Rennie Davis, ‘Chicago Seven’ activist, dies at 80

FILE - In this Feb. 28, 1970, file photo, the seven defendants in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial hold a press conference in Chicago after the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals granted their request for bail. Left to right, Lee Weiner, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, (behind Hoffman), Jerry Rubin and John Froiners. Dellinger holds his granddaughter, Michelle Burd. Davis, one of the “Chicago Seven” who was tried for organizing an anti-Vietnam War protest outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago that turned violent, has died at age 80. Davis died on Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2021, of lymphoma at his home in Berthoud, Colo.

By James Anderson | AP

Feb. 5, 2021 at 1:12 p.m. EST

DENVER — Rennie Davis, one of the “Chicago Seven” activists who was tried for organizing an anti-Vietnam War protest outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago in which thousands clashed with police in a bloody confrontation that horrified a nation watching live on television, has died. He was 80.

Davis died Tuesday of lymphoma at his home in Berthoud, Colorado, his wife, Kirsten Liegmann, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

A longtime peace activist, Davis was national director of the community organizing program for the anti-war Students for a Democratic Society and was a protest coordinator for the Chicago convention.

Some 3,000 anti-war demonstrators clashed with police and Illinois National Guardsmen on Aug. 28, 1968, near the convention. Police clubbed demonstrators and carried out mass arrests. Davis himself was seriously injured and taken to a hospital. An investigative commission later described the clash as a “police riot.”

Davis and four co-defendants — Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and David Dellinger — were convicted of conspiracy to incite a riot during the “Chicago Seven” trial in 1969 and 1970. A federal appeals court overturned the convictions, citing errors by U.S. District Judge Julius Hoffman.

Co-defendants John Froines and Lee Weiner were acquitted. An eighth defendant, Bobby Seale, was tried separately, convicted of contempt and sentenced to four years in prison. That conviction also was overturned.

Davis was “one of the most important nuts and bolts organizers of the anti-war movement in the 1960s and the early 1970s,” said David Farber, a distinguished professor of history at the University of Kansas who has written four books about the 1960s — including “Chicago ’68” — which details the anti-war protests in Chicago.

Unlike the more famous members of what became known as the “Chicago Seven” — including Hoffman and Rubin — Farber said Davis “was not a celebrity, but he was a very essential organizer for the anti-war movement.”

“He was the one negotiating with the (Mayor Richard J.) Daley administration, trying to get permits and the right to march and rally,” Farber said. “He was the hands-on organizer … doing very practical, pragmatic things.”

He said the protest became famous not because of how many people showed up “but because a commission later determined that there had been a ‘police riot.’” And because of the TV coverage of the Democratic Convention, “images of this protest were seen all over the United States and indeed all over the world,” Farber said.

Police targeted Davis and beat him on the head with batons, Farber said.

“It became a famous example of how a local government could stop protests from happening. It’s very relevant today,” Farber said.

In 1971, Davis also organized a mass demonstration against the Vietnam War that was designed to tie up traffic in Washington, D.C.

Davis’ wife said his legacy goes well beyond his pacifist activism. He moved to Colorado, where he studied and taught spirituality and entered the business world, selling life insurance and running a think tank that developed technologies for the environment. He became a venture capitalist and a lecturer on meditation and self-awareness, Liegmann said.

She said he pursued a spiritual path designed to create awareness of the planet even as he was dispensing business advice as a venture capitalist.

“Everybody knows him as the ’60s activist, and really what he would want to be remembered for is his vision for a new humanity — the magnificence of who we are,” Liegmann said.

Davis was born on May 23, 1940, in Lansing, Michigan, and raised in Berryville, Virginia. He graduated from Oberlin College and earned a master’s degree from the University of Illinois.

Davis got his start as one of the key community organizers for Students for a Democratic Society in the mid-1960s, Farber said. Davis was originally based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but helped oversee community organizing projects nationwide.

In the early 1970s, Farber said Davis became disillusioned with the more violent course the anti-war movement was taking.

“One of the things people always said about Rennie Davis was that he was a gentle man. He was not a rabble rouser, he was not an angry, hostile person. He deeply believed in a more just and fair and equitable society and pursued it nonviolently all his life,” Farber said.

In addition to Liegmann, Davis is survived by three children from previous marriages: daughters Lia Davis, 44, and Maya Davis, 28; and a son, Sky Davis, 26; as well as three siblings and two grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements were pending. Liegmann said a public memorial would be held at a future date over social media.

