Sentencing Hearing: Trial of the War

Because jury trial procedures restrict the presentation of issues, Armstrong decided to plead guilty in order to deal more fully with the reasons for his acts in a sentencing hearing.

These proceedings demonstrate the utmost hypocrisy of a government which I and the greater part of humanity deem to be criminal. The acts with which I have been credited were undertaken with a purpose of crippling the efforts of the American government to wage an illegal criminal and aggressive war against the Indochinese people, to prevent there the further loss of life, devastation and suffering. I have acted out of a sense of moral responsibility and felt for me not to have taken concrete actions against this war would have been criminally irresponsible. I am not happy about the death of a human being and the suffering suffered by others as a result of these actions. These actions were intended as an affirmation of life and great precautions were taken to prevent injury to human life.

[applause]

COURT: There will be order in this court. No demonstrations from the audience of any kind.²³

William Kunstler began the sentencing hearing on Karl’s behalf promising that “for the general public this will be a unique educational experience.” Issues such as the illegality of the Vietnam War and how the AMRC became a symbol at the university for the resistance to the war, all of which would be ruled immaterial in a regular trial, would be presented. This is the same kind of opportunity Clarence Darrow used successfully in the Leopold and Loeb case to demonstrate that the young men had been carried away by an insane philosophy when they killed Bobby Franks and that they should be spared.

The forty-one witnesses called by the defense included Vietnam veterans, who related experiences of the brutal and indiscriminate killing of civilians; experts on warfare, who told about military tactics and weapons; a leading psychiatrist, a former United States senator, an expert on international law, and several historians, who set Karl’s act in the emotional context of war as the others questioned its legality and affirmed the rightness of resistance to it. The director of the AMRC was called, as were its critics and leading antiwar activists from Madison and the rest of the country. Finally, Karl and his parents were called. With witnesses like Robert Jay Lifton, Senator Ernest Gruening, Richard Falk, Philip Berrigan, Daniel Ellsberg, Harvey Goldberg, Gabriel Kolko, and Howard Zinn, what ordinarily would be a routine sentencing hearing became, as the New York Times called it, “a full-scale evocation of the Vietnam war—its morality, its impact on American youth and the climate of protest it engendered.”²⁵

Six Vietnam veterans testified that the atrocities against civilians were commonplace.

Among the experts who testified about military tactics and weapons was Kenneth Osborn. He told about the CIA’s Phoenix program which employed such torture techniques as pushing detainees out of helicopters or driving dowels into their ears, killing some 43,000 people suspected of being Viet Cong sympathizers.²⁷ Egbert Pfeiffer, author of Harvest of Death, recounted evidence of the effects of the chemical Agent Orange in Cambodia as early as November 1969, months before the administration admitted its “incursion.”²⁸

Robert Jay Lifton, the Yale psychologist who in 1973 had just finished the highly regarded study of Vietnam veterans entitled Home from the War, painted a portrait of the emotions and attitudes produced in the war. When GIs, who after arrival in Vietnam were at first confused, then saw their buddies killed, they felt guilty because they had survived. Overwhelmed with rage and unable to take out their emotions against an unseen enemy on fixed battlefields, they developed a “kill everyone and everything attitude.

Former senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska, eighty-six years old, one of the two senators to vote against the Bay of Tonkin Resolution, eighty-six years old and a publicity director for Robert LaFollette’s 1924 presidential campaign, proclaimed that “resistance to this war is not only an obligation but a solemn duty of the American people. The people who have had the courage to fight this war deserve not castigation but accolades. It took courage to say �?I will not fight in this obscene war.’”³¹ Seven Madison activists took the stand to trace the path of protest from peaceful dissent to violent resistance, explaining their growing frustration especially when the university insulted the students by refusing to take action against the AMRC.³²

The AMRC itself was the center of testimony for one day when Dean Stephen Kleene of the College of Letters and Sciences and R. Creighton Buck, acting director of the AMRC, claimed that none of the material in the center was classified. “Mathematics is a very ambiguous subject,” Buck remarked. “There is no such thing as Army math, any more than there is Jewish math or British math.” Joseph Bowman, however, who assisted in writing The AMRC Papers, which were critical of the university’s sponsorship of the AMRC, cited instances of research for the army which suggested that as much as half of the AMRC research was done for the army and much of that would have application to the Vietnam War.

