A Trapped Generation on Trial
Schipper, Henry
The horrors of Vietnam are revisited during a mitigation hearing in Wisconsin's campus bombing case A Trapped Generation on Trial HENRY SCHIPPER Dane County Circuit Court Judge William Sachtjen...
...Billy Kaplan, now twenty-six, an occupational therapist in Milwaukee, came to the University of Wisconsin in 1965...
...Earlier today," began Greenberg, as Gruening took the stand, "Professor Falk called our involvement in Indochina 'grossly illegal.' Does your experience, sir, tend to confirm that statement...
...On the following Thursday, Judge William Sachtjen, unswerved by the two weeks of testimony, ordered Karl Armstrong to serve twenty-three years in the state prison at Waupun...
...Then Armstrong recounted the familiar, stunning sequence of events: Chicago, Cambodia, Kent State, Jackson State, and a seemingly interminable war directed by unapproachable national leaders...
...Some of them died...
...I tried to understand the German Nazi experience and how it came about...
...This is the plain truth...
...For Armstrong, the hearing meant an unexpected chance to tell publicly why he did what he did, and to propose convincingly the argument that his acts were necessary...
...Ernest Gruening, eighty-six-year-old former U.S...
...And this native son of Madison who blew up a building—Karl Armstrong—what had made him do it...
...Then, when assistance was offered, he refused help from his attorneys, choosing to tell his story himself...
...I went to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention...
...Gruening told the court about deception in high office...
...The judge, who is considered a liberal and who had spoken out publicly against the war, maintained that the defense should have expected his sentence, which simply acknowledged and accepted the plea bargain which the defense had agreed to more than a month before...
...I can say, in good conscience, under exactly the same circumstances, I would do it again to end the war...
...But, I felt that for me to preserve any feeling of humanity that I had left . . . well, there wasn't any other way...
...And those crimes will never be tried...
...Unless an author's name is appended, the material represents editorial comment...
...Government's capacity to carry out its wars the world over...
...In light of the Nuremberg tradition, and the absence of constitutional redress, the sense of the right and duty of the individual to take the law into his own hands is reinforced " Falk paused, stared straight at the judge, and added: "A minimal notion of due process would recognize this fact...
...Some people relived their own changes, dug deep into their emotional experience for the breaking points, the points at which they turned from questions and protest to resistance, to warfare...
...Three other persons sought in connection with the AMRC blast, including Armstrong's younger brother, are still at large...
...However misguided, the action by Karl was a conscientious action...
...someone shouted...
...Justifiable homicide, the army rules...
...So the general focus of the hearing was the Vietnam war, an investigation of its criminal nature and of the militant resistance which it spawned...
...But, in the case of the Indochina war, I could justify for myself the use of violence used to deter even greater violence...
...We, in Congress, of course would never have given the money for Vietnam if all the facts known at the time had been presented to us...
...Other sabotage actions admitted by Armstrong include the bombing of ROTC offices in the University Armory, the bombing of ROTC classrooms in a campus building, the bombing of a Primate Laboratory research center in Madison (an accidental target—Armstrong's intended target was the nearby Selective Service Headquarters), the attempted bombing of a power station in nearby Sauk County, and the abortive bombing of the army-owned Badger Ordnance Plant operated by the Olin Corporation in Baraboo, Wisconsin—a daring attack from the air in a stolen plane which constitutes the only known aerial strike against the Vietnam war made from within America's borders...
...No reduction of sentence, no explanation...
...Resistance to this war is not only an obligation but a solemn duty of the American people...
...Anything higher than a minimum sentence would be a mockery of justice...
...Throughout his hearing, he would not mention their names or allude to their possible collaboration...
...We appreciate, your honor, that, in many ways, this is a unique proceeding—unique and historic...
...On the second Monday of the hearings the line-up of witnesses read like a random selection of names from any telephone book: Tommy Simon, Hank Haslach, Phil Ball, George Bogdanich, Paul Schreiner, Billy Kaplan, and Max Elbaum, who had no individual reputations with which to impress Judge Sachtjen...
...Karl made the mistake of feeling deeply enough," said the silver-haired Jesuit...
...Seventy-five years ago a Negro residing here received infinitely better treatment...
...Now, Karl, take your time and try to relax...
...Helen Keller February 1922 BLACKS IN WASHINGTON Segregation in Washington...
...Army...
...The lawyers for the defense were disappointed by Judge Sachtjen's decision, but not crushed...