“He is so beloved that I owe that to the world,” she said.

___

Associated Press writer Rick Callahan in Indianapolis contributed to this report.

Rennie Davis, ‘Chicago Seven’ activist and leader of New Left, dies at 80

Three members of the Chicago Seven — Rennie Davis, center, with Abbie Hoffman, left, and Jerry Rubin — hold a news conference in 1970.

Emily Langer

Feb. 4, 2021 at 12:19 a.m. EST

Rennie Davis, one of the leftist activists collectively known as the “Chicago Seven” who were tried in federal court for their role in instigating the clashes at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, an event that sealed his place in the annals of the counterculture, died Feb. 2 at his home in Berthoud, Colo. He was 80.

He had been diagnosed two weeks earlier with lymphoma, said his wife, Kirsten Liegmann.

Along with organizers such as Tom Hayden, Mr. Davis was an early leader of the Students for a Democratic Society, the wide-ranging activist organization that became a defining element of the New Left. Mr. Davis assisted Hayden in drafting the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the SDS, and he remained a force on the political scene through the rest of that decade.

With his short hair and bookish glasses — a Washington Post reporter once described him as looking “more like a seminarian than a revolutionary” — Mr. Davis appeared at least superficially to be an outlier among his more hirsute colleagues.

The son of a top economist in the Truman administration, he had grown up in the Washington suburbs and then on his family’s chicken farm in rural Virginia, where, he boasted years later, he became the chicken-judging champion of the Middle Atlantic.

He turned to activism as a student in the late 1950s and early ’60s at Oberlin College in Ohio, where he joined the SDS and initially occupied himself with efforts to bring about greater economic equality in poor communities.

“He was profoundly committed to mobilizing people and very skilled at it, very articulate, very well-organized — an interesting combination of somebody who had oratorical skill and at the same time organizational smarts,” said Todd Gitlin, a former SDS leader, professor at Columbia University and author of books including “The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.”

Gitlin described Mr. Davis as “very personable and magnetic,” someone who “recruited supporters with ease.”

Mr. Davis’s interests gradually expanded to include marshaling opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Tensions over the conflict boiled over at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago as Vice President Hubert Humphrey defeated U.S. Sen. Eugene McCarthy (D-Minn.), who had campaigned on an antiwar platform, for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Thousands of demonstrators had gathered in Chicago, where violent confrontations with police and the National Guard ensued. Mr. Davis recalled being struck in the head and knocked to the ground. “I was on the ground crawling with my two arms trying to get away and just being clubbed and clubbed and clubbed,” he told the Guardian newspaper of London years later.

A federal commission convened to review the incident described the events as tantamount to a “police riot,” with law enforcement officials responding in disproportionate fashion to the actions of protesters, some of whom were peaceful and some of whom were seeking to provoke.

The next year, Mr. Davis was among eight defendants — the others included Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, David Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, Lee Weiner, John Froines and Bobby Seale — indicted on charges stemming from a conspiracy to incite a riot. They were known initially as the Chicago Eight and became the Chicago Seven after the charges against Seale, a Black Panther leader, were moved to separate proceedings and eventually dropped.

“In choosing the eight of us, the Government has lumped together all the strands of dissent in the sixties,” Mr. Davis told the New York Times. “We respond by saying the movement of the past decade is on trial here.”

The dramatic, at times circuslike courtroom saga held national attention on the Chicago Seven for months. Five of the defendants, including Mr. Davis, were convicted of crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot. They appealed, and in 1972 a court overturned the convictions in a decision that criticized conduct by the judge and the prosecutor.

Decades later, the trial remains the subject of abiding public fascination. A film about the episode, “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” written and directed by Aaron Sorkin and featuring actor Alex Sharp as Mr. Davis, was released last year.

As the 1960s gave way to the ’70s, Mr. Davis appeared to become increasingly militant, particularly in his opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1970 he told a gathering of Columbia students that if the 1960s had called for sit-ins, then the new decade demanded the burning of banks.

“If this generation is to survive,” he said, according to an account in the Times, “it has to begin to fight.”

Mr. Davis speaks to antiwar demonstrators in Washington on May 2, 1971.

