I met Frank Kroncke about seven years ago when my husband and I, as "fringe agents," were handling a limited number of manuscripts for other writers. Frank's work was brilliant and way, way ahead of its time — "experimental," as one publisher described it in the rejection letter. Although we couldn't sell his novel, we struck up a long-term relationship born of like philosophies on life and the world. It was not until some years after our first contact that I discovered that Frank was one of the "infamous" Minnesota Eight — a group that made national headlines for its daring draft board raids in 1969.

As the nation again headed toward a devastating, pointless war in Iraq, I asked Frank to tell his story for the present generation. As he did, he shared revelations about the turmoil and soul-searching that led him to be willing to face prison for his beliefs, about his relationship with famed Black Panther Fred Hampton, and about his role in the legendary Beaver 55 draft board raids — the biggest in U.S. history. Frank's story shows what real patriotism is all about — it's not about being willing to die for you country in an unjust, unjustifiable war — it's about being willing to sacrifice everything to uphold the ideals America is supposed to stand for.

This article, Part I of two parts, is a combination of information from interviews with Frank and excerpts from two unpublished manuscripts by Frank (***ms. Text is in italics): "Patriotism Means Resistance" and "Silversex."

PART I: The Making of a Patriot Resistor

"My name is Frank Kroncke. I'm an outlaw. Getting to be an outlaw was easy, legally that is. All I did was join in with seven other young men in a series of raids on Minnesota's rural draft boards. That I became a draft-raiding outlaw with a background steeped in the exacting Obediences and Authorities of Irish-German Roman Catholicism is not so easy to explain." — from his 1972 autobiography, "Patriotism Means Resistance"

The year was 1969. The war in Vietnam — still officially a "police action" — had escalated to the point where any warm body under age 24 without family influence or an ironclad deferment was being scooped up by the draft and dropped into the jungle. The death count had climbed to hundreds some weeks. The steady stream of body bags and broken men being shipped back from the front had become "routine," as had the nightly news coverage of the conflict — read by deadpan commentators with the toneless dispassion of a history lesson. LBJ had left office, a defeated man. Nixon had swept into the White House, a man with an agenda disturbingly similar to G. W. Bush's, surrounded by many of the very same people, merely less gray.

The race riots had already ripped across the nation. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been buried. For half that year, the Charles Manson gang roamed free before committing a wanton, ritualistic murder that rocked the nation. Men would walk on the moon for the first time, yet that televised spectacle would fail to raise America's sights higher than the southeast Asian jungle. That year, young men dreaded turning 18, for it could mean their number (as in the draft lottery) could then come up at any time. In 1969, an activist priest named Father Daniel Berrigan and his group, the Catonsville Nine, were found guilty of burning hundreds of those same draft "numbers" in a courageous effort to spare just a few of those same young men a life too short or a nightmare-wracked life too long. Just a few years before, as the war was getting under way, Time Magazine had asked the famous question "Is God Dead?" In 1969, the question still hung in the air.

It was in this moment in American time that a young theologian and former monk at the University of Minnesota's Newman Center, named Frank Kroncke — a strapping 6-foot-three all-American basketball player of a man, raised with an unquestioning belief in church and state — faced a crisis of faith. By 1970, Frank Kroncke, the former Friar Otto, O.F.M., Conv., would find himself at the center of one of the most highly-publicized trials of the entire war, one in which Richard Nixon himself would become involved: The trial of the Minnesota Eight.

Unlike so many disillusioned intellectuals, Frank did not question if God was dead. For Friar Otto, God was almost too much alive. Frank's crisis was not a matter of faith in God, it was a matter of faith in his chosen course of action. Was it enough to simply not participate in a war he believed was immoral? As a former monk and a lay minister with a master's in theology, he had easily been granted conscientious objector status when his name came up for consideration by the selective service. In an unintended masterpiece of irony, his selective service officer had assigned him to alternative service at the Newman Center at the University of Minnesota — which happened to be ground zero for anti-war activism. Father Harry Bury, under whom Frank worked, was already a legend there, as a charismatic spiritual leader and speaker and as a leader of the anti-war movement.

Frank found himself counseling hundreds of young men — some seeking to evade the draft, others seeking spiritual absolution for their actions as soldiers in the war zone. At first, though intellectually opposed to the idea of the national Vietnam "military adventure," Frank knew nothing of war. He simply did his job to the best of his ability. But that all changed the day a young soldier (we'll call him "Joe") showed up at the Newman Center in desperate need of spiritual support.

