters for the National Moratorium on Prison Constructions in Washington, a project sponsored by the Unitarian Church). The train did not slow or stop, it ran over Brian. Still, he survived! It severed one leg and the other had to be amputated.  But, to answer the psychiatrist (17 years later, mind you), the train had neither crushed Brian nor his spirit. The event had increased his stature as a peace warrior.

I detailed for the Bureau Dr. (“headshrinker” the inmates would say) the harassment we'd been receiving. "That happens to everybody," he said. "But everybody doesn't have to take it," I replied. "What's more psychically healthy than fighting for your rights?" Luckily he was young enough to jump out of his job role and give us a clean bill of mental health. He could have recommended that they send us to the dreaded federal medical center at Springfield, Illinois. Cons dreaded Springfield because of what they'd heard about the medicine practiced there. Only well organized support (which most inmates lack) had saved Chandler from going there. There, the rumor went, they'd give you shock treatment and turn you into a vegetable.

The psychiatrist's questions later reminded me of other government bureaucrats I'd met. They shared the American trait of fatalism, a world trait I suppose, as in "what will be will be" or "God's will". I think our point was, "God's will my ass!" A lot of them were similarly fatalistic as are many Americans generally. "Hopeless" is another word to describe them. I asked my probation and parole agent whose side would he have been on at Christ's trial. "Well", he supposed, "I’d probably be doing the same thing 1"m doing now" i.e. advising Pilate as to the appropriate sentence. "After all," he went on, "Christ got what he was looking for, didn't he? I mean the crucifixion was a fulfillment of prophecy. Not that I'm not sympathetic. I feel sorry for snakes too. They've had to crawl since the fall. It's not up to me to make them walk." I met this in‑the‑nature‑of‑things, can't‑be‑helped argument all the time.  That or some variant of the lines uttered by Adolf Eichman, found guilty at his trial in Israel of war crimes: "I was only doing my job."

People give up in the face of the thousand betrayals, by parents, friends, situations, which surround them like a steady wind. I heard it all the time. People will give up and die rather than resist saying, "When you're time comes, it comes". Resistance and struggle are difficult and the first tendency is often to give up. Few opposed Hitler in Germany's mad race to destruction. Education would be better defined as that which teaches hope, teaches struggle. Ignorant persons everywhere will give you their reasons why nothing can be done and nothing will change. They will sit there and chew on a hay stalk, whether they are the powerful or the poor. What is it about us that makes us so passive?  People come to believe the maxim, "old age and treachery will always defeat youth and idealism".

After the psychiatrist's visit, I was able to leave "the wall". I was sent to the farm camp in a bucolic setting surrounded by corn fields and overlooking a long ridge of the Allegheny Mountains. It was a relief to be leaving; inmates who grew old and died within the wall would be buried in a little cemetery behind it. If no one came to claim the body, the joke was that it would be buried standing up until the sentence was finished, then be lain flat.

My stay in the wall had been difficult, but none of it, looking back, was any worse than the years I had spent at the prison‑like Mount Hermon, my prep school in Massachusetts. There too, our days were ruled by bells and whistles; there too the male culture reigned. Given the separation from parents and a snug childhood, given the study halls and pressure for grades, "Hermon's Hump" as we affectionately called it, was worse than prison! At Mt. Hermon, you not only suffered, you had to perform. If you survived Mt. Hermon, you could manage most anything life had to throw at you. That was the point, it was a "prep" school.

 In 1989 I returned to the old school, then crossed the Connecticut River to a field high on a ridge at which I'd longingly gazed while "imprisoned" there in adolescence from '54‑'58. I'd looked at this green notch as a symbol of freedom, in the same way that I gazed out at the Allegheny mountains or the farm fields and silos from my cell window at Lewisburg.

Sure enough, when I reached it, the once far away green lozenge was a field of beauty, with hummocks of dark green ground juniper and glistening white birches behind. From this field the school in the distance had shrunk to a far away blur as it had in memory. I felt I had exorcised the place. I was free at last, I could dismiss even the occasional bad memory of the place.

