Prince of Peace (69 page)

"Yes. So does half of Manhattan."

We stared at each other. Steam puffed from his mouth and nostrils. Finally he said, "West Point is playing basketball against Saint John's tomorrow night at Madison Square Garden. The local commander always attends Army games as a kind of presiding officer. General Sennett's going to be in the front row at midcourt. There's going to be a demonstration and I am going to be a part of it."

"But you can't! You go into custody tomorrow!"

"That's what I wanted to tell you. I'm not turning myself in. I'm not cooperating with the government anymore, Durk. Authority has to be legitimate." Michael smiled. "Even Saint Thomas said that. If this government wants me to obey it, then they can stop the war. If they won't call the real criminals to account, then we will. If they want me tomorrow, they can come to Madison Square Garden."

At first, so domesticated—housebroken—was my mind that I did not understand what he was saying. Had his lawyer obtained an extension from the court? Of course not. Even before I spoke I grasped in its full dimension the enormity, the audacity, of what he'd said. "You mean you're going to...?" I didn't have a word for it.

But he did. "Resist, Durk. I'm going to resist. Not out of rebelliousness. You know me. I'm no revolutionary. I hate what I've come to. But I see now what we have to do—challenge and if we can, destroy America's faith in people like General Sennett and General Abrams..."

"And Nixon?"

"As far as the war goes, yes. GIs have to stop obeying their officers. Teenage boys have to stop obeying their draftboards. And peaceniks have to stop obeying the courts."

"Michael, you've lost me. Honest to God, you've lost me. The last time we talked you told me you'd had it. You were through. You'd done your part."

"I was indulging myself, Durk. I'd become obsessed with my anxiety about prison. What's that next to the sacrifice of the Vietnamese? My Lai reminded me, that's all. At first I thought I was doing this because I
am
afraid of prison, but that's not it. I'll go to jail eventually, but not before I strike a real blow at the war. Americans, if you face them with it, won't tolerate this thing. And that's what I'm going to do, face them with it. Before we're through, Durk, it won't be that kids refuse induction, but that their mothers and fathers won't let the army near their kids."

"Where will you go?"

"To America," he said, utterly without self-consciousness. "If the government wants me they can come out there and catch me, where everyone can see."

The melodrama of his statement, the cartoon-talk about "America" so typical of the time, stands out starkly now as I repeat it, but then it seemed eloquent. His bravado simply took my breath away. My God, I thought, it's the old Michael Maguire, the boy-soldier hero hurtling down a hill against an enemy patrol to save his wounded buddies and their priest, the young idealist handing over the rest of his life in one wrapped package to the Lord, the priest off to Vietnam to rescue children, then defying the cardinal to bury Nicholas Wiley. Yet now Michael seemed readier, as if every previous act of boldness—
"L'audace! Toujours I'audace!"
—was practice for this one.

"And this means," he said, "I'm going to owe you a lot of money. I'll be forfeiting bail. That's your twenty thousand dollars. That's what I'm here to talk about. I'm telling you right now that somehow, someday I'll see that you're repaid."

For a moment I felt sick at the thought of all that money, which was
all
of my money, going up in smoke, the smoke of his sacrifice. I couldn't reply.

He said, "I feel terrible about it," and I saw that he did.

But then it hit me, what was money, even that sum, in such a context? Michael was talking about an ultimate act. He had become, in a way, an ultimate man.

And I? At that moment I was like everyone. I forgot what he'd shown me in secret, the cost of his world-saving, charismatic integrity, the cost in loneliness and self-doubt. I rejoiced instinctively to see him large again, unyielding, the rock of our rejection. My reservations—I thought his decision was quixotic, foolhardy and dangerous—were obliterated by the pride I felt just to be his friend. I thought him right about the war, about America and about My Lai as the turning point we'd been awaiting.

"Forget the money, Michael," I said, "I mean, please. And tell me now exactly what I can do to help."

And when our work is done
Our course on earth is run
May it be said, "Well done;
   Be thou at peace."
E'er may that line of gray
Increase from day to day,
Live, serve and die we pray,
   West Point, for thee.

