Devil's Defender

by John Browne

  Now, weeks later, here was the vice president sitting in the ABC greenroom. My greenroom. Agnew resembled an oversized big toe. His face had no angles. A former Democrat who had switched parties early in his political career, Agnew was governor of Maryland before becoming Nixon’s right-hand man. As VP he was prone to alliterative name-calling. (“Nattering nabobs” he called my fellow war protesters and me once; another time we were “pusillanimous pussyfooters.”) Four days after the Moratorium march, at a Republican fund-raiser in New Orleans, he told his donors that our struggle for peace was nothing more than the work of “an effete corps of impudent snobs.”

  Those words kept ringing in my head, goading me to make my move. I had come prepared. I’d known for at least a week that Agnew would be in my crosshairs. And so I’d brought a tab of LSD to the studio. It was in my pants pocket. As I slowly prepared Agnew’s Manhattan, I awaited my chance. He was scheduled to go on the air in forty minutes. If I dosed the drink now and gave it to him, the acid would take hold at just the right time.

  I wasn’t above crossing the line with these people. On another occasion Gerald Ford, then the House minority leader, left his briefcase open in the greenroom. Inside I saw a file from the FBI labeled “top secret.” Ford was not the brightest bulb on the porch. He pandered to the right wing with a crusade to impeach William O. Douglas, ostensibly on the basis of the Supreme Court justice’s supposed ties to a casino financier. But what Ford really seemed focused on was that Justice Douglas was “too liberal” and was sullying the nation’s morals because he’d been married so many times. I was a huge Douglas supporter, and as it happened, Cathy, his wife at the time, was my classmate and friend at law school. So I was ecstatic to discover that the classified FBI brief outlined the bureau’s investigation of Douglas and that it concluded there was no legal basis to impeach, let alone begin an impeachment process. The next day I told Cathy to relax and to tell Bill to relax. I don’t think she had a clue what I was talking about. Ford later dropped the investigation and became vice president.

  And now the current VP was about to go on a little trip. I imagined Agnew drinking his LSD-laced cocktail, all the while silently condemning me, a bona fide hippie, for the duration of his wait in the greenroom. And then, around the time I’d be leading him out of the room and to the stage, his world would cave in. Maybe the olive green walls would undulate. Host Howard K. Smith would turn into a large reptile. The national audience would see the man undergo a psychotic breakdown. I didn’t care. Agnew and his ilk had framed the policy disagreement over Vietnam as a war between conservatives and liberals, and he had resorted to name-calling. “What do you think of the effete corps now, Spiro?” I might ask as he blinked back, his pupils the size of pennies.

  I mixed the cocktail, and it perspired on the bar. All that was left was one ingredient. I fumbled for the LSD tab in my pocket. I had to think this through. First, it wouldn’t take investigators long to figure out who had done this: the longhair who prepared a cocktail for the vice president. And it would mean prison. Maybe for life. The narrative could so easily be spun to seem as if I had poisoned Agnew. Second, the studio could also be found culpable, particularly Peggy, who’d shown so much faith in me. I wasn’t sure I was willing to see her take the fall too.

  Still, it was a good idea. Agnew deserved it. I watched the clock. The window in which I had to act was closing quickly. I figured I had one more minute before the plan had to be scrapped. I pulled the tab out of my pocket. The Big Toe sat at a table, going over some notes, unaware. Thirty seconds. Impudent snobs, he’d called us. He still wasn’t looking in my direction. No one was. All we wanted was peace. Twenty seconds. Some respect. Ten. This was my chance. Six, five, four . . .

  I handed Agnew his drink. I swear he looked right into it. We both did. He tipped it back and drained the cocktail. Minutes later he was on live television, completely in control. Telling more lies. Alone backstage, I sighed, half relieved and half disappointed that I hadn’t gone through with my plan. Agnew, it seemed, would go unpunished, and, worse, I feared the world would never know that he was a bad guy.

