The Burglary Read Online Free PDF Page B

the Catholic activists, he worried that what he once would have opposed doing he now thought might be acceptable. He probed his motivation. Given the madness of those days, he asked himself: Am I moving toward more effective protest, or am I moving down a slippery slope toward violence? The question was chilling. As he contemplated the challenge the question posed, he reminded himself that the war was escalating in new and terrible ways, and national leaders still didn’t seem to be listening. Hebecame convinced that neither he nor his new colleagues, the Catholic peace movement draft board raiders, would let themselves go down that slippery slope. He had come to regard them as so grounded and disciplined in their commitment to nonviolence as both a humane way to live and as a strategy against war and for peace that he did not think it was possible for them to move into violence.
    Davidon with daughters Ruth and Sarah (in stroller) near his home on the Haverford College campus around the time of the Media burglary.
    Despite Davidon’s initial reluctance to embrace the methods of the Catholic activists, by the time he decided to work with them, he had concluded that no other part of the peace movement was as effective or inspired as much hope during that hopeless time as they did. He regarded them as the most radical and courageous people he had met in the peace movement. He continued to work with theResistance and other groups, but now he found a new home with these activists—priests and nuns, ex-priests and ex-nuns, the young sons and daughters of working-class Catholics, and other people who embraced their commitment to nonviolent protest. They reenergized Davidon’s activism and gave him the hope he was searching for. Reluctantly, he became a burglar.
    As he became more involved with the Catholics, Davidon’s identity among his colleagues in the Philadelphia peace movement became even more confusing. For years, some people had assumed he was a Quakerbecause of his involvement with Quaker peace organizations. Or was he an Episcopalian? He occasionally worked with members of theEpiscopal Peace Fellowship, especially enjoying working with a peace activist Episcopal priest, the late ReverendDavid Gracie. But now some people assumed Davidon was a Catholic. He became used to, and somewhat amused by, having a mistaken identity. Actually, he was a secular Jewish humanist who was willing to work with anyone, as were these Catholics, who shared his passion for nonviolent protest in an effort to stop the war and the use of nuclear weapons. Probably no one from the scientific, academic, or Quaker organizations with which he had long been affiliated guessed he had added another identity: burglar.
    THE DESIRE OF DAVIDON and many other peace activists, including the people in the Catholic peace movement, to find stronger forms of resistance came in part from a powerful cascade of extreme developments from late 1969 through 1970, the year before the Media burglary. These developments greatly intensified reaction to the war. So extreme was that period that it was hard to keep track of what was normal in the military, in the White House, or in resistance to the war. People often thought nothing more shocking could happen. And then it would. This remarkable cascade of events started in a small hamlet in Vietnam, moved to a small campus in Ohio, to a Mississippi campus, to the financial district of New York, and then to the White House, where President Nixon dismissed most of the events as inconsequential:
    Â â€¢Â In November 1969, the world was horrified to learn that American soldiers had massacred 504 unarmed Vietnamese children, women, and elderly people in March 1968 in My Lai, a small hamlet in Vietnam. Several old men were bayoneted, women and children were shot in the backs of their heads while cowering in ditches, and some young girls were raped and then killed. Though the evidence of the massacre was well