“Now, Dave, you understand why we had to pick up the gun, why everyone has to pick up the gun. Now you can see why even you, Dave, have to pick up the gun.”
Listening to the words of William O’Neal, one of the Black Panther Party’s heads of security in Chicago, David Dellinger was feeling at an all-time low. It was December 1969 and the Black Panther Party Chicago leader Fred Hampton had just been killed in a raid by the Chicago police. There were several things, however, that Dellinger did not know in the immediate aftermath as he was conversing with O’Neal. One was that the murder had been coordinated by the FBI and Chicago Police Department, and the second was that he was speaking with a key FBI infiltrator in the Panthers, recruited and paid by the Bureau, who was intimately involved in Hampton’s murder. This was not the first time Dellinger had seen violence pushed as a solution and not the only time he had interacted with a government he could not trust.
Next Time It Will Be You
In attempting to discover a useful angle of discreditation, the CIA had noted Dellinger in a report to Lyndon Johnson in November 1967 as a “tireless” crusader in search of an end to the Vietnam War through nonviolent protest, the most significant example having been the March on the Pentagon that brought 100,000 attendees that October. His stance earned him powerful and violent enemies; that December, he discovered that some threats even impacted his family.
To close out the year, he celebrated a late Christmas in an extended family gathering on December 30, which included his wife and five children. After spending the day in New York City shopping, the family returned to their home in a remote wooded area of New Jersey. They sat in the Dellingers’ living room that evening opening packages sent to them through the mail, a fireplace burning next to them. Dellinger noticed a strange package bearing the New York return address of a peace organization he coordinated, above which also bore the marking “VC.” He knew VC stood for “Viet Cong,” but could not fathom someone in his organization adding this as a joke for a gift sent to him. Removing the brown paper wrapping from the package, he stared at the gifted carton of Johnnie Walker Red Label Scotch whisky in his hand a little too long.
“Look at the old man, savoring his Scotch before he opens it,” his oldest son teased. “Come on, Dad, open it and you and I’ll try some.”
Fearing the worst but not wanting to frighten his family, Dellinger carefully opened the carton from its side and peered inside. He saw a series of wires and black powder inside the box. “I immediately saw a different shaped bottle—what looked to be like a bottle of gasoline with some sort of gauze underneath it,” he recalled days later. “Then I noticed wires.” Standing up, he said to his son: “Come with me, Patch.” The pair walked outside, Dellinger informing his son: “It’s a bomb,” describing what he had seen in the box. They stored the carton in the snow on the ground far away from the house and they decided to tell Dellinger’s wife but not the kids.
Dellinger phoned the state police the next morning and that day, the bomb squad defused the device and showed the contraption to Dellinger: inside the box there was a hand grenade, a small bottle of gasoline, a battery, and explosive black powder. The gasoline, he was told, was intended to start a fire to destroy evidence and the powder was additional explosive material to make sure that maximum damage would occur. Between the detonation cap, the gasoline and the grenade, the bomb disposal expert told him, “Any one of the three would have done the job.” Had he opened the package normally from the top, two wires would have made contact to detonate the bomb. Dellinger also spoke with an inspector from the U.S. Postal Service. “We’re going to track these people down. We’re going to get them…This is no homemade bomb but something made by professionals in a well-equipped shop.”
The inspector explained this was not the first bomb recently encountered by the Postal Service. On December 4, a postal worker named Charles Andrews returned to the Elizabeth Post Office in New Jersey with a mail truck at around 5:45 pm. He began throwing packages down a metal chute, one of which exploded immediately and sent a fire shooting back up out the chute “like a fountain of flame,” recounted one witness. The explosion “sounded like the whole world went,” said another. Andrews was throw back 10 feet from the blast. He suffered from burns to his eyes, ears, face, and hair, in addition to rupturing his ear drums. Four other postal workers suffered injuries from the package, which one of them described as large enough to contain a fruitcake; its mailing address was never reported and likely was not retrievable in the wreckage. Bomb fragments were sent to a postal inspection laboratory in Washington and a postal inspector named Fred DeLauter, likely the same man who spoke to Dellinger, was quoted in the press as saying, “We’ve found nothing at present that we can hang our hats on.”