One day, I often promised myself, I would similarly return to Lewisburg and look down upon it from the mountains in the distance. On 9/18/'99 I did return. I found the perspective skewed from that in my mind- the mountains were further away and more to the left (I guess you would say). As C and I drove towards the front entrance we were warned that we were trespassing. Luckily we had already shot a few photos and we proceeded to drive around the reservation to see what we could see- finding more vistas with the unmistakable prison tower to photograph, a tower one notices in Lynn Sach’s documentary on the Catonsville 9. C and I drove around the prison perimeter- neat Amish?, Mennonite? farms . the past as Fitzgerald describes it at the end of The Great Gatsby¼

The drive up to Lewisburg along the Susquehanna was interesting. Somehow I find some towns (or houses, for that matter) along river banks to be bleak. Obviously the hey day of the Susquehanna was past. Unless they are right on the river (or lake) in which case they risk flooding. But, there is always quite a bank down to rivers that the river has cut down through. Thus these houses are cut into a bank that slopes downwards and you may or may not see the river from the house. Obviously a house with a river view is the best, and yet it’s liable to be flooded. Houses by rivers, houses by lakes, A poem needs to be written! I tried to imagine what kinds of persons lived in these places.  There is a book on the Susquehanna in the great rivers series of some publisher or other. The great thing about it? It is illustrated by Stow Wengenroth, who also illustrated a book on the Hudson.

The little college town of Lewisburg was quaint enough. I had never got to see it while nearby in the prison, obviously. But Boyd Douglas had!

In 2002 I read Alger Hiss’s (the accused Communist and spy) account of his stay at Lewisburg (1951-4) in Recollections of a Life.  There was much to fascinate and enjoy, beginning with Hiss’s quiet, readable style and his description of West Street where I too had begun my sojourn as a prisoner. I could see that Hiss was more thorough and careful than I in establishing the basic facts about the prison. Although 20 years earlier, some things about the place had not changed. He describes, for example, the solidarity of the Italian inmates which I too observed. At one point a rose breasted grosbeak started singing in the yard bringing Hiss a “surge of intense enjoyment. A small group gathered, watching and listening silently. I cannot think of another time when my spirits were so lifted that I was oblivious to my grim, oppressive surroundings.” (shades of the pheasant I described in “Prison Letter” and the hawk that I had observed from my cell in “the hole”, swooping down on pigeons from the prison’s main tower). Hiss, like me, was a writer and poet and had written a poem from his lozenge of a window in the wall as had I- my “Blue Hair”. Hiss had observed pheasants flying in over the wall. His description of the prisoner reaction to the execution of the Rosenbergs is moving. At one point, he, like me, had a reason to feel in danger himself, although it came to naught. His description of various inmate characters and surroundings like the prison library were all too familiar. Unlike me, Hiss had been too proud to seek a pardon.

Hiss’s son, Tony had also written extensively, perceptively and well of Lewisburg in The View from Alger’s Window. The book opens as Tony makes the same kind of pilgrimage back that I made- back to the prison- the little town of Bucknell and then, and here Tony writes powerfully, the drive up top the prison entrance ending with a long approach though two rows of fir trees. I sent Tony a copy of a poem “Blue Hair” which I, like his father, had written from one of the prison windows. Also my little chapbook which contained my prose poem, a “Prison Letter”. I got a kind reply.

In my career of prison/jail work I would hear from time to time that Americans had “invented” the prison system. They had not- what is meant is that we (Quakers in Philadelphia) had invented the “penitentiary” system. Tony Hiss points out in his book that “the last 2,500 years—pegging the date to one of the earliest prisons we know about, the vast underground Mamertine Prison in ancient Rome”. Another fallacious statement one kept hearing? That it costs $25,000 or more per year to keep a prisoner- used by prison abolitionists to say- why not send the prisoner to college instead. I had myself been an abolitionist back in my Moratorium on Prison Construction days. But in fact, given the industry that it is, yearly costs of keeping prisoners are only so high if one takes into account debt service, the cost of building each cell, the salary of the guards, etc, etc, but the real costs are probably much less.

In 2002 I met an inmate at the Baltimore City Detention Center who had been at Lewisburg from 1974 until the early 80’s. As revealed in a Home Box Office Documentary- “Doing Time”, my alma mater had become a much more chaotic, dangerous and violent institution during this period. The inmate told me this had been because more dangerous prisoners had been moved to Lewisburg from the federal prison in Atlanta which had always held more dangerous sorts (was it because Cubans had burned part of that prison down that they were moved?)- and that the Cuban prisoners were a very angry lot whom Castro had kicked out of Cuba-sort of the real rejects of that society- the lowest of the low? (sometimes I had joked with other staff members that people we counseled were the “cream of the crap”).. Also, he felt that prisoners from D.C. (but hadn’t they always gone to federal institutions?) were no longer of the calibre of the usual federal inmate- the “old school” inmates who knew how to “carry themselves”- i.e. stay out of trouble.

something about L's knees and that peasant dress still drives me crazy-  this was L and me in the visiting room- same room where Hoffa conducted his business- at the main prison-  "the wall"- Louise has hippy sandals