...Milton Mayer August 1949 PROPAGANDA AGAINST RUSSIA The famine in Russia is a result of a drought following years of war, and a long imperialistic blockade of Russian ports, preventing entrance to them of all necessary supplies...
...Then, turning to the defendant, the judge said with galling politeness: "After careful consideration, I sentence you, Karl Armstrong, to twenty-three years...
...Revolution expressed itself in court, but rationally, so that all of the ultimate militance, the scary rhetoric of insurgence, all of this became rooted in something now understandable if not admirable...
...The crowd was composed almost entirely of his supporters from the campus community and members of the press...
...Something happened in between to change me...
...It had to be done...
...I most certainly do," Gruening shot back crisply in a strong, clear voice...
...But first there was testimony from unknowns who, like Armstrong, had been changed by the events of the late 1960s...
...Candy,' he grinned, coaxing the kids...
...It has been imposed by the small, tightly knit business group that dominates this voteless community...
...I don't really know how to explain...
...It was his twenty-seventh birthday...
...Government had declared war on the students...
...There was simply no other way...
...In 1964, Armstrong told Sachtjen, he worked for President Johnson's election because Johnson had promised not to commit troops to Vietnam...
...By 1970, we knew that we had to take concrete action that would, in some way, inflict damage and curtail the U.S...
...I'm a very nonviolent person, basically," he said, "I don't feel comfortable with violence and even as I was firebombing ROTC and conducting the aerial attack at Baraboo, I felt very alienated from the violence I was using...
...More than forty witnesses, many of them prominent scientists, historians, and political activists, came to Madison to testify on Armstrong's behalf and sound the core thesis of his defense: The war in Vietnam was "immoral and illegal" and all resistance to that war was justified...
...AMRC had been the target of student antiwar protests since the spring of 1969...
...William Curman, a twenty-four year-old former GI from Milwaukee, told the court about whorehouses: "Some guys in my company didn't think Vietnamese whores should be paid...
...He ticked off, like links of a chain, the developments which inevitably led students toward violence...
...To the last, Armstrong embraced his deeds...
...On October 15, the opening day, the line-up for admission to the 9 a.m...
...It was a process of radicalization under examination, a process which has already, in the last ten years, affected the lives of millions of Americans: What makes a gung-ho war hero throw his Purple Heart collection on the steps of the nation's Capitol...
...The courtroom was filled with reporters who were in Madison for the first time...
...Discussing the question of individual responsibility, he told how the precedent of the Nuremberg decision requires individuals to oppose crimes committed by their country, especially if normal channels of protest are stifled: "It is the individual's duty to do what he can to stop criminal acts from happening...
...I did what I had to do...
...They set up carefully-restricted areas, steadily drove Negroes out of their homes, remodeled the dwellings, and offered them to whites at a handsome profit...
...On the fifth day of the hearing, defense lawyers brought this link with Nuremberg into the courtroom through the testimony of Richard Falk, distinguished professor of international law at Princeton University...
...In the end, I finally bombed it...
...Theirs is the real story behind the case...
...To stop the commission of great crimes, one may have to commit lesser crimes," the noted legal expert concluded...
...So I took these acts against military institutions and I felt that that was enough...
...That afternoon, an old man entered the courtroom...
...Government's illegal involvement in Southeast Asia...
...At that time I was against the war because I wanted peace...
...That bargain stipulated that the prosecution would recommend a twenty-five-year sentence, and it was this factor which Sachtjen weighed the most...
...Such were the questions under examination in a Wisconsin courtroom...
...It is not necessary to examine more than one of these witnesses, for essentially their testimony was the same...
...But the specific focus on this first Monday was on atrocities...
...Later in the trial there would be other prominent witnesses: radical historians Howard Zinn and Gabriel Kolko, Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, Philip Berrigan and Anthony Russo...
...That really left a lasting impression on my mind...
...Yet millions of sensible men and women have been deceived about conditions in Russia...
...You don't get very far in this country by feeling deeply enough...
...When troops were committed just one year later, Karl said, "In a real sense, I really felt betrayed by the President of the United States...
...They had these heat tabs [for heating rations]," explained Charles Piper, twenty-six, a marine for four years who described what some GIs had done in Vietnam, "and a couple of boys came by, begging for food...
...The Editors WE COMMUNISTS Said Senator Canwell, chairman of the Washington (State) Legislative Committee on unAmerican activities: "If someone insists that there is discrimination against Negroes in this country, or that there is inequality of wealth, there is every reason to believe that person is a Communist...
...But by 1967, I'd get these heavy flashes of what was really happening in Vietnam, a very strange feeling, and it would leave me totally empty...
