Transcript of Oral History Interview with George Mische

Oral history interviews of the Vietnam Era Oral History Project

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Version 3 August 20, 2018 George Mische Narrator

Kim Heikkila Interviewer

September 28, 2018

George Mische -GM 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 Friday, September 28, 2018, and I’m here with George Mische. My name is Kim Heikkila. Today I’ll be talking to George about his role and experiences in the antiwar and draft resistance movement, including his role as a member of the Catonsville 9 [Catonsville, MD, May 17, 1968]. So, thank you so much, George, for sitting down and talking to me.

GM: Sure, you bet. Happy to do it.

KH: So, as I said earlier, I’ll start with about five questions that you can answer pretty briefly and then we can kind of go back and get the story.

GM: Sure.

KH: So, if you could just start by stating and spelling your name?

GM: George Mische. M-i-s-c-h-e.

KH: Okay. And when and where were you born?

GM: St. Cloud, Minnesota, on July 30, 1937.

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

GM: Well, both sides of my family are Germanic background—my dad’s father grew up in Germany and my mother here in central Minnesota, up where all those Germans live in Minnesota.

12 KH: All right. And I know I just said this in the introduction, but if there are other things that you identify yourself with in terms of antiwar efforts or antiwar organizations during the Vietnam era, what are those?

GM: Well, you know, when I came back from Latin America, I really was focused a lot on Latin America and it took a while to tune in to what was happening in Southeast Asia and all of a sudden, I thought, Oh my god, this is exactly the bad policy that we’ve had in Latin America. And that had gotten me involved and I had done a lot of lecturing around the United States against US foreign policy over and around United States, Canada and Mexico, after I got back. And then, when I started to focus in on Southeast Asia and realized that all this nonsense about being a buffer with communism, it never was about communism; it was about the same thing in Latin America: natural resources. We wanted to control the natural resources in Southeast Asia, oil and everything else that was there, and that was basically our policy in Africa and all over Latin America.

And I started realizing that American people are buying into this crap, what our foreign policy was about, and at the time of Vietnam, you know, at the time of Catonsville, 78 percent of the American people supported what was happening in Vietnam, what we were doing. And, you know, it was all fraud. And, what was interesting—by the time of the Camden 28 [Camden, NJ, August 22, 1971] action in 1972 and after that [it was] just the opposite, 75 to 76 percent of the people were opposed to what we were doing there, and also in Central America with the Contras. And that’s why, for the longest time, they had to cool it about what we were doing in our foreign policy. And unfortunately, it started all over again the way it was fifty years ago but, you know, what the US policy is.

One of the interesting experiences I had a couple years ago—at Augsburg [Augsburg University, Minneapolis, MN]—I can’t remember the name of the national organization that funded this, but there was a program in June—I think it was two years ago—at Augsburg where they brought in teachers for I think it was two or three weeks and they were from all over the Midwest and it was to try to get them to be able to have the ability to have meaningful courses at a high school level on a whole bunch of issues, which was really interesting.

So they contacted me—one of the days they wanted to have dedicated to was the antiwar movement by focusing on the Catonsville 9. And I agreed to do it and what you had to do—all these teachers who came in—they split them into three groups and they all had to read Dan Berrigan’s [Daniel Joseph Berrigan (1921-2016)] book, The Trial of the Catonsville 9, [The Trial of the Catonsville 9, by Daniel Berrigan, Beacon Press, 1970] which I hadn’t read in years and years. Had to read that and then the teachers split up into three groups. One-third of the teachers represented the prosecution; one-third of the teachers represented the defense; and one-third the jury. And so they enacted that whole thing and then I was to critique it in the afternoon and have questions.

And so I read the book a couple days before and chuckled at a few things that were in there. And one of the questions was, Well, you know, what do you think when you look back at that and where things are today? And I said, “Yeah,” I was—Tom Lewis [Thomas P. Lewis (1940-2008)] wasn’t a real articulate guy; he stumbled a lot when he talked, but he was a sincere guy and he’s trying to get the judge to understand. And the judge, by the way, during the trial, was trying to convince us and the audience how he kind of was sympathetic to us, or he understood it because, after all, his father was a Baptist minister. And we never let him to that. Every time he tried to—he’d get close to us, we’d be like, No, no. We’re not on the same wave length.

And Tom Lewis is trying to tell the judge how terrible our foreign policy is and the judge says, “Now, Mr. Lewis, aren’t you exaggerating a little bit how bad things are?” He said, “Your honor, you don’t understand. Do you realize that the United States has military bases and troops in twenty-six or twenty-seven countries?” And I laughed. I told the teachers, I said, “The reality is today,”—two years ago—“that we have military operations in one hundred and forty countries around the world. So, it’s dramatically worse today than it was way back then.”

And, you know, I was pretty sympathetic to almost any group in the country—SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] I thought did a great job on campus and getting the think tanks that were rampant with the faculty across America, who were doing all these programs on campuses, you know, public forums. I remember coming into St. Cloud State [St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, MN] to do one and slept down here in Minneapolis, that was making people understand that there’s another side to what our foreign policy is. And that’s how the whole movement started.

And then SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] —you know, people don’t understand what happened in the sixties. It wasn’t just one thing that was going on. When H. Rap Brown [Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, aka H. Rap Brown, (1943-)] took over SNCC from Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture, aka Stokely Carmichael (1941-1998)], Stokely said to the press, “You think I’m bad. Wait till you see this guy who’s taking over for me.” And Rap really was into organizing in the south on taking over elections and what not. And how many students from the north were going south during the summers hooking up with SNCC with their stuff?

And Mario Savio [Mario Savio (1941-1996)] with the Free Speech Movement out in Berkeley [Berkeley, CA] was a whole other dimension. The women’s movement was really starting to build. You know, I always—National Welfare Rights League [National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO)]—is that the name of it? I think of the women way back then. They had a great organization. So all this stuff was happening and campuses were building—which we see today with—I think the circumstances in America are identical to the way it was fifty years ago. Look at how the students have responded in Florida finally and all the organizing. They’re out there on campuses getting people registered to vote. The Black Lives Matter stuff—so people are looking today the

14 same way they did then about how do we get our hands around the throat of the monster in a sense and do something besides peeing in a snowbank. Let’s really try to find something that’s effective, that changes public policy.

So that was part of the long, you know, view of things that affected myself in converging to see that Latin America and Southeast Asia were the same phenomena.

KH: So tell me a little bit about your background. You were born in St. Cloud. Did you grow up there?

GM: Yes. If anybody would have told me when I grew up that someday I was going to end up in prison because of the US military, I would have said, “What are you smoking?”

And, you know, a buddy of mine and I were dating a couple gals that we thought—it was very clear—we hooked up real fast for the rest of our life. And we decided to go and get the military thing over because then—the draft was there, you know, it was before Vietnam. But still, you had to go down and register and eventually you had to go in. And we enlisted.

And when I got out of the military, one of the places I was at was Fort Jackson, South Carolina. And the racism was very clearly there because in my company there were three platoons and two of them were all white and one was basically all black. And I had a civil rights background in my family; one of my brothers, Will, had started up one of the first successful Catholic Workers [Catholic Worker Movement] in Chicago and that was my first introduction, you know, about the plight of minorities [trying to survive] in this country.

And so I started to hang around with these guys in the black dorm and most of them were from New York City and all the stories I heard about them living in Harlem and whatnot. So when I got released, went back to Minnesota, I decided I wasn’t ready to get married and I had to go up and find out what the rest of the world really was. I went out with one of my older brothers who had started up this organization, professional organization of Catholics who would go down, not to baptize people with hoses in Latin America, but who were agronomists, had professions like setting up those institutions. And so we went out together and I worked the street gangs up in Spanish Harlem and that was my first real introduction to Harlem and to really see what their plight was like.

I remember being astonished that there would be big apartments rented where three families would rent [the same apartment], would be there. One would sleep there for eight hours and the second one would move in while the third one would be working. And I just thought, Wow, you know, totally foreign to what I grew up in in lily white Minnesota.

KH: So what years were these?

GM: Well, when I went out to New York it was 1956, end of 1956.

KH: So after you’re done with the military?

GM: Yeah, right. And I got hooked up, seeing what the hell was going on in real life in New York. I was fascinated by it and I couldn’t get enough of seeing what the rest of the world was like, especially New York City because New York is unique of any place in the world because every ethnic group you can think of—ethnic, political—it’s all there. And you’d have to an automaton not to have that experience penetrate you.

So I decided to go to school. When I got out of the army, by the way, just before I left I had gone to St. Cloud State for a quarter and played football over there in my freshman year and then realized that if you were a veteran athlete, you didn’t have to go to classes. That wasn’t the type of education I wanted and so that’s one of the reasons I left too.

So I ended up going to St. Peters [now Saint Peter's University, Jersey City, NJ] which was a Jesuit college in Jersey City and it was a totally different atmosphere. I was working full time at New Jersey’s Boystown [New Jersey's Boystown, Kearny, NJ], you know, forty to sixty hours a week there plus going to school. And I remember a good Jesuit guy I had who the kids always used to call the holy ghost because he would walk around with this cape—gray-haired guy. He was one of the few faculty guys that would come down to the cafeteria, sit with the students and not in the faculty room having coffee. And we became pretty good friends and he told me, “George,” he said, “Look, this is crazy, your schedule right now, you know, working full time over at Boystown and doing that and then coming here full time. Get out of here. Go up to Scranton [Scranton, PA], play ball up there at our school up there. Get your degree and then you can come back and you’d be in a position where you’d—you could run an organization or something.”

So I thought that was kind of an interesting thought and so I took him up on it. But my brother and his organization—I had the only car and I thought they needed a vehicle and I told my brother, I said, “Take my beloved 1955 Chevy, but take me up to the freeway and I’m going to hitchhike up to Scranton.” And my brother had told me about an organization he had run into on campus up at Erie, Pennsylvania, Gannon [Gannon University, Erie, PA] that was trying to get the students all involved in Latin America and whatnot. There’s a priest buddy of his up there told me about it.

So I’m hitchhiking up to Scranton and this sales guy picked me up, unusual type of sales guy who really knew what the hell was going on politically in the country; very attuned. And we were talking [about] all of what was going on in the country as we’re driving along and finally at some point he said, “Where did you want to get out?” I said, “Scranton,” and he said, “Oh my god; that’s almost one hundred fifty miles back there— we’re almost up to—” He was going to Buffalo [Buffalo, NY] and I said, “Well, that’s all

16 right. You’re going to Buffalo? Take me up there and I’ll get a bus over to Erie because I’ll check something out over there.” So that’s how I ended up in Erie, got involved in organizing on campus, not only there, but all over the east.

But in 1993, I think, Gannon had a big anniversary of I don’t know, fifty years or something like that, and they took one person from each decade to invite them back to tell them what Gannon was like then and what [they] have been doing [since]. And all of the other people, from the other decades were all very affluent guys who had been successful contributors and here I am this not so wealthy guy from the sixties back.

And it was a fascinating time because they had me coming up for the whole week I was doing radio and TV stuff and a lot of stuff on campus. There was this new theater in the round that didn’t exist when I was on campus, they had me there and here all the ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps] guys—there was a major who was on active duty and I thought, Oh, this is going to be something. And I gave my talk and I talked about how Vietnam really was using American troops as fodder to go over and die for capitalism and all that kind of stuff. And I thought, Boy, they’re really going to come down on me, and the major gets up and all these ROTC guys had their uniforms on and pistols packed and he said, “You know, I agree with what Mr. Mische has to say here, that the worst thing about our policy has been how they utilized the military.” And I thought, Wow. And they showed up at the cocktail party afterwards and I thought, Wow, you know, this is the first time active duty military guys were giving this support.

But a student said, “You’re from Minnesota.” I said, “Yeah,” and he said, “How did you end up here?” And I told him the story how I ended up there. I said, “That just goes to prove you’ve got to have your life mapped out and planned before you do anything and the whole place broke up because that got me involved.”

And those were the days when there were a lot of conferences around and whatnot and people knew what I was doing on campuses so I’d get invited—this was my senior year—I was invited down to a big conference on Latin America in Washington, DC. While I was there people heard me talk and I got the offer to go to work during the Kennedy [US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963)] administration.

And I had had another good job offer in Chicago but I thought this sounds very interesting to do as part of the launch of the Progress Program [Alliance for Progress] of going down and meeting with—it was kind of three-pronged backing of the State Department, American Labor Movement and USIA [United States Information Agency (USIA)]—but it was a three-party operation so they sent me down.

In fact, I was meeting with the President of Honduras [José Ramón Adolfo Villeda Morales (1909-1971)] on a project I was putting together down there. In every president’s office in Latin America you go in, Simon Bolivar [Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar Palacios Ponte y Blanco aka Simon Bolivar (1783-1830)] is on every

17 wall and this guy, Villeda Morales—by the way, Honduras at that time, in one hundred forty-seven years, they’d never had an election where somebody got elected by an election. The military always overthrew them.

And I’m meeting with President [Morales] and a guy comes in and whispers something to him—and by, the way, he had no pictures on his wall. He had one picture on his desk. It was Jack Kennedy. I noticed that right away—what a difference. And he said, “Wait a minute. We just got word here that President Kennedy’s just been shot.” And, you know, they didn’t have what we have now with TV and all that kind of stuff so we had to go over and see the ticker tape stuff and read that he’s dead. And he said, “Don’t go back there,” because he knew I was Catholic and they started killing Catholics—that’s how they interpreted it. And all of a sudden, all the TV in Honduras stopped regular programming and people were out in the streets with white caskets that they had put together because Kennedy—they loved him. To Central Americans he was the first president since Teddy Roosevelt [US President Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (1858-1919)] who ever came down and gave a shit about what was happening in Latin America.

So it was a real stunner and it wasn’t long after that they overthrew Villeda Morales1, ten days before he was to go out of office, a guy by the name of Rodas [Modesto Rodas Alvarado (1921-1979)] who had won 80 percent of the vote, and he said that he was going to renew close relations with Castro [Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (1926-2016)] and at the same time with Juan Bosch [Juan Emilio Bosch Gaviño (1909-2001)] in the Dominican Republic. The military overthrew him and they were all with US (interruption—sound of cat meowing—GM says, “Oh, you’re hungry. Yeah, I know.”) And so—when they overthrew [Morales] in Honduras, I got called back for consultation. I’d been meeting with the labor guys and they were trying to decide what to do. Should they go to the hills to fight to bring back the president and stop the military coup? And I said, “Well, if you decide to do that, I’ll go with you, because they’re going to have to explain how this young representative of the American government is up there with these guys.”

And so I got them out of the country because as I went up around—they took all the Peace Corps jeeps, took off the Peace Corps thing and put machine guns on and they were shooting labor leaders.

KH: So what were you doing down there as part of this Alliance for Progress? What was your role?

GM: I was setting up projects, you know, and the one I had going there at that time— and I was doing it through the existing labor union down there, but to build them up. I

1 Kennedy was killed in November 1963, but Morales had been exiled on October 3, 1963 following a coup.

18 had a housing project—I think we had about, at that time, seventy-five houses that we were putting up and I was doing the same thing in the D.R. [Dominican Republic].

KH: So you were in multiple countries?

GM: Oh, yeah, all the Central American stuff and in the D.R.—well, as I get these two main leaders out of the country and into the City of Hope out in L.A. to keep them safe, I flew out into Guatemala with the guy who was the consulate—he told me he was on— B.S. artist—that he had been on the Enola Gay when they dropped the bomb and here I find out he just gotten his flyer’s license and it was the roughest Cessna ride I ever had. And the guy from the international unions who was down there—he was a good guy and I have his contact down in Florida; I’ve been meaning to get in touch with him—he said, “When you get to the states, New Orleans [New Orleans, LA], send a telegram to Switzerland and put a boycott on all ships going into Honduras to help.” So I did that. And by the time I got to Washington, I went up to the State Department on the sixth floor and they must have had fifty people out there wanting to know what the payoff was, what the labor leader thought and I said they wanted to be put back—but they said, No, they were looking for a payoff. I said, “No, they’re not interested in that. They like democracy. Don’t you understand that?”

And I remember one of the guys told my boss that, Your young Communist friend you have here—well, they wouldn’t let me go back. How they found out that I had met with the labor leaders was that the labor attaché, who I thought was on our side down there, was in with them—and even—down there forever. Turned out he was the CIA local head and he put back immediately what I had been doing and he wanted to know who authorized me to send that cable [about the boycott] because they intercepted that. They [didn’t know] how I got it through but they knew I did that, that I sent the cable through calling for a boycott. And they wouldn’t let me go back except to the Dominican Republic.

Now this is all within a month after Kennedy is assassinated. There was a guy—I think if I remember right—Lopez I think it was. He was a Texas Latino who Johnson [US President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973)] now put in, no longer Sargent Shriver [Robert Sargent Shriver Jr. (1915-2011)] and those guys, put in charge of the Alliance for Progress. And by the time it got to D.R. I find out that he had called all the ambassadors back from Latin America to meet in Washington.

And there was a guy by the name of Ed Martin [John Bartlow Martin (1915-1987)], who had been the ambassador to D.R., who was one of the real progressive state department guys who was legit. And he now was down in Chile, which was a prime place to be. So he calls all the ambassadors back and Tapley Bennett [William Tapley Bennett Jr. (1917- 1994)], who was the ambassador at the time to D.R., said that when they were all there and the locals told them that from now on US foreign policy in Latin America will be based on how it best serves the interest of the United States. And Ed Martin raised the

19 question, “Well, does that mean that there’s no such thing as a good guy or a bad guy from now on?” And he said, “Yeah, that’s correct.” So when Tapley told me that, I said, “Hey, you’re going to see domino here.”

And the only place by the time that Kennedy was assassinated had military dictatorship was Somoza [Anastasio "Tachito" Somoza DeBayle (1925-1980)] and Stroessner [Alfredo Stroessner Matiauda (1912-2006)] down in Paraguay. Kennedy had quietly had the policy to tell the military, Not only are you no longer getting foreign policy money from us, but no military aid and we aren’t going to—

So, one by one, all of these military dictatorships were going back to democratic rule and by this time, these are the only two guys who were still in power, Somoza and Stroessner. And I told Tapley, “You’re going to see a domino here that this is going to happen.” I said, “Goulart [João Belchior Marques Goulart (1918-1976)] will fall in Brazil within thirty days.”

So I was out in some [unclear] and Tapley calls me—I had bet him a hundred bucks— and he said, “When are you coming back in to Santo Domingo?” I said, “Monday.” He said, “Well, you can come by and pick up your hundred dollars. It happened.” And, of course, one by one, they all started going down.

And I had an interesting meeting, lunch with a guy by the name of Bob Eastland, from the New York—what the hell’s the big—New York National Bank [National Bank of New York City, Flushing, NY], the big national bank—and he told me that he was at a meeting with other corporate guys and US military on Juan Bosch. Now Juan Bosch had won what? Seventy percent of the vote against fifteen candidates and he really believed in democracy. You know Juan Bosch’s greatest heroes was Thomas Paine [Thomas Paine 1737-1809)]. He read all the democratic stuff and that’s what he—he never moved into the palace. And the military got together and said, “What do we do? Prevent him from becoming president like they did with Rodas in Honduras before the election or do we topple him?” They decided to give him six months because Bosch had said, too, he was going to have decent relations with Cuba.

So he said all the US military guys, they agreed to let him be in for six months then throw him out on the basis that he had sided with Castro and all that kind of stuff. And that was the whole turnaround. So I decided to resign and came back and testified in Washington and went on a speaker’s tour all around the country. So that’s—they would like me to get the hell out and then, of course, I realized that Vietnam was the same as what we were doing in Latin America.

KH: So you resigned what? Was that in ’64 or ’65?

GM: Yeah, ’64.

KH: Sixty-four. Okay, so ’64 then, things are heating up, so to speak, in Vietnam with the Tonkin Gulf incident and all that. Your attention sounds like it has been primarily for several years in Central and Latin America. When are you starting to then pay attention to what’s going on in Vietnam?