On December 7, another package exploded and injured a postal worker when it was thrown into a receiving bin, this time in a post office in Manhattan. This shoebox-sized package originated from Canada and was addressed to be sent to Cuba. Labelled “medicine,” the package injured eight postal workers slightly and damaged hundreds of parcels. Dellinger had read about the bombs in the local paper (one article in the Jersey Journal was entitled: “Postal Mad Bomber At Work?”), not realizing possibly one of them had been meant for him. The inspector confirmed the link, stating that the post office where the New Jersey package exploded was where mail addressed to him was sorted: “Clearly this is not the first bomb they have sent you.”
Another news article noted the similarity between the two bombs, the earlier package causing a fire as the Dellinger package was intended to do:
Fire that followed the blast wrecked the basement of the three-story building in the heart of this northern New Jersey city, but firemen managed to keep the fire from spreading to the upper floors.
The FBI and members of a bomb demolition squad from Ft. Monmouth went to the scene to investigate. Police said it appeared the bomb contained a liquid explosive because of the flash fire that erupted after the blast.
Despite assurances from the inspector, Dellinger was never contacted again by anyone investigating the incidents. The speed with which the case disappeared bothered him: “It increased my suspicions that the government was behind sending the bombs and made me think that it was making sure that the investigations didn’t go too far.” What also stood out in his mind was the fact that his whole family could have been killed, “some of them quite possibly burning to death while lying wounded and helpless.” Dellinger remarked: “the inclusion of the gasoline and the presence of the roaring fire in the fireplace around which we had shared so many good times made everything seem even more horrifying.”
Dellinger had done his best to make acquaintances in town at the local bar, having drinks and engaging in conversation to emphasize the notion that he was not a person worthy of fear or hatred. This could only go so far as the press remained hostile and his personal relationships could not overcome public sentiment. The FBI had approached the local post office and a private business owner to warn them against him years earlier. More recently, his office had been vandalized with the following statement etched in red ink, dripping to look like blood: “NEXT TIME IT WILL BE YOU.” He was also informed of a conversation of unknown men approaching the local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in which it was further suggested Dellinger’s presence was unwanted given his press coverage: “It’s a disgrace to you and the town. Why don’t you beat the shit out of him and get rid of him?”
Dellinger suspected that while his visit to South Vietnam had garnered no attention, it was his visit to North Vietnam in 1966 that earned him this murderous ire. Using his contacts with the North Vietnamese, by the war’s end, Dellinger had secured the release of 12 American prisoners of war.
The press accounts of the attempted bombing at the Dellingers’ home never went as far as contacting the authorities for their view or questioning the actions being taken in response to the incident. One journalist contacted Dellinger’s office and learned that the package had been postmarked from Pennsylvania; the inquiries ended there. More column space was devoted to the announcement that the Dellingers were unsurprisingly selling their home in New Jersey later that year.
The CIA November 1967 report that described Dellinger and his colleagues as “tireless, peripatetic, fulltime crusaders,” must have disappointed President Johnson, a later CIA historical study surmised. The Agency had found no foreign direction in the activists’ actions, the report stating: “On the basis of what we now know, we see no significant evidence that would prove Communist control or direction of the U.S. peace movement or its leaders.” On the other hand, a later examination of the CIA’s domestic activities against Americans found that the Agency had retained “a repository for large quantities of information on the domestic activities of American citizens…much of [which] was not directly related to the question of the existence of foreign connections.”
Yale
Born into a Republican family, in the 1930s Dellinger attended Yale University, studying economics. A sports enthusiast, he became captain of the Yale cross-country running team, with injuries preventing him from making the Olympic tryouts. Inspired by his view of Christianity as “a loving, not blaming, religion, one in no one was without sin and no one was entitled to throw any stones,” he left the comforts of his life at Yale to spent time to live with the homeless. As the country was in the midst of the Great Depression, he had often argued with his father about the poor, who claimed that his son was unaware of what life was really like in the real world. Dellinger recalled those conversations: “All my ideas came from books, he would say. Now I was trying to find out first hand a little of what life was like for some of the people we had argued about.” Sleeping in a shelter overnight, he was surprised to awake at 4:30 am to watch everyone get out of bed, as if a fire had engulfed the building. “Where’s everyone going?” he asked a man hurrying to leave. “To look for work, you dope,” came the reply. He briefly considered becoming a minister and attended the Union Theological Seminary of Columbia University for a year, but rejected the rigidity that came with institutions.
