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Personal
James Carroll
weaves his personal story with the history of the Pentagon in his new book, House of
War. The Pentagon itself was dedicated in January, 1943, the same week
Carroll was born. His father moved from the FBI to the Pentagon as an Air
Force General, and Carroll grew up inside and alongside the Pentagon. Carroll
chronicles the growth in the influence of the military on American policies
from World War II through Iraq.
Many readers will object and disagree with much of what Carroll has to say. His
writing style can become preachy and his personal viewpoints can skim over
facts that don’t fit his argument. His prose is written so well that even
those who disagree with find pleasure in reading House of
War. Carroll’s perspective on the people, the place, and his personal
connection to the Pentagon add to the uniqueness of this book. Here’s an
excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter Eight, “Unending War,” pp. 418-423:
1. INTO PLOWSHARES
In early May 1997, I drove from Boston
to Portland, Maine, every morning for a week to attend
a trial in federal court. A man from my past, Philip Berrigan,
and five others had slipped aboard the USS The Sullivans
three months before, taken hammers to the ship’s weaponry, and poured
blood. This took place at the Bath Iron Works, in Bath, Maine,
where the recently completed ship was to be commissioned. Berrigan
and the others1 made their move in the early morning, and within a
few minutes they were arrested by sailors armed with shotguns. The Sullivans is an Aegis-missile-carrying destroyer,
named for five brothers who died together in World War II. The protesters
damaged the casement for the nuclear-capable cruise missiles. One of the group was an artist named Tom Lewis-Borbely,
who had been one of the original Catonsville Nine in 1968.
In support of the
Catonsville Nine, I had mounted an exhibition of Lewis-Borbely’s
paintings at Boston University in 1970,
and he had given me one of them, a view of the Pentagon, which has
hung on my wall ever since. Speaking in the hallway of the courthouse, Tom
told me that, at the Bath Iron Works, he and the others approached the ship
shortly after dawn. Finding it unguarded, they simply walked aboard. “I would
say?’ Tom added, as he recalled the ease with which they acted, “that the
Holy Spirit led us?’2
Presiding at the trial in Portland was federal district judge Gene Carter, a stern
man who had been nominated to the bench by Maine’s Republican senator William Cohen.
Carter refused to allow the defendants to explain their actions to the jury.
At that, Phil Berrigan, tall as ever but
gray-haired now, his face lined, turned his back on the judge, a posture he
maintained day after day. The trial was perfunctory. The defendants were
found guilty. Judge Carter sentenced Phil to two years in prison, the others
to lesser terms. At that, Phil was finally allowed to speak. “The United States
has spent fourteen trillion dollars on arms since 1946,” he said. “Our government has intervened in the affairs of
fifty nations and has violated the laws of God and humanity by designing,
deploying, using, and threatening to use atomic weapons.”3
Philip Berrigan,
with his brother Daniel, had been famous in America during the Vietnam War,
but he had dropped from the news. We saw this. Unlike most antiwar activists
of the time, however, Phil had not given up his life of protest. With his
wife, Elizabeth McAlister, he had founded a peace commune in Baltimore, and from
there he had launched a new campaign. It was dubbed the Plowshares movement,
from Isaiah 2:4: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their
spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.” With Berrigan
at its center, a circle consisting of dozens of people carried out symbolic
assaults against America’s
nuclear weapons manufacturing sites and military deployments, including
attacks on B-52 bombers, Trident submarines, and MX missiles.
The first took place at a
General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, on September 9, 1980, when Philip Berrigan, with seven others, including Daniel, walked
into the factory as the morning shift was changing and “beat” a number of
nuclear-tipped Mark 12A reentry
vehicles, which were mounted on the nose cones of MIRVed
MX and Trident missiles.4 The protesters had prepared a statement:
“We commit civil disobedience at General Electric because this genocidal
entity is the fifth leading producer of weaponry in the U.S. . . . We wish to challenge the lethal lie
spun by G.E. through its motto, ‘We bring good things to life.’ As
manufacturer of the Mark 12A re-entry
vehicle, G.E. actually prepares to bring all things to death.” 5
Over the next twenty years,
about a hundred Plowshares actions followed, in Europe as well as the United States,
at manufacturing plants and at Air Force and Navy bases. More than a hundred
people participated in the symbolic “beatings” of weapons, all to be promptly
seized and arrested. Such acts, in the military’s view, are sabotage, gravely
threatening, yet no one was ever injured — not the demonstrators, workers, guards,
or arresting officers. Philip Berrigan had been
dismayed by the peace movement’s temptations to violence late in the ever
more criminal Vietnam War, but with Plowshares he had found a form of protest
that was as direct and nonlethal as its objects
were denied and murderous. He conducted such raids again and again, and was
incarcerated again and again. By the time of his death, in December 2002, he had spent eleven years of
his life in prison.
