An American Requiem

by James Carroll

  When I'd taken my place on the couch, nearest Klugman, who was at Cavett's desk, the comic's opening line to me, aimed at my turtleneck, was, "Where's your dog collar?" The audience gasped pleasurably at the gibe, then waited for my reply. Oh, this could be fun.

  "I'm sorry?" I stalled, trying to think of something to say.

  "Your dog collar, Father. You know, woof-woof." Ba-boom went the drummer. More laughter. Get with it, Jimmy.

  I stared at him. The audience grew silent. The hapless Klugman was a Boston cop, his nightstick at my throat. I said, "Is it priests in general you want to insult, or only me?"

  Klugman made a hammy face at the audience, but the scattered applause was for me.

  I smiled as broadly as I could, still aware of my wet pants. I reached across to put a friendly hand on Klugman's arm. "We aren't dogs anymore, Jack. But we still bite." More applause, an advantage to be pressed. "Now can we talk for a minute about something serious?"

  "Oh, now, Father, if we—"

  I cut him off. "That's why I came here. I want to tell these folks about a police riot I just left. Not three hours ago, I was roughed up by cops myself."

  The clean statement, the start of a narrative that had to be completed, stopped him. He glanced at the audience, saw their interest, and so sat back and let me talk. Which I then did. Beginning with a description of the clash at BU, including a swipe at Silber's outrageous encouragement of police brutality, and moving on to state my appreciation and concern for Daniel Berrigan, I spoke uninterrupted for what seemed like a long time. I called on everyone present and everyone watching to do what they could to oppose the war. Then I stopped.

  There was a moment of awkward silence. Klugman was nonplused. He looked toward Henny Youngman, who for once had nothing to say. Then some members of the audience began to applaud. The floor manager waved at Klugman from behind the camera. He stammered, "I guess we'll take a break." During the commercial, no one on the set spoke to me. Klugman huddled with the producer. After the break, in an unheard-of departure, the band played an entire number and the show ended.

  I learned from my mother the next day that my parents had not seen the show, but that she had heard about it from friends. "What did you hear?" I asked.

  "That your hair is too long, and you wore sandals."

  "My hair is fine," I said. "What did Dad say?"

  "I didn't tell him, and I'm not going to. He doesn't need to know that you've deliberately embarrassed him."

  "Embarrassing Dad had nothing to do with it."

  "Don't be ridiculous. They only asked you onto their program because of him."

  "That's not true, Mom." To my horror, I heard the whine in my voice. How I'd feared at first that it was true. "They didn't even know about Dad. He never came up."

  "Then why did they ask you?"

  My question too. "I don't know, Mom. I've been writing things. I've given speeches."

  "Come on, Jim. You really think a national TV show asked you because of you?"

  "I guess I do, Mom."

  She said nothing for a long time, then broke the silence with her sternest voice. "Just don't you embarrass your father. And don't embarrass Brian."

  "Wait a minute, Mom. Wait a minute. What if they're embarrassing me?"

  There was no answer. I heard the click when she hung up.

  Later that year, "Philip Berrigan and seven others," as the press always referred to them, were charged with plotting to blow up steam pipes under the Pentagon and to kidnap Henry Kissinger, the architect of Nixon's air-war escalations. Phil was in prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He had trusted another inmate, who had study-release privileges, to smuggle letters to and from Sister Elizabeth McAlister, a radical nun at New York's Marymount College, where I'd met her. The inmate was an FBI plant. In fact, the McAlister letters did contain reports of conversations about antiwar strategies, including a proposed "Citizens Arrest" of Henry Kissinger. The letters also provided the FBI with the crucial clue to Dan Berrigan's hiding place on Block Island, where he was finally arrested. The FBI vendetta against the Berrigans continued with indictments and the trial of the so-called Harrisburg 8.

  The by now broad Berrigan network, which was centered on but not limited to Catholics, used the trial as another mobilizing event. I helped organize support. At one point my campus ministry colleague, a former nun named Anne Walsh, was subpoenaed to testify about Phil's activities, which she refused to do. She was charged with contempt of court, and I traveled to Harrisburg to testify as a character witness for her. I wore the Roman collar when I took the stand.

