The Burglary (75 page)

FORSYTH REGARDED
his chosen resistance base, the Catholic peace movement, as more like an amoeba than a disciplined political action group. Most of the time, he says, you felt “it wasn't really an organization at all. It was just a bunch of people that felt the same way. I remember reading something in the paper by some PR turkey that portrayed us as this organization that was run by Dan and Phil Berrigan.…It was the antithesis of that. There were a lot of people involved who never met Dan and Phil. And there were a lot of people who should have met them because they could have learned something from the Berrigans. It was very loose and spread out, and different people did things in very different ways. Some wanted to get arrested. That was their philosophy—especially those close to Dan and Phil had that orientation. They felt, ‘We're going to do this, and we're going to take responsibility publicly and get arrested on purpose.' They felt that increased the political impact to force the state to put them on trial and put them in jail.…That was a perfectly legitimate philosophy. I didn't happen to agree with it, but I respected it.”

Given his view, it was fortunate Forsyth became involved in this movement after it had switched from symbolic actions to clandestine burglaries of draft boards. “I wanted to disable draft boards. I wasn't interested in being arrested. I wasn't afraid of being arrested, but I wasn't interested in being arrested. I wanted to be free so I could destroy as much of the Selective Service system as I could, or the Army.…I would have rather done it on Army bases”—destroyed records, made it hard to fight the war—“but they had barbed wire around bases.…Security was tight. And the only way you could do any damage there would involve injuring people, and I wouldn't do that. My only choice was the draft boards.”

It was his only choice until Davidon asked him, in December 1970, what he thought of burglarizing an FBI office, an option that of course had never occurred to him and perhaps not to anyone else except Davidon.

Unlike some of the Media burglars, Forsyth says he didn't live in fear of being found by the FBI after the Media burglary. All of his fear was concentrated in those intense hours he spent breaking into the office and thinking they should call off the burglary. Later, he thought the job had been done well and was confident no trails could lead to them. Consequently, in the aftermath of the burglary, he did not have sleepless nights, he did not worry about a knock on the door. He was never visited or called by the FBI.

He remembers being “totally happy” hours after the raid when the group gathered at the farmhouse to begin the next stage of their work, sorting the
documents they had stolen. But even as it became clear during the ten days the burglars read and sorted the stolen files that they had been successful beyond their wildest hopes, Forsyth started to disengage from the process. The satisfaction he felt soon after the burglary dwindled fast. “I really felt good about Media,” he said. “It was a great thing, but within a week after it was over, the effect on me had worn off. I knew we had done a good thing, but I quickly felt, ‘What am I going to do now?' And I really didn't know what to do now.” At movement parties, he was silent as he listened to people discussing in excited detail what the Media documents had revealed. “People were very pleased. But I wasn't that excited about it. It didn't have that much meaning for me. We did this and it was over, and now it was time to go back to work the next day,” he says. “That's what it was like. You go to work and you do something and the project is finished and it's successful. Your boss gives you a pat on the back. Well, you don't quit your job then. You go back to work the next day and start up the next thing. That's sort of how it was for me.”

Within a short time, though, moving on to the next resistance project became difficult for Forsyth. “I was hoping somebody smarter than me would come up with a good idea and suggest it to me. But nobody did. And I came to realize the limitations of that whole draft board thing.…There are so many draft boards in the country. It was clear what we were doing was not causing them to suffer from a soldier shortage over there. The reality that we were this mouse gnawing on the elephant's toenail was coming home to me more and more, and I got more and more frustrated. And very unhappy.…

“In the beginning it was more satisfying,” Forsyth says. “In the beginning just the act of resistance was enough. As that started to wear off, the opportunity to do Media came along, and that escalation was enough. But then, once that was over, it was, ‘What do we do now?' And the only good ideas I remember after that were about things that were not feasible because of the security.

“I think in some ways Media made the draft board raid work even less satisfying because it seemed kind of like going backwards to a lower level.…My frustration level was rapidly increasing immediately after Media.”

In late June or early July 1971, Forsyth was recruited to be part of the group that was planning the Camden draft board raid. It wasn't the great idea he was looking for, but he agreed to participate. “Camden was bad news from the beginning, and I knew it was bad news.…I knew it was something I was getting myself into that I shouldn't. But I was just frustrated,
mad at myself and at everybody else, and said, ‘I'm gonna do it. I don't give a shit.' He felt awful afterwards. He felt that many of the people in the Camden raid never should have been there, that they had not been properly prepared. “And, of course, I had as much responsibility as anyone else to bring that up and try to deal with it, but I didn't do it.”

After Forsyth was released from jail and arraigned for the Camden raid, he said goodbye to this phase of his life. “Camden was my last contact with the Catholic Left.…I had just had it with that stuff. I felt like I had to do something different.…I had been with them a year, a very long year.…It seemed like forever. I decided that grassroots work was going to be more effective. I think my thinking was something like this: Resistance is not effective, it's not working in the short run. We need to dig in for the long haul instead. I had a sense of accomplishment, but not a big one. Not a big one at all.” He readily acknowledges that his post-resistance attitude probably developed in part from the intense impatience often typical in youth. He had made a major change in his life in order to stop the war. When the war didn't end, and he felt he might not be able to do more to make it end, he felt compelled to move on, to use his intense drive for another purpose.

“I told the people in the group, ‘I'm not going to do this anymore.' There weren't any long goodbyes. I just said, ‘This is the end for me, see you later.' It sounds kind of cold, but I wasn't in it for the social aspect.…I felt closer to the people I lived with than I did to them.…They [the people he lived with] were all involved in some kind of progressive politics, though some were more into macramé than they were into anything else. But to the extent that I had emotional attachments, it was to the people I lived with.…The resistance work was strictly business as far as I was concerned. I think I was atypical. I think to most people in the Catholic Left, the group was like a family, but not to me.”