Yet most people took no
note of Berrigan’s life after Vietnam. Few understood that the
obsessive concern about nuclear war that sparked the Freeze movement for a
time had gripped Berrigan and his followers with an
unrelenting extremity. The threat of nuclear war that prompted such
outpourings in the early 198os would seem to most others diminished after
Ronald Reagan began to speak of eliminating weapons, but Berrigan
saw through the ways that Reagan had co-opted the Freeze, and unlike most
others, Berrigan knew that the nuclear arsenal was
still growing. And then, when Gorbachev gave the world serious reason to hope
for peace, Berrigan was one of the few to note the
one-sidedness of that breakthrough.
From start to finish, the
media found the Plowshares actions not newsworthy. That was especially so
once the dominant story unfolding in the late 198os and early 1990s was the thaw in the Cold War,
and then the end of it.
To those who had heard of
the Plowshares protests, Berrigan was a lunatic,
or at best a wild-eyed idealist. He and McAlister, it was said, were frozen
in time, unable to surrender the self-anointed grandeur of their Vietnam
glory days. Anarchist, terrorist, fanatic — such were the words
prosecutors routinely applied to Berrigan. I
myself was always moved by reports of his actions, but otherwise I took
little more note of them over the years than most
others. But the Plowshares group that took action against The Sullivans in 1997
called themselves “the Prince of Peace Plowshares.” They took the
name, of course, from Isaiah’s title for the Messiah,
one Christians had applied to Jesus. As it happened, I had used the same
epithet as the title of a novel I wrote, based on, among other things, the Berrigan brothers’ exploits during the Vietnam War.6
That novel was concerned with the moral problems of war and how to
resist it. A loving tribute to the Berrigan wing of
the antiwar movement, it also took up the question of protesters who seem to
judge the actions of others from a position of ethical superiority. As the
story unfolds, the fictional characters, despite heroic acts of resistance to
an evil war, are themselves revealed to be flawed human beings.
At the end of the Vietnam
era, which coincided with the end of my time in the priesthood, many of us
had been forced to confront the “beams in our own eyes,” as the Gospel of
Matthew defines hypocrisy. Perhaps for that reason,
or perhaps because of the usual dispersal that occurs after a time of
emergency passes, the once close-knit community drifted apart, leaving many
of us with feelings of unfinished business, even regret. So when I read of
the Plowshares raid in Bath,
and that the group had called itself Prince of Peace, I recognized a
coincidence that was also a conscription. The
assault against the Aegis missile had been ignored in the press, and by then
I was a columnist for the Boston
Globe. I felt compelled to write about what the Plowshares collective had
done, what they were trying to tell a blithely indifferent world.
“We want to tell people
what’s going on in this country,” Phil wrote from jail in Maine. “We want people to know that the
government has entered a new phase of the arms race — we are racing with ourselves. . . The government is beating plowshares
into swords, creating an entirely new arsenal of nuclear weapons.”7
It was true. This was
almost exactly ten years after Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan had marked
the supposed reversal of the arms race with the signing of the INF Treaty in Washington. It was
early in the second term of Bill Clinton, who had objected to the war in Vietnam and
who now had had more than four years to reshape American policy. Why had Clinton done so little
to dismantle the American half of the Cold War nuclear apparatus? That is our
question now.
Philip Berrigan
a lunatic, a wild-eyed idealist? No, it was with shrewd realism that he
looked at what had happened since the end of the Cold War — a situation from which his fellow
Americans had universally turned their gaze. We are racing with ourselves.
Here is the last legacy of the “arms race of a rather desperate
character” that Stimson had warned of. Back then, Stimson had been almost alone in seeing it, and now Berrigan was, too. Ever attuned to the liturgical
calendar — the raid on The
Sullivans took place on Ash Wednesday — the former priest had taken solemn note
of the fact that the flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
had been lowered from above the Kremlin for the final time on Christmas Day, 1991. Feast of the Prince of Peace.
