An American Radical:. Susan Rosenberg
to begin their careers. My parents believed in civil rights, the early anti-nuclear movement, and they were against the Vietnam War.
In 1964, when I was eight years old and attending the Walden School, Andrew Goodman, who was to become one of its most famous alumni, was slain by the Klan for his participation in the voter registration drive in Mississippi. Even though he was my senior by more than ten years, his younger brother was in the class ahead of me, and his family was very active in school affairs. The school became a base of support for the civil rights movement, raising money and recruiting people to go south. James Chaney was assassinated along with Andrew Goodman. His family was from Mississippi, and his brother Ben, who was twelve years old at the time, was sent north and later enrolled at Walden. He became my friend, and for the next several years I acutely watched events with the added perspective of what I imagined to be Ben’s experience.
I continued at Walden through high school, during the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement. At first I went to anti-war demonstrations in New York with my parents. But, by 1970, I was attending with others from my school. That year, I went to the big anti-war mobilization in Washington and I got separated from my friend Janet and walked into a police action against people who had raised a North Vietnamese flag on the Justice Department building. I had never seen people getting beaten with clubs and dragged into wagons, except on television. Then the police let loose tear gas to disperse the crowd of thousands. I ran to get away from the gas and the police until I fell on a grassy slope and pressed my head into the grass to stop the searing pain and tears that I had gotten from just a small whiff of it. When I returned home, I discovered that other Walden students had been beaten up by the police. Furious, I joined the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, an anti-war group that was organized by college students who were members of Students for a Democratic Society. My high school chapter organized teach-ins and actions against the war in schools all over the city. The Vietnam War, specifically what our government was doing against the people of Vietnam, was predominating all of my thinking about the world and my own responsibility in it. Daily, I watched on TV the carpet bombings, the napalming of whole villages, and the tiger cages that were built out of bamboo that were smaller than a bathtub and used to torture pro-Vietcong villagers. As the body counts got higher and higher on both sides, I groped for any justification that made sense.
I was fifteen in 1970, and along with millions of other people across the globe, I wanted to make change, stop war, and build a peaceful and just world. It seemed possible because there were clearly drawn sides between war profiteers and supporters of the establishment and the majority of people who were resisting and demanding transformation.
Perhaps my choices and life course were the result of a combination of nature and nurture. Despite being surrounded by middle-class privilege, I seemed to be aware of injustice and inequities around me. At the age of five I had first seen a legless man on a skateboard and refused to go into a store to buy shoes, because, as I angrily explained to my mother, how could I buy shoes when the man had no feet. Maybe from that moment when I understood the oppression of others, followed by the images from Selma, Alabama, and Haiphong, Vietnam, and the rows and rows of burned-out houses along Morris Avenue in the Bronx, my skin had become so thin that the pain and suffering of others penetrated my own blood and mingled with it and drove me to an agony of distraction that meant I had to act.
Fourteen years later I still believed in the need for change. I began to converse with all those radical spirits, comparing what I imagined they had gone through to what was happening to me. I thought, If it isn’t worse than this, I can manage it. But then it got much worse.
OUR TRIAL, IN April to May of 1985, was a three-week accelerated collision between the prosecution and us. In the months leading up to the actual court proceeding, we remained housed in New York City. Every time we went to the federal court, in Newark, New Jersey, escorted in a high-security caravan that included helicopters and police of every type, the Holland Tunnel was closed down. If we were not already misunderstood or despised, our impact on thousands of harassed commuters would have been enough to spark an instant mass hatred. The outcome of the trial was a given even before the jury was selected. We did nothing but escalate it.
The security team responsible for us was assembled out of the Joint Terrorist Task Force, which included U.S. marshals, FBI agents, and local New York police. One member of the team was Bernard B. Kerik, who many years later would become New York City’s police commissioner under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and later still go to jail on charges of tax fraud and perjury. The first time we were due in court for pretrial motions, we were taken to the underground garage of the detention center, where one of the waiting cars was a black Mercedes-Benz. A member of the security team told me to get in. I had over forty pounds of chains wrapped around me, which was standard transport attire. I looked at him and said, “I refuse to get into that Nazi car.” The officers thought that was very funny. One retorted, “This is the car we use for officials; you don’t know how lucky you are.” Then, several of them picked me up and put me headfirst into the backseat. That was the end of the discussion.
Our trial was a venomous and hostile drama. The judge was Frederick B. Lacey. He had been a naval officer, and then the U.S. attorney for the district of New Jersey from 1969–71. He was appointed a U.S. district judge by President Richard Nixon, and his reputation was that he was tough. He was also a member of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. This was the court that heard FBI and CIA applications for international wiretaps in cases pertaining to national security. Judge Lacey was as highly politicized in his way as we were in ours. We tried to present a necessity defense, saying that the government was guilty of war crimes against people in the developing world and at home. We had lawyers who helped us research and prepare our brief. Judith Holmes, an attorney who had experience in defending other political activists, worked with us for weeks as we organized our own defense. We said that we were part of an organized illegal resistance movement and that we were acting out of conscience. We opposed the covert U.S. involvement in Central America, the government’s backing of the Contras in Nicaragua, and the illegal sale of arms to the right-wing paramilitary groups throughout Latin America. We also opposed the racist regime in South Africa and wanted an end to apartheid. We argued that the United States had waged an illegal war via the FBI’s cointelpro(Counter Intelligence Program) against the radical and progressive movements for freedom and liberation among black people, Native People, the people of Puerto Rico, and other oppressed people, forces, and groups. We believed that as a result of cointelpro the civil liberties and human rights of thousands of citizens had been abrogated.
The prosecution, however, asserted that because we were apprehended with hundreds of pounds of explosives, numerous guns, and extensive amounts of false identification, we trafficked in violence (although they did not link any of the materials found to any actual activities) and therefore could not talk about politics. We were simply terrorists. It was their court and their outcome.
Our lawyers, Susan V. Tipograph and Mark Gombiner, both lawyers who were part of the legal community that fought to uphold constitutional rights and defend extremely unpopular defendants, believed that if we put on a necessity defense we would face the wrath of the court, and so we fired them the day our trial began in order to represent ourselves. Still, they sat with us and acted as our legal advisers, and when sentencing came, their hopes took over and they predicted that we would get fifteen years. But Tim and I knew differently—the lawyers had been right in the first place about the anger of the court and we expected stiffer sentences.
We were each convicted of eight counts of conspiracy to possess and transport explosives, guns, and false identification across state lines. We were each sentenced to fifty-eight years in federal prison for possession of weapons and explosives. It was the longest sentence ever given for a possession offense. Judge Lacey compared us to Russian spies during the cold war and instructed us to read The God that Failed, a classic collection of essays by six prominent thinkers who had become disillusioned with communism and through their ideological rebirths became militant anti-Communists.
About a week after our sentencing we were in the visiting room at the