Dellinger’s personal pacifism stemmed from his last fight at Yale, when he attacked a man after a sporting event and rendered him unconscious. Feeling despondent at his violent act, he helped the man get home and vowed to never hit anyone everyone again. That personal pledge would be severely tested when he served time in prison.
Lewisburg
Dellinger had been enticed towards violence on several fronts. Having spent time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, he was tempted to pick up a gun and participate. Back home during World War II, he was tempted by patriotic displays:
One day I was wavering a little and chanced upon a “patriotic” parade in Newark. As I saw grade school and high school students marching behind the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars and armed U.S. troops, I had a traumatic vision that these students and thousands like them would soon be in the trenches, killing and being killed. I was particularly moved because a lot of the young people marching came from the forlorn and desolate area of poverty and powerlessness in which I lived. And I thought about how that tragedy would be repeated for generation after generation unless we developed a nonviolent antiwar movement that denied itself special privileges and worked to achieve economic democracy.
Despite the personal consequences, Dellinger resisted the draft and was imprisoned twice for it. “I wasn’t even tempted to pick up a gun to fight for General Motors, U.S. Steel, or the Chase Manhattan Bank, even if Hitler was running the other side.” Sentenced to one year and a day in 1940 and sent to Danbury, a low-security federal prison in Connecticut, he was later sentenced to two years in prison in August 1943 for failure to appear for a physical exam under the Selective Service Act.
Dellinger was sent to the Lewisburg, Pennsylvania medium-security federal penitentiary in 1943 and this experience would have him again question his pacifism. He first joined a hunger strike early on in his incarceration in protest of sending inmates to “the Hole” as punishment (a cell with a hole in the floor in lieu of a toilet, and no bed, books, toothbrush, or any materials to speak of). In addition, the protest included a demand to end censorship of their mail. At Danbury, Dellinger had received a copy of a book entitled The World’s Great Letters, with a letter from Benjamin Franklin (known as “Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress”) torn out by prison censors.
The hunger strikers were isolated from all human contact; empty cells were put in between them and guards sent to entice them with food, including normally unavailable steaks, were forbidden from speaking to them. The goal was to make them give up or collapse and be taken to the prison hospital. The first to do so in the initial weeks was Paton Price, an actor who was described as “skin and bones even before the hunger strike,” making his collapse understandable. The protestors were let out of their cells to watch Price be carried out on a stretcher, his eyes closed, appearing to be ghostlike and unconscious. “See what you have done!” the warden yelled. “You’ve killed him.” Dellinger thought Price may in fact be dead until he saw Price’s eye open and then wink. “I’m fine,” he whispered. “Don’t give up!”
Days afterwards came the next inducement. The warden visited Dellinger’s cell and informed him that his wife was dying due to complications from her pregnancy. Dellinger’s first thought was this could be true, his wife having had issues before in a past pregnancy. “She’s dying,” the warden said solemnly, mustering more pathos than in Price’s death announcement. “She has sent a message telling you to go off the strike so that she can die in peace.” Lacking access to his mail due to the strike, Dellinger was inclined to believe him. However, he had already learned how officials lied in his previous prison sentence. “Take me to her,” he requested, but the warden refused. “If she’s dying,” Dellinger continued, “you have to arrange for me to get to her. You have no right not to!” The warden claimed he was not permitted to do such a thing and walked away. Later the warden showed up at his cell with a State Department official, offering Dellinger a job in Washington “where you could do a lot good.” Dellinger refused, thinking of the offer as “a bribe that would silence us more effectively.”
Red
Taken to the prison hospital on the 33rd day, a doctor stuck a tube up his nose and prepared to pour liquid into Dellinger’s body. He shook the glass container. “Aha,” the doctor said, “what was that?” He shook it again next to Dellinger’s ear. “Oh my God,” the doctor continued. “Someone is trying to kill you. There’s ground glass in it.” He shook it a third time and there was the unmistakable sound of glass inside. The authorities blamed a hostile inmate, but Dellinger believed they may have in fact done it as a threat. “They had saved me this time,” Dellinger thought of the act, “but clearly my life wouldn’t be safe if I insisted on continuing the strike.”
