CATCHING UP WITH REBELS WITH A CAUSE
Antiwar group broke law; judge broke with tradition
Jeremiah Horrigan’s heart sank when he saw whirling red lights reflected through the arched windows of the Gothic Revival government building where he was trespassing. He had a miniature crowbar for cracking the locks on file cabinets filled with Selective Service System records. And he understood — standing there in his underwear — that his life was over.
Horrigan and his antiwar confederates were burgling Buffalo’s Old Post Office building on a steamy August night in 1971. They’d shed their clothes because it was hot as Hades in the dust-cloaked attic where they’d hidden for hours until nightfall. They’d emerged with their faces streaked in grime, like Lenten ashes, and felt giddy exhilaration as their scheme unfolded precisely as they’d planned — until that moment when they saw those refracted red lights, pulsing like a telltale heart on the stonework.
Now police stormed in, guns drawn, their shouts ricocheting off the cavernous stone walls. A pair of armed FBI agents, who’d been called away from a summer party, arrived in Bermuda shorts and sandals. And the Buffalo Five,
as they’d soon be known, were quickly thrown to the terrazzo floor, placed in handcuffs and arrested.
This peculiar tableau of trespassers caught with their pants down and federal agents in tourist attire called to mind a mix of Monty Python and Inspector Clouseau, popular comedic stylings of the era.
But this was no joke: Federal charges beckoned. Prison terms loomed. And they hadn’t even gotten to destroy any draft records.
The Buffalo Courier-Express trumpeted news of the arrests. Horrigan’s name wasn’t there. He’d given it to the cops as Joe Hill, for a turn-of-the-century labor activist. That would keep the truth from Horrigan’s father for a few more precious hours. Jack Horrigan was a familiar name as the Buffalo Bills’ vice president for public relations and a confidant to their star running back, O.J. Simpson.
This is a story of fathers and sons, war and peace, firstborns and second chances — and of a formidable federal judge who allowed a band of bohemian dissidents to represent themselves and put the Vietnam War on trial.
It all happened at a time not unlike today, when competing ideologies in a fractured, fractious country believed their side owned the moral high ground and a proprietary purchase on patriotism.
The Buffalo Five — three men, two women — are as old as 71 now. John T. Curtin, the U.S. District Court Judge who presided over their trial, is 95. He sent a retirement letter to President Obama last spring, ending a remarkable 48-year tenure that included some of the most important cases in Western New York history, including school desegregation in Buffalo and Love Canal in Niagara Falls. But few cases in Curtin’s career would unfold more unconventionally than the trial of the Buffalo Five.
USA TODAY Sports talked to Curtin and four of the five former defendants, including Horrigan, a retired reporter at a skein of small-town newspapers in New York and author of an unpublished memoir called Fortunate Son: A Dying Father, An Angry Son and the War on the Home Front.
‘THAT’S ALL I HAD TO HEAR’
Horrigan graduated from Canisius High School in 1968, in the same class with Tim Russert, future Washington bureau chief of NBC News, and Anthony Yerkovich, future creator of Miami Vice. Three weeks before their commencement, antiwar activists in Catonsville, Md., burned draft records with homemade napalm.
Horrigan enrolled at Fordham where he eventually found himself drawn to a subculture of the American antiwar movement known in the newspapers as the Catholic Left. He began spending time at a church rectory in the Bronx where war resisters took inspiration from the so-called Catonsville Nine.
The Nine included Catholic clergy, notably brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, later styled as “Rebel Priests” on the cover of
Time. (Daniel was a Jesuit, Philip a Josephite.) Their trial was national news. So were their convictions. And their brazen act of civil disobedience gave rise to a national escalation of antiwar marches, sit-ins and flaming draft cards
Horrigan dropped out of Fordham after his sophomore year and returned to Buffalo in the summer of 1971 to participate in a daring draft board raid, thrilled at the notion of destroying the records of men he’d known as boys in hopes this would keep hundreds out of the war.