...By the final Friday, almost two weeks later, people would be waiting throughout the night for the few spectator passes...
...The son nodded gently at the woman, his mother, and took a seat...
...At first, the gallery of Armstrong supporters sat quietly as before...
...Blind women raped and killed...
...I thought that any chance of getting that strength back was destroyed when my mind was literally devastated by Mr...
...Do you mean, sir, that your conscience guides you above the law...
...Central to that history, Kunstler continued, was an examination of the Vietnam war, a war that threw a shadow over the growth of an entire generation...
...His step was easy, and his pale, bearded face brightened in response to a clenched fist salute from the gallery...
...He explained, in a carefully worded statement read to a packed courtroom, that he was admitting only the facts of the evidence against him...
...He reported much of the recent hearing in Madison, Wisconsin, for The New York Times...
...Former UW student Armstrong also admits to participation in a series of antiwar firebombings during the school year of 1969-1970...
...I thought that if I couldn't live at peace any longer with this war, then, if I was going to die, then the best way I could die was in resisting it...
...Do you agree with that statement...
...But, after hearing the vets, I don't feel guilty anymore...
...They were simply people who had fought in Madison against the war several years ago...
...only now, the weeks of testimony were over...
...Even then, he had questions about the war in Vietnam, but as he introduced himself to the judge, he was quick to point out: "I did not go to college as a Communist...
...But the real estate interests changed all that...
...It seems clear that Karl and I were experiencing the history of the United States in the same way," resounded Ellsberg's voice...
...In late September 1973, Karl Armstrong pleaded guilty to reduced charges of second degree murder and to four counts of arson stemming from the bombing...
...Even the judicial system acknowledges that belief...
...Falk," Greenberg interrupted, "to the effect that illegal resistance to a criminal war is a legal right, perhaps even a duty...
...And, after all the protests by all the thousands, with all the trashing, I felt that the University of Wisconsin could no longer ignore the demands to abolish AMRC...
...It showed me, in brutal color, what napalm meant for the Vietnamese...
...It was not easy for him to go back, relive, and cough up the most searing memories of a painful past...
...I think all acts of resistance are fully justified, no matter what form they take...
...They had come to testify about the forces which had shaped their beliefs, and which had made Armstrong what he was...
...On Friday, the last day of the mitigation of sentence hearing, Karl Armstrong himself took the stand...
...And Karleton Lewis Armstrong, as part of this sweeping social process, this movement for social change, began to make sense for a generation that felt trapped by the costly blunders of their elders—and to make sense for many others...
...The next morning, Karl told several friends, "I was beginning to have some doubts . . . you can't help it when so many say you're a criminal...
...Some knew Armstrong, some did not, but all of them had sought to remove the Army Mathematics Research Center from its discreet nest within the University...
...As the words crawled out in his thin voice, it seemed almost as if he were talking to himself: "I don't know how I got the strength to come up here...
...THE WAY WE SAW IT In this space The Progressive publishes flashbacks to articles and editorials written during its sixty-five-year history...
...But then came Cambodia, people at Kent State got killed, and, to me, that meant that the U.S...
...Earlier in the day, he had asked his lawyers, "How can anyone possibly tell his whole life story from the stand...
...I walked down the halls where I worked at Rand Corporation...
...When I began college, I began as a Young Democrat, as a middle-class, suburban product...
...When I left, I was on the steering committee of SDS...
...Senator from Alaska, had just arrived from Washington...
...Had I been younger, I would have done it...
...all this had an effect on me...
...Daniel Ellsberg, too sick to travel, spoke to Judge Sachtjen via a tape recording delivered to the court by Kunstler...
...Robert Fassnacht, a thirty-three-year-old physics researcher, was killed in the tremendous blast, which roused people from their sleep as far as fifty miles away...
...Thus, without apology, and almost anti-climactically, his testimony ended, on an astonishingly honest note that seemed to drain the courtroom of energy as much as it had visibly sapped Armstrong by the time he ended his four hours on the stand...
...I wanted to throw it into the computer room...
...is neither rooted in history nor dictated by ancient Southern custom...
...I know that there have been bombings and that people have died," he said, referring obliquely to the AMRC fatality, "but sad happenings like that have to be balanced off against the official crimes that decimated half of Vietnam...
...The judge's words had come too easily to register...
...My reporter's press pass took me through the tightest courtroom security in Wisconsin's history, in time to see Armstrong enter...
