Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  CARL BERNSTEIN (Washington Post reporter)

  This was a criminal presidency from beginning to end, first against the antiwar movement, then the press, and then the political opposition and the Democrats, then the system of justice, and finally against history.

  I believe that when Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the Times, he anticipated that he would be prosecuted. This was an act of civil disobedience, knowingly undertaken, knowing what the consequences might be, and therefore a really courageous act at the time. But by the time of his trial in 1973, the crazy thing that the Nixon people did was they didn’t even have enough faith in the system of justice to be satisfied with putting Ellsberg on trial. So as with almost all of the wretched excess of Nixonian retributive and illegal actions against those who opposed him, instead of simply putting Ellsberg on trial, they decided to keep him from becoming a hero, both to the antiwar movement and to the country. They decided they would get the records of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and put them out there, before Ellsberg went on trial.

  By that time, the criminality of Nixon and those under him was already full-blown. Go to the tapes and listen to June 17 of 1971 to get an idea of the mentality, and Nixon’s obsession with the antiwar movement. Nixon orders Kissinger and Haldeman [his chief of staff] to break into the Brookings Institution, where they think Ellsberg has kept classified NSC documents, that they called the Bombing Halt file. Nixon says, “Goddamn it, get in [to Brookings] and get those files. Blow the safe and get it!” He keeps coming back to it, day after day, on the tapes. “Have you gotten into Brookings yet?”*5

  Nixon, on earlier tapes, has already said to Kissinger that the war was unwinnable, yet he stayed in for three more years and twenty-seven thousand more American deaths, not to mention a couple hundred thousand “yellow people,” as they regarded them. But Nixon saw Vietnam as part of a much larger chess game. He was playing China and the Soviet Union against each other and Vietnam was just a pawn. Not on any of Nixon’s tapes is there a discussion about what would be right for the country, not once. There is not a word on the tapes about the human lives involved. [Bob] Woodward calls it “the dog that never barks.”

  STEVE WASSERMAN

  I remember attending the 1973 Ellsberg-Russo trial in Los Angeles. I went only one day. It was a startling day because there, testifying for the defense, was McGeorge Bundy, one of the architects of the war. I’ll never forget Lenny Weinglass, who was Russo’s attorney, asking him: “Mr. Bundy, if you were a spy working for a foreign power, engaged in espionage, how would you go about your business?” Bundy replied: “Well, first I would take out a subscription to The New York Times, and second I would take out a subscription to the Congressional Quarterly, and third I would make sure that my library card was up-to-date. Doing these three things would give me 98 percent of everything I would need to know.”

  The Pentagon Papers confirmed the remaining 2 percent and made legitimate everything else we knew or had long suspected.

  MORT HALPERIN (former Nixon national security aide)

  When John Dean went to the Justice Department and spilled everything he knew, one of the things he told them was there was an illegal wiretap program. Twenty-one people were wiretapped. One of them was Halperin. Judge [William] Byrne was told that Ellsberg had been overheard on my wiretap. I had been wiretapped for twenty-one months, and the files were missing from the Justice Department. He announced that at the trial in the morning, and that afternoon he dismissed the case, based on governmental misconduct, in part, we think, because the wiretaps were missing, and therefore there was no way to tell whether they had learned anything relevant to the trial. The next day, Ehrlichman [the White House counsel], who Nixon had just fired, announced the wiretap files weren’t missing. They had removed them from the Justice Department because they didn’t want Hoover to get his hands on them, and they were in the White House, in his old safe. So, I think the judge might not have dismissed the case, because he could have looked at the wiretaps and saw that there was nothing remotely related to the trial in the wiretap.