GM: Pretty much—because I was doing lecturing all over the United States, Canada, whatnot and questions like that were coming up. What do you think about Southeast Asia? Because, the whole Eisenhower [US President Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (1890-1969)] thing was, you know, when he had people there just as military advisers, nothing else. And then unfortunately Kennedy got sucked in by Spellman [Archbishop Francis Joseph Spellman (1889-1967)] because the—Diem’s [Ngô Đình Diệm (1901- 1963)] family—they were all sitting up at Ossining [Ossining, NY] with the Marianos and, of course, Spellman, he used to go over every Christmas Eve and bless the bombs and had Mass over there and he convinced them to put the Diệms in and it took a couple years for Kennedy to realize that was a mistake. And we’ve never seen the executive order and I can’t remember, was it Abrams who once said that Kennedy had signed an executive order that he was going to stop all the involvement in Vietnam and he was assassinated shortly thereafter. Then, of course, there was the build-up and that.

So I was learning as I was going and my brother Jerry said, “What do you think about Nam?” when I first got back. I said, “I’m not sure,” I said. “I want to take a look at that, and see what the hell the similarities [are].” And it wasn’t long—and I was trying to think. In 19—when the hell did I do it? Sixty-five—my brother had all these great people they were sending over, families who went over for three, four years to these countries. And they’re always living off of the, you know, a thin economic situation and I was there with them. In the beginning when I saw them doing it—they were great people. And we got a couple of handouts from parishes here and there. I took a year off when I got back to just get myself together in Chicago with three of my old college roommates and we were having fun at the same time as trying to stay in touch. My brother Jerry came through and said, “What are you doing?” He knew I was having a good time, dating and whatnot and I said, “I’m trying to decide where I’m going for the rest of my life.” And I said, “I made up my mind when I got here. One year from today I’m going to leave and decide where I’m going to go from here on in.”

And I had been working for Serra International [Serra International, 333 West Wacker Drive Suite 500, Chicago, IL] when I got back. That was the job I originally had from before I was in Latin America. And that’s one of the ways, [as you’d asked about,] they provided me with the ability to fly around and meet with groups all across the country on US foreign policy.

KH: Okay, that was my question: who was sponsoring you?

GM: Serra International. Serra International started out as a Catholic organization to promote the priesthood. But Cardinal Stritch [Cardinal Samuel Alphonsius Stritch (1887-

1958)] who was the guy who helped them set up in Chicago—unfortunately he wasn’t alive and well at Vatican II stuff years later because Stritch saw early on about that this is just not Catholicism but they—he established a second role as the University of Christian Principles. That was the thing that they supposedly stood for. And so that meant that we no longer were going to, just because some bunch of bishops in Latin America sided in with the right wing, that that was not going to be what it should be. And that’s why I was attracted to it in the first place.

So I had decided that I was going to do it for one year. So I said, “I’m going to [unclear].” [Jerry] said, “Boy, I hope you do it—it’s a waste of talent.” I said, “Jerry, I’m going to make a decision about the best thing to do is.” So finally I said, “Look, you know, you’ve been living off of bullshit money for so long. I’ll come in and I’ll raise some funds but I’m going to go around and see the bishops and I’m not going to do like you guys who are so grateful if you get two hundred bucks for a Sunday collection that you kiss the ring.” I said, “I’m not going to kiss the ring. I’m going to go back to these bastards and tell them, use the same tactics they laid out for lay people to use. Make them feel guilty to pull out their coffers and support the church.”

And most of these guys who had been in my brother’s organization, Association for International Development (AID), they were—a whole bunch of them were ex-Mariano [Mariano Movement of Priests] because Mariano was a unique religious order because most of those guys back then were in World War II, saw what was going on around the world and the devastation and then gravitated to Mariano because it was, you know, a missionary order, that was the term. But it was more than that. It was a feed the poor type of a concept.

And so I met with eighty Catholic bishops over that period of time. And I remember the first, when I went on one of these—his name was Joe Donnelly [Joseph Francis Donnelly (1909-1977)] up in Hartford, Connecticut. And he was a heavy set guy, a guy who was sympathetic to working people, labor. He wasn’t so much a bishop but with the poor, I mean, with the rich. And he had a guy who was a—I can’t remember his background, if he was a convert to Catholicism but he was now a priest, or was his chancellor. And I walked into Donnelly’s office and like most of those bishops’ places, spectacular offices. All this incredible woodwork and it’s just elegant, you know, and we’re sitting down and Joe’s got oh, just a shithouse full of stuff on his big desk and we’re talking and I’m telling him the type of work we’re doing in Latin America and whatnot and I wasn’t pulling any punches either. I said, you know, I looked around the room and I said, “You’ve come a long way from the seminary,” and I used to use that on these guys a lot. And he never took offense, you know.

We’re talking and I blinked at one point, and I was trying out contact lenses and with my astigmatism, contacts didn’t work, certainly back then; they would pop out. And here one of them popped out and went on the rug. And I got down and he said, “What’s the matter?” And I said, “One of my contact lenses just bounced out.” I’m looking for the

22 damn thing and all of a sudden I hear this thump and here’s this big bishop down, with his cassock, hands and knees on the floor trying to help me find it. And the thump was heard by the chancellor and he came running in, “Your excellency, excellency,” and he told him, “Get the hell out of the way; we’re trying to find a man’s contact lens.” The guy just couldn’t believe it. And we found it and sat down and he said, “Well, what kind of help do you want from me?” And I said, “Well, I try to have the categories by the size of the diocese; I’d like to get a three-year commitment out of you,” and I said, “I’m looking for ten, fifteen and twenty thousand dollars, depending upon the size of the diocese. I think you probably fit in the ten thousand dollar category. So, if we could get that commitment for three years.” So he calls the chancellor back and tells him to write out a check for ten thousand dollars to me.

I thought, Wow! I go back to Patterson [Patterson, NJ] and the guy’s still sitting in the office, the guy who was taking over for my brother now because my brother opened up a place in Buffalo, too. And we had a business guy there who really was a good guy, Frank—what the hell is Frank’s name? Shit. I’ve got a brain lock here. He was a successful business guy who had a couple of liquor stores in Cleveland [Cleveland, OH], who went to Latin America himself and worked for a couple of years down there and he was only guy who had business sense, how to make dollars. So, I had this check in my pocket or in an envelope. So they’re all skeptical about me doing this; that I’m going to do the strong arm approach going out—they didn’t want any of the bishops pissed off at them because of me. So I walked in and Jim says, “Well, how did you do?” And Frank is standing in the office and I give him the envelope and he opens up the check and sees ten thousand dollars—they had never seen a check more than two, three hundred dollars ever and when Frank saw it he said, “Wow! That’s big!” So I did that with eighty of these guys over a period of—that’s how I met Tom [unclear], in fact, in Detroit [Detroit, MI].

KH: And so this money was going to the organization that your brother had started.

GM: To support couples who were going down and living in these countries, you know, some of them were down there for eight years, two four-year terms.

KH: And this brother—what was the name of this organization?

GM: Association for International Development. USAID stole the name, AID Association, and my brother sent a letter and said, “Would you please not take that name?” and they said, “Well, we have priority.” And they took it.

KH: Another AID. So this was your brother Jerry. Your other brother Will started Catholic Worker. So how many brothers did you have?

GM: Four, well five—one I never met because he died before I [was born] but I had one sister and four brothers; there were six of us.

KH: And so, it sounds like, at least from the—

GM: By the way, my dad, too, we didn’t know any of this until long after he died, was an IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] organizer from the very beginning—

KH: Really?

GM: and spent we don’t know how long in jail in New York because they busted him organizing out on the West Coast and transported these guys across—in rail cars—and one of my nephews, who was the first nerd electronically, found this article—it was 1917-1918 New York Times. I told my kids when I took them up to the World Trade Center before it got bombed, that, “Long before your father was one of the Catonsville 9; your grandfather was one of the Seattle 19, who were down there on Ellis Island where they tried to deport him.” And here’s this article in the New York Times. It said that the Seattle 19 were down in what we would call in the sixties and in prison ‘The Tombs,” that they were singing Bolshevik songs, led by Louis G. Mische, and I looked at that name when my brother showed me that. I said, “Where the hell did you get that?” None of us knew that.

KH: You didn’t?

GM: None of us knew that and my mother didn’t. I said, “Mom, didn’t Dad—didn’t you find this out?” She said, “No.” He was thirty-two; she was twenty-eight and he had ended up on Ellis Island. They finally found out he really wasn’t—they were deporting all these at the time and Emma Goldman [Emma Goldman (1869-1940)], all these people were there. You can’t just put somebody on a ship and send them back to a country; you have to prove that they—he had told them his name was Karl Schmidt—we never knew why he did that because he thought he must have done something that, you know, radical [unclear] and they found out he really was—he said Karl Schmidt from Switzerland.

Well, there was no record of this guy in Switzerland so we don’t know how long he was out at Ellis Island. Somehow a lefty in the Congress—I’ve got some of that documentation—found out he really was Louis G. Mische, born in Cleveland, but his dad got—when his mother came over with the dad and the kids, he got killed in an industrial accident in Cleveland. Blew up. And the mother took the youngest kids—he was one year old at the time—back to Germany so he grew up there.

And he got politicized we feel because—remember Lenin [Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov aka Lenin (April 1870-1924)] was in Germany. They thought the revolution was going to come out of Germany. And in Germany there was a lot of radical stuff going about the revolution and change and he was there during that period. He was born in 1890 and so we know from what we can piece together, he came over at about eighteen/nineteen years old with his brother who had a place up in Canada at the time. Canada was giving five acres of land to people who would permanently stay and he didn’t want that. He

24 somehow got involved with the IWW, which came out of, you know, International Falls, so that’s how it got started and it spread to Canada and the West Coast and somehow he ended up on the West Coast and he got busted. He had the toe next to his big toe on both feet missing and it was like a big piece of sausage was taken out of his arm. And I used to say, “Daddy, what happened?” And he’d say, “Well, during the Depression it was pretty bad and Mom once in a while would lop off a piece and make some stew,” he would say. (laughter) And he told me that shit for years.

And here at nineteen—I’ve got a picture of this guy downstairs on a shelf—he was a historian at the University of Washington and got involved with us and he, with the guy who was an All-American football player [unclear]. They set up the first underground [unclear] easy getting draft resisters in the [unclear] and Black Panthers out of there to fly to Cuba because they were after the Panthers cracking down at the time. Oh shit, I must have his name again. His wife was the chief librarian in Seattle [Seattle, WA] so Helene [Helene Mische] took the two youngest because we hadn’t—we had taken the three oldest on big six-eight week trips all over Canada whatnot. We figured we owed it to the two youngest and we decided to go west.

Harbury—Dick Harbury. And I used to stay with Dick in Seattle. And I told this story what I heard, found out about my dad, some of the documentation, and could she find out what was in their archives about the IWW, because he got busted organizing the what do you call it, the forestry workers, you know, the logging; that’s where they nailed him. So here she brought all these documents. She was retired but she got her two assistants who now were running this library. Here they had stuff, not only from the current paper but one of the other Seattle papers who was out of business at the archives. And here we brought back stuff about the hearings, how my dad ended up being cleared because of these public hearings and brought all that stuff back home.

And in that there were stories about how the Pinkertons were the bad guys, all the guys and all the places. They would come in, get the union organizers and they would cut off digits and just form—and then, what do you call it? Tar and feather people and some of these they even hung. And then, somehow, in the most recent documents I got, he was in Spokane [Spokane, WA] in jail. We don’t know how long, quite a while. And he—talk about representing yourself—he somehow was able to get into court and demand a public attorney to be able to find out the records and he was able to be released and then they put him on the train, sent him to New York. So here’s that whole history and this Congressman who blew the story for him—he had friends who were real progressives and Minneapolis General Hospital was existing at the time. Well, because his doctor was a lefty, too, and the Congressman was a lefty from Minnesota—they got him a job down here and he became one of the orderlies at Minneapolis Hospital. Then they’re opening up the new V.A. hospital in St. Cloud and he got recommended by them down there to go up and become the superintendent over all the orderlies. And the orderlies in those days ran the V.A. hospital and he ran that for thirty some years.

KH: So that’s how your family ended up in St. Cloud.

GM: Yes, and that’s where I really started to see the victims of war because I spent a lot of time with him out at the V.A. Hospital and seeing all these patients, you know, who were victims of the war, all the holidays we spent going out there. So I started to realize, even though I knew I was going to be drafted, that all of this John Wayne bullshit about, you know, patriotism, [even if we] forget who the victims were in the other country but here were the victims of war here. So I was pretty sensitive to that.

KH: So your dad’s really fascinating, very radical and dangerous history was certainly part of your family history but not part of your family’s story because you didn’t know about it until much later.

GM: No, but we had—politics was openly talked about all the time and I remember us sitting by the radio before TV covered conventions through the whole thing and there was no topic that you couldn’t talk about at the table with him. And we knew his sympathies and it was kind of interesting. It took me years to understand, once I found out his real background, why he had supported Bob Taft [Robert Alphonso Taft Sr. (1889-1953)] when he ran for president because the real interesting part of the Republican stuff was— and I got close to understanding it—The Progressive magazine [The Progressive (1929- Present), Madison, WI], of course, a hundred years, I went over to the hundred year anniversary which was headed up by the LaFollettes [Robert Marion "Young Bob" La Follette Jr. (1895-1953)]. LaFollette, you know, they were the radical Republicans who were opposing US intervention bullshit around the world and Dad supported, you know, well the DFL [Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party].

How the DFL came in? To organize the convention my dad was at. It was up in St. Cloud in 1918 or was it 1922? I forget. But the two big influences on Minnesota—Democrats never won an election ever until it became the DFL and the DFL was formed on the basis of the LaFollette Republicans and the—what the hell is the North Dakota outfit? It’s nonpartisan, the Nonpartisan League [North Dakota Democratic–Nonpartisan League Party], who were radical Republicans over there who were against the all that.

So Dad was involved with that from the beginning. I never understood the Taft thing until years later and I remember him supporting—who was the guy they thought was going to win in ’48 when Truman won? [US President Harry S. Truman (1884-1972); the opponent was Thomas Edmund Dewey (1902-1971)]. It made sense later on when I found out his background. He was a conservative Republican; he was opposed to the internationalism.

And there was a guy name of Frank Sis [Frank A. Sis (1930-2016)]—and I see his name now almost nightly as a sponsor on Judy Woodruff [Judy Carline Woodruff (1946- )] on PBS. And Frank—that’s the son who was my brother Will’s same age. The original Frank—he was like Dad. Grew up in Germany and actually had been arrested; had been

26 on the boxcars over there. Came to Minnesota; set up a furniture store in St. Cloud and here all these old guys who grew up in Europe would get together at night, listen to shortwave radio—they were hopeful, you know, that what was going to happen in Germany, was not going to happen with Hitler [Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)], but that there was going to be real economic revolution.

I used to go down as a little kid. He’d go down at seven-thirty, be home by ten, and it was fascinating seeing these old guys sitting around that radio listening to the news. And you talk about disillusioned. When they started to get people coming from Germany telling them what Hitler really was doing and the whole thing with the Jewish people, their hopes and dreams were shattered. And we didn’t know the context of where that was coming from this experience. So, anyway, I asked Mom years later and she said, “What do you think Dad would have said about the Catonsville thing?” I said, “Well, what we know about it now, he’d have been supportive as hell,” and I said, “Didn’t you bother to ask?” She said, “No. I met him and he was the finest man I ever met in my life and that was good enough for me. I didn’t have to know what he’d been doing for thirty-three years.” Until my nephew found all this information. But I wish—I sure as hell wish I’d have known that so I could have picked his brain years later or said, “Dad, tell me about that.”

KH: So would you have, at the time, you and your brothers, your siblings, maybe your parents even, have considered yourself part of the Catholic Left?

GM: Well, that term didn’t come about until Catonsville and we never gave it that. That was the press. The press throw titles on every damn thing, you know.

KH: So that term wasn’t part of the Catholic Worker Movement?

GM: No, not at all. I mean, the first time I saw that in print after Catonsville, what the hell? Because first of all, I designed Catonsville to be all Catholics because if you see that statement, you know—then this is the quarrel some of us had with Dan, too. And, you know, Dan and I had been friends since 1959, nine years before Catonsville. Phil [Philip Francis Berrigan (1923-2002)] and I, friends since 1962. Mary Moylan [Mary Moylan (1936-1995)] since 1965 and Paul Mayer [Paul Mayer, 1931-2013] who was a Benedictine—who was in that movie [Hit & Stay, directed by Skizz Cyzyk, 2013], too, had been with the Benedictines for twenty-five years and had the best retreat I’d ever seen any priest ever give. And we used to use him at AID with our people and Paul and I became real close.

And at one point, when he saw I was getting involved in the antiwar stuff and Dan was, too, and there were rumors that Thomas Merton [Thomas Merton (1915-1968)] was going to be leaving Gethsemani [Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, Trappist, KY] and getting out on the street, too, because he was talking about taking Thich Nhat Hanh [Thich Nhat Hanh (1926- )] and whatnot.

And Paul said to me, came looking for advice about, you know, “Do you believe in the Benedictines and coming up and joining us?” And I said, “I’d never tell people what they should do,” and I said, “Paul, you’ve got to make up [your mind],” and I said, “You’re doing fantastic work right now as a monk, but you’d do great on the street, too. You’ve got to find out what you want to do with your life and fit in.” And there was always a great disagreement between Phil and I about—Phil and Dan would always try to bully people to do what we did and it was bullshit as far as I was concerned. You get people more involved and build all kinds of structures that bring down the war. And—I lost track where I was going with that. I know there was a reason.

KH: Well, I had asked about the Catholic Left.

GM: Oh yeah, and so I never believed that other people should—we had to do Catonsville the way it was. And if you see that in the movie, there’s that—we never knew that were no draft file records until—because Helene, talk about coitus interruptus. Helene and I were sitting at one o’clock in the morning getting laid up in my brother’s apartment in New York and she knew Dan because Dan had married us the previous year. And here—it didn’t mention names but it said on the—we had the TV on real low and here the voice comes on at one o’clock in the morning and said, “Four people were arrested for pouring blood in Baltimore, Maryland, and two of them were clergymen.” And I jumped up and I said, “That’s Phil Berrigan.” And she said, “Who is that?” And I said, “Dan’s brother.” And I knew he had been kicked out of, forced out of Newburgh, New York, because they were demonstrating up at West Point, and the Pentagon got on the Josephite Order [The Josephite Fathers and Brothers aka Saint Joseph's Society of the Sacred Heart, Inc.] to get him out of there and that’s how he ended up in Baltimore [Baltimore, MD] at St. Peter Claver Church [St Peter Claver Catholic Church, 1546 N. Fremont Ave., Baltimore, MD] down there.

And at the same time, by the way, and I knew Liz McAlister [Elizabeth "Liz" McAlister (1939-)] before he met her and I was having meetings in New York, not about the draft boards, to go after corporations who were involved in the war and what they were doing in Latin America like the Rockefellers [John Davison Rockefeller Sr. (1839-1937) and descendants] and Peter Grace [Joseph Peter Grace (1913-1995) and all these companies who were really bad US corporations. And I was trying to get something going like that and had several meetings and we were trying to figure out where to go with it. When I found out about this, I went down and saw Phil. And I said, “Jesus, if I’d only known they were doing this, I was simultaneously trying to put something together up in New York.”

So I went down for the trial. And the guy who was a prosecutor, he still keeps appearing over and over and over again, Steve Sachs [Stephen H. Sachs (1934-)], who is a Jewish, political yuppie, who was the US Attorney at the time. He went after big time in that blood pouring trial and I found out when I was over there, from a couple Jewish friends,

28 who were progressives, who got on his ass at cocktail parties for him, fundraisers, saying, Why are you going after these Catholics like this? If we’d have had more Catholics like that in Nazi Germany, we wouldn’t have had as many people going into the, you know, and he was immune to that kind of pressure. But I knew that about what was happening with this guy.