Dellinger had already suspected that the warden was lying to him about his wife’s pregnancy. When the hunger strike ended after 65 days, the prisoners having won on the censorship issue, he was presented with a stack of mail. His wife Betty had written him that she “was having no special problems with the pregnancy and supported the strike, encouraging me to keep it up as long as I could.”
Returning to regular prison meals the next day, Dellinger was still weak and dizzy from the hunger strike, with a ringing in his ears that made it difficult to hear. Two guards led him to what was known as the “fuck-up dorm,” filled with violent criminals. The guards had decided on his punishment for defiance and proceeded to lie about him to encourage the maximum amount of violence. “This guy is one of those phonies who says he's too good to be in regular prison with the rest of you…And he’s a Nazi who spits on the American flag and refuses to fight for our country.” The guard paused for effect. “We’re leaving, so that you guys can take care of him.” The second guard then spoke for the first time as they closed the door behind them: “When we come back, we hope you give him back to us with his head in his hands.” The door latched shut and Dellinger was left in the room to deal with the consequences of that introduction. Barely able to stand from dizziness, he tried to take the offensive, staggering over to the largest group in the room who were playing cards. As he approached, they picked up the cards and they all silently walked away. He tried another smaller cluster with the same result. Finally, he tried approaching two men sitting on a bed; they too stood up wordlessly and left.
Dellinger perceived that the inmates were likely waiting for lights out in order to attack him. Believing this to be his only chance to plead his case, he leaned against a wall in his weakened state to remain standing and spoke in the loudest voice he could summon. He used his experience from his previous incarceration and employed prison language in an attempt to save his life:
You guys know enough not to believe those motherfuckin’ hacks. That’s a lot of bullshit they’re trying to shove down your throats and you know it. Any prison-wise convict like you guys know better than to believe a word the hacks say. They’re lying through their motherfuckin’ teeth. It’s the hacks who act like Nazis, not me. You know how they treat you. I’ve been up there in solitary fighting for you guys. Five of us have been up there fightin’ to get rid of the goddam fuckin’ Hole. We’re fighting for the cons, and the hacks don’t like it. We’ve been fighting for the con’s right not to be put in the Hole every time they look at a motherfuckin’ hack cross-eyed. Fighting for everyone’s rights to be treated like human beings for a change. I know a lot of you guys have been in the Hole, so I don’t have to tell you what it’s like. I don’t have to tell you why we’ve been on hunger strike demanding that they stop acting like Nazis and do away with the Hole once and for all. You want to know why they’re tellin’ all those lies about me? To get you and me fighting amongst ourselves instead of stickin’ together against them. Anyone who has been doing time like you guys have won’t fall for that shit. You know the score. And so do I. So let’s cut out the crap and not let the motherfuckin’ hacks fuck us over.
Throughout his speech, Dellinger hoped for a response from the crowd at some point but was met with silence. Not one inmate had spoken to him from the moment he entered the room and the lights were now being turned off. He heard the sound of some prisoners whispering excitedly to each other, with increasing agitation. Then there was the clamor of footsteps quickly approaching his aisle. Here it comes, he thought. He lay in his bed, scarcely able to maintain consciousness and yet ready to accept death, “not even worried about the details of how it would happen.”
Unexpectedly, the prison stampede passed him by and Dellinger soon fell asleep until the morning. He learned that the previous night the men “had gone to the bed of another guy at the far end of the dorm, dragged him into the john and gang-raped him.” The victim’s name was Red and he was returned to the dorm from the hospital the next afternoon. Dellinger was doing his best despite his condition to conduct his assigned kitchen work, buoyed by the fact that some inmates had finally spoken to him. Neither side acknowledged what he or the guards had said and Dellinger was fine with keeping it that way. He had survived the first night and might do the same a second night if he did not make any sudden moves. Despite this mentality, he approached Red at the earliest opportunity. “Geez, Red,” Dellinger told him, “I had no idea what was happening. I thought they were coming for me, and when they went right on past me I didn’t know where they went or what happened. If I had known, I would have tried to help you. If they try it again, I’ll do my best to help you.” Red was less than accepting, glaring at Dellinger. He held a large kitchen knife within inches of Dellinger’s chest. “Get away from me, you motherfuckin’ Nazi. If you ever speak to me again, I’ll jam this so far into you that it’ll come out the other side.”
