And, from the other side (I exempt a huge number of sympathizers—radical, liberal, and uncategorizable folk of heart) we have the journalistic taunters and chucklers and revolutionary purists who find (since today's reality is a super-supermarket in which one can find anything) something salable for good money or good political grades. What do they find? A post million-dollar defense, easing the late-night strategy meetings with morning swims in Olympic pools and weekends at Malibu Beach. A defendant (Dan Ellsberg) vulnerable to the fatuous observations of pretentious portraitists who manage to agree on three devastating facts: he and his wife have money; he was an enthusiastic Marine, Harvard Fellow, Defense Department analyst, and Rand Corporation whiz-kid; and he is, above all, intense.
As for Tony Russo, he gets less attention, because it would take too much imagination to find something to poke at in this ex-student of aeronautical engineering and physics, son of an Italian man and a Virginia woman, who worked with a Rand research team in Vietnam, and now doodles poems in the courtroom during the many gaps in intelligibility. Tony wrote one for me while I was testifying, and gave it to me, with his great broad smile, when I came off the stand. He is always thinking beyond that courtroom.
Fly face on.
Pan American wounds,
Wounded heart,
Wounded Knee,
Right the Arm of Lady,
Liberty.
There are two kinds of witnesses in the case, from a legal standpoint. There are the "fact" witnesses, who testify, if they are government witnesses, that the defendants stole the documents, and try to explain why it really was a theft even though Ellsberg worked for Rand, was entitled to have the documents, and returned them to the office each morning after his Xerox operation at night. And there are the "expert" witnesses, who testify for the government that they have read the 18 volumes of the Pentagon Papers picked out for indictment purposes (less than half of the total reproduced by Ellsberg and Russo) and that, if given to the public in 1969 (the year of the Xeroxing), the Papers would have done injury to the national defense or been of advantage to a foreign power. And then there are the "fact" and "expert" witnesses for the defense, who say the opposite.
Called in as an "expert," I was "the first radical witness," the New York Times reporter wrote on the first day of my testimony. I "made a good impression on the jury," he said, there would be more radical witnesses. There was a wrangle in the defense team, he wrote, between Ellsberg and Russo, over whether there should be "radical" witnesses. The reporter was about as far off on this as when he referred to me as "the six foot six educator, towering over the courtroom." That is, about four inches off.
In fact, both Ellsberg and Russo, and just about everybody on the defense team, agreed that their first witnesses (Schlesinger, Sorenson, Bundy, Galbraith) may have performed a useful function in saying that what they read of the Pentagon Papers clearly did not relate to national defense, and could not be injurious to the United States. But they also agreed that these witnesses did not place before the jury and the public those clear and burning facts about this vicious war of white Westerners against Asian peasants, which alone could make the Ellsberg-Russo behavior morally understandable.
And while they want legal acquittal, there is something more important to the defendants: the American public should learn from those cold official memoranda what really went on inside the closed doors and closed minds of the plotters of mass murder in Washington and Saigon. And so, they agreed that the White House witnesses would have to be followed by people who had worked against the war and could speak a bit of their thoughts and feelings to the jury; people like Noam Chomsky, Tom Hayden, Ernest Gruening, Wayne Morse, Don Luce, Richard Falk, and the defendants themselves. The only disagreement was on the number of such witnesses, and on exactly which of the radical and near-radical antiwar people should be invited. They agreed to start with me.
On the stand, I had before me five of the 18 volumes cited in the indictment. "Will you tell the court what is in those volumes?" said Leonard Weinglass, one of the five defense-team lawyers. The jury was a few feet away from me: ten of the twelve are women, of whom at least three are black and one an emigrant from Australia. One of the two men is a black local official of an auto union; another is a wounded Marine veteran of Vietnam. The prosecutor sits and takes notes. The judge, Matthew Byrne, is youngish, smooth, a consummate dispenser of "fair" decisions in a trial whose very existence is a monstrosity of injustice: Ellsberg and Russo face 130 years and 40 years for revealing to the American people what the government was doing behind their backs. At the defense table, lawyers and defendants sit a little forward in their seats, like rooters in the bleachers trying to push a line drive into the stands.
I turn to the jury and start telling what is in those five volumes, quoting occasionally. How the Vietnamese movement rose in World War II, after 80 years of French colonial rule in which the peasants starved eight months out of the year. How Ho Chi Minh came to lead this movement, and everyone (even French and Americans) said he was an intelligent, dedicated, charming, gentle man, loved by the people of Vietnam. And how in spite of the noble words of Roosevelt and Churchill in the Atlantic Charter, promising freedom to colonial peoples after Hitler was defeated, the United States, when World War II was won, helped the French back into control in Vietnam. And what a blow this was to the Vietnamese, who on September 2, 1945 had adopted a Declaration of Independence which said "All men are created equal, etc., etc."