Well, he, you know, like all the federal trials at the time were going nuts about overkill— to tell the jury what terrible deeds these were—and he brings out the Colonel, who is the head of Selective Services in Maryland and he had these files on wheels—they would roll them out. And he’s saying how all this blood stuff is destroying this and it was getting in the way of government doing due process. And what you have to understand—I can’t remember what the total value was, but you had to prove that it was over fifteen thousand dollars or whatever the figure was—then that was a felony charge. So they’re trying to show how costly this was.

And so when the prosecution was on, Weisful—he broke every rule he learned in law school. You don’t ever ask questions that you don’t know the answers to. So he gets up there, he looks at these things, and he says to the Colonel that, “Well, wait a minute, is this an exaggeration how terrible a deed this was?” You know, he looked at these. He pulled out a couple files and he said, “You just clean these things off.” “Oh no, you can’t—no, no, some of them are totally illegible and it’s just terrible; it’s just—we couldn’t function anymore.” And Weisful says, “Now, wait a minute. You couldn’t wash these off?” No, no, no, no, you couldn’t. “Well then, why didn’t you just go get copies of the records from the Selective Service System?” And the Colonel says, “There are no duplicate copies.” He said, “What? There are no duplicate copies since World War II of all of the people that are drafted in the United States?” He said, “That’s right,” and [the prosecutor] pulls one out and he said, “You mean if I took this file now and burn it, that person wouldn’t exist in the minds of the Selective Service?” “That’s right.” And I poked Helene and I said, “Oh, I’ll burn the fucking things.”

So, at the break, at the lunch break, I told Phil that. He looked at me like I was—he started to laugh. He said, “What?” I said, “Hey, screw this symbolic horseshit. If the idea is to shut the system down, we’ll go and burn the goddamn things. Didn’t you hear what the guy just said? They don’t have any copies of this stuff.” And so that’s how the whole idea came about and then, of course, we decided—Dean Pappas [Dean Pappas (1939- 2017)], one of the great supporters would decide—I went out to his memorial service last December—that he came up with the idea that, Well, here in the US Army’s handbook, they have the recipe for making homemade napalm so that any soldier can do this. So they were making homemade napalm down in the basement of the old house the two nights before the action so that—and our whole concept was that we said it was better to burn files than bodies with napalm and that’s why we used napalm. So now that’s how the action kicked up.

KH: I’m going to back to the specific planning for what becomes known as the Catonsville 9 thing but I want to—you mentioned that, you know, you specifically planned this action as an action to be undertaken by Catholics. So, I mean, you could have called on any one of a number of identifies: a political identity—you could have, you know, called in people who had also worked for the Alliance for Progress. Why choose to act through your Catholic identity specifically?

GM: Well, because I already had gotten around, met all these bishops, eighty of them, for one thing, coming out of the Catholic background, especially with my sympathy for the Catholic Worker Movement and all that kind of stuff. One of the problems of militarism is militarism understands you’ve got to use religion. And you can see that in all of the conflicts around the goddamn world, you know, look at whether it’s Catholics, Protestants, Muslims—I mean, you name it. God—it’s all blamed on the god why we got to be doing these horrible things. And the Catholic Church was one of the worst at it here in this country. So this is one of my quarrels with Dan and the problem with the brothers is—there has never been a thing in the press that they haven’t really enjoyed. And that’s a problem when people consider themselves prophets or you do it because God enlightened me to do this kind of stuff. That’s dangerous bullshit. And you don’t really get to the heart of stuff.

And we wanted something that—we didn’t intend this to be just about Vietnam. I started the statement after that night when the hands went up when we decided to do it, I started a rough draft and passed it around to everybody about—and that’s what you’ll see in the final product that was our statement and in the biographies of all of our backgrounds. And we wanted to go after, not just Vietnam, but—after the original meeting when I, you know, had this going, when Moylan knew I wanted to do that she said, “Count me on board,” because she had spent four years in Kenya and then came back, hooked up with and Marion Barry [Marion Shepilov Barry (1936-2014)] and the whole black thing in D.C. so we both were sympathetic to internationalism.

And in domestic policy Tom Melville [Thomas R. Melville (1930-2017)] comes up to me because he’s living with us at this time he said, “Are you and Mary really going to do this?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Well, we might be interested in that too, but I have three kind of conditions.” And I said, “What are they?” And he said, “Well, you know, we don’t want this to be just about Vietnam because fifteen years they’d been in Guatemala and got kicked out and all that.” And I said, “Tom, what’s my background? Latin America. What’s Mary Moylan? Africa, Kenya. Of course. What’s number two?” He said, “Well, those of us in the Guatemala crew there in the house, we’ll decide who’s in this action ourselves.” And I said, “Fine.” And the third thing he said, “We want no brother act. If I’m in first, I’ll go in and Art [Art Melville] will go later because, you know, they were both, Art and Tom Melville were Mariano missionaries in Guatemala. They all got booted out as well as Tom’s wife [Marjorie Melville], you know, they weren’t married and she was a nun for seventeen years down there. “We don’t want any

30 brother act because if there is, the press is going to grab that and not what the issues are really about.” He was absolutely right.

So I said, “Hey, you got a deal, all three. That’s easy.” So they were in. So, unfortunately, how the Dan/Phil thing happened is this: that meeting shocked them when all those hands went up. He never believed it. And I never knew why he was so cynical about people don’t want to do these types of thing. That’s the thing he laid on me when I got over the blood pouring thing.

KH: I think we were talking about that before the recorder was on—this meeting—so tell us again, on tape here, about, a little bit about that meeting and when it happened.

GM: Well, yeah, we had the meeting on March 31, 1968, down at our house in D.C. After the blood pouring thing, Helene and I had decided to move from New York down to Washington and set up this house which became quite a notorious place in the birth of the Catholic Left, unquote. 1620 F Street. It went on for years after we left. And we had this meeting, set up this meeting to find out where to go because we definitely were going to do something after the blood pouring and have a second action.

And there were about twenty of us, maybe twenty-five people—I’ll have to look up all the names—but three of the people who were there were priests from Boston [Boston, MA] Bob Cunnane [Robert Cunnane] Tony Mullaney [Anthony Mullaney (1929- )] and Jim Harney [James W. Harney] who got there, found out about the meeting through Phil and Lewis [Thomas P. Lewis (1940-2008)] so they came down. Then all the Guatemala crowd was there, and then Dick McSorley [Richard T. McSorley (1914-2002)], who was a truly well-known Jesuit priests who suffered many years being based in Georgetown, to see that the rest of his Jesuit people were supporting warmongers with the Center for Strategic Services [Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)], [which] is still there, you know; their alignment with the CIA and the Pentagon for years has been there. And he just died a million deaths trying to get them to see the truth but they didn’t.

And he had become close with the Kennedys, especially Sargent Shriver, and he used to say mass over there every Sunday morning. Shriver was a real person; he was the real thing. Dick thought that we were going along just fine but he, like Harry Bury [Fr. Harry J. Bury, PhD, 1931- ], who we mentioned before, didn’t figure that was the route for him because he really thought through Sargent Shriver he could make a positive influence on the Kennedy policies. And so he was there that night and then left for a turn.

Dick McSorley was well-known across the country for his, you know, lonesome stand against the Jesuits in D.C. He was there. There were just a ton of people so when I finally said, “Hey, look. We’re going to go back over to Baltimore and we’re going to show them when this blood pouring thing is over that you’re not—this isn’t going to kill it. We’re going to be back time and time again. We’re going to really go after this full- time.” And so I said, “We have three places we’ve cased over there; we’re going to take

31 the one that we decide is the most likely that we could pull off and that nobody would get hurt.” And that’s how we chose Catonsville. The fact that it also was at the time the home turf of Spiro Agnew [Spiro Theodore "Ted" Agnew (1919-1996)] was helpful, too, you know, as a message.

So, when I finally called for a show of hands—well, before I called for the show of hands, Tony Mullaney, good Benedictine, said, “George, I’m not sure your analysis about Humphrey [Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr. (1911-1978)] is going to be the same as Johnson even though he said he’s resigning, but we’ll soon find that out in the next couple months. And I know you’re convinced that people are going to be coming out of the walls after this action and I guess we’ll have to see that, too. Plus, in fact, I’m not sure I can handle prison.” And that’s when I told him. I said, “Tony, there’s nobody should be getting into these actions unless they are sure they can handle prison for themselves because we could be doing heavy time after this action.” And we thought there was potentially ten years that we could get sentenced to. And so, when the evening was over, he said, “Who knows? Maybe if there are more actions maybe I’ll be ready then,” which he was. He became, with the other two guys, part of the Milwaukee 14.

So Phil and Tom and Lewis and Bill O’Connor [William W. O'Connor (1923-2006)] were from Baltimore. They had a lead to get back to Baltimore and the rest of the people stayed over there for the rest of the weekend with us and we walked out on the street. Bill O’Connor had been teaching along with Dean Pappas at Baltimore Community College for years and any book that you ever read, he had five books by the same author on his bookshelf at home. And he was just alive because he really believed the Phil stuff that people didn’t want to do these types of things. He said, “God, when you asked for the call of hands,” he said, “I about crapped my pants,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it.

And Tom Lewis just had this kind of almost angry look, upset that I had, you know, of the evening. And Phil said, “Well, you know.” He was going back and figuring that he was going to get a mild slap on the hands by the judge in Baltimore for the blood pouring thing and that he’d just go on with the rest of his life. “And now here I’m going to be sitting out, living on the edge again.” And I said, “Phil, isn’t that what this is about? You’ve got people willing to live on the edge to be able to stop what’s going on?”

And I never really understood why he was so cynical that people didn’t want to do these things, until years later as I was doing all this research around the country in newspapers and all that and I got all this stuff from the Baltimore press. And here in the Baltimore News- American, which was the Hearst paper, which actually covered the trials better than the Baltimore Sun did even. So here’s this one article in the Baltimore News- American than said there were originally going to be nine people in the blood pouring action and not just four. And I had never heard that. Phil had never told me that and then years later I said to Dean Pappas when I saw that, because he was one of the original people that were in Baltimore. And I said, “Is this true?” He said, “Yeah, five of them,” including himself, that they chose not to. And the reason being is that Phil became

32 insufferable and tried to dominate, tell people what they had to do and that’s not what they were about and five of them dropped out.

And the only reason I think it was able to be pulled off was the story I was telling you about. Jim Mengel [James L. Mengel], who we found out here, the three of us, was one of the blood pourers and Jim said—and he had been in awe of the demonstration when they went after Dean Rusk’s [David Dean Rusk (1909-1994)] house and whatnot and they tried to do a citizen’s arrest on—what’s the guy’s name who was head of Selective Service System at that time?

KH: Hershey [Lewis Blaine Hershey (1893-1977)]?

GM: Yes. They tried to do a citizen’s arrest on somebody and he said Hershey is a pretty big guy—he’s not somebody you can put hands on and say, You’re under arrest. But he had been involved in all those things but he didn’t believe in destroying property; he would go along and pass out little Bibles because he was a United Church of Christ minister and that’s how he got involved. And I often told Jim had he not been willing to do that there might have been no Baltimore 4; there would have been no Baltimore 5, probably no Catonsville 9—none of these actions. They are all interlinked and evolved.

So, anyway, this meeting we have in D.C., that was the beginning of the Catonsville 9, the Milwaukee 14, with the three there didn’t, with our Art Melville there and being part of the D.C. 9 when they went after Dow Chemical [Dow Chemical Company, Midland, MI].

KH: So tell me a little bit—you’ve mentioned already that you [had known] Dan Berrigan what? Since 1959; Phil since 1962. How did you get to know these guys? How did you—?

GM: Well when my brother and I went out together, you know, he set up AID. AID in its fledgling years there were based in Patterson, New Jersey, and I was staying with him at the time. That’s when I was even going back and forth, still in New York, working with some of the street people I had been working with. And there were three priests who used to come around and hang around because this was a real novel thing and it was, you know, pre-Vatican II. And Dan Berrigan was up at Le Moyne [Le Moyne College, Syracuse, NY] then and Dan had an interesting background. When he got ordained, he just didn’t fall into the usual thing that people fall into when they get ordained, whether they’re in diocesan priest or in different religious orders.

And he went over to France because he became intrigued with the notion of the worker priest, where priests were going out, not in the churches, but going out in the factory working. And he went over and really took a look at that. He came back and that’s where I met him. He was up at LeMoyne at the time and I helped him set up—he knew I had been organizing students on campuses and whatnot and he wanted to get something going

33 at LeMoyne and I went up and helped him get students involved in the organizations [unclear]. In fact, Brendan Walsh, who I mentioned who set up that great Catholic Worker place, which is still going, on the night before the trial started—Brendan was in that organization a year after I had been up there and he and Dan were close too.

So how I met Phil was in 1962 my brother was with the organization by this time they started doing what they called the Seton Hall Summer Institute at Seton Hall University [Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ]. It was a six-week thing where they would bring in notorious, for lack of a better term, priests who were doing a lot of stuff in the labor movement, antiwar/civil rights stuff and Phil was down in New Orleans at the time, was with the Josephite Order and Josephites really focused on the black community. And he had been there for years. In fact, he hadn’t been home to Syracuse for years and he and one of the other Josephites were heading north, driving up and here they heard on the radio that Martin Luther King [Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)] was organizing the the Freedom Ride [Note: the Freedom Rides were organized by the Congress of Racial Equality] and they turned around and went and joined and Phil was the first Catholic priest who got arrested in that whole thing.

So in 1962 he had just written his book, his first book on the military industrial complex and Jerry had brought him up for a week and that’s where I met him because I already knew Dan and we knew about each other. And that book he wrote on the military industrial complex—I can’t remember the title of what thing is anymore—and always on a Friday night whoever was one of the guests there for the week, they would have a special evening and some very fat cat supporter, big huge house, and everybody who was a part of that would come over on Friday night and whoever that speaker [was] would have a very informal discussion. And that was the first and best presentation I ever heard on the military industrial complex by Phil in ’62.

And Mary Moylan, when she came back, she was with a group called Women’s Volunteer Association and she was a nurse for four years over in Kenya, came back. She was elected head of the organization and we hooked up and became friends then.

Well, the Catonsville thing, going back to the Berrigans, is this. After that night when those hands went up, it was all set to go. We were going to do the all the logistics and then finally a week, ten days before—a very short period—Phil calls me from Baltimore and said he wanted me to go along on a trip up to Ithaca [Ithaca, NY] because Dan was getting together a lot of profs there and—turned out to be an interesting—well, wanted me to go along on that between the two of us and Tom Lewis to hook up with everybody. But he also was going to up to Syracuse first the night before because his mom and dad were alive up there. And I got curious about that because one thing that I’d heard from both those guys for years, which I didn’t find pleasure hearing, was those two guys used to just bad mouth their dad over and over. I never knew Tom’s [Thomas Berrigan] name for years until—all I ever heard him called was the old bastard. That’s how the two of them referred to their dad. And their mother was the Blessed Virgin Mary. And if you

34 read their autobiographies—when I read their autobiographies, I stopped after the first chapter because I figured I didn’t have any more I’m going to learn.

Both of them rip into their dad and say that the mother had married beneath her stature and I thought, Why would you feel it was necessary to put in the public first of all? And the fact that there were six boys in that family during the Depression when jobs were scarce and that he had, you know, supported that whole family, kept it together all those years wherever they went and to speak that unkindly about him all those years. So I was fascinated to find out myself.

So we go up there and there’s a third part of the Berrigan—there’s six, but there’s three and three. The three younger ones, Jerry Berrigan [Jerry Berrigan (1920-2015)], who also was, you know, they were like triplets and their attitudes in the family, and so I go up with them and I meet Tom in the kitchen of this old wood frame house that the parish [unclear] on and they had been living in it and he had bib overalls on and not, you know, not an outward going guy you would suspect. He was just, Hi and a nice welcome and he had bib overalls on I remember. We were in the kitchen chatting and all of a sudden I realized Tom had quietly just gone outside and I happened to see out the window. He went out and sat on the picnic bench out on the lawn.

And I got really curious about that so I kind of broke off from the family and went out and sat down. I sat with him for about two hours on the bench with him and every once in a while, with peripheral vision—when you’re a basketball player [you’ve got good] peripheral vision; I could see the three brothers looking through the window up in the kitchen wondering what the hell’s going on with me out there. And this guy, you know, he was a fifth grade guy I think he had made it to. I think the mother finished high school, I think. So she was supposedly the learned one. This guy knew everything that was happening in the world. I was amazed how—you name it. And it was the greatest discussion; I really liked the guy. But obviously, you know, one time meeting somebody you can’t make an evaluation that’s perfect and they are bad, but it certainly gave me a new insight into who their father was.

And so then we go down to Ithaca. Interesting night there—I wish I could—I’d have to research all the names, but that’s where I first met Eqbal Ahmad [Eqbal Ahmad (1933- 1999)] who later on became one of the Harrisburg people, indicted with that Harrisburg crap. And I can’t remember who the hell who had the economics department—I just saw an article when he died a few years ago—who was nationwide recognized authority on economics in America and the whole capitalist society. It was a fascinating night and we told them basically what we were about to do and didn’t spell it out 100 percent, but, you know, something weird is coming down and it was a really interesting discussion on, you know, where the movement was going and what should be happening on campus and whatnot.

And we stayed overnight and in the morning—there was a guy by the name of Paul Krazinski, who was a dear old friend of mine going back in the late fifties with AID, who was a car dealer in Hawthorne, New Jersey, and all the radicals were driving around in these—what the hell? It wasn’t Toyota—a Swedish company. And I was able to get Phil one from the guy and Paul Mayer and they all were driving.

So we’re driving back in the morning. Phil’s driving. I’m here and Tom Lewis is sitting in the back seat but he’s sitting forward because he knows the discussion is about to happen. As we’re driving, Phil says, “Well, he’s in.” And I never, ever made it easy on either one of those guys to just let them talk without, you know, with a question. I said, “Who’s in what?” And he said, “Dan. He’s in.” And he bragged about how they were up all night, because they used to like to share a bottle of booze, and they were talking into the wee hours and he described the conversation that in case the little bastard tried to weasel out and all that kind of stuff.

And I had to tell him, “What are you doing that was so important in your life?” And the interesting thing as I look back was—I told you the history of Dan going over to worker priest years before. And remember too, that in January of that year he had come back with Howard Zinn [Howard Zinn (1922-2010)] and gone to Vietnam to get the first three flyers released from Hanoi [Hanoi, Vietnam]. And they landed the plane in Germany to go to New York and that’s when the military came on board, took the prisoners off the plane because they weren’t going to let Zinn and Berrigan fly into Kennedy Airport with the first three US prisoners released.

So anyway, with all that kind of background and saying, “What the hell are you doing that’s so important?” And I told Tom Lewis years later, I said, and going back to Tom Melville’s condition about getting in—no brother act—and I told Tom the last time we walked together at a demonstration here not long ago in New York, I said, “You know, Tom?” And Tom has a big thing about the two brothers. He wanted Dan in because he didn’t want Phil to be the only priest that were then legally a priest because Melville by this time already had left. And I said, “Tom,” I said, “you know, that’s one time I let friendship get in the way of my vision.” Tom Melville was right. There should have been no brother act and I should have said to Phil, “No, if you’re in; he’s out. He can be in the next one. Or if he’s in, you’re out.” And I said [to Tom], “I let friendship color my vision,” and I said that it was the beginning of the downfall of the Catholic Left. And I can expand on that with Harrisburg certainly took care of that. So that’s how it happened.

So then when we had—I say a week to ten days before the action, we had that fateful evening a couple nights before, making the napalm and by this time, that press ticket that I gave you, that had been the final product of all of us. Dan reads it that night at O’Connor’s house. He didn’t like it when it changed. And Phil—because of the rivalry between the two was unbelievable—Phil said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “All of us put this together, you want to add something—I don’t like it.”

