Burglar for Peace

Lessons Learned in the Catholic Left's Resistance to the Vietnam War

Ted Glick

• Publisher: PM Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781629638157
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Burglar for Peace is the incredible story of the Catholic Left—also known as the Ultra Resistance—from the late 1960s to the early '70s. Led by the Catholic priests Phil and Dan Berrigan, the Catholic Left quickly became one of the most important sectors of the Vietnam War–era peace movement after a nonviolent raid on a draft board in Catonsville, MD, in May 1968.

With an overview of the broader draft resistance movement, Burglar for Peace is an exploration of the sweeping landscape of the American Left during the Vietnam War era as we accompany Ted Glick on a journey through his personal evolution from typical, white, middle-class, American teenager to an antiwar, nonviolent draft resister. Glick vividly recounts the development of the Catholic Left as it organized scores of nonviolently disruptive, effective actions inside draft boards, FBI offices, war corporation offices, and other sites. Burglar for Peace is the first in-depth, inside look at one of the major political trials of Catholic Left activists, in Rochester, NY, in 1970, as well as a second one in 1972 in Harrisburg, PA. With great humility, Glick recalls how his selfless devotion to ending the war in Vietnam resulted in his eleven months of imprisonment, which included a thirty-four-day hunger strike, and he tells the remarkable story of a Catholic Left-organized, forty-day hunger strike against the war. Concluding the story is a reflective account of Glick's open resignation from the Catholic Left in 1974, his eighteen-year estrangement from Phil and Dan Berrigan, and the eventual healing of that relationship. The final chapter relates timeless lessons learned by the author that will find deep resonance among activists today.

Burglar for Peace will serve as both an inspiration and an invaluable resource for those committed to transformational, revolutionary change.

CHAPTER ONE

The Draft Resistance Movement, 1965–1968

He was living still a month later

I was able to gain access to him

I smelled the odor

of burning flesh

And I understood anew

what I had seen in North Vietnam

I felt that my senses

had been invaded in a new way

I now understood

the power of death in the modern world

I knew I must speak and act

against death

because this boy’s death

was being multiplied

a thousandfold

—Father Daniel Berrigan, “In the Land of Burning Children”¹

Five U.S. citizens died as a result of self-immolation to protest the Vietnam War: Alice Herz, March 1965; Norman Morrison and Roger Allen LaPorte, November 1965; Florence Beaumont, October 1967; teenager Ronald Brazee, referenced in the poem above, March 1968. These actions were likely inspired by the June 1963 self-immolation of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc, in South Vietnam, as well as the self-immolations of several other monks who followed him. Quang Duc was protesting the repressive and violent regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, the U.S.-backed ruler of South Vietnam at that time.

For those not alive then, it might be hard to appreciate how intense, how dangerous, how terrible those times were, so terrible that they would drive men and women to suicide for humanitarian and political reasons.

This was the first televised war. I remember watching war news on TV as a teenager, seeing young men not much older than me crawling through the Vietnamese jungle, while bullets flew around them. I heard the daily body counts of hundreds of people dead, people our government told us were our enemy.

All of this death and destruction was being inflicted by the U.S. military upon the people of Vietnam, both South and North, to support successive repressive South Vietnamese governments in the name of “fighting communism.” Supporters of the war literally said, in all seriousness, “If we don’t stop them over there, they’ll soon be coming over here.”

There was no “South Vietnam” prior to 1955. It was essentially a creation of the U.S. government when it refused to sign the 1954 agreement ending the war between France and Vietnam. France, the colonial power in Vietnam and Indochina from the 1880s until 1954, was defeated after eight years of war by a Vietnamese independence movement, the Viet Minh.

The United States, a major supporter of France’s efforts to maintain colonial control of Vietnam, stepped in more actively after France was forced to leave, creating and supporting a pro-U.S. government in the southern part of Vietnam and calling the territory that government controlled South Vietnam. They did so even though the agreement between the leaders of the Vietnamese independence movement and the French government that ended the war called for free elections throughout Vietnam to choose a national government.

It was the 1950s and early to mid-1960s, and fear of the spread of communism ran deep and wide within the U.S. body politic. It was the time of the Cold War. In Africa, Asia, and South and Central America, popular movements were overthrowing colonial and neocolonial governments, and communists and socialists were a part, sometimes a leading part, of those movements. The U.S., as the leader of the “Free World,” was on the wrong side of history, attempting to suppress or co-opt those movements.

