Authors: Bill Ayers
The kids and I went to a print shop on Broadway with a photo of the three of them sitting on the hood of a car in just their swim shorts eating big ice cream cones, and we ran off hundreds of postcards with Judge Goettel’s address on the back side. It made a sweet card, and they each sent one every day to Goettel—their very own Sheriff of Nottingham—with a personal plea to let their momma go. We also handed them out liberally to friends and associates and anyone who attended the meetings that were organized to fight grand jury abuse. When we heard later that as the flow of cards increased his irritation in chambers escalated as well, we felt that at least we were finally visible, which cheered us up.
We were trying, without great success, not only to get Bernardine and the others who’d been swept up by this marauding witch hunt out of jail, but also to build, if not a movement, at least a wider and deeper awareness of the dangers of unchecked government might. We got only fleeting coverage in the press, with one notable exception: Phil Donahue got permission to bring a whole film crew into the MCC, where he taped an hour-long interview with Bernardine for his TV show. It was great, and she was stunning.
By and large, it was a daily slog. She endured the isolation and helplessness of being caged, the despair of being disappeared and its accompanying sense of insignificance—as if being cast out of the open world had gone unnoticed and left not a mark——and mostly the crying anguish of being separated from the kids. “The keys to your cell are in your mouth.”
I worked all day at BJ’s Kids, day after day, and then took the train downtown to see Bernardine. I tried to be with the kids every morning and every night, and with my sweet partner in life and in crime every late afternoon. I got a lot of help from BJ and other friends, including Peter M., a lovely teaching assistant at BJ’s Kids by day and a flamboyant gender traitor and fabulous sexual outlaw by night. Peter moved into our apartment with us, became a lifelong friend to our boys, and joined the growing list of lifesavers.
I slept less and less, and relied more and more on Coke—the diet kind and the real thing—just to make it through. My admiration for single mothers spiked right then, as I realized that beyond the physical demands of parenting was the pervasive weight of emotional and psychic responsibility with no breaks and no downtime, an all-encompassing sense that
you were never off the clock
. Even if the kids were OK and Peter had them at the playground while I jogged in Central Park, I still had to be on. I was completely shot.
Zayd and Malik went separately to visit Bernardine every week in the federal remand center. “I want to be all-there, and it’s just altogether happier one on one,” Bernardine would tell me. Chesa’s assignment was already too much: he took long trips—by car with Leonard and Jean, by bus with BJ—to see Kathy and David regularly, and while it was necessary to maintain a connection with Bernardine, it seemed nuts to add him to this new dance card very often. BJ, the resident genius in all things young children, was the mainstay of the system, the godmother of our visiting mafia, juggler and helper, and she took it on with characteristic thoughtfulness and passion, making each trek to lower Manhattan its own field trip for Malik or Zayd, something special to plan and anticipate with the kids and then pull off as an exciting, immense journey.
The Metropolitan Correctional Center was a tense, angular tower, all brick and steel and glass, squeaky clean on the surface and stinking of sterile antiseptic toxins deep down. The visiting ritual began with BJ registering and showing an ID at the front desk, then making her way with Zayd or Malik to the waiting room—overcrowded, hot, and full of irritable children—where they would stay until their names were called. The guards weren’t mean in any overt way, but the casual and bored bureaucratic coldness incensed her. “For us, every minute lost was stolen treasure,” she said later, “and their apathy or exaggerated lack of concern just grated on me.” They could be kept waiting anywhere from fifteen minutes to two hours to see Bernardine.
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 affidavit.” 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.