...Ronald Carbon, a Madison native who spent more than seventeen months in Vietnam with the "pacification" program, ended a detailed history of the atrocities he had personally witnessed with this statement: "I'm sure I can honestly say, with thousands and thousands of other war veterans in this country, that, with more courage, I would have done what Karl Armstrong did...
...But I trust that the good sense of the American people will soon surmount the wall of calumnies and prejudices which now prevent friendly relations between the two countries...
...There was no use kidding myself any more...
...Russo, Ellsberg's co-defendant in the Pentagon Papers trial, was next...
...People from the press, young people, were summarily beaten, clubbed, and arrested...
...Just like that, Armstrong was being led away—already out the door...
...I remember, sometime in 1966," Kaplan went on, "Ramparts magazine came out with a special issue called the Children of Vietnam...
...The only real resolution I ever made in my whole life was that I would be prepared to give up my life so that that wouldn't happen here in America . . . there would be no purpose in living...
...Armstrong would not acknowledge any criminal behavior...
...activists marched in the streets and demanded the abolition of AMRC...
...Carbon replied, "That's my final guidance, yes, certainly...
...I will never forget that issue...
...He had bargained for, and obtained in exchange for his guilty plea, an unprecedented two week mitigation-of-sen-tence hearing, during which Judge Sachtjen would listen to Armstrong and others explain the circumstances which influenced him and inspired his actions —the mitigating circumstances which might persuade the judge to reduce or even suspend sentence...
...That first day of the pre-sentencing hearing, October 15, marked the day, twenty-seven years ago, on which Nazi war criminals tried at Nuremberg were sentenced to be hanged...
...I have never before said this publicly," he blurted, as the courtroom grew silent...
...At 9 a.m...
...Prosecution attorney Michael Zaleski, an assistant state attorney general, showed no reaction to the somber tales...
...I brought back a grenade from Vietnam...
...Fass-nacht's death . . . and prison certainly hasn't helped because, when I was free in Canada, I started to feel halfway human again and prison almost destroyed that...
...Philip Berrigan embraced Armstrong before taking the stand...
...It most certainly does," Gruening answered, and for the next half hour, lecturing without pause, he described the history of the U.S...
...In the end, implied the judge, Armstrong got what he bargained for...
...It would all happen so fast, as if it didn't mean anything...
...Somebody has to take risks . . . somebody has to stand up...
...it has to be . . . my conscience...
...By mid-day, the atmosphere was stony and tense...
...I think I'd like to start talking about my own life," Armstrong continued, taking a small paper cup of water offered by Sachtjen...
...My father used to talk to me about the war...
...William Kunstler, and assisting lawyers Melvin Greenberg and Robert Kellerman, opened for the defense...
...I thought that all the strength I ever had was used in the bombing of the AMRC...
...I don't know what happens to you . . . something . . . anyway, these guys would spend a night and then, instead of paying, they'd throw a fragmentation bomb into the house...
...We have tampered with the original language only to achieve brevity...
...Karl Armstrong, the center of a three-year drama about resistance in America, is the confessed bomber of the controversial Army Mathematics Research Center, a military think tank on the University of Wisconsin campus at Madison...
...In critical times, when there is a possibility of tyranny, and one is given the choice between passivity and violence, one must choose violence...
...I wanted to blow up the computers for the benefit of mankind...
...So ended one of the most significant courtroom proceedings of the antiwar decade, a proceeding virtually ignored by almost every newspaper and radio and television station outside the state of Wisconsin...
...I knew at the time that I would probably be jailed for the bombing, since the institution is so important to the U.S...
...Researchers have found that back in 1872—during a brief interval when inhabitants of the capital could vote—a law was passed giving Negroes equal rights in restaurants, hotels, barbershops, and other public places...
...Long live the Revolution...
...The reports floated, like* frozen demons, in the courtroom air: a seventy-year-old man drenched in gas and burned to death...
...I walked out on the Santa Monica pier and threw it into the ocean instead...
...On Wednesday, Father Philip Berrigan, once an antiwar prisoner and now a defrocked priest, and Anthony Russo, antiwar defendants themselves only a short time earlier, came to Madison to support a fellow resister—Karl Armstrong...
...You may tell the court anything you like," Judge Sachtjen advised...
...Facing the judge, holding him to attention with his intent eyes, Russo described the sharp frustration he experienced over the war...
...A marine got up, and with a big smile, handed them the tabs, which could pass for candy...
...The connection between these two courtroom events, Armstrong defenders argue, is more than superficial...
...He had pleaded guilty to crimes for which sentences, served consecutively, could total ninety-five years...
