Transcript of Oral History Interview with Bill Tilton

Oral history interviews of the Vietnam Era Oral History Project

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Version 3 August 20, 2018 William Leo “Bill” Tilton Narrator

Kim Heikkila Interviewer

February 10, 2018

William Leo “Bill” Tilton -BT Kim Heikkila -KH

KH: This is an interview for the Minnesota Historical Society’s Minnesota in the Vietnam War Era Oral History Project. It is Saturday, February 10, 2018, and I’m here with Bill Tilton. My name is Kim Heikkila. Today I’ll be talking to Bill about his role and experiences in the antiwar and draft resistance movement in Minnesota, and especially his experiences at the University of Minnesota and as one of the Minnesota 8. So, thanks so much, Bill, for agreeing to participate in this project

BT: I’m happy and proud to be part of it.

KH: So I’m going to—again, as I said, I’ll just start with some real basic questions, biographical questions and then we’ll sit back and start at the beginning and get the full story. So can you please start by stating and spelling your name?

BT: Bill or William Tilton, T-i-l-t-o-n; William Leo Tilton.

KH: Okay.

BT: I was a “Junior” and then Dad died, so I’m not a “Junior” any longer.

KH: And when and where were you born?

BT: I was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, here, seventy years ago, or a little over seventy years ago on October 16, 1947.

KH: And how do you identify yourself racially and/or ethnically?

BT: Oh, I’m European, quite Caucasian, totally, you know. I was raised to think I was Irish and then I believe I have a lot of, a ton of, French blood and I’ve done 23andMe [23andMe: DNA Genetic Testing & Analysis] —it’s Northern Europe, Northern Europe.

KH: Okay.

BT: Yeah, I’d hoped to have some native blood because family members generations ago had intermarried [with natives], but as it turned out, not my wing of the family.

KH: Okay, so I know this is a big question for you, and we’ll talk about all of these things in turn, but if you could just kind of briefly identify or state the kind of anti-Vietnam War activities you were involved in, that would be helpful.

BT: I was lucky to be at the University of Minnesota from 1965 to 1970, during some of the peak efforts of the antiwar movement. I sat at literature tables for Gene McCarthy when he was the peace candidate for the presidency. That era—it was not just the Vietnam War. There were intense civil rights things that were going on that I was involved in, the Liberation Coalition, the Urban Coalition, Legal Justice Task Force. There were—Earth Day was starting around then. First Earth Day I guess wasn’t until 1970, so that was kind of Johnny-come-lately.

As far as the antiwar movement goes, I’d been involved in student government at the University of Minnesota, Minnesota Student Association, and so became its representative to the antiwar movement because many of the other people involved in the MSA were working on student power issues. We were getting students admitted to the—all the university governing bodies at the same time. That was one of the other things going on—gay rights, women’s lib, the sexual revolution, birth control—had come along.

And so I quickly rose to a position of some responsibility with the state antiwar movement. As the student government representative, I had a privileged position. In other words, I could get free rooms in Coffman Union with no trouble for meetings and stuff and did that. And I apparently was unthreatening enough that I was then put in a position of running meetings. I ran many microphones at rallies, speeches and stuff. People remember me giving great speeches. I didn’t give so many speeches. I was there to introduce other people who gave speeches or I’d give very short speeches, you know. Get in, get out, make them laugh once, make them feel heartfelt once and then quit. Then they remember you well.

Anyway, so I very quickly became what was called the co-chairman of the Minnesota New Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, called the New MOBE for short. And this would have been ’69 I believe, because probably a couple years earlier there had been the MOBE and the MOBE was heartfelt and somewhat successful but hadn’t ended the war so this was the New MOBE. And all of a sudden this kid from St. Paul, who’d never been on a plane before, was going to Milwaukee as Minnesota’s representative to national antiwar meetings. I hadn’t a clue what I was doing, right? And also, in that case, you just shut up and listen, right? And the first flight I ever took was to Philadelphia for some national organizing meeting.

Sixty-nine was a heady time. I went to Woodstock in 1969. We had campus turmoil over the arrest of the leaders of the Afro-American Action Committee [AAAC] when they took over the bursar’s office at Morrill Hall. I have two boxes of materials on that for the historical society. It’s great stuff.

That was the Liberation Coalition. The arrests of the black student leaders was the best thing in the world for white students to realize there weren’t any black students at the University of

Minnesota. In 1969, there were eighty some black students on a campus of forty some thousand students. We had the largest single campus in the country. There’s other bigger systems—New York, California, Texas—there was no bigger campus and we had eighty some black students counting the athletes.

Anyway, so all of a sudden those arrests got white kids on campus to realize there were practically no black kids on campus and to get to know a few of them. Some of them are still dear, dear friends. And for us to get to know people in North Minneapolis, Spike Moss [Harry “Spike” Moss] and other people. So these were heady times.

So the antiwar movement was just part of it. But I became a leader in the antiwar movement just by happenstance because of coming out of student government and so—what did I do in the antiwar movement? I gave speeches; I organized things; I chaired a lot of meetings, as I was saying earlier. The meetings would be, sort of, the SDS—some of them crazy—on one side of the room and the Quakers and Fellowship of Reconciliation, gentle church folk on the other and the Black Panther wannabees in the middle and, you know, ten other interest groups. We would have big meetings with twenty-five people that would go on for hours, just about what was going to happen at a rally.

Where was I going with all of this? One of the best things I did was when we went on the student strike in May of 1970 after Nixon invaded Cambodia, I knew where all the parking lots were, having commuted for years and so we very successfully had people [with leaflets ready for Monday morning student arrivals] at all of the proper places for the commuter campus students to come to campus. We had a huge rally on just very short notice in front of Coffman that Monday.

So the antiwar movement was pretty much my life, with this in mind—the movement included the Liberation Coalition, you know, it included that thing, United Progress I was showing you that was just some people from St. Paul that were going to change the world. And I actually registered for a second major. I stayed for a fifth year on campus. I was going to major in African-American studies. I was reminded of that in these boxes; and I never did do that second major. I pretty much majored in the revolution during my fifth year in college. That was 1969. We had—there were profound national events that happened. October of ’69—October 15 was moratorium marches and teach-ins and stuff all over the country at separate locations. Then November 15, 1969, was a national demonstration in Washington, D.C., and it was profound. It was successful on the one hand insofar as how many people were mobilized. It didn’t end the war. In any case, we had to take our victories where we could.

So your question had to do with an outline of the antiwar movement; I’m trying to stick to the subject. I actually—I gave the going away speech [for buses leaving Minnesota for the November 15 Moratorium], two of my proudest moments—

If I can come back to the October thing—my favorite story ever about myself in the newspaper appeared on October 16, 1969, about things I’d done the day before and it was the best birthday present because that was my birthday—and somewhere I have that [news clipping about it]. And on the way to D.C. in November, I gave one of the speeches, not the only speech, but one of the

40 speeches for the going away rally. We actually left from the Armory in downtown Minneapolis and I got to be the guy—I was the guy who collected two or three dozen draft cards from Minnesota people at that rally at the Armory who were turning them in, because the plan was to put a bunch of draft cards in a coffin that was being carried symbolically at the demonstration in Washington. And I didn’t put them in the coffin. I thought, there’s hundreds or thousands of cards in there; these will just be lost. I’m going to do something different.

So I waited around till Monday morning—back then, I was able to walk right into the Justice Department. This is the big building on the mall. I walked in and got on the elevator and went up to US Attorney General John Mitchell’s office and the anteroom to his office was huge and there was a woman at the desk, “Can I help you?” [I’m thinking,] How’d I get this far? (laughs) “Is John Mitchell here?” “I’m sorry, Mr. Mitchell is busy.” What am I going to do? And I gave her the draft cards. I didn’t—I don’t think I identified myself but I learned in my FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] file, that they knew it was me.

KH: They knew already?

BT: Well, I don’t know if they knew at that moment, but by the time that it was written up, you know, I mean, I’d given the speech; I was well-known in the antiwar movement. It was all Minnesota draft cards so it probably wasn’t rocket science now that I think about it for them to realize it, but I didn’t know they knew it was me until I read my FOIA file.

So, if this is for history, I’m going to brag. I mean, before I get into 1970, I’ll stay with ’69. In October ’69, October 15 was the local demonstrations. I’m sure we rallied on campus and walked downtown Minneapolis. Don’t ask me exactly where. Usually to the old federal building because it was open space, good steps, etcetera, etcetera, symbolic. Well, we were heady; it was great; it was successful. It was a brisk day but it was very good.

And also I came back to campus and I don’t know how I got notice, but I got a phone call that people were downtown wanting to trash things. Because, remember that was going on now, and there was a wing of the antiwar movement and the movement, the revolution, that wanted to break windows; that wanted to bring helmets to demonstrations and fight with cops. And I was not part of that; I’m not a pacifist but it just wasn’t the social movement that I was in.

And I don’t even know how I got downtown Minneapolis but I got—there were probably a couple hundred people left straggling around the mall, being earnest and doing theater and chanting but some of them were, you know, a few of them were stoned and whatever and so I— oh, I know, the police were all getting all ready to arrest them. They were stopping traffic and stuff. And I think this is when Charlie Stenvig [Charles A. Stenvig, 1928-2010; mayor of Minneapolis 1969-73, 1976-78] was mayor—a former police detective who was the right-wing guy of the day. Today he’d be a conservative Republican or middle of the road Republican.

So I spent an extra hour just going up and down the Nicollet Mall yelling at people, telling them, “You can’t do this. Go back to campus. This is not what we’re about. You’re not going to be the news,” etcetera, etcetera. “Don’t break anything,” you know, etcetera, etcetera. And I thought nothing more of it. I didn’t know a reporter had been following me so somewhere in all of this

41 stuff is my favorite news clipping of all, [published in the Minneapolis Star the next day, October 16, my birthday, about what I’d done on the mall].

KH: Right here.

BT: Okay, all right. Dave Kuhn, good writer. He might still be alive. So that’s one of my prouder moments.

Jumping ahead, 1970, we were a little bit adrift. I mean, we were sort of, Where do we go next? We just had this heady, national, virtually international event showing that we thought that public opinion was, Get out of this war! And we weren’t getting out. And when was it? Was that when Johnson said he wasn’t going to run? No, Johnson said he wasn’t going to run in ’68; Nixon—so this is ’70. We had no thought of Nixon being impeached or anything like that. And then he invaded Cambodia. I mean, to segue through that winter of ʼ69-ʼ70, there’s meetings—I mean, there’s stuff going on. The antiwar movement wasn’t dead but, you know, it’s cold and people were sort of exhausted and what do you do next?

I always worked at 529 Cedar—or ask Dave Gutknecht—it was 539 Cedar—it was a hotbed of the revolution. It was one of the—this wooden building that got torn down by Heller-Segal in the early/mid-seventies on some phony claim. It had Marv Davidov on the first floor with the [Liberty] House selling handmade goods from the Mississippi Delta. On the second floor, the Twin Cities Draft Information Center, military counseling center, Hundred Flowers newspaper, and probably eight other things. I think even the early co-op, when Dean Zimmerman and people were organizing, they might have stored some of their stuff in the back. And when the Minnesota 8 got arrested, my draft board group, we took over the basement, totally unfinished, gnarly basement and we (laughs) took over the basement of 529 Cedar or 539 Cedar and it was a hotbed of the revolution. When we planned for the student strike in 1970 we had our meetings there at this place. The Hundred Flowers newspaper, like I said, was published there, the Draft Information Center—so I’m distracting myself.

I’m going to give one more vignette from November of ’69 because, like I said, I’d given one of the speeches going away and got my picture in the paper because of it; and then I came home and didn’t go see my parents because, you know, the revolution was going on, etcetera, etcetera. My dad died then, November 22, exactly one week after the demonstration. And my dad was, you know, he was a middle manager at the Great Northern Railroad; he was a conservative Republican. He was not a big fan of his son when he got on the front pages with all this antiwar stuff.

And so it was, you know, your dad died. I hadn’t talked to him [since before the November demonstration in Washington]. I was just becoming an adult; you don’t really get to know your parent as an adult for a long time. It was worrisome because I was—my responsibility all of a sudden was to go down to the Great Northern and empty out his desk. It was—he had this decent sized desk with a big piece of glass on it. Under the glass on his desk was that newspaper article [about the going away rally, with my photo in it] for all of his coworkers to see. It was just—it was a heartfelt moment for me. I’m tearing up just thinking about it because I, you know, you do worry, what’s Dad’s perception? Am I an evil person? Does he think that?

So, my conservative Republican father put that [news article about my antiwar speech] out there for the world to see.

You said you only had five questions; I’ve got five hours of crap.

The next big event of the antiwar movement was when Nixon invaded Cambodia in late April, 1970. And the next day was a Friday; I think he did it on a Thursday night. The next day was a Friday and there was a Students for Craig rally. Earl Craig [Earl D. Craig, 1932-1992], is that name familiar to you?

KH: You bet.

BT: Earl Craig. He was a sainted man. He was—worked in the student affairs office when I was in student government and I got to know him. Young black guy, graduate student, who went on to be a tremendous leader of the community at a number of levels. But he was the sacrificial lamb, or I don’t know how you want to put it—but was the guy willing to run against Hubert Humphrey for the Senate nomination. And so this campaign would have been going on in April of 1970 and, you know, I couldn’t have told you but there must have been elections that—a Senate election, off year election, of course, in 1970.

There was a Students for Craig rally at Coffman Union and it must have—maybe that was May 1; Friday, May 1, 1970? Does that make sense?

KH: It could have been.

BT: [It could have been Thursday May 1, 1970 or Friday May 2.] I remember it snowing. Because I’ll always remember, now I’ve seen snow in May, a day I could remember. And so we went, after the Students for Craig rally, went down to Coffman Union and started, what do we do about the invasion? And that—like I said, the meetings ended up across—on the West Bank at 529 Cedar. But the guy who wrote the first strike leaflet for the University of Minnesota is a guy named Nick Coleman. You know Nick?

KH: I know who he is. He’s on my list of potential contacts.

BT: Well, tell him Tilton says he’s an irascible old coot and he was an irascible old coot when he was in college, okay? He was. He is and he was then, but he was there and he—he wanted to play a little bit of the independent journalist; and I said, “No, you’re the writer, you write the leaflet,” right? When we said, what do we do? And we said, we need leaflets, we need that. So he wrote the first strike leaflet for the 1970 strike. He’s the brother of the mayor who’s running for governor. Okay? You know him? So Nick’s bit of reference is before then. Okay? Where was I?

And so the student strike was a profound event. I mean, eight to ten thousand people showed up on no notice whatsoever. We even leafletted all the parking lots. I picked the places because I knew where they came, right? In sort of an early GPS, and we had a hell of rally. Mulford Sibley

[Mulford Q. Sibley, 1912-1989], who was a sainted man, a pacifist professor of [political science], gave the keynote. And I ran the mic; I called for the vote.

And we voted to strike, but a lot of people didn’t want to strike. It was louder in favor of striking but it was—but there were a lot of people who didn’t want a strike, but we striked. We had a successful strike, one of the better—

One of the speeches I gave was—we don’t know what we’re going to do after the rally calling for a strike. What are we going to do? Okay, we’re on strike. What do we do next? And there was a group of SDS’ers who always felt a little jealous when the Afro-American Action Committee [AAAC] took over the bursar’s office at Morrill Hall in 1969. They didn’t take over [the entirety of] Morrill Hall; they only took over the bursar’s office. And there was a lot of white students in there in support of them. Black students didn’t let any white students into the bursar’s office.

So [in 1969 when AAAC was in the Morrill Hall bursar’s office], SDS and Marv Davidov and all my friends—I was one of them out there because I was in student government. We were in Morrill Hall but we weren’t on the inside. I think SDS always wanted to be on the inside; wanted to run whatever.

So from the 1970 strike rally, hundreds of people surged down to Morrill Hall; they wanted now to take over Morrill Hall.

And Malcom Moos [Malcolm Charles Moos, 1916-1982] was our president. He wasn’t a bad man. He was a good man. And Moos and the other guys at the university are going, Oh no, we didn’t invade it; we didn’t invade Vietnam, you know, which is why I run an educational institution--what do you think? (laughter)

And so there was a surge—hundreds of people went to Morrill Hall and I gave a speech in the stairway. It was sort of the biggest arena to get people together. And I yelled at them. I said, “What do we want to take over this place for? Our fight’s not with the University of Minnesota. What do we want to do? Have headlines and have the police bust us because we’re bothering the university administration? Let’s go take over Coffman Union.” Coffman Union was the student union, and so the administrators were so happy [laughter]. They probably usually shut down at midnight or something. We kept Coffman Union open twenty-four/seven. So that’s another good speech I gave, totally unplanned. So all those people, all that energy; we’re going to go over to Coffman Union and we had it twenty-four hours a day.

KH: So, I don’t want to get too far ahead because I want to go back first, but, you know, a lot of the press coverage, the mainstream press coverage that I’ve read about these events and you in particular, I mean, it really seems like you were, as you’ve suggested, the guy trying to kind of keep everything from getting out of control.

BT: I wasn’t the only one, but I certainly took pride in that, yes. So, yeah, people tease me. Tell me, you’re the guy that kept the strike peaceful. (laughter) But I can think of a couple of speeches I gave where I said, “We don’t need this flack.” You know, I mean, you’ve given

44 buildings in different—in Madison, you know, the guys came from Seattle. They were the ones with the helmets. “We always take our helmets to the demonstrations.” What are you—you’re going to invite trouble? What kind of bullshit is this?

Anyway, I’m proud that the University of Minnesota stuff was peaceful and I’ll take some small credit for that. It was 1972 when the campus blew up. I told you, it was my friend who got beat up. He [Glen Strand] was a cameraman himself for like Channel 5 or something and the police beat the tar out of him. Terribly good looking guy, sweet as can be. I got written—I think by Marv Davidov. You know who Marv is? Saint Marv.

KH: Um-hm.

BT: I have his ashes and we were going to have a ceremony. It’s a longshot how I ended up with them, but there—in that box there.

KH: Oh, yeah.

BT: Marv wrote me [in ʼ72 when I was in prison]. “Bill, if you’d been here, this wouldn’t have happened.” The reason the cops came on campus—we were always careful—don’t give the [Minneapolis PD] cops an excuse to come on campus. We’ll do bad things that the university police can handle but we don’t want the cops, the downtown Minneapolis cops, because it resulted in—this right wing former detective was the mayor. The student protesters [in 1972, when I was in prison in Michigan,] shut down Washington Avenue for days and this is back before the train when it was really a busy thoroughfare. I would have been pissed. And it was these same—this same sort of core of radicals—and people I knew. So I just believed that—and Marv wrote me and said, “Bill, this would not have happened if you had been here.” I would have just said, We’ve got to—let’s just clear the street. This is not our fight. What do we want to fight with the Minneapolis Police Department for? They didn’t do this crap.

KH: So was your—?

BT: I’m less of a civil disobedient than you might think. You’re here because I got arrested but I’m less of a civil disobedient—I know I’m interrupting your question—but I’m here because I got arrested as part of the Minnesota 8, right? I understand that. All of this other stuff is forgotten history. Ninety-nine percent of my life was above ground organizing—speaking at high schools; sending people to churches, you know doing teach-ins; sitting at literature tables.