So Dan knew, with his notoriety, because he had, you know, not only the Hanoi thing but he had won—what the hell was the award, that famous poetry award that he won? And the press knew who he was and whatnot. So he writes up his own statement and it’s his statement that the press picked up so that whole thing about that we were way past Vietnam but Latin America and the church because we really went after the church if you read that because we talked how—

At the time of Catonsville, there were four Catholic bishops in the United States who were opposed to the war. It was Boswell out in Oklahoma; Hallinan [Paul J. Hallinan] in Atlanta [Atlanta, GA] with Joe Bernadine [Joseph Louis Bernardine (1928-1996)], who later on became the head of the bishops and was the Cardinal in Chicago. He was the auxiliary; he signed it and Tom Pembleton in Detroit. Those are the four. [unclear] down in Puerto Rico didn’t as soon after but over four hundred Catholic bishops supported the war because of Spellman. So we wanted to really go after the church structure about why they were doing it. And unfortunately, that all got buried because of Dan’s poetry things, you know, some of the famous statements he makes. I mean, yeah, he writes good poetry but Dan’s, he’s an [unclear], you know. Unfortunately, that whole message got distorted. And much of the chagrin of the whole Catholic Left, of the actions after it because we weren’t into being prophets; we weren’t into being saints. It was to mobilize, not to show—

People used to come up. I remember when I came out of prison, some of the people who helped Helene a lot to get things going when we needed help was Betty Medsger [Betty Medsger (1942-)] and Ben Bagdikian [Ben Haig Bagdikian (1920-2016)]. Ben Bagdikian was the assistant at the Washington Post, editor under Bradlee [Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee (1921-2014)] and Betty was doing all the Catholic Left stuff since, you know, occasionally to this present day she writes on it.

And I remember they had a welcome out party for me when I got released at Ben and Betty’s place and a bunch of people were over there. And one of these guys who was a Protestant—I can’t remember what denomination—minister and he was one of these type who kept coming up and saying, Thank you; I almost want to touch your garment. And that always made most of us uncomfortable. And he kept thanking me and I said, “Thank me for what?” He said, “What you did for us.” And I came out—but I can see him with his goatee, and Helene remembers him well too and I said, “We didn’t do it for you and other people. We did it because of the people who were dying over there and it was not meant to be anything Messianic,” because he was kind of into that clergy thing.

And, you know, I don’t know if you ever saw the movie, Investigation of a Flame [Investigation of a Flame, directed by Lynne Sachs, Icarus Films, 2003] I have a copy of it here. A gal by the name—ironically, and not related—Sachs, Lynne Sachs [Lynne Sachs (1961- )]—she was in Baltimore and her husband at the time was teaching at the community college. She calls me in Minnesota here and she wants to make another Catonsville movie. And at the Baltimore Sun said, “If you want to [do this], you‘ve really

37 got to get a hold of Mische, because he knows the whole thing back then.” So we talked on the phone and she wanted to do it and I—I wasn’t going to [unclear] background or do anything like that again.

And so she sent me her bona fides—I think I even have it downstairs—did a couple movies. One on I think the women’s movement and there was something, maybe the Anglicans or some damn thing—that she had done documentaries on. And we talked for six months on the phone and I wasn’t agreeing and she’d send me different things. I never was critical openly, publicly about the differences with Dan and Phil and all that. I’d always figured that was in-house. And I finally decided, because there were so many people in the movement who were really upset. I remember Eddie McGowan, who— when I got out of prison, was starting the nonprofit thing down in D.C. The Jesuits became paranoid that all the Young Turk Jesuits who were at Woodstock, down in Maryland, who were all at our trial, who got infected by us, they wanted to put a wet blanket on it so they made them all move up to Sixty-eighth Street. At one time there were forty, fifty, sixty Jesuits. I remember they had three floors, great bar and the whole damn place and they had them up there where they couldn’t go anyplace else.

And [unclear] I knew and the president of Fordham was a friend of my brother’s and I decided to go up to get them to change their tune, let these Young Turks get the hell out and do what they all were ordained for. And I remember stopping at the bars in the Jesuit place and when some of the older guys found out what I was up to and said, “You’re going to go up there?” And I said, “Yeah, I’ll go up and talk to them and they mocked the hell out of me.” This was on Thursday night.

And so I go up and meet with my friend—with three of them and I sat down and said, “What are you doing?” These guys got ordained, you know, you are thirty-three years old when you’re ordained as a Jesuit, much longer than any other order. And I said, “These guys really want to do something with their lives and not just sit around here and say mass for a few rich people,” and told them what I was starting down in D.C. and I wanted to get Pete especially to come down to set up a training program that we had envisioned. And I met about three hours with these guys.

So I left, went back—this is Friday—stopped in at 68th Street again with all the Jesuits. I again got the mocking. And I said, looked at Pete nicely, and I said, “Look, Pete, I’m sure on Monday you’re going to get a call that it’s going” —they didn’t tell me that, I just thought I was reading the meeting right. I said, “You’re going to get a call on Monday. You come down to D.C. with us,” and man, I got hooted by all the rest of them. Sure enough Pete calls me in D.C. on Monday and says, “I can come down.” They let Ed McGowan come down and then Ned Murphy was able to go down and join Phil and Liz at Jonah House in Baltimore. So three of them got sprung just like that to be able to come down.

The reason I’m telling you this; give me the question back. Oh, yeah. I had never made public criticism and so what happens is we got very tight and very close to all of us guys and in ’76, well actually started in ’75, I came down with—I found out I had a hereditary blood disease called Hereditary Spherocytosis and that I had a whole bunch of cells that were round, spherical and where blood normally goes through all your organs and filters through the walls, they couldn’t get through the spleen because they’re round and they kept all these years building up and one day I was going—I’d just come back from a month out in Hollywood [Hollywood, CA] where people were raising money for us and were doing a lot of media stuff out there. And I got back to D.C. and I told Helene one night before I was really tired. I said, “I got to get some sleep here.” But I said, “When you take the kids to school in the morning, yell at me upstairs and then I’ll go and get a shower and go down to the office.”

And I got halfway across the bedroom to go in to take a shower and it’s like Rocky Marciano [Rocco Francis Marchegiano (1923-1969)]—it’s like suddenly I got floored. I hit the floor. She came running up and thought I was having a heart attack and they got the ambulance, took me to Baltimore County or Washington Hospital Center and I was in there for three days. They went through every—they went in to MRI’s of every organ and couldn’t find out what the hell was going on and the doctor who was my primary at the time said, “Well, you probably had gastro-enteritis.” I said, “Bullshit.” I didn’t believe that.

And so about two weeks later the same thing happened. Back in Washington Hospital Center and fortunately the guy who was redoing the scanning that time was an M.D. and not a tech. And they were scanning me—it was a liver scan and all of a sudden he said, “Oh my god, look at the size of that spleen.” They had never noticed that previously and here I’m in the hospital and this hematologist is coming in and he’s asking me all kinds of questions about what my nationality is; where I’m from, my parents. And I told him my parents came from, you know, eastern Germany on the border with Yugoslavia, whatnot. And so with that he did a specific blood test called Osmotic fragility test that you’d never pick up in a regular blood test. And here they found that I had Hereditary Spherocytosis. They went in and my spleen was nineteen times larger than normal. It went from here, all the way down and all the way around. It took them up—he had to get his partner in, the surgeon, to cut this dang thing out. And some of our kids have it; some of them don’t. And it can jump generations so I ended up having to leave D.C., we took a year off, moved back to Minnesota.

Then when I found this stuff at Eberhardt’s [David Eberhardt] —he had in his basement—I started looking at it historically trying to put this thing together, trying to figure out some way to correct the record about who all these people were involved in our history, you know.

KH: So speaking of—you’ve talked about a lot of people, you know, most of the people who were involved in the Catonsville 9, but what about David Darst [David Darst (1941-1968)] and—?

GM: David Darst and Murray?

KH: John Hogan.

GM: Oh, John Hogan, yeah. David Darst was at that meeting in our house that night and Darst is a really interesting guy. He—

KH: Another Minnesota guy, right?

GM: No.

KH: Wasn’t he from Minnesota? I thought there was somebody else who was from Minnesota.

GM: No, just the Melvilles and myself.

KH: Okay.

GM: Well, in other actions there were all kinds of Milwaukee 14 and all that kind of stuff but Darst was a real free spirit and how we got in contact with him is when the blood pouring thing happened, Dave Darst sent a letter that if something else is about to—let me know if you want to have flames turned into a bonfire, contact me if there’s anything in the future. So I found that out from I don’t know, Phil or Bill O’Connor, and I called him and I invited him immediately and didn’t know a lot about him. Phil in fact was reluctant at first to contact him because he thought maybe he was a federal snoop coming out of the clear from St. Louis [St. Louis, MO]. He was that—and so when I met him, I thought, Man, this is an interesting dude.

He was twenty-six but teaching in—the Christian Brothers, much like the Josephites, like Cretin/DeLaSalle out, they used to really cater to third world nation type people. And had been teaching in an all-black school and I really got to like him during the trial. And the very fascinating thing about Darst that was unique was his father was a full colonel who was working in the Pentagon at the time of Catonsville. And during the trail, when Dave was on the stand telling all of his—his dad shows up in the courtroom. I saw him at the break. I said, “Who the hell’s that?” and David said, “My dad,” and here he was in his full military uniform with all the medals on and all this kind of stuff and I know military ranks and I thought, Man, the guy’s a colonel. He’s sitting in the courtroom. So when Darst gets done—gets off the stand, his father stands up in the courtroom, clicks his heels, salutes his son, says, “That’s my son who I am very proud of.” Tells the whole courtroom. The judge and jury were shocked. And I thought, Ooh, that’s interesting.

So at the time we were released after the trial, Roszel Thomsen [Roszel Cathcart Thomsen (1900-1992)], the judge, you know, who tried to pretend how sympathetic he was, he said we all had to go back to whatever cities we were living in and we were not able to leave that city without his personal permission to travel any place. Well, I wasn’t going to, I knew what my role was when I got out—it was to organize and I wasn’t about to ask his permission because of all the defendants, the one he was really upset with was me because of the stance I took in the courtroom. And everybody knew I was going to do this and nobody else wanted to do it and I said, “That’s fine.”

Darst finds out that I’m going to do that and he said, “Well, where are you going to go?” And I said, “I’m just going to start heading west on contacts I have in all these cities.” And he said, “Why don’t you come to St. Louis?” So I went to St. Louis—that was my first stop. And there was a—and I tried to get this from Joann Malone, who was one of the Webster nuns who is a really sexy, mini-skirted nun who is militant as hell. And she could, I mean, she could really hit audiences and that’s where I first met her and Dave— I’ve asked her through the years if she—and she said, she drank a lot so she doesn’t remember a lot of the names, whatnot.

But there was a guy at St. Louis Washington University [Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO] which is a really good small college that is academically one of the best small colleges in America. There was a prof there who really was—Man, was he solid. He got a whole bunch of people together, Joann one of them; Dave was there. And then a guy by the name of Don Cotton [Donald Cotton (1945-1995)], who was—who became one of the Milwaukee 14, and Don and a guy by the name of Art Heisler from Marquette were the first two guys who brought SDS on Jesuit campuses across the country. And Coffin [William Sloane Coffin Jr. (1924-2006)], really, really fascinating guy—he was there.

And so we spent a week there and they had a lot of nuns and people over and I decided— I suggested—because they said, What if you do it on a local level so we got talking about the local bishop and about him saying his high masses on Sunday. I said, “Well, why don’t we go in there on Sunday when the guy turns around, like you said, to go to give the sermon, that we walk in and essentially take over the church, read a statement on peace and justice and whatnot and critical of the church?” And everyone, “Yeah, yeah, let’s do it.”

So that was the first place I started doing it on Sundays and Bob Hoyt, who was the first editor of the National Academy Reporter, and I were friends. I met Bob when I was going around seeing, you know, raising money with the bishops. And I used to stay with him in Kansas City [Kansas City, KA] and he had a thing called—and [unclear] had reported it on the left side of the front page, called “Cry Pocks Column,” and there were little tidbits. And he did a Scarlet Pimpernel [Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orczy, Greening

Publishing, 1905)] thing on me and he said, “They seek him here; they seek him there. Where will they find him next Sunday, in what church in America? George Mische.”

So that started that whole St. Louis thing. So then Darst said, “Where are you going from here?” I said, “Well, I’m going up to Minneapolis.” And I said, “We’ve got, you know, Harry Byrd [Harry F. Byrd Jr. (1914–2013)]”, and some of these guys I had contact with. Then he said, “Hey, I think I’m going to ride along with you. Could we stop at St. Mary’s College [now Saint Mary's University of Minnesota, Winona, MN]?” And he said, “There’s a guy here, you know, Basil O’Leary, who it turns out went to Christian Brothers.” To the young Christian Brothers, Basil O’Leary was the same as Dan Berrigan was to the young Jesuits. He wanted to tell them, you know, about Catonsville, why we did it. So we stopped in with Basil and here’s another leprechaun. He’s got about ninety- five Ph.D.’s and stuff like that and sitting down and he’s listening to all of our rationale why we did the Catonsville. And his eyes were dancing. And he said, “Well, what’s next?” And I said, “Well, I’ve got a thing scheduled out at—I’ve arranged with Paul Mayer to get his old monastery in New Jersey. We’re going to have a retreat up there in August and decide where to go with the next action; where can we do it?” And he said, “Well, whenever that is, let me know.” And that was the beginning with Basil.

So then we come up to Minneapolis and meet Freddy Ojile [Fred J. Ojile] and Harry Bury and Doug Marvy; Al Janicke [Alfred Janicke] was a local priest here with a very conservative parish and John—Jesus—he was up at my brother’s place, Will’s place up in St. Cloud; he was a Scientologist. Then we went to Milwaukee [Milwaukee, WI] and met the rest of that crew there and Darst hung right with me till Milwaukee and then went back. And the night we were doing the planning, we found out that Nick Rinalda, whose picture I showed you, down in the priesthood in the Philippines was the one in Chicago, he was really getting into the movement down there. He was staying with Groppi [James Groppi (1930- )] for a while.

And there was a gal who was in just a little group of people who were really militant and she was sleeping with an F.B.I. agent and the F.B.I. agent thought he was using her to find out what was happening with the movement. Well, she knew what she would come back with. And Nick calls me and says, “Hey, wait a minute. She told me that the Feds heard something big is coming down in Milwaukee.” Since I had been taking over churches, you know, I got ahold of Art Heisler, who I mentioned was one of the guys. He was head of the student body at the time, who had brought in SDS on campus and I said, “Art—” and he knew what I was planning the Milwaukee thing—“we just out the Feds heard something big is coming down. Get the students together and let’s take over the cathedral here on Sunday and hopefully that the Feds will buy in.”

So I got about fifty students together and I told them we’d been doing previously. Oh, yeah, let’s do it. So we go to—I’m staying at the at the Catholic Worker, Helene and I and our daughter, who was in our arms. And I get a call from the Catholic Worker that said, “Oh, my god, the bus pulled up with the local cops with riot gear. They went into

42 the back of the church and got in the sacristy.” So I said, “Okay,” so Helene and I went down and whatnot and people are all across the street in the park. And I told them, “Let’s just go on in,” and I said, “and do our thing and whatever happens, happens.” And I said, “Just everybody stay cool.”

So we walk in and the mass starts and sure enough, at the sermon, you turn around and we walk in to take over. Nick Riddell [Nicholas J. Riddell (1930-2014)] goes up in the pulpit to read the statement and we’re going in the sanctuary to make the statement and all these guys come out with clubs and whatnot, banging people. And Look magazine— I’ve got to get those pictures—Look magazine—I think it was Look—did a six or eight page photo page supplement of what happened in that cathedral. Here’s the Monseigneur with his black cassock pointing to the cops to get Nick up in the pulpit. They drag him down, bang the hell out of him. The cops are dragging women out by the hair and I’ve got the daughter in my arms and I’m walking—Friday night, talk about history works that way—it was the first network showing of was it Becket [St. Thomas Becket, (c. 1118- 1170)], and Murder in the Cathedral [Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot, 1935] and here I’m walking up and down saying, “Hey, you already saw it last Friday night on national television, what’s going on [in front of your] eyes” and the whole place was in pandemonium in the church. And I kept walking up and down, talking to them.

And Mike Cullen [Michael Douglas Cullen] had the good presence of sitting down and starting a prayer thing. But the priest has told everybody to go home, that their Sunday obligation has been fulfilled; and people are, What about your obligation? And the whole place is going nuts. Cullen’s leading prayers and people are judging and people are yelling, “You’re going to pay for Red Russia?” It was one hell of a time.

And on Thursday night before we had this meeting outside of Milwaukee to go over what the plan was. Tuesday was going to be the draft board raid; Sunday the church thing. And I said, “Here’s what we found out. The feds have gotten wind of this. We’re hoping that once we pull the church takeover on Sunday, that the feds will be, ‘Oh, that was it.’ ” And I said, “I don’t want to see any of you people getting involved in that thing in the church and screw this thing up.” Well, two of the guys did get busted and I thought, Here it goes, but the feds bought into it. They must have felt that was it and so we were able to get the action done with twenty, twenty-five thousand draft files burned.

KH: When was that? Milwaukee 14?

GM: It just happened. It was the fiftieth anniversary September twenty-fourth, Monday, last Monday, September twenty-fourth, ’68, four months after us. It was between our action and our trial in [unclear].

KH: So we’ve got maybe an hour left here before we’re done.

GM: I’m sorry if I’m taking that long.

KH: No, no, I mean, we could, like I said, we could talk for many hours. But I wanted to ask you about Helene. So, when do you meet and marry and how involved is she in all of this stuff?

GM: I had been involved and kind of engaged three times before and each time I figured I’m not ready, that I’m not ready to be a spouse or a family person and I just each time walked away from it. And I ended up in Chicago and with my college buddies; we used to have these great parties on Friday night. The best were where a truck would pull up, unload X amount of cases and kegs and we’d have one hundred and fifty people come over Friday night.

And Helene was at one of those parties. And she always heard from her close friend, Oh, I heard [there are] neat guys and George Mische—you’ve got to meet him. And she thought, with the name, I must be Japanese. That’s what we laughed about later. So I started to see her after that in—I used to hang out, lived in Old Town on the north side of Chicago; she was over on Rush Street area where all the yuppie babes [lived]—I used to kid her about how different it was. And we—after I probably met her in the bar and found out that, unlike most of the other singles at that time who were thinking about a career and money and all that kind of stuff, that she had gone to St. James in Chicago and had a nursing degree and she was teaching nursing to minority groups.

And I thought, Whew, that’s a horse of a different color. And so I thought, Wow, it’s not the party crowd and we started to date. And I remember she had never run into somebody talking politics and stuff like I did and a bunch of us used to party together and one weekend, she thought, Well, this is nooky weekend. And I said, “Why don’t we just talk and find out a little bit more?” And in the morning I woke up and I realized my wallet was in a different array of stuff and I said, “Were you going through my wallet while I was asleep?” And I said, “Really? You thought you’d find my card that I’m a member of the Communist Party like the movies on the TV thing, that I was a card carrying Communist?” I said, “Really?” And she said, “Well, I never heard a guy talk about the stuff like you’re talking about and I wanted to find out.” And I said, “You didn’t find a card, did you?”

So we got, you know, my friends and I—I decided to take a break and I decided that I was going to head out and she talked me into moving in with her and her roommate. And I had never moved in with anybody before; I never let anybody move in with me; that wasn’t where I wanted to go. And so we moved in together and I had a flight out to New Jersey from this organization, AID, and decided, Now, since I left because I disagreed with where they were going, [it] had now turned more right wing. My brother already had been up in Buffalo and they were having an important meeting about where should the organization go from here because the money that I had been bringing in, all of a sudden, instead of focusing on the people in Latin America so much, but [to] their local salaries and I was not going to be a part of that.

So we had—the meeting was very interesting for the long weekend and the decision was let’s shut it down if we’re going to go with the precedent that we started up with. And I had gotten the IRS thing—that was kind of interesting. The guy who was Lyndon Johnson’s IRS director read in the paper what I was trying to do, did all my tax work, got us a 501(c) 3 and then warned me then. He’d say, “No George, with your politics, every time you do an IRS report, it better have receipts for everything because they’ll come after you if they ever find anything out and they’ll be on you forever.” Which is true.

