O Washington
Jones, Arthur
O WASHINGTON Arthur Jones Lunch at the White House Lunch at the White House, noon to 1 p.m. Campbell's beef broth and Golden Delicious apples. I introduced myself to the man next to me—William...
...In the District of Columbia Jail Thomas was not, as he had thought, without friends...
...It was because Mayer finally couldn't do what Thomas does—take some satisfaction from talking to those who stop, and sending them away with copies of the essays and tracts—that Mayer went to the Monument to make people listen...
...It was due to the economic selfishness of the United States and Western Europe, and secondly to the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries," he says...
...Thomas, by contrast, has been on the White House beat long enough, he says, to sense that people's attitudes toward the nuclear threat are changing...
...And beef broth and William Thomas...
...As Thomas recounted it during our luncheon, he kept getting into trouble...
...That answer did not satisfy Thomas, who insisted that he would remain in the embassy until he received permission to go to the Soviet Union...
...passport and other identification papers and declared himself stateless...
...Around June 1981, Thomas began sitting on the wall at the White House...
...He would become a stateless person, like his Palestinian cellmates...
...We've got Disneyland and everything.'" When Thomas said he would not get off the aircraft, they said, "We'll get you the fuck off," and dragged him off to immigration...
...I don't think we could use you there," the Soviet official told him...
...When they left the aircraft, so did Thomas, through a service door...
...The local Moonie paper, The Washington Times, has editorialized that Congress should rid the White House of such "visual pollution"—a strange stance for an organization that makes its money by sending its acolytes to litter airports with fatuous books...
...The British police had no jurisdiction...
...CCNV arranged for Thomas's release, and eventually charges were dropped because Soviet embassy officials would not appear in court...
...Two nights earlier he had slept outside on a heating grate...
...From his living box and "tent," Thomas can extract not only the certificate, but smudgy photocopies of his essays, such as "Ultimate Decision" and "The Parable of the Two Slaves" (the United States and the Soviet Union), as well as Mayer's "Ten Laws of Reality" and' 'Prelude to the World Wipe-Out for the Intellectually Honest— Mail One to a Russian, Time Is Short...
...Because of Camp David, Thomas, as an American, was treated well by the Egyptians, but he observed the ill-treatment the Palestinian prisoners received and decided that global oppression stems in part from nations unnecessarily defending borders and the private property within them...
...Thomas revels in the irony: Anwar Sadat, "on this lawn behind us," telling Carter Jerusalem should be open to everyone, "on the very day the Egyptians wouldn't let me walk to Israel...
...But he couldn't get himself declared stateless...
...The consul called the U.S...
...He was jailed again, for refusing to tell the police how he had reentered Britain when they'd stuck him on a plane for New York...
...soil—the American embassy—until his status was put in writing...
...the Marines handed Thomas over to the British police...
...Three policemen put him on a British Airways plane for New York...
...He is there almost twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week...
...It was in London three years ago that Thomas threw away his U.S...
...And so it went until, in 1979, he landed in England...
...He hung up a hammock and hung down a sign: Wanted, Wisdom and Honesty...
...And for the last six or seven he has been accompanied by huge hand-painted posters—Welcome to the MAD House: Mutually Assured Destruction and If a Genocidal Weapon Is a 'Peacemaker' then Adolf Hitler Was a Saint...
...He would oppose the arms that were used to defend borders...
...I polarize people," Thomas told me over lunch, "and these days fewer people are attacking me and more agreeing with me...
...The signs get confiscated...
...After an hour or so, I thanked Thomas for an agreeable lunch and walked back to my office past a sign that proclaimed: God Bless Jelly Beans and H-Bombs...
...Middle Eastern countries were determined to deport him...
...Thomas replied he wasn't trespassing, he had been invited...
...Thomas and I were seated on the Pennsylvania Avenue wall, leaning against the railings...
...Just to keep the peace...
...Someone from the Community for Creative Nonviolence (CCNV) had invited Thomas to stay, instead, at a CCNV shelter...
...However, each night he drags his box to the front of the Executive Office Building next door and sleeps there...
...The Egyptians, for example, wanted him gone, but would not let him walk to Israel...
...He decided to set off and see the world, seeking an answer to his dilemma...
