Public Enemy Read online

  BJ would snuggle the kids on her lap and talk about all the highlights from the week that they would want to tell Bernardine when they saw her in a few minutes, so they would have news about their day-to-day lives fresh in their minds. BJ also wanted to distract them from the inevitable tantrums going on around them—no bottles, diapers, or toys were allowed, and kids were hungry, thirsty, wet, or just crumbling under the stress of separation and waiting.

  When they finally got to the visiting room, a bare, square space with metal chairs up against the wall, there was another wait. BJ initiated a ritual that became the indispensable start to every visit: the kids hid under the chairs or behind BJ or in back of the opening door, and when Bernardine walked in and asked, “Where’s Malik?” he would pop out and leap into her arms. BJ got the idea for this when she was first figuring out how to do these visits as well and as stress-free as possible, and she read in We Are Your Sons that the Rosenberg kids had initiated the same game. “Children have no control over being separated from a parent,” she said. “And just this tiny thing, hiding, gives them a little agency about when they see them again.” A lot of other kids began to do the same thing.

  Good-byes were always tough, but here too BJ developed a custom that the kids looked forward to—they walked to a far corner on Park Row and looked high up to the women’s floor. Bernardine would blink the lights off and on in her cell, and they would wave wildly and blow monster kisses. She would blink some more, and then it was over.

  Bernardine, Kathy, and David were all learning together how to be with their kids in these terrible circumstances, and in time Kathy became the most creative and wisest person I’d ever known around practical ways to parent from a distance—applicable to hospitalization and divorce, forced migration and military deployment, but in our cases, applied to the separation of prison. She became more and more honest with Chesa about what had happened and her own responsibility, but always following his lead on how far to go and what territory to enter. She was unstinting and unambivalent in communicating to him her support for us as his other parents, and she took a lot of time and spent enormous energy working on art and story projects that would last over time and could be done by phone or mail as well as up close and personal. She was a mentor to us all.

  Bernardine wrote long, intricate chapter books for each of the kids, soliciting advice and counsel from them on the phone about the direction of the next week’s installment. She created a growing catalog of riddles and knock-knock jokes for Malik, and made a crossword puzzle every week for Zayd based on a theme of his choice: favorite foods or best fruit, Central Park and dogs, baseball, and mommies coming home.

  I made an appointment to see Viola Bernard, a renowned New York psychiatrist and a leader of the orthopsychiatry movement, who for decades had been an outspoken champion of humanistic approaches to therapy, racial justice, and mental health reform. Viola was in her eighties and had become a friend. I told her I was losing it and needed to talk to someone—perhaps she could refer me to a colleague. We met after dinner in her cluttered and overstuffed office on the Upper East Side—I ran into Woody Allen in the elevator on my way up—and I settled into a huge leather chair with a warm cup of tea and a little plate of cookies. “I’m depressed,” I began, and we talked for over two hours about the kids and Bernardine, the Boudins and Kathy and David, work and prison visits, fear and loneliness, exhaustion and apprehension. At the end of our time she reached across from her chair and took my hand. “Bill,” she said warmly, “you’re rarely sad or even upset, but now your life is pretty terrible; you have these appalling burdens to bear and an awful lot to be sad about. But sadness is not the same as depression. You don’t need a therapist, Bill. You need to get your wife out of prison.”

  I felt much better.

  A few months in, my senses badly battered and beaten down, Bernardine asked me to marry her. I was shocked—she’d been the most vocal opponent of state-sanctioned marriage I’d ever met. Of course, I agreed. She was locked up, seemingly forever, and what could I say—where are your principles, Darling? Her rationale was that if she were indicted or if I were to be subpoenaed, this might offer a thin layer of protection. Far-fetched, perhaps, but being behind bars hurts and messes with your mind. Goettel granted permission, and while Bernardine was interviewed by the prison priest, minister, and rabbi, and approved, I ran around to get the official papers. At the last minute, the judge granted a two-day furlough. We were married on Central Park West in the home of Judge Elliott Wilk and Betty Levinson, two cherished friends from the Lawyer’s Guild. A dozen other friends bore witness, and Brother Kirk of the SNCC Freedom Singers brought the beat.