  DANIEL ELLSBERG (defense expert)

  We had been in court for four and a half months at that point. One morning, an announcement came in from the judge in the courtroom, a memo from Earl Silbert, the Watergate prosecutor, saying that on the orders of the White House, burglars had broken into my former psychiatrist’s office to get information on me. Well, this came from John Dean. When that announcement was read in court, it was quite electrifying. Reporters who had been stuck in Los Angeles while their colleagues were doing exciting things on Watergate in Washington envisioned headlines, “Watergate Meets the Pentagon Papers Trial.” That was the headline they all wanted. They dashed from their seats in court for the pay phones in the hall. It was just like the movie Front Page for the first time in the trial, and not the last time.

  CARL BERNSTEIN

  It was a huge surprise to everybody. I remember Woodward and I were in the newsroom when Judge Byrne in Los Angeles declared a mistrial on May 11 of ’73.*6 It was as shocking as anything that happened during Watergate. It was, at the time, almost incomprehensible, but it fit the pattern. It fit because it was the same Plumbers, the same people.*7

  RICHARD NIXON, OVAL OFFICE TAPE, MAY 11, 1973

  The sonofabitch thief is made a national hero and is going to get off on a mistrial, and the New York Times gets a Pulitzer Prize for stealing documents….They’re trying to get at us with thieves. What in the name of God have we come to?

  DANIEL ELLSBERG

  If they hadn’t had to commit those crimes against me, Nixon would’ve stayed in office. Did I do this by myself? No. I wouldn’t have released the Pentagon Papers in the first place if it hadn’t been for the antiwar movement, and people like Randy Kehler going to prison.

  Credit 26.1

  Daniel Ellsberg and his wife, Patricia Marx, celebrate outside the courthouse in Los Angeles the day his Pentagon Papers case was dismissed, May 11, 1973. The conspiracy charges against Ellsberg, which carried a maximum penalty of 115 years in jail, were dismissed because of government misconduct and illegal evidence gathering.

  Meanwhile, in the political atmosphere accompanying these revelations of White House crimes and cover-up in the spring of 1973, Congress finally cut off funding for further combat operations in Vietnam: initially, in the House with respect to Cambodia, on May 10, the day before our trial was dismissed, and totally on August 15, 1973. Together, these developments were crucial to ending the war in Indochina in 1975.*8

  WEATHER UNDERGROUND

  BILL DYSON (FBI agent)

  The list that I maintained was the official list used by the FBI. It was thirty-eight bombings. I had that list memorized at one time. The Weather Underground was extremely sophisticated with their devices—more so than many people realize. None of the Weathermen bombings have been solved. They put one in the Pentagon in May 1972. So with that in mind, we’d still like to find out who did them. However, the statute of limitations is over for all of them, except for the Golden Gate police department in California, where a police officer was killed.*9 And nobody has ever been named. We closed the Weather Underground investigation in ’77, which is when I wrote the closing report, because the group had become defunct.*10

  MICHAEL KENNEDY

  There was a special prosecutor out of Washington, D.C., named Guy Goodwin. Goodwin’s job was to try to interdict the aboveground support people who were helping the Weather Underground. So when anybody would ever speak about Weather—and a lot of people did—he would subpoena them. He was very angry and paranoid, and he became the guy who organized the grand jury in California, Chicago, and New York, in order to subpoena people. There were a lot of people subpoenaed to grand juries. Several of them were clients of mine. We only knew a little bit about the COINTELPRO illegal break-ins and illegal gathering of evidence then. We didn’t have a clue as to how deep it really went, until later. But we fought those grand juries. We fought Guy Goodwin, mostly to a stan
dstill, because the defense primarily was that these were political people, and they were not going to testify against anybody. They were not going to bear witness against their comrades.

  BRIAN FLANAGAN (Weather Underground member)

  When Jimmy Carter took over the White House, it became in his interest to clear the FBI of the people that were loyal to Hoover because it was this rogue organization. It was uncontrollable and would defy anybody in the government. So he did a housecleaning. One of the things he did was jack up this guy John Kearney in New York who ran the FBI’s Squad 47, and had approved of all these black-bag jobs—these illegal break-ins, wiretaps, mail covers, etc. Kearney was charged with five felonies. One of the things that they charged him with was wiretap and mail cover of me after I surfaced.