Traveling to communist North Vietnam, he later wrote, he “started to feel like someone who had slipped into one of the American colonies from Great Britain to witness a small band of freedom fighters during our own country’s war of independence.” In 1971 he helped organize the May Day demonstrations in Washington, where protesters — thousands of whom were arrested — erected barricades throughout the District to voice their opposition to the war.

Protesters shut down D.C. traffic before. It helped end the Vietnam War — and reshaped American activism.

Two years later, Mr. Davis announced that he planned to forgo traditional activism and pursue a more just social order as a devotee of Guru Maharaj Ji, a 15-year-old Indian mystic who had cultivated an international following.

“I would cross the planet on my hands and knees to touch his toe,” Mr. Davis said in 1973, describing the guru’s teachings as a “practical way to fulfill all the dreams of the movement of the early sixties and seventies.”

The announcement prompted bewilderment among admirers as well as critics.

“It was one thing for Tom Hayden to marry a well intentioned if slightly flat-headed movie star,” journalist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote in The Post, referring to Hayden’s marriage to actress Jane Fonda, “or some of the other movement heavies to turn into the psychological basket cases a number have become.”

But “Rennie,” von Hoffman continued, “was the most stable, the calmest, the most enduring of that group of young people who set out to change America at the beginning of the 1960s.”

Von Hoffmann attributed Mr. Davis’s conversion at least in part to the dissolution of the protesters who had once surrounded him.

“In the spring of 1970, this generation believed it could overcome all,” von Hoffman quoted Mr. Davis as saying, “but then came the summer . . . drift and no direction and by the fall of 1970 we really did lose the generation. The activists continued but after that it wasn’t the same. People went into the country, they were into drugs and into themselves.”

Rennard Cordon Davis was born in Lansing, Mich., on May 23, 1940. He attended high school in Clarke County, Va., where he was student body president, worked on the newspaper and yearbook, and played varsity basketball in addition to his activities with the 4-H club.

He graduated from Oberlin in 1962 and later received a master’s degree in labor relations from the University of Illinois. At the start of his involvement with the SDS, he led the Economic Research and Action Project, an initiative that placed activists in low-income communities and sought to organize what they described as an “interracial movement of the poor.”

Mr. Davis’s marriages to Luane Abend and Valerie Albicker ended in divorce.

Besides Liegmann, whom he married in 2018, his survivors include a daughter from his first marriage, Lia Davis of Lakewood, Colo.; two children from his second marriage, Maya Davis of Boise, Idaho, and Sky Davis of Denver; a sister; two brothers; and two grandchildren.

At the time of his death, Mr. Davis was chairman of a foundation established, according to its website, to remake a human society that has become “a wrecking ball to every natural living system” and to forge “an unstoppable force for a new way of living on Earth.”

“I try not to be reckless,” he had told in The Post in 1971, “and try to avoid confrontations that can lead to prison or death, but I’ll never stop working. . . . I’m really pulled toward a life that lets you keep in touch with yourself.”

The woman who helped protect Lincoln from the men who tried to kill him in 1861

A portrait of Kate Warne, the first female detective employed by Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, in 1866.

By Petula Dvorak

Feb. 15, 2021 at 7:00 a.m. EST

Her invisibility, born of 19th-century sexism, was Kate Warne’s most powerful asset.

Because no one suspected that the beguiling woman mingling in Alabama social circles was a private eye hunting a master embezzler.

The secessionists flirting and gossiping with the lovely “Mrs. Cherry” at Baltimore galas didn’t worry about tipping off the charming Southern belle to their assassination plot.

And while a city bristling with weapons, rumors, assassins, spies and officers anxiously waited for the heavily guarded President-elect Abraham Lincoln to pass through Baltimore on the way to his 1861 inauguration — and possibly straight into a trap — they ignored the young widow accompanying her unusually tall, invalid brother in a sleeping berth headed to Washington.

Lincoln’s first inauguration met with threats of kidnapping, killing and militias

President Abraham Lincoln sits for a portrait on Feb. 5, 1865. (Alexander Gardner/Library of Congress/Getty Images)

Warne rode in that berth, alongside Lincoln, all the way to the Capitol that night. Her sleepless vigilance inspired her company’s slogan: Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency — We Never Sleep.

The story of America’s first female private detective started the way most private-eye stories begin — a pretty dame walked into a Chicago office in 1856.

“In a very pleasant tone she introduced herself as Mrs. Kate Warne, stating that she was a widow, and that she had come to inquire whether I would not employ her as a detective,” Allan Pinkerton wrote, in “The Expressman and the Detective,” one of his many memoirs.