                                                        The "Farm"

The din of eventful current that had roared around me for four years subsided as I moved to the Lewisburg Farm Camp. I was able to relax a bit from the landscape of issues into a landscape of interesting human faces, my fellow cons. My first job assignment was an easy one: wiping up tables in the dining room.  My co‑worker, Joey, who had also just arrived from the wall, needed light work: he had entered prison with four bullet wounds to the stomach. These weren't draining properly. He was involved with the Mafia and Carmine Galente was showing him around. The two approached me, Carmine fingering the required mafia De Nobili cigar in its holder: "Nowa Joey, dis here's Ebahart and uh Ebahart I want yuse to make it easy for Joey here, uh, he's got bad health and Joey dis here's a good kid and he'll show yuse the ropes, he's one of tha Berrigan gang, you know, da priest and dem nuns and so fort..." "Yeh, da fadder," Joey says devoutly ...  "ain't it a shame."

 Another mobster, J, who lived in our eight‑man dorm was a charming old guy, so used to the big spender role on the streets that the inconveniences of the farm life incensed him: the food, the work, etc. He didn't like his assignment at the power plant so would find some nook in which to read because of his "bad back" or would parlay many trips into the wall on hospital sick call so he could communicate with friends. Or he would spill coal and misread meters. It was all fairly nonpolitical but it amused me and one day I pointed out to him the similarity between his actions and ours of non‑violent resistance and civil disobedience. He understood. He made himself into such a nuisance that he achieved a transfer to one of the plummiest positions of all, attendant at the prison gas station. Very few trucks stopped there and you could play gin rummy all day. J ate upstairs in our dorm or in Carmine's room from their own private stock of smuggled goods: salami, anchovies, etc.

 A chain link fence provided the farm's only security perimeter and, to hear it told, you could sneak out and pick up "drops" of various goodies left by relatives on nearby country roads. At Lewisburg's other minimum security facility, Allenwood, inmates actually met their loved ones in the woods or would go as far as registering for a night at the local motel, it was said. Another route into the farm camp for contraband was through the visiting room. The same Joey from the dining room became the official visiting room attendant, a combination waiter and polaroid photographer. He would take items from visitors over to the ice machine and shove them deep into the ice, to be retrieved later when visiting was over and he cleaned up. I proudly made use of another route for contraband some time later on in my sentence as I "hired" accomplished thief "Iceberg" to walk casually down the road alongside the camp building. He would take a few steps to the side to reach the bushes by the visitors' ladies rest room door, where Louise, according to instructions, had dropped a six pack of miniatures. The only bad part of this arrangement was Iceberg's cut, a whopping three out of the six little bottles.

 The high point of my smuggling came when I brought a fairly large manuscript for Louise into the visiting room. I had rolled it up and put it in my crotch, so that if, in frisking, the officer felt it, he would assume it was a hard on. Guards didn't get too close to your privates at the farm anyway, although in the wall you had to strip naked and they would even look up your ass.

Iceberg, so‑called because he had locked two FBI agents in a freezer, became a good friend. He was a loose, tall, thin and gawky individual with more than the usual convict guff and bluster. He was from Hoboken and had once admired the mob but had become too independent for them. A petty thief and addict, he delighted us with stories of his crimes, how, for example, he and his partners would size up the obituary columns to plan burglaries of houses whose owners were away at funerals. Or he might be out for a stroll, "geezing" as he called it, sizing up any and all items to steal and pawn for dope money. He would walk close to the curb with an eye developed for unlocked cars or cars with packages, packages with coats thrown over them, etc. What a thrill to "cop" some unidentifiable package, maybe around Christmas time, ducking into a hallway to open it. "What if it was some kid's Christmas toy?", I'd play the gadfly. "Aw, I'd give it to the first kid I meet," said Iceberg, all heart. Once, according to him, he stole his own bail bondsman's suit. The man was driving him home from jail and made the mistake of stopping to talk with Iceberg's parents. Ice had "checked the suit out" in the back of the car. In the same motion he made to push the car lock down he pulled it back up, then came back in a minute to take the suit. "Rough neighborhood," he later commiserated with the bondsman.

 Iceberg seemed to be cooling out during his stay in prison, prison was good for him. I found out later that he'd returned to his life of crime upon release. Only a few inmates, pool players, writers perhaps, could refine their trades in prison. Most cons returned to lives of crime as soon as they got out.