So we decided to shut it down—I fly back to Chicago and we go out to a new romantic supper that she had raised in a restaurant down from where she lived and then she tells me she’s pregnant. And I said, “You’re pregnant?” And in those days everybody was on the pill and if they weren’t, you were told. And I said, “Helene, you weren’t on the pill? You didn’t tell me?” She said, “Well, no for health reasons.” And I said, “What?” I said, “For Christ’s sake, you know.” She talked about how regular she had always had been and I was really shocked and she said, “Well, if you want, I’ll get an abortion.” I said, “No.” I said, I didn’t want an abortion. “I mean, Jesus Christ, Helene, you could have filled me in on what was—” Everybody would tell you in those days. And I said, “No.” I said, “What we’ll do is we’ll have the kid and if it doesn’t work out between you and I, I’ll take the kid; you can go back to being a nurse in Chicago.”

And we got together in Chicago, in Golden Gate Park, and she had a long time plan with her girlfriends who were on the West Coast trip to go down there and I wanted to go up to Minnesota for a month to spend some time with my mom. And I said I had to go out to San Francisco because we got the word, Paul Mayer and I, that Che Guevara [Ernesto "Che" Guevara (1928-1967)] was alive in Bolivia. And I’d made contact and we were going to go down and interview him while he was in the hill doing [unclear] because, you know, Tad Szulc [Tad Szulc [1927-2001)], who was the New York Times foreign guy—I ran into him a lot in Latin America—he’d write these articles about what was going on from the Hilton. He wasn’t go up into the hills and interviewing these people.

And I said, “Let’s go down and find out from Che why they’re doing this.” And so I told Helene, I’ll meet you on such and such a day at time at six o’clock at the city hall in Berkeley [Berkeley, CA]. And I knew where it was and so I got there an hour or two early and they got there late, pull up in a car across the street and she comes running across and said, “I thought you’d be gone.” I said, “I told you I’d be here. I wouldn’t leave.” So we spent the weekend and we were sitting over in Golden Gate Park and I said, “Hey, listen, I’m willing to take a shot if you’re willing to take a shot.” Because the agreement was, she had debts and I didn’t and I said, “We’ll live out here; I’ll pay off your debts. When the kid comes if it doesn’t work out between us, I’ll keep the kid and you can go back to Chicago.”

So she said she’d decided, Yeah, let’s take a shot so I said, “Here, I’ll go call Dan Berrigan, an old buddy of mine.” And she said, “Who’s he?” And I told her and I get on a

45 payphone and call Dan in New York and I said, “What are you doing two weeks from now?” He said, “Nothing, what do you have in mind?” And I said, “Well, can you come out to Chicago and I want to get married?” And he said, “Yeah, sure.” So he pulled up and we wrote the liturgy coming in from the airport—my brother Will is pretty good at this kind of stuff—and here Helene and I had all of our friends; a lot of my friends flew in from around the country on short notice and her—all of her friends from Rush Street area at the wedding, the mascara was running and they were going up to Dan Berrigan and saying, This is the first religious experience I ever had with that Eucharist because he had said something about Christian principles on peace and justice. We all had clippings out of the Chicago Tribune in the news about what was being said. It was really a hell of a thing.

KH: And what year was this that you got married?

GM: Nineteen sixty-seven, September 3, 1967. It was about just a year before the Catonsville thing.

KH: Okay.

GM: So we had the kid. She was born on March twenty-sixth.

KH: Sixty-eight?

GM: Yeah.

KH: Just before?

GM: Yeah, just before. Some of the famous pictures are around with Helene. A lot of people remember that, standing outside the courtroom with her and I and the baby with the peace sign.

KH: So she obviously knew what was going on, what you were planning to do.

GM: I told her before. We had some discussion about that years later. I said, “I wanted you to know that if we get married I’m going to end up doing something that’s going to get me into some serious trouble with the law.” So I told her later, “Hey, you had a goddamn warning.” I told her, but she said, “Yeah, but guys lie all the time.” And I said, “Wait a minute. Guys lie and then when they tell you the truth you’re saying, ‘Why should I believe you? Guys are always lying.’ ” I said, “I never lied to you.” When I quit, after that meeting, by the way, when the vote came in—because she did all the cooking and hosting—the house was something—and when I told her it’s on, Mary Moylan had brought back—Helene didn’t even know what the hell the weapon was—she brought back from Africa. It was a cool thing. And she had it in her hand and she said, “Is this going to be a one-time thing or is this going to be a lifetime commitment?” I said, “A

46 lifetime commitment.” And in frustration she threw this thing up and it hit the ceiling and knocked a chip out.

By the time I got to Hollywood, that story was legendary out there with all the movie stars whatnot saying, Is it true that when word came down, your wife took a spear and threw it and stuck it in the ceiling? And I said, “Not quite like that.” And so, you know, I remember she didn’t come over while we were in jail. By design, we had an eight-day fast and stayed in jail. And she didn’t come over and when I got over to—we took a walk down to the corner in this little park, she said, “Should we get a divorce?” I said, “What the hell, we just got married. What do you mean divorce? No,” I said. “What are you talking about?” I said, “No, things will work out. Give yourself a chance to grow. “

So it worked out and, you know, I laughed when I went to Milwaukee, too, as well as Vietnam, to see that Helene, you know, I got notoriety but in the article I wrote for The National Catholic Reporter, I put in there that I read to her the other day and I said, “Remember in that article I said that you were always—I considered you the Catonsville 10th because you’d been there at the beginning of this whole damn thing.” And, you know, the stuff she did while I was in prison. If they could have got her they would have indicted her, the stuff that she was smuggling into the prison and all that kind of stuff that was, I mean, when they came in to arrest me in jail to take me to holding [unclear] big strike, we met with the warden the day after. I was in the hole and the captain who brought me over and put me in the hole, she said Helene went up one side, down [the other of] the warden, “You mother—” this back and forth. I had to bite my tongue because I was trying not to laugh.

He had never, ever heard of, you know, some spouse coming in and reading the riot act to him and when the press got ahold of the story, they had helicopters flying over Lewisburg [United States Penitentiary, Lewisburg, PA]. Bill Buckley’s [William Frank Buckley Jr. (1925-2008)] brother [James Lane Buckley (1923-)] who was the independent senator from New York at the time, after Javits [Jacob Koppel Javits (1904-1986)], prison reform because an issue. He came to our defense. The Washington Post ran all kinds of stories. We had the judiciary committee come up and do an investigation. I took them to court and we won.

KH: And what was happening in the prison?

GM: Well, I had been—when I got to Lewisburg there were stabbings every week. People, you know, into violence. And it was Mayor Daley’s [Richard Joseph Daley (1902-1976)] concept of control. All these different, you know, blacks, Latinos, rednecks, mafia, and as long as they kept fighting with each other, they could control and, of course, there would be a lot of violence because of it. And I saw what was happening and when the clincher was at a—I played lots of sports—and here there was a softball game between a black team and a Latino team and they got in an argument and all of a sudden, guys picked up these metal baseball bats, were hitting each other over the head and I

47 thought, This shit’s got to stop. So I started to get two people from each of those groups meeting in the laundry room secretly and I said, “As long as we do this kind of shit, that this is what Daley did in Chicago. He stayed in control because he got every different group against each other and here people are working and prisons are making all the money; nobody’s got commissary money, average working people. And the violence involved.” I said, “Until we stop, this is never going to happen.”

We got into a period there where was a six-month period, there was not any anguish at all between the groups and they knew that—found out that I had had these meetings and they came in and they were going to take me off to the whole—Allenwood by that time. They got me out of the wall. And when they found out they were going to take me to solitary confinement again, voluntarily, spontaneously, they came out of the dorm and surrounded the vehicle and said, “Where are you taking him?” They said, to an administrative segregation unit, we’re going to take him and throw him in the hole. They said, No, you’re not.

They made Bobby Baker [Robert Gene Baker (1928-2017)] and these guys get his ass out and join in in surrounding. So they took me up to the wall and they—that’s when Helene read the riot act to them after what they did. They were already by this time, just as I had organized two people, they were taking five or ten of each group and starting to send them to prisons around the country. And that’s what—they were nervous because the press was coming in and had gotten involved. They had me on this schedule in court where they normally had three people, the warden and two other people but there must have been a hundred people in this big room and before I would talk I said, “I want to know who these people are.” And the warden’s, “What?” “I’m not talking until I find out everybody who identifies themselves.” They had Bureau of Prisons [Federal Bureau of Prisons], FBI, there was a CIA guy in there.

And finally they got nervous and after Helene read the riot act to them, they decided to get me out of holding and to send me out to the Lewisburg farm. And I wouldn’t agree to go unless they let me call my wife. And they said, You know how distraught she was with you guys in here. Okay, so there was a guy by the name of Dave Rudovsky [David Rudovsky (1943- )] who I knew at the time was doing a lot of great prison reform lawyer stuff, who eventually, years later, became one of the lawyers of the Camden 28 ironically. And I get on the phone and there was a social worker sitting in the other room to listen to the phone call and I said, “Helene, I’m safe. They let me out. Call David Rudovsky. We’re taking these bastards to court.” Hey, you can’t say that. “I just said it.”

Rudovsky was up the next day and we took them to court and I uncovered a lot of corruption that was happening in prison. And the judge in Lewisburg, even though that was his jurisdiction, never had been inside the prison. I told the rest of the crew, I said, “Hey, we’re going to get one chance to testify and nobody playing candy ass here. We’re going to tell them exactly what the conditions are and they had bureau people up and whatnot. They couldn’t believe what we were saying on the stand. And the judge ruled in

48 our favor and they had to bring all of these guys back from—he had ruled that everybody who had any job from now on had to be paid—it was a lot of money then, twenty-five bucks a month so they had commissary money, cigarette money, that you could have unlimited visitors and correspondence, all that.

And when we won that, the Bureau of Prisons went to the appeals court and the appeals court upheld it. They didn’t go to the Supreme Court because that would have meant that they lost—that would have been all of the federal prisons in the whole system so that by itself—and I used to tell Phil that. We can’t do anything about the war inside the prison, but we can do something about what’s going on here. So I felt pretty good that by the time we left there that the present conditions and prison system had dramatically changed. So that’s—you know.

KH: Okay. So, oddly enough, we have not actually talked in any kind of clear, orderly detail about what actually happened on May 17, 1968. So if you could just describe how this whole action unfolded.

GM: Well, as I mentioned, after that meeting in March, on March thirty-first, we cased three places and decided the one in Catonsville was the best one—had the best chance of actually being able to get in and get all the draft files but where nobody would get hurt. So we chose that and we told the press—we didn’t tell them what we were going to do but what we had was—there were three or four people who were crucial to pulling this off: Dean Pappas and Bill O’Connor, who had both been teaching at Baltimore Community College, and who had really been instrumental in getting this whole movement in Baltimore going before Phil appeared at Peter Claver.

And they brought in Gren Whitman [Grenville B. Whitman] and between the three of them, and Brendan Walsh, who started up the Academy Worker House, they did all kinds of jobs like one called up the press to tell them a very significant action was going to be happening but didn’t tell them where and what.

KH: Why was it important to contact the press?

GM: Well, you know, one of the disagreements I have with the Plowshare Movement up till now is, they claimed, you know, Gandhi [Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869- 1948)] inspired us. Nonsense. Gandhi was very shrewd in what they did on civil disobedience. Whenever they were going to go at someplace, they not only had the participants who would actually be doing the civil disobedience, but they had hundreds and hundreds of people there to witness so it wasn’t done in isolation. And they’d get the press there. So the press can see who the demonstrators were, what they were doing and all the supporters and that the message got out.

And unfortunately, the Plowshares Movement, you know, with all this going around doing the tap, tap, tap and pouring blood—it’s all done in anonymity now. The press isn’t

49 picking up that stuff. People are going to jail for five, ten years for nothing. And it’s happening up to this day. So our important thing is—our idea was—if we’re really going to stop the war and stop the draft and all that kind of stuff, you really got them to see that the civil disobedience is relevant to the issue at hand.

And, as I mentioned at the time, we found out there were no records, duplicate files of all the draft records in America. So number one, by doing that, we could actually destroy those records and that person would no longer exist. And you cannot believe how many people have come up to many of us and said, “Thanks. You got my draft file.” So they never had to go.

So in one of the articles there I estimated that we got between three and four million draft files in the first fifty actions. We didn’t know about the two hundred ninety-two at the time so god knows how many we actually got. And Pete McCloskey [Paul Norton "Pete" McCloskey Jr. (1927- )], who I supported, McCloskey proved this. McCloskey, you know, was a twenty-year military marine veteran who was a ten-year congressman, Republican, from California, who decided to oppose Nixon [US President Richard Milhous Nixon (1913-1994)] on the war and ran against him and challenged him.

And McCloskey—it was kind of interesting—when I got out of prison in ’72, and Republican congressman from Rochester, who was very close with a guy by the name of Dave Finks [David P. Finks (1930-2009)], who was a diocesan priest up in Rochester [Rochester, NY] who got Saul Alinsky [Saul David Alinsky (1909-1972)] to come in to go after Kodak [Eastman Kodak Company, Rochester NY]. And he liked what we did at Catonsville and he wanted me to go down to the Republican platform committee in 1972 in Miami Beach [Miami Beach, FL]. And I said, “You’ve got to be kidding. There’s no way they’re going to—“ He said, “No, one of the guys named Tower who was the majority—was speaker of the house for the Republicans at the time, and he were friends and he said, “No, I can arrange it.”

And Jerry Wurf [Jerome "Jerry" Wurf (1919-1981)] was head of AFSCME and I flew down to give—to testify before the ways and means committee and Pete McCloskey, the Republican, even though he was running for president, [they] would not let him appear at the Republican convention at all. And so Jerry and I fly down and here when they found out that’s where I am—it was paparazzi really—when they found out one of the Catonsville 9, out of prison, is going to testify before the ways and means committee, Jerry and I just sat down at the table and all of a sudden the press found out about it and in a matter of minutes there were a hundred microphones on the table. They couldn’t believe that that was happening.

And one of the whole things that—when they wouldn’t let McCloskey testify and couldn’t really go ahead, he decided, Well, shut the funds off on Vietnam. So he went back to the House and it took him a year and a half, two years, and he convinced them to shut off the funds for Vietnam. And all those famous films, those pictures we see, of

50 those helicopters going out the embassy with people holding on, they didn’t leave because they wanted to. The funds drove them out of Vietnam. So that was the whole principle with what we were doing is to have a real net effect, and you can’t have a net effect and political change unless you get the media to get what you’re about out because that was the whole strategy. And that’s why all those actions after a while had—

And then the feds started to realize that, Hey, it’s against their public interest to let these trials be federal. So all of a sudden they stopped, backed off from doing federal trials and let state trials take over and that’s when the Plowshare people were going to have two or three people going out in some North Dakota—or getting sentenced to ten/fifteen years and nobody knows about it because when you have a state trial the national press doesn’t pick it up.

We found out in our case from a friend who worked with the wire service that if you’re going to do an action, if you want to be national, on the federal level, that when you have the date of that, you have to have [someone] locally from the AP to request that that story from that area come into there and it becomes a national story. The feds figured out what we were doing and what was happening. That’s where they figured they’ve got to back off. Let the states do it because they can really hammer people and the story isn’t going to get out. And that was a Gandhian principle, you know.

KH: So you alert the press that something is going to happen.

GM: And they knew—the hints that they got—that they should show up.

KH: And did you—did you say, when you alerted the press, that it was this group of Catholic people? Did they—were they drawn to the idea that, Oh, this is kind of an unusual group, you know, it’s not the kind of student protesters on campus?

GM: They were told that people that were there were going to all have significant backgrounds. None of us were students that could have been drafted and all that kind of stuff—they got all kinds of hints like that because they showed up.

Now that picture there on the Catonsville 9, over there, all these pictures, you know, first of all, there were the local TV and radio stuff but there was a guy by the name of Kris Farniocus, was a guy who was a Korean War veteran but he was a conscientious objector so he was in the original M.A.S.H. units and he helped carry people off the battlefield dying and whatnot. And he was—his parents had come from Greece and he was a reporter for the Middletown New York Press, [whose] Sunday subscription was the largest small town newspaper in America, [they had] like two hundred fifty or three hundred thousand subscribers then.

And he had met Phil up at Newburgh, when they were doing the stuff against West Point. And he came down and Woody Guthrie was—not Woody Guthrie, Jesus, her name was

Woody, Christ—famous actor—he won an Academy Award in fact. The Impossible Dream [The Impossible Dream, from Man of La Mancha, film adaptation by David Wasserman, 1972, starring Peter O’Toole (1932-2013)]. Remember? Well, The Impossible Dream was a great Broadway play—he had the lead on it. And when I got out of prison there we got together; he came down to lend some support. So he had twelve kids and Woody, his wife was living in Middletown, New York. She came down with Kris. They threatened to indict her for conspiracy and him and he took all these photographs of the action. And so he was part of the—he knew what we were going to do. He was one of the press who came down because he was, you know, trusted.

So when they filmed the whole thing, Huntley and Brinkley [The Huntley–Brinkley Report, NBC News, starring Chester Robert "Chet" Huntley (1911-1974) and David McClure Brinkley (1920-2003)] came down from Washington and New York to get the film. And the feds so intimidated the local NBC station, If you release that to them, we’ll indict you on conspiracy, so it never appeared—and Huntley and Brinkley said, We’ll protect you, but the guy was afraid and wouldn’t release it. That film never came out until our trial but they had to show it in the courtroom and, you know, and so we learned from that. And so when we did the Milwaukee thing, we did a different thing. We got the press there and it all appeared on ABC the next morning and all the news.

So that was the whole rationale of why we needed the press because otherwise you’re doing something you don’t know if you’re going to get any results. People won’t know about it. But that’s how it became notorious then because the press did find out about it.

KH: So how did you decide what each of you was going to do once you get into this— ?

GM: Well, we sat at O’Connor’s house—you know, Dean Pappas and Tom Lewis are down in O’Connor’s house putting together the napalm. So we figured out how we’re going to do it and we learned—that’s why we kid about Tom Lewis, that he stammers a lot and he’s not really articulate. It was his role when we went in that he was supposed to tell, make this statement to the women in the draft board that we were here; we’re clergy and lay people; we’re concerned about peace; you don’t have to worry. He couldn’t get it out of his mouth so he finally said, “Let’s go.” And pushed in so we knew where the draft files were—

KH: What time of day did this happen?

GM: Uh, I don’t remember—late morning or midday.

KH: So you knew who was going to be there?

GM: I’m sorry.

KH: You knew who was going to be there? That there would be three clerks there or— ?

GM: Oh yeah, no, it wasn’t—all that stuff was—we cased the joint before; we knew what was going on. So everybody had some assignments and I was to grab one of the— bring in the basket. Dan was going to be posted by the file with somebody else. Mary Moylan was supposed to be in there to neutralize any woman who—yeah, god, that was funny. And all this was happening so that then we go outside and it’s funnier than hell because, you know, all our tasks, who was supposed to do what, kind of disappeared when all the chaos happened. And then, you know, and what was funny is that we were sitting around and stuff is burning and press is filming all this stuff and whatnot and we’re having these statements and there was a county, yeah, it was a county sheriff type guy sitting in his vehicle watching us. He couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on and so it took awhile for him to call back and say, Hey, you better come, and they all came because, you know, they might have come and put out the fire before it got as far as it did.

KH: How long were you actually in the office? How long did it take you to gather all these files?

GM: I don’t know. Ten, fifteen minutes I would figure. Because we knew what files to go to and we had these big baskets and we—

KH: Because you were looking for 1A files?

GM: Yeah, we knew they were all 1A and we knew where to go and this Mrs. Murphy, “My files! My files!” And on the stand she bragged about how impartial she was that she drafted her own husband during World War II and everybody in the courtroom broke up at that, you know. She was really a committed public bureaucrat with—

KH: So yeah, what was the reaction of the clerks who were working?