Joe was the epitome of the 1950s, Norman Rockwell-style "All American boy," with his shock of sandy hair, freckles, and boyish grin — the quintessential wide-eyed farm boy. He had been so determined to serve his country — to fight the commies he had been raised to believe threatened our freedom — he had lied about his age and successfully fudged his way into the Army at 16. He had weathered boot camp and survived some of the worst Vietnam had to offer — the endless, often pointless but bloody jungle "patrols," the "securing" of villages (a euphemism that usually meant burning and/or killing everything that constituted the village), the countless nights of sleeping with one eye open.

In the middle of a raid on a "ville," Joe had experienced a traumatic epiphany. It was, he said, as if he had suddenly been waked up where he stood. What he saw before him was no longer a hut but a home. The screaming, terrified child, the dying parents, were no longer gooks, they were a family — a family just like his. Something inside Joe collapsed. He came back to the States, got married, tried to start a new life and put the war behind him. But, as hundreds of thousands of Vietnam vets (and now Gulf War vets) can tell you, you can take the soldier out of the war zone, but you can't so easily take the war zone out of the soldier. Joe found himself being waked up from nightmares by a screaming wife — around whose throat he would find his hands.

Through Joe's haunted eyes, Frank looked for the first time into the abyss that was war. Vietnam, he now clearly saw, was not only wrong — it was evil of the worst order:

"After all, this is not just another war ... it is not just a brushfire war, or a police action, nor is it World War III ... what it is, is a total war — A Global war ... the First Cosmic War ...a war in which our Government seeks to destroy every living person and thing in the whole of Vietnam. In short, for me, I realized that Vietnam is the first spiritual War. What is at battle there is the question of whether human life ... and indeed any form of life … is worth anything. Yes, wars are always brutal and by-standers sometimes get killed ... but in this war it is no accident that civilians are killed and that everything: every idea, person, place, custom and institution is the Enemy ... it is defined that way in the Army Field Manual. Yes, evil is something human. But by the same token it is something which possesses. Humans are the vehicles, the viruses of evil ..."

Frank asked himself: Was what he was doing within the cloistered confines of the church — even within the less limited parameters of the Newman Center — enough? It was not the first time he had asked himself that question.

In 1963, as Friar Otto, a Franciscan monk with a shining future in the church (his monastery wanted to send him to Rome for his doctorate), Frank's path was the epitome of unquestioning obedience. Frank was the fourth of nine children, born in Bayonne, New Jersey, to decidedly "Old World" values — his parents were second and first generation immigrant parents — an Irish-Catholic mother and a German father so conservative that he thought FDR was a "demon." As the third son in an archaically traditional family, he had been "earmarked" since childhood to become a priest. He had dutifully followed the prescribed path — choir boy, postulate, good boy from a poor, tough neighborhood where being good wasn't always so easy.

When he was in junior high school, the family moved to Minnesota, where, said Frank, he wore his "New Joisey" accent like a birth scar. Instead of entering a conventional high school, Frank was sent to a seminary on Staten Island, NY. Upon graduating, he entered the novitiate, a place where life revolved around the Holy Office — a life of constant ritual, into which he threw himself completely. "I was inside myself, I was inside the bowels of the church," he recalls. "I did everything I was supposed to do." At daily communion, the blessed wine became Christ's blood for Frank, the blessed wafer the actual Body of Christ. It was a ritual that both absorbed and disturbed him. "It occurred to me later that the communion really is a sort of mythic blood ritual — you are completing a rite of violence in which the angry father God kills his son and eats his body and blood."

The turning point for Friar Otto came when he was in Indiana visiting the Franciscan monastery that was, quite possibly, to become his permanent home. As he stood outside the gates looking in, he saw his future: a life sequestered from real action. His laundry and food would be provided. He would be safe, in a completely predictable environment. "A hothouse plant" was the image that came into his mind. He could not do it.

After a stormy confrontation with his family, he departed for a time from his religious path and went to the University of Minnesota, with the plan of becoming a doctor. But his spiritual mission, he soon felt, had not been fulfilled, not even yet begun. As a compromise with himself, he enrolled in a theology program at the University of San Francisco with the goal of becoming a lay theologian, a vocation then recognized by the Catholic Church. He earned a master's degree and returned to Minnesota, where his path, in 1969, led him to the Newman Center and, once more, to a crossroads.