And how Ho Chi Minh wrote letter after letter to the White House, asking that the pledges be kept, that the French be kept out of Indochina, that the Vietnamese be allowed to rule themselves. And how not one of these letters—14 communications in all—was answered by the United States. I read to the jury from one of those letters, in which Ho wrote Truman and said: there is drought and famine, and the French have taken away the rice, and two million Vietnamese have died, and won't the American people help? No reply.
Then came the war, from 1946 to 1954, the French against the Viet Minh, which was a coalition of Vietnamese for independence, led by Ho Chi Minh and other communists. And the United States, by the end of that war, was supplying most of the guns and money for the French. And when the French were defeated, and had to sign a peace in Geneva, promising a united Vietnam in two years based on elections, the United States stepped in, propping up as head of state in Saigon Mr. Ngo Dinh Diem (the volumes refer to his "mandarin style") who refused to hold those elections.
The early volumes of the Pentagon Papers say why the United States intervened in Vietnam, why we had eased the French back in, why we opposed self-determination and the Atlantic Charter, why we replaced the French in 1954 with ourselves, through our man Diem, fresh from his stay in New Jersey. They say why Indochina was so important to us. There it is, again and again, in the official memoranda. Rubber, tin, oil, rice. We need that. Japan needs that, and we don't want Japan to have to turn to a Communist country instead of to us. Oh yes, and there is the matter of security. If Indochina falls, then the other dominoes will fall: Malaya, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, And...
I was able to point out to the jury that those in the higher circles of government never did explain, even to one another, how one country going Communist would lead to another country going Communist, and how any country going Communist would affect the national defense of the United States. And that the idea of containment, which started presumably, as preventing Russian aggression against her neighbors, ended as justifying American aggression against any country in the world that decided to be Communist.
Finally, the coup against the Diem regime, by his own generals, with the connivance of the United States. After nine years of collaboration, Diem counted on the U.S. for support. But he was not keeping order. He was attacking the pagodas, putting people in jail. And monks were burning themselves to death in downtown Saigon in protest against the cruelty of the regime. And the Vietcong were popular and winning.
The CIA met with
the Saigon generals. The White House watched coolly, with Kennedy saying: let's not do anything openly, but covert stuff is okay. And Henry Cabot Lodge, our new Ambassador, enthusiastic for the coup, and in touch with the plotters. Lodge, who, between contacts with the plotters, accepted an invitation to spend a holiday weekend with Diem, a week before the attack on the palace and the execution of Diem and his brother Nhu. Lodge, who later told the New York Times: "We had nothing whatsoever to do with it."
So, I was able to give, without interruption, a brief history of the first 20 years of the war, in a one-hour presentation to the jury on Friday afternoon, and another hour the following Monday morning. This is very rare in a political case, but it would have been hard, legally, to stop this, since I was just saying—in my own words, and sometimes in the words of the documents—what was in those papers that were supposed to be the materials of a terrible crime.
"Are you finished?" Len Weinglass asked.
"Yes." Now the big question.
"Having read those volumes, would you say that, if made known to the public in 1969, they would have injured the national defense?"
"No."
"And what is the basis of your opinion?"
Four points. One, there is no military information in these volumes; what we have here is political history, period. Two, if there were military information, we would have to distinguish: there are military activities for the defense of the country; there are others which are acts of intervention in the affairs of other countries, having nothing to do with defending ours, and such was the war in Vietnam.
Point three. A country's national defense rests partly on military strength, but mostly on the health of its society, the confidence of the people in the government, the sense of community, the belief that the principles of the nation are being fulfilled. All this adds up to the morale of the people, crucial in national defense. History has shown us nations whose main strength in self-defense was their morale, not their weapons. What was the morale of the American people in 1969? Very poor. Thirty thousand dead. Our soldiers destroying peasant villages, to our shame. Anti-war feeling growing. A hundred billion dollars spent for war, and the cities so neglected that blacks rose all over in 1967 and 1968. (I was going too far now, and the judge stopped me: "Mr. Weinglass, ask the witness a question.")
Point four. National defense means defense of the nation, of all the people, not defense of special interests. Secrets disclosed in 1969 might hurt special interests, might embarrass politicians, might hurt the profits of corporations wanting tin, rubber, oil in far-off places. But this is not the same as hurting the nation, which is the people.
My testimony was over. The prosecutor decided not to crossexamine me on the documents. He asked how I came to know Dan Ellsberg and Tony Russo and flashed a police photo of Ellsberg and me in a demonstration at the federal building in Boston, May 6, 1971. And then: "No more questions."
There will be more said about the war from the witness stand in the weeks to come. The mass media will minimize the trial of Anthony Russo and Daniel Ellsberg. And some people will deride it. But these men did a remarkable thing. And they did it, as we all do what we feel we must, amidst all the old and silly furniture of this world. And that's all right, as a beginning.