The Five walked into the Old Post Office during business hours and hid in the attic, waiting for the building to close and darkness to come. The men stripped down to T-shirts and tighty-whiteys, the women to T-shirts and shorts, and not solely because of the hours they’d spend in an attic sweatbox. They also worried the rustle of pant legs brushing and shoes clacking could echo in the building.
Police would find seven pairs of shoes at the scene of the crime because the Five was really Seven. Two men managed to sneak out and dash into the night.
Hours later, from his jail cell, Horrigan thought about the terrible arguments he’d had with his father over the war. But there was no anger in the air when his father paid his bail.
“He said, ‘You’re my son and I love you,’ ” Horrigan recalls. “And that’s all I had to hear.”
‘MUST FIND THEM GUILTY’
The Buffalo Five argued their non-violent action was justified in the face of an unjust war. Curtin denied their application to subpoena President Nixon but allowed them unusual leeway: Witnesses for the defense included former American troops who’d fought in the war, a Vietnamese woman whose village had been destroyed, academics from the fields of history and theology.
Defense attorney Vincent E. Doyle Jr., appointed by Curtin as co-counsel, said the Five’s non-violent action targeted paper, not people. Assistant U.S. Attorney James W. Grable said the Five broke the law and admitted it.
Curtin’s charge to the jury was stark: “If you find the defendants committed acts as charged in the indictment, you must find them guilty of those acts.”
The verdict: Guilty of conspiracy to destroy draft records and intent to commit third-degree burglary, not guilty of removing records from a military intelligence office.
Horrigan’s girlfriend, Patty, learned in the weeks after the verdict that she was pregnant. She and Horrigan were the only ones in the courtroom at sentencing who knew.
Curtin told the Five their love of country was greater than most citizens because they’d put their moral outrage into action. But he said the jeopardy in which they’d placed themselves and others outweighed any good they’d hoped to achieve. Then he sentenced each to one year in prison.
But quickly Curtin said something else. He was suspending the sentences. Each of the peace activists would be placed on one year’s probation. It took a moment for this to sink in. Shouts of joy rang out in the crowded courtroom.
‘A SECOND CHANCE’
Curtin shares a cozy condo with Jane, his wife of 64 years. He is asked about that day, half a lifetime ago, when he placed the Buffalo Five on probation. A leprechaun’s smile — amused and pleased — washes over his Irish features. His health is precarious these days, but the jaunty grin renders him momentarily young again.
“I always believed there should be a chance for a second chance,” he says, “and the opportunity to have a good life.”
Time affords judges a verdict on their judgments. The Five offer living testimony.
Maureen Considine, 66, is a nurse practitioner who has devoted her life to healing. Chuck Darst, 67, is a retired bookseller who has lived a life of ideas. Ann Masters, 71, is a travel consultant who spends much of her time in Italy. Jim Martin, 70, is a retired geologist who remains active politically.
Horrigan, 66, called Curtin on the phone last April, shortly after the judge retired, to offer personal thanks for what he’d done all those years ago. Horrigan wrote about it in May for the online site Narratively.
“I tried to tell him how much I owed him the only way I knew how — by describing the barest outlines of a life of the luckiest man I know,” Horrigan wrote, “a life he allowed to happen.”
Last week, Horrigan offered thanks in person. He drove from his home in New Paltz, N.Y., to his hometown of Buffalo at the behest of USA TODAY Sports. When Horrigan walked into Curtin’s condo, the former firebrand and the former judge shared a room for the first time since sentencing.
“You look so old,” Curtin said. “You look older than I do.”
Horrigan told Curtin of his son, daughter and four grandsons. He told of his newspaper career. And he told of how he and the girlfriend who stood by him in court that day are an old married couple. He thanked the judge for all of it.
And they laughed like old friends.
“I tried to tell him how much I owed him the only way I knew how — by describing the barest outlines of a life of the luckiest man I know.” Jeremiah Horrigan