 

After the robust, throaty rendition of their alma mater, the cadets, a thousand strong and concentrated, a gray mass, in the upper seats, let out one of their startling, sustained roars. The noise, like a balloon expanding in a box, pressed against the walls and girdered ceiling of the Garden. West Point cadets make the best roars in sport because of all that pent-up energy and their acquired knack for unison. Only seminarians could match them in those traits. Seminarians, of course, do not learn to roar since they are not, most of them, being trained for battle.

The roar did not fade until the referee tossed the ball into the air at center court. The Redmen snagged it and immediately moved on Army's basket; three quick passes, a feint, a shot, swish! Saint John's would never lose the lead. By halftime the score was 42—28. Even the automated cadets in the stands had gone slightly limp. The Saint John's fans across the arena looked like long-haired hippies next to the Corps, though in fact they were relatively conservative Catholic kids from Queens and would have looked downright square at Dupont Circle or Haight-Ashbury or, for that matter, in Greenwich Village. But by now even to most of them, the army was the enemy of their generation, and the cadets were traitors to it. They wanted their ballplayers to beat West Point mercilessly.

It was because of the abuse Military Academy teams regularly took at other colleges during the late sixties that the local commanders compulsively attended the games. They always sat, bedecked and accompanied by aides, in a prominent seat. It was like setting up a commandpost on a ridge so that both your enemy and your own forces would behold your nerve and be, in one case, shaken and, in the other, reinforced. At halftime General Sennett stood in his place in the first row at center court and greeted well-wishers, old friends, retired officers and celebrities.

When the priest walked out onto the court with a microphone in his hand, the general assumed, as the guards had, he was some functionary from Saint John's about to begin the halftime program. He looked innocuous in his Clark Kent spectacles, black suit and Roman collar.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "may I have your attention, please." At first the crowd ignored him. Sennett took his seat, however, and the cadets, seeing that, fell silent. Soon the quiet spread across the Garden. The priest was alone in the middle of the court. "Please come forward," he said. Suddenly from seats and aisles in all parts of the arena, men and women filed onto the court. They moved with ceremonial dignity, donning white conical hats as they did so. Sennett was among the first to recognize those as stylized Vietnamese peasant hats, and he was close enough to read what was written on them: "Old Woman,"

"Infant,"

"Buddhist Nun,"

"Village Elder," and so on. The priest, Sennett realized, was staring at him as he said, "Think of these four hundred and twenty-two people as the old men, women and children who lived in a small village in Quang Ngai Province until March 16, 1968. That was the day that you, General Sennett, as the commanding officer of the Eleventh Infantry Brigade, sent Task Force Barker, led by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker, including Charlie Company, led by Captain Ernest Medina, including a platoon led by Lieutenant William Calley, against their village, which was called My Lai." By this time the several hundred demonstrators had joined the priest on the court. They stood rigidly, like figures in a mime, pointed in every direction, their faces obscured by their conical hats. After a long silence during which there was no sound from anyone in Madison Square Garden, the priest said, slowly and distinctly, the sound system carrying every nuance of his voice, "General Sennett, we accuse you of and charge you with the murder of these people."

At that all four hundred and twenty-two demonstrators—the "infants,"

"elders" and "nuns"—fell to the floor, limp. Like that, snap! They were a mass of corpses! Only the priest remained standing.

After an initial gasp, the crowd was absolutely still, too stunned to react, with the exception of photographers, whose cameras clicked and whirred.

Sennett stared at the priest. His face was a blank mask.

The priest said, "May God forgive you. We do not." And then he took off his glasses, his gesture toward disguise. He walked off the court, stepping around the "corpses" as he did so.

The newspapers the next day made much of the fact that at the very moment Michael Maguire was confronting the army general in front of twelve thousand people, the FBI was searching for him in New York rectories. As of noon that day he had become a fugitive priest.