Once—this may be one of your questions in the future, but how did I end up in the Minnesota 8? I was giving speeches on a regular basis. This is especially that winter of ’69 and ‘70. We used to give speeches, going to high school classes and churches all the time. And we got questions -- What do you think of flag burning? Well, I don’t support it myself but this is whatever. What do you think of this? What do you think of sitting in the streets? What do you think of draft board raids? I had to have an opinion, right? And so, after being asked the question [about draft board raids], I finally said, “Well, I support it. Yeah, I wouldn’t burn the flag.” I wasn’t going to resist the draft, but I supported the people who did. But I supported draft board raids personally, and at

45 that point, I realized, I have to do that, right? You are what you do, especially in that era. You are what you do and so that’s how I became part of the Minnesota 8.

I knew people who had done an earlier one, just because I knew people, and I said, “I want in on the next one.” So I was just a soldier.

There’s a funny story, if we can get to it, about Michigan. I went to Michigan on what turned out to be a failure of a draft board raid. It’s a funny story. So, I’m sorry, I interrupted your question.

KH: No, that’s okay. Two things and then I’m really going to back us up a little bit here, but to your point about why you’re here and you’re here because you were arrested. And that’s really just a small part of your overall contribution to the antiwar movement. That was—and we can kind of come back to this as we’re winding down here, but that was one of my questions, you know, was, How does the notoriety, whether positive or negative, mostly positive I would think at this point, from your role in the Minnesota 8, are you happy with that or do you think it is misrepresenting—or, and I don’t mean to attribute any kind of ill intent behind that with that term, but is it a fair representation of how you see your overall contributions to the antiwar movement? You know, you’re well-known for the Minnesota 8; that group has gotten lots of attention in various ways and maybe not as much some of this other stuff so it’s interesting to hear you say that right out of the gate.

BT: I’m most proud of all this other stuff, of being involved with United Progress and the Urban League Urban Task Force and the Liberation Coalition and the African-American support group—that was the Liberation Coalition—and all these other things and co-chairman of the New MOBE, whatever, you know.

But I got busted. I even broke the law. I can be proud of it and in early years it was an albatross maybe in some ways because there were a whole lot of people that were, you know, I was in prison during Watergate. I got out in ’73. Wasn’t Nixon about to leave office? Was he still— whatever? So there you go. The interest was still intense in some parts of the country and, you know, for decades I wasn’t invited on boards. Now people want me on their board.

So, it’s not a fair representation of what I did, but it is somewhat representative insofar as I was an activist; I was out front. Everything else I did—except I smoked marijuana, did LSD –was legal, but, yeah, I’m not a huge civil disobedient.

I was on trial once for another demonstration at the “U” but I was a reluctant participant in that. So is the Minnesota 8 a fair representation? It has become my identity in some ways and so I’m going to embrace it. What the hell? We had fun with it. I learned more in prison than the people who were out. Everybody thought, Oh, poor Bill. Bill’s in prison. Well, yeah, it was poor Bill’s in prison. It was mainly boring but I had fun in prison. We might have had better marijuana in there than you had out here. I don’t know. (laughter)

KH: Okay.

BT: So I’m [unclear]—does that answer your question, right?

KH: Yeah, yeah, and I think I had come to that question just as I was getting ready for this interview, but also because I think I saw—now I’m not going to remember what the date was, but one of the articles about you and I think it was about the group of you, not just you, but you made a comment about that at the time even, you know, back in the seventies about “Well, this is all well and good, but I’m getting kind of sick of the notoriety of being associated with the Minnesota 8.”

BT: Well, it’s frustrating—so it was frustrating then because it wasn’t in that regard representative of who I was. (phone rings) Sorry about that.

KH: No, no worries.

BT: Now if I can find it. Kim, you hear it?

KH: I do.

BT: I’m sorry; I’m sorry. This didn’t happen. I was about to say something important. What was it?

KH: Oh, that you were sick of the notoriety at the time—

BT: Well, think about it now, because I don’t mind—I think some people hired me because I’m an ex-con, because I did some time. You know, it’s totally—or I had a tough guy, one of these tough Northeast Minneapolis guys who said, “I checked you out.” And it was that sort of a deal, “I checked you out.” It gives you some street cred, you know. And I will claim it, okay, this or whatever. But then to run into somebody and say, you know, like “Oh hi, I’m Bill”, “Oh, you got arrested forty years ago.” And I go, “Yeah, and I’ve done some things since then.” (laughter) So, it not only misrepresents then; it totally misrepresents me now. I can’t change that. And so, that’s my standard response. Yeah, that was me. I had fun with it but I’ve done a few things since then. Then you wonder if they’re curious and they want to hear more. Most of the time they’re not. They don’t want to go on and ask questions about that.

KH: Well, okay, this leads me to my fifth short question. You can go back. And by implication, I think you have already answered it but, what do you do now, Bill? Obviously, we’re not going to have time to talk about everything you’ve done in the past forty-five years, but what are you doing right now?

BT: Well, in the traditional, what do you do for a living? How do you pay the rent? I’m a lawyer. I practice law and I’m in my forty-first year now. I do mostly civil litigation; I do a little bit of criminal work but not really. The last criminal thing I touched I went to North Dakota because I got called to represent some of the people that were arrested in those water protection pipeline [Dakota Access Pipeline] protests. And the best thing I did was bring along a guy named Bruce Nestor. He’s a criminal defense attorney. I just went up and introduced him to the clients. But, yeah, you know, when Winona LaDuke calls you, you’re going to come.

So I practice civil law. I do a lot of medical legal stuff. I’ve represented a whole bunch of doctors and nurses on their professional boards and I’ve sued a bunch of them in medical malpractice actions.

What do I do otherwise? I’m on the board of the Hmong American Education Fund, founded by a client of mine, who used money from a wrongful death settlement to start this for the Hmong community, fashioned after the United Negro College Fund.

I’m chairman of the board of Save Our Sons, St. Paul, which is a social welfare agency. It’s really Melvin Carter, Jr, who’s the father of the current—the mayor of St. Paul is Melvin Carter III. His father is a retired St. Paul cop, Melvin Carter Jr., a leader of the African-American community, who has always done social work. This is part of being a police officer. Save Our Sons, St. Paul is not just Melvin, but mainly Melvin and other members, elders of the community. So it’s—every week we’re in the Juvenile Detention Center. Practically every kid who comes through JDC comes in contact with Melvin or one of Melvin’s surrogates; and Totem Town kids and stuff. I’m convinced that there are several murders in St. Paul that have not occurred because of Save Our Sons; so I’m on that.

I’m on the fundraising board for the Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services called SMRLS. I’ve been on that fundraising board for decades.

And once a month [I’m] a conciliation court referee. Judge Wapner—they have fifteen thousand dollar limits now. So if people come with heady stuff, you know, it’s their yearly income sometimes.

So what else am I doing? I’m the father of three wonderful daughters; they’re all in New York.

KH: Oh, okay.

BT: Yeah, yeah. They could come back and live in St. Paul. I’ve got a triplex here; they could—if they ever read this, “Come back. You can live upstairs with your children.”

I’m a kayaker. I’ve kayaked all over the world; I’m going skiing this month. So what else do I do? Well, I still do shit. I’m seventy years old; I hadn’t planned on living this long or doing this well. I really thought I was going to die at age sixty-three, sixty-two, like my dad, and I had a full life then. And I got cancer about then but I didn’t die. And so every day is found money, you know, or maybe I did die and this is a long goodbye. (laughter) I’m having fun with it.

Tell the historical society to come get this paper and they can interview me and I’ll tell them about each file. I can give some history of these, you know, the beginnings of these organizations or whatever—what do you do with it? They’re going to say, where’s the money? You know, I don’t blame them. That’s the problem with your transcriber. What’s your budget? What are you doing next? I don’t know. Got any money for it? Good luck with that.

KH: Okay, so let’s go back.

BT: Let’s go back.

KH: So we’re going to go back and start at the beginning as it were and then I have some things I want to ask you about because they are some of the things you’ve just been talking about. So but let’s go way back—tell me a little bit about your family and where you grew up.

BT: I’m the middle kid, the middle of five from a Catholic family, from a middle-sized Catholic family. Grew up in the Midway area of St. Paul, a middle-sized city in the middle of the Midwest. Descended from my mother’s side from French voyageurs who came down from Hudson’s Bay in the 1600s, through Detroit and the rich ones ended up in the 1700s in St. Louis where the houses were the size of our garages. There was at least one slave owner in my family history. We found a will where the most valuable—this was in the mid to late 1700s—the most valuable thing in the will was slaves, two I think. And in the late 1830s, my great-great-great grandfather walked from Prairie du Chien to St. Paul, knew he wanted to come back. Came back in 1841, with two hundred dollars to four hundred dollars, depending on who you read, and bought out the claim of Pig’s Eye Parrant. Have you ever heard of Pig’s Eye?

KH: Um-hm.

BT: All right. Well, Pig’s Eye, you know, got kicked out of Fort Snelling for being a bootlegger. He went downriver to St. Paul. Towards downtown St. Paul, the lower part of it is the last good portage before the gorge. The head of navigation was St. Anthony Falls and the last—the next five miles south of that was a hell of a rapids compared to the Grand Canyon and I can wax poetic about that. I used to be chairman of the Mississippi White Water Development Corporation.

In any case, St. Paul was built because of the [St. Anthony] falls. St. Paul was the last good portage on the lowlands of St. Paul’s old wash of that lake, that glacial Lake Agassiz ten thousand years ago. And so [in about 1841 my great-great grandfather] Louis Robert, bought Pig’s Eye Parrant out. Up the hill, you know, maybe a city block up from the river Robert built the first frame house in St. Paul, which burned down six months later. He married Mary Turpin. The Turpin family was early settlers in Mendota, farming in the 1830s and many of them intermarried with natives. This is one of those French voyageur families. They intermarried. Mary Turpin I thought, the rumor in the family was that she might have had Indian blood, but according to 23andMe she didn’t. The History Center did a play about her.

KH: Okay.

BT: It was First Ladies of Ramsey County, centered around the child bride, my great-great grandma, Mary Turpin, who married Louis Robert. She was barely—she wasn’t yet fourteen. She was just short of her fourteenth birthday and he was late twenties; and she came with her parents. I guess they didn’t have sex for a while, I don’t know, but they had nine kids, I mean, they had a good, solid marriage and only two of their children lived to adulthood. They had several houses burn down. A lot of them were built by her family; so Mary Turpin and Louis Robert—Robert Street is named after him. That’s the Anglicization of this. Everybody’s heard of

Robert Street just because they built the bridge there. What’s now Lambert’s Landing, used to be Robert’s Landing until like the 1930s when the army corps named it after one of their engineers.

KH: So you are—

BT: So I’m old St. Paul.

KH: Deep St. Paul, yeah.

BT: Totally. But I don’t know, maybe I’m boring, but I know how lucky I am. This is a great place to grow up. I’ve been to over fifty countries; this is a great place to grow up. I don’t know if I want to visit here. You’ve heard that; but this was a great place to grow up and my kids are starting to realize that.

KH: What made it great for you? Did you realize that when you were growing up?

BT: No, but think about it. We have potable indoor running water, hot and cold. We had central heating, you know, it went out once in a while, but we grew up with central heating; we grew up with good water; we grew up with electricity; we grew up with refrigerators; we grew up with a real educational system and roads and stuff. Growing up in 1950s-1960s America was a bubble, maybe, of the world. Who knows where we’re going? Hell in a handbasket or are we all improving? I don’t know. The roads are good in Mexico now, too. Where am I going with this?

So I grew up in a wonderful situation and now my kids grew up in St. Paul and they got a good education and dodged the big bullets of rape and loss of limb. I used to say tattoos but no more. I can’t say that any more.

KH: So you said that your dad worked for Great Northern Railway?

BT: Correct. My whole family did. My grandpa had been controller. Dad was middle management because he never finished college. My aunt worked there; my uncle worked there. I went to college on a Great Northern Railway scholarship. The railroads were big employers in this part of the world, you know, they were the transportation of whatever.

KH: Did your mom work outside the home?

BT: No, once she started having kids right away and she was a stay-at-home mom.

KH: Okay. You also said that your dad was a conservative Republican. Your mom, too?

BT: No, she—they’d always cancel each other’s vote or at least the ones I was aware of. I know they did in 1960 and ’64; I’m not sure about ’56. Probably in ’56, she might have been [Adlai Stevenson], I don’t know.

KH: So did your parents talk about politics at home? Like did you grow up in family that was specifically—?

BT: Not much.

KH: socially, politically—?

BT: No. The dinnertime conversation was probably pretty mundane; probably pretty Ozzie and Harriet and probably centered around my sisters. I had two older sisters, Marcy and Cathy, and they were cute babes. We went to St. Luke’s School, which was an active community; had a lot of friends. I really had a privileged life. I grew up surrounded by beautiful women. My mom was a babe; my sisters were babes; all their friends were. I just didn’t think anything of it at the time. I just thought this is the way it’s supposed to be. I didn’t know how lucky I am. So what did we talk about at the dinner table? Not politics. You know, I know that my parents canceled each other’s votes out so they had to talk about it a little bit.

KH: Okay.

BT: But not a lot because, you know, Mom had been home and cooking and then Dad arrived and he’d have his cocktail and then we’d eat at six and after that we’d watch TV, so they—that’s a long way of saying no, they didn’t talk about it—once in a while.

KH: So your two older siblings were sisters. What about your two younger?

BT: Two younger brothers.

KH: Two younger brothers. So three boys, two girls—

BT: Correct.

KH: in your family?

BT: Correct, so I had the ordinal number three, I’m the middle child, and I’m also the first boy.

KH: Okay, and you went to Cretin High School?

BT: Yep.

KH: What year did you graduate?

BT: My sisters are both very right-brained, living in Oregon now selling fabric and taking people on tours of Paris. I’ve got to brag about my sisters. So what was the question? I’m sorry.

KH: What year did you graduate from high school?

BT: Nineteen sixty-five.

KH: Sixty-five? So that was the spring of ’65. So by that time in ’65, the civil rights movement had been very visible for at least ten years.

BT: Yep.

KH: At least ten years. We have the Port Huron Statement out in ’62 so we have students speaking out more and more. By this time, the civil rights movement was kind of, you know, developing offshoots and having conversations about different philosophies and tactics. And, as of March of ’65, we have the marines in Vietnam so we are, as officially as we ever get, involved in a war in Vietnam. So how aware are you when you’re in high school of all of these things going on out there in the world?

BT: Pretty much unaware.

KH: Okay.

BT: I mean, I remember where I was when Kennedy was shot. I remember vaguely that. Eisenhower was a little scary and Johnson was, I don’t know—so, yeah, when I was in high school, yeah, we got a good education but current affairs were not high on the list. They weren’t high on the list at home.

I don’t think the draft was quite so big in ’65, was it? And I trust your memory better than mine. You know this history better than me, but the heavy drafting was ’67, ’68. People weren’t unaware. I know kids that went to college who might not have just for that insurance and—I can remember Tom Bean, you know, he dropped out, I’m going in the service, it was sort of, especially coming out of a military high school, a lot of guys just dropped out and volunteered for the draft. And it wasn’t necessarily out of any grand patriotism. Well, it was probably fundamental patriotism, not support for the war or opposing the war. It was fundamental patriotism, especially coming out of a military high school. This is one way you can serve. It’s always been beaten into you that this is a good thing, especially in that Catholic world, you want to contribute.

KH: So, yeah, now that you raise that point about service and Catholicism, right? John Kennedy kind of embodied both of those things--

BT: I even remember being inspired by him. You asked what political awareness I had. I do remember being inspired by him.

KH: Okay, and he was about “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

BT: That’s the one phrase I associate with him. Totally, yeah. So that’s his image in my mind in many ways. Obviously I can hardly do more than that.

KH: Now, did anybody in your family—your dad, uncles—have a tradition, did they serve in the military?

BT: Dad was in the military during World War II, but he was a little old so he was in his thirties and ended up getting stationed at Fort Snelling so he served but, you know, you’re too old, man, after that I guess.

KH: How about uncles?

BT: Well, my Uncle Chuck was in the service. He never talked about it. He had Nazi memorabilia on his wall in the basement, not because he was a Nazi, but it was a war souvenir, you know. I think it was a knife and an armband or some patch, I can’t remember.

KH: Okay.

BT: But no, the military was not—we were not a military family.

KH: Even though you were at Cretin which at the time is.

BT: Yeah, but the Catholic kids went to Cretin or St. Thomas and it was the lace curtain Catholics that went to St. Thomas and the rest of us went to Cretin, right? And Cretin, I think they made sure that they were cheap enough that, you know, don’t go to Central—that’s where the blacks and the Jews were, right? So, whatever. No it wasn’t a military family, but the St. Paul Catholic community fed their boys to one of those two schools. Archbishop Murray, excuse me, for the east metro. Brady was open, yeah, excuse me, there were other alternatives.

KH: Now you said that—

BT: But in this part of town, why not go to Cretin? It was a good school.

KH: So you said that you weren’t—in your family you didn’t have lots of conversation about politics or current affairs, those kinds of things. You weren’t paying attention, or, you know, you’re a kid—you’re a teenager; teenagers are very self-absorbed; you’re just involved with what teenagers do—I’m about to raise one myself so I know that.

BT: How old is he?

KH: Twelve.

BT: Okay, boys—my boys were harder when they were kids because they’re like ping pong balls; bouncing off the walls. Now, as a teenager, girls are easier—or girls are harder. He’s not having those hormonal ‘slam the door in your face’ crap. I had three daughters but still, good luck. They emerge as a new person when they turn twenty.

KH: So you just mentioned kind of offhand that Cretin may have made its tuition reasonable enough so you didn’t have to go to Central to kind of mix with all those, you know, black kids and Jewish kids.

BT: But that was never articulated.

KH: Right, right.

BT: But Catholics have always been very provincial and they segregated—the Catholic Church is as much responsible for segregation as any institution, and not just racially. The black Catholic kids went to St. Peter Claver not to St. Luke’s, right? And a few of them came to Cretin but not many. Not many. A lot of Catholic blacks as often as not didn’t want to go to Cretin. There was only two in my class.

KH: So what were your attitudes about those kids, your two black classmates, or about race in general?

BT: I remember seeking one of them out. In fact, he wrote in my yearbook, “You’re going to get to my neighborhood.” Because I sort of said, “When am I coming over to your house?” Fran Williams. He’s still around, you know, I bought some SAT phones from him a couple years ago. But we were only vaguely aware that it wasn’t part of our world. We were only just vaguely aware of it, you know. The two black kids in my class were curiosities. Pretty much quiet, kept to themselves in the main. All right? They were forced to go there. (laughter) I think Francis was the youngest of a prominent African-American family. His dad was the dentist and his older brother was the smart one that went to law school and became a judge and Fran was, you know, the youngest child, and he got sent to military school. He’s just as nice as the day is long. He’s still around. So, I’m totally free associating, I’m sorry.

KH: No, that’s fine. So you graduate in 1965. Are you aware at all at that point about the war and what’s going on over there?

BT: Only vaguely. I told you then that summer I worked at the railroad and then as a freshman, it was Welcome Week at the “U” is what they called it. And that’s when I went and the first thing—first time I’d ever seen a literature table. Like I said, I joined a fraternity; I joined the Freshman Cabinet which is how I got into student government; the Student Project for International Responsibility. I wanted to join the Rovers Club because they jumped out of airplanes, but I needed my parents’ permission—I wasn’t eighteen yet—and they wouldn’t do it. SPAN, also, Student Project for Amity Among Nations—I just decided to sign up for a whole bunch of crap. I was like a kid in a candy store. Minneapolis was the big city. This was like going to New York for me. I was a wide-eyed innocent and I wanted to taste everything. And so the war might have been one of those literature tables. I wasn’t sitting at it then and I don’t know anybody who was. I don’t know that there was an antiwar literature table there Freshman Week, or Welcome Week in 1965.