GM: Well, Murphy was the only one. You know, and the other woman—I can’t remember the second woman, what she was—didn’t get involved. The third one was the one who called the police because Murphy was yelling at her, “Call the police!” And she can’t get to the phone call and Mrs. Murphy is really something else. And it’s funny in the movie because they pull the transcript up in black and white of her statement back then and then on the stand and in the courtroom. So it took a while, you know, for the cops to get there and we certainly weren’t going to go anyplace because that was a whole part of the idea of getting arrested and then taken into court and [get an] investigation going on to challenge the constitutionality of the war. Because there were a couple of West Coast judges who already had ruled that Vietnam was unconstitutional but it had never gotten to the circuit level and then certainly not to the Supreme Court. And that was part of the goal, was not only to mobilize—

By the way, one of the other targets was the peace movement itself, too, because the peace movement at that time was, you know, being co-opted in a sense that, you know, you get fifty to one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand people turning out for the damn thing and doing the same damn thing. Lyndon Johnson used to use that and brag about how, what a democratic society we are that we allow this participation to go—but when it started to really build, and about the time we did our thing, that he—I remember it came out—he was challenged at a press conference about it and by this time, it had really gotten going. He said he didn’t care if every long-haired yellow-bellied hippie carried signs from Maine to California that he was not going to be the first president to lose a United States war. And, of course, who other used that same thing was [another] Texan president, George Bush [US President George Walker Bush (1946-)] on the Middle East, when he said that he was the decider; that “I will be the decider,” you know, that same thing. He wasn’t going to let public opinion tell him a damn thing.

KH: So that’s when you decided—that was part of the logic for deciding to do something like destroy draft files. You said earlier something about wanting to kind of disrupt the system versus just going out and showing, demonstrating your opposition, you wanted to do something that would impact the operation of the system.

GM: Yeah, and you get the message out that, you know—remember at the time when Johnson came to power is the whole thing about the War on Poverty bullshit thing that they were for. But—and I reminded Rick Nolan [Richard Michael Nolan (1943- )], my friend from Congress a year or two ago, “Hey, Rick, remember the big challenge then was ‘Guns and Butter’ and the whole thing about how we were for the War on Poverty but then we’ve got to have money for the guns as a priority.” And, of course, that’s it with the—who’s the famous general? I had his name before—who was in charge of the Vietnam War, went up to five hundred fifty thousand troops?

KH: Westmoreland [William Childs Westmoreland (1914-2005)].

GM: Yeah, Westmoreland, you know, so that was why we wanted to tie it in with not only the war but because of the war, all of this stuff was happening in the inner city. That’s what the statement addresses; all the domestic issues.

KH: The statement—that you gave me—

GM: The press release, yeah, that the press didn’t get because of Dan—well, they did, but Dan’s got the emphasis and—so we got pigeoned only because of the war when Catonsville was not meant to be only about the war. It was multi-issued, about the plight of where America was; where it is now.

KH: Okay, so you’ve got these files; you’ve got your homemade napalm. You go in, you get the files and then you bring them down onto the lawn—

GM: Parking lot.

KH: Parking lot?

GM: Parking lot.

KH: Okay, and light them on fire. And how many press members were around at that point do you think?

GM: Ten, eight to ten, something like that. A guy in the movie who’s really good was Pat McGrath [Patrick McGrath]. He was the local good reporter who was, probably, the most watched station in Baltimore at the time and he’s in the movie. Pat McGrath—he not only covered that and, you know, was in the movie, but the filmstrip shows that from there. But when we got out of prison—I know when I got out he got a hold of—by this time he went with—it’s an independent TV station that no longer—it got taken over, but he was their chief correspondent when I got out and he got a hold of me when I got released for [unclear] and he did that with a few people so that he, you know, he stayed in touch beyond his duties of covering the movement over there and he still is. Pat McGrath is a good guy and he told the real story and not the mythology part.

KH: So the name of the film, Hit & Stay, right, refers to the method that you chose— you Catonsville 9 people chose—to go in, raid these draft board files, in this case, light them on fire and stay around with the express intention and expectation that you will be arrested, right? And that’s why you tell Helene, “Look, if we’re going to get married, just so you know, there’s going to be something—” which is a little bit different than some other subsequent draft board break-ins where the intent was not, you know, like some of our local draft board—their intent was not to get arrested.

GM: Right.

KH: So what—I mean I understand what you’re saying about, Well, we wanted to get rid of the draft files because those people will be erased from the record of the Selective Service. So what is the function and purpose of—for all of you—to be arrested? How does that serve your purposes?

GM: Well, you know, because the principal emphasis or motivation of the antiwar stuff were students because of the draft. All the think tank stuff that was going on around the country, teach-ins, is really the word I was thinking of—and what the, you know, it’s the same thing. Trump [US President Donald John Trump (1946- )] now and all these guys raise—they try to create a false enemy and at that time, it was all these draft-dodging young, hippie, dope-smoking people. And I was convinced that we had to have various ways to penetrate that message and [one way to] break that was to have people whose background they could not doubt at all—that all of us—of the nine of us—and people

55 came out after—were not people who could have been drafted, you know. And not only Phil and I were veterans, but in the Milwaukee 14, Jim Forest [James Forest] was; John Swinglish in Camden; a whole bunch of people who were veterans so we wanted that message to get out. Hey, look. We’re not a bunch of draft dodgers. None of us could be drafted. We’re saying that they’re right, the young people, and—but we also—when we kicked the movement people in the ass about that—don’t you see you’re being co-opted by Johnson who’s saying, “Hey, we let democracy go,” and the policy stays the same?

So I remember when we got out, I set up a meeting up in New York. It was Stewart Meacham [Stewart Meacham (1911-1985)], who was the really key guy at the American Friends Service Committee at the time, the Quakers. They had headquarters in New York at the time and he set up—he got members from all of the major organizations, the peace movement organizations together, and I took John Hogan—and I’ll tell you more about Hogan, too, but Hogan and Moylan along with me, which I was—that was one of the differences, too, about Dan and Phil and myself is that I would always try to incorporate more people into this so it wasn’t just me versus what their push was so I always took Hogan or whoever else was willing to come along. And we had this great meeting up in New York. And the one guy, who I just found out died, Dave McReynolds [David Ernest McReynolds (1929-2018)]; he and I became better friends years later. He was head of the War Resisters League, which was the oldest antiwar organization in America.

They had—there was a place like a Vatican up in—what the hell is the name of that street up in Lower Manhattan, where all the antiwar movement, every social movement, had in the same building all the way up and the Catholic Peace Fellowship [Catholic Peace Fellowship, now South Bend, IN] had their place there. We knew everybody. And McReynolds and the War Resisters League—they had a mailing list, a contributors list of a hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand people, which is the best mailing list of any organization in America. So we went up and met with all of these representatives and we told them why we did it. And we said, “One thing is that you’ve got to come to see that all the stuff that we’re all organizing together, the movement, it’s not changing policy at all and the government’s using the fact that we’re doing this to their good credit that, ‘Hey, we’re a democratic society.’” And everybody really got into understanding what we were saying and then I said, “What we want to do [is] some mass mailing and raise some money. We have to get the word out, explain that.” Everybody agreed to let us use their mailing list except War Resisters League. And god, how things happen.

Within a month or two, and they said no, Dave said, “No, this is our list and we’ve built it, no way. No way.” So they wouldn’t do it and about a month or so later I was up in New York and I happened to go by—I must have the street name—it’s famous—this was their Vatican and I walk in and I was going up to meet with the Catholic Peace Fellowship, talk to Tom Cornell [Thomas C. Cornell] and Jim Forest [Jim Forest (1941- )] and Maggie Gillis and Maggie said, “Did you see McReynolds out there?” And I said, “No. Why? What’s the matter?” “Oh, he’s really pissed off.” And I said, “Over what?” And he said, “Somebody got into their office and ripped off their big fundraising total list

56 in the place and he thinks you did it.” And I happened to have to walk to the john a little later and as I’m going down the hallway, Dave’s coming out of his; I’m walking by. And I said, “See Dave. If you’d given us a copy of that list, you’d still have your list, your copy back.” And he didn’t think that was very funny. I said, “It wasn’t us,” you know. But that was part of the things we—I think we put the statement, too, that the peace movement is just there; we’re doing the same damn thing without any change.

And I went to enough demonstrations. I was at the Million Person March out in New York and the five hundred thousand one at the Pentagon. It’s an exhilarating feeling being there, you know, to see all these people I knew who care, but is it stopping the war? And, you know, even with the civil rights movement, with all the stuff that King was doing, it really never made the real effective change was until they did the boycott in Georgia, Atlanta.

All these places—I remember Lester Maddox [Lester Garfield Maddox Sr. (1915-2003)], who had his restaurant later be [unclear], he said, called a foul—that why were they doing these sit-ins and boycotts of the restaurants and the message came back from the civil rights movement, Because you guys are the ones who got the segregation policy and that. Until you change the whole economic thing—and only then did Georgia start to change the laws on the integration thing. And Nelson Mandela [Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (1918-2013)] said the same thing, that if it wouldn’t have been for the boycott that these pastors out in Philadelphia started with South Africa, until they went and boycotted companies who were investing money in South Africa, that the policy changed because this white South Africa realized we’re getting killed economically here and that’s when they changed. So he said if it wouldn’t have been for that movement in the United States they never would have got rid of apartheid. So, you know, there’s got to be strategies that have effect besides making us feel better.

By the way, the second movie, Investigation of a Flame when I decided that No, I won’t be a part of it I told Lynne Sachs—I said, “But hey, if the rest of my friends, my colleagues in Baltimore, that’s fine; that’s up to them. And she said, “I don’t have any contact with them.” I said, “What? You don’t have Dan or Phil’s or anybody else’s?” She said, “No. The Baltimore Sun said, you’ve either got to get—” I gave her everybody—all the people except Darst, who was dead, who to contact, including Dave Eberhardt, Bill O’Connor, all these people. And when it—the feature film of 19—what the hell was that? I just saw it the other day, too, of the Maryland Film Festival and he took that, our film to be the feature movie.

So all of a sudden I started getting calls from people in Baltimore that, Hey, this film is going to be on as a feature film and everybody’s worried that Steve Sachs is in that movie and they’re going to have a talk-back after for the first time. And they were going to do the same thing at Grauman’s Theatre [Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Los Angeles, CA] with the handprints outside and the sidewalk and all that shit. And said, “You’ve got to come out because Steve Sachs is going to be on the program after and they’re going to

57 have a talk-back after the flick and you’re the only person we think who can nail Sachs and you’ve got to come out.” So I was reluctant at first and whatnot and finally, the Film Festival guy calls and said, “People really believe you should be out here for this.” And I said, “Well, you know, I refused to participate.” And he said, “Yeah, we know that but you should come.” I said, “Okay, I’ll come if you pay for round trip fare for Helene and I to fly out and give us a couple nights in a hotel. We could use that.” So I said, “Yeah.” So I’m sitting in the audience—well, first we went to dinner and then after the dinner we come to the theater; it was up in New York Avenue and all that cement sidewalk bullshit and red carpet going in and there’s not people—I didn’t realize they’re all inside the place. The place was packed. So we go in and sit and saw the movie and, oh my god, am I glad I said no here. Because when I told her, you know, that what I would have to say that probably you won’t want to put it in, she said, “Well, I wasn’t thinking about doing—.” So I said, “That’s why I’ll pass on it.”

So when I saw the movie, Thank god I did. So it came time to go up on the stage. At first I didn’t even move to get up and somebody said, “You’ve got to go up there.” So Steve Sachs was sitting way on the right side and I’m on the extreme left and in between there’s about eight, ten people, I don’t know. And I’m not saying a thing and I see the flick and here is Dan and Phil, sitting like two old farts and they’re talking about prophecy and the Old Testament and Jesus, and John Hogan was a—on the camera—the socially redeeming factor in the movie and Dean Pappas was the voiceover and he came from a Greek Orthodox background. He knew more about Catholic history than most Catholics do, but going back to the Middle Ages and all the Vatican Council stuff and I told Dean he was terrific.

And so I knew Steve Sachs would do the same old bullshit. He did the—what the hell was it—Beckett [Thomas Becket (c. 1119 (or 1120)-1170)] [A Man for All Seasons, directed by Fred Zinnemann, Columbia Pictures, 1966] I think. He did the famous discussion between Skovack, not Skovack, Paul Scofield [David Paul Scofield (1922- 2008)], the actor who played Beckett, about his discussion with Rich about the concept of the law. Why you had to do this and Rich doesn’t—that whole thing. Well, Sachs does that on—and that’s George Bernard Shaw [George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)], stuff and seeing it on film, and I knew he’d do it again and sure enough, he did it.

And I’m not saying anything and finally Lynne Sachs comes over and says, “George, you’ve got to say something.” And I looked out at the audience and I said—and the place was packed and I knew every part of it was Jewish progressives—and so I said, “Well, let me start out by saying that every social and political movement in this country, thank god, at the beginning of the leadership, you name what the issue, women’s right, voting, the whole thing going back to Susan Anthony [Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906)] and civil rights movement, had the Jewish community at the leadership—of the labor movement, everything. The social conscience of America, as far as explaining it all, has been aided by the conscience of the Jewish community.

And I said—and I purposely used the term holocaust because I knew how it was going to set him off across the stage and Tom Melville’s [Thomas R. Melville (1931-2017)] book [Through a Glass Darkly: The US Holocaust in Central America by Thomas Melville, Xlibris, 2005]—do I have it here? It’s downstairs. It’s—the subtitle refers to the holocaust but in Latin America. And I had heard stories from him that on a number of occasions in the past, that when he was scheduled to speak at campuses, a couple of the Jewish people were supporting more or less OPEC [Organization Of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)] and, you know, the Netanyahu [Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu (1949- )] mentality of the Middle East objected to letting him on, because he was trying to use the holocaust term with Latin America. (Phone rings). Here we go again.

So I said, “I commend the Jewish community being at the heart of the social conscience of America” and I said, “But, you know” —I brought up the whole holocaust of this country and sure enough, Sachs, I knew he’d bite for it, “Oh, Mr. [unclear] George did— Vietnam was not the Holocaust” and I said, “Steve, “I said, “and for the community in general. I know that there’s some people here who probably believe like you Steve that that word is reserved to what happened in Nazi Germany,” I said. “But this whole country’s been built on holocaust, that we came over from Europe, stole land from the Indians, put them to death and killed them at random; we brought over black people as slaves, hung them and all that kind of stuff.” And I said, “Of course, we— and the dropping nuclear weapons on Nagasaki and Hiroshima was holocaust and was our threat to the rest of the world. We’re in charge. So the whole American culture is built on holocaust, not just here.”

And I said, “My challenge to you out here tonight is this,”—and I told them about— Steve I knew the community said to you back many years ago, ‘Why are you going after Catholics because they could have helped in Germany?’ “—what I’m curious about here is who in this community—what would you say that when, now in June”—this is May, or July—I said, “When George Bush [US President George Walker Bush (1946-)] gets the nomination for the Republican Party, which he will, and then in August and September when Al Gore [Albert Arnold Gore Jr. (1948-)] gets the nomination from the Democratic Party, which he will, and in November when George Bush beats Al Gore for the presidency, which he will, and when the first thing that George Bush starts to do is to go into the Middle East because of oil, which he will, what will be this community’s reaction to doing that because it’s all based, connected with Israel?”

And I remember friends, like David [unclear] saying, “Holy shit. Did you hit that on the head?” And that is how the whole policy of where we were at, you know, went and when I looked at Sachs’ movie, I thought, This is sad and I thought, Thank god I never got involved with—and the unfortunate part of it when they saw that movie, simultaneously it was—What the hell’s the name of the movie? John Hogan said, “Hey this so and so guy here”—I can’t remember what the guy’s name was—they made this flick, remember when John Kerry [John Forbes Kerry (1943-)] and all of those Vietnam guys took over

59 the park up in New England, right where the original demonstration, where the Revolutionary War started? That was a powerful effect and I said to the director, “Why did you make our thing the featured film and not that one?” Because it was really stunning. And the guy who made the movie couldn’t stay for ours the next day but he told Hogan about it, so we all went to see it. And wow, heavy movie! And the famous thing with John Kerry with his military uniform on, testifying before Congress. And the film guy, the director, said, “Well, we took it because in fact the Catonsville thing is such a local thing that that would be important for the film festival.” But the second rate movie became the featured one but did good when it did. So that was, you know, I was so glad I didn’t take part in that. And that’s why when Tropia came out with Hidden State: A Finished Product, thank god, at least there’s something out there.

KH: So I’m going to bring us—

GM: I get sidetracked so many times when you ask questions, I’m sorry.

KH: That’s all right. We’ll—it’s all—

GM: You can pick and choose.

KH: So then you’re all arrested on the scene as the files are burning. What are you charged with?

GM: Destroying Selective Service files—what’s the technical term of getting in the way of the government doing its due process? Conspiracy to—I can’t remember what the fourth one is. And they always gave me conspiracies but every federal trial they always dropped the conspiracy thing just before the trial, because the conspiracy thing is always the toughest one to convict them so they don’t—they still try to do that to scare people but then they always drop them when the trial starts.

KH: Interference with the Selective Service Act?

GM: Yeah.

KH: Okay, so tell me a little bit—so the trial starts—this happens in May; you’re arrested and the trial actually takes place in October, so a few months later in Baltimore. Tell me about the trial.

GM: Well, it was a hell of a week because now we had the mob turn out. We never, you know, expected that turnout. I mean it was—it gave you a sense of humility but also, thank god, that the public is reacting to this that the, you know, we found out in the pretrial stuff before—a couple weeks—that the judge was not going to allow us to have anybody come in outside of the defendants to testify. The way he’s going to be, always talking about the constitutionality of the war and bringing in Zinn and all that, even

60 though Zinn came, got on the stand to say what he would testify, but the court never allowed that to happen. But, you know, when it came down to the trial itself we had decided strategically that we would have nothing to do with the jury selection process, that the jury would be totally up to the government to do what they want.

And it was showed, you know, what a bankrupt judge—he was always trying to play the son of a preacher man—that he allowed to be seated as one of the twelve, a guy who showed up at the voir dire meetings with his American Legion hat on and [was] very clearly a military guy, but he was okay—the judge approved him, and we didn’t object to anything, you know. We said, “This is your trial; you do what you want. We’ll take any twelve you want.” So they had the whole jury selection and because of all the heat that Sachs got from the first day, you know, from his own community, and with us having Kunstler [William Moses Kunstler (1919-1995)] and—I’ll tell you how we got Kunstler in in a minute here. That was the difference between Dan and I, too, what prompted us to get Kunstler. I’ll tell you real quick.

We were in jail—eight days and we were fasting—and we were getting the paper and I read this paper in the article in the Baltimore Sun that Bill Kunstler had just gone into the white judge in New Orleans, for Rap Brown, who had taken an unloaded gun on an airplane to fly as his civil disobedience to tell black people that the time has come where blacks are going to have to start defending themselves because the police are killing their people on the street corners. So it was his way of getting close to it. He got arrested. The trial was down there and Kunstler goes in and asks the judge to recuse himself on the basis that he was a white racist and the judge went nuts.

And so Rap Brown got five years and ten thousand dollars fine and when I read that, I yelled out to Melville and I said, because we hadn’t even talked about the lawyers at the time, beforehand, and I said, “This is the guy we need as our attorney if we’re going to have a real political trial.” That’s what we wanted and now Dan, getting in late with his nonsense, he was close with Hoffman [Abbot Howard Hoffman (1936-1989)] and Benjamin Spock [Benjamin McLane Spock (1903-1998)] and all these guys who went on trial who never said, Yes, we urged kids to resist the draft. They went in and spent one hundred eighty-five thousand bucks—now you’re talking about big money way back then—one hundred eighty-five thousand dollars, to go in and they’ll say, Yeah, of course we told people to draft resist. Oh, no, you know, they got them on technicalities and nobody went to jail. And Dan wanted to have that type of trial because he was buddy- buddy with them.