The experience with Joe had filled him with doubt and questions as to his role as a spiritual advisor. Though he greatly admired Father Berrigan and the Catonsville Nine, his deeply engrained conservatism made him view their bold activism as extreme. Berrigan and eight other Catholics and nuns had raided a draft board in Catonsville, Md., right outside Baltimore, and burned hundreds of draft cards after symbolically spattering them with blood.. The group was tried, convicted and sent to prison in 1969. In effect, they had knowingly sacrificed their freedom for the lives of others. Back then, before modern computerized systems, a draft card — the physical card itself — represented a man's life. As the Minnesota Eight's defense attorney Kenneth Tilsen was to assert at their 1970 trial: "The character of the (draft) records are no more 'irrelevant' to this matter than the character of the records would be if these were records perhaps of Jews being selected out for burning in the ovens of Dachau."

Yes, Frank counseled young men in ways to escape the horror of war, but it was still a passive form of resistance and, he feared, through its coexistence with injustice, was condoning evil. He sought to become more outspoken on the war. He personally attended the trial of the Milwaukee 14, who had burned files in public on Sept 14, 1968 — Joe Mulligan, S.J. and Fred Ojile (another former seminarian) chided Frank for being a bookish theologian. Though charges against the group were dropped because an impartial jury couldn't be formed, their words — and the memory of how heads had been systematically bashed in the summer of 68 at Chicago's Democratic Convention — left Frank on the razor's edge.

Then the final push came. A year or so earlier, during a stint on the faculty of Rosary College in Chicago, Frank met a charismatic young black activist named Fred Hampton. Fred was a leader in the Chicago Black Panthers. The Panthers were vilified by white conservatives as "violent," "subversive," and "dangerous," though the evidence to support these claims, as it was later revealed, was largely disseminated by rightwing propagandists or planted by law enforcement officers working with political operatives. In one case in California, police blackmailed members of the Hell's Angels into agreeing to plant guns at a Black Panther clubhouse in exchange for not being prosecuted for various crimes themselves. Once the guns were planted, the Panthers were rounded up and send to federal prison.

Frank was impressed by Hampton: "He may have had his faults, but he was one of the most inspiring speakers and charismatic presences I have ever encountered. He was passionately committed to the cause of civil rights." The two men struck up an unlikely friendship — the intellectual, conservative white "friar" and the fiery, tough black revolutionary. Hampton once asked Frank to speak at a Panther meeting in Chicago — Frank turned out to be the only white person present, confronted by a formidable, highly skeptical audience of black activists. "But Fred intervened and it was fine — they were respectful." Hampton was one of the most constructive urban black activists to have lived. Far from the thuggish image the Nixon-Hoover regime wanted to project, Hampton represented the poor and working class black community. He started several programs, like the Free Breakfast for School Children program that fed over 3,000 children in Chicago every week, a sickle cell anemia testing program, and a free medical clinic. And all this by the time he was 21 years old.

Frank was stunned when, on the morning of December 4, 1969, he opened the paper to discover that Hampton had been machine gunned to death in his bed in a cowardly pre-dawn raid by the FBI and Chicago Police. The Peoria Panther Leader, Mark Clark, had also been killed, and several others had been wounded, including Hampton's wife, 8 months pregnant. Years later, a civil suit found the FBI guilty of wrongful death.

Beneath the newspaper's headline was a photo of the agents carrying Hampton's body out of an apartment building on a stretcher; and there were smug smirks on some of the agents' faces. Later, Frank was to discover that Hampton, like the California Panthers, had been betrayed. The same betrayers had drugged him with seconol before he went to bed to insure he would never wake up, never stand a chance.

The tragedy devastated Frank. It was not just the loss of a dynamic leader and a respected activist-friend, it was the complete travesty of justice that the event represented. Until that year, Frank said that he had never really questioned the basic goodness of America's institutions. They could be misguided, yes, and sometimes run off-track, but to engage actively, knowingly, and systematically in evil — such a possibility had never truly entered his consciousness. The Hampton assassination, coming on the heels of his encounter with Joe, drove the ugly truth home: Evil can infiltrate anywhere. The only antidote was action. "It hit me full force then: If you want to be a spiritual advisor, you cannot hide behind the walls of a church or college."