Not until years later was he able to feel deep satisfaction about what he accomplished in those days. Like Williamson, he did not fully recognize the significance of what the Media burglary revealed, and the large public reaction to the revelations, until several years later, after he had rebuilt his life. “It took me five to ten years to figure that out.

“In terms of the antiwar movement and that period of my life, it was downhill from then on. That was the beginning of my period of frustration. Actually, I was frustrated from the day I read that book in 1968 on, but I mean really frustrated [by mid-1971]. As long as I was doing more, and more, and more, somehow that helped to keep my frustration at bay. The war was still going on, and it didn't look like it was going to end anytime
real soon. I couldn't think of anything to do except to get down in the grassroots and try to change people's minds about things.…At the time that seemed the most effective thing to do.

Forsyth put away his lock-picking tools, which were rather well worn by mid-1971. He returned the standard items to the various toolboxes from which he had borrowed them. He kept the ones he had made for a while and then threw them away. Almost immediately after he got out of jail following his arrest in Camden, he called someone who was doing community organizing. A short time later he moved to Kensington, then a largely working-class and poor neighborhood in Philadelphia.

For most of the next ten years, Forsyth was first a neighborhood organizer and later a union reform organizer in a factory owned by the Budd Company, a metal fabricator and major supplier of body components for automobile manufacturing companies. During these years, he said many years after he left organizing, “I wanted to change America. I was fired with the zealot's vision.” But after a few years, Forsyth found the work less and less satisfying. His lack of satisfaction may have come in part from the nature of the particular group he was working with. Members consumed themselves with constant criticism of one another, a sharp contrast to the warm, friendly atmosphere of the Catholic peace movement.

By 1981, Forsyth said, he knew “this is not me anymore.” By that time, “the most immediate thing was how personally painful it was, the way we were attacking each other and expecting perfection.…A lot of the people I was working with, I started wondering what it would be like if they were in charge of the government, and whether that would be such a good idea.…I was the most zealous of the zealous, and when I finally woke up to what I was like, from a human point of view, I just couldn't do it anymore.”

Finally, the “missionary attitude” drove him out of organizing. Increasingly, he was bothered “by the relationships we had with the people we were supposedly organizing. The missionary thing was always there … that sense that Father knows best, that we knew best.…We said we were trying to empower people, but we were pushing our own agenda, and there was always an undercurrent of not being completely up front about exactly what we were doing.…You say you're trying to save the world.…But we treated people like recruitees.…It's still a source of pain to me now when I think of that missionary attitude.”

At the end of this period of his life, Forsyth again “didn't know what I was going to do, but I had to get out, so I did.” In 1981, at age thirty-one, he was a veteran of intense political involvement, with thirteen years of
experience under his belt: campus organizing at Wooster, long-term community and union reform organizing in Philadelphia, an acquittal in the very unusual Camden trial, and no arrest in his biggest coup, the Media FBI burglary. “If I have any regrets, it's that I wasn't able to keep up.…I just got real tired and real discouraged.”

AS HE CLOSED
the organizing chapter of his life, Forsyth decided to build a new life. He analyzed his skills, his interests, his needs. He decided to utilize his strong penchant for being precise and methodical. He went back to college and earned two degrees—a bachelor's degree in physics from the State University of New York at Albany and a master's degree in electrical engineering from Drexel University. He became an electrical engineer, his father's profession.

He likes this work. It provides him with a refreshing contrast to an aspect of political work he found extremely distasteful. In political life, he found, “if you're fanatic enough, you can justify anything in the name of some principle. If you're a good enough arguer—and I met some champion debaters—you can make green red and red green. I'd go home after some debates and say, ‘What the hell did I just agree with? Am I out of my mind?'

“That's one of the reasons why I gravitated toward engineering.…What I do now, when it's all done and it comes time to turn on that switch, it either works or it doesn't.…If smoke comes out, you screwed up, you're wrong, you made a mistake, and you can't blame it on anybody else. If it works, I get the credit. If it doesn't work, I get the blame, and that's the way I like it. You can't bullshit your way around.”

Since then he has worked for companies and also worked independently, operating his own consulting business,
Forsyth Electro Optics, from his home in Manayunk, a neighborhood high on a hill above the Schuylkill River on the western edge of Philadelphia. His work has included such projects as designing equipment that uses light in the operation of lasers, fiber-optic systems, electronic cameras, and other devices. He advises companies and individuals on the feasibility of systems they have designed.

Forsyth hastens to point out that though he is not active politically, he hasn't rejected his progressive beliefs. “I have a lot of bad things to say about the left and about my own involvement in the left. I'm not active, and I'm very cynical about the prospects for change, but I have no sympathy for these reconstructed people who say, ‘We made a mistake. Nixon was right all along.'…That stuff makes me puke. I'm not reconstructed in that sense.”

His relations with his parents have improved. He often has differed with them on politics. Usually, “I find that they don't convince me, and I don't convince them.…My attitude now is that I'm not going to try to convince them.…If they say something that I really disagree with … I'll say something about it, but I don't get hot about it anymore. I just stop and think, ‘There probably is another side to this,' and let it go. At that time, I couldn't let it go. At that time, what they thought was really important to me.…When you're a kid, especially if you grew up in a real close family, your parents' beliefs have a weight that they don't have after you've become an adult. At that time I felt betrayed: How can you support this war, how can you do this to me?”