War Crimes in Turbulent Times

Sidewalks with Tom Deignan

War Crimes in Turbulent Times

September 24, 2007

By Tom deignan

THIRTY six years ago this month, newspapers in New York and New Jersey were filled with reports about a band of radicals who had broken into a draft board office in Camden, New Jersey and plotted to destroy government property. Specifically, as an act of protest, they intended to confiscate records used to draft young men to fight the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War.

FBI leader J. Edgar Hoover announced that the government planned to prosecute the so-called Camden 28 to the full extent of the law. Given the era, the facts of this story may not seem all that surprising.

But many in the public were more than a little shocked when it turned out the Camden 28 were not a band of hairy hippies or Abbie-Hoffman quoting radicals.

Instead, they were a group of devout Catholics, and included an Irish-born priest as well as an activist who would later do human rights work in Northern Ireland.

The story of the Camden break-in has gained new attention lately with the summer release of a documentary about the group, which has been showing on PBS stations in recent weeks.

Entitled Camden 28, the film outlines the group’s roots in the so-called Catholic Left of the 1960s and 1970s. It also outlines how there was, it turns out, a Judas among the group, who was collaborating with federal law enforcement officials to infiltrate the Camden activists.

The ensuing trial, with its revelations of an informer and the Camden 28 more or less representing themselves, was pure theater. The government was on trial almost as much as the young radicals.

Justice William J. Brennan Junior, himself the son of Irish immigrants, called the Camden 28 case “one of the great trials of the 20th century.”

In the end, the story of the Camden 28 –- and the Catholic left as a whole –- is an often forgotten aspect of Irish American history. You don’t have to buy into the more radical aspects of their actions, but you do have to acknowledge the depth and sincerity of their convictions.

Meanwhile, as America yet again wages an unpopular war abroad, the Camden 28 episode begs the question — how far can you go to express your opposition to a war?

At the heart of the Camden 28 was an Irish immigrant priest named Mike Doyle. He was serving poor African American neighborhoods in New Jersey when it occurred to him that there were some similarities between impoverished American cities and the Vietnamese villages U.S. forces were bombing.

Doyle, along with fellow Irish Americans Joan Reilly, Ned Murphy and Ed McGowan, were part of a movement that had evolved into the Catholic left. These were devout Christians who believed the teachings of Jesus allowed -– even demanded –- action in the face of a perceived injustice.

The gravest injustice to Doyle and the Camden 28 was the Vietnam War. So they plotted an act of civil disobedience. They would break into the draft board office, destroy records and make it almost impossible to recruit new soldiers.

What Doyle did not know was that there was an informer in the group, working with federal officials, and even prodding the Camden 28 to commit this crime.

As it turns out, this was a useful defense tactic when the Camden 28 were arrested.

During the trial, Doyle and the other Camden defendants essentially claimed that the government was implicated in their crime. After all, if they had known all along what was going to happen, why didn’t they just step in and stop it?

In the end, the Camden 28 were acquitted. More broadly, this episode showed that while many Irish Catholics were growing increasingly conservative during the Nixon years, another movement was taking place.

Irish Americans such as Doyle, McGowan, Reilly and Murphy has managed to link their devout Catholicism with more radical times.

After the trial, Doyle became pastor of Sacred Heart in South Camden, while Reilly was an activist in Philadelphia. Murphy ran a shelter and soup kitchen on Fordham Road in the Bronx, while McGowan traveled to Northern Ireland to fight for Catholic rights.

These are people with whom you may very well disagree. But let’s face it, there’s no left or right wing way to provide soup to a hungry man.

(Contact Tom at tomdeignan@verizon.net)

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