jeans, loafers without socks, I noticed he also had a gun pointed at me.
Following him were a phalanx of about a dozen others. Who were they?
Vigilantes? Why were they interrupting what I thought was my patriotic duty?
That was fifty years ago tonight, and I'm still here -- so I guess I didn't
move. I was in the Alexandria, Minnesota, draft board office, trying to keep my
country from committing more war crimes in Southeast Asia, trying to push my
government off of the necks of the Vietnamese people. It turned out the young
man with the pointed gun was with the F.B.I., so what he said was my patriotic
duty trumped what I thought was my patriotic duty.
We had intended to call ourselves "The Minnesota Conspiracy to Save Lives," but
I guess when you get arrested, you lose your naming rights. Along with five
others arrested in the Little Falls and Winona draft board offices that same
night, the media dubbed us "The Minnesota Eight."
Actually, there were 14 of us -- three other people who, on that night,
successfully stole the files from the Wabasha draft board office, and three
others who, believing they saw a newly installed alarm system, called off their
raid of the Faribault draft board office.
Of course, it wasn't just the F.B.I. who thought we weren't patriots. The
Minneapolis Tribune printed a letter to the editor calling for us to be hanged
during the Aquatennial -- we were arrested on the night of July 10-11, so the
timing was good -- and that very nicely stenciled "Hang the Eight" graffiti
under one of the bridges on I-94 seemed to stay up for an uncomfortably long
time.
We were charged under the Espionage Act with attempted sabotage of national
defense material. The government was getting serious; it hadn't charged any
draft board raiders with that kind of a charge before. Regrettably, when the
grand jury indicted us, it was for attempted interference with the operations
of the Selective Service System. I say "regrettably" because with the attempted
sabotage charge, there is no way the government could have kept the war and the
draft out of the courtroom.
The U.S. Attorney decided to try us in three separate groups. The first two
groups were tried by U.S. District Court Judge Edward Devitt. He ruled the war
and the draft were not relevant. All that mattered was that the files kept in
those offices were Selective Service files, and we were trying to do something
to them. Maybe he didn't realize, or the thought didn't enter his mind, that
there wasn't just one trial at Nuremberg. There were twelve of them, and the
third trial was called "The Judges' Trial." Being a judge does not make you
immune from being responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
I remember asking Judge Devitt at our sentencing -- yes, of course we were
convicted -- whether it would have been relevant if those files were names of
fugitive slaves to be returned to their owners? Or what if they were lists of
Jews in Nazi Germany? Or what if they were names of U.S. Federal District Court
judges to be assassinated? Now I think maybe I should have left off that third
one.
Anyhow, Judge Devitt began his sentencing statement with something like, "These
five young men come from fine families." Just as in his ruling that the draft
and the war were irrelevant, he was clearly again engaging in misdirection. He
gave us the maximum: 27 years -- five years each for three of us and up to six
years for two who were under the age of 21 and sentenced under the Federal
Youth Corrections Act. Judge Devitt said: "Those who act out of an allegiance
to a higher law than the law of the land are making jungle law....You gentlemen
are worse than the common criminal who attacks the taxpayer's pocketbook. You
strike at the foundation of government itself." The anarchists in our group
thought, yes, he had finally understood.
Then came the third trial in January 1971. This one was before Judge Philip
Neville, known as being more liberal -- and more fatherly -- than Judge Devitt.
And, lo and behold, unlike Devitt, Neville decided to let the jury hear
evidence about the war and the draft, but only on a "provisional" basis. The
defense theory was an extension of the legal theory of "necessity," which says
that if you reasonably believe your act is necessary to prevent an evil that is
greater than the evil the law was designed to prevent, you can be found not
guilty. For example, you can break into a burning building to save someone's
life, and you wouldn't be guilty of breaking and entering, or trespass, or any
other crime.
One of the witnesses in that third trial was a former Marine and former Defense
Department employee named Daniel Ellsberg, who, at the RAND Corporation, had
helped write a 6700-plus-page study of the history of U.S. involvement in
Vietnam from 1945 to 1967. He believed that if he could get this study made
public, he could help end the war and maybe save a million lives or more. But
he was having little success with media people or members of Congress who would
be willing to publish the study. So he figured, this was his opportunity: What
better way to release the study than in a federal courtroom, where he'd be
sworn to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth"? So he
very conspicuously placed a briefcase by the side of the witness stand as he
began to testify. In it were about 1,000 pages of that study. Unfortunately, at
a crucial point in the testimony, Judge Neville upheld a standing objection
from the Assistant U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case, and said: "I am going to
sustain the objection, as I indicated in advance, to any criticism of this
administration or past administrations or Congress or anything else." The
concept of checks and balances between branches of government apparently didn't
apply here.
Neville eventually got his bearings, and, at the end of the trial, ruled out
all of the evidence he had allowed in provisionally. The testimony from
veterans, biological experts, draft resisters, scholars of protest, civil
disobedience and the draft, the defendants themselves describing their
religious and political motivations -- the jurors were now told to ignore
everything they had heard. The war and the draft once again became legally
irrelevant, and two more of us officially became convicted felons.
Five months later, on June 13, 1971, the New York Times began publishing
excerpts from that very study that Ellsberg had tried to introduce. Leaked to
the Times by Ellsberg and his colleague, Tony Russo, it soon became known as
"The Pentagon Papers."
Remember Nixon's "Plumbers Unit"? That group was formed at that time in 1971.
President Nixon was furious about leaks, plumbers plug leaks, so the unit
became the "Plumbers." Their first break-in was not into the Democratic
National Committee offices in the Watergate. Rather, it was into the office of
Dan Ellsberg's psychiatrist. On Nixon's order, they were trying to dig up dirt
on Ellsberg so they could "try him in the media," as Nixon put it. The
Watergate break-in came a year later in June 1972, and that debacle eventually
led to Nixon's forced resignation to avoid being impeached by the House and
convicted by the Senate.
In his transformation from a Cold Warrior to someone who was willing to risk
decades in prison for his attempt to end the war, Ellsberg had been very moved
by draft resisters he met, in particular, Randy Kehler, who was imprisoned for
refusing induction into the military. I think he was probably exaggerating, but
Ellsberg also said meeting groups such as ours helped push him along in his
efforts to make the Pentagon Papers public. So we like to think that what
started out as five simultaneous draft board raids in rural Minnesota, in an
attempt to end an immoral, illegal, undeclared war begun and prosecuted by
government lies, may have played some role in helping to lead to the only
Presidential resignation in United States history.
Until you act, you just never know. Unintended consequences often surprise,
both negatively and positively.
When the first five of us entered prison, a Minneapolis Tribune editorial
titled "Where in history for Minnesota 8?" speculated, "History may treat the
Minnesota Eight more approvingly than do their contemporaries, if the war in
retrospect comes to be viewed even more negatively, and if such protest comes
to be seen as courageous acts of conscience." Just as recent events have made
clear that the Civil War has never been fully resolved, I think that's even
more true of the Vietnam War. Just as we haven't come face-to-face with the
nature of slavery as an institution in our country's history, we also have yet
to come to grips with what we did in Southeast Asia half a century ago. Fifty
years may not be enough time for history's verdict, but we will have to render
one eventually.
Chuck Turchick
Minneapolis