  Here’s the thing though. Four years later, like so many members of the Nixon administration, Spiro Agnew left the White House a disgrace. In the summer of 1973 the vice president was charged with extortion, bribery, and tax evasion connected to his time as governor. To avoid prison, he pled no contest, received three years’ probation, and exited the national stage in shame, hardly to be heard from again.

  Looking back, I’m glad I didn’t send Agnew on an acid trip. Honestly, I’d probably still be rotting in a cell in Leavenworth today. It was also an important lesson in control. I had had the impulse to deliver my own justice. Overcoming that impulse was a huge step in my understanding of life and becoming an adult, yes, but also in my understanding of the system, a system I had vowed to fight—but of which I was becoming a part.

  6

  DEBORAH

  The more time I spent in DC, and the more I knew what kind of lawyer I wanted to be—the kind who fought the injustices I witnessed during the marches on Washington—the more claustrophobic the Hillman family plan made me. I loved Audrey, but I didn’t want my life scripted for me. I didn’t want to be a corporate lawyer. And I sure as hell didn’t want to be a politician.

  Audrey visited me in DC frequently—she was in Pittsburgh—and with each visit the feeling nagged at me more. In the end I did the ungentlemanly thing and broke it off on the phone.

  Without her in my life, I needed to connect with my closest friends more than ever, and I made frequent trips to San Francisco. Michael was there, thriving in the Bay Area music scene. The Crystal Palace Guard had disbanded, but he was teaching guitar lessons to soon-to-be guitar greats William “Willie” Ackerman and Alex de Grassi. I also reconnected with Punky, my pal from Palo Alto High, who was in grad school at UC Berkeley. She had attended Smith College in Massachusetts before, and her roommate in the Bay Area was a Smith classmate, Deborah Beeler from Philadelphia. Like Audrey, Debbie came from an upper-class family, and she was just as pretty, with brown eyes and long brown hair she parted down the middle. The night we met we stayed up talking until 4:00 AM on Punky’s couch. We talked a lot about the war, which was getting worse, the body counts rising. And we talked about prisoners’ rights, something we were both passionate about. We also learned we were both vehemently against the death penalty. We clicked mentally, politically, and physically. She was working on a master’s degree in English education and was so easy to talk to and so smart—intellectual in a way that no other girlfriend I’d ever had was.

  She lived in Haight-Ashbury, which in 1969 was the red-hot center of the hippie universe. I started to stay at her apartment, and we’d walked up and down the street, taking it all in. I was struck by her kindness toward strangers. If we came across a homeless man, she would stop and engage him in conversation. And if she had spare change, she would hand it over. It was almost alarming how open she was, how trusting. At Christmas she joined me for a holiday party at my parents’ house. I have a photo from that party that my dad took of her sitting on my lap.

  I returned to DC, and we maintained a long-distance relationship, talking on the phone, occasionally exchanging letters. When Debbie came out east to see her family, we connected in her hometown of Philadelphia. I met her parents, John and Elizabeth, who had a beautiful home in the tony neighborhood of Chestnut Hill. John, like my father, was an engineer, and was president of Precision Tool Company.

  Debbie and I talked a lot on that trip about what we wanted out of our relationship. We weren’t anywhere near where Audrey and I had been. We weren’t ready to get engaged, but we knew we loved being around each other, even if we had lives on separate coasts. She was excited about the intern program to which she’d been accepted, teaching English at Oakland Technical High School. And I was excited about a new program I’d just started with my law school pal Allen Ressler in DC.

  7

  A TOTAL EC
LIPSE OF THE SUN

  Inspired in part by the arrests and incarcerations we’d witnessed during the Moratorium and Mobilization marches, Allen and I decided to form Law-Core, a university-based prisoners’ rights project. We found a supportive mentor in Professor Nicholas Kittrie, and I wrote a grant proposal and got the funding.