  BILL DYSON

  In 1976 information came out that some of the FBI agents were doing break-ins and so forth in connection with the Weather Underground, and fifty-six FBI agents were charged with crimes.*11 That became a national scandal. It was one of the worst scandals ever to hit the FBI. And it affected me tremendously because I was the national case agent [for the Weather Underground]. Dick Held, senior assistant director at that time, contacted me and said, “Bill, what do you think of this?” And I said, “I’m opposed to these break-ins, but I don’t think the agents should be criticized for what they did.” You had the [acting] director of the FBI, L. Patrick Gray, and [Deputy Assistant Director of Inspections] Ed Miller and [Associate Director] Mark Felt basically saying, “Yeah, we did it.” And you had a lot in the middle management saying, “Don’t know nothing about it.” Bull, they all knew about it. I knew about it, but I wouldn’t do it.

  Today we realize that the Weather Underground made a decision not to kill people, but we didn’t know it at the time. And I’m not so sure they’re telling us the truth today. They may have been lying. There may have been some people willing to kill people. In other words, these people could bring down our government. Maybe they couldn’t overthrow the United States government but, if you kill the president, if you kill key congressmen, key senators, you kill Supreme Court justices. They were telling us they had the ability to do it.

  BRIAN FLANAGAN

  What happened with President Carter clearing house at the FBI, Kearney said, “They’re not getting me, because this was okayed from the top.” He gave up Mark Felt. Now, Mark Felt is a felon, and one of his felonies is wiretapping and mail-covering me without a court order. He was convicted of those charges, and Reagan pardoned him. So that’s a lot of the reason why hardly any Weathermen went to jail—all of those charges against them were thrown out. COINTELPRO’s activities were all illegal under the letter of the law.*12

  In addition, they did break-ins to Bernardine’s sister Jennifer Dohrn’s place. They were really after Jennifer because they knew she was the nexus between the above- and underground organization. So they did black-bag break-ins into her place, put listening devices in, and stole her underwear. That was a big thing.*13

  MICHAEL KENNEDY

  When the federal government tried to prosecute a number of my clients and clearly Daniel Ellsberg, the defense attorneys, including myself, would raise issues of ill-gotten evidence. Evidence gotten mostly by the COINTELPRO people, by break-ins and illegal wiretaps and other forms of surveillance, and when you raise that as an issue to dismiss the case, the government would be in a position where it had to disclose what it considered to be matters of national security. All their peccadilloes, almost everything they did that they knew was wrong, they claimed to do in order to protect national security. That was all bullshit. That’s what they claimed, but we were allowed to bring it forth, and frequently the government would dismiss cases rather than let us reveal the fact that they had acted illegally, because they didn’t want the publicity. So for example, when Bill [Ayers] and Bernardine [Dohrn] surfaced in 1980, there were no charges against Bill, and Bernardine’s charges were minor misdemeanors, potential felonies, involving the Days of Rage and the 1968 Democratic National Convention.*14

  The FBI was all over us for so many years. I assumed that our phones were tapped, but I never had proof of it until I saw the documents years later. We knew we were under surveillance from ’69 to ’73, almost perpetually. We’d see them all the time. They would even occasionally come bang on our front door. God, it was awful, and they were mean, nasty sons of bitches. I got my FBI files through the Freedom of Information Act a few years ago, and when we got the first tranche of documents, it made me so sick to see all of that, I just couldn’t keep on reading. Whereas, when Emile de Antonio, the radical filmmaker, got his FBI files, he made a movie out of his, Mr. Hoover and I. God bless “De.”