KH: Okay.

BT: And so my first couple years of college I was in IT for a while and then I was at the fraternity and people were into, you know, sex, drugs and rock and roll; and I just had my finger on politics because I stayed in student government.

KH: Okay, so that was your entry point, was getting in—?

BT: In student government. Those first years of activism had more to do with student power—just sort of—that was the beginning of, why aren’t there students on these different committees? I mean, there was a steering committee for all the university senate called the Consultative Committee. We were—I was one of the first students on it. There was like three of us, two or three or whatever, on the committee and I was one of the first. So the first couple of years, Was I active about the war? That’s what your focus is. Was I thinking about international politics? It wasn’t a big part of my life, I know that.

KH: Okay.

BT: Except that guys were dying—so we knew it was stupid. I don’t remember being in favor of the war. I always remember thinking it was stupid and not—friends were gone and—you know, a lot of people were in school because they didn’t want to go in the service. And the guys that were going in the service it was sort of a flip of a coin whether they were going to Vietnam—I mean, it was sort of, Well, good luck. What are you there for?

KH: And you said some of your classmates from Cretin were off, at least in the military.

BT: Oh, totally. I had a good friend from Cretin who died over there. When I’m in the Ramsey County Courthouse, I usually go down the third floor corridor to walk past Casserly’s name, Joseph Michael Casserly. They have in the marble in there; they have names of military deaths from a number of wars, including him. And a couple of guys came back sort of shell- shocked.

KH: Do you remember that at that time? Like when you were at the “U” were you already seeing some of your friends, your former classmates coming back from the war? Were you having any conversations with them?

BT: Yes, well, at Hundred Flowers, I met—who is still maybe my best friend—who had just gotten back from the war. It wasn’t a high school buddy, though, Chuck Logan, in fact. Here’s a picture of me and him in Huế standing in front of the imperial, in front of the old— the Citadel. That’s us at the Citadel in Huế. He’s an author; he lives in Stillwater and so, he and I became fast buddies.

And so, what did I know about Vietnam? Even at the Vets House, they didn’t always tell stories, you know. People are now telling stories. You’re going to get more stories than we got back then, okay? Yeah, Kim, I’m glad you’re talking to people; you’ll get the stories now that we didn’t get then. So I can think of other people from what I’d known in high school didn’t hang out as readily, you know, people came back and some of them sort of came out but others, you know, they were pensive about what had happened. They were sort of politically conflicted.

Some of them came back and got into the antiwar movement like Chuck—I’m trying to think— nobody in particular that I knew from Cretin. But I don’t remember any of them being strident in favor of the war; it was sort of like, damn. I’m not remembering right now—

KH: Okay, that’s—and that’s not the most important thing. Did your relationship with, or awareness of, or whatever conversations you might have had with these guys who were coming back, did that affect your view of the war at all?

BT: Well, of course, to the limited extent that it happened. And so in that regard, I more listened to speakers who’d come back from the war than—we had personal conversations but— and there were veterans certainly involved. Remember I told you Dave Gutknecht and I would take turns chairing these New Mobe of Minnesota Steering Committee meetings of twenty-five groups? It would include Vets for Peace and there some guys who—they weren’t satisfied with Vets for Peace—that was too broad an umbrella—they started VVAW, you know VVAW? Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and that’s Chuck Logan—those were the more gnarly guys; they had the Vets House and they had better parties. (laughs) But they were all a little crazier and they were a little crazy. You come back from that experience, you’ve got genuine grip and you’ve got a little bit of anger and you’ve got a little bit of violence, right? And all those are sort of undercurrents of your personality and so not a lot of college kids hung out necessarily at the Vets House. Yeah, and I’d go over there now and then, but it wasn’t where I wanted to hang out quite frankly. We had fun with our friends but there was different tension there.

KH: Yeah. So you start at the “U” in the fall of ’65; you’re involved in all these student governance, student—I mean, student power issues or—

BT: I remember going to meeting with students. We had a healthy foreign student population so in some of those early years, yeah, I remember the SPIR (Student Project for International Responsibility) and SPAN (Student Project For Amity among Nations). We’d just go to the meetings and we didn’t really know why we were here but it was really just to mix, to meet people from other countries. So, I mean that was privileged. Those student government groups were fun.

KH: And so, you had said earlier, both I think before we turned on the recorder and maybe since, that a large part of what you were doing at this time in the Vietnam era, was not just the antiwar movement, but these other movements, about racial justice; about other things. So tell me about how, having come from a family and a high school where you weren’t super aware or tuned into other things, now you’re at the “U.” Now you’re in student governance. Is it just this blossoming awareness? How do you get involved in some of these other issues and organizations around progressive matters of justice?

BT: Well, in part we’ve addressed it. I was in student government and so that becomes— almost every movement touches it because again, student government is supposed to be aware of what the other student groups are. You were to pretend to be a convener of interests and so I had a special platform or viewing stand there. Plus, I was that kid in the candy store who signed up for everything. I just went, Damn, this is fun and I want to do all this stuff.

KH: And part of that—

BT: Yeah, I also skied. We also smoked marijuana; we also—I mean, I went to Woodstock, so there was—the movement was going on. We hitchhiked to the coast; and you could sort of tell by the nature of the vehicle whether they were going to pick you up or not. And people hitchhiked—I remember my brother-in-law, just totally straight insurance salesman—he didn’t pick up hitchhikers and I’d give him grief. I gave him grief and he started picking up hitchhikers so every holiday he told me he had to pick up some hitchhikers. So one day he confessed he, because most of these hitchhikers were long-haired hippies with, you know, girlfriends and beads and whatever, and he said, “You know, this hitchhiker had a very short haircut and I was afraid to pick him up.” (laughter)

So I don’t know where I was going with that—but all sorts of things were going. It was heady times to be around. It was heady times. You know, the antiwar movement forced people to think politically in a way they might not have otherwise. There was a musical revolution; there was a sexual revolution and there were civil rights things going on. We didn’t need the antiwar movement, but it really forced people to think about international affairs. I learned much more about politics and stuff from the debating and preparing for those speeches and just sitting around meetings arguing politics. Should this rally be in support of freeing Bobby Seale in addition to being about the war in Vietnam?

So was there a blossoming? Of course there was. You know the answer to that, yeah, hell-- it was a great time to be alive and I think I was unusually curious and—

KH: Just by nature

BT: it has to be true because other people went to Welcome Week and didn’t sign up for ten things and still have opportunities to do things with these groups and don’t. I like to do shit—I have fun with life—I sometimes think I do too much but I like to do shit.

KH: Yeah, and I think for a lot of kids, you know, that’s a time of life, eighteen, nineteen years old, you’re out of the house maybe for the first time—I know, I taught those kids for a long time. It is kind of this intellectual and social and personal, Wow! I mean the world is out there. But like you were saying, at that particular time there was also so much going on in the world to absorb and be part of should you choose to do that.

BT: Yeah, so it was—I had a good time; still having fun. So let’s take a two-minute break. I’ll go down the hall and get more coffee. You should have water or something. Oh, you’ve got water.

KH: I brought my water.

BT: So, while I’m there—one of these has photos.

KH: Look at all this stuff.

BT: Here’s my photos. I found some good photos. So that’s—he’s the chief of cardiovascular surgery at the University of Minnesota.

KH: What’s his name?

BT: Herb Ward.

KH: I’ve been in touch with him.

BT: Oh did you? Did you get in touch with him?

KH: Yeah.

BT: Well, anyway, this is the University of Minnesota police captain; good guy, really a good guy.

KH: Yes, we’re back. Okay. So we were talking about your first year or two at the “U.” We’re just looking through stacks and file folders and boxes of stuff that Bill has collected here.

BT: The May ’70 strike at the U of M. Urban Coalition Legal Task Force, chaired by I think, by Peter Dorsey of the Dorsey firm. African-American Studies, Minneapolis Civil Rights Publications. U of M Policy on Demonstrations—we spent a lot of time at the University with, arguing over the policy for demonstrations. And so students would sit there and these faculty members would say, what do you think about this? And I had never drafted any of this crap. I was happy to have somebody else draft it and then I’d criticize it. Here’s some photos. Cinder Boxrud and Marv Davidov again. U of M Student Association, Student Government—some of these labels are mine; some of them are not. “Availability of Educational Opportunity; an Analysis of Higher Education Needs in Minnesota, 1970 to 1980.” Some stuff is more interesting than others.

Then I have boxes more about the early environment meetings. We had Paul Ehrlich who spoke for the first Earth Day. He was quite a get at the time. Paul Ehrlich had written a book that was— sort of predicted Malthusian disaster of the world that we couldn’t feed all the people that were coming, which was part of the impetus for the early antiwar or, excuse me, early environmental movement. It wasn’t—only some people called it an environmental movement. One of my files is called “Ecology.” In other words, what do we name this? We’re having an Earth Day saying we’ve got to start—Rachel Carson had written Silent Spring and so that was part of my freshman curriculum.

So the need for change was part of, now that I think about it, just maybe because of Toni McNaron’s class. She was one of the great teachers. I didn’t realize I had such a good teacher right away, you know her?

KH: I do.

BT: She’s a sainted woman, a great teacher. So where am I going? I’m just free associating. What am I talking about? All these files.

KH: Yeah, yeah, that’s what we were looking at. That’s amazing, an amazing collection of stuff here. So, there’s a box I see labeled “The Minnesota 8.” Let me ask you about the draft. You were saying earlier that, you know, you were not a draft resister yourself.

BT: Right.

KH: So you registered for the draft when you turned eighteen as you were required to do. So you turned eighteen in what? Sixty-five, right?

BT: Yes, October ’65.

KH: So your freshman year at the “U.” No thoughts at that point about, I’m not going to do this; I don’t support this war; the war is still not front and center?

BT: It was—it wasn’t front and center; I can’t say that I was unaware that I had a draft deferment. I certainly was aware of that. How important was it? When people were dropping out a year or two later and the understanding was, well, you’re going into the service and I wonder if you’re going to Vietnam. So it was on the radar screen in that regard and even the people volunteering for the service—I mean, some kids were sort of not destined to go to college. Just went into the service right away and others were toying with it. Very few of them—well, some were gung-ho, but it was like we’re repeating ourselves. It was just a felt patriotism and this is a way to serve and to be a tough guy. And, quite frankly, a lot of people just sort of needed to be grown up. I still have some sympathy for the belief that you can go into the army and you get toughened up. Learn how to be an adult and make your bed and do a few things like that.

KH: And that there’s something particularly significant for men historically as that being a rite of passage, right? From being a kid to being a man.

BT: Totally, it’s becoming a rite of passage for some females now. It’s interesting how that’s changed. So you want to talk about the draft. How do you feel about the draft? I’m not entirely opposed to a draft in all circumstances. In World War II the draft was necessary. The Japanese had invaded us; Hitler was, you know, about to decimate millions and whatever. Bring on the draft and I’m not a huge fan of—but what would have happened in the alternative? A mercenary army. You know, a draft makes sure that there are average people of different opinions in the strike force. We certainly give government a monopoly on some sorts of violence; of necessity you do. And so you want to have that tempered so in certain circumstances I’m not opposed to a draft.

KH: Okay. And you said a couple of times you’re not a pacifist either?

BT: Right.

KH: Right, so that’s not underpinning or wasn’t the underpinning of your opposition to the war. So let’s talk about how your awareness and understanding of the war changed and evolved and why specifically you came to oppose it.

BT: Assuming I can remember?

KH: Yeah, assuming you can remember or whatever you can remember.

BT: I’d like to hear what I have to say. Well, we’ve sort of being talking about it. It was, yeah, it was an issue forced upon us so it was always in the background. Then—actually it’s interesting. The guy who turned me on to my first sitting at a literature booth for Gene McCarthy was my fraternity president, a guy named Pat Fallon, who became later famous for advertising agency, Fallon McElligott, Pat Fallon, who became a very conservative Republican. But for some reason, I hold him responsible for my first getting associated with the antiwar movement in that regard. Probably I had been to some demonstration or maybe not. How many demonstrations had there been before ’68? I don’t know.

KH: Yeah, I don’t either.

BT: Anyway, so—and then, because I was the student government representative at the antiwar meetings, one meeting leads to another and then to another, and then you are what you say or you are what you do. And, you know, all of a sudden I was giving speeches and I had some facility for it and I believed in it and—

KH: So were you—your opposition to the war, as it becomes stronger, more visible, was it through these meetings or were you talking about it in classes?

BT: I don’t remember the war being the subject of any classes. So it was tangentially. This is why I learned more about politics outside of the classroom, but inherently because I was part of that community because we talked about it and then you’d have to read stuff. I remember during the student strike we’d be up all night; you never got any sleep. I got trapped by an SDS’er who had just gotten his first copy of The Red Book and was reading me patches. “Here’s what Chairman Mao says.” Here, he hands me his copy—and this is like a Saturday Night Live skit. Get away from me. Stop reading it. So, where am I going with this?

KH: Just about how you were—did most of your information about the war comes from your classmates, your peers in these kinds of—?

BT: And it came from my peers so like I said, I gave a lot of speeches. I had to do my research so we followed what was reported in the New York Times and were obviously involved in writing leaflets. Back then, you mimeographed things. It was really a chore. It took a lot of skill to make it on a typewriter and then there were the grease markings. You ran the drum and it was easier to write these things than to execute them—

KH: Yeah.

BT: In retrospect.

KH: Yeah, no kidding. So you said, and I can’t remember if we had turned the recorder back on at this point or not, but you said that it was really later, ’68-ish, maybe where you became even more politically engaged on campus.

BT: Correct.

KH: And why? What is going on at that point that is drawing you in?

BT: Maybe it was just reflective of the country in general. I mean, I’m sure I was against the war in ’67 and, if I was aware of it, and, you know, just like I was in favor of the environment movement in ’65 without knowing what I was thinking about. Gene McCarthy really did heighten things. It helped. A local guy, somebody who I respected suggested, you might want to go sit at a booth? And I did and then you’d get sucked in. Sucked in is the wrong metaphor. Because you’d jump in. You just—I’d put my toe in the water. All of a sudden, I believe in this. This is right because this is what should be. You know, and classes were boring. (laughter) You were more likely to meet girls at the demonstration or at meetings than in German class.

KH: That’s one of the things that I actually wanted to ask you about as well because it came up in some of the articles that I’ve been reading about you, that were published at the time about you in the paper. And you’ve been saying it over and over here now too, it seemed like to you a lot of this, you know, part of the motivation for your involvement in this was that it was fun.

BT: It was. Yeah, it was fun. It’s what we wanted to do.

KH: Yeah, but what about it was fun?

BT: Well, we believed in what we were doing and it was stimulating and we had to read stuff and I like learning. You know, I love Wikipedia; I love the Internet in that regard. Even Facebook. You read stuff, you know, you get new facts, you argue over things. It was stimulating; it was fun.

I’ve always felt that you want to be at least a little bit part of the issues of your time, right? And we were young and idealistic and some of it was fun. Yes, It’s a long way of saying, Yes, you’re absolutely right. It was fun.

And remember it was also sex and drugs and rock and roll.

KH: I was going to say—

BT: We weren’t just—it wasn’t gravitas all the time. During the student strike, it was sort of an organization of anarchy with the high school speakers’ bureau because somebody said to me, we need a high school speaker’s bureau and then you say, Okay, you do it. And yeah, she was at some of those meetings. She was part of the faculty insofar as the strike.

We created a Sunshine Collective.

KH: A Sunshine Collective?

BT: A Sunshine Collective because there’s some guys who are just stoners. Every movement and Hooverville and whatever attracts colorful characters. They’re sort of street characters. They might be bipolar, they might be schizophrenic; and some are just stoners. And some people want to be stoners once in a while. And so that became the Sunshine Collective. There were a couple of vets who were the core because they were total stoners but they were responsible and everybody else was afraid of them. (laughter) And so I always knew where I could get marijuana or LSD. Anyway, where was I going with that? Yes, it was—so the revolution was fun but it was also part of that larger movement, rock and roll and new kinds of—given new ways to dress. I did not wear beads by the way and yeah, sex, drugs, rock and roll says it all, says a lot.

KH: So how much—and I think that this is a question that has been asked by scholars, and by the general public looking back at these kinds of times, or even perhaps present times; you probably can’t break it down clearly into a little pie chart—but how much of the motivation for you, or maybe others who were involved in these things—can you talk a little bit about the various factors that motivated you? Fun, political commitment and ideology, being with your friends, your peers in this organization, pacifism, you know, where does fun fit in relative to some of the other motivations that you had to be such an involved activist?

BT: Well, it had to be a big part of it. I have fun. I had fun in prison, you know, I mean not all the time but, you know, you had three hots and a cot and indoor running water pretty much. And so was my motivation fun or do I make fun of it, with it? Both. I mean, I feel like I’m repeating myself. Sex, drugs, rock and roll; heartfelt belief about political issues; fear of being drafted; watching the disaster of your friends being drafted; some of them dying; some of them coming back very unhappy and Rachel Carson and—

KH: Yeah. I guess part of the reason I ask that is, especially when you’re talking about people who, as you eventually do, do things like break the law or, for those who say, maybe go to Canada, you’re sacrificing something here. You’re putting—you’re willing to take risks with your life and its potential trajectory and so it’s interesting to me and I think to others, to try to figure out, well, you know, what makes somebody willing to do that? What makes somebody willing to break the law, risk going to prison, risk the animosity, perhaps, of friends and family who might disagree with what you’re doing? There are sacrifices that activists make all the time and so what allows you to do that? I don’t know if I could do it.

BT: Oh, I bet you have—don’t make it harder than it is. Sometimes it’s the only choice. I mean, once you are faced with these issues—so I don’t want to paint a picture where I had to fight a gauntlet of disrespect and disdain from my family and friends. I mean, my family and friends were either neutral or part of it or I didn’t care, right? I mean, I shouldn’t say I didn’t care, but I hate to return to marijuana, but if you’re opposed to it, I care that you’re opposed to it but I’m going to do it anyway. So I don’t feel like I really had to step out. It just seemed like the logical positions to take. You know, I’ll go back to Welcome Week. These are all these things

62 the world offers; all these opportunities to do things, meaningful and not meaningful. I mean, I’ll get in the game. I want to do it.

KH: Did you have, whether it was family members or friends or people from, I don’t know, any of your social circles, who looked at you or said things to you like, what are you doing? Did you have any pushback? And maybe that comes later; maybe I’m getting a little bit ahead of the story here.

BT: Well, my family was not political but when they were forced to think about it they knew I was right, okay? I mean, even my dad, the conservative Republican, put that under his glass at his office, right? And so I didn’t have that much pushback. I regularly encountered people who had the opposite political opinion. That was the thing to do. If I wanted to get into a high school classroom it was usually because I was there debating somebody from the other side, somebody supporting the war effort. And so I regularly met those people, some of whom were fine people, right? You know, in principled disagreements with them. But did I get personal pushback? I don’t really remember that.

KH: Okay.

BT: I was in a fraternity I mentioned, which was a conservative group, you know, a lot of football players and people that became officers. I remember a couple of guys coming back really, really gung-ho about this war. They were people I had thought were sort of prancing roosters beforehand, and then I really knew they were; and so I had conservative friends with whom I just sort of didn’t see around. If you saw them you’d say hi but we didn’t have fights or whatever.