“At this time female detectives were unheard of,” Pinkerton wrote. “I told her it was not custom to employ women as detectives, but asked her what she thought she could do.”

Warne told Pinkerton “that she could go and worm out secrets in many places to which it was impossible for male detectives to gain access.” He was impressed with the 23-year-old and decided to hire her.

“True, it was the first experiment of the sort that had ever been tried; but we live in a progressive age, in a progressive country,” he wrote.

Not long after he hired her, Pinkerton dispatched Warne to Montgomery, Ala., to befriend the wife of the main suspect in a crime the nation was talking about — the $50,000 robbery (about $1.5 million today) of the Adams Express Company.

Warne made herself at home in Alabama, befriended the wife, got the confession and even found the buried cash. The New York Times followed the case on its front pages.

“She succeeded far beyond my utmost expectations, and I soon found her an invaluable acquisition to my force,” Pinkerton wrote.

That Alabama training would serve her well on the biggest assignment of her career in 1861, when America was deeply divided and she could mingle easily among increasingly agitated Southerners.

A bust of Lincoln sits in the window of the district offices of Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.) in Springfield, Ill. (Daniel Acker for The Washington Post)

“It was whispered that there was a plan … to blow up the Capitol and seize the arsenal and navy yard; that Washington soon would be isolated, with railroad tracks torn up, bridges burned, telegraph wires destroyed; that armed secret societies were springing up throughout Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, ready and geared for action,” wrote Norma B. Cuthbert, introducing the collection of Pinkerton papers from the Huntington Library in “Lincoln and the Baltimore Plot,” which she edited.

“To this end every scheme focused on eliminating Abraham Lincoln, and Baltimore was generally conceded to be the logical site for the trap to be sprung,” Pinkerton had written.

On his 11-day, whistle-stop tour from Springfield, Ill., to his Washington inauguration, Lincoln was planning a stop in Baltimore. That’s where Pinkerton sent the best agent for the job — Warne.

She went by Mrs. Cherry or Mrs. Barley, poured on the Southern accent she learned in Alabama and pinned a black and white cockade — the knot of ribbons signaling allegiance to the South — to her chest. She partied with the secessionists at the legendary Barnum’s City Hotel, described by some as one of the most opulent in America at the time. It was also the secessionists’ headquarters.

There, she learned of the various plots to kill Lincoln. The most plausible one, according to Pinkerton’s account, was a plan to attack Lincoln while he was getting into the carriage that would take him from his Pennsylvania train when it arrived at Calvert Street Station, across the city and to his Washington-bound train.

Pinkerton tried to persuade Lincoln to cancel all his stops — especially the one in Baltimore — but Lincoln insisted on keeping his schedule, which included dinners and speeches and a flag-raising over Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The man who called himself Lincoln’s bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, tried to give the president-elect a revolver and Bowie knife for protection. Pinkerton was horrified and wouldn’t have it.

When Lincoln’s future secretary of state, William H. Seward, independently heard about the Baltimore plot and urged Lincoln to believe it, the president-elect finally listened to Pinkerton and Warne and went along with the plan they hatched to get Lincoln through Baltimore.

The president wore an old overcoat, a soft hat and possibly a shawl over his shoulders. The accounts vary.

Lincoln takes the oath of office as the 16th president of the United States on March 4, 1861. (AP)

In her report about that night, filing it as “M.B.” (Mrs. Barley), Warne described how she bought four tickets in Philadelphia for a sleeping berth to Washington via Baltimore and set out ahead of time to secure them. They were unlike any she’d seen before: not reserved by ticket, but rather, a first-come, first-served free-for-all. So she tipped the conductor a half-dollar to keep the four she had selected unoccupied as she waited for Lincoln, Lamon and Pinkerton.

The president-elect was friendly, she wrote, even though he was surprised that a woman, rather than a cavalry squad, would whisk him through Baltimore.

“I believe it has not hitherto been one of the prerequisites of the presidency to acquire in full bloom so charming and accomplished a female relation,” Lincoln told her.

Her description of the president-elect in her report was not so generous:

“Mr. Lincoln is very homely, and so very tall that he could not lay straight in his berth,” she wrote.

She stayed awake, by Lincoln’s side, the entire night. Lincoln was safely delivered to Washington.

