The Burglary (9 page)

THE MEDIA BURGLARS HOPED
that if they were successful their effort would demonstrate that it was possible not to be powerless in the face of massive power. They hoped their aggressive nonviolent resistance would make it clear that to fight injustice it wasn't necessary to match the government's violence with violence. They also hoped their action would help defeat what they believed were the rampant enemies of dissent at that time—fear, apathy, hopelessness, and now the FBI.

They found the courage needed for this high-risk venture from diverse sources. Their consciences had been set on fire—by the
Holocaust in Europe, by
racial injustice in America, by the use of atomic bombs against
Japan in 1945, and, for all of them, especially the youngest members of the group, by the Vietnam War. They were determined—as was German theologian
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who heroically resisted the
Nazis during the
Holocaust, was—not to be silent, not to be passive. They rejected silence in the face of injustice. They regarded silence as collaboration with injustice.

They realized people would be shocked if they knew what they were about to do. Though the country was born as an act of resistance, many Americans had long ago become timid citizens, ready to accept whatever government officials told them, especially about war. Until the war in Vietnam, few Americans had raised questions about an American war, let alone engaged in acts of resistance against one. In recent years, though, more and more people had raised questions about the war in Vietnam. Consequently, as the burglars prepared to test the possibility of breaking into the FBI office in Media, resistance was not the totally strange and forbidding concept it had been just fifteen years earlier.

Resistance had not been embraced by the masses, but it had been seeping into the American conscience during the last decade. Courage had been made visible repeatedly by civil rights activists in the South. They had set examples. After hundreds of
lynchings, and after being excluded from equality for nearly a century after the Civil War, more and more African Americans found the courage to say no to the suppression of their rights. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, as they stepped forward to claim their right to vote and other basic rights they had been guaranteed but denied, they faced arrest, imprisonment, even death. As they did so, Americans saw a new vision of courage on the evening news.

The faces of courage were no longer only faces from the past etched in history books. Courage was not just brave soldiers going ashore at Normandy.
It was not just
Harriet Tubman leading hundreds of slaves in the dark of night, helping them flee from slavery in the South to freedom in the North as she passed through the Underground Railroad station in the town the burglars soon would make famous again—Media, Pennsylvania. Courage was not just Mahatma Gandhi fasting as he led a massive movement of people in India seeking independence from the British.

Courage, as people had often seen since 1955 on the evening news on the televisions in their living rooms, was alive today. Courage was
Rosa Parks refusing to go to the back of the bus. It was hundreds of black students quietly refusing to obey orders to leave segregated lunch counters in Nashville. It was black children walking through club-wielding mobs of spitting, screaming, face-scratching white people in Little Rock who didn't
want black children to go to school with white children. Courage was Martin Luther King writing a “Letter from Birmingham Jail” urging people to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience against unjust laws, and then insisting, despite scars from being beaten, that “one who breaks an unjust law must do it openly, lovingly.” Courage was
Michael Schwerner,
James Chaney, and
Michael Goodman, three young civil rights workers, two of them white and one of them black, who were savagely lynched, murdered, and buried in a dam in Mississippi in the summer of 1964—
Freedom Summer it was called, but it was not freedom for them.

Because courage had become more visible, more people found it. If it hadn't, thousands of young men probably would not have refused to serve in the Vietnam War. If courage had not become more visible, the Berrigan brothers and others in the
Catholic peace movement probably never would have raided draft boards. If courage had not become more visible, Davidon and the other burglars probably never would have even thought of doing what they were about to do in Media.

Still, even in the context of the courage that had become visible in that era, an act of resistance as extreme as burglarizing an FBI office was something very few people would have been willing to do. Resistance this extreme was so rare that it seemed like something only fools or saints would attempt. However laudable the goals might have been, normal people did not train themselves to become amateur burglars in order to break into an FBI office. But these people, who were neither saints nor fools, agreed to do just that.

In the end, their decision to engage in this extraordinary act of resistance came down—as such decisions had for historic leaders of nonviolent resistance, including Gandhi and King—to this:

Fully aware that what they planned to do could, whether or not they achieved their goal, take away their freedom, perhaps even endanger their lives, they decided that their desire to stop injustice—the destruction of dissent by the FBI—was more important to them than their desire to lead a normal, uninterrupted life.

They moved forward.

4

F
ROM THE BEGINNING
, the Media burglars worked in total secrecy. “We pulled the curtains around us,” Bonnie Raines recalls. As they closed the curtains, they recognized that the break-in they were about to plan might be more dangerous than anything any of them, or anybody they knew, had ever done. They intended to keep the curtains drawn before, during, and after the burglary.

Closely maintained security was new to all of them. Security had been loose, almost casual, in the draft board break-ins. Unlike the draft board raiders, the Media burglars would be silent and the group would be small. At their first meeting as a group in late December 1970, when they chose their name—the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI—they all agreed that no one else would be invited to be part of the group. It would be only as large as necessary to accomplish their goals: get inside the Media FBI office, take as many files as possible, review the files, and, assuming they contained information the public needed, distribute them to the public.