  At an outdoor rally in Harrisburg one night, I gave a speech and read my poems. It may have seemed to others that I was successfully reinventing myself on the model of Daniel Berrigan, a priest-poet at last. But the truth was, inwardly I was terribly frightened all the time. That night, after my appearance, while I stood on the edge of the crowd listening to another speaker, a derelict approached me. Repelled by his stink, I sidled away, but he followed. His shabby beard and matted hair and soiled clothing made him seem half mad. I moved again, but he stayed with me, drawing close enough to whisper, "If you don't tell your friends about me, I won't tell mine about you." He flashed a shit-eating grin. Brian. Before I could answer, my FBI-agent brother melted back into the crowd.

  Jesus told his disciples, "You will have trouble," and when I did, I tried to take it as a mark of the faith to which I was clinging. I was raised to be obedient, polite, and good. Yet I had become someone I did not recognize—defiant, angry, and irreverent. There were good reasons for the changes, of course, but I did not like myself that way. I got in trouble with John Silber for denouncing him on the Cavett show. I got in trouble with the cardinal when parents complained that I was advising their sexually active college-age children to use birth control. The cardinal heard rumors that I was concelebrating a weekly midnight Eucharist with an Episcopal priest, that we'd merged our congregations. It was true. The cardinal received objections about sit-ins organized at Newman House. Ultimately, he heard hysterical reports that my colleague—a nun! a woman!—had said the Mass in my absence. It was true, all true.

  Once I even got in trouble with my new allies, the peace movement heavies who had shielded Dan Berrigan and were now shielding each other. They had heard reports that I had an FBI agent for a brother, and they labeled me as one not to be trusted. I was an informant, a provocateur. When I learned of this, I confronted the man most responsible—a "friend"—and demonstrated that there was no secret about my brother, or my father for that matter. I had written of both in poems and articles. I had wrecked myself at home, yet now I was accused of having maintained that first loyalty. I felt betrayed and angry beyond anything that man could understand. The rumors about me stopped.

  But maybe FBI agents themselves had heard the rumors, because one day a pair made a visit to my office. I could have told them all we had in common, but I said nothing. Then I realized: they knew. They asked me about certain fugitives, a couple of whom I had known. I said nothing. Finally, exasperated by my refusal to answer their questions, one of the agents, a Jesuit-trained Irish Catholic who had no category for priest and nun resisters, blurted the question, "What kind of creatures are they, Father?"

  "We're human beings," I answered.

  To my knowledge, my father never learned of my Air Force arrest. It took place, Oedipally enough, at a protest at the main gate of Hanscom Air Force Base, outside Boston. Hanscom, a high-tech research center associated with MIT, was the development site of a program code-named Igloo White. It was a system of tiny electronic sensors that, when salted onto the fields and paddies of Vietnam, would pick up any movement and trigger air strikes by B-52S. Igloo White was an integral part of the Nixon-Kissinger escalation of the air war. The bombers would come when the triggering movement was of an infiltrating North Vietnamese soldier—or of a water buffalo or a rice-harvesting peasant. As a weapon that did not distinguish between combatant and civilian, Igloo White seemed t
he perfect emblem of the war's evil. I had no qualm about joining in the pointed protest against it. I remember the faces of the air policemen standing by as local police picked me up from the road after I, like my twenty or thirty comrades, went limp and refused to move. The APs were acne-ridden kids like those who'd saluted me as I drove my old man's car through the gate at Boiling. At the bus to which I was carried, and onto which I still refused to climb, a man in civilian clothes leaned over me, clipboard in hand. He warned me that if I did not cooperate, I could get hurt.

  "You're with the OSI, right?" I said.

  He was shocked that I knew of it.

  I told him that my father was its first director. He stared hard at me, then said, "Your name is Carroll."

  I nodded. Oddly, I felt a rush of pride that a decade and a half after my father had left OSI, the agent knew his name. And at last I didn't care if he told on me.