  Lots and lots and lots of lawyers had gone in to see Bernardine in the MCC—friends, colleagues, associates, students, even judges. One crazy visitor was Don Reuben, a high-powered attorney from Chicago and as unpleasant a person as I’d ever met. “I like your father,” he told me on the phone, “and I feel bad that he’s suffering.” He’d be in New York in a few days, he told me, and he had a plan to get Bernardine released that he wanted to discuss with me.

  We met for an outrageously expensive upscale dinner at the Quilted Giraffe, a restaurant whose owner-chef coincidentally had graduated from law school with Bernardine—Don’s treat. “I know Bernardine won’t talk to the grand jury. I get that,” he said when we sat down. “So I’ll get her released to my custody.” Goettel had been Reuben’s college roommate, and Don was a cocksure SOB. “I’ll put her on a lie detector, ask her the same questions, and then I’ll testify.”

  “That’s it? That’s the plan? It’ll never happen,” I said. “It entirely undercuts the principle she’s stated a thousand times and so she’ll never agree. Plus, it will never work; and it strikes me as rather stupid.”

  “So you’re a lawyer?” he said. “You know more than I do? Do you tell your surgeon where to make an incision?”

  Actually, yes, sort of, and I reserved my deepest skepticism for every kind of expert, but I spared Don the details.

  He went to see Bernardine the next day with Judge Harold Tyler, a colleague of his with an independent and ethical streak, now retired from the federal bench and returned to big firm practice. She listened politely, then explained to them that she could not go along with their scheme because it would violate her values and beliefs, that it was clever but unprincipled, and that if she did it, it would undercut her entire stance. Reuben told me on the phone later that day that we were idiots who deserved whatever pain was coming our way, and left New York steaming.

  The Kennedys had a brainstorm then that lit us all up: we would set about collecting affidavits from everyone—especially all the lawyers, even Reuben and Tyler—who had visited Bernardine, each one saying whatever the hell they wanted to say as long as they made a single point clearly, simply, and forcefully: having met her in lockup, and having discussed her thinking and the issues with her fully, it was abundantly clear that Bernardine Dohrn would not talk to the grand jury under any circumstances, period. She was completely defiant and would remain silent, and the feds could lock her in a dungeon for five or ten or twenty years and it would make no practical difference—her testimony would never, ever be compelled. If everyone made that particular point, Michael Kennedy would pile them all up and provide the conclusion: keeping her behind bars no longer served the purpose of compelling her to talk; it had become a punishment for her silence. And he’d try to sell it to the judge, while the rest of us crossed our fingers.

  We went before Goettel after having submitted the collected bushel of affidavits. “Most of these are from ACLU types,” the judge began, making the common mistake of painting anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan with a broad brush and then affixing a convenient if inaccurate label. In fact, some were indeed ACLU attorneys, but most were members of the National Lawyers Guild or her law school classmates from the University of Chicago. “But I see here that Don Reuben of Chicago and Judge Harold Tyler have also seen fit to sign an affidav
it.” He proceeded to read one weird and, to us, highly entertaining sentence from Reuben: “Bernardine Dohrn suffers a kind of martyr complex, fancies herself a modern-day Joan of Arc, and will therefore never talk, preferring prison in the service of some delusional principle.” I was interested that Reuben, so insistent at our dinner of the importance of professional expertise when it came to the law, now fancied himself a psychiatrist as well as a lawyer, but never mind.