"Fred [Hampton] was more than a challenge to [Chicago] Mayor Daley's political machine. He threatened its cultural undergirding. He had access to political power, however, and he used it well. Society as a whole refused him dignity as a person. Fred's claim to dignity, and cultural visibility, was the reason they murdered him. He fought in the streets of America for the right to be a man. He had said to me, "To them I am the enemy." His death made me shudder."

Frank's conversion from conservative pacifist to radical resistor — outlaw, as he dryly calls himself — was made complete a few weeks after Hampton's death. The final blow came when, as Frank bitterly put it, "Nixon bombed Cambodia for Christmas."

"The thrust of my educational mission was soon radically altered by the revelation of the secret war in Laos. It is difficult, today, to appreciate how shattering this secret event was. Today, government lying is widely assumed. However, the day I realized that the government was deliberately lying, that truth-telling was against policy, my identity was transformed.

"Previously, I had been a reformer. Even my support of draft board raids was part of an effort to say, "Enough!" — and to call the government to its senses. Now, I was confronted with an impossible dilemma: If the government was lying, how could I speak to it? I considered leaving the country. I visited Toronto, but was convinced that my challenge was to speak to my people. But how? I pondered what the FBI saw as they peered at Fred Hampton. How had he made himself visible to them? I realized that I would have to redefine myself as an agent of the symbolic. Yet how could I or anyone consciously appropriate symbolic material?

"As I lost my story — the version of American history which had grounded me in a shared public morality — I grew mad. The thought of being imprisoned or murdered obsessed me. My antiwar activities became the discipline of my spiritual search. I no longer thought of the future — of a career, marriage, or getting old. In this state, peering revealed the symbols. I found a way to speak symbolically: return one draft card, burn the next, refuse induction. I did it in union with others. The government heard us.

"Destroying a single draft card was desecration: a ritual of alien spirituality; idolatrous allegiance to a strange god. I had been an outsider; I now became an outlaw. I began to peer at everyone and everything and could not believe what I was seeing. I watched Walter Cronkite on the evening news and saw his cue cards: "Lie! Lie!" I scoured the morning newspaper; the photos exposed the verbiage as lies. I listened with paranoid attention to governmental sermons and, slowly, the Nixon Lie unfolded. Watergate had not yet taken place, but its future servants were already about their mission of converting America."

Frank sought out other activists who would be as committed as himself to making a difference in the battle against the war. These would-be activists gathered in a series of retreats to discuss the war, their goals, and possible plans of action. In the beginning, several dozen people attended. Ironically, in light of the slanted view of the present generation that '60s activists were all "drugged out, high-profile hippies," the very people who did not persist in the circle of activists were those same "types."

"Of course, there were a few rhetoric-mouthing types who said some supposedly far out "revolutionary" things. These came to our retreats, one could quickly tell, just for the excitement of hearing themselves say daring things ... and to be among people who did not fear Resistance. Yet as the second and third retreats were called, those characters were filtered out. Soon I found myself with a core group."

This core group — the Minnesota Eight — was composed of young men whom, Frank laughs, looked more like guys from an All-American college football team than a band of revolutionaries. Molly Ivins, then a young reporter in Minnesota, who ran the first story on the group after their arrest, had much the same impression. Frank recalls her description clearly:

"The Minnesota Eight were young men, sons of the Establishment, with impeccable, middle-class, white, Judeo-Christian backgrounds. Young men whose minds and hearts are torn apart by the Vietnam War. Young people who had been active on the University campus, in church gatherings, in draft counseling centers, as conscientious objectors, as writers — in protest against the War which we judge immoral and insane."

The group came from diverse backgrounds, but agreed on one thing: They would raid draft boards. Why? First, as mentioned above, draft cards represented lives. Once your card was burned, said Frank, your chances of being drafted were all but nil — "Unless you were dumb enough to go to the selective service board and say, "Here I am, guys! Haven't heard from you in a while!" Second, it was a bloodless form of action — no bombs or threats or physical danger to anyone was involved.

"In a further effort to communicate our moral values to the draft servants, we geared our actions so that no one would get hurt. After all we could have firebombed the Boards, or shot the State Director, or ran in during the daytime, gagged the clerk and ripped off the files. Rather, we wanted to speak non-violently. Therefore, we selected out just the 1-A files. Snuck in at night. Had letters prepared to explain the meaning of our actions. And planned everything so as to minimize fear and destruction."