And I said, “Bullshit.” So he wanted to use—oh, what the hell was it? Boudin [Leonard B. Boudin (1912-1989)] and Rabinowitz [Victor Rabinowitz (1911-2017)] were their attorneys with Spock. So he sets up a meeting with Rabinowitz and Dan and I go up to hook up with him and Rabinowitz has got this big flashy office and a really big desk and he’s got nothing, not a thing on his desk and Dan’s telling him about what we did and he’s, Yeah, we read it in the paper and whatnot and so he’s telling we’re going to go to

61 trial and blah-blah-blah and the first thing out of Rabinowitz’s mouth is what kind of money he could come up with and Dan—and I didn’t say anything—Dan was sitting at the table and he said, “Well,” he said, “I probably raised, you know, as the beginning retainer, twenty-five thousand bucks,” and Rabinowitz says, “Okay, that will do.”

And I let him talk for a minute and I said, “Well, Dan, I’ll tell you what. If we can raise twenty-five thousand dollars, we wouldn’t be going to him, to the attorney. We’d be using that to send our organizers out and do more stuff at fifty bucks to one hundred dollars a week, or something like that, not to give it to an attorney.” I said, “You can talk to him all you want,” I said, “but that ain’t going to go. I’m going to go walk down the street.” So I walked. Dan wasn’t too pleased with me. I walked down to Kunstler’s because I knew where Kunstler’s office was. I walked down there to Kunstler’s office myself and walked in and asked to see him. And the secretary—so he gets—this office is quite large, just a big open space and Bill comes out into the office and shook hands and I told him who I was and he’d read about it in the New York Times, too.

And I said, “I just left Dan up at Rabinowitz’s office,” and I said, “I told him I wanted to come down and see if you’d represent us, that we wanted to have a real political trial, not to go in and try to get off. And he said, “Well, what changed your mind? What were you thinking about?” So I told him the Rap Brown story I read and I said, “I yelled out to Tom Melville at the time. This is what we want to do.” And he said, “You mean you’re not going to try to get off or anything?” And I said, “No, we want to tell them why we did it and whatnot, because if we get off on the wrong reason, we’d have to go out and do it again anyway.”

So he said, “Well, you’re the first potential client that ever came into my office and wanted to hire me on the basis I just got my last client the maximum sentence.” We both started to laugh. So that’s how we got Kunstler in. So I set up a meeting between him and Dan in a restaurant up in New York and it went—and oh, by the way, Bill came down to Washington. He was [unclear] the people in our house and everybody liked him right away and said, Yeah. And then Dan wasn’t at the meeting so I set up a private thing with him and Dan went along with it when he met Bill. And so they never had any regrets about getting him involved.

So the strategy that evolved in the trial was to let the government do the jury selection and with Sachs, what a sneaky little bastard, he knew Kunstler’s civil rights background and, you know, which was him, Kunstler and [unclear] and they were the ones who really, who were the lawyers of the time in terms of the movement. And so he decides he’s going to get—he didn’t want to face Kunstler. So he gets a black attorney to be the lead attorney for the government and—oh, what was the number two guy in there? Geez! It was a Democrat who ended up, became the US Attorney and then brought charges against Mandel [Marvin Mandel (1920-2015)], the Democratic governor who became corrupt. And, in fact, he gave me the money later on to bail, temporary money to bail Phil and Lewis out because I had to raise a lot of money. I said, “Oh shit, we’re going to have

62 to bring the checkbook.” He wrote the check himself then I replaced it. He had become convinced— So here all of a sudden, we’ve got this black attorney who’s going to not only be a buffer against Kunstler but also with Bill’s background with the black community, David Darst—he wanted something to offset that. And, by the way, he realized he had been used, too. And later on when that trial was over, he resigned from the justice department.

But so the strategy was to get on and appeal to them so the government got up and gave all this horseshit on the trial and the judge let them say anything, never made one objection to the prosecution was overplaying their hand whatnot. So, when it came to our turn, Phil was to, I think, lead off or was it Tom? And I was going to go near the end with Dan. And Phil was—maybe it was being in jail for eight months at the—six months at the time—that his mind wasn’t working good. He was terrible on the stand; same as Lewis. And at the break I said, “I’m going on next.” I said, “We can’t let this continue here of them playing this game.” And every time Phil would start to talk, the black attorney would get up, interrupt him and object and that was the routine with the judge. They were not going to let us get into any coherent discussion of all that kind of stuff.

So I told everybody—I told Kunstler and Dan, I said, “I’m going to go on next.” I said, “We’ve got to stop this,” I said, “and if it has to get kind of rough, I’m going to take the judge on.” So I got on and I started—and there was one black juror, a woman, who was— and I would talk to the jury rather than, you know, and Kunstler asked the question. I just went on and Kunstler knew enough to not get into Q & A—to let me say what I was going to say. And, of course, bang! The judge—the guy started to get up and object to everything I was saying and I told him, “Sit down.” And the judge almost broke the damn gavel that day. And he, you know, “You’re going to wait for me.” I said, “Wait a minute. You let him do this all the time when Berrigan and Lewis were on and we never said a damn thing. When you, when the government presented we let them say anything. It was your jury and if you think I’m going to go to jail for up to ten years without having my say, I’m sorry.”

And he gaveled I don’t know how many times and finally he stopped doing it. I started talking; I was talking to the jury. And then, everyone, the rest of the defendants after that really got a chance to talk and that’s when the prosecutor realized he’d been used by these guys and he never got up after that. And it went on and the thing that, you know, Dave Darst’s dad was powerful.

And, by the way, when Melville got on, there were I don’t know how many people from the Pentagon, uniforms came in because Melville was the one who blew the whistle that here these secret planes were coming into Central America and, you know, when it was illegal with the Contra thing, and told them about the airplanes that were landing up near the jungle area and all that kind of stuff. And they wanted to know how much Melville knew and what he was saying and when he got done, they left.

And Hogan was a beaut because he’s such a gentle sort and he made everything so soft and in the role he played, too, because while they were in the process of getting kicked out of Guatemala, they knew that once they were out, the government was going to go in and kill all the people who had been up in Art and Tom’s cooperative—and Hogan went up and he got them in canoes and boats and he got them up the river into Mexico because they knew the slaughter would have come in so they saved a lot of— And so, Hogan, you know, soft, gentle guy that he was, had real depth and he and Moylan, in the house—I used to kid them because they used to love to play cribbage. They’d sit and have a can of beer and play cribbage and Tom was not—I mean, John was not a loud guy at all but boy, a real [unclear]. What a great family, too—he came from, too. That Hogan family really backed him on everything he did. And, you know, I was lucky; Hogan was lucky. We had—and Darst had the best support from our families, you know. That was good.

KH: So you have said that all of you wanted a political trial, which I assume means that you wanted to bring it—and you said at other times that you wanted ultimately to challenge the constitutionality of the war. So, for you, it was less about the specific actions—Did you violate? Did you destroy government property? Did you interfere with the Selective Service Act? That was going to be your entry point into talking about these bigger issues.

GM: Right, yeah, because, you know, very clearly ever since Korea, we always declared wars because that’s part of the constitution. And Congress at the beginning in Korea ducked that and let the presidential action, direct action and that’s how Vietnam happened. Every place that’s been that. And instead of making the Congress say, I declare war, like we did in Japan. And that’s how, you know, the merger between the industrial military complex has taken place and through the political structure, and Republicans and Democrats alike. That’s why [it was such] fresh air when McCloskey argued about unconstitutionality of the war since they had never declared war.

So, you know, while I’ve always been a strong supporter of protests and civil disobedience and all that kind of stuff, but not to make myself, any of us, feel better, but because unless you get the body politic in this country to see what the hell you’re about and change public policy, that is not to say, Oh, what a bunch of nice Catholics those people are—that’s all bullshit even though all of us came from strong Catholic backgrounds. We didn’t get caught up in that Messianic nonsense. That was always an unfortunate disagreement between Dan, Phil and the Plowshare people.

And I want to tell you where I really started to see how pervading that feeling was—in the ’68 to ’74 a group of activists versus now is—you know, I said before I’d never made my objections publicly because that was in-house. And when they started to tape people—and one of the real key guys—and he mentions it in that movie, too, my role; Andy McGowan did, the ex-Jesuit, is that I was taping him—there were two occasions where McGowan really spent some time. I was taping him years ago up in Ithaca [Ithaca, NY] around the lake. I was getting all of his background, you know, what got him into it

64 from his Irish Catholic background whatnot. And then started to realize how upset he was with the role of the Berrigans even though all those Young Turk Jesuits first got in because of Dan’s notoriety whatnot, made him take a look at their own priesthood. The thing with Ed was that because of the role of Dan and Phil, they had robbed everybody else of their rightful place in history. That’s what his statement was on the tape and I remember when I got back to Minnesota I said to Helene, I said, “That was the first time I’d gotten somebody to really speak about what I suspected their opinions were,” which was certainly my attitude and I came back—and she thought the world of McGowan, too, because it was a year and a half of [unclear] in D.C. And I said, “Wow,” when Ed laid that out, you know.

And then years later, I remember we were—it was the Camden 28’s twenty-year reunion they wanted me to come to and Mary Moylan was not invited to the twenty-fifth anniversary in Catonsville but I didn’t know that when I went out. And here I realized that Dan and Phil and Liz were using really our anniversary to promote their Plowshares stuff, actions. I was really upset when I got out there to find out that they had not tried to find Mary Moylan, invite her and the Catholic Worker— I went over to Brendan Walsh, and they’re all laughing because I went over on Friday night to Goucher [Goucher College, Towson, MD] and said, “Those are all Phil and Liz’s people.” And I said, “Where’s Mary?” And they said, “She was never invited.” And I said, “Are you serious?” And they said, “No,” and I said, “Well, if I’d have known that, I mean, I wouldn’t be out here right now. And I found out when I went looking for her at the Goucher thing on Friday, none of the usual suspects were there.

And Liz happened to—and her [unclear] they were having a cookout outside of Goucher for Friday night because I knew that’s where everybody would be, and I didn’t know anybody and here comes Liz McAlister out of the kitchen carrying food and she sees me and I said, “Where is everybody?” And she’s real cold to me and I say, “C’mon, where the hell?” I knew Melvilles were in; everybody was fine. “They’re probably over at Brendan Walsh’s house.” So I went over to Brendan Walsh’s house and they’re all laughing when they found out that I had gone over to that place. And I said, “Yeah,” I said. “Liz is really—and just then I find out where the hell you people were.” And I said, “I don’t know why she was so cold.” And they all started to laugh and they said— somebody said, “Well, because of what was in the Baltimore Sun that morning.” And they pulled out the article and I read it and here in there it mentioned that contrary to what people thought before, that George Mische was the guy who was really the person who put Catonsville together and I said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake. How the hell did that come about?” And they all started to laugh and looked at Tom Melville. And, “Tom did it.” And I said, “What the hell did you do that for?” And he said, “I figured after all these years the damn truth ought to come out instead of all this bullshit about those guys.” And I said, “Well, that certainly explains that.” And then I found out that Mary wasn’t invited.

KH: Was she—what year was this?

GM: Well, ’93.

KH: So it was Mary—because Mary Moylan stayed underground for a long, long time—

GM: Ten years.

KH: Ten years, okay.

GM: And that just shows you the bullshit about the press when you promote yourself is they got me within a month because—and I realized later it was because of Liz McAlister. McAlister contacts Paul Mayer and once he got in [unclear] my brother Jerry because Dan doesn’t—he’s out there underground, doesn’t know what the hell, where to hook up with me wherever I was. And I said, “Well, I told my—” to tell them that I was going to be at Paul Koch’s place in Chicago in two days and I’ll make arrangements from there. That’s why they all thought, because obviously, she made these calls on unprotected lines and was careless, so the feds knew what was happening.

So the feds who were waiting for me; they thought Berrigan was with me. So when they came with the guns they wanted to know where Berrigan was. Where’s Berrigan? And I thought—oh, that’s how they found out. Here I find out years later that that’s how Dan got caught on Block Island [Block Island, RI] when seeing Bill Sternfield out there because Liz got careless on the phone and said he was coming there and the cops, the feds, were waiting there.

And then, of course, her and Phil were responsible for the whole Harrisburg bullshit because, you know, when the feds got me, I told you about the back and forth, how long it took me to get out there, but I got out to Lewisburg, I’d been there for a month in the hole. And when I got out, I got out on [unclear] and by this time I find out all my colleagues are there. And I said I knew something was up right away and I warned Phil and I told Tom Melville. I said, “Hey, the prison system of the feds doesn’t work this way. They don’t put draft partners in the same place because they figure you conspired outside; you’ll conspire inside.” They had us all there. I said, “We’ve got to be careful.”

Then Melville tells me that this guy, Boyd Douglas [Boyd Frederick Douglas Jr.], who was a bad guy, came up to him first and said, “Hey, Tom, if you want to get in touch with any of your revolutionary friends out there I can make contact for you.”

Because of three thousand inmates, here’s this two-bit hustler who had no college behind him, he got him going out on this program out to Bucknell [Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA]. We all said, there were hundreds and hundreds of prisoners in there who had—half college graduates—who they could have sent out to say, Hey, here’s how we rehabilitating people; they’re getting their college education. They didn’t send me any of that. They sent him out and I said, “Hey,” he came up to Melville and said that and

Melville told him no. He came up the third time and finally Melville, who’s not a violent guy, grabbed him by the throat and said, “Listen, you little bastard. You come near me again I’ll break your goddamn neck.”

So Paul—he told me about him—he warned me about him and then he told me that he got in touch with Phil, that he’s taken out these damn things between him and McAlister, these letters, and I tried warning Phil. I said, “Phil, we can’t do anything about what’s going on here about Vietnam, but we can do something about this joint.” “Oh, yeah, you’re right,” and he kept doing it and I said, “Hey, look. You know,” because they were Irish, all of the priests in the early action were Irish and I said, “Phil, look what the IRA did. When one of their people get busted and go to prison they shut off all communication with that person because they know how vulnerable they are inside, but they take care of their families out there.” “Oh, yeah, you’re right.” I kept telling him but he kept doing the damn things.

So then when, all of a sudden we’re watching TV inside of prison one night and Rooney [John James Rooney (1903-1975)] was a Catholic Congressman from Brooklyn, who was the head of the appropriations committee. And these are televised. Here his hearing’s with Hoover [John Edgar Hoover (1895-1972)], looking for new money to have these special projects. And Rooney said, “Well, you know, what are you doing about all these radicals —are you getting—?” “Oh, yeah.” “How about the Black Panthers?” “Oh, yeah, we’ve got people inside of Black Panthers. We’re keeping abreast of them and SDS and the student movement, all these movements.” And it came, then Rooney said, “Well, how about all these commies who are planning on doing this?” He said, “Now they’re a little tougher to find out because of all their church connections in their background. But we just uncovered this plot to kidnap Kissinger [Henry Alfred Kissinger (1923- )] and blow up the tunnels.”

And when I heard that I looked at Douglas. You dumb son of a bitch, yeah. This whole thing is coming down because you and McAlister and within twenty-four hours, the feds were going up there. And I got the word from, you know, I had good communication with certain people inside of the prison. And one of the guys who’s a hit guy for the mob, who was a chaplain’s assistant and was a pretty good guy actually and he told me, he said, “George, the feds are going through all the people’s prison files to find out who they can most likely get to testify that Phil Berrigan told me in jail that we were plotting to do all this stuff. And it’s to—and I told this to Ramsey Clark [William Ramsey Clark (1927- )] when I got out, what was going on, and I said, “It’s—the human condition shows how no matter how far you’re down, that there’s a goodness in—” They could not find one prisoner to agree to get on the stand to testify that, Yeah, this is true, they were going to do this kind of stuff.

So, when I get out, Joe, the priest, the D.C. guy—he was working on the Harrisburg Defense Committee. He had copies of the letters and he showed me those letters and I was embarrassed reading them. And guys—there were nuns and priests who were part of

67 the—who got indicted at Harrisburg. Those people worshiped the ground that Phil and Liz, you know, walked on, and when Phil and I broke—and I had moved back to the Midwest, and he used to send them out to spy and undercut what I was doing back in the Midwest. And I knew that at the time and I found out later on— had it corroborated from the inside from the defendants themselves. But when I read those letters about how little they thought of Tony Skobloch and all these priests and nuns who were like puppets for them, I was embarrassed reading it for their sake. And there are three people—their names were mentioned without some editorial comment was Helene and I and Tom Melville. Boyd Douglas approached my wife outside of prison by trying to get into—and I had warned her about him and she just, nicely said, “We’ll pass on it,” without letting him know that we already suspected him.

So, you know, all that shit came down so when I go back to that Goucher thing and I find out that Mary’s not there, I said, “If I knew that Mary wasn’t going to be here today I wouldn’t have driven out yesterday.” And I said, “If anybody knows where Mary is, when I get out of here, after the lunch break, I’d appreciate knowing.” And that morning when I got over to Goucher, here Garry Wills [Garry Wills (1934-]—I don’t know if you’re familiar with Garry Wills. Garry Wills was there and what’s his name? John [John Paul Cusack (1966- )], the great actor, Dick Cusack’s [Richard John "Dick" Cusack (1925-2003)] son, John Cusack, and the daughter. Cusack and George McVeigh, one of their great supporters, and Phil Berrigan were college mates up at Holy Cross and they were all there. And after I found out about the Moylan thing, Garry Wills, when the National Catholic Reporter started—their two great columnists were Garry Wills and John Leo [John Leo (1935- )].

Garry Wills was the conservative voice and John Leo was the wild-eyed lefty. Well, as years went on, it turned the opposite. Leo was writing for Newsweek, or whatever. He was the more conservative guy and Garry Wills had just become the opposite. He really [unclear] the catholic left stuff and very, had written some very good stuff, and Garry was there at the trial every day and all that kind of stuff. And here I hadn’t seen him in years and I said, “Garry,” I said. “You know, I walked into the Goucher thing up there and here were tables and that enlarged picture of those two [the Berrigans]—not the nine—it was our nine‘s twenty-fifth reunion—went from the ceiling to the floor, a huge picture, all this stuff on the table was about publishers and then I realized exactly what they were doing.” And I said to Garry, I said, “I think I might say a few things that might piss a few people off.” And Garry said, “I always believed that whatever should be said should be said.” So I got up and told he Mary Moylan story and said, “I would not have been here today if I found out that Mary was not invited and second of all,” I said, “the only reason that Catonsville has any relevance at all is because all the actions that came after it—”

So I started with the Milwaukee 14, twenty-five thousand draft files, 14 people; DC 9— went all the way to Camden, and said, “And a realistic assessment of why any of us are known is because that Camden, after a three-month trial, convinced that jury and the

68 judge to say, ‘Not guilty.’ And had that not happened, there would be no relevance here. We wouldn’t be here today.”

Well, Phil didn’t like that I told it then. When he got done talking he took off, didn’t stay for the weekend and went up to New England. And Kunstler comes up to me and says, “I didn’t know anybody was looking for Mary. I was up at a fundraiser last week in New York. Paul Mayer walks in with Mary Moylan and Val Green. Paul didn’t know where she is so I called, found out where she was—she had not been invited and I called her and I said, “Camden is next weekend, Mary. They don’t want me to be there and would you please come—I’ll come and pick you up.” And she, “Yeah.” So I go up—she’s up in Red Bank [Red Bank, NJ] in that—Val Green’s parents owned the place and Mary was there.

And I get up there and I get out of the car and she’s on the porch and she can’t see me. And I said, “Mary.” And she said, “George, that you?” And I said, “Yeah.” Go up to the house and first, she’s blind and had been living in real tough shape for years, Val Green had worked for the State of New York and got her on assistance so Mary would have to get on the train once a month to go to New York to be able to get her help. So we sat— she was under [ground] ten years. I get caught in a month and the press hits when I get caught, Dan gets caught in five or six months. I’m driving from Minneapolis to St. Cloud and I always listen on the top of the hour to CBS News to find out what’s going on. Here the three o’clock news says, Well, today, Mary Moylan, one of the Catonsville 9, turned herself in in Baltimore, Maryland, after ten years on the road.