KH: Okay. So, and then, on the subject of fun, I think you called it—or you did a ‘Yippie’ when it came to your response to your draft board. So tell us so we—meaning, since the recorder’s been on here, we know that you registered for the draft as required and you have said that your intention was not personally to resist the draft.

BT: Correct.

KH: So tell me about—tell it on tape—about your response to your draft board and your ‘Yippie.’

BT: Oh, the story about the Magic Marker?

KH: Yeah.

BT: So I got notice to come in and have my physical which was necessary prior to getting drafted; and so I had my roommate at the time, actually who was a conservative Republican fraternity brother, but he still was game for it. He’s a dentist in Stillwater now, but he was game for it. He wrote on me, peace signs. I took off my shirt and he wrote on my skin with Magic Marker. There was a peace sign and there was probably a ‘Peace Now,’ and did it say, ‘Go, go, NLF’? I don’t know but it was important because on my back I had him write—

Maybe I should give a footnote. At the time the director of the Selective Service System was a general named General Hershey [Gen. Lewis B. Hershey, 1893-1977], and so I had the fellow write right on my back, “General Hershey eats here,” with an arrow pointing down to my butt crack. And so that must have happened at five in the morning because then you had to report early to wherever they give the physicals. I think it’s the old federal building was the induction center as well as the examination place. And at a certain point, you know, an hour into it, everybody takes their shirt off as you line up to get an x-ray. At which there’s, I don’t know, twenty to, you know, forty guys—and you can’t help but notice that one guy has these tattoos on him with Magic Markers. And so people are giggling and pointing and I’m a little bit flushed, you know. I’m a little embarrassed but they quickly pulled me out of line. It was within ten minutes. It seemed longer but it might have been that long before the guards—I shouldn’t call them guards—before the service members that were running the physicals noticed me, asked me if I was refusing to take the physical, because they had occasionally had that, and my friends I’m sure did that. I said, “No, I’m here. What’s the matter?”

The denouement of this story is less exciting. They took me into an office and again asked if I was refusing the physical, whatever, and I said n. And you could tell they were calling people on the phone and they were going, you know, to and from rooms or whatever. Finally, they just had me stand up and examined me privately and then I left. I had my own private examination.

KH: When would this have been?

BT: It had to be 1970. I was about to lose my deferment and I hadn’t yet been arrested so it would have been July, before July of 1970, when I was arrested, arrested on the draft board raid.

KH: Okay.

BT: And I believe that’s when I went.

KH: Okay, because then you graduated from the “U”—

BT: Somewhere it’s in my files.

KH: Okay, so’70. So that would have been—if we’re looking at this timeline here, if you graduate from the “U” in let’s say May or June of ’70 —

BT: Well, the student strike happened.

KH: Right? So was this after?

BT: So we got administrative passes so my graduation ceremony didn’t happen until July. In fact, it happened the day after I got bailed out of jail and I didn’t go. I just said, I don’t think so.

KH: Okay.

BT: But that spring I would have been losing my deferment so they were ready to draft me.

KH: So now I know that—now I’m forgetting what we talked about while the recorder was going and when it was not—we talked a little bit about the occupation of Morrill Hall and the bursar’s office by the African-American students and their protest and I know this is not on the recorder. Tell me a little bit your response to or your awareness or involvement in that particular issue.

BT: The fulcrum of the story happens in January of 1969. The Afro-American Action Committee had been politely knocking on the door of the administration to get them to pay more attention to African-American issues, get some scholarships, get some recruiting going. University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus—it was—and may still be, the largest single campus in the country as far as student population. It’s a forty-five to fifty thousand students, I think. There are bigger systems elsewhere like Texas and New York or whatever, but not a bigger campus. And in the entirety of those forty-some thousand students, there were eighty- some black students, counting the athletes. And us white students didn’t know that. The black students that were here did, and they’d been coming, especially here with the civil rights stuff going on, so they were politely asking for more attention from the university administration and the powers that fund them at the legislature and were getting polite, you know, Later, yeah, we’ll do a committee on that.

So finally they sat in at the bursar’s office. It was one of the most brilliant, surgical in and out successful sit-ins in an era of sit-ins, an era of important sit-ins.

KH: And what distinguished it? I mean, what made it so brilliant?

BT: Well, for a number of reasons. It was a small group. Remember, how much—what’s your base of power when you’re eighty-some students in a white campus of forty some thousand? And they had their own turmoil within the organization. John Wright might talk about that or he might not. I watched some of those people beef among themselves over the years. It was more important to them internally than it was to me. They were all leaders and they put their neck out. And so it’s a little scary when you’re the only blacks, to take over. But I think they’d maybe seen what happened at Columbia where, you know, you take over the whole administration building and sit having a cigar in the president’s chair and it ends badly, right?

And, indeed, I learned when I went to Milwaukee for Rose Freeman Massey’s birthday last year, that there’d been another thing in Chicago that I wanted to check out that had sort of set this template. Again, black students taking over just a part of the administration building. They shut down the bursar’s office and they wouldn’t let anybody in that wasn’t part of the group. And so the white kids were kept outside, the white supporters, which included the SDS folk, Marv Davidov and Honeywell Project type people. I was out there, student government were there and we got to get in the building and supported them. And so the AAAC kept it to themselves. They only took over a part of the building; they had members of the community come and join them; Bill English and other prominent sort of members of the black community and faculty members. There were a few faculty members that supported them. And we had a sensible administration. That helped.

But they only stayed one night. They did very little damage and they got an agreement from the university to create a committee to investigate their things. And they got a department—they got a real department, African-American—an African Studies Department was started in 1969 as a direct result of that sit-in. They got in there; minimal damage; minimal confrontation and this county attorney felt the need to indict three of them, which led to the Liberation Coalition that I talked about earlier, which was the first sort of black/white campus and university/North Minneapolis organizing together.

That wasn’t a full sentence I don’t think but, you know, so the African-American Action Committee, led by my friend Rose Mary Freeman; she was the president. John Wright was part of that. Steve Winfield. Do you know the name Winfield? Do you know Dave Winfield, the world famous baseball player, well his brother Steve, his older brother Steve, preceded Dave at the “U” and Steve was there then; and there were people who said that Steve might have been a better athlete. He was—maybe not—but he was an excellent athlete and is still just buff as can be. One of the nicest men around. He was part of that and supported it and there are some people who believe that he never really had a pro career because he got branded just for supporting.

Anna Stanley, I showed you her picture, she was a part of that group. Horace Huntley. What was impressive not just about it being such a surgical, successful, sensible, peaceful event, those people really put their money where their mouth was. John Wright had been in the University of Minnesota in engineering. He changed his major to African-American Studies and has become, became a world-leading academic in that field, gave his life to it. Rose Freeman Massey, the woman who was the chairman of the AAAC, spent her career as a professor of African American Studies she just retired a few years ago—she went to Milwaukee Area Technical College and taught her entire career there.

Horace Huntley, who was like vice chair of AAAC or whatever, he was sort of the elder of the group because he’d been in the service already and so he was like twenty-four or something, he went and spent his entire career at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. I mean, I just have so much respect for that group of the African-American student leaders, the black student leaders at the time.

KH: Now you’ve said—you’ve mentioned SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, a couple of times. Were you part of SDS?

BT: No.

KH: Why not?

BT: Because they were too strident. I mean, they took leadership. You know, we were vaguely aware of what The Port Huron Statement was. You know, when it was ‘62 and it became more important ten years, maybe eight years later, the leading thing, but SDS—there were some very smart people and good people, most of them, let’s say, but they also sort of felt like they had to be the edgiest. And sort of were, in my mind, quick to adopt the correct political line. Give me a break, you know. I’m twenty years old. I’m going to know everything about

Palestine as well as well know everything about South Africa; as well as know everything about Southeast Asia; as well as I know everything about Birmingham, Alabama. I’m sorry, I don’t know all this yet but they pretended to know it all. A lot of them were red diaper babies and so they just sort of grew up with a world view and yeah, so that was my view of SDS.

I mean, one guy in particular, said: I don’t have friends, I have principled political allies. You go, Oh, let’s go party. They were often right and they were good at introducing one to new thought, like I say, the one guy force fed me the fricking Red Book. (laughter). Stop this. You were sent to torture me. And so, yeah, I just thought they were strident and over the top and, you know, they became what RYM wanted them to. I don’t know if you remember the Revolutionary Youth Movement and Weather Underground, and, you know, they—those folk would be—at this one meeting which I happened to be in, they were very full of themselves.

And, like I say, the ones that were local, they knew of issues; they knew of issues I didn’t know so I didn’t feel they were complete idiots, but they were just a little too dogmatic for me.

KH: Okay. All right, so ’69, the Afro-American Action Committee’s occupation of the bursar’s office in Morrill Hall in January of that year. I know there were other things going on on campus even in January of that year, protests against ROTC. Were you involved in any of that?

BT: Yeah.

KH: So all part of the—?

BT: Some of those photos—I got arrested and went on trial, with a group of about fifteen others for blocking the doors of Morrill Hall. It was as much an ROTC protest as anything.

KH: Oh, okay.

BT: This was a few weeks into the strike and all movements like that sort of, what do we do next? What’s our next energy? What issue do we highlight?

KH: So that was in ’70?

BT: Correct, yeah. Had I previously? I remember watching demonstrations. I didn’t always play a part in them. Don Olson, Don Olson, do you know who he is? He’s a sacred man. He’s one of my rabbis in life. He was part of the early demonstrations at the ROTC building which was the armory on campus which was kitty-corner from my fraternity house so I took—watched a kind of demonstration that happened there. Also, across the street, right on University Avenue there, right behind Bell Museum, every Wednesday there was a group of faculty, Burnham Terrell, T-e-r-r-e-l-l. Is he still alive? And others. They weren’t there to show the science to the Beta house but they were right across the street from the Beta house so—I’m now free associating so I’m now realizing that there was that presence there.

When did Burnham Terrell start doing that?

KH: Of faculty who were involved—?

BT: He was faculty but he was one of the consistent ones. And you know, who took over? Did you know Sharon Vaughan?

KH: No.

BT: Oh, she was a saint. She started the first women’s shelter. Women’s Advocates was started by Sharon Vaughan and Rachel Tilsen and Monica Ehrler and a couple other women. Sharon lived on Osceola, about six blocks that way and before they had the place on Grand, she took people into her house. She ended up starting the Peace Studies program for MCTC [Minneapolis Community and Technical College], I believe.

KH: Oh, okay.

BT: Sharon Rice Vaughan was active in WAMM [Women Against Military Madness], so you’ve got Polly Mann, she’s on your radar screen. I’m just free associating. Her and Terrell did that every Wednesday. They segued that; they had been doing the Lake Street Bridge every Wednesday for years.

KH: Okay, yes.

BT: What was the question?

KH: I can’t remember where we started with that one. That’s all right.

BT: You just hit my ‘on’ switch [unclear] more coffee. (laughs)

KH: We just getting a—

BT: We better have some beers.

KH: That’s how memory works so that’s fine.

BT: Well, I appreciate it. You’re a good listener, what the hell? You’re a good listener.

KH: So, again, I’m pretty sure—this must have been on tape because we didn’t talk that long before everything else—

BT: So did I get everything out about the African-American Action Committee, what a great thing it was and what quality people were there?

KH: Yes.

BT: We were very lucky.

KH: But was there overlap, in your experience, between African-American students, or, you know, people who were working on race issues, particularly African-American issues and the antiwar movement? Did you have—I mean, clearly by 1967, Martin Luther King is speaking very publicly, for the first time, against the war and takes a lot of criticism for that but he says we can’t separate these issues. They are part of the same problem.

BT: We did not separate them. I can’t say that all of our signs had to do with both, but, you know, the moratorium had to do with Vietnam, but it was always, in my mind part and parcel of the same thing. When we took a student strike vote in May after the invasion of Cambodia, one of the demands besides getting out of Vietnam and whatever, stopping the bombing—I forget what all the demands were—but one of them was to free Bobby Seale.

KH: Right. Okay.

BT: And so, I mean, part and parcel—I just remember it must have been ’69 because when was the Chicago 7 trial? We watched the five o’clock news for news and they covered the trial every day. One day a group of us were just looking at it and said, we’re going. I called Sara Driscoll and she got a car and could go to Chicago. We left at nine and we arrived in Chicago about four in the morning. The line already was so long; we barely got into the afternoon session to watch that Chicago 7 trial.

KH: Wow.

BT: So it was just—so that’s something—Bobby Seale was out of it by then. He was chained and gagged and had been removed and it went from the Chicago 8 to the Chicago 7.

KH: Right, right.

BT: So in my mind, the race and the war were inextricably linked from the beginning. It didn’t hurt that Martin Luther King had taken that brave stand early on but it was just a natural concomitant. They both had to do with fundamental human rights.

KH: So did you—were there many of those—whether it was students from the Triple A-C or otherwise, did you see many African-American or nonwhite, let’s just expand that, nonwhite people involved in the antiwar events organizing activism?

BT: Well, remember, forty-some thousand students; eighty-some black students so—

KH: And so most of your activism was campus-based so—

BT: Most of it was campus-based, or because of the campus, then I became New MOBE chairman and so I gave speeches around the state, mainly in the Twin Cities area and went to national meetings. But it was pretty much a white movement in Minnesota but Earl Craig, who was the peace candidate, was black, and so—and we generally had representation from the colored community of one sort of another. I mean, AIM came out early for the strike.

KH: Okay, they did?

BT: Very impressive. Don’t ask me which event but, you know, there’s those columns in front of Coffman Union and I don’t know how many came, six, four, six—but they all had their red beret on and just stood cool as could be, [one guy in a red beret] next to each one of the pillars. Just spread out all across. I mean, it was great. It was just beautiful.

KH: So yeah, when you were—

BT: So that thing I found that I sent to—that United Progress—was Clyde on that board? I was on some board with Clyde Bellecourt.

KH: So even though you were traveling, you know, you mentioned that you spent a really active year traveling to some of these national organizing meetings for the antiwar movement, were there more people of color at those kinds of meetings or was it mostly a white led movement?

BT: Well, there certainly were black faces. Don’t ask me to remember names, but it was mostly white. Yeah, it was mostly white.

KH: And why do you think that is?

BT: Well, because they were separate issues insofar as your specific demands and your specific, you know, demonstrations and things. And so, remember it’s—the leaders of the African-American community were in the main focused on their issues so they would have been The Way community center in North Minneapolis with Spike Moss and like Earl Craig, became Urban Coalition. I was a teaching assistant for Gleason Glover, who was the local guy who ran, what was it, the Urban League? Maybe it was—I get the Urban Coalition and the Urban League mixed up but both were civil rights oriented organizations led by local blacks, not including police and whatever.

KH: Okay.

BT: And they were guaranteed supporters of an antiwar event, just like we were guaranteed supporters of whatever their events were and so, you know, the black community was well- represented. After the Triple AAAC took over the bursar’s office, there was a Morrill Hall Investigating Commission. I was on that. Somewhere in the bowels of these books is a report of the Morrill Hall Investigating Committee. It was led by T. Williams. Have you ever heard of Theatrice Williams?

KH: No.

BT: He ran Phyllis Wheatley House in North Minneapolis. He might still be alive. I mean, he seemed old then so maybe he’d be eighty-five now. I don’t know. But T. Williams might still be around and so—don’t ask me who else was on this thing. Roy Roybal was on it, a Chicano

70 activist—he’s still around; he’s still alive. He was on the United Progress thing where we were going to rebuild Selby/Dale. Maybe eight young twenty-year-olds, or as teenagers.

KH: Good thing for them. So what about women? What were women’s roles in these antiwar efforts?

BT: Well, some of them were significant. The Afro-American Action Committee—chaired by a woman, and there were very strong women in all of these groups. I mean, I remember a lot of the meetings, there were a lot of women there, including some of the most strident SDS’ers and some of the most gentle church people were female. I mean, and so many of the people that I learned from then, Monica Ehrler—have you ever heard that name?

KH: Just in—I think in some of these email conversations we’ve been having.

BT: Okay. All right. Like I said, she was in that group with Sharon Vaughan and Rachel Tilsen that started Women’s Advocates—

KH: Okay.

BT: And women’s lib was, of course, an issue. I mean, it wasn’t like I invented it and so I always grew up around women who were sort of in charge and just learned to operate despite them, around them. (laughter)

KH: With them? (laughter)

BT: And so, there were—were we conscious about mixing? Yeah, I think we were. I think we tried to be and so, you know, talk to some of the women. I gave you Marsha Zimmerman’s name. I met Marsha—we were both sort of, you know, shallow-veined members of Greek—she was her sorority president and we met at the Liberation Coalition, the support group, the campus community support group for the African-American leaders that were arrested or charged.

I was the treasurer for that group. I don’t think we raised one hundred fifty bucks. (laughter).

KH: So I want to be a little cognizant at least of our time—in fact, I’m going to pause this and start it over so I don’t lose anything. Stop it. Let that one go. All right. Are you doing okay?

BT: I’m doing fine.

KH: Okay, this is part two on this recording.

BT: This guy—I think this is his Ph.D. thesis—wrote about the occupation of Morrill Hall. [looking through files and boxes] Somewhere I have the official report. “The President’s Investigating Commission”—so this is our report back then. February—they didn’t put the year down. How vain! “A Chronicle of Events from April 4, 1968 through March 1969 Which Occurred at the University of Minnesota. Fact sheet of the Liberation Coalition.” That’s where I met Marsha. So this is—we’re all teaching ourselves history. Yeah, this was—we had fun.

KH: If you like that kind of thing. (laughter)

BT: Well, you can say what you will. I’m a lawyer. I push paper and talk for a living. I’ve seen your book –okay. (laughter)

KH: Well I get it. I think that would be fun. I’m just saying not everybody might think that’s fun. (laughter)

BT: We’re not that far off base here.

KH: Okay, so where were we? Sixty-nine—

BT: Can I offer you a beer?

KH: No, I’m good. Water’s fine.

BT: You don’t mind if I have one?

KH: Nope. [sounds of getting a beer]

Brief pause

BT: Sorry—I usually wait until five o’clock but this is a party here.

KH: So we’re going to jump ahead a little bit. We haven’t even gotten to some of the big stuff here yet. We’re going to jump to the fall of ’69 when there was a national moratorium in October and that is when—tell the story again about what you were doing in Minneapolis in October of 1969 during the local events around that moratorium.

BT: Well, these were heady times and what do I remember versus what do I think I remember? Obviously, we organized a good demonstration here in the Twin Cities on October 15. I don’t have a distinct memory that a march went from campus to downtown Minneapolis but I’ll bet it did. That was an obvious route and there were, I’m sure, parallel events in places like Mankato and so the idea was to get sort of the troops fired up in anticipation of the national event happening a month later. And we were successful. And so I can’t remember what we did ahead of time. We’d been leafletting, postering—I spent a lot of time handing out leaflets and trying to attach things to—what do you call— the poster places on campus, right?

So we did a lot of that and, you know, every now and then we’d have a demonstration at some building, maybe to just get attention to what was going on. You’ve got to keep things in the newspaper to educate people. I mean, to have social change has a lot to do with communication and communication has a lot to do with shoe leather because you’ve got to get out there and just sort of walk around and get attention and make some noise. And so, what did we do in October? We had a good demonstration. Good and it didn’t fall apart.

KH: And what was your role—?

BT: What was my role that day?

KH: What was your role—the article came up the next day on your birthday that your dad—?

BT: See, I remember what I did afterwards when I went down—do you want me to tell that story?

KH: Yeah.

BT: I told that story.

KH: It might have been before the recorder. My apologies if we’re hearing it twice.