Some of the thieves looked down on others who had "no scruples". D, for example, had returned a fancy accordion and one old lady's TV set. S planned to steal for the revolution, Robin Hood style. D would choose a 10 grand job over a 50 grand one to avoid hurting anyone. But J didn't care whom he hurt if he had his mind on taking something. "When I was a kid", he explained, "somebody stole our Christmas money from my mom in the lady's room at Macy's; I never forgot it." (Probably it was somebody like Iceberg.) "Ever since," he went on, "I figure I'm entitled to my share!"

"Doc" Hampton or Dr. Jive was a drug specialist. Not hard drugs but downers, the several different multi‑colored "dolls" or tranquilizers obtainable from the prison hospital. He was an articulate black doing ten years for hijacking trucks. I think he was a Teamster. There were quite a few at Lewisburg because they had transported stolen goods across state lines. D had carved out a prison career for himself as pharmacist; inmates presented him with their acquisitions for identification; some even came to him for diagnosis of small ailments.  We were friends and I was able to kid him about his sleeping his "bit" (sentence) away. I would find him nodding in front of the T.V. "Why spend your time snoozing? His retort was reasonable enough: "How would you spend a ten year sentence?" I wondered at what cost Doc acquired his peace for we were in the same dorm and some nights he awoke screaming from some recurring nightmare. "Poor circulation," he would explain, or jokingly tell me, "I almost caught him last night," referring to the hated partner who had snitched on him at his trial.

Because of his truck‑driving skills Doc was prison fire chief. The fire truck for the main prison was housed at the farm camp and I volunteered to join the six man crew. It was a desirable position since we got to take test drives around the perimeter of the institution and occasionally go outside the prison to train with local fire crews or put out some nearby fires.

The local Lewisburg Township Fire Department was a sharp outfit. We did some training with them and I waxed quite poetical about them. Since they were, I believe, unpaid volunteers, I thought of the anarchist societies proposed by Prince Kropotkin which would be based on mutual aid, as I sat and chatted with them amongst the snorkels and oxygen masks, the great yellow hoses and bright shining red trucks. One of the grumpier older inmates on our prison crew questioned my right to take part. What if we got a fire at a draft board or ROTC buildings? I wouldn't try to put it out and might endanger his life, he reasoned. His objections were far fetched to the others however, since they figured we wouldn't be called to many such fires. I got into some interesting discussions with the town firemen about burning draft records.  One said he thought it would be O.K. as long as we took the files out of the building!

 Checking hoses and equipment on the other side of the main prison next to the placid Buffalo River was a treat. You could open the hose nozzle wide and pound the river with a hard jet of water or turn it to its narrowest setting,"spray, curtain, mist" in which case the fine spray would steep Hamp's kinky black hair in silvery dew balls. (Doc's last name was Hampton.) I wrote a poem about it. Prison was great for reading and writing.

 The crew joked about a possible prison fire and the political issues it would present, i.e. should we help put it out?  Often, prison fires were set by our fellow inmates. Luckily we never had a bad prison fire. The only one we were called to inside the wall was a very small one in the Education Department, probably the work of some disgruntled scholar. It was out by the time we got there. As we uncoiled our hoses under the Warden's worried gaze, one of the gas mask boxes fell open and out spilled someone's stash, tins of pate, canned shrimp, vienna sausages and other wonderful delicacies!

     We jokingly appraised each situation as to possible "good days" or days of credit off our sentence that we might earn. One inmate claimed to have thrown the Warden's dog into the Buffalo River so he might rescue it and make parole. Once we were called to a fire at the Associate Warden's house. Hamp had never liked this particular prison official, so he took a very circuitous back route driving very slowly at about ten miles per hour. Luckily for the Associate, the town crews had already arrived.

      At about this time I wrote a poem- in mem- Diana Oughton?  I have a copy but I don't think it was very distinguished. The only line I remember is "Susquehanna run softley" , after the Spenser "Sweet Thames, run softly" .

Once we were called to a brush fire up on Dale's Ridge overlooking the far blue Allegheny mountains. With them in front of us and the institution far behind, in the sweat of the work under heavy yellow slickers and in the pungent cedar and pine smoke, spiritual feelings rushed over me, an experience akin to the Indians in their sweat lodges. I got all mixed up in calm and bliss and sexuality and sadness as I thought of the nearby Susquehanna and Buffalo Rivers, flowing gently like Spenser's Thames. The cedars can burn explosively like an oil fire, a fellow fireman told me; I imagined this happening, to go along with my epiphany. Beyond us, between us and the mountains, the ridge dropped off precipitously and deep and I thought of the long geologic maneuvers which formed it and the valley below. This was about as good as it gets, I now realize, this was the kind of moment we live for: unpredictable, unplannable, the kind of moments which well up inside us making life totally worthwhile, with no assistance from anyone else necessary. They all the wealth we need to survive (besides food and shelter in bad climates).