The group called itself the "Minnesota Conspiracy to Save Lives," in honor of Father Berrigan's group, "The East Coast Conspiracy to Save Lives." But though they modeled themselves after Berrigan, the Minnesota Eight were far more daring in their draft board raids. They were to become anonymous legends of the anti-war movement for their part in the "Beaver 55" raids — the largest draft raid in American history.

This raid, which took place just a month after Hampton's murder, in January 1970, took out 45 centralized rural boards housed in the US Postal Service towers in downtown St. Paul. It was also the office of the State Director, Colonel Knight — the first and only State Director's office ever raided. "We wrote on the walls and defaced Nixon's picture!"

The scale of the raid prompted J. Edgar Hoover to order 100 agents to Minnesota and the Willmar VFW and American Legion to put a $10,000 reward on the heads of the uncaught raiders. The PO towers were supposed to be impregnable, with 24-hour security — yet the group of more than a dozen men and women made it in and out without ever being caught, as snow began to fall. Hundreds upon hundreds of blank draft cards and official Selective Service stamps, including the signature of Colonel Knight, were seized and destroyed. Some were spray painted, some were ripped, some dumped in the Mississippi River.

But even better than that, said Frank, he stumbled upon roughly 1,200 draft "stamps" — official stamps that, once affixed to a draft card, proclaimed that the card holder had completed his service and was thus free forever from the draft. The seizure of the stamps, which were promptly shipped to Canada, made it possible for hundreds of American refugees to return to the U.S. legally, to all intents and purposes.

After the dramatic triumph of Beaver 55, many activists might have called it quits, but not the Minnesota Eight. They were in this "war" for the duration. Undeterred by the increased security of draft boards and the increased likelihood that they would be hunted down, the Eight pressed forward with more raids.

Yet, far from having become a "hardened" revolutionary, Frank constantly struggled within himself over the concept of "breaking the law." His inner sense of what was right was constantly being challenged by his programmed concept of the "law as right." The night of the last raid found him proving the old axiom — "Courage is not the absence of fear — it is the mastery of it."

The night of the last raid was in Minnesota in July. It was stiflingly hot and Frank had "borrowed" his mother's air conditioned Chevy (she was away on vacation) as the getaway car. He had something of a premonition that day that something would go wrong, but would not back away from his mission, anymore than the soldiers forced on suicide patrols in Vietnam were allowed to back away from theirs.

"My hands shook as I tried to cut diamond shape holes in the plastic bags. Sweat began to itch my legs. "Got to get a hold on yourself." Someone kept asking me — trying to raise his voice from somewhere back in my head, not speaking to me directly but a vaporous asking — "Should you do it?" I was hot and hair sweaty. A slight trembling buckled me — my knees get painfully weak when I get nervous. Just an hour before, Karen called saying that one of the southern Boards had cancelled themselves out. With cautious concern they reported that an alarm system had been installed by "Silent Knight." When I had heard that I felt really funny, like when winter numbs your skin and it tingles near frostbite. A numbing paranoia in a way. Some sense kept telling me not to go on the raid. Something kept urging me to cancel out — "The others would understand, wouldn't they? — and just go back to San Francisco as I had planned. But I didn't cancel. Rather I went out and raided a draft board in Little Falls, Minnesota."

Later, in the car heading for Little Falls with another one of the Eight, Mike Therriault, Frank's doubts welled up again. He was scared shitless and wanted to bail.

"Jesus, what are we doing?" I glanced at Mike. He seemed to glow as mellow as ever ... We looked so young that for a glimpse I was startled. I shuddered — rippling full body lengths — and took some heaving, nerve-relaxing breaths. I reflected to myself. Images of a million human faces — rainbow's hued faces — flew towards me from around the curving, hilly bends of farmed fields. Faces of untold multitudes of the dead — "these my body's bones and bloods" — "these my spirit's breaths and nourishments" — the peaceful grip of the Struggle wound itself tight around my chest and stomach. I knew that we'd do it no matter what — They were calling us forth!

Frank's misgivings were well-founded: Unknown to the Eight, the FBI had begun to monitor the movements of some of them, and knew about the Little Falls raid through a deal cut with an informant. Frank , Mike and the others had barely made it into the file rooms when all hell broke loose.