  MARK RUDD (Weather Underground member)

  I stayed a fugitive until ’77, with the help of my then wife, Sue LeGrand. I stayed in touch with the organization, and I knew what was going on. I increasingly became cynical. I had a sense that the information I was getting was not real. You know, “Oh, we have such a big impact on this part of the movement, or that part of the movement.”*15

  BILL AYERS (Weather Underground member)

  J.J. [John Jacobs] died in 1997. He’s one person who never came aboveground. His ashes were taken to Cuba and put on Che Guevara’s memorial. J.J. was the main author of the Weathermen document. He left the Weather Underground after the townhouse explosion. He was a revolutionary until the end.

  COUNTERCULTURE

  MICHAEL KENNEDY

  In October of 1971, Nixon signed the Controlled Substance Act and decided that he was going to put marijuana in Schedule One. Well, marijuana didn’t belong in Schedule One, because it’s not dangerous, and it does have medical properties, as we all now know and the vast majority of the country now recognizes. But Nixon said, “I’m going to give it the worst classification possible,” meaning that those who were dealing marijuana could face twenty years in prison because of that classification. There was an uproar. People were saying, “Why are you putting marijuana in Schedule One? I mean, it’s nothing!”

  Nixon said, “All right, what I’m going to do is appoint a blue-ribbon commission,” and it was called the Shafer Commission. [Raymond] Shafer was then the governor of Pennsylvania, and a great number of very intelligent, sophisticated people, mostly Republicans, were appointed to that commission. They spent about a year studying marijuana. In 1972, the Shafer Commission voted unanimously to recommend decriminalization. Not only did marijuana not belong in Schedule One, said the commission, but the possession and distribution of marijuana for personal use should be decriminalized. That’s exactly what the Shafer Commission said. Nixon ignored them. He said, “They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about,” even though there were medical doctors and all sorts of people testifying during that commission. That’s when Nixon declared the war on drugs. He used the phrase first in ’71 but he really declared the war after the Shafer Commission had sent him their report in 1972.

  Nixon thought that if he could empower his federal agents to go after marijuana, it would be a very good excuse, politically, to get inside the left, because he considered them all “dopers,” and lot of us were. That wasn’t our common denominator. Our common denominator was antiracism and anti-imperialism. So the thing about drug laws is, they really are not about the drugs; they were about politics.

  NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, AUGUST 6, 1972

  Fifty-seven persons connected with Timothy Leary’s sex and drug sect, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, were arrested or indicted and large quantities of LSD, hashish, hashish oil, cocaine, mescaline and marijuana were seized in dawn raids in California, Oregon and Hawaii today, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs announced….

  MICHAEL KENNEDY

  They charged Michael Randall in the ’72 conspiracy involving over fifty members of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love for manufacturing massive quantities of LSD and distributing them around the world and dosing everybody. That was basically the charge.

  With referen
ce to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, they were not after them because they made the best acid in the world. They were after them because of their politics. These guys were total screaming libertarian, anarchist, crazy motherfuckers, and they were determined to dose the entire world if they could, and they took a real shot at it. They spread “Orange Sunshine” all over Southern California. I can’t tell you how many judges ended up getting dosed because it had gotten into their water up on their desk, up on their dais, or they would put it on the doorknobs, so when the judge grabbed the doorknob, they would take it dermally through the skin. That’s the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

  MICHAEL RANDALL

  There was a federal case against me for passport violation. The grand jury was convening in San Francisco, and it didn’t look good. It was just unwinnable. So I got the hell out of there before I was indicted. I was on the run from the Brotherhood conspiracy, from a passport charge, and from the conspiracy in Northern California to manufacture LSD. The best thing I ever did was run.

  MICHAEL KENNEDY

  Michael Randall was out on bail and within literally hours of being free, he and Carol and the kids were in the wind. They went to Mexico and stayed there for a long time, and then moved up to New Mexico and Arizona and stayed around those places. Michael became a master jeweler. It took them twelve years to find him, and he did the five years for a bail-jumping violation.*16