Presidential Aide Henry Kissinger recently met with three of the alleged co-conspirators in the Berrigan case—the plot to kidnap Kissinger and blow up Government buildings. For 75 minutes they engaged in a polite discussion of U.S. policy in Indochina, but neither side came close to converting the other. Another, more amicable dialogue took place last August between Harvard Psychiatrist Robert Coles, author of Erik H. Erikson, the Growth of His Work, and Father Daniel Berrigan, just before Berrigan was captured by federal agents. Berrigan was convicted in 1968 of burning draft records in Catonsville, Md., as an act of protest against the Viet Nam War; since then, he has been named a coconspirator, but not a defendant in the kidnap plot. In a series of articles copyrighted by NYREV, Inc., the New York Review of Books is currently printing excerpts from the Coles-Berrigan conversations, which are to be published in book form as The Geography of Faith. Some key exchanges:
Berrigan: I have never been able to look upon myself as a criminal and I would feel that in a society in which sanity is publicly available I could go on with the kind of work which I have always done throughout my life. I never tried to hurt a person. I tried to do something symbolic with pieces of paper. We tend to overlook the crimes of our political and business leaders. We don't send to jail Presidents and their advisers and certain Congressmen and Senators who talk like bloodthirsty mass murderers. We concentrate obsessively and violently on people who are trying to say things very differently and operate in different ways.
Coles: How would you apply your thinking to those on the political right who would like the same kind of immunity from prosecution and the same kind of right to stay out of jail?
Berrigan: Well, that subject came out very acutely at our trial; the judge and the prosecution asked me that same question. How would we feel about people invading our offices and burning our files? And our answer was very simple: if that was done, the people who did it should also present their case before the public and before the judiciary and submit themselves to what we went through.
Coles: Well, how about one of the chiefs of the Klan who was arrested a while back and went through the process you describe—and as a result went to jail? Would you argue that he perhaps should have taken to the underground?
Berrigan: Well, it seems to me what we have got to discover is whether nonviolence is an effective force for human change. The Klansmen, as I understand it, have been rather violent over the years; so their methods are not ours.
Coles: Are their methods any different from the Weatherman's methods?