Daniel Ellsberg, who had been scheduled to testify, became ill and was forced to send a tape recording. On it he admitted that he had never met Armstrong and that he did not condone his actions. If he had been present he would have opposed his doing it. Nevertheless, he continued, “I am applying standards to which I aspire. I would like to live in a society in which the use of dynamite or explosives is condemned. But this is not the society we live in.” Ellsberg said he would gladly testify at a trial of President Nixon, who “has exploded more dynamite than any other individual in history.”³⁴ Ellsberg’s co-defendant in the Pentagon Papers conspiracy case, Anthony Russo, told a hushed courtroom how he had been sent to Vietnam by the Rand Corporation to do a study and returned with the realization that most of those being killed were civilians and that the Viet Cong were the defenders of the nation.

I never before said this publicly. I brought back a grenade from Vietnam. I walked down the halls at Rand and I wanted to throw it into the computer room. I had it with me, but I thought I would come back when all of the people were gone. I wanted to blow up the computers for the benefit of man. I thank God I didn’t. I walked out on the Santa Monica pier and threw it into the ocean. Had I been younger I would have done it.³⁵

Former priest Philip Berrigan had been one of the Baltimore Four convicted in 1967 for pouring blood over draft records, the Catonsville Nine convicted in 1968 for destroying draft records, and the Harrisburg Seven convicted in a 1972 conspiracy trial for smuggling letters out of prison. He sketched his own involvement in the anti-war movement and his attempt to understand the role Christians must play in a nation which wages war.

Karlton’s parents, Donald and Ruth, testified on the final day of the sentencing hearing, as did Karlton himself. Karlton detailed the precautions he took to make sure that no one would be in the AMRC when he bombed it. He decided that during semester break at predawn on a Monday would be the time when there would least likely be anyone in the building. He watched for lights in Sterling Hall the weekend before the bombing, and he saw none. He counted auto and pedestrian traffic, and he kept a careful log. He also tested the length of time it would take to phone the police. On the night of the bombing, when he drove the van to Sterling Hall, he was upset to see a car parked there and lights on in what he thought was the AMRC computer room. “I would have to honestly say that—that there probably—you know, the probability was that there was someone in the computer room.” He looked in the window, could see about three-quarters of the room, and noticed no one. Then he lit the fuse, returned to the window, and still saw no one in the room. He made the phone call to the police and the bomb blew up shortly after he placed the call. The early morning radio news reported that someone had been killed in the bombing of Sterling Hall.

And—I don’t know—that—that really destroyed me. Because—because in my own mind I didn’t think that there was any way that the death could be justified. And the explosion had—you know, the news of the death had had such an effect on me that—that I didn’t think I could even explain why—at that point—why Army Math was even destroyed. I don’t know, I guess you’d say I was in shock.³⁷

Armstrong’s bomb did succeed in destroying the Army Math Research Center and much of the rest of the new six-story wing of Sterling Hall, but that was because the bomb was as powerful as it was, not because Armstrong had placed it accurately. The AMRC was on the third floor, and the Physics Department occupied the basement and the first floor. Armstrong had parked the bomb-laden van on a ramp outside the office of physicist Dr. David Schuster. The lighted room Armstrong thought was the AMRC computer room when he peered in the window was really the Physics Department’s accelerator room, a place which was in use twenty-four hours every day. Robert Fassnacht had his coat on and was on his way out of the building, only pausing in the hall to talk to Norbert Sutter, the security guard. Schuster had briefly left the accelerator room in search of some reading material and had just passed Fassnacht and Sutter in the hall when the bomb blew.³⁸ The bomb was powerful enough that, in addition to destruction of much of Sterling Hall, other buildings—chemistry and pharmacy—including the University Hospital and its cardiac care wing 500 feet away, suffered damages.

Ruth Armstrong, Karlton’s mother, was the final witness to take the stand. She expressed sorrow for the Fassnacht family and recalled how her son had always been conscientious and fond of people. From his earnings at Gardner’s Bakery, she mentioned, he saved every check for his schooling. Her concluding comment drew applause: “There would have been no bombing if people my age got up and done something beside letting our children do it for us.”³⁹

The defense introduced, in addition to the forty-plus witnesses, more than sixty exhibits. Among the exhibits were two critiques of the AMRC; part of the Pentagon Papers; the book by Richard Falk, Gabriel Kolko, and Robert Jay Lifton, Crimes of War; and photos of Vietnam atrocities.