5
Amazing Grace: The Movement Wins in Camden
Again and again, determined anti-war activists, often priests and nuns joined by lay people, invaded draft boards and destroyed draft records as symbolic acts of protest against the Vietnam War. Philip and Daniel Berrigan, Catholic priests, were probably the most famous of these protesters, who became known by the number of participants; the Baltimore Four, the Catonsville Nine, the Milwaukee 14, and so on. One of the last of these trials was that of the Camden 28.I had testified in a number of these trials, and had just come from testifying in the Pentagon Papers case. Now one of the Camden defendants, a working-class young woman from Philadelphia named Kathleen (Cookie) Ridolfi, called on me to be a witness. It turned out to be a different experience from my other courtroom appearances, and I wrote about it for Liberation magazine, in its July-August 1973 issue.
There is much to learn from the trial of the Camden draft-board raiders which ended last week (May 20) with total acquittal and a happy courtroom standing and singing "Amazing Grace."
First, that it pays to struggle, that we must not listen to the wailers who point to the power of the Establishment, the impotence of the Movement, and how little has basically changed. The Camden "28" did in August, 1971, essentially what the Baltimore Four had done in 1967— they entered a draft board illegally to destroy or damage draft records, as a protest against the forced recruiting of young men to kill peasants in Indochina. But out of that first action, Phil Berrigan got six years in jail. In many trials of other draft board raiders in between, the sentences kept going down. And finally, with Camden, acquittal on all counts.
What can that clear progression toward exoneration be attributed to, except that the antiwar movement—and of course, events themselves—created an ever-stronger climate of opposition to the war which affected judges, juries, and public, and made possible the bold defiance of government that the Camden jury showed? True, the jurors had good legal ground to stand on for their verdict—an FBI informer, infiltrating the group, had made the raid possible by supplying equipment and expertise that the group lacked, and the judge told the jury that it could acquit if the government, in helping set up the raid, had gone to "intolerable" lengths that were "offensive to the basic standards of decency and shocking to the universal sense of justice."
But the jury would not have searched for that legal ground if it did not believe the defendants were right in opposing the war. One of the jurors, a fifty-three-year-old black taxi driver from Atlantic City named Samuel Braithwaite, who had spent 11 years in the Army, left a letter for the defendants when the verdict was in and the jury broke up to go home. His letter began:
To you, the clerical physicians with your God-given talents, I say, well done. Well done for trying to heal the sick irresponsible men, men who were chosen by the people to govern and lead them. These men, who failed the people, by raining death and destruction on a hapless country, a country who was trying to govern their own country and lives, sans our interference.... You went out to do your part while your brothers remained in their ivory towers watching, waiting and criticizing your actions.... The two greatest commandments, to love God and to love your neighbor was shown by you and your community. Keep up the good work and hopefully some day in the near future, peace and harmony may reign to people of all nations.
Braithwaite was a remarkable juror. He left a list of questions directed to "all men of the clergy," which included: "Didn't God make the Vietnamese? Was God prejudiced and only made American people?" Throughout the trial, Braithwaite did something the defendants urged jurors to do when the trial started, to take advantage of a right that juries have but never exercise: to question witnesses. He would send up questions to the judge for witnesses. The day I was in Camden to testify, Phil Berrigan was on the stand, and when he finished, Braithwaite sent up several questions. One of them was: "If, when a citizen violates the law, he is punished by the government, who does the punishing when the government violates the law?"
Braithwaite's bold sympathy for the Camden defendants was a product of this own past as a black man in America, of the black struggle of these 15 years (he often referred to Martin Luther King), and probably of the antiwar movement. But he, as well as other antiwar jurors, might never have gotten onto the jury if not for the fact that the Camden defendants, aided by a group of "movement social scientists," worked enormously hard at the start of the trial to figure out which jurors would be most likely to support them, and to handle the jury selection accordingly.
That worked, and it helps to answer a question often pondered by radicals in the political trial: isn't the whole trial procedure stacked against the defendants, even when it is "fair," and aren't we playing the s
ystem's game when we work with its rules, trying to use them instead of ignoring them, defying them, overthrowing them? The jury selection process—it's designed to produce middle-American people who won't like blacks, radicals, oddballs. The judge—he's a tool of the system; no point trying to be nice, or persuasive with him, only to fight him. The witnesses for the other side—especially the informer—they are enemies.
The experience of the Camden trial suggests that we must grasp the protuberances of the system as handles, knowing that they may fall off in our hands, but also knowing we need every advantage we can get hold of. We must, guerilla-fashion, pick up the implements of the other side and use them without naivete, but also without embarrassment.
The Camden experience suggests something else: that while people do tend to behave according to their class background and social role, it would be simplistic (we might call it a mechanical approach to the materialistic interpretation of history) to ignore the fact that individuals diverge from their social role under certain circumstances. And it is the job of conscious radicals to try to create the conditions under which that can happen, without the expectation that it will happen.