  Goettel asked the prosecutor for a comment, and the prosecutor dismissed the affidavits as political propaganda and meaningless before the law. Goettel then noted that the government had been seeking handwriting samples from Ms. Dohrn, which she had, of course, refused to provide, and yet he, the judge, had routinely received written letters and petitions that she had submitted to the court—describing the unjust handling of the women prisoners there, the fire danger, and arbitrary treatment by guards—and that he had always forwarded them to the prosecutor. “What about those letters?” he asked the prosecutors. “Are you still in need of her handwriting?” Apparently unaware that the judge had fresh copies of her handwriting, the prosecutor stumbled momentarily but recovered to argue nonetheless that they wanted her to write specific words and statements that would not be contained in the petitions, were they able to locate them. Michael Kennedy leapt in: “Specific words and statements? How about ‘I’m guilty’?” Goettel gave the prosecutors one week to find and analyze the handwriting, and at the next court hearing, released her on the spot. The strategy had worked. The judge was convinced that her testimony could not be compelled, and the law was clear that short of that, he must let her go.

  I raced uptown and rounded up the kids, and then raced back down to meet Bernardine coming out the door. Ecstasy! We all waltzed and pirouetted and rock-and-rolled to Eleanora’s favorite family-style spot in Little Italy, just a couple blocks from the MCC. Michael bought bottles of champagne and sparkling apple juice along the way, and we piled into a huge booth in the back and celebrated with heaping platters of homemade lasagna, pasta puttanesca, penne primavera, fettuccini Alfredo, and warm bread fresh from the oven slathered with extra virgin olive oil, mashed garlic, and diced peppers—Italian peanut butter, Eleanora told the kids. When the Italian ices were ordered—peach for Chesa, lemon for Malik, and very berry for Zayd—I headed to the men’s room.

  Frankie, the owner, who’d introduced himself when we arrived, stopped me in the wood-paneled hallway. “Yo,” he said, our eyes level, his face close to mine. “What’s the celebration?” His salt-and-pepper hair was slicked back, his body broad and muscled, and he had no neck. It was an uncomfortably narrow hallway. But his tone was curious and friendly, not the least bit menacing, as if he wanted some reason to join in and share the collective joy. I hesitated, wanting to avoid Brinks, the Black Liberation Army, and the Weather Underground just now, swallowed hard, and settled on an abbreviated version of the truth. “My wife just got out of prison,” I said. “Federal lockup.”

  “No shit!” he said, his eyes bulged as his voice lowered to conspiracy-level. “That lovely lady over there?” He cocked his head toward Bernardine, covered with kids. “Yes, that’s her,” I said. “What was she in for?” he asked, wrinkling his brow, curious and quite friendly still, and then, apologetically, “that is, if you don’t mind my asking.”

  I swallowed hard once more and plunged on but still in short form, avoiding the content of the case. “She refused to talk to a federal grand jury,” I said. “She refused to cooperate.”

  “No shit!” he repeated emphatically, astonishment mixed with awe. The content seemed to matter not a whit to him. “No shit!” His voice rising in admiration, he added, “Beautiful! Good for her! She’s a real stand-up chick!”

  “Yes, she is,” I said.

  And Frankie picked up the check.

  There was no accessible mass movement sweeping us forward and illuminating our demands for peace and justice at that moment, no unifying focus, nor any widespread, palpable sense that if we could just muster ourselves up and storm the heavens, another world was in fact within our reach. But Bernardine and I agreed with our old friend Myles Horton, who’d always said that in every social movement there were bound to be valley times as well as mountain times. During mountain times, the popular struggle is visible, explosive, and the momentum of the movement creates a range of spaces to enter and to participate; the challenge of the slower and seemingly silent valley times is to prepare for the inevitable propulsive upheavals to come—and they will come, they surely will come.

  But those were valley times, and we dug in.

  Our political outlook was what it always had been: still opposed to imperialism and its evil twin, white supremacy; still believing that capitalism had exhausted itself and was in its dying moment and most dangerous zombie stage; still certain that the political class was corrupt and without a single answer to the gathering crises. All of that combined with a strong reserve of romance and idealism—not the dreamy sort, but an idealism edged with pain and urgency; not a barricaded retreat, but a living sense that there are ideals worth striving for in this wicked, wounded world. I was still hopeful for a freer and more peaceful future, a world more joyful and just than the one we’d inherited. We were also now a lot more agnostic about how to get there, and because we were unsure, Bernardine and I divided up our forces and attended every demonstration, every meeting, and every conference of the Left. You take the kids on Saturday and I’ll go to the organizing meeting, or I’ll take the kids to their swimming lessons and you go to the conference, or let’s pack a picnic and take the kids to the rally in Washington Square Park. And so it went, day by day.