It was a powerful myth for Catholics of the old school. The priest on the run, the outlaw celebrant, the Jesuit with a price on his head. Fugitive priests had founded the Church in the Catacombs while Caesar's legions hunted them. Fugitive priests had kept the last flicker of the true faith alive in Elizabethan England while the queen's men stalked them. They hid in priest-holes, in secret rooms behind fireplaces. They went about disguised as lawyers or teachers, and the people revered them. Their legends grew even while they lived, and when at last they were caught and martyred, the Church remembered them as saints. They were Thomas, James and Peter, Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell and John Fisher. There were fugitive priests in Ireland and then, in our own time, in Europe under the Nazis, in China under Communists, and in Latin America under military regimes. As children my generation of Catholics read comic books about them, and articles in
Our Sunday Visitor.
We celebrated their feast days and prayed to grow up with their courage and their willingness to risk everything for God. We sang how sweet 'twould be if we "like them could die for Thee." Now there was a priest-fugitive in our own country, hounded not by Caesar or the queen, Hitler, Stalin, Mao or some generalissimo, but by that other company of our heroes, the FBI.

Michael taunted them. Within a week of having "gone underground" he began the dramatic series of surprise appearances at rallies and in churches, making speeches, preaching sermons, and giving interviews, stealthily, to reporters. A network of dozens of people from Washington to Boston sprang up to help him, to hide him, to arrange his meetings with students and with antiwar and church groups. Brave strangers drove him from one rendezvous to another.

Carolyn and I were not among that network and neither were his other close friends. For the most part, during his months underground, we did not know where he was. Obviously we were being watched and our phones were surely tapped. Michael was in the hands, mainly, of Jewish professors, ironically, and that was why he succeeded beyond anyone's expectation. The FBI, lumpishly, concentrated on us Catholics.

Still, we heard stories about him. Not many days would pass without some report from that unlikely outlaw subculture about his latest escapade. There we were, sophisticated academics, journalists and professionals all up and down the East Coast, but we were like kids with ears to the radio.
Gangbusters! The FBI in Peace and War! The Shadow!
In the snatches of what we heard we knew that a legend was being made. A legend, unbelievably, for the likes of us.

In Washington in late January there was a meeting of top leaders from around the country of CALC, Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam. About seventy of them, men and women of various denominations, gathered to coordinate plans for the upcoming campaign to lobby congressmen to cut off funds for the war. They were meeting in the basement auditorium of a Baptist church in Northeast Washington, not far, ironically, from Catholic University where Michael had done his training. At the start of their morning session the chairman melodramatically promised the group that before the meeting adjourned that day they would be hearing from, as he put it, "the priest-prophet of the peace movement." No one at that meeting had to have it spelled out that that meant Michael Maguire, and the anticipation that even those hard-boiled activists felt at the prospect of his coming was a distraction of the first order all day.

Sure enough, late in the day, after their workshops and small group meetings, the people reassembled in the auditorium. Word had spread to other local clergy and activists. Even seminarians from Catholic U. showed up, filling the corridors and stairwells outside the basement hall. The uninvited overflow were ushered into the unheated church upstairs, and soon even it was full. There the people stared at an empty sanctuary, the cold air showing the vapor of their breath, and they listened closely to the proceedings downstairs through the squawky sound system. The CALC meeting had turned into an ad-hoc rally. A folksinger led choruses of "Blowin' in the Wind" and "If I Had a Hammer." A black poet in Muslim dress read verses that asked questions of the Vietnamese. (Do you not curse us in your sleeping and your waking?) A gospel choir sang three rousing numbers. A minister from Indian Territory in South Dakota spoke feelingly about the old American custom of genocide. And then silence fell over both groups, down and up, as the CALC chairman took the podium.

No sooner had he introduced Michael than Michael's voice, cutting short the applause, filled the auditorium and the church with heartfelt exhortations addressed expressly to the organizers. "CALC exists to save lives!"

No sooner had his speech begun than half a dozen men, some bearded and wearing fringe-leather jackets and some clean-shaven, dark-suited, looking like clerics, left the pews of the upper church hurriedly. They dashed down the stairs to the auditorium and burst into it, with guns drawn, crying, "Freeze! FBI!" Their FBI colleagues who had infiltrated the auditorium ahead of them looked sheepishly back from their chairs. Those agents hadn't moved because they knew the truth, that Father Maguire's ringing antiwar speech, which had not stopped or slowed or broken cadence despite the interruption, was even then being delivered by a large, reel-to-reel tape machine balanced precariously and quite visibly on the otherwise vacant podium.