And I got home; I told Helene that. I get on the phone and I’m pretty good at pulling stunts like this. I didn’t say I was an attorney but I acted like I was an attorney and they bounced me around to three numbers and finally Mary—she sat in the same damn jail when we were—Mary picks up the phone, I said, “You finally turn yourself—” “George! How the hell did you do this?” So we stayed in touch ever since then and the press didn’t mention jack shit about Mary Moylan turning in, outside of that CBS program. And it just goes to show you that, you know, especially being women, you know, they’re tagalongs, you know, but Mary’s one of the great joys of our life. All of our kids are named after all of our political colleagues, including—our son is Chris Moylan, after Chris Farnakous and Mary Moylan. And Melville’s— The only one we didn’t get in was Darst because the last—the fifth kid we decided we’d name after the two grandmothers.

KH: Some family legacy. So, by the time Mary Moylan turns herself in, you’ve already served your prison time; you’re out.

GM: She would have, too.

KH: She what?

GM: They said when she turned herself in, they sent her to Alderson [Federal Prison Camp, Alderson, Alderson, WV] and she did do the full term—

KH: But years after you did, right?

GM: Oh, sure, yeah.

KH: I mean, you’re in and out; you’re back in Minnesota by this time. So just to back up and clarify for the record, you all are convicted, found guilty of these charges and then you got various sentences. Yours was three years and you go underground for a while until they find you in Chicago and you served twenty-three months?

GM: Twenty-five.

KH: Twenty-five months. I know we’ve talked a little bit about your prison experience already and what was it like for you when you got out of prison? What did you do?

GM: Well, you know, you never know how the ball’s going to bounce in your life but a guy who had befriended Helene, a guy by the name of Tom Buck, who was very close with—oh, what the hell’s that Congressman’s name [William Robert Anderson (1921- 2007)] that—he was the former admiral, head of the—who took the Nautilus, the famous, you know, first nuclear sub—Tennessee. Geez, I can’t remember. He was the guy who went over to Vietnam and blew the whistle on the tiger cages—that we were—what we were doing over there. And he was a Congressman from Tennessee for two terms and they didn’t give him very good shit. He got fascinated with us when he got back and it came up that he was supportive of the Berrigan’s on the Harrisburg thing. Well, that isn’t become too popular in Tennessee as you’re running for reelection when you’re befriending these people down in Tennessee had—and when it came time before the election, Dan and Phil didn’t do jack shit to help him out to get re-elected and he got beat.

And he and I became pretty good friends. We used to have a drink together when I got out in D.C. and Bill, god, can’t remember but I will. He—give me the question again. I’m sorry. I got sidetracked.

KH: Your experience of getting out of prison, after prison.

GM: Oh yeah, Tom Buck was a friend of this Congressman and he was also a friend of Stanley Kubrick [Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999)] and all these guys, who were real lefties. And he had set up a deal with—told me when he came to visit—“When you get out, what are your plans?” And I said, “No definitive plans but I want to do something about this experience when I get out, too.” And he said, “Well, there’s a group of people getting together in Europe to organize this organization to—and to make it grow. It’ll deal with international countries where bad crap is happening. And they’d like to have you become a part of that and go over there and it can be easy to get money to support ourselves by talking and being involved in this.” And I decided, though all that was tempting and probably would have been good for Helene and I to have us a chance to get away from all

70 this after all that time in the joint, but I had decided I was going to really do something about the prison system and the legal system in America. Not only prison itself, but who’s ending up there.

So I decided that I was going to do that and I hooked up with John Conyers [John James Conyers Jr. (1929- )], who just had organized the Black Caucus and a number of other organizations to help out and a couple guys who put up funds, one guy especially—first time somebody gave me five thousand dollars over a luncheon gave me to get something going and asked—

Then when Sheldon Cohen [Sheldon Stanley Cohen (1927-2018)], the head of the IRS read about what I was trying to do and helped me get this 501(c)3 and warned me about who—really neat guy—people like that just came out of the wall. And that’s what kicked it off and then a whole bunch of people on the West Coast in the movie industry, Walter Matthau [Walter Matthau (1920-2000)] and Jack Lemmon [John Uhler "Jack" Lemmon III (1925-2001)] got involved in raising money; Valerie Harper [Valerie Kathryn Harper (1939- )] helped out a lot. John Denver [Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. (1943-1997)]—we had this great concert at Notre Dame [University of Notre Dame du Lac, Notre Dame, IN]. John Denver, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, oh shit—Jimmy Buffett [James William Buffett (1946- )],—Buffett was a friend of [unclear] and she said, “Hey, I’ve got a buddy. Can I get him on the program, too?” And I said, “Who?” I hadn’t heard of Jimmy Buffett.

So there were eighteen thousand people at that place and five thousand people outside and it was quite a night. So Judy Collins [Judith Marjorie Collins (1939-,)] a whole bunch of people got involved in doing—Joan Baez [Joan Chandos Baez (1941- )]. Baez was the only one that had a condition that any time you do a benefit for her, you’ve got to limit the price line—like it was maybe three bucks, five bucks so that people could afford to go to concerts because most other people can’t afford to go to some of these concerts.

And, you know, we had a lot of support. The organization—I passed up helping it get going was Embassy International and I often thought back, you know, that could have been interesting but I don’t regret doing what we did because it was a, you know, we had a—we published two books on the prison situation—

KH: So what was the name of the organization?

GM: Jesus, give me a break here. (laughter) I’m too damn tired.

KH: We’re almost done.

GM: Oh, no, this is crazy. It’s—I’ll get it.

KH: But it was on prison reform.

GM: Yeah, but I didn’t use the term prison it was—oh, I’ve got the books downstairs. We published two books—

KH: You can email it to me.

GM: Okay, we did.

KH: But this was a fundraising concert for—to raise money for this organization?

GM: Yeah, yeah, because people really jumped on it. John Harper was a guy we didn’t—none of us at first was really excited about but finally somebody’s going to show how badly the, you know, from day one, you’re going into court until you go to prison that it’s all screwed up. The Black Caucus were really great, you know, it was—I was sorry to see Ron Dellums [Ronald Vernie Dellums (1935-2018)] just died now. Dellums really was a cool cat because he was the first guy who got elected—well, he was in Congress a long time—he was a community organizer, you know, out in Berkeley before he ever got in Congress and eventually became the mayor of Oakland [Oakland, CA]. And boy, you didn’t have to convince him on any issues, I mean, he was there.

But, so there were—so that’s what I did and then finally my health got a hold of me, but—god, I can’t believe that my one organization, National Coordinating Committee for Justice—N-C-C-J-L.

KH: N-C-C-J-L.

GM: National Coordinating Committee for Justice under Law.

KH: Coordinating Committee—

GM: I did hearings—it was kind of interesting. We did a week’s hearing, Ramsey Clark had to lead it off with a keynote and it—we started out at Congress hoping to have hearings right in the Raeburn Building, which is totally unusual for outside organization with the Black Caucus as a cosponsor and having the hearings start out on in the Congressional hearing rooms. And then the last four days we did it in Georgetown. And, boy, it was a who’s who group of people I was able to get to come to testify.

KH: And when was this about?

GM: Well, I got out in 1972 and so this would have been probably ’73 or ’74—I’d have to look. I have all the documentation down there [in basement files]. It was ’73 or ’74 that we actually had the hearings and all this stuff going on out in, you know, the West Coast. And it was amazing how many people got interested in it very quick, you know. Kirk Douglas [Kirk Douglas (born Issur Danielovitch (1916- )]; Anne Douglas [Anne Buydens Douglas (1919- )]—I’m just saying, you know, she comes from peasant

72 stock in Branson [Branson, MO]. I think she’s probably his social conscience and she got a lot of people together in their house and she was really solid. You didn’t have to do any explaining to her, you know, what the hell the issues were in terms of poverty. And there’s a lot of people in the Hollywood scene who stand for something in a real way besides just publicity or all that horseshit of being a star.

KH: So you are back in Minnesota by when?

GM: Seventy-six we moved back. Yeah, my health with that whole spherocytosis bullshit and the surgeries and we decided we’d move back and we were trying to decide where to move and we were—I wanted to set up some place where I could—a resort type place, training people to be organizers. So we looked at different places—Kalispell [Kalispell, MT], on the other side of Glacier [National Park], was really interesting, where the monuments are in South Dakota. We were just talking about that over in South Dakota where one of the guys from the Camden 28 was there at the Milwaukee thing and he’s in Sturgis [Sturgis, SD], you know—

KH: I do. I can’t think of it either.

GM: So we thought of there and then also, we had looked for a resort for that whole summer when we came home in ’76 up north. Helene and I camped all over and we came close to buying a place up by Leech Lake [Leech Lake, MN] and there was a little resort there—they had twelve or fourteen nice cabins, a lodge amongst all these goddamn red trees and I think it was forty acres on the damn thing. One hundred twenty-five thousand they wanted for it and the guy was willing to take a contract for deed for dirt cheap and we had sold our two houses in D.C. We were going to do it and then all of a sudden, I thought, Wait a minute. We get up here in the north woods. What happens if I croak and Helene is stuck up here in the north woods with three kids? I said, “No, we better not.” So we chose to look up in St. Cloud where I grew up and so we bought a little three-two bar and Gene McCarthy [Eugene Joseph McCarthy (1916-2005)] used to come down and read poetry for us.

In fact, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, when I brought them into St. Cloud, came down to our little bar—people couldn’t believe it, they came in to hear them play. So it was—turned into kind of a real political thing and then when I decided to run for City Council, my political enemies were saying, Yeah, he’s just doing that because he wants to get a liquor license. So I had to convince them I [wasn’t doing it to] get a liquor license so we sold the bar and that kind of screwed up people’s predictions and—

KH: So what did you do for—once you were done with the city council, what did you do?

GM: Well, that would have been ’78 to ’82—well, then I went to work organizing unions. Don Hill [Donald C. Hill] was one of the more interesting heads of teachers’

73 unions in the United States and he was from Sauk Rapids [Sauk Rapids, MN]. And Don was a couple years older—I just talked to Helene about him. We’ve got to call and see how he’s doing. Ironically, when I had a strike down at Carleton College [Carleton College, Northfield, MN] a number of years ago which was a big national thing when it happened, Don was the head of MEA [Minnesota Educator Academy (MEA)] and his wife was the office manager for the guy who I was battling the most at Carleton about getting a settlement. Don had got involved— he was a teacher, got involved with teachers and when the lotto was changed, where they could really organize, he organized all these teachers and they could do strikes for the first time.

And when I had the strike at Carleton, Don helped me—it was like the thirties—and I remembered what the thirties—what happened to the Teamsters—it was a very nasty strike where so many guys had convinced the women to go out on strike now you warned them in the beginning—once you’re out there, you think you’re going to settle in two or three days you’re full of shit. They’ll really go after us. And unfortunately, they didn’t listen—so the strike lasted about two months and it came at a bad time of weather, too. It was now right after October/November when snow was going and a couple of these damn guys who were in the engineering department who really were the highest paid the way it was—there were girls and women were standing out twenty-four hours a day in the cold and one of the guys brought a gun out and I found out about it and I went up to him and said, “This kind of crap isn’t going to happen on the line here.” And we organized a demonstration right down through Northfield, reminiscent of the thirties, you know. I got all of the unions up here to come down. We had floats and, you know, the Northfield Chamber of Commerce liked to say what a wonderful little town we have here and to see this happening in the middle of their thing on a Saturday and Don helped a lot to get all the teachers that came out strong on that kind of stuff.

And, you know, a lot of money involved at Carleton and they had a guy by the name of Edwards who was—he had come from the Main Line in Philadelphia—was the president and he wasn’t going to let this go forever. The Chamber of Commerce finally got on his ass after our demonstration and said, “You settle this damn thing and they settled.” And it was really a favorable settlement and the Northfield Press, which is not a New York Times, after it was over said that, Thank god, this thing is over and said that a lot of people liked it to blame George Mische, one of the radical guys, for doing this stuff but our position is that we think every working person in the country would like to have a business agent like him who fought for the last—. I was surprised when I read the editorial.

So I did that for a couple years, from ’82—I started an independent union thing, not aligned with AFL-CIO, Independent Unions of Minnesota and MEA helped sponsor it. So we went out and organized—Don organized people in the school systems as well as in the private—I’d organized the Minneapolis Professionals—they said it couldn’t be done.

When Reagan [US President Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911-2004)] came out and was going to cut back all the funding to counties and cities—the average wage at that time for the Minneapolis Professionals was seventy-one thousand dollars or something and they had one hundred seventy-eight members. And when I got approached everybody said, and the people with the government said, You’re nuts. You’re never going to get people that connected to join a union. So I had several meetings with them and I said, “You know, here’s what’s going to happen. If Reagan cuts all the funding on public governments, all of a sudden they’re going to be short of money and who are the first people they’re going to get rid of? It’s all of you people on the top,” who were making good money at the time, “and they’re going to replace you by people who are making twenty-six and twenty-seven thousand.”

And when the vote came in I won 78 percent of the vote, when they never thought it would ever pass so that was the beginning when MEA really got behind it, too. I did that—I’m trying to think. What the hell, eighties. Oh, and then I got involved in the national stuff. I mentioned I was in there with Jimmy Carter [US President James Earl Carter Jr. (1924- )] and all that kind of stuff. In all these last fifty years still going out and doing a lot of public speaking all around the country, which I still do, trying to get people to, “Don’t surrender,” you know. There’s a battle to be won.

KH: Which kind of leads us to closing. We’re going to close up here but two questions. One of which is where—what do you—you’ve talked a lot about kind of how the Catonsville 9 has been mythologized and your dissatisfaction with some of that. What would you like people to know, aside from what we’ve discussed the last three hours talking about, but what kind of lesson would you want people to draw from the experience of the Catonsville 9 or your experiences?

GM: Well, you know, to this day, in all the reunions I go to and keep in touch with all these people who all getting older and passing onto the big party in the sky, that, you know, I’ve never heard one of those people ever come to say they regret it. That they are proud of what they did. The anguish was that, until Joe came along, and people knew that through the years—that I always bragged about all the other people who came out of the walls it wasn’t us. There had to be—any social movement usually has some way or some people to kick something off and one of the best things that I saw happening with Black Lives Matter and I’m trying to think of that—I have a brain lock on this organization I’m trying to remember—that started up in New York, down in the Village with the first demonstration and it spread across the country and remember—I’m starting to remember with Helene the other day that going down to the Hennepin County when that same organization was spreading out here and we held—I’m standing next to Jesse Ventura [Jesse Ventura aka James George Janos (1951-)]. And Jesse and I had had a thing years before publically which went well. And I can’t remember the name of the damn organization.

KH: It wasn’t Occupy was it? Occupy Wall Street. Occupy—

GM: Yeah, yeah. And when I was just telling somebody the other day, the funny thing about that, I’m watching a thing on television and I found about it later on. Here this reporter didn’t know who he was interviewing but he ends up interviewing these two older guys—what the hell they’re doing out there joining these young, the Occupy movement. And it was Dan Berrigan and another guy and the guy didn’t realize he was talking to Dan and he asked him, you know, what brought him there. And he said, “Well, it’s the place to be right now and what’s going on is very important.” And I said to somebody else the other day, “I imagine what the editor must have thought back and said, ‘You dumb asses; you didn’t know who the hell you were talking to.’” He didn’t realize it was Dan.

But the nice thing about Occupy and Black Lives Matter—and that’s the problem when Dan and Phil fell into the trap of being the leaders—was that they never could find out who was the head of Occupy or Black Lives Matter because what the press does then once they get a leader, they focus on the leader and then all of the vulnerable personal shit comes out and all that and the movement gets discredited. And that was one of the reasons why people were upset that Dan and Phil never found a press conference they didn’t like. Or, as I tell people, that, if I’d ever heard them—and I told them about that, too, is that if I’d ever heard them or put in writing say, Hey, what’s this? There are all these other people who got involved.

They never had done that and that’s what really hurt a lot of people is that they looked like they were just a bunch of followers when there were people in some of these draft board raids—I know eight and nine of them—because once people started to realize that some of us didn’t agree about this martyrdom shit; if the idea was to shut down the draft, this symbolic nonsense falls aside. Then you have to really look at what—if this is the enemy, you either use nonviolent principles to try to stop that institution from doing it. And I know that there are people like Women against Daddy Warbucks.

Good example—I was up in—oh and after Phil and I had separated, a gal by the name of Maggie Geddes and another gal came up to visit and found out that Helene and I were up in the Bronx and said—she had been with the Catholic Peace Fellowship and she never got into our courtroom because she was one of the people out in the street all during our trial. And, by the way, part of that Catonsville week was that every night a guy by the name of Michael went down to this Jesuit church—that was the greatest goddamn teach- in that you ever—you name anybody that I never, well Bernie Dohrn [Bernardine Rae Dohrn (1942-)] came out—everybody was there that night, you know, strategizing about what—I. F. Stone [Isidor Feinstein Stone (1907-1989)]—I remember when I.F. Stone came I used to love his newsletter; I remember when he showed up. I mean, everybody was there.

And that kind of thing was so vital to the movement growth that people—people never knew about it. And that’s the problem when you let yourself get mesmerized by yourself.

And one of the things that I’m sending out—that when you see this thing in that pile, I’m giving the background of all these people; I’ve got a lot more written; I couldn’t find it in the files but I’ll find it. But trying to warn people that if any social movement comes along, you’ve really got to stay away from the prophecy concept, admire them. Because—and if any of your friends are to—stay away from them because that is the beginning of the end of what your movement really is standing for because the press will pick up on that kind of crap and eventually it brings disharmony to your own movement.

And I say, Rap Brown was very important on day one for me to understand it. Rap saw all that shit. I mean he was a [unclear] guy, like Jim Groppi. Groppi, you sit with him like this—you almost wanted to go over with a stickpin and wake him up because he was really introverted. Get him on the street in front of cops—that guy was dynamic. And Rap was the same way, you know, and Brad was a very easy going guy but you get him up in front of the street in front of the cops or in the press, you know, the Rap Brown heart and soul came through very strong.

And I, you know, anticipated that early on and I look back and I’m glad we did what we did. I wish things wouldn’t have happened where Dan and Phil—and then the Harrisburg thing. When the Harrisburg thing came down and boy, those five people who, you know, got shafted; I’m still in touch with them on a friendly basis. But the hurt that got involved there and Garry Wills wrote an article for either Atlantic, after the Harrisburg thing and the Camden trial, because they were tied in together by the feds. His famous writing said in the article that, “Catonsville created the myth of the Berrigans; Harrisburg destroyed the myth of the Berrigans.” And, you know, these people who believed in what we were doing but believed in them. Boy, to this day, and two of them speak out very clearly on that in Joe’s movie. But, you know, the world’s full of good people who give a shit who everyday are hoping to try to figure out how they make their lives relevant to what the problems are in society. And they don’t need anybody coming along to be a knight in shining armor and leading the unrest. That’s the tragedy of what happens with movements, you know.

That was—when you look at the history of the Chinese revolution is that Mao Zedong [Mao Zedong (1893-1976)] and Zhou Enlai [Zhou Enlai (1898-1976)] and [unclear], rode six thousand miles to build the Chinese revolution and they went, you know, the three of them when it started by the time they went all those miles, they had the hordes of the country behind them. So when they overthrew Chiang Kai-shek [Chiang Kai-shek (1887- 1975)], they built that grassroots thing as they were moving and why, you know, they were so much a part of the overthrow. And that’s the way it happens in any country. If you’re going to really have an overthrow, you have to—the people have to believe it’s our movement. And when you let—take yourself too seriously—it becomes a disjointed movement, you know.

So, I know how important Catonsville was but, as I said, if it wouldn’t have been for all of the other actions, Catonsville would have been peeing in the snowbank, you know, and

77 fortunately something happened that was positive. And that’s why I didn’t go to Catonsville thing because I was annoyed that the same forces that took over the twenty- fifth anniversary worked on the fiftieth. “No, I’ll pass.” So going down to the Milwaukee thing, it was good to see all those folks again, always is. It’s good to see you every time I come through here.

KH: Well, I really appreciate the time—

GM: Oh yeah, I’m sorry I talked too much for you probably.

KH: No, no, no—that’s all right. This is good stuff. So, I’m going to turn this off. Thank you.

GM: Yeah, absolutely.

End of Interview