There was also the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and the threat of a world nuclear conflagration that would devastate all life-forms on the planet. At the time of the Vietnam War, this existential threat to all life on earth was a very real and present danger.

As Betty Medsger wrote in her book The Burglary:

The Vietnam War touched the lives of more and more Americans in profound ways. Nearly everyone had family members, neighbors, or friends who had been called—or expected to be called—to serve in the military and be sent to Vietnam ready to kill or be killed. A sense of urgency about the war permeated the society. The country felt electric. It was a time when everything seemed to intensify—in the war, in the peace movement, among those who supported the war, among those who opposed it, and in actions against people who opposed it.²

A Mass Anti-War Movement Emerges

Significant organized resistance to the Vietnam War began after President Lyndon Johnson, reelected in 1964, running as an anti-war candidate against conservative Barry Goldwater, proceeded to escalate the war after taking office. There were close to twenty thousand U.S. troops in South Vietnam when he was reelected. In March 1965, he initiated Operation Rolling Thunder, an expanded bombing campaign against North Vietnam. By November of that year, there were 125 thousand U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. At its high point, in 1968, there were over half a million.

It didn’t take long for a mass anti-war movement to emerge. On April 17, 1965, twenty thousand people rallied in Washington, DC, in an action organized primarily by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Women’s Strike for Peace (WSP). On November 27 of that year, thirty-five thousand people encircled the White House in another mass demonstration.

Without a Selective Service System that could draft young men into the armed forces against their will, the Vietnam War never could have escalated so quickly and massively, and anyone who was against the war knew that. In 1965, in Mississippi, the anti-war Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) issued a leaflet calling on young black men to “not honor the draft here in Mississippi. Mothers should encourage their sons not to go.”³

Five men burned their draft cards in late July 1965 at the Whitehall Street army induction center in Lower Manhattan, New York. A month later Life magazine published a photo of one of them, Christopher Kearns, doing so. This infuriated ardent pro-war Congresspeople, leading to the introduction of legislation making draft card burners liable to a fine of ten thousand dollars and five years in jail. Arch segregationist Strom Thurmond was a prime sponsor of this effort. The new law passed through Congress quickly and went into effect on August 30, 1965.

The first person to publicly burn his draft card in defiance of this legislation was New Yorker David Miller of the Catholic Worker movement. Father Phil Berrigan, a leader of the peace movement, described it this way:

On October 15, 1965, a young man stood in front of the Armed Forces Induction Center in downtown Manhattan. He was wearing a suit and tie, his hair was neatly combed, and when he lighted his draft card and held it aloft, passersby were stunned. David Miller had been one of Dan [Berrigan]’s students at Le Moyne College. Now he was the first American to publicly burn his draft card [since it was outlawed], an act of resistance for which he received a three-year prison sentence.⁴

Here is how David Miller later wrote about his action, undertaken before a crowd of about five hundred people:

The expectant crowd fell hush in front of me. The hecklers across the street ceased their ranting and watched silently. I said the first thing that came to my mind. “I am not going to give my prepared speech. I am going to let this action speak for itself. I know that you people across the street really know what is happening in Vietnam. I am opposed to the draft and the war in Vietnam.”

I pulled my draft classification card from my suit coat pocket along with a book of matches brought especially for the occasion since I did not smoke. I lit a match, then another. They blew out in the late afternoon breeze. As I struggled with the matches, a young man with a May 2nd Movement button on his jacket held up a cigarette lighter. It worked just fine.

The draft card burned as I raised it aloft between the thumb and index finger of my left hand. A roar of approval from the rally crowd greeted the enflamed card.⁵

Bruce Dancis, a leader of the peace movement at Cornell University, has eloquently described what thousands of young men were thinking during that time:

My draft card was (figuratively) burning a hole in my pocket, and I couldn’t stand remaining complicit with the system that was so integral to perpetuating a war I abhorred. I was also concerned that the momentum of the antiwar movement had stalled. I felt people needed to take stronger, riskier actions both to keep the pressure on the Johnson administration and to increase the seriousness of the movement itself. I hoped my own action would, in a small way, help build a larger and more committed antiwar movement. I was willing to act alone, but hoped that others would be joining me in the not-too-distant future. That’s when I decided to destroy my draft card and cut my ties to the Selective Service System.⁶

The most prominent draft resister was heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali. After over a year of hassling with his local draft board over a conscientious objector application that was finally rejected, he refused induction on April 28, 1967, in Houston, Texas. This led to the revocation of his boxing license and a criminal indictment. Ultimately, Ali won on appeal, after initially being convicted.