BT: October 15, 1969, we had a great demonstration and there was all this tension because the mayor of Minneapolis was a former police detective named Charlie Stenvig who was a strident law and order guy and supported the war, not in favor of all this student rigmarole and stuff, and looking for an excuse to bust these students. And they, of course, always monitored our parades. They, you know, sometimes they were very courteous. Sometimes we did demonstrations; we didn’t have a parade permit and we took over half the street. And they were just fine, quite frankly.

But on this day, afterwards, we had thousands and thousands of people that went from the demonstration downtown. There were always some stragglers and somehow we were back at campus and I got word that there were a couple of hundred stragglers that were still downtown and we’re being corralled by the police at the Nicollet Mall and people were getting more and more upset. They’d been doing community theater; they’d been sort of, you know, walking around with their placards and stuff afterwards, and some were of the mind to break windows and cause a ruckus because they were young and had too much testosterone and sort of felt they had to do something worthy.

And so I went down to the mall. I don’t know how I got there; somebody had to give me a ride. And I just yelled at them. I just yelled from group to group, “You can’t do this; you’re not going to do this. You’re not going to become our headline tomorrow. We had a great demonstration. You guys, don’t get arrested otherwise your arrests are going to be the story, that they—”

And the cops to their credit sort of gave me time to get there. I don’t know if I was—maybe the cops called me. I don’t know. I don’t think so, but they were mellow enough in a way they’re not today, so even with a law and order mayor, the police were sort of standing back, not looking for an excuse. I mean they were going to make an excuse. They were going to corral these kids and get rid of—at a certain point maybe they deserved it, I don’t know. All I knew was that I was not going to let them trash Dayton’s windows—that was the threat. And so I will take some credit to giving some short, loud obnoxious speeches that changed some behavior. So we had a good time. And to put in a footnote, I was followed without knowing about it by a Star Tribune reporter, a guy named Dave Kuhn, who wrote about it and wrote an article the next day that described some

73 of what I’d done; and it was the best birthday present in the world because that was my birthday, October 16, 1969.

So if I’ve told that story before I hope it was consistent.

KH: Well, from the ones I’ve heard and maybe, again, maybe we got it on tape twice but that’s okay. Better to have it on than off. So I do have a question for you. You’ve said that, you know, you wanted to make sure that these demonstrations, the parades, marches, the rallies, whatever they were, weren’t getting out of control. The beef wasn’t with Malcolm Moos and the university; it wasn’t with the police in Minneapolis—

BT: Right.

KH: So, was your commitment to kind of keeping things civil strategic in that it would have been counterproductive for things to have gotten out of control? Was it because you were just kind of philosophically opposed to that kind of just more destructive, combative behavior? What was—?

BT: All that and more. Our fight isn’t with the city police nor with the university campus and it’s not with that cop. Why do I want to create that problem? And, you know, are you doing it because you feel you need to do something or are you doing it to get publicity? If you’re doing it to get publicity, then sit down. I mean, the civil rights movement had set a pattern for peaceful civil disobedience as a way to use lawbreaking as a method of heightening awareness of things and confronting inequities and that’s a sacred way of social change to this day.

How strident do you get? I mean, our country was founded by revolutionaries who picked up the gun. There was conversation like that back then. The Black Panther Party carried guns. They were an open carry organization. They could do that in Dallas, Texas today. They were open carry and they were—they were, you know, so there were conversations like that. Philosophically I didn’t think we had reached that point where we needed, where we wanted violent revolution. We still have a constitutional democracy. Imperfect as it may be, it’s better than most governments that have existed over time, you know. Most governments are dictatorships and monarchies and so, you know, even with this nitwit in the White House now, I’m not suggesting that we take guns to the streets.

All right, we still in the main, whatever—so it’s keeping the peace, totally philosophical. That was influenced by the civil rights movement and so correctly influenced by the civil rights movement. Whatever the genesis—its inspiration came from past social movements.

KH: Right. So you’ve mentioned this several times, too, in passing and directly, that the media was around. I mean, they were documenting these events; they were writing about it; they were reporting it. Were you, as the activists and the organizers behind some of these events, specifically planning things with an eye toward how the media would represent what you were doing?

BT: Of course. I mean, not every decision was made in that regard, but—because we wanted to talk to people. I mean, we were very much into changing people’s minds, educating people and getting noticed less by the media than by decision makers. Why do you have demonstrations? Why do you crowd the streets? So that the people in office will see. I mean, we still have a representative democracy. Of course, we scorned electoral politics back then, but you can’t get around it, I mean, or you’re not going to have a democracy. And so—where was I? I lost my train of thought.

KH: Oh, how much you—?

BT: How much was planned for the media? So we had teach-ins and demonstrations where we didn’t expect any press coverage and—because we wanted attention from people on campus for example, right? And, you know, the same with speaking at schools and churches and stuff like that. That wasn’t done for the media; we just wanted to get the word out; we wanted to talk to people. But—and we were stupid in some ways that we didn’t sort of have more of a PR attitude. But we were also aware that we were news of the time and so the major events, of course, we wanted coverage and expected coverage.

KH: So this is—what we were just talking about; had just been talking about—was October of ’69. Then there’s the big antiwar gathering in Washington, DC in November; you travel to that. In between those two is when Nixon comes out with his “silent majority” speech.

BT: Really? Okay.

KH: He’s trying to kind of forestall the momentum that the antiwar movement is building because these two events are attracting good, upstanding, you know, mothers and fathers and business people and—

BT: That was our goal, yes.

KH: Right, so Nixon’s getting a little uncomfortable with this so he—and politically, it’s very savvy, to give a name to this group, the Silent Majority, but the November protests happen anyway and it’s quite large and you travel to Washington, DC.

BT: (I have like ninety-seven pens here if you need one.)

KH: And that’s when you turn in the draft cards to John Mitchell’s—

BT: Oh, yeah, forgot about that.

KH: And then, after that, you know, there is this kind of lull. You were describing earlier that there was—I mean, we had these two, across the nation, two massive expressions of antiwar sentiment and nothing seems to be happening and in fact, in the spring of 1970, the war is widening when Nixon bombs and then invades Cambodia.

BT: Remind me. Remember Nixon was the peace candidate. That was the secret plan—but for years, and the North Vietnamese sort of played games with this too—the shape of the table stuff. Didn’t they get fired up about the table because Nixon had told them that—wasn’t that part of the impeachment process that Nixon got—was holding behind the scenes—I’ll give you a better deal? So my guess is in ’69 and ’70, there was pretense of some sort of extrication and so you like to think something will happen. So you wait to see what the politicians who, at least—I was less noticing of electoral politics than other people smarter than me, right? Because that is how power is exercised, right?

KH: Right.

BT: And so, tell me what’s happening.

KH: Yes, he was the peace candidate; he was Vietnamizing the war, right? So there were ground troops coming home even if our air war was increasing and the draft turns to a lottery in December of 1969. So it does seem that there are some gestures by the administration.

BT: Was it that early that it became a lottery?

KH: Yes, December 1, 1969, was the first lottery drawing.

BT: Oh, okay, why did I think it was ’70 but that’s close enough, yeah.

KH: So there do seem to be gestures from the administration that, Well, you know, maybe.

BT: They always pretend. Ergo the Pentagon Papers.

KH: Correct, and, you know, it’s a PR management. But, at any rate, by the end of April 1970, we know, we who were around and cognizant, know that this is not looking good; the war is in fact expanding into Cambodia now, and has been except now we’re having an “incursion” into Cambodia and that’s when the student strike happens on campus at the university. So I know we’ve kind of talked about it here and there in bits and pieces. Tell me a little bit more about it as its own subject of conversation here. Tell me about the strike.

BT: There was so much pent up emotion about the war that had been demonstrated the previous autumn and then things weren’t moving. So those who were interested in that issue, sort of were itching for something to go and the invasion of Cambodia gave everybody the perfect catalyst. It was an “in your face,” let’s just bomb people back to the stone age kind of militaristic, obnoxious move and motivated the hell out of us. I mean, some of us had been sort of doing stuff and all of a sudden, the story’s going to come out—we always wanted it to come out, you know, so we can educate you and so we can get the attention of the people in power and the media as well.

And so, like I told you, the invasion happened—I thought on a Thursday night. There was a Students for Craig event the next day and those of us who were regular organizers just sort of said, let’s do something. It was the same thing going on all over the country. Everybody knew

76 that we need to act; shoe leather needs to be displayed. We’ve got to get in the streets and say that we disagree with this.

There was a little communication but not much. Long distance calls were a big deal back then. Phones were expensive, you know, we only heard by rumor what was going on in Madison, for example. And then the kids got shot—[at Kent State in Ohio on May 4] okay, so we have that big rally in front of Coffman Union where we voted; but there were a lot of people that didn’t want to go on strike. Then the news came about four dead in Ohio and you couldn’t get by the door. Everybody was coming up—it was the organization of anarchy; but it was just beautiful because there was, you know, we had the big demonstration and then we decided we were going to take over Coffman Union and now what do we do? Coffman Union had a lot of meeting rooms and it had a cafeteria. We took over the university’s—the Faculty Club on the third floor. They had beds and—people, we’d have meetings, you know, what do we do? Let’s have a meeting.

And so I got to chair a lot of these meetings. I’m sort of a big, loud guy and I wasn’t part of SDS; I wasn’t part of these other groups—I was sort of, you know, just sort of an acceptable, bland liberal or maybe something I don’t know.

KH: So it was an advantage not to be too—

BT: Oh, hell, yeah. I wasn’t taking—I get along with people. I like people, even the crazies— go the Sunshine Collective. (laughter) And so, like I said, somebody said we should have a high school speaking committee. Okay, you guys are the speaking committee and it would kind of generically form. And whether it would be four people or fourteen or forty they’d do that.

We need to be knocking on doors, going door to door telling people the good news. Okay, you’re in charge of it. And there was just a—and there were faculty specific groups. It was very much fun and Toni McNaron, like I said, from the English department was a big supporter but, just as we’d have—days would progress. I think we had like a public meeting of sorts every day and every day there was a new resolution of support from new university group we never heard of. You know, the English faculty and the Rovers Club or whatever, it was just—they were fun meetings. We didn’t know what we were doing. Now that we’re on strike, what do we do?

KH: Yeah, yeah, right.

BT: So we’re totally making it up as we go along. Of course, the planning for the demonstration and negotiating with the university and being asked about, what do you think about this faculty member who’s holding classes? And there’s all this shit going on. But it was sort of a beautiful mishmash of people coming and going and making stuff up and being inventive and getting the word out.

We had a demonstration—it might have been a week later or two weeks later. You tell me. It was a Saturday. It was early to mid-May, 1970. We went from the university campus to the state capitol.

KH: Yep, May 9.

BT: And we were blessed with decent weather. I can’t tell you it was wonderful but it was not too hot; it was not too rainy; it was—and we had a lot of people.

KH: And that’s when you marched—

BT: Down Summit Avenue.

KH: And picked up students from other colleges on the way—

BT: Totally—it was huge.

KH: Yeah.

BT: I gave the speech on behalf of the students. I don’t remember what the hell I said. I know it wasn’t as good as those other speeches.

KH: Well—so one of the articles I was looking at recently about the strike—again, I’m not sure if it was happening on Thursday, May 7, where there was mass picketing on campus and you are quoted as saying that again, you were telling everybody, all the actors who out doing this picketing, that it cannot be “coercive” was the word you used.

BT: Oh, really? Did I?

KH: Yeah.

BT: That’s good to hear what I said.

KH: Yeah, so that seemed to me in keeping with your kind of attitude and your practice of being reasonable and not unduly escalating all of these events and that it wasn’t about—and perhaps I’m putting words into your mouth here—but that it wasn’t about, you know, beating somebody over the head literally or even figuratively with your ideas. Instead it was about communication. Right? That’s what you’ve been—

BT: That’s what we were raised to believe, and I still believe that when presented with the facts, many of us wound up agreeing on certain things. I mean, what’s the expression? You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts. But if you agree on the facts, you’ll oftentimes reach the same opinion.

KH: So that was your mission was to get the facts out and then—?

BT: Yeah, I actually believed that, you know, you get the truth out there, things will be okay. It doesn’t always work that way but—

KH: Well, now when we don’t even agree on— so how does the strike impact you personally as a student and other students who are involved in the strike? How many students at the university participate in the strike? Do you know?

BT: I don’t. I do think that almost everybody got the option of an administrative pass.

KH: Okay.

BT: I could be wrong but I know I had that and got credit for my classes and so I don’t remember how this—the university I thought, was always very accommodating.

KH: Okay.

BT: Yeah, this isn’t what they wanted. Holy cow, give me a break. I’m sure they had resistance from some faculty members who thought everybody should be failed who doesn’t do the traditional, but the university was always pretty accommodating. So how many people really went on strike for the rest of the term? Not that many. I don’t know. I was in my own world of being a full-time organizer by then and I didn’t have to pretend to be a student. That was good, but in fairness, I learned more outside of class than inside of class. It wasn’t like I wasn’t getting an education. I believe that I got an education. But you tell me how many thousands of students took administrative passes. I don’t know.

KH: I don’t have the statistic. I think I read somewhere that attendance in classes declined about ten percent for the duration. I don’t know if I’ve even seen any—they may be out there somewhere and I just haven’t seen them—about how many people participated. But it was several thousand.

BT: Sure, but not twenty thousand. See I would have guessed during that first week, a lot of classes were missed and then, you know, people didn’t—then you have your big demonstration and the true believers want to stay on strike.

KH: Right, right.

BT: That would have been me. But the rest of them, you know, you didn’t end the war. I’ve still got to take—I’ve got to go to calculus.

KH: So I guess here my notes say about six thousand students took the pass/fail option.

BT: All right, all right. I should be interviewing you. How many people took the pass/fail option? Well, that’s what—about one seventh of the university.

KH: That’s pretty good if you think about a—yeah, all the different kinds of students that are on campus and their different interests and focus and attention. So you mentioned something that makes me want to ask you this and you refer to yourself a couple of times as being a full-time organizer, right? That’s what you were. You were on campus; you were still registered as a student; you were doing a lot of this through your position in student government. How did

79 you—or maybe, did you balance this very focused, very time consuming work as an antiwar and other activist, with the rest of your life or was that your life? You had classes, right? You had to—

BT: Classes were like sort of a necessary evil. It was like going to Catholic Church when you’re in high school. I really feel sorry for a couple of my teachers. There was one German teacher in particular. It was an early morning class and I wasn’t a morning person and I wasn’t that good of a student. So, I passed. I think I entered law school with like the lowest GPA of anybody in my class. I had a 2.7.

So, you know, college wasn’t easy but it wasn’t that hard; but the rest of this stuff was going on and so, yeah, organizing became my life. But it was fun. I still worked. I had nerdy jobs. I was good in accounting so I did accounting for little firms. The Builders Exchange of St. Paul—I was their bookkeeper.

KH: Wow! During all this?

BT: Yeah, during all this. I drove school bus. There was a big bus barn by Como and Snelling and they always loved university students. They’d accommodate you. If you had early morning classes on Tuesday, Thursday, you could drive on Monday, Wednesday, Friday morning. Same in the afternoon. You’d have a busload of students who were drivers going back and forth between campus and the bus barn in any case. Summertime, I worked at the railroad. So part of my scholarship was that I got a summer job—and I worked—there was a huge train depot at Hennepin Avenue, where the federal bank is now. That was a gorgeous building; a huge building so for years I worked there in summers and Christmas holidays—made good money.

KH: Were your personal/social relationships coming through this antiwar organizing?

BT: Oh, yeah.

KH: So kind of all-encompassing.

BT: Yeah, it was. Did I date women who were sort of star revolutionaries? No, [yes?] but the mating game was going on. We dropped the revolution and did LSD and listened to Jefferson Airplane all night long, and the Fireside Theater. I mean, sometimes there’d be twenty of us sitting around listening to—just the Fireside Theater or something. But so—the counterculture was an antiwar culture in that—so some in the social group were like me and more war focused. Others were working on the co-op and others were more mystical. And some, Marsha, Marsha Zimmerman, worked for the county. She worked for Hennepin County Medical Center for like forty-two years or something. I mean, people had lives outside. Not everybody in the group was full-time antiwar movement and I didn’t even consider myself full-time antiwar movement. It was whatever you call it, in the movement, the movement. I guess you’d call it the progressive movement.

KH: Okay. So, now in terms of the chronology of our conversation as it reflects the chronology of your life, we are now at summer of 1970. So the strike has kind of delayed your graduation ceremony which you can’t attend.

BT: Which I wasn’t interested in anyway—

KH: Well, right.

BT: I was going to go in the armed forces. I was going to get drafted.

KH: So, let’s talk about the Minnesota 8. Let’s do get to that.

BT: Okay.

KH: How do you end up, besides the fact that you’re done with school now and you’re losing your deferment, how do you go from being this kind of major campus organizer to being part of what becomes known eventually as the Minnesota 8?

BT: Well, I told you, I decided to do draft board raids because I was giving speeches and was asked, do you support this sort of thing? And once I realized that I did support it, did think it was a proper thing to do, then I’ll say what I said before. You are what you do. As—I don’t know what Jean Paul—I don’t know what philosopher or whatever—but that’s true, you know, especially then at that age. I knew who was into that because there’d been other actions and so I just said, Next time, I’m in.

KH: Okay.

BT: And so the Minnesota 8 was arrested on July 10, 11, 1970—somewhere before then I’d gone to Detroit to do a draft board raid that didn’t occur.

KH: Oh, okay.

BT: It’s sort of a funny story. I don’t even know why I got picked but I’m going to Detroit. It’s ironic; that’s where I ended up doing my prison time is right outside of Detroit and I still own property in Detroit and have many friends out there. But—I and a couple other Minnesotans went out there and went to some, you know, revolutionary’s house, and two by two we went into this building. It was one of the big, downtown Detroit buildings, twenty-five to thirty stories tall. Two by two we went in to the building and at the top of the building where the staircase goes to the roof for access to the signage or whatever, there’ll be a room that surrounds the top of the staircase that’s, you know, twenty by twenty maybe. Well, that’s where we went [to hide until evening]. All but two people who for complicated reasons had to go to a boiler room and hide inside, whatever.

So there’s twenty of us waiting for the signal at midnight in this room. We’ve unscrewed the bulb and so—I’m making a long story short—and coming two by two and end up on the top floor and have to wait till the signal at midnight because nobody’s going to come find us, right?

Because nobody goes to the roof in the middle of the night. Well, this night, some poor working schmo apparently, you know, the neon was out on the sign or something on the roof and so we hear this guy down below us. Hush, we shouldn’t talk.

And then there’s this metal staircase that, you know, the sort that is relatively steep, metal staircase, you can imagine the top floor—one of these old buildings with the light coming from below. And the guy flicks the switch and clicks the switch again and you could tell he was thinking, Oh shit! He might have said, Oh, shit! So he starts climbing up and he’s coming from the bright light and so he can’t see anything and he’s got to go around to the right on the rail to get to the door that’s like five or six feet that way and he comes up and he hits somebody. And he doesn’t know—all he knows is that he’s hit something. The poor guy leans over and he can’t see anything and he realizes it’s a human being. That man took that—he turns around; he was right at the top of the stairs; he turned around and he like took that whole staircase in one leap, one bloodcurdling scream—this poor man.