A month later, in his State
of the Union address, President George H. W. Bush declared that the United States,
“by the grace of God,” had “won the Cold War.”8 And yet the U.S. arsenal that had been built up and
justified by the threat from the Soviet Union
had not been dismantled. The much-ballyhooed “peace dividend” had never
come. As the Warsaw Pact disbanded, NATO
expanded. The newly independent former Soviet republics of Belarus, Kazakhstan,
and Ukraine had completely
divested themselves of nuclear weapons and embraced the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, while the United States defied it. Clause
VI of that treaty requires the nuclear powers to work toward the abolition of
nuclear weapons, but in America,
the weapons were still being developed, built, and deployed. For use against
whom? To protect America
from what? In the second Clinton
term, the Pentagon budget began to climb again. And this without an enemy.
Why? And why, under President Clinton, had the destruction of nuclear
warheads been stalled, when thousands had been destroyed under Reagan and
Bush?9 What had been destroyed under Clinton, at the behest
of right-wing senator Jesse Helms, was the Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency, just when its work was most needed.’ 10 Why? These were
questions no one was asking.
Except Philip Berrigan and his friends. Susan Crane, one of the Prince of
Peace Plowshares defendants, said, “At some point, we must call this charade
to a halt. We must say ‘enough’ to Judge Carter and the empire on whose behalf
he seeks to send us to prison.” 11 A few weeks after the
Plowshares trial in Portland,
I happened to be interviewing William Cohen for a magazine article. 12 Having
been Judge Carter’s sponsor as a U.S.
senator from Maine,
Cohen was by now the secretary of defense. For the article, I had met with
him in his grand third-floor office above the River Entrance, the office into
which my father had once ushered me to meet Secretary McNamara.
Returning to the Pentagon
as a writer was to be briefly at the mercy of memory: sliding down the polished ramps in my stocking feet, wandering
through the rings and corridors as if they were my magic kingdom, drinking
from water fountains the very abundance of which had been designed to keep
the races separate. In interviewing one Pentagon general, whose office was
down the hall from Secretary Cohen’s, I felt a chill on my neck as my eye
went to the distinctive wall map showing a projection of the globe, the
leather couch in front of it, the way the wall map’s frame joined the
wainscot molding, and I recognized the room as my father’s old office.
A few days later, I flew
with Secretary Cohen on his Gulfstream jet for a
trip back to his hometown of Bangor.
We departed from Andrews Air Force Base, having boarded the plane within
sight of an Air Force building that had been named for my father. 13 As
we flew over Portland,
I gestured out the window and told Cohen that Philip Berrigan
was in jail down there. An assault on the destroyer at the Bath Iron Works
would have registered with Cohen. The shipyard was Maine’s biggest employer; its head was a
major supporter of Cohen’s. As secretary of defense, he was working to make
sure Maine
kept the Navy contracts for the new nuclear warships. I asked him if he had
heard what Philip Berrigan had done.
Cohen shrugged. He is a
pleasant man, with a reflective manner not given to extremes. “I read about
it in the press?’ he told me. “I saw a little, small story about it. I
figured, that was still Phil Berrigan.
It didn’t strike me as being unusual. I think that there are legitimate ways
to protest. Destroying or trying to destroy things aboard a destroyer is not
one of them.”
Cohen is something of a poet,14 yet he seemed unaware of the
irony embedded in his use of the word “destroy.” He went on about Berrigan, “But that’s not how he feels about it. As long
as he’s prepared to accept the consequences that come with it, I don’t pass
judgment?” 15 Such benign dismissal was about as positive a
response as Philip Berrigan was likely to draw from
any establishment figure in post—Cold War America. Yet he and his band of
crazy, ignored, denigrated peaceniks seemed to have been the only ones in the
nation to have noticed the stunning anomaly. The Cold War was over for most
of a decade — but not in America. The
arms race had ended when one of its two competitors had simply disappeared — but the United States was still running.
How could that be?
House of
War will leave all readers with unanswered questions, and that’s a good
thing. It leads to reflection, especially about the impact of the American
military on our country and on the world. Collectively, we need to decide if
we want to remain on our current path.
Steve Hopkins,
September 25, 2006
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