Ali’s statement about why he took this course was very strong:

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?

No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end.⁷

Draft Resistance Gets Better Organized

Local groups formed during this time to reach out to draft age young men to encourage them to resist the draft and the war, and national meetings were held to try to figure out how to magnify the impact of the developing movement. One important meeting, a national We Won’t Go conference attended by five hundred people from dozens of groups, convened in Chicago in early December 1966. Those attending the conference “brought back to their organizations not only ideas and contacts but a sense of purpose and solidarity within a rapidly growing almost-movement.”⁸

Major demonstrations against the war were held in New York and San Francisco on April 15, 1967, attended by as many as half a million people. On April 4, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his first public, widely reported speech against the war in Riverside Church, in New York City. On May 10, more than 250 students at twenty-five medical schools announced their refusal to serve in the armed forces. By mid-summer, Marty Jezer, a leading activist, estimated that there were sixty We Won’t Go groups.

One hundred and fifty young men publicly burned their draft cards on April 15, in New York City’s Central Park. On the same day, at the big San Francisco anti-war demonstration, David Harris, a leading, nationally known draft resister, who eventually spent twenty months in federal prison, announced plans for a nationwide draft card turn-in on October 16. On that fall day, 1,200 young men publicly returned their draft cards. In Boston 5,000 people turned out for a rally in support. Thirty cities held local events.

The next nationally coordinated draft card turn-in took place on April 3, 1968, with one thousand publicly turning them in.

Here is how Harris described the work of the resistance at this time in a June 23, 2017, New York Times op-ed titled “I Picked Prison Over Fighting in Vietnam”:

At draft centers, we distributed leaflets encouraging inductees to turn around and go home. At embarkations, we urged troops to refuse to go before it was too late. We gave legal and logistical support to soldiers who resisted their orders. We destroyed draft records. We arranged religious sanctuary for deserters ready to make a public stand, surrounding them to impede their arrest. We smuggled other deserters into Canada. We even dug bomb craters in front of a city hall in Florida and posted signs saying that if you lived in Vietnam, that’s what your front lawn would look like.

Then we stood trial, one after another. Most of us were ordered to report for induction, then charged with disobeying that order, though there were soon so many violators that it was impossible to prosecute more than a fraction of us.

I was among that fraction.⁹

David Harris was one of my heroes. I had met him and his then wife Joan Baez in February 1969, when I traveled to Washington for a national peace conference. I had made the decision by this time that I was going to leave school, turn in my draft card, and work full-time against the war. And so, on May 1, 1969, I publicly deposited my draft card in an envelope in the chapel at Grinnell College in Iowa, sealed it, and gave it to the college chaplain for him to send to my draft board. Three other people did the same, and 160 people signed a “complicity statement” in support. Two hundred and fifty people were present in the chapel for the turn-in ceremony.

This happened on a day that the resistance movement had designated for people to turn in draft cards around the country. Although these “national turn-in days” had lost some of their appeal as a tactic among leaders of the resistance, this coordinated call for such actions worked just fine in the spring of 1969 for those of us in small college town Iowa.

The Pentagon Action

As someone who did not join the anti-war movement until 1968, at the age of eighteen, if there is one major action that I regret missing, it was the hugely historic action at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on October 21–22, 1967.

Coming just a few days after the first nationally organized draft card turn-in, it was significant in a number of ways. First, it stood out as the first massive demonstration at the Pentagon. One hundred thousand people took part in the rally at the Lincoln Memorial before demonstrators marched across the Lincoln Memorial Bridge to the Virg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction by Frida Berrigan
• Preface
• Chapter One. The Draft Resistance Movement, 1965–1968
• Chapter Two. My Personal Transformation
• Chapter Three. From Catonsville Onward
• Chapter Four. Taking on the FBI Too
• Chapter Five. Changing Hearts and Minds in the Courtroom
• Chapter Six. Prison
• Chapter Seven. The Harrisburg 8 (Minus 1) Trial
• Chapter Eight. A “Fast unto Death”
• Chapter Nine. Anti-War Burglar Culture
• Chapter Ten. After Harrisburg
• Chapter Eleven. Resigning from the Catholic Left
• Chapter Twelve. Lessons Learned
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Authors