The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left (review)

Nineteen-seventy-two in Harrisburg? Why, that was Hurricane Agnes, of course, when the Susquehanna crested fifteen feet above flood stage and the region sustained billions of dollars in damage. But there was another inundation just before the June flood, as the national press, FBI agents, and Harrisburg Defense Committee workers descended on Pennsylvania's capital from January to April for the trial of a loose-knit group of opponents of the Vietnam War who became known as the Harrisburg 7. The prosecution of these (mainly) Catholic religious activists, accused by FBI director-for-life J. Edgar Hoover of plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger and blow up heating tunnels under the nation's capital, was one of several high-profile trials of antiwar activists on conspiracy charges. The Chicago 8 (who allegedly planned to disrupt the 1968 Democratic convention), the Boston 5 (opponents of conscription, one of whom was pediatrician Benjamin Spock), and Daniel Ellsberg (who leaked the "Pentagon Papers") are better remembered today, but the Harrisburg trial deserves recognition as well. As this evocative account by William O'Rourke reveals, it underscores the intersection of the local and the national during this turbulent era.

O'Rourke was a twenty-six-year-old aspiring novelist in 1972, a friend of one of the defense lawyers and immersed—like some of the defendants—in an ambivalent relationship with the Catholic Church. He came to Harrisburg with a small publisher's advance to write about the trial, and the book appeared later that year in the "new journalism" style just becoming popular. For this fortieth-anniversary edition, O'Rourke, now a veteran professor of English at Notre Dame, has added an afterword on the writing and reception of the book, along with a rather cynical synopsis of the trajectory of American politics, dissent, and the Catholic left from 1972 to the present. Though not a historian, O'Rourke is a gifted writer, with a sharp eye for the telling detail and for apposite historical and cultural allusions. His impassioned account, framed around a narrative of the courtroom proceedings, makes for compelling reading.

O'Rourke's sympathies are hardly in doubt. He blames the trial on Hoover's need to justify increased funding for his agency, which led him to fashion a conspiracy from a few offhand conversations and letters by radical priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan (who had previously been convicted for the public destruction of draft board files) and several associates. O'Rourke draws a devastating contrast between the bungling efforts of the prosecutors and the skill and eloquence of the defense attorneys, a radical dream team that included Ramsey Clark, Leonard Boudin, and Paul O'Dwyer. The longer that Boyd Douglas, the prosecution's main witness, remained on the stand, the more the government's case crumbled. Douglas, a fellow inmate of Philip Berrigan's at the Lewisburg penitentiary who was permitted to take classes at nearby Bucknell University, had won the trust of some of the defendants and other local antiwar activists. However, during seven days of withering cross-examination, the defense caught Douglas in significant discrepancies regarding dates and conversations, and revealed him as a habitual liar. The defense rested without calling a single witness.

On the other hand, O'Rourke also shows the naiveté of some defendants—especially Elizabeth McAlister, a young nun, and Philip Berrigan himself—for trusting Douglas to pass letters in and out of prison, and for assuming, despite their history of civil disobedience, that their discussions of escalating protest would not draw government reprisals. O'Rourke portrays McAlister's bravado in committing such thoughts to paper as intended to impress Berrigan; indeed, the two—by then ex-priest and ex-nun—married a year after the trial. At one public meeting during the trial, McAlister revealed the historical ignorance and self-centeredness of some in the "new Catholic left" when she asserted that repression of dissenting voices was greater...