  We focused on three facilities: Lorton Reformatory prison in Virginia; the DC jail; and Saint Elizabeths mental hospital. We’d go in, sit with the prisoners, and help them, pro bono, with any legal help they needed. I’ll admit, Lorton, the maximum-security prison for the DC area, was a scary place. But we had free roam of the facility, and I learned a lot from the prisoners, who were mostly African American. Most glaringly, it was clearer to me than ever that America’s criminal justice system was based on class and race. One hardly ever saw white, middle-class people in these prisons. The black inmates I met with had grown up in inner cities, which they had never once left their entire lives. They had never seen a mountaintop. Or even a cow.

  I became good friends with one Lorton inmate, Jasper, whom I was helping with a detainer issue. Jasper carried and bounced a basketball at all times and was full of wisdom, some of which, later in life, I wish I’d paid more attention to.

  “John, ever tried cocaine?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Don’t. You will like it too much.”

  On some nights I’d call Deborah and tell her about the work I was doing. She was proud of me. She had started to volunteer at a halfway house, teaching ex-cons how to write, and had recently moved into a cottage in the hills above Berkeley. The phone calls kept me tethered to the Bay Area.

  I told her about Father Ray, a Catholic priest who oversaw the shelter near the DC jail for the families of inmates. I was at the jail two days a week, Tuesday and Thursday—quite the contrast from the weekend, when I was still rubbing shoulders with elites at ABC. Father Ray was a wonderful, just, and compassionate man, and I learned a lot from him.

  The warden, not so much. I remember one chilling day when the warden showed me the electric chair DC used to execute people. Electrodes sprung from a leather biker-type beanie that they put on the condemned men’s heads. Written inside the beanie were all the names of the people executed in that chair.

  “Want to try it on?” the warden asked with a grin.

  Absolutely not. I was against the death penalty, and he knew it. What an asshole.

  I also loved telling Debbie about my life at American University. My law school was started in the mid-1880s as the Washington College of Law and was the first law school to admit women. But when I entered there were only three women in my class of about 125 students. I remember a male student telling one of the female students she was just “taking up space.” He had gone to prep schools and had never been in school with women.

  Sometimes I wouldn’t hear from Debbie for a week or more, or I wouldn’t call her. Our lives were both so busy. So I thought nothing of it in late February when I didn’t hear from her for several days.

  On Thursday morning, February 26, 1970, around 2:00 AM, the phone in my Georgetown cottage rang. I’d been in a deep sleep, and there were only so many people who’d call me at that hour. Has to be Debbie, I thought.

  It was my dad. He had really bad news, he said. He was at home in Palo Alto and was holding that day’s newspaper. Deborah Beeler had been found dead, lying facedown on the living room floor of her Berkeley cottage.

  My whole body went cold. “Police said an electrical cord was looped several times around the neck,” my dad read to me from the Oakland Tribune. “Death was caused by strangulation, but there were indications she was struck on the side of the head. She had been dead for at least twenty-four hours.”

  Because she was found wearing a short nightgown and “a slipover housecoat” and there were no signs of a forced entry or struggle, police believed she knew and trusted her assailant and likely let the person into the cottage willingly. There was no sign of a sexual assault.

  I held the phone, saying nothing.

  “John?” my dad said. “John, I’m sorry.”

  I told him I would call him later. At twenty-three I’d never had anyone that close to me die before. Over the next few days my shock hardened into anger. How could anyone hurt Debbie? I thought about her open, trusting nature, and realized that the cops could be right. Her killer was probably someone she knew. Or someone who had gained her trust quickly, not much of a challenge when it came to Debbie.

  I tried to imagine her murderer. Was it one of the men at the halfway house where she volunteered? Or a stranger she had tried to help? I wanted to kill him. If they catch this guy, I hope they electrocute his ass. I thought those words and surprised myself. Suddenly I was considering the death penalty a good option. Because if anyone deserved it, it was the person who killed Debbie.

  I fell into a deep depression. I didn’t leave my apartment. Didn’t eat. Didn’t answer the phone. I missed classes. I was confused and heartbroken.