Letter from prison: (this is also included in Capt. entitled "Tree Calendar") The many pheasants in the corn fields around the farm also presented romantic images. Hunters couldn't follow them onto the "reservation". Inmates were allowed to trap them and put them in crates for shipment to sparsely pheasanted parts of Pennsylvania or maybe to the banquet tables of federal prison officials. If you were on one of the outdoor crews you might stop to visit the pheasants in the tractor shed and admire them peering glum but fierce from between the slats of their little imprisoning, lobster‑trap crates. You would especially notice them in the fall when the corn had been cut. The burningly phosphorescent males looked like freedom as they scooted up out of the corn stobs with a whistling sound to escape you. Their iridescent vests for courtship displays like pigeons' or the blushes of purple tetra fish reminded me of my sexuality and how much I missed Louise. Or they reminded me of beautiful privacy and meditation as they flew up evenings to roost in skeletal trees.

Always they were gorgeous with strange autumnal hues: coppery chests with freckles like those in the tubes of iris flowers or like the shimmering markings on an eye's iris. They had white rings round the necks ... which inmates dearly loved to wring. They were delicious cooked between the rungs of our radiators. (Prisons are kept hot; lethargy results.) To feather, gut, joint them, it helped to know someone in the butcher shop.

 Winters the pheasants would sometimes make the mistake of flying over the main prison wall to look for food on the ground over steam pipes where snow had melted. Supposedly, an inmate had caught one from his cell window by dangling a pin, bent fishhook style, on the end of a line. I imagined the raucous squawking in the clear blue Pocono air!

 Mornings we dozed toward winter on our work crew in the general farm shed. The work of the year was largely done, the root cellar filled to capacity with apples and potatoes. Zillions of snowflakes blitzed the surrounding fields until they looked like the flakes of sugar frosted cereal. The snow wiped out our vistas of the far blue mountains. We could only see the minute details of the close black and white land looming bitterly larger and larger.  We could feel the full weight of our unjust sentences ... time itself an unjust sentence!

Did we deserve this? we were almost tricked to wonder, the slave's terrible question. Had we not chosen to be here?  Wasn't this our fault?  We would interiorize our sentences and grow to accept them, a final brutality, as the snow came in on a slant over the Alleghenies, beauty and horror together. Luckily, we war protesters were not alone, we had loved ones and vast support systems. Christmas brought us cards from all over the world, even North Vietnam as I remember it. We had belief. We had humor. All these things enabled us to be sarcastic and angry. We would never become "losers" like some of the regular cons for we knew our mission, we knew who we were. Society might despise us, but deep down it knew we were right (or did it?).

 We took our place beside the "common" car thieves and bank robbers. Pheasants are so dumb they will enter a wire cage trap, unable to retrace their steps out of the little hatch to freedom.  Society stands behind the prisoner smugly saying, "You have seen this happen to a person also." Undoubtedly many of the inmates would return to crime upon release, as we all return to the ruts in our mind which are familiar. But we not only knew the way back into society, we rejected it. And so, in a way, we were free.

Such philosophizing, writing it down, playing pool or the piano or guitar helped me pass the time. Story telling was a well developed pastime. Jesse, an elderly, earthy, illiterate black man from Baltimore, regaled us with some of his favorite tales as we sat out cold fall days in a farm shed after the potato crop was in. He had killed a Chinese fellow at a restaurant in Washington, D.C. and complained that no "chink" was worth all the time to which he'd been sentenced.

 Once he was in a bar on Pennsylvania Avenue in Baltimore and had finally located a choice whore for the night's entertainment.  She was a darling, all in satin with gorgeous, mincing feminine ways. He took her to a hotel downtown and wanted to dispense with preliminaries and get right down to it since she looked so fine.  So he asked her to take off her clothes. "Well," she said, "first let's turn out the lights." He wanted to watch her undress but she kept insisting, so he turned off the light and they proceeded to bed. Next she wanted him to undress her piece by piece in the dark as if ... as if, he began to get the feeling she wanted to hide something from him.