  One day I stood right outside the front gates of Stateville Correctional Center as the State of Illinois willfully murdered John Wayne Gacy Jr. I’d come to witness and protest the execution.

  John Wayne Gacy Jr. had been projected onto our collective screens as a monster of mythic proportions, and at the time of his state-sanctioned murder was the reigning poster boy for the wisdom of the death penalty in Illinois. Serial killer, violent rapist, sociopath, fiendish slayer of at least thirty-three teenage boys and young men over the period of a decade, Gacy had buried twenty-six of his victims in the crawl space of his home and discarded the remains of his last four known victims in a nearby river. He had run his own construction business in suburban Chicago and dressed up as an affable clown he called Pogo to perform at charitable events and children’s parties. He was a lurid nightmare come to life, so when the ogre was finally trapped and condemned, the cheering crowd, led by the media and the political class, was unrestrained.

  Bernardine and I didn’t join the mob; we’d been instinctive abolitionists forever and the identity of the perpetrator/victim changed nothing for us. The death penalty was legal, it’s true, and also intentional, deliberate, calculated, and considered—planned, premeditated, and purposeful—all of which made the killing that much more barbaric and inexcusable. It was well known that public hangings did nothing to prevent the acts of a psychopath or the murderous outbursts of spontaneous passion. The bad guy—in this case, the monster—was already captured and caged; no more harm was anticipated or possible, so the authorized execution merely added to the coarseness and cruelty of our already violent culture. The elaborate machinery of death, finally, served only one purpose: it fed our repulsive penchant for vengeance. It was morally indefensible.

  We were sickened for days by the gleeful anticipation of Gacy’s appointment with death beaming through our radio, and when the day finally arrived, Bernardine and I looked at each other and quickly agreed that one of us had to go down that night to bear witness and stand in opposition.

  After the kids were asleep, we made a cardboard sign—“Thou Shalt Not Kill”—and drew straws. I won, and Bernardine sent me off to Stateville without a plan or any idea what to expect.

  As I drew close to the prison, traffic on the two-lane highway thickened and then clogged up, so I pulled onto the shoulder
and parked in the middle of a tangle of cars and pick-up trucks. I joined the crowds surging toward the prison as rock music blared from boom boxes: “Pray,” “I’m Too Sexy,” and “Hold On.” There was beer and marijuana everywhere, and young people carried homemade signs and stretched painted banners from trees to trucks: No tears for the clown, said one. Who’s laughing now? said another. I kept my little counter-sign folded under my vest as I made my way for over a mile toward the front gates, the party intensifying and the chanting increasing with every step: Burn, baby, burn! Burn, baby, burn!

  When I finally arrived, my natural crew was easy to spot: nine elderly nuns with candles standing in a circle singing “We Are a Gentle, Loving People.” Two lawyers were there as well: Larry Marshall, a colleague of Bernardine’s at Northwestern School of Law, and Michelle Oberman, a brilliant feminist legal scholar teaching at DePaul. I pulled out my sign and was welcomed into the round as I joined the singing.

  I’d felt marginal and lonely and practically invisible in my dissent before, but this was as severe an instance as I could remember: thousands of people rallying in support of a popular court decision and the mandated action of the state, and perhaps a dozen of us standing up to say NO!

  Sometime after midnight, Gacy’s death was announced. A massive cheer went up as the nuns kneeled to pray. I said good-bye and headed for home. There’d been no calculus of success in my presence nor in the presence of the other protestors. There was no expectation of victory that had drawn any of us to that place on that night—Gacy would die, some sick bloodlust would be served, the mechanics of criminal injustice would grind forward, and we would return home and resume our lives.