  On March 8, 1971, something completely unexpected occurred—an event that drew even tighter the web in which Brian and I had become entangled. Unnamed members of the Catholic left, retaliating for FBI harassment, broke into the FBI resident agency in Media, Pennsylvania. They called themselves the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI, and set about at once to publish the various documents they stole from the office. Never before had FBI files been revealed without authorization. The image of a rogue agency manipulating, infiltrating, and interfering not only with militant groups but with mainstream, even innocuous organizations like the phone company and the Boy Scouts was given substance by memos and reports that described such tactics in detail. For the first time in its history, the FBI was made to seem to the public at large simultaneously sinister and ridiculous.

  I was part of the Boston effort to exploit the Media sources. I helped organize a "citizens' tribunal" that indicted J. Edgar Hoover himself. We convened in Boston's Faneuil Hall, and various activists, drawing on Media documents and other sources, "testified" to FBI abuses. Behind these "witnesses" were massive oil paintings and busts displaying the heroes of the Revolution. Faneuil Hall, famous as America's "Cradle of Liberty," was built by a merchant whose stock-in-trade was human beings, the slave trader Peter Faneuil.

  Among the witnesses testifying that day was a Pentagon official, one of McNamara's whiz kids, whose insider description of the illegal conduct of the war was particularly riveting. This was his first public act of dissent, and I remember feeling sorry for him, he seemed so nervous. Like everyone, I was edified by his willingness to risk his career by joining us. His name meant nothing, although by June, only weeks later, everyone in America would know him, Daniel Ellsberg, as the person who leaked the Pentagon Papers. At the tribunal's conclusion, a dozen of us trekked over to the JFK Building, across Government Center, to the FBI field office on an upper floor, to deliver our verdict on J. Edgar Hoover. Guilty!

  Sometime later, after Hoover died, Brian gave me a T-shirt bearing Hoover's picture above the words "J. Edgar Hoover is coming back, and is he pissed!" He was sure pissed that month. He suspended the head of the Media office without pay and launched a nationwide manhunt with his best agents to find those responsible for what in Bureau argot was immediately dubbed MEDBURG. A few Catholic pacifists had done what no gangster (not Roger Touhy) and no KGB operative (not Colonel Abel) had ever done before, and, by God, the director wanted them!

  My father, meanwhile, was the chairman of a gala Washington dinner at which an association of former FBI agents was to honor Hoover. I received a phone call from Dad, the first I'd had directly from him since before I was ordained. He stunned me by asking if I would come to Washington and attend the dinner, so that I could offer the benediction. "Everyone knows my son is a priest," he said. "The director himself mentioned it."

  "I thought I'd embarrassed you, Dad."

  "Your mother tells me I shouldn't be asking you to do this. But it would mean a lot to me. It would mean a lot to Mr. Hoover. They still think of you as a former employee."

  It was so easy to imagine what my friends would say: Do it. Turn it into an action. Throw blood on the table in front of him. Denounce Hoover to his face!

  I heard the plaintive note in my father's voice. He was asking for far more than a few pious words from me at the beginning of a meal. He was trying to redeem my entire priesthood, to wrench it back within the sacred margins. He was also trying to redeem our relationship. If I did this, everything would be good between us again. How could I possibly explain that if I dutifully said yes, there was no way I could follow through with it, standing before a ballroom full of FBI men in black tie, blessing them, affirming what they believed, praying for what they did. And as for Hoover, he was as close to a personal enemy as I had. I would never throw blood, but if I went to the banquet, it could only be to denounce him.

  Which I would never do to you, Dad, I wanted to say, and, This refusal is my act of love. Instead, I said only, "I can't, Dad."

  He did not press. He hung up, and it was clear to me that he would not ask for anything from me again. I told no one in the movement of the chance I'd passed up. I was a traitor after all.

  The only person on the left in whom I could have imagined confiding was Dennis, but by then he was in India, a draft exile. Amazingly, the person to whom I found it possible to turn, laying bare the outrageous and hilarious complexities of my situation, was Brian. His situation wasn't so simple either. I was close to his wife, Vicki, whom I had known since Wiesbaden. Their daughters were the nearest thing I had to children of my own, and I never missed their celebrations. When I visited their house in New Jersey that spring, it was to baptize their new baby, a big family event. Brian took me aside, and it was a relief to both of us that we could laugh about being on opposite sides. He invited me to go into work with him, which I did as a lark. He gave me a tour of the Philadelphia field office, introducing me around with the old wisecracking brio. At lunch I tried to tell him what a mistake the Bureau was making, but he didn't want to hear it, and I didn't push. He thought I was a naive fool.