"Aw, have I got myself a queer?" he began to wonder to himself.  "Well ... well, was it?" we all burned to know. Then he felt that hard thing between "her" legs and he knew..."Good God almighty!" "You went on ahead anyway?" someone asked him. "Damn right, I wasn't gonna miss out on those , get me a taste of those "cakes". Another story of Jesse's was his "with or without the dog" story. Jesse goes to this whore house; it appears to be one of the nicer ones with lots of girls to choose from just like they show in the movies, so he goes upstairs with this lady and when they get into bed she asks him does he want it "with or without the dog?" This confuses him but the place seemed pretty special so he told her "with". She went out of the room, then came back and they got down to business. All of a sudden in runs this little poodle and commences to f  k Jesse in the ass. "I jumped so hard, I ran my head up against the head board and my head was bleeding. I'se so mad I jumped up and kicked that little dog halfway across the room!"

 Some inmates I met were in the federal system for crimes they'd committed in Vietnam. Usually, these military folk were incarcerated at Leavenworth, but they could be transferred to other federal prisons for various reasons. Bill had killed a fellow soldier. He had been on guard duty when the other guy came back from town drunk. He had tried to play a joke on Bill or hadn't given an appropriate response to Bill's "Halt" or maybe Bill was high.

 Bill started his sentence in the Long Binh jail. He told me there had been a "race riot" there and in the confusion other inmates had opened his cell and he had left the stockade to go downtown to see his "mamasan". According to him he returned the next day just in time to make the "count". His account of the "brothers" settling scores by beating or killing some of the red neck hillbilly guards were details left out of media accounts I had read when the riot occurred.

Another black inmate I met earlier when we fasted in the hole would not give us all the details of his Vietnam crime. He had apparently participated in or actually arranged a crossfire between two army units, two U.S. units! Men died in this incident which also had racial overtones.

The Attica prison rebellion occurred while I was at Lewisburg; we watched it obsessively on T.V. I got my two cents worth by writing memorial to the inmates killed:

What mother fu  kers these to draw the line

Between reactionary, revolutionary suicide.

There are no monuments to them outside

The walls at Attica, only "Johnson J. Pig"

"Guard", I see

And "Sacred To His Memory". Cons

Must fend for their own memory stones

Which they do daily looking through frames

Cell windows make: they see

Views long polished by desire

To call it quits to bluff, bust into fire

(And yet inmates had only clubs, the pigs

Had 藞 long range").

As usual violence changed nothing so to the chant

"Attica means fight back!" you sadly add the words

"And lose?" 

The Attica rebellion did lead to the construction of a new maximum security penitentiary. How would you like to have died for that?

 Building a political movement in prison was nearly impossible. Black Muslims had managed to recruit members. We protesters entered the system with hopes for reform, but only a few hard core radicals tried to get anything together. Most inmates were strongly individualistic, they were not joiners, so that one outbreak at the Tombs in New York dissolved as inmates rushed to rob the commissary for candy bars and the hospital for drugs or went about settling old scores. No one wanted to do the hard work of organizing.

There was a short‑lived strike in the wall just after I left for the farm. Several other federal pens also had strikes, but jokes were made about Lewisburg's, it was supposedly the home of "fags and snitches". A joke circulated that women at the Alderson federal prison had sent up some boxes of tampax for the strikers.  The strike did not last long and had but token results: coca cola added to the list of commissary items, a new column in the prison newspaper, a new warden, supposedly. The Bureau would juggle wardens around to stave off trouble. The new warden at Lewisburg brought in new pool tables and all day yard privileges. They said he had been a bastard at El Reno, while the "bastard" we had at Lewisburg, went on to McNeil Island in the state of Washington.

 Real grievances like the low pay for labor for Federal Prison Industries went unmet. The February before I arrived at Lewisburg, black Muslims had "rebelled", leaving one guard seriously injured.  When I got there, inmates enjoyed saying that he would be a vegetable, in a coma, for the rest of his life. But the results for the Muslims were serious: new charges which would keep them behind bars for many more years. (story of George in Carmine's room refusing to eath w the mob/mafia unless they invited everybody- blacks included)

 The judicial and prison system seemed most afraid of blacks and Communist Party members (although there were few of the latter). Many of the guards at Lewisburg at this time were white country boys.  It stood to reason that the most dreaded convict would be a black communist, although the one I met, a guy doing a 30 year bit on a red spy case out of the 50's was tame enough. He was the warden's secretary!

 I also met a spy, supposedly a Russian major, at the farm.  He was trying to get publicity for his case. If the U.S. was so anxious to get its POWs out of North Vietnam, why not a swap? he would propose.

 A Marxist friend in the wall considered himself an organizer.  The feds thought so too and he was almost shipped out to the Springfield medical facility to get treatment for a spinal problem. Cons dreaded Springfield because of the medical practices that took place there. Luckily his grandmother died, and my friend was able to get his ailment checked by a real doctor when he went to the funeral.