"Within seconds the whole scene whirled around. Heavy footsteps scampering and rushing up creaking wooden stairs. With two jerky, quiet strides I moved towards the door. But before I could do anything, the dark started chanting, "Back away from the door!" "Back away from the door!" A flurry of possible reactions flooded my mind. I was almost close enough to shove the door closed, I had added some lighter fluid in case something like this would happen. I wanted those files!! Possible thoughts of just burning the files in their cabinets ... and with that distraction, making an attempt to escape by the windows ... hit me, yet the knapsack was across the half-open door. I jumped to the protected side, glanced at Mike, saw some face flesh squat outside in the hallway, heard a kicking and pounding to the left of us shaking the waiting room door ... and behold! One figure crouched dimly in the doorway yelling, "Don't move ... or we'll kill you!"

Ironically, it was in those moments after capture that Frank found his true moral ethics being challenged as they never had before.

"Here, finally, among the enemy. No: not the Agents as such. "No matter what you feel — don't hate or fear them. Heal them — and so heal yourself." Hate the forces they so physically represent: death and the devil. How can I ever share with you how I felt that night? Handcuffed and captured by those other humans who protect the devil's dance? Quiet, stoned-face humans, who went about their government's work with such well-trained Dick Tracy precision."

By 2:30 AM on that Saturday morning, all eight raiders had been rounded up, transported to the Twin Cities, processed and locked into Hennepin County jail cells. By Saturday evening, a former priest and nun, Charlie and Pauline Sullivan, had formed "The Committee to Defend the Eight," and were already being interviewed on television.

"For the next three days and nights there were large rallies held outside the courthouse building. Over 500 people protested in the streets, the Minneapolis Tribune said. On one night the Tactical Squad rioted and went crashing through the crowds, banging heads and arresting people at random. A woman had broken a courthouse window with a flagstaff. All this police frenzy brought the righteous liberals out of the woodwork. Remember, this was the hot summer following Cambodia, Kent State, Jackson State, and nation-wide draft office raids. Minneapolis, like so many cities, was simmer to boil. When the cops came down, the people rose up! Even more people came into the streets when they heard that the eight of us had been formally arrested on the charge "sabotage of national defense materials" and had been handed a $50,000 bail bond apiece. The charge? That we were part of a sinister, national plot (he almost said "international Roman Catholic plot") of draft raiders, ala the Fathers Dan and Phil Berrigan, who were "intending to overthrow the Government." It was Nazi weird."

Note how quickly the rightwing government of Nixon/Hoover, et al was to make the draft raids a "Catholic conspiracy." As Frank points out, the Catholic clergy has a long and proud history of activism and has often been the most strident voice challenging the morality of government, here and elsewhere. "Bishops are the only countering voice of authority — answering to God and Rome first, not the U.S. government," Frank explains. He suspects that the push by the mainstream media (always the purveyors of government propaganda) to keep the Catholic priest sex scandals smeared before the public eye for so many weeks — while failing to investigate similar, and just as common, crimes among other religious sects — was calculated. With an imminent Middle East war in the works, what better "pre-ammo" could Bush want against any Catholic clergy who might later oppose him? Expect to see the "pervert priest" issue revived as soon as the war against Iraq meets serious resistance from activist priests like Berrigan.

The outpouring of public support for the dissenters intimidated the Nixon administration as much as such displays intimidate the Bush administration. The demonstrated eloquence of Frank and some of the other Eight was also perceived as a threat. As a result, a media blackout descended.

With a few days, the charge was changed from sabotage to "interference with the Selective Service system by force, violence or otherwise" — in essence, a common burglary. This ploy was to serve two government purposes: first, to deglamorize the activists with the public (it didn't work), and second, to gag the issue of Vietnam from the courtroom.

The trial of the Minnesota Eight — practically a military tribunal in its secrecy and manipulated charges — foreshadowed the coming of Bush "justice." And, the hypocrisy of the government's heavy-handed over-involvement in the trial's outcome (Nixon ordered them to be found guilty and given the stiffest sentence of all draft board raiders caught in the entire war) also foreshadowed the Bush administration. In a supreme irony, while Nixon's influence caused the charge of sabotage — which could have become a symbolic issue — to be shifted to burglary, the Watergate burglaries (to be committed within the year) were to represent sabotage of the U.S. Government in the truest, most non-symbolic sense of the term.

Next: Part two : The Trial of the Minnesota Eight: Nixon Steps In, Justice Steps Down