...It was then that I made the decision to destroy AMRC...
...Suddenly Russo stopped talking and sat for a full twenty seconds, eyes closed, apparently trying to decide whether or not to continue...
...Kaplan finished by looking at Armstrong...
...The pacifist priest then quoted Gandhi in his defense of Armstrong...
...I looked for excuses not to do it...
...We have also heard testimony today by Mr...
...I didn't want to do it...
...I was horrified . . . but, at certain points, I really grasped what was going on there...
...We are going to show you, in a sense, the history of the times...
...James A. Wechsler January 1949...
...I guess I was still pretty naive...
...Zaleski bristled...
...I resolved then that nothing like that, as long as I was alive, would happen in America...
...On the outside," the bailiff replied, and the courtroom was cleared...
...The horrors of Vietnam are revisited during a mitigation hearing in Wisconsin's campus bombing case A Trapped Generation on Trial HENRY SCHIPPER Dane County Circuit Court Judge William Sachtjen smiled indulgently at defense attorney William Kunstler: "I commend you on your courtroom manner—your summation has been eloquently conceived...
...He couldn't understand why the German people didn't resist, because he thought that any act, almost any act of resistance, would be justified against the Nazis...
...Armstrong will be eligible for parole in five years...
...Then, three months later, in the early morning hours of August 24, the building was blown up...
...And as his parents rose in controlled agony, the sentence began to make its impact...
...Protests were greatest during the May 1970 riots, when as many as 10,000 to 15,000 students and other antiwar Henry Schipper, a free lance writer and a University of Wisconsin 1973 graduate, has covered the Karl Armstrong case since Armstrong's capture in Canada two years ago...
...No one is indicted...
...The Gulf of Tonkin incident was a hoax, he said, carried out by the President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson...
...the judge ordered them served concurrently...
...mitigation hearing began to form two hours earlier...
...In spite of persistent University denials that it conducted any secret or classified research for the military at the Center, an increasing number of students joined forces in the campaign to close the facility...
...And I couldn't think of napalm as a word any more—but only as a child, who suffered an agonizing death, or an ever more agonizing life...
...I saw a lot of things there, but most of all I guess I saw a lot of repression...
...Why does the American nation have enemies, fierce and dedicated enemies, on the inside...
...Vietcong or North Vietnamese POWs kicked from helicopters to a crunching death below...
...I went as a morally committed student...
...The defense had insisted from the first that this hearing would be a unique and historic proceeding, the first time that the war and the resistance which it had bred would be microscopically inspected in an American courtroom...
...Antiwar GIs were responsible for the transformation, as veteran after veteran bore witness to war crimes in an almost confessional atmosphere...
...The hearing was more than a matter of Karl Armstrong's fate...
...After three years, spent partly as a fugitive (listed among the FBI's ten "most wanted" fugitives) and then as a prisoner (seized eighteen months previously in Canada, he fought extradition unsuccessfully for more than a year), he became the first white radical of the late 1960s to plead guilty to violent antiwar acts, and then to fight his imprisonment on antiwar grounds...
...And after listening to the agonized testimony of the veterans, the scholars, and the Billy Kaplans, it became clear that a generation had borne profound witness to itself...
...It was only when the recitation of war crimes seemed to link up to a defense of Armstrong that Zaleski was aroused...
...With alternate looks of irony and weariness, Kaplan described the fall of 1969 as a whirlwind of events, a pressure-cooker period that was bound to explode...
...Pale, thin, and extremely nervous, Armstrong had been unable to eat since Wednesday, his stomach tightening in anticipation...
...I was literally stunned when I returned to the UW and found that the University was, in fact, ignoring the demands...
...The wearing march of war crimes continued for three days...
...Kaplan entered into his testimony with a certain hesitation...
...But, even after I made the decision, I found myself looking for ways to avoid actually carrying it out...
...So low key, so lacking in dramatic flourishes, but so totally uncompromising was his testimony that it seemed to rob the court of the one final requisite for a possibly lenient sentence: a penitent...
...A cane in one hand, a black fedora in the other, he walked slowly to the defense table, accompanied by defense attorney Greenberg, and, after shaking hands with Kunstler and Armstrong, he took a seat...
...As Armstrong returned the gesture, a middle-aged woman near the front whispered, "Happy Birthday, Karl...
...You know, I was born on the day they hung the Nazis at Nuremberg...
...The police, under orders, went mad...
...the courtroom audience was expectant and eager...
Vol. 38 • January 1974 • No. 1