Neither blacks nor reds nor we pacifists were getting very far when it came to changing the prison system. They could bring new charges on you, have you transferred. One approach by prisoners was to use the courts, filing writs, suits, etc.  Probably this caused more change than other methods. The American Civil Liberties Prison Project led in filing such cases. The Berrigans had entered a case on behalf of all federal prisoners seeking less censorship of writing and speech; a judge told them they had failed to exhaust all legal remedies and they got nowhere. Other jailhouse lawyers were at work. Vince for example, at the farm claimed to be near his goal of winning back 2,000 years from the government for various inmates. 

It had been good to leave the wall for the farm's more peaceful atmosphere, removed from the hard driving Phil and peace plottings and informants. The farm proved conducive to poetry. My thoughts turned to Louise: 

                                                BLUE HAIR 

                                                            (Lewisburg Federal Prison)     

                        I want to see

                         How your face changes

                         When you c  m.

                         What are we

                         Put on earth for?

                        When you bend over

                        Your breasts blade

                        More real than the

                        Mountains we kept watching

                        From our cells,

                        Couldn't reach them!

                        The state evaporates

                        As you approach, but it

                        Kept us there! We would

                        Dream/walk towards

                        Hills 'til they formed rare

                        Thighs, faces and blue hair.

              My time for parole approached at 21 months; it was rumored that they made you do about the same amount of time a draftee spent in service. Close to the end of my sentence, I was doing what the convict calls "short time". The night before I left I had but one more "wake up". An acquaintance, Slim, asked me for some help writing a letter to his judge on some legal point. There was no question he could use some help since he was illiterate. I sat down with him and he offered me a drink, which wasn't out of order though I didn't care for one. We proceeded and I realized someone else had helped him about a week before on the issues which were patently ridiculous anyway. I began to wonder, he doesn't really need any help when, goddamn if he didn't next ask if I'd like to hear a record and I realized I was in the middle of a seduction scene. I was shifting to go when, in a quick, fumbling gesture, Slim put his hand on my thigh.  I left in a huff. Here was stammering poor Slim reaching out to touch me when he realized I wouldn't raise a stink about it since I was leaving the next day. It was something he may have thought of doing for quite some time.

           The feds paroled me January 24th, 1972. I had hoped for it but not expected it. I had kept my nose clean since arriving at the farm. My resister friend George Mische, who had arrived the same time as Phil and I did, was released to a D.C. halfway house without parole. We speculated that this was due to his participation with several other resisters in a protest at the nearby farm camp of Allenwood. There was to be no parole for Phil either whose newest trial began in Harrisburg on the day that I got out. Our old friend Boyd Douglas was the government's star witness, fortunately, because the jury didn't believe him. Phil was acquitted except for a minor charge of contraband letters to Liz McCallister (who later became Phil's wife). One reporter wrote, "the jury must have  seen that the kidnapping plot consisted of a few hours discussion among friends and was never implemented because it could not be carried out without violence and because the peace movement had neither the will nor the competency to carry out such a task." There's no doubt that kidnapping or at least a citizen's arrest of Henry Kissinger and the blowing up of heating ducts under D.C. or some damage to them had been considered. Phil had written to Liz, "Nonetheless, I like the plan and am just trying to weave elements of modesty into it" (capturing Kissinger). "Why not coordinate it with the one against capital utilities?", i.e. the ducts.

         Just as he had carried the momentum of the blood pouring onto Catonsville and the burning of files, Phil had continued anti draft actions and militant planning into prison. I, on the other hand, had always been quick to look for a chance to rest, a door through which I might walk to a different life than continual protest.

        Phil had even written, "About the plan" (the Kissinger and ducts)‑ the first time opens the door to murder" (I believer Phil meant the government might kill the kidnappers)‑the Tupamaros are finding that out in Uruguay ... When I refer to murder, it is not to prohibit it absolutely" (did he mean to murder Kissinger?!)" (violence against non‑violence bag); it is merely to observe that one has set the precedent, and that later on, when government resistance to this sort of thing has stiffened, men will be killed."

 Reading about Doug1as, the informer in Phil's Harrisburg case, reminded me that an informer, George Demerle, had been involved in the arrest of Sam Melville, the inmate writer killed at Attica. Perhaps both felt they were doing something for their country. Boyd claimed that as a devout Catholic he was greatly shocked by Phil's plottings, unlikely given Boyd's long history of scams and shams.