The strict secrecy rules were not easy to maintain, especially about something they knew their friends in the antiwar movement would find riveting. Secrecy was against their nature. They enjoyed talking with friends about politics and about what they were doing as activists. Suddenly, such conversations had to stop. They realized that given what they planned to raid, an FBI office, they were likely to fail if any information about their plan leaked. If they were going to be arrested, they wanted it to be for something they actually did, not something they planned to do. There was no room for casual talk now.

With those conditions agreed to, the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI started to plan. The first item on their agenda: pick a night for the burglary. In the annals of burglary, this surely was the only time a group of burglars purposely chose the night of a boxing match for their break-in.

They had to establish the day and time of the burglary at the outset so they could case the area during that time. As they discussed possible dates, it did not seem any one night would be any better or any worse than any other. But one of the burglars—none of them remembers who it was—made the case for scheduling the burglary on the night of the Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier fight, March 8.
For the first time, two undefeated heavyweight champions were going to compete against each other for the title. Ali would return to the ring that night for the first time since he was convicted in 1967 for refusing to be inducted into the U.S. Army. Frazier, a Philadelphia fighter who supported the war, had won the heavyweight title while Ali was kept out of the ring.

The burglars were not boxing fans, but they became fans of this match. All of them eventually grasped the idea that the match was going to be so special that it was possible nearly every sports-loving person in the country—maybe, they dared to think, even the people who lived in the apartments on the two floors above the FBI office—would be riveted to their televisions and radios that night.

Their discussion of which night to break in became very exciting. The buzz of a neighborhood full of televisions and radios tuned to the fight might provide white noise sufficient to muffle the noise of footsteps and other burglary-in-progress sounds. People might be totally absorbed and not easily distracted by random noise. And if there was any chance that a Media FBI agent would be inspired to work overtime at night—during casing, not once did the burglars observe an FBI agent working at the office after 5 p.m.—the night of the Ali-Frazier fight surely would be the least likely one for such inspiration to strike.

The possibility that noise generated by the fight could serve as a distraction struck the burglars as a great stroke of luck. Even the local police, they thought, might be so glued to their televisions and radios that evening that they would make few, if any, street patrols. That did it. They chose the night of the Ali-Frazier fight—Monday, March 8, 1971.

Actually, the fight was projected to be a much bigger phenomenon than the burglars realized. During his exile, Ali had become a hero throughout the world because he placed his opposition to the war above his boxing career, because he was brash and bold in his defense of the rights of black
people not only in the United States but also in the emerging independent countries of Africa.
Even
Nelson Mandela, the great South African antiapartheid leader, regarded Ali as a hero. In the middle of his long imprisonment on Robben Island in South Africa, Mandela later said, when Ali became a conscientious objector, he embraced Ali and saw him as a sym-bol of hope and courage. On a shelf behind Mandela's desk in his home are framed photographs of two Americans—Barack Obama and Muhammad Ali.

In December 1970, when the prohibition was lifted on Ali boxing, he immediately agreed to fight Frazier. Ali had defended the world heavyweight title nine times before he was shut out of the ring. Because he had not lost the title in a match, he and his supporters insisted he still held it. Frazier won the title in February 1970, but he knew he would not really be regarded as the heavyweight champion until he beat Ali. Frazier desperately wanted to fight Ali.
He even enlisted President Richard Nixon in the effort, meeting with the president at the White House to get his assistance in helping Ali return to the ring. Frazier later described his conversation with Nixon: “I went down to DC to help Ali get his license back. President Nixon invited me up for tea: ‘Joe, if I do that, can you take him?' I said, ‘You dust him off, I'll beat him up.' Nixon kept his word. So did I.”

It was the most anticipated heavyweight title fight since
Joe Louis defeated
Max Schmeling in their 1938 fight at Yankee Stadium when the world was on the brink of World War II. Schmeling was not a
Nazi, but Hitler used his previous victory over Louis to promote the Nazi belief in Aryan superiority. The win by Louis against Schmeling in 1938 in that perilous time was considered a great triumph by Americans, especially African Americans.

Now another war hovered over the Ali-Frazier fight and also over the Media burglary. The strong cultural and political forces spawned by stances for and against the Vietnam War fueled both the burglary and the fight. Without the war, and the burglars' fear that the government was suppressing dissent against it, they would not have been planning to break into an FBI office. Without the Vietnam War, Ali and Frazier would not have faced each other in 1971 under such extraordinary conditions. Ali, the most famous conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, was embraced internationally by people who opposed the war. Frazier, who supported the war, was embraced by people who supported it, including the president. Ali was reviled by politicians throughout the country—first for choosing to be a Muslim and then for refusing to serve in Vietnam. Frazier, the son of a
South Carolina sharecropper who had fought his way to the championship, increasingly had become a symbol of conservative working-class Americans.

Anticipation for the fight intensified as Ali, in interview after interview in early 1971, promised he would make a comeback the night of the fight. “On that night,” he playfully predicted, “they'll be waiting everywhere—England, France, Italy. Egypt and Israel will declare a forty-five minute truce. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran; even Red China and Formosa. Not since time began has there been a night like this. People will be singing and dancing in the aisles. And when it's all over, Muhammad Ali will take his rightful place as champion of the world.”