Dellinger eventually was able to speak to Red cordially away from kitchen knives (though shivs created in the machine shop were omnipresent) but he still felt a general unease around other prisoners. That changed when he used his athletic ability in a ping-pong tournament. “Guess who’s in the semifinals?” said one inmate, “Dill here. Ya shoulda seen ‘im. He’s terrific. We’re gonna be the champs.” After winning the tournament, Dellinger’s status among them was elevated “because the most looked down on dormitory in the joint, filled with insecure fuck-ups, had produced a winner and it was me,” he recalled. He still waited a month to request a transfer to another area of the prison, not wishing to be seen as running away to ruin his reputation.
Steele
Dellinger was to experience fear again with scarcely a pause following his transfer to his own cell in a regular cellblock. His vow that he would never hit another individual after the incident at Yale would be tested more seriously than ever before. A 20-year-old Quaker named Bill Lovett approached Dellinger for help. Three prisoners in the cellblock had gone to his cell the night before to inform him that they would rape him later; he would be their “boy” and they would not accept no for an answer. They flashed a shiv to threaten him and a makeshift “key” crafted in the machine shop they used to enter his cell, which they could employ at any time. “Tomorrow night,” they told him, “it’s fuck or fight.”
Dellinger was only slightly familiar with two of the aggressors. They were violent criminals, as were most in the cellblock. Contentious war objectors were often grouped with violent individuals to “show you people what the real world is like,” as one official told Dellinger. The war resisters would either be beaten, ask for transfers to give the administration the upper hand, or abandon their cause and submit to the draft to potentially get out of prison.
To assist his friend, Dellinger weighed his options and decided on the plan of leaving his cell at the appropriate time to stand guard in front of Lovett’s cell. He would try to talk them out of it and if that failed to work, he would fight the largest among them in an attempt to establish dominance, a word and concept he despised but felt was necessary in this situation. He had a physical limitation when it came to fighting; he had broken his wrist playing football years before which had not healed properly. For the rest of his life, any pressure put on the underside of his hand would cause immense pain. He was worried that any fight might have him on the ground in pain as soon as it started. Lovett happened to work in the hospital ward and provided Dellinger with tape, which he used to bandage his wrist as best as he could.
Once the lights were turned off for night, Dellinger left his cell with the assistance of an inmate in prison for bank robbery. Dellinger knew he would not be bothered by the guards as they had a tendency to leave the inmates alone at this time of night, “long enough for them to take care of their sexual needs or otherwise get rid of their pent-up emotions” to avoid being attacked themselves or foment a prison riot. Instead of the expected three prisoners outside of Lovett’s cell, he soon witnessed four inmates approaching. The fourth was an ex-Army sergeant called Sarge who had a history of fighting, having killed two people outside of his military duties. In Dellinger’s words and in the parlance of the time, “he was a mean sonofabitch.”
“Hi,” Dellinger said to them, with a gulp. He started talking to them, hoping to establish a rapport. They seemed confused but nonetheless engaged in the conversation. Rather than discuss Lovett initially, with his back to the cell, Dellinger proceeded to talk about the prison, their rap sheets, the Hole, experiences in other prisons, and other shared ordeals. He began mentioning Lovett when discussing the hunger strike, how tubes had been shoved in their bodies to force feed them; Dellinger had lasted 33 days whereas Lovett, who was younger, had collapsed after three weeks. Lovett was the only one of the five to allow a tube down his throat. “He’s brave,” Dellinger said, “but he’s still a kid. He’s hardly been around at all. He’s never even been in prison before. But he laid it on the line when he went on a hunger strike for prisoners’ rights, and I’d hate to see him get messed up now.” The attempt to gain sympathy immediately backfired.
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