Demerle, the agent in the Melville case, had informed the government that Sam was planning to bomb army trucks, which had led to Sam's arrest and conviction. Phil and I just missed meeting Sam at the West Street Federal Detention Center. He had been doing 13�� years at the time of his death (in the Attica uprising) for his part in a series of politically motivated bombings, the United Fruit Company, Marine Midlands Bank, the Whitehall Induction Center and New York City Criminal Courts Building. Apparently Sam had taken more than his share of credit for these acts in order to shield friends. (Compare and contrast- story of Mark Rudd, Ayers and Dohrn) 

         Agent provocateurs and double agents were especially complicated figures in their motivations. They were activists like us, but they usually acted only out of self interest and trotted out the right wing political beliefs when convenient. Sam's girl friend wrote of Sam and agent Demerle, "The games they played were similar, but for George it was all games. It was easy for him to disguise his motivations because they were so shallow. Sam's whole drive was against the objectification of human beings, George was an oddly passionless human being", she wrote, but it turns out he had some beliefs. He "told a right wing gathering that he had become an undercover agent in order to protect society from the violence of the radical left."

         Only the F.B.I. knows how much they relied on informers.  Documents stolen (by Grady) from Media, Pennsylvania office showed that they used them. One informer had an apparent change of heart and revealed that the F.B.I. had paid him to lead a raid on draft board offices in Campden, N.J. He had actually carried the raid off for them despite his own beliefs. These double agents came up with various justifications for their work. One that I got to know in Baltimore after my release from prison had been working for the underground newspaper "Harry" as a photographer. At the same time he reported to the police on drugs or "subversive" hippie activities. But once revealed, he claimed that he had thought of himself as a kind of referee between the movement and the police. We wondered from time to time, looking back, were there ways we could have spotted some of these informants. "Their shoes, their shoes are always different," joked a friend. But cops and agents, if they could not be prevented, could at least be subverted for the purposes of revolutionary work. One group required its members to work so hard that any informant was contributing so much to revolutionary change as to probably outweigh the negatives.

              The momentous first  Plowshares  Action- the Plowshares 8-  took place, Oct. 5th, 1980 at the General Facilities, Westchester, PA , both Phil and Dan participating. Concentrating on parts and plans for the Mark 12 missile, this action was an ACTUAL act of disarmnament- contrasting all the windy phrases of U.N. officials or “statesmen” such as Henry Kissinger. I found it interesting how Phil talked about the role of faith in felicitous finding to important locations in the building- “we were going in like blind mice”! With faith, Phil said, we always find the weapons- as if God were guiding them. Emile D’Antonio directed a film on this action with famed Hollywood actor, Martin Sheen, playing the Judge. Phil discusses the action in his 1998 interview with Amy Goodman. (I am not surprised about how pleasant and expansive Phil, and later his other family members- Liz, Frida, and Jerry are in talking with (selected) members of the media and press. We always cultivated a good relation with the press in our movements. They didn’t have to be blazing activists! We had to get our message out!!) This Plowshares action was humorous in the details of the actors’ jail stay. I believe they started out with no bail situations, but as one of their members, John Shuchardt, exercised his skills as a jailhouse lawyer, helping inmates in the jail with numerous problems, the group became more and more of a liability to their warders, and their bails were reduced and reduced until, finally, they were told: “I just want you out of my prison”. As Phil puts it with a twinkle- “We became intolerable”.   

Molly Rush- a Plowshares 8 participant recalls: "Most likely it was Phil and Schuchardt who got us together. Planning done by all of us at a retreat"   

                                                      1993   First Reunion

        In November of 1999 I attended a discussion led by Lynn Sachs at the Catonsville library. Lynn had collected interviews with the remaining nine and was proposing to do a documentary movie which became "Investigation of a Flame". Bill O'Connor and Brendan Walsh were present at the gathering of some 30 folk. The duaghter of the Selective Service clerk who had suffered a slight cut was present. She said the 9 had sent her mother sympathy cards from prison. A local poet informed the group that, upon occasion, across from the military cemetary down the hill, a somewhat official sign appeared, stating that the act had occurred, a kind of disappearing historical marker; he implied that he knew who put the sign up. Willa Walsh made the point that we should not treat the Catonsville 9 action as a kind of memorial to be encapsulated, separate from what is going on in the present- that the same work goes on. I felt a wash of emotions. I told them that I hoped the act was a "Joan of Arc" sort of historical import, but that you had to lobby to get into history, that if there is meaning in the universe, the act will be a milestone, if not, well, at least it was great guerilla theater. Lynn was donating her Catonsville nine materials to the library where it would be available for study. The main library in Baltimore- the Enoch Pratt- also had a small C-9 web site.