...Everything seemed to come together in England," says Thomas...
...Thomas recalls, "The airport security men said, 'It's a nice country, you'll like it here...
...Marines...
...But, once at John F. Kennedy Airport, Thomas refused to leave the aircraft...
...He went to North Africa, and walked from Casablanca to Cairo...
...Nuclear weapons, he concluded, existed mainly because national boundaries existed: Get rid of the one and you get rid of the other...
...The airport security force was called...
...So the guards just took him through the gates, stuck him on the street, and said, "You're free, go where you want...
...The wind whipped across the White House lawn...
...British immigration charged Thomas with overstaying his visa, and he was sentenced to three months in prison...
...Norman bought the paint...
...At the Soviet embassy in Washington, an official agreed to listen to William Thomas's complaints against world powers as peacekeepers...
...The park police told him he could not hang a sign more than five feet off the ground in that area...
...Thomas was building his plywood "tent" the day Norman Mayer was shot...
...Thomas flips through the transcripts of the court cases in which he has been accused of "camping" where it's forbidden...
...The consul at the U.S...
...People were not listening...
...One of the arresting Secret Service agents said Thomas was crazy...
...Thomas, too, has had his share of frustrations...
...When the Egyptians released Thomas, he walked across the Sinai to Israel, where he was arrested for illegal entry...
...Norman," he said, "was frustrated...
...Thomas said he would remain on U.S...
...Thomas was charged with offenses ranging from damaging the tree to camping...
...That was at noon...
...Thomas's own tale is no less bizarre than Mayer's...
...Life, laws, and the British police eventually caught up with him...
...She said the White House guards came over and laughed at her when they told her Mayer was dead...
...This was lunch at the White House, not in the White House...
...That was on the first day of President Carter's Camp David talks, says Thomas, who gleaned that information from an English-language Egyptian newspaper possessed by one of his Palestinian cellmates...
...Thomas spent a half hour at the embassy, and even offered to work for peace in the Soviet Union...
...I introduced myself to the man next to me—William Thomas, who spends more time at the White House than President Reagan does...
...Some years ago he was making jewelry, and it occurred to him that money was the root of all evil, yet money was necessary to live, so it was necessary to live wfth evil...
...The next night, Thomas did...
...A self-declared stateless person, he arrived on Pennsylvania Avenue from a New Mexico jewelry-maker's stall by way of jails in Egypt, Israel, and Britain...
...Eventually, the charges were dropped...
...The White House guards regularly harass her and Thomas, she said, and every now and then the park police arrest them—as they had the day before Mayer's death...
...I offered Thomas some of my soup, which he accepted, and a Golden Delicious, which he declined...
...This time, the British said they would deport him to the country that last issued him a travel document—the United States...
...As an old hand at entering and leaving countries, Thomas refused to answer any questions...
...Then he went up a tree in Lafayette Park on a hunger strike...
...I saw suffering...
...Thomas said that was nonsense...
...At 2 a.m., twenty police cars, two fire trucks, and a cherry picker attended the dislodging...
...Thomas doesn't just have posters...
...embassy in London would not provide a document that certified Thomas as a stateless person who had renounced his citizenship...
...He contends he isn't "living" in front of the White House, just demonstrating...
...And he refused deportation to the United States...
...he has a plywood living box and a plywood "tent"—both covered with slogans...
...The official said Thomas would be arrested for trespassing...
...It took two hours to remove him from the embassy...
...That was a conclusion I didrft like," says Thomas...
...The next time out, two British bobbies accompanied him to New York...
...He started off anyway and was thrown into jail for trespassing on a restricted military zone...
...the other, according to Thomas, said, "No, he's the only sane one here...
...His sole remaining document is a baptismal certificate issued July 15, 1979, by the Life Tabernacle United Pentecostal Church, Battersea Park Road, London...
...Attending the leaflets that day was another regular, Thomas's colleague Concepcion...
...The "tent" carries tributes to his late friend, White House wall sharer, and fellow poster maker, Norman Mayer, who was killed by police after threatening to blow up the Washington Monument...
...William Thomas has been sitting outside the White House for about twenty months now...
Vol. 47 • April 1983 • No. 4