  I was relaxed about the Media burglary because, though we were exploiting the purloined files in Boston, I'd had nothing to do with the break-in itself. I had heard rumors that various acquaintances of mine were involved, but few outsiders knew anything for sure. It was a well-kept secret: No one in the Bureau, however, was relaxed about MEDBURG, not even Brian. In relation to me, he was under pressure I did not know about. I would later learn that I was a naive fool, not about the Berrigans, as he thought, but about the Bureau. In Sanford J. Ungar's book FBI, published in 1975, I came across this passage about Media: those whom FBI investigators "felt they had identified as implicated in the burglary were primarily affiliated with the Catholic Left, ironically including the sister of one agent assigned to Philadelphia, and the priest brother of another. (The latter agent invited his brother to the field office and pleaded with him 'to help us solve a crime.' The priest refused, and the agent reported back to his superiors that 'I can no longer understand my brother.')"

  I knew at once what bullshit this was. Brian had never asked me to help solve a crime, and there was no question of his "no longer" understanding me. He knew what my commitments were, and accepted them. To Brian I was naive, perhaps, but my allegiance was always clear, always strong. Our mutual disagreement was out in the open, and so was our respect for each other. Our Harrisburg compact held: "I won't tell my friends if you don't tell yours." Obviously there were pressures on Brian to try to turn me. Perhaps he pretended to, which would explain why he'd put me on display at the office that day—and it would account for the report Ungar had picked up. If Brian was behaving slyly with anyone, it was not me. After I read the Ungar passage, I sent a copy of the book to Brian. By then it was five years after the fact. He called me up at once, alarmed at what I might have thought and ready to explain. I told him he didn't have to.

  When the Bureau found that it could not prove that the Catholics had pulled off the Media raid, it did the next best thing. Using the services of an ag
ent provocateur, the FBI set up some of the Media suspects, as well as numerous others, in a new burglary, this time of draft board offices in Camden, New Jersey. The action took place one night in August 1971, and several friends of mine from Boston participated. Because the Bureau had been tipped off from the start, dozens of agents, including Brian, had no trouble breaking in on the protesters, shoving the snouts of their shotguns under the chins of unarmed Catholic flower children. They arrested what came to be known as the Camden 28.

  Brian told me later that he and his colleagues had waited to spring their trap in the embalming room of a mortuary across the street. But that was far from the worst insult to the Bureau's dignity, for when the case against the Camden 28 came to trial—I was there as a character witness for several defendants; Brian was standing by to testify for the government—the jury quickly voted to acquit. After the verdict, the judge lectured the FBI on entrapment. The Bureau, he said, had disgraced itself.

  When I went to Washington the next year with about two dozen mainstream clergy and establishment liberals, the last thing I expected was to get arrested. This was an ecumenical group of clergy and lay leaders, not Catholic radicals. It happened that J. Edgar Hoover had died only days before, and much of Washington was in mourning. I refused to feel anything for him, although I couldn't help remembering my FBI summer job, my awed glimpses of the director, his meaning for my family. But that day I told the story to no one.

  Our purpose was to visit the offices of congressmen and senators and urge the cut-off of funds for the war. In the strange dispensation of the era, such conventional lobbying had come to seem the audacious approach. To me it seemed radical to be wearing a black suit and Roman collar. My Paulist brother David Killian was with me, and we connected with another friend, Larry Kessler, head of the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh.

  After a day of making the rounds of congressional offices, we met up with the rest of our confreres in a vestibule beside the Capitol rotunda. In the rotunda itself, J. Edgar Hoover was lying in state, his flag-draped coffin flanked by an honor guard. We tried to pretend he was not there; our work against the war was the point. We had all been through like experiences, brushoffs and cold receptions even from antiwar politicians. Few were inclined to bring the war into the appropriations process. But in fact, if every senator and congressman who had claimed to be opposed to the war voted to cut off funding—this was nearly five years after Tip O'Neill had boldly rejected the war—they could have derailed it right there. But appropriations bills included the bacon for back home. Almost no one was prepared to risk losing his own line in the bill.