From Yale to Jail

...negotiator Henry Cabot Lodge...

...If he has any reservations at all about the rightness of their cause, his meeting with Ho Chi Minh—"a gentle, elderly man with a humble demeanor"—wipes them away: I knew that Ho and I were members of the same Beloved Community, regardless...

...During the Paris Peace Talks (where he served as an intermediary sympathetic to the enemy), he heard his father praised by U.S...

...But he has spent lots of time behind bars...

...Then, possibly because he would not answer to his number instead of his name, he ended up in an unlit dungeon called the Hole...

...There are problems in Castro's Cuba, he concedes after a visit in 1964, "the persistence of sexist stereotypes" for instance...

...Taken to a bombed Hanoi suburb, he listens to a "twenty-year-old girl" without suspecting that her words might have been scripted by a propagandist: "Ask your President Johnson," she said to me, "if our straw huts were made of concrete and steel...

...The thrill of meeting with a foreign leader, then coming home with a few released POWs, corrupted him as surely as power corrupted any politician...

...draft...

...Dellinger points to Tolstoy, Jesus, Jung, St...

...He considers it appropriate and sufficient, when the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia coincides with the protests in Chicago, to add a sign reading, "Welcome to Prague, U.S.A...

...The strike ended in partial success, but the next day Dellinger was put in a dormitory with "military prisoners from the South, white of course, who had committed violent crimes," and was introduced to them as a "nigger-lover" and a "Nazi...

...His interpretation of the demands made on him was to organize a violent defense of his country, and my interpretation of mine was to work nonviolently against my country's attempt to subjugate his country and his people...

...Tell him that we will continue our life and struggle, no matter what future bombings there will be, because we know that without independence and freedom nothing is worthwhile...

...Francis of Assisi, Gandhi, and Shelley as some of his influences, but accepts none as an authority...

...riots, and Bill Clinton, yet the Boat People are entirely invisible...

...To get him to eat, his jailers offered him steak dinners, then falsely told him that his wife was dying of complications in pregnancy and calling for him to give up...

...His eccentric refusal to fight Hitler, whom he thoroughly opposed but wanted the Germans to overthrow nonviolently, seems quixotic now...

...And, equally important to me, as I grew to know Communists, I found that often their attitudes ran counter to my beliefs that people who wanted to create a better world should live now as much as possible in the kind of human relationships they were supposedly working for instead of waiting until "after the revolution" to start doing so...

...Is this the story of yet another limousine leftie...

...Especially nowadays, when we have a president who tells us that fooling the draft board is an act of conscience, this is something strikingly rare...

...he clearly prefers the dictatorships...

...His first stay in prison lasted a year and a day...

...The book is up to date, with references to the Gulf War, the L.A...

...so do all non-confrontational "peace bureaucrats," for acting as if the U.S...

...Now 78, he lives in Vermont, wears love beads, and has a grandson named Shenandoah Sundance...

...In someone who examines his conscience relentlessly, worrying that he spent too little time with the kids or that he violated a fast by taking honey and lemon in his water, this is an outstanding blind spot—and a reminder that the most scrupulous and uncompromising among us are as vulnerable to self-deception as anyone, perhaps even more so...

...He held them off with a blast of profanity, calling for solidarity against the "motherf---ing hacks," but it wasn't until he made prison Ping-Pong champ that he won his dorm-mates over...

...Yet he has always tolerated Party members in the civil rights and peace movements to which he has belonged, reasoning that they "will be heeded when they talk sense and ignored when they do not," and that when the Party line conflicts with the values of the movement, the Communists will just have to choose between them...

...A sympathetic judge wanted to put him in the relatively comfortable prison farm, outside the main walls, but Dellinger would not take a spot "that could be filled by a needy long-timer...

...Dellinger is a hard man to dislike, since he writes generously about adversaries as well as allies, and his analysis of his privileged upbringing in Wakefield, Massachusetts, is illuminated by affection for his family and neighbors...

...were basically a just society and not rotten to the core...

...What years of starvation, beatings, and even Hitler could not make him do, theblandishments of Uncle Ho could within minutes...

...ellinger's invincible belief in the D goodness of human nature except when spoiled by the wrong social conditions, and even then curable with simple love and understanding—explains his naïveté in dealing with less principled members of the American left...

...One's liking for Dellinger is nonetheless tested when itcomes to Vietnam...

...David Dellinger hasn't spent much time in limousines—in the only instance that he mentions, it was Martin Luther King's idea and Dellinger was embarrassed...

...While on trial as one of the Chicago Seven, he had Dustin Hoffman baby-sit his teenage daughter...

...171...

...When he refused to sit in the white section of the segregated dining hall, he was placed in solitary confinement...

...Ask him if our Catholic church that they destroyed was a military target, with its 36 pictures of the virgin, whom we revere...

...Dellinger does raise the matter of American POWs, but accepts Ho's assurances that they are being well fed and cared for, and will return home "better informed and better citizens of their own community...

...The "nonviolent" part is essential—he resisted Tom Hayden's calls for "blood" at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, and repudiated the Weathermen for their Days of Rage—but so is the "war": Martin Luther King gets a drubbing because he toned down the March on Washington to please the Kennedys...

...But his idiocy a quarter-century after that, while a leader of the powerful anti-war movement, is a graver matter...

...he stories of prison redeem this T overlong, sometimes self-indulgent memoir, not only because they are the most dramatic, but also because they demonstrate what is most admirable in the author: his willingness, in the tradition of Thoreau and Gandhi, to give up his freedom and even his life for what he believes...

...T he saddest thing is not that Dellinger was fooled, but that he abandoned the principle of nonviolence by which he had lived for so long and with so much hardship...

...Unlike so many intellectuals and political leaders of this century, on the left and the right, he was repelled by it from his first serious encounter in college: I couldn't believe that armed struggle, with the bloodshed and hatred it would generate, was the way to build a better world...

...No party or sect can claim his allegiance, certainly not Communism...

...Of course, "things like that take time...

...Harder to understand is his reluctance to condemn Moscow and Peking, except under the blanket of anti-militarism...

...of the different situations in which we worked and the specific demands that those situations had made on us...

...At Yale, he argued politics with Walt Rostow and McGeorge Bundy, later his opponents in a more public debate over the Vietnam war...

...In 1940, Dellinger, although exempt as a divinity student from military service, went to federal prison rather than register for the Francis X. Rocca is a writer living in New Haven...

...In 1943, still resisting the draft, he was arrested after a peace march and sentenced to two more years...

...All establishment politicians—even Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and Ron Dellums—are beyond the progressive pale...

...A man who distrusts everything his own government tells him, and who imagines himself surrounded by FBI agents at home, he goes to North Vietnam in 1965 and lets the government there play him like a protest singer's harmonica...

...Dellinger admits to no second thoughts about his conviction that all Vietnamese, aside from the "puppet government" in Saigon and the corrupt elite around it, wanted the U.S...

...It is a hard faith to know, much less to keep, its doctrines vague and eclectic...

...He joined a hunger strike to abolish the Hole and the censorship of prisoners' mail, and did not eat solid food for sixty-five days...

...When it comes to the client states of the Communist superpowers, even such equations are too harsh for him...

...Dellinger believes in "total brotherhood" and "full social and economic equality" pursued by "nonviolent war...

...The only people who have kept the faith, it seems, are Dellinger and some of his intimates, most of whom you've probably never heard of...

...It didn't work...