  Finally, my friend Brad, whom I met at the University of Denver, and his girlfriend Michelle got through to me. They wanted me to visit them in Connecticut over the weekend and observe the coming solar eclipse—an eclipse the New York Times had billed “by far the most dramatic of the century.” The plan was to take some drugs, sit on the beach, and contemplate the cosmos. Did I want to join?

  On Saturday, March 7, 1970, less than two weeks after Debbie’s murder, I piled into my Fiat 850, bound for Connecticut. An eclipse! It spoke to my love of shadows, I thought, and would be a good distraction.

  I spun north up I-95 with a glove compartment full of mescaline. My car looked like it probably contained a glove compartment full of mescaline. Painted green, the Fiat had California plates, flower stickers, antiwar stickers, and a bumper sticker that read JERRY GARCIA FOR PRESIDENT. My hair fell to the middle of my back, and I wore a red bandana for a headband.

  Around Elizabeth, New Jersey, I saw red lights in my rearview mirror. The New Jersey State Patrol. I asked the trooper why he had stopped me, and he said honestly, because I was a “longhair from California and probably carrying drugs.”

  He started to search the car, uninvited, pulled back the driver’s seat, and spotted my law books. He asked why I had them, and I told him I was a law student at American University and he had no right to search my car. He backed off, never looking in the glove compartment, and let me go on my way.

  (Incidentally, my friend Allen and a few others were stopped that same weekend on the same stretch of interstate, for no reason other than their looks. We compared stories and contacted the Center for Constitutional Rights at Rutgers University Law School. A few years later I flew to New Jersey to testify in federal court, and we won. The judge issued a permanent injunction against the state police to prevent such arbitrary stops and searches.)

  Brad, Michelle, and I arrived at the beach in Connecticut, only to find the sky overcast. Not exactly eclipse-viewing weather. No matter. We ingested the mescaline and roamed the shore. As the drugs took hold the Atlantic began to undulate. It was like a giant, flat monster awaking from a long slumber. The hours blended into each other, and I remember very little about the actual eclipse or what we could see of it.

  But I do remember wandering up from the beach back to the parking lot, where we saw a pile of leaves skittering across the asphalt like crabs. This fascinated us. We surrounded the pile so it would stay in place. With a piece of chalk, either Brad or Michelle or both drew a leaf identical to the leaves in the pile. Next to that they drew a double helix that snaked along the asphalt. Next to that an asterisk. These symbols meant something to Brad and Michelle, either as part of a secret language between them or as something they discovered on their mescaline trip.

  They handed me the chalk. I wasn’t half the artist they both were. But I drew exactly what was on my mind.

  I made the line of her thin body first. From there forked two skinny legs. And tiny arms. A circle for a head. And then Debbie
’s long hair, parted at the middle and falling farther than it did in real life, down to her feet. Two eyes, eyebrows, a nose. For her mouth I settled on a smile, a sideways parenthesis that was a far cry from the one I’d seen on her face the last time we’d been together.

  I kept going. I thought of her compassion. How she was always trying to help others. I thought about how encouraging she was of me. And I thought of the sky above and the greatest shadow caster of all, the Earth, the penumbra of which had just slid across that big ball of flame.

  Below Deborah Beeler I wrote, “Try for the Sun.”

  8

  CHICAGO

  As I approached graduation my mentor, Professor Nicholas Kittrie, supported my effort to get a Ford Foundation fellowship at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago. The fellowship focused on training grads to become real prosecutors or defense lawyers, since law school did nothing to prepare you for the courtroom, which was and is still true.

  It was competitive and exclusive. My chances were slim. This was to be the last year of the program, and they had limited funding, only enough for two students out of more than five hundred applications. With Professor Kittrie’s support, I applied and was turned down. My fallback wasn’t bad though. I’d been offered a job with Kennedy and Ryan in San Francisco, the most “radical” and successful criminal law firm in the city. They were at the time representing Timothy Leary, who was living as a fugitive in Algeria. They had a cool Victorian house as their offices. I left DC in my Fiat, destination San Francisco, with a stop in Denver to visit friends.