Telegraphs from Pinkerton (known as “Plums”) confirmed the success: “Plums has Nuts.” Yes, Lincoln wasn’t Eagle or POTUS. His code name for this operation was “Nuts.” When Waldo Porter Johnson, one of the peace delegates gathered in Washington to try to avert a civil war, heard the news, he blurted: “How the devil did he get through Baltimore?”

Warne inspired Pinkerton to hire scores of female detectives, making Warne the superintendent of all of them.

During the Civil War, Pinkerton and Warne went undercover in Southern society, posing as a partying couple and gathering intelligence for the Union. After the war, Warne continued her adventures, going undercover as a fortune teller or befriending a murder suspect’s wife to solve cases and make headlines.

Warne died in 1868 of pneumonia and is buried in the Pinkerton family plot. Her name is misspelled on her tombstone as “Warn.” She was either 34 or 35; her birth month is unknown.

“She was a marked woman amongst her sex, with a large, active brain, great mental power, and excellent judge of character, and possessed of a strong, active vitality,” said an obituary in the Democratic Enquirer.

“In her career while she lived she developed that her sex could do much more than had ever before been ascribed to their sphere,” the obituary reads. “She leaves a void in the female detective department which it will be difficult ever to fill. As she lives, so she died, a strong, pure, devoted woman.”

Lincoln, by then, was already gone: fatally shot by John Wilkes Booth inside Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, just weeks after his second inauguration. This time, it was his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, by his side, not Kate Warne.

Father of Capitol rioter helped thwart potential 2005 terrorist attack linked to Oklahoma City bombing

Updated Feb 14, 9:00 AM; Posted Feb 14, 9:00 AM

Supporters of then-President Donald Trump try to break through a police barrier Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol in Washington.AP File Photo/Julio Cortez

By Gus Burns | fburns@mlive.com

The FBI says Karl Dresch of Calumet in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula was part of the crowd that stormed and breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in what some have described as an attempt at domestic terrorism.

Nearly 16 years prior, in March 2005, his father, Stephen Dresch, helped the FBI thwart a potential terrorist attack linked to anti-government Oklahoma City bomber and Lapeer native Terry Nichols.

Karl Dresch, 40, is now behind bars facing federal charges of entering and remaining in a restricted grounds; disorderly and disruptive conduct; disorderly conduct in a Capitol building, illegal demonstrating in a Capitol building and tampering with a witness, victim or informant.

If convicted, Karl Dresch could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison for his role in the Capitol attack by supporters of President Donald Trump that resulted in the deaths of a police officer and four rioters, including one who was fatally shot by Capitol police and three others who died of “medical emergencies.”

It isn’t the first time someone from the Dresch family has made national news.

On April Fool’s Day 2005, FBI investigators removed long-hidden explosive materials that had been stashed in a home previously owned by Nichols’ in Herington, Kansas, in part, based on a tip provided by Karl Dresch’s father.

Retired FBI spokesman and Special Agent Jeff Lanza remembers arriving to the scene and relaying what few details were available to curious reporters and TV news crews waiting nearby.

“It would be an amazing coincidence that the same family would have information pertaining to two very, very important and historical events in our county’s history,” Lanza said when contacted by MLive this week.

By 2005, Nichols had been convicted and sentenced to life in prison, where he remains today, for his role in the April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. His co-conspirator, Timothy McVeigh, died by lethal injection four years prior.

“There was some lead that there was either weapons or materials related to weapons, like blasting caps and things like that,” said Lanza, who now earns a living giving speeches about cybersecurity and identity theft protection.

“It was just a couple weeks shy of the 10th anniversary of the bombing, so making that discovery was not only interesting but also coincidental on timing,” he said. “I know stuff was found under a foot or so of gravel that was under the stairwell. It was an area that wasn’t searched during multiple searches of Nichols’ house.”

The tip that led FBI agents to bomb-making materials beneath Nichols’ house in central Kansas came through Stephen Dresch, who learned about it from imprisoned mobster Anthony Scarpa Jr., a high-ranking member of the infamous New York City Colombo crime family.

Scarpa Jr. told Dresch he learned the information during a conversation with Nichols. Scarpa Jr. and Nichols were both serving federal prison sentences in Colorado, Scarpa Jr. for conspiracy to murder and drug trafficking.

Nichols told the Oklahoman newspaper weeks later that rumors he was plotting a second terrorist attack using the explosives on the 10th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing were false.

Stephen Dresch, who died at 62 in 2006, worked as an international, for-hire — and sometimes pro bono — investigator.

He developed a relationship with Scarpa Jr. while investigating the mafioso’s hit-man father, Gregory “Grim Reaper” Scarpa Sr., said Angela Clemente, a forensic intelligence analyst and congressional consultant who worked with Stephen Dresch at the time.

Muskegon-born Clemente, who now lives in New Jersey, teamed with Dresch in 1998 to investigate an FBI agent and mob informant handler, Roy Lindley DeVecchio, who would eventually be indicted on allegations that he protected and sometimes gave confidential information to Scarpa Sr. that the mobster used to commit at least four murders in the 1980s.

The case was later dismissed, but Stephen Dresch and Clemente developed a strong bond through their work. She compared Stephen Dresch to a father figure.

“He was fantastic,” Clemente said of Karl Dresch’s father. “I’ve never met anybody more honest and transparent.”

Stephen Dresch earned a Ph.D. in economics from Yale in 1970. After working as a professor at universities, including Yale and Rutgers, he became a dean and professor of Michigan Technological University’s School of Business and Engineering Administration in Houghton, near Calumet, between 1985 and 1990.

There, he did some of his first freelance detective work, uncovering financial corruption stemming from university fundraising efforts. He resigned in 1990 and embarked on a short-lived political career, serving in the state House from 1991 to 1992 as a Republican. Subsequent campaigns for U.S. House and to regain his state House seat failed.

He served on the Board of Scholars for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which describes itself as a nonprofit research and educational institute aimed at advancing free markets and limited government, and he was the focus of a documentary named “The Anthrax War,” which explored his international investigation into 2001 anthrax attacks across the globe.

“A Republican-leaning libertarian from the notoriously independent-minded upper peninsula of Michigan … Dresch wore the physical trappings of an iconoclast,” a description of Stephen Dresch on the documentary website reads.

By the time filmmakers Bob Coen and Eric Nadler began working with Dresch, “age had bleached his full beard and long hair; years of chain smoking had stained his fingers and teeth.”

“He looked, many would comment, more like the Unabomber than a tireless crime buster who harried the FBI to catch America’s most-wanted. But even in the last years of his life there was an unquenchable youthful light in his eyes — a ray of determination to somehow lessen the badness caused by the overwhelming abundance of malefactors.”

The description of Dresch said he “gave off an aura of mild wackiness and might be written off as a ‘conspiracy nut,’” if he didn’t have so many facts to support his claims.

Clemente said Dresch adored his wife, Linda, whom he married at age 19. Oddly, she said, she doesn’t recall him mentioning his son Karl Dresch, who would have been about 18 when they first spoke.

Stephen and Linda Dresch had four children together, including another son and two daughters.

Clemente said Stephen Dresch was a big proponent of government transparency and often said, “sunlight is the best disinfectant for corruption.”

His years of fighting for truth and justice, often against institutions of power, left Stephen Dresch drained and dejected near the end, Clemente said.

“Before he died, he felt that no matter what we do (to fight against corruption), it’s not going to get anywhere,” she said. “I think he had kind of given up and decided the system is just too bad and us trying to correct it is not working. I think he felt kind of tired.”

She described him as politically neutral, “not a conservative and not a liberal,” and said he would never have condoned the violence his son is accused of participating in at the Capitol.

“Right from the start of our acquaintance I have been continuously impressed by Stephen’s intellectual capabilities, breadth of knowledge, personal courage and, above all, his profoundly patriotic attachment to the ideals of the American Revolution,” former Michigan Tech Professor Karol I. Pelc said in one tribute published by the Mackinac Center about Stephen Dresh following his death in 2006. “I will forever remember the stimulating discussions with Stephen ranging in their scope from philosophy to economics and politics.”

Clemente said Stephen Dresch was diagnosed with lung cancer and died soon afterward; she offered him one of her lungs for transplant, she said. He declined.

Remembering Gerald D. McKnight by David R. Wrone

Gerald D. McKnight

October 12,1932 – January 30, 2021.

by

David R. Wrone

Professor Gerald D. McKnight.

Now cracks a noble heart. Gerald D. McKnight has died. Implacable Death took him on January 30, 2021, from his medical/retirement home in Lawrence, Kansas. He had been ill for many months.

For many years as a professor of history he had taught history at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, where he also had served as the chair of