Detroit was a dicey place. Remember, this was 1970; the ’67 riots had made Detroit a very tense place. That poor man—had to have aged ten years that night. I could go on about that. We ended up, by then, of course, we were all busted. We couldn’t go raid the draft board and so we ran down twenty some floors and then couldn’t get out so then we got collared by—they’ve got a few street cops that have come in—what are you doing? Having a be-in, somebody said. I mean we hadn’t done anything. We hadn’t broken in; we were just in the building and we were just a bunch of white academics, you know; I’m sure we looked the type. They let us go. They let us go!

KH: This is 1970.

BT: Nineteen seventy; it would have been before July—I got involved in it [at six a.m.?] Why they included me, I don’t know, but we had to do a phone trick with the guard because the two people—because there were two people who hadn’t gotten busted who were on a different floor. That was fun; that was an exciting sort of James Bond-y kind of thing. We had to time, to make the phone call and the guard being distracted to sneak up and get the friends out of the building.

KH: By that time, by 1970, let’s say spring or early summer of 1970, things had been happening in Maryland with draft board raids and the Berrigan brothers; Philip Berrigan and Beaver 55—the first one in Cleveland so these guys, these cops, theoretically may even have known what was going on there with all of you doing your be-in, but they let you go.

BT: So do I take it there was some subterfuge—that they purposely let us go? No. Quite frankly, like I said, I still have property in Detroit. I used to have an apartment on the east side. They just had bigger fish to fry than a bunch of white stoners in a building that they hadn’t—

KH: But they wouldn’t—so do you think they knew probably what you were actually doing there and just didn’t think it was worth it, they didn’t do it?

BT: No, my guess is that if they had suspected that we were there to break into the draft board they might have called the feds. We just said it’s a be-in and it was a time, remember, it was a time of stoner be-ins.

KH: So it was a perfectly reasonable explanation?

BT: Well, no, but remember, these are Detroit cops in the middle of the freaking night who have other things going on. Detroit was on its way down then. And so I don’t know. It just—it wasn’t a purposeful bust; it was too real.

KH: So you said earlier that you yourself were not going to resist the draft, right?

BT: Yeah.

KH: But then you start giving these speeches; somebody asks you, do you support the draft board raids? And you say, Yeah, and you think, Well, all right, I’m going to learn; I’m going to do what I am, whatever. So why—is it just an evolution in your thinking? I mean, you’re showing up at your induction physical, you know, with yourself all painted up is not too far-- too much in advance of the break-in in Alexandria.

BT: True, yeah.

KH: So what’s the difference—I’m trying to figure out what the difference is between you saying, I wouldn’t have resisted the draft myself but I’m going to break in and ruin draft files?

BT: That’s an incongruity. Is that what you’re—?

KH: Is it an incongruity? Yeah, I guess my question is, is it? Are those two things—they seem to be somewhat a paradox shall we say? It seems like if you were willing to break into a draft [board office], you know, and destroy draft files, that you would also yourself have resisted the draft.

BT: Well, I can see what—so, the goal being the same, to avoid being a part of the war machine, and the hurdle being breaking the law.

KH: Okay.

BT: I don’t know. Maybe it is inconsistent. At the time, getting out of being in the draft required you to be a conscientious objector and I wasn’t a pacifist so I didn’t intend to do that. Would I have gone to war if I’d been assigned to Vietnam? Would I have carried a rifle? I’m not sure I would have gone that far. Maybe I was cocky enough—I was going to go in and organize in the army. I didn’t know what that meant.

It was like when we went on strike, we didn’t know what that meant. You just sort of wing it from there. But I had friends who went to prison: George Crocker, Dave Gutknecht, you know, other people. I just figured it wasn’t what I wanted to do but—

KH: Okay.

BT: I don’t know. But yeah, I was willing to break the law because I’d been confronted with that question, so you know—

KH: You’ve got to live what you’re preaching.

BT: Well, you know, you want to strike a blow against the empire.

KH: Right.

BT: Quite frankly, I hadn’t planned on breaking the law and getting arrested and going to prison so you’re asking me if this is an incongruity—you’re willing to break the law. I wasn’t going to voluntarily go to prison.

KH: Okay.

BT: So—

KH: So your intent—and I think you say this in the letter that Rolling Stone publishes in 1972—and you say, you know, “My intent was not to be a standby”—I think that was the word you used—“a standby draft protester” or something, you know, the people who—

BT: Is that what I said?

KH: Yeah.

BT: Is that what I said?

KH: “I didn’t mean to do that. I didn’t intend to—I didn’t want to get arrested.”

BT: I could be a politician today. Kim, look at me. I’m a regular politician. I could have been a politician. (laughter)

KH: The next incarnation. So, you said, you know, I could have done more good had I not been arrested and been out here still doing further draft board raids and ruining the files perhaps—you didn’t say that but—I could have done more good had I not had to go to prison. Right?

But for you, personally, your draft ability becomes a moot point once you are arrested. Is that right?

BT: Correct, and I’d be 4-F. Once I’m convicted I’m 4-F, but once I’m charged they don’t want me, yeah.

KH: So your—so then the question of your response to the draft, to the selective service coming to you and saying, Time to be inducted, is erased.

BT: Correct, yeah.

KH: Because you’ve done this other— Okay, okay. One thing I’m really curious about as I have been thinking about all of you who are involved in the Minnesota 8 and you just said, you said at some point you told the people who were involved in these kinds of things, Next time I’m in. I want to be a part of this.

BT: Yeah, and then I went to—

KH: And that didn’t go as planned. (laughter) So how are these things organized? Like did the eight of you know each other in advance? How is that eight of you who got in - ?

BT: Frank Kroncke has a lot of material. Frank’s [story] will have a different tenor than mine. He was a draft board raid organizer. His material might deal with some of that. I wasn’t. I was just a soldier. I was riding the microphone and stuff, our above ground stuff. I just wanted to be a soldier on the draft board raids. I just wanted to count coup; I wanted to be a part of it. So who was making the decisions? I don’t know. To this day, I’m not sure; they were sort of making it up as they went along. But Frank was a ringleader I believe. There was a— he was part of that Catholic left, that some of it was spontaneous; they just imitated each other and sometimes they were talking to each other.

KH: Right, okay. So do you know— let me back up before I get to that question. What was the Minnesota Conspiracy to Save Lives? Were you part of that?

BT: That was I believe what Frank had called us. In other words, so I don’t remember being part of the decision to call us that or to make literature or whatever. I believe Frank might have been arrested with it. I don’t think we were but maybe we were. I don’t remember because I just showed up and thank God it was easy to break into this place.

KH: So who, and maybe you’ve already answered this and forgive me if you have and I’m asking you again, you don’t remember like who told you, Okay, you three are going to Alexandria and you two are going to Little Falls and you two are going to Winona? Would that have been Frank?

BT: I don’t remember.

KH: Okay.

BT: I don’t remember. It might have foolishly happened on the phone; I’m sure people’s phones were being watched, but six months before we were arrested was the Beaver 55. I mean, January 1970 was the most—it was very successful because it simultaneously got the Minnesota state draft office files as well as Hennepin and Ramsey County, which was a big portion of the state. And I—

KH: And you weren’t part of that?

BT: No, no. But I know who was. There’s a story behind that, a couple—but yeah, I wanted in next time.

KH: So did you know—so it was you and Cliff Ulen and Chuck Turchick in Alexandria? Did you know those two before you showed up?

BT: I’m not sure. I don’t think I’d been—well, Chuck I had to have known. Chuck was a well-regarded anarchist and anti-draft guy and always very smart, distinctive because of this, you know, he’s short and he’s bullet-headed and asked very piercing questions in a very polite way. His father taught Hebrew to all the Jews in North Minneapolis for decades so everybody knows Turchick and he grew up with a virtual rabbi as a father, you know, so there’s a tenor and a power that comes with that sort of temperament. So Chuck might have been the contact. He might have been assigned me and Cliff. Cliff Ulen was I think, Mike Therriault’s roommate.

KH: Oh, okay.

BT: They lived in some hippie house.

KH: So, connection there.

BT: Cliff’s always been sort of the vague eighth person, right? I just think he was another well-meaning seminary student who got in over his head. But I don’t know. But I did not know him. The others, Brad [Beneke] I didn’t know, but Brad was always sort of a weird guy, sort of out on the edge. Frank’s always been very loquacious and—with opinions. Pete—I don’t remember if I knew Pete Simmons. Don Olson I knew. Don has always been one of the sainted people and an anchor. He’s always been this fabulous Furry Freak Brother-looking guy who always had anarchist literature and is just sort of the epitome, the paradigm of a pacifist anarchist, just a gentle man and if everybody had his personality, then pacifistic anarchism would work. But he’s just a sweet man—he has had a radio show on KFAI for decades now.

KH: Yeah, I haven’t met him yet but I know his name.

BT: You’ll love him. He’s really a great guy.

KH: So, how much planning went into this evening event?

BT: You’ll find out better from Brad or from Chuck or Frank because Brad in particular would scout and be sensible.

KH: Okay.

BT: You know, so you’re going to hit the Alexandria draft board. Have you been there? Have you been there? Do you know what it looks like? Do you know what hours it is? Do you know

86 anything about the physical plant around it etcetera, etcetera? So I know Brad scouted a lot of places and he and Frank were like best buddies for a minute. I was there at the same time. Frank’s partner at the time was Karen Clark. Do you know Minnesota State Senator Karen Clark?

KH: I know of her and I’ve tried to get a hold of her.

BT: Who’s a sainted woman. I think she’s retired and then you can interview her and then she’ll have time. But she’s still a dear friend. She’s one of the real ones. Where was I going with that? Who did the planning? So Frank and Brad were tough into it. They’d already done—and Chuck and could Don be part of Beaver 55? I don’t remember; I can’t remember if he had. But they’d been around the block and so I didn’t do the casing. Just a soldier; just tell me when to show up.

KH: Do you remember how—like did you all go to Alexandria together? Did you meet there?

BT: We went in Chuck’s car. Did Chuck have his dad’s car? (laughter) Rabbi Turchick—in one of the Coen brother movies where there’s a rabbi character who was Turchick.

KH: Oh, okay.

BT: I believe they were taught Hebrew by his father.

KH: Oh, really? Interesting. I bet I know which one.

BT: So, yeah, I was just sort of told this is going down like tomorrow night or whatever.

KH: Did you bring stuff like who—? I mean, when they say you were found with this, that and the other, the three of you, whatever—I have it written down here somewhere, you know, a sackful of stuff.

BT: Right, well Chuck would have brought that. Yeah, I don’t remember having any assignment.

KH: Okay, okay. But your goal was to go in and—?

BT: And to remove and destroy the records. I’d gone in the afternoon. I was supposedly—I hadn’t been there before—and to look around to see if anything had changed.

KH: Okay, hard to tell.

BT: Or was it wired or was there something—I had no idea what to look for. So you walk in and there’s this second floor, small town, and are the other offices even occupied? I don’t know, like an accountant or an attorney or whatever and all sort of glass doors. And there’s one woman sitting there and I’m sure she twiddles her thumbs ninety percent of the time so I was a

87 prominent event and I’m supposed to be in there casing the place, looking for secret wires around the door outside. I didn’t know what I was looking for.

And then we cooled our heels; went and shot pool some place. And that night broke in and we had to climb above first—we had to climb on top of the garbage cans. We only had to go to a second floor window and had we opened it, or was it commonly opened? A bathroom—there’s a common bathroom for that second floor—we broke in through either an easily openable window or an unlocked window. And then one of them had the skill to break glass in order to get past that lock or to go and pick a lock. I don’t remember. It wasn’t me. We spent ten minutes in there.

I went to the typewriter and bent the “1” key and the “a” key just as a Yippie thing, you know, the significance of “1A,” [meant one was eligible to be drafted] and Cliff and Chuck were looking at the files; and I think they’d rearranged the labels on the front and so it was taking some time to figure out just what was going on. Then all of a sudden the door opens and there’s a silhouette of a guy with a gun and he says, “Don’t move or you’re dead.” It’s the FBI. So, you don’t move.

KH: What were you thinking at that point?

BT: Oh, shit, you know, it is, Oh, shit. Isn’t that the most common thing that pilots have said right before the crash? Oh shit?

KH: Well, anyway, yeah. You said at the time and you said now that your intent was never to get arrested—I mean obviously you’re doing this under subterfuge; you don’t want to get arrested. Did you—before you did this or perhaps even at that moment, where, you know, that oh shit moment, did you have an appreciation for what may happen to you if you were to get arrested? Had you thought about that?

BT: Well, yeah, but, you know—

KH: How old were you?

BT: Twenty or no, no, I was—maybe I was twenty-one. Nineteen-seventy?

KH: Yeah.

BT: I was twenty-two.

KH: Twenty-two.

BT: Yeah, so I had just finished five years of college and now I go to prison. I had sort of assumed we weren’t going to get caught and I knew there were consequences and so I was arrested. Did my life pass before me at that moment? Certainly ahead of time we thought about what would happen if you got arrested. I don’t remember having a conversation about, would we get five years? What happened? We more had conversations, what would you do if you met a

88 security guard? Would you physically manhandle that person in order to get away? That was the philosophical question.

KH: And what was the—?

BT: The resolution was that we would not; we would run away. (laughter)

KH: Non-violent.

BT: Non-violent, but I think I had to be convinced. Why can’t I punch that person? I do believe I was on the losing end of that discussion but in any case. So did we talk a lot about what was going to happen if we got arrested? No.

KH: Because you didn’t think you would.

BT: Well, yeah, why jinx it?

KH: Yeah, right.

BT: I’m not sure we thought that far ahead. It was just we were going to do it and quite frankly, the possibility of going to prison clearly was not a deal killer. Inspiration was coming from those who were doing it publicly and sticking around, particularly the Catholic left that Frank Kroncke came out of. Mike Therriault was a seminary student; I’d been in the equivalent of a seminary for the Christian Brothers. A novitiate as a sophomore in high school. So there was a lot of this heartfelt Catholic altar boy feeling going on as well as the Jewish radical pacifist that would be Chuck. And where was I going with that? Bring me back here girl.

KH: Thinking about it in advance, going to prison.

BT: Oh, so the fact of going to prison wasn’t an impossibility. I’ve always entertained the impossibility that someone purposely spilled the beans so that we would get arrested.

KH: Yeah, because the FBI and local police were in all three locations.

BT: Three out of four.

KH: Right because there was the Wabasha one that does get pulled off so that was part of the whole plan was four—

BT: No, five were planned. You know, if Brad—one of them could— I’m pretty sure five were planned. One they aborted—

KH: Oh, okay.

BT: They went there; things looked much different. They just had a bad feeling and they aborted and Sandy Wilkinson, I think was in there. He’s my Facebook friend.

KH: Okay, so one aborted. Wabasha goes off but the three others—well, that’s interesting. How do you think that happened that the FBI and local police were in those three locations? Was it pure luck? Did they know? I know at your trial it became an issue—

BT: And we never learned, Kim, we never learned. We wanted, you know, made motions and this that and the other thing and the most we got out was that there were sources, plural, so there wasn’t one source. And now I can play that game, you know, you might have one very valuable snitch; you’re still going to testify there are sources.

Let’s think about it. There were a lot of raids going on around the country but one of the most successful happened here and some people had sort of taken moral responsibility for it, okay? Including, I think, Brad and Chuck. I don’t know about Don. He might remember, but they took moral responsibility for it and so is this an invitation for a wiretap or what? Everybody was still relying on land lines back there and had limited land lines and a whole bunch of us were living in one stoner or hippie commune house on Elliot Avenue South, 3813 Elliot. It was great. That’s where twenty people sit around on LSD and listen to the Fireside Theater. And this person was in the beginning of the co-op, and Marsha was working at the county in healthcare, and somebody else was very active in the women’s movement, and somebody else was dealing hashish. And so it was—I said, a nice collection of people.

But that phone I’m sure was fertile ground and was tapped. And we just sort of pretended that, you know, so you can be good ninety-eight percent of the time and still be busted on that telephone; plus people were getting stoned, talking about stuff. I know that one person, the woman, the one woman involved—was she part of the aborted place or did she—was she at Waseca? Joan Francis? Do you know that name?

KH: Nope.

BT: Joan Francis. Find Joan Francis. Good, I think, a Quaker. See I think she’s rumored to have stood up during Quaker Meeting and said she was going to do this. And so, how did they find out we were going to do it? Shit. I take moral responsibility for the Beaver 55 and you know they flooded us with FBI agents and so it was just, wait around. Sooner or later we’ll catch these guys.

KH: So why do you think—and you may have no specific ideas about this but speculatively, why would they have been able to interrupt the three but not Wabasha?

BT: Well, because a lot of the information is imperfect. That’s my belief. I don’t believe— because I don’t see something sinister there. I just—we live in an imperfect world. Dan Ellsberg was on the run for a long time—couldn’t happen today. You know, it was a different world. People didn’t have photocopy machines virtually. That was high end stuff that only a few offices had.

How did they know—did they follow Chuck Turchick? Did they follow us to Alexandria and Frank and Brad and they didn’t know those other people? Or missed them? I just—I don’t know.

KH: Okay, so you get arrested and do they take you right back down to Minneapolis?

BT: Because I think I have heard that people who’ve said, my relative was in law enforcement and they were out watching such and such a draft board that night. So I think some places were watched that weren’t hit.

KH: So it might just have been a common practice?

BT: Well, no, my guess is they knew we were about to strike. We weren’t that good at security. You’ve got to give some credit to the people tapping phones; they were one of the better organizations at what they do actually. We were so stupid that they better have found us out or I’m going to be very disappointed in them. (laughter) You want these guys—we were not that smart. We were young, earnest criminals. Today we’d be better—just joking.

KH: So when you get arrested; the three of you get arrested—well, actually the eight of you. Are you all then back to Hennepin County, Minneapolis?

BT: Correct. And for a couple hours we just—we were cool—all that—Chuck and what’s his name, Cliff, and I, at least, we sort of—I think we gave our name and didn’t say much else. I— we at least—I don’t know if we talked about it but you know, you don’t have to tell them anything. They’ll say—nowadays they’d throw you down on the floor and put their knee in the back of your neck. They didn’t do that shit. It was a much kinder law enforcement at that time than it is today.

Anyway, we knew the jig was up when we got into the bowels of whatever lock-up they took us to. Hennepin County probably—because it was Chuck and Cliff and I and then all of a sudden, we see Don Olson and then we see Brad because they were all in the same corridor and then sort of we knew the jig was up. Maybe we hadn’t even given names up until then. I don’t remember specifically but it was a funny moment. (laughter)

KH: And you’re originally charged with something to do with sabotage—

BT: The Treason Act—

KH: That’s right, which is a big—I mean, that’s a—

BT: It was a major felony, yeah. They backed down a week later.

KH: So it was pretty quick.

BT: As I remember, and if there’s a record, correct me. No, well, actually, no. We were bailed out a week later with that—I mean, the assumption was that charge and then we got indicted. I’m the lawyer. I should know, did they take it to a grand jury? Just sort of—did they?

KH: I think so.

BT: Okay, or just make an internal charging decision and charge us with attempted interference instead of treason. I think it was the sensible thing to do. I mean, you know, it was a kinder, more Minnesotan thing. Bob Renner [Robert G. Renner, 1923-2005] was the US Attorney. He wasn’t an evil guy. He and I became friends. I tried a products liability case; a Dalkon Shield case. You know what the Dalkon Shield is. Well, I cut my teeth as a trial lawyer on the Dalkon Shield case in front of Bob Renner. He’d been made a federal judge by then; so all of a sudden, I was in front of Bob Renner for a six-week grueling trial. It was quite cool. It was way cool.

KH: So what kind of reaction—did you call anybody after you got arrested and say, hey, guess where I am? Family? Friends?

BT: Good question. I mean, my dad was dead and so I would have called Mom. Did I call Mom? Poor Mom.

KH: What was the reaction from the people who knew you, who maybe weren’t part of the movement?

BT: Well, did I see them? I don’t know. I don’t remember seeing my family—we were only in jail for a week, six days maybe. And so did Mom come to visit? Maybe, you know, she was used to it. Poor Mom. We more entertained lawyers. John Connolly came; Chet Bruvold came; Ken Tilsen came. Maybe a couple others, Jack Remington—I’m not sure who came but we sort of had a beauty contest. (laughter) Somebody—it was fun because—you probably know this— you’ve clearly done a ton of research—but the next day, a big crowd gathered outside city hall. Dave Pence’s sister Ellen was the one who had the NLF flag and broke the window. The friend I told you about who’s now the chief of cardiothoracic surgery, he’s the one who took down the American flag—

KH: Really?

BT: And put up the VC flag. I have a picture of him doing that.

KH: Interesting.

BT: He lives less than half a mile that way. Where was I going with that? So, did I call anybody? I don’t remember. It was, you know, more white kids in prison—with a whole bunch of black street kids. It was interesting.

KH: But at that point—now that you had—?

BT: But we were celebrities.

KH: Yeah, that was one—so the Committee to Defend the 8 seems to form boom! Immediately—

BT: Yeah, it really did.

KH: and there was that immediate march out there to support you all.

BT: All while we were in jail, during that first week.

KH: Yeah, that’s amazing.

BT: Yeah, I think that button—the 8 button—was created during that week.

KH: Okay, so I mean, granted, I’d assume that the people that are doing these kinds of things are part of the movement—

BT: Totally.

KH: So they’re geared up—

BT: Ellen Pence was Dave Pence’s --Ellen Pence; there’s a Minnesota 8 button. [shows artifact]

KH: Oh, yeah. Did you all have lots of contact with—I mean, I don’t know how formal a committee it was, the Committee to Defend the 8, I mean, but they printed a newsletter, right?

BT: All this shit was ad hoc, make it up as you go along.

KH: I assume that once you’re out, you know, while your trial is happening, you’re in touch with these folks?

BT: So let me think. I lived on the West River Road. It had been a Beta Theta Pi house and sort of I inherited it and then my yippie, radical friends took it over. That’s why the guy who did the whatever—I mean it was this conservative fraternity but then we ended up at the Elliot house at 3813 Elliot. When did that change occur? Marsha might know better than me. So but when we got out, when I was arrested, was I at the Elliot house by then? I don’t know—is that when I broke up with Connie? I never really thought about the specifics of those events.

But we got out and there was a committee that was already formed and you know, we were making it up as we go along so we interviewed lawyers—I’ve got to take a pee.

KH: Yeah, do you want to do this on a separate day? I mean we can even do this on a separate day if you’re getting interview fatigue.

BT: I’m at home. I’m going to have another beer. I’m happy as a clam. Would you like a beer?

KH: Nope.

BT: Would you like some coffee?

KH: Nope. I’m still good. Okay, we’re back on. So we were talking partly about the attorneys that you were considering or who were working with you in your defense or you mentioned—

BT: There were some really good attorneys around. We chose Ken Tilsen. He was first among equals and became my father figure in many ways. But John Connelly came and talked to us. John, for his entire career, until he became a judge, represented the downtrodden. Chet Bruvold, I think, was the guy who took Dave Gutknecht’s case all the way to the Supreme Court. John Graham was a lefty lawyer; I can’t remember who else we talked to. Dick Oakes might have been around. Dick Oakes was an attorney who represented once—a bunch of us were arrested for the demonstration at the university in ’70; Dick Oakes was there.

So there were a lot of good lawyers out there who were willing to mix it up and we interviewed a number and we picked Ken Tilsen. Ken became my father figure. My dad died in 1969, the same year I met Ken, so it wasn’t an accident. I’m Tilton, T-i-l-t-o-n; he’s Tilsen, T-i-l-s-e-n. I met him because—remember I said earlier I was treasurer for the Liberation Coalition, that university community group to support the Afro-American Action Committee leaders, so my first conversation with him was sitting outside in the hallway at City Hall because the courtroom was so full of community supporters and they gave precedence to the black community so I was in the hallway. So I introduced myself to Ken. “Hi, I’m treasurer of the Liberation Coalition.” So my first conversation with the man who became my father figure was saying, “Hi, how much money do you have?” I had about three dollars. We were all starving students; we raised no money.

Anyway, Ken Tilsen comes from just the most wonderful family—they’d been one of the few Jewish families in North Dakota. His father, his ancestors came to the Twin Cities in the early 1900s. His dad had the first integrated housing project in Minneapolis, Tilsenbilt Homes in South Minneapolis after World War II. That was a radical thing so these were old radical Jews. His wife, Rachel Tilsen, had been Rachel Le Sueur. Meridel Le Sueur—is that a name you’re familiar with?

KH: Oh, yes.

BT: Okay, well her [Rachel’s] mom was Meridel LeSueur, who was a sainted person, and, you know, one of the icons of the progressive movement of the thirties. So Ken was Meridel’s son-in-law and just an awesome lawyer of all sorts, even dog bite cases. One day I said, “Ken, what do you know about dog bite cases?” It turned out that the last dog bite case at the Minnesota Supreme Court had been his. I mean, he was that good and he was just also an old red diaper baby, an old lefty lawyer and did a whole lot of draft stuff and was just—all of us loved Ken; got along with Ken. And he came with Rachel. Rachel was a powerful personality. I mentioned her earlier because she was one of those with Sharon Vaughan and Monica Ehrler and stuff that started Women’s Advocates.

KH: Okay. They were married?

BT: Ken and Rachel. Oh yeah.

KH: Okay, I assumed that was the case, okay.

BT: So lawyers—we were talking about lawyers. We ended up picking Ken.

KH: Did he represent all of you?

BT: Informally, yes; formally no. Formally our trial, Ken represented Chuck and Cliff. no Chuck, because Cliff had pled. And I represented myself.

KH: That’s right.

BT: And the expectation was, Well, Bill’s going to be able to say this. I remember being at a meeting and there was like eighteen bullet points that Bill was going to say. These were things that Ken couldn’t—

KH: So that was the reason, was because you had—

BT: I could represent myself. I could give my own speech to the jury. I don’t claim that as one of my best speeches. I haven’t a clue what I said but I do remember, at one point, Well, Bill could say that, Bill could say that (laughs).

KH: So this was something that you all decided on together—that you would represent yourself because you had –?

BT: It was not a unique template to us in a political trial like this. Some were represented by counsel and some represented themselves. It made perfect sense.

KH: Okay.

BT: In the later two trials—I think Ken did all three—I don’t remember whether one of them—

KH: I think Frank did.

BT: Represented themselves. Frank would be a logical person to—

KH: Yeah, and the other one I don’t know.

BT: Very loquacious. I don’t remember. And it was Frank and Mike’s trial that was the most meaningful insofar as getting in evidence and introducing us all to Dan Ellsberg—

KH: Right, right. So, okay, I should just back up and just make sure this is on tape. You were indicted in September of 1970—

BT: Thank you.

KH: For interfering with the selective service. Those charges had been amended, reduced to this. Your trial originally was scheduled for Fergus Falls but then it gets relocated to St. Paul. Right, Judge Devitt [Edward James Devitt, 1911-1992]?

BT: Yes, Judge Devitt.

KH: And now Judge—I did—I read Ken Tilsen’s book, Judging the Judges about Judge Devitt and Judge Neville [Philip Neville, 1909-1974] and others, mostly about those two and Judge Devitt—well, tell me about Judge Devitt. Let me open it that way.

BT: Ed Devitt was an old patrician. Came from a political family, looked right out of central casting, you know, good looking, good big features—a white mane of hair. He was a smart man and he excelled in just nerdy legal scholarship I think when he was in law school writing about like civil procedure or something. I can’t remember but Devitt and Blackmar became a treatise within the legal profession, just a well-regarded authority in some arcane aspect. Didn’t he run for the House of Representatives as a Republican and might have lost? And that’s—so he was popular in Republican politics and must have been nominated by Eisenhower because he’d been around forever. He was an institution and a classic imperious judge and a conservative guy.

And so he was the judge for the first two trials and was sort of no nonsense, “I’m not going to let you bring your politics into my courtroom.” You know, he thought we were just unfortunate, totally misguided miscreants that deserved to be punished. He didn’t pretend to be impartial --so his rulings were that—in the first case we didn’t make an offer. The second case Chuck—Ken might have made an offer. In the first case we thought we’d just sort of try to see if we could get jury nullification based upon lack of evidence or whatever. It didn’t work. My speech wasn’t that good. Where was I going with that?

I can’t remember—was it—the kind of offer of proof that was made for Mike and Frank’s trial, the third trial by Judge Neville included Marv Davidov; included Alan Hooper; included Dan Ellsberg prominently. He had the Pentagon Papers with him at the trial to admit into evidence as a way to preserve them, to get them into the public record in a permanent way and Judge Neville—that was the brink over which they did not go. It was interesting.

So going back to Ed Devitt, he was a stern guy, just the facts, Ma’am, as I see them, as I want to let them in and a jury convicted us fairly quickly.

KH: And it seems that I read somewhere, too, that unlike Judge Neville, Judge Devitt didn’t allow much time between what? The time you were indicted and the time your trial was—?

BT: We had a hurry-up trial. You told me that the indictment came out in September. We went to trial in November.

KH: Okay.

BT: And then it was what? A two-day trial? I don’t remember. It was very quick and then it was over and we were convicted and it was like the one gift we had is we did not go to jail. Today guys go to jail much more readily, are not permitted to continue their bond during an appeal. It was more common then, being released on bond while the case was on appeal. I don’t think we got special treatment; I think it was more common then.

KH: So what do you remember about your trial and the atmosphere in the courtroom?

BT: Hardly a thing.

KH: Really?

BT: Yeah, I don’t want to pretend otherwise. It happened so fast. It was—you’re a little bit in a dream state. It’s a little bit Kafkaesque even though I know I gave a speech and talked about dead bodies piling up in Vietnam. I never felt that I rose to the occasion, that I was saying something so moving that it would take these, you know, friends and neighbors to ignore the law.

KH: Right, well, okay—that would have been—Okay, so here’s what I have in my notes here. What does it say? So, you addressed the court, of course you would have since you were representing yourself, and do you remember having any special words for US Marshal Harry Berglund?

BT: I called him a pig. “Harry, you’re a pig.”

KH: And that he may have been—he would have been a good SS Trooper?

BT: Did I say that? Yeah, I might have. (laughter)

KH: And it looks like twelve or more protesters were removed from court on the first day of your trial for refusing to stand when Judge Devitt entered?

BT: Yeah, I acknowledged most of that; I can remember that.

KH: So it sounds like, I mean, it was—I know, for example, with the Yippies and juries and all that and the Democratic National Convention and their trial of the century, you know, there’s an element of theatricality to some of these—and I think, by design, they’re intentional.

BT: Totally, and expected of them.

KH: So do you think there was any of that at play in your trial? I mean, maybe you don’t remember. Maybe it wasn’t. I don’t know.

BT: No, I mean I’d like to say we were total Yippies, just so successful. No, our first trial was bring it to the point, as you say, some people didn’t stand. That’s not a Yippie action so much as just a silent protest action and actually the day we went to the Chicago 7 conspiracy trial was

97 either the day or a day when Abbie [Hoffman] and Jerry Rubin showed up in judges’ robes. So I was there that day. (laughter)

We didn’t have enough time. They had weeks, weeks to think about, what are we doing tomorrow? We didn’t.

KH: Were you surprised at the verdict?

BT: No, we were guilty. Damn. It’s what you are. It’s pretty hard to defend the guilty.

KH: Yeah, so on what grounds did you appeal?

BT: I don’t remember. I’m sure that we weren’t permitted to stridently enough protest how there was an illegal war going on; it was necessary to stop the war machine.

KH: Because that was—

BT: That was fundamentally why we did.

KH: Right, and that was part of the goal of the trial, having a trial, right? Was to bring those ideas in and—which Judge Neville did allow to some degree by allowing all these other people to testify, Dan Ellsberg and Staughton Lynd and all these guys but then ends up telling the jury that that’s not relevant. But Judge Devitt just kind of closed the door on that from the outset. Okay, at any rate, the appeal is not successful.

BT: I’m sure some things were better thought out by the time Mike and Frank [went to trial] and I think—it’s not like we planned on being arrested. If I’d had a playbook for who our witnesses should be. It’s all a lot of ad hoc shit going on.

KH: So when you’re convicted—and the appeal was not successful—so you are sentenced to five years in federal prison. All of you are.

BT: Yep. Actually I think Pete and Brad were sentenced under the youth act and got six years—

KH: Oh, that’s right.

BT: So it’s a little strange quirk. So they might have been eligible for release sooner— it didn’t make any difference, so they might have got six.

KH: And—but were you all sent to different prisons?

BT: I think five of us went to five different places. We turned ourselves in on a cold morning. I think we had some ceremony at the cemetery near Fort Snelling. And I went to Milan; Brad went to Terre Haute. We went to five different places and Pete went to Colorado and Don went to Missouri. Is that right? [note: Frank Kroncke and Mike Therriault served sentences at the

Federal Correctional Institution, Sandstone, in Sandstone, MN] I don’t blame them for suspecting that if more than one of them were together they could become critical mass and cause trouble. I don’t blame them. I didn’t—I was in the hole until I met with the warden. He sort of looked me eye to eye and asked me if I was going to cause trouble. He was a good guy. We had a good warden.

KH: Okay. So by this time—I had asked you earlier how well you knew each other beforehand. How well did you know each other by the time you’re all sent off to prison through the whole trial? I mean are you in pretty close contact? Certainly those of you who were on trial together, I would assume are of necessity in touch with each other.

BT: Yeah, but, so Cliff disappears to history. Did I spend a lot of time with Chuck? I certainly, at the time I’m sure I did. Brad and Don are the ones I’ve gotten to know the best and been in touch with most over the years. You know, Brad’s—he and I did do a trip. We did a trip out to—we were on appeal bond for over a year.

KH: Right. Okay.

BT: We took a trip, did LSD at Big Sur. We had a great time. He was so bold. His now wife was living with another man in like Port Townsend, some obscure part of Washington State. We had to take a ferry to get there. She was living with another guy and so he and I stopped by to hang out for a couple of days. Damn, Brad, you’re bold! Damn, you’re bold!

KH: Apparently it worked.

BT: Well, she’s head of women’s medicine at the University of Minnesota, Carolyn Torkelson, and so Brad—so somebody’s got it a little better now. Don has just been one of those constants. He’s been just a sainted man and sort of an instructor and a quiet sage and example his whole life.

KH: So did the moniker, which was very in keeping with the times, the Minnesota 8— granted Cliff kind of was on the periphery there once he pleads guilty, but does that—?

BT: He wasn’t that involved while we were in jail. I think the button was made while we were in jail.

KH: So does that impose a certain kind of unity among you that didn’t necessarily exist?

BT: Of course, of course.

KH: And that’s what becomes this whole legacy, is the Minnesota 8 as if you were more cohesive a group than perhaps you were, at least at the beginning for sure.

BT: Oh, of course. I hardly knew—I didn’t know some of them and hardly knew the others. It’s not like we hung together. We don’t hang together now! But we’re all, you know, we’re all still progressively political in that regard and we built this bond so we’re forced to hang out with

99 each other now and then. Some are better at keeping in touch, you know. Pete’s good at keeping in touch; Frank is good; Chuck is good; I guess I am; Brad’s in and out. Don just—Don sort of has a website; sort of has email. (laughter) He’s just sort of in that world.

KH: So you go to Milan? That’s how you pronounce it, Milan?

BT: Milan FCI—Milan Federal Correctional Institution.

KH: So tell me about your time in prison. You said, well, you said this of many things. It was fun. What was fun about prison?

BT: Oh, I played a lot of hand ball--I was buff. I was in good shape. I had a couple of very dear friends. Pete Walsh, whom I’d known from Cretin High School, was a year behind me at Cretin. He’d become accustomed to heroin when he was in Vietnam and got busted and he was doing time.

KH: There?

BT: In Milan. And Bob Wollach, “R.E.,” was in jail from New York. He’d been in there for dealing cocaine and I mean, we had plenty of other friends, some of whom are still alive. But so I hearken back to those friends. They both went into social work. Pete didn’t want to come back here; too many of his friends were into heroin and Bob didn’t want to go back to New York because all his friends were into drugs so they both got MSWs there in Michigan; and in the mid- eighties, hit a glass ceiling at Boysville, because they weren’t priests so they started their own organization. So I always associated the prison with my present association with Wolverine Human Services, which is about to have its thirty-first annual banquet this April. It’s one of the largest social service agencies in the Midwest. They have seven hundred employees. It was started by my buddy from prison; but I take some credit [for encouraging him to go to college]. “You’re as smart as anybody I met in college.” I’d tell him, “Why are you going back on the streets to cut meat and start dealing again?”

So, in any case, so prison was a big eye opener. I grew up, you know, in St. Paul, right? And so it’s a big introduction to the African-American community; big introduction to just the streets. I wasn’t without some experience but it was a new level—it was a new level itself and so you’ve got people like an Italian wannabe, made man gangster from Ohio; and the brothers from Chicago don’t necessarily get along with the brothers from D.C. and the Muslims are over here, threatening the rest and seeming weird until the minister wants to borrow your Penthouse Magazine. It—so it’s a system full of characters, total characters of all sorts. And so it was— when we turned ourselves in, we spent a week in the Hennepin County Jail. County jails are much worse than prisons.

KH: That’s what—

BT: There’s no room. You’re all on top of each other. I was in a cellblock. One guy was on trial every day, got dressed up in a suit. He was on trial for murder. He was a total legitimate tough guy. I wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley. Another guy, who they tried to make my

100 cellmate for a minute and I objected and they whatever—he was in for taking a hatchet to his mother and his sister. Sometimes—and then other people who were really good at the jailhouse games, Euchre—there were a couple of games—cribbage, you don’t even need a board. You just keep score; you know, you play a lot of cards.

A week there and then a week in—a week in Hennepin and a week in Cook County– or one of the two; I can’t remember. The Chicago jail was so noisy; so noisy—it was just all metal, you know, the classic big doors and whatever and they let guys have radios so WLS is in this cell competing with some other station [in the cell on the other side].

KH: Why Cook County? Chicago?

BT: It was just on the way to Michigan; it might have been deciding as we went where we were going to be sent to. Who knows? They weren’t that efficient and they make it up as they go along, too, in some ways.

KH: Right, okay.

BT: Anyway, by the time I got to prison, all of a sudden, it wasn’t as noisy, right? I was in a dorm with fifty guys I suppose and you just sort of, you know, I’m a big enough guy; people don’t give me shit. And so it’s not like I had any trouble.

KH: And so you, because you were in good shape so you had to kind of do that. Did you have a job? Did you read? Did you write? What did you do?

BT: I—they wanted me to teach in the education and they acted like that was a favor for them so I said, “I’ll do you that favor if you let me take VT.” So I taught remedial reading, which I would have done anyway because it would have been fun but they were looking for somebody educated to teach remedial reading. And so I also got to take vocational training. I took some auto mechanics; I took apart a Harley Knucklehead, totally put it back together. It worked. Didn’t get past second gear. I didn’t have much room inside the walls. And then automotive mechanics.

So that first half of my bit I worked in the education department and took VT. Second half I worked—I had a warehouse/kitchen job. It was one of the jobs where you had access to controlled stuff; since the food had to come down from the warehouse and stuff gets stolen. You’ve got a block of cheese it’s going to get stolen. You got a block of this, you know, yeast was really valuable. That was kept in back with the knives and the meat.

KH: Yeast?

BT: Yeast so you can make jack/alcohol.

KH: Oh, of course.

BT: Yeast is really important, oh, yeah. Yeast is worth its weight in gold in prison.

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KH: Sure.

BT: And so the warehouse job was—everything that came down came by me. I always had a guard on my tail but they were lazy and stupid and whatever; and I could always steal stuff. And so my best friend, R.E., who started Wolverine Human Services, he was the butcher. He’d worked in the meat industry out in Brooklyn and became the butcher of the prison, so that’s where the yeast was kept and the knives and the meat. It’s sort of an interesting deal. They’d lock them inside, all the guys with the knives, because cutting up big sides of beef (laughter) in a couple of cases. But R.E., was just sort of one of the white guys from Brooklyn, had them all scared. He’s the guy that started Wolverine Human Services.

So what was prison like? You know, you get into a routine, all you need is, what was it? We have three hots and a cot. All we need is a toke and a poke. And many times we had reefer so.

KH: Were there other draft resisters, offenders, whatever?

BT: There were, there were. Not many, and I didn’t hang necessarily with people from that milieu. I’d be assigned to watch over for them. I didn’t have trouble but, you know, imagine yourself as some stupid, not very big, wallflower white guy coming in; people prey on you. And [I’d have to advise them that] that guy that was giving you a cigarette and kissing you is not doing it because he’s your friend. And so I occasionally got assigned—Tilton (laughter) what’s- his-name just got kissed by Montgomery up in F2 south so you better go clue him in. So there were draft resisters. Some of them only had short time by then. Kids were getting six month sentences so you’d hardly get to know them. They’d only be there for three or four months. And I liked, you know, common stoners. My milieu in prison was not other resisters.

KH: Okay, so whether in prison or at other times and in other places, when you had contact or ran into or got to know Vietnam vets, what was their reaction to you once they understood that you had opposed the war and that you had done this draft board thing?

BT: I’ve always gotten along very well with vets. And I’ve had a couple of them tell me that effectively going to prison gave me spurs, or stripes, or whatever metaphor you want to use, probably stripes because it’s prison. In any case, correct, including from Chuck [Logan]. I mean Chuck was a legitimate combat vet, spent his entire tour of duty up by the DMZ and is certainly deserved because of it. And so I’ve gone along with that and actually Chuck I’d met before I went to prison. We met at the Hundred Flowers office. He’s the one that did the controversial cartoon. He decided he was going to be a cartoonist. He didn’t go back to Detroit because he woke up with a gun with a bullet missing and he decided he ought to leave town.

In any case, we met at Hundred Flowers. I remember Chuck walked in with a case of beer on his hip saying, “Tilton, let’s go get drunk.” He wrote the Hundred Flowers cartoon where two laid back stoners are up against the wall with, you know, marijuana smoke drifting above them and huge breast is coming in the wall, and one guy says to the other, “Cool it, man it’s a bust.” And that was Chuck’s style. He’s the author in Stillwater.

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So he was—he’s my sort of image of vets and they’re just—they’re gnarly guys, you know, , you give them a smile and they’re just as whatever.

KH: There has been a lot of conversation and writing about the relationship between the antiwar movement and government and soldiers, much of which has been based on the assumption, whether correct or not, that it was a relationship of animosity, that veterans felt targeted by the antiwar movement. So while you were at—opposing the war, you know, through the Minnesota 8 stuff or while you were on campus or whatever, what was the general tone or attitude towards those guys who were serving, or your relationship to them for that matter?

BT: The guys who were serving?

KH: Or had come back, either way.

BT: Well, that’s a big difference because we didn’t know people who were serving. I mean, it’s not like there were service members around the Twin Cities. There aren’t today.

KH: Right, but were you—

BT: So the guys who came back, they were the category of Chuck Logan. They were tougher; they were edgier; people were more afraid of them than hostile to them. I know there’s many stories of Vietnam veterans returning who were treated in a disparaging way and that mortifies me. That was not my experience. I did not see people do that. I did not witness that. I occasionally witnessed people who looked down on vets but that was pretty rare. There was a fairly good understanding that these guys were cannon fodder. Whether you’re true believers or not, these guys were not the reason for the problem. And I just think that in general, people who didn’t have that experience were timid about approaching those who did. They were a little bit fearful and so, to the extent that some people felt disdained, if that’s a word, it might have been self-imposed or just a misperception of other people’s reluctance to engage because it was fearful to go to the Vets House, because these were some tough guys, all right? And it wasn’t because you hated them or whatever it’s just that it was the unknown and so to the extent that might reflect the other, you know, sort of psychology of people in my group or that group or—I don’t know. Is that true? You tell me; you’re the one that’s studied it more.

KH: Well, part of the reason I ask the question—when I taught this history to students, right, the general assumption is that the antiwar movement—and veterans will talk about this as I’ve said—that the antiwar movement spat on us when we got back home; they called us baby killer, you know, they were kind of uniformly hostile towards those who were serving and/or the vets.

BT: What percentage of people do you really think that happened to besides getting reported on?

KH: Right, and that is my belief.

BT: Okay.

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KH: And particularly when you look at a lot of photos, whether from here or elsewhere of these antiwar rallies where, you know, the signs are “Bring the Troops Home Now.” They’re very—

BT: It was led by the vets. The front row was always, yeah, you guys are up front.

KH: Right, and so to me, as a historian when I’m looking at some of this stuff and I have not been specifically been looking for this kind of stuff, but I see it, it seems to me that if anything, the antiwar movement was doing their work on behalf of these guys who were serving.

BT: We totally believed that. Holy Cow! The motivation for us was we didn’t want to be that cannon fodder. Holy Cow! Yeah, a lot of people in the antiwar movement, maybe me, because don’t put me on that line. Don’t put my friends out there. So in my perception I got along with vets all the time. If there was timidity, it was mine, but if there was fear and misperception of awkward connections, that may have been more on the vets’ side if so many people; because I did not see anybody spit on or come down on a soldier because he’d been a soldier. It was not part of my experience.

KH: Well, and the Nixon administration was certainly fostering that animosity.

BT: They would highlight it if it ever happened and so you take one apocryphal or one story, whatever, and it becomes apocryphal; it becomes what happened and it becomes sort of shorthand for one of the issues of the day like you—

KH: And it was a way to discredit Nixon’s political opponent.

So how much time—you were sentenced to five years. How much time did you actually end up serving?

BT: Twenty months.

KH: Twenty months. So almost two, a little shy of two?

BT: Yep.

KH: And you were all paroled or let out, released, the same month?

BT: Correct. The same day except for me. I stayed in—I got held in over a weekend because I had an asshole caseworker. My parole job was [going to be a] happy stoner painter around here-- so I missed the big party.

KH: So there was a big hoop-di-do?

BT: I’m told, I’m told, I’m told. What happened—Mike and Frank, remember, had the last trial in front of Philip Neville and he gives the same sentence as Devitt. He said he had to. But I think he’s sort of thinking, I want these boys out. And I’d gone to the parole board, as had the

104 other five, and we’d all been sent off for like forty months. We aren’t even coming back to the parole board until ’74 or ’75. As far as Mike and Frank go, I think Neville said, get these boys out. They go to the parole board and they get a hurry up release date. Hurry up, soon, like less than a year. Did they only do seven months? They might have gotten a release date in less than a year. And so as soon as that happened, well, hey, how about us? And so Ken wrote a couple of letters and Mondale might have written a letter, Senator [Walter] Mondale. If the later going are getting out then the earlier ought to be getting out at least at the same time. So we all got out at the same time. So all of sudden they reopened and paroled us, same time.

Watergate had happened. I was able to watch on TV in my job in the kitchen and then for the, yeah, it gave me time in the day to watch TV and John Dean was testifying. I remember watching John Dean testify in prison. It was pretty funny. It was vindication, man.

KH: Well, yeah.

BT: It was total vindication.

KH: So what do you do when you get out?

BT: Paint houses. Paint houses and it was in this neighborhood—in one of these big houses. Standing high up, like thirty feet up in some, scraping paint above my head in ninety-degree weather, I had decided I’m going to law school. This is what I can do for money. I’d been admitted to law school back in ’69 and didn’t go and so took the LSAT’s again and tested well and I got in. And so that winter, Church Turchick got me to go to a meeting. They were moving the Wounded Knee trials here, the leadership trial of Dennis [Banks] and Russell [Means].

And I went for an hour meeting and I ended up working on that double time for the next eight months. They needed somebody to go do some research and a woman raised her hand who I knew to be incompetent so I raised my hand. I didn’t know how to do it but I was dating Diane Wiley. Diane Wiley is a legendary person. I think I gave you her name and her information.

KH: You did.

BT: Diane Wiley—she had just returned from six months in the Greek Islands. She was young and hard and buff and as tan as can be. But she also was a professional data gatherer and tester and so the early jury work started out of the Catonsville Nine. Jay Schulman brought jury work here for the Wounded Knee leadership trials, [and I got Dianne involved and she worked with Jay and out of that came]the National Jury Project, which has been around since then, since 1973 and Diane Wiley was there at the beginning.

So I’m free associating now. What happened—I painted house for a while; I went to that damn meeting; I forget where I was working. It’ll come around to me where I was working. That would have been ’73, ’74. But I worked on it and then it was fricking full-time Wounded Knee. I was just an idiot; full-time, whatever. They moved the Wounded Knee Leadership Trials here and I was sort of office manager for the outreach office, the legal stuff was at Ken Tilsen’s office where I ended up practicing law then years later and in the Nalpak building on Sibley. We had a

105 big suite where we fed people with fry bread and we had the reporters come and we printed up leaflets and whatever.

So that’s where I met—Margaret Moos came to volunteer there. She was at MPR. And she met me and I was looking for a job because I couldn’t be working on the Wounded Knee Defense Committee while I was in law school and so she hooked me up with my first job at Minnesota Public Radio. So it’s because of Wounded Knee that I worked at Minnesota Public Radio.

KH: And then you finished law school in what? Seventy-seven?

BT: Yep, ’77. And then I applied to join the bar to be permitted to take the bar exam. [I was betting on] the outcome [by going to three years of aw school without knowing if they’d let me become a lawyer]. And after Nixon and Watergate and Haldeman and Ehrlichman and twenty lawyers going down in the Nixon administration, who are these schmos to tell me I’m not moral enough to be a lawyer? And I also figured, if I can’t become a lawyer, I’ll do something else with it. I just didn’t want to paint houses. I respect people who paint houses; I don’t want to do it. So I became a lawyer. And I ended up renting from Ken Tilsen. Instead of going for a job, I ended up paying him money.

KH: So how did your experiences as an activist, as an organizer, as an antiwar person, as a member of the Minnesota 8, as a—somebody who had served time in federal prison—how have those affected your practice of law or have they?

BT: Of course they have. How have they? I don’t know. I mean, it molded me as a person. I think I’m a better lawyer because I’ve spent some time in prison, you know, because I’ve given speeches, because I’ve done all this ad hoc organizing. I’m comfortable talking to people. That came out of the antiwar movement, right? You know, I did debate at Cretin High School, but I hadn’t planned to make public presentations like I got experience doing in the antiwar movement. And so that helped mold who I am, you know. I’m the big, loud guy. People want me to be their mouthpiece. I know I wasn’t that guy when I left Cretin High School.

KH: So what do you think—kind of turning towards wrapping up here—what do you think the impact of the antiwar movement was on the war itself or the government’s ability to wage that war? Did it help put an end to the war?

BT: Oh, I think it helped. That may be hubris; may be self-deception, but I like to think that because of political pressure, they did not carpet bomb villages any more than they did. I don’t want to say that they didn’t do things. I do think that calling people out morally does temper their—I think wars were more cruel in the past. Genghis Khan thought nothing of eliminating cities and cultures. You know, Jews didn’t go from slavery in Egypt to slavery in Babylonia, or was it vice versa, by accident. People were cruel to each other and so war is cruel now and we count in hundreds the number of people, civilians that were killed in Syria this week if not yesterday.

But, you know, I do think because there’s that moral loudspeaker out there, I think things are tempered. I think that war could have been crueler or could have lasted longer. Maybe I’m self-

106 deceived. I’m also embarrassed that, you know, that marijuana’s not legal; that George W. Bush represented my generation in the White House. You know, as much as we hate Donald Trump, he hasn’t yet invaded Iraq.

KH: Yeah, that’s a thought. I was going to ask you just—. Boy that one’s gone; it came and it went.

BT: Well, tell me something about you. Robbinsdale High School?

KH: Robbinsdale-Cooper not technically Robbinsdale High School because those closed.

BT: Robbinsdale-Cooper, excuse me.

KH: Doggone, what the heck?

BT: Do I remember where you went to college? Are you going to say University of Minnesota?

KH: Oh, I know, we’ll come back to me. All right.

BT: Promises, promises.

KH: We talked earlier a little bit about the legacy of the Minnesota 8 in your life. Peace Crimes, the play, comes out in 2008. What was that experience like for you?

BT: It was fun.

KH: Do you think it served a purpose? Was it good seeing this play out there? Did it capture the attention—? Do you have a sense of how successful it was in capturing the attention of audiences?

BT: I don’t. I mean, it had a nice audience. I think what the History Theatre does is sacred— that they remind people of history and to a certain extent, our experience is a good education in how—in all sorts of things. I mean, I could wax poetic here-- you know, how government does stupid things and people need to resist it and we need to remember that, etcetera, etcetera. History Theatre does that on a regular basis; they tell some wonderful stories.

So with the legacy of the Minnesota 8—so you asked me what the import was of that Rarig Center event?

KH: Yeah.

BT: It was fun; it was great. Was it profound? You tell me. It was profound for my friend Frank. I mean, he’d written that book when we got out of jail and he was so earnest; he was so consumed and he—gave us manuscripts, I think, gratuitously, and we didn’t want to read it, his friends. I remember Brad and I started laughing, Have you read Frank’s book yet? And then

107 months later, Have you read Frank’s book yet? And so Peace Crimes was Frank’s story; it was probably my story, too. I don’t want to, you know, say I wasn’t a character there but it was sort of Frank’s story.

Frank had a kind of more profound prison experience. He had a more profound antiwar experience. He is a more heartfelt person than I am. So the impact of the play? I thought it was wonderful.

KH: Did you find yourself to some degree in the spotlight again? Were you happy that you were getting more attention for this part of your past?

BT: I’m sure I was. I hadn’t thought about it that way but I’m sure I was pleased. I enjoy talking about this stuff. I had fun doing it. I think it was worthwhile stuff. When people ask questions about it that reassures me that it must have been worthwhile and, you know, how did I learn but by listening to other people and to their stories? Like I said, we made up a lot of stuff but you sort of draw on what you’ve heard about other things. I also got to renew my friendship with Dan Ellsberg. He stayed in my house so the third floor—I lived about four blocks away in a house this size except we had the whole house; and so the third floor was my Dan Ellsberg suite. All right? He’s one of my heroes and so—I liked the play. I was happy to do the play; I was happy it happened.

KH: I remember what I was going to ask. It has come back to me. Looking back now from your vantage point in 2018, and looking back to those years while you were on campus organizing against the war, doing the draft board raid, is there anything that you either would have done differently or regret?

BT: Oh, yeah, you’re supposed to ask that. Yeah—

KH: No—I’ll ask the converse later.

BT: Are you really glad you did? I could have been nicer to my mom, you know, I know I took my poor mom for granted. She was just a wonderful, sainted person who was always there for me and then the poor girl—Dad had just died in November ’69, and then her oldest son gets arrested and it seemed like the end of the world to her. I think it was harder on her than on me. In retrospect, I have more of an appreciation for that.

Do I have other regrets? I could have been kinder to this person or that person, but otherwise, I know how lucky I’ve been. I mean that, yeah, so I know how lucky I’ve been. And so I’m stronger because I went to prison and so I’m sort of glad I did.

KH: Somewhere I read—and now I’m—

BT: I’ve done some other things. I’ve traveled all over the world. I’ve hitchhiked across the Sahara Desert. I’ve climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. I’ve done, you know, tried a few cases so we’re focusing on what happened in ’69 and ’70, but I’ve done a few other things.

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KH: Oh right, clearly, yes, this is what? Let’s say 1965 to 1973; maybe a ten-year period, just a portion of a life. Oh dear, things are coming and going very quickly.

BT: Do you want a beer yet?

KH: No, that would not help. Anything that you’re particularly—oh, I know sorry transcriber—I read somewhere—maybe it was that Rolling Stone piece—where you said, at that time, that if you had known you were going to be arrested, you wouldn’t have done it. Does that still hold?

BT: Sure.

KH: Now you have all of these additional years of retrospect to look back on and —you know, you say you’ve benefited from prison—looking back now would you still say, If I had known I was going to get arrested, I still wouldn’t have done it?

BT: I still agree with what I said in that article insofar as, at that age, if I’d known, no, I wouldn’t have done it. I just—because I wasn’t that much into civil disobedience. The Milwaukee 14 had tremendous effect by removing and destroying selective service records, napalming them and waiting around to be arrested. I wasn’t that guy. I respected them. I was more the guy—there were other raids that were successful. I wanted to be that guy. I wanted to throw some grit into the gears of the war machine. I mean, that’s what we were doing, you know, and we’re going to succeed here and then we’re going to do it again until they cried uncle. We were just going to keep up the struggle. And I suppose we did.

Did they cry uncle? That was your question earlier? Did they cry uncle? I do think that things were kinder than they could have been and hopefully shorter than they were. You like to think that education for social change has some effect and I believe it does. I believe it does but it’s also a pendulum. I mean, we have some assholes in the White House right now; assholes in charge of the Congress, so, you know, the struggle goes on.

KH: And perhaps this is—perhaps you’ve already answered this question and again, I understand that in asking you this question when we’ve been focusing on this relatively small portion of your life, that it may not reflect your most honest answer to it, but looking back at this period of your life, what are you most pleased about or most proud of?

BT: Oh, I’m proud that I stood up for my principles; I’m proud that I acted on my principles; I’m proud to have so many friends who were cool people. Like I said, who sort of walked the talk or Don Olson, my law partner, or you know, Rose Freeman Massey from the Triple AAAC. I’m privileged to have known some very cool people.

We haven’t talked about Eddie Felien; we haven’t talked about—there’s all sorts of cool people around that I’ve been privileged to know and be part of. So I’m proud that I’ve been an active member of my community. I’m proud and I will brag to say I think I’ve been right more often than not on social issues.

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Plus I’ve raised three wonderful daughters. We haven’t talked about any of that.

KH: No, not much we haven’t. Given that, that I know the answer—that we haven’t talked about a lot of things—is there anything else that you want to make sure we do talk about and get on tape?

BT: Oh man, once you leave, I’ll go through these boxes, I’ll think of twenty-seven different things. So no, you’re a very good listener; you’re a very good interviewer. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this stuff.

KH: Well, it’s been great.

BT: Yes, you’re a great researcher and you gather great data. I hope it’s appreciated. Well, I mean, you did the yeoman’s service with these nurses—the Vietnam nurses. It was interesting it came out of a sort of different direction and you happened upon it, right?

KH: Yes, very different. Well, thank you so much, Bill for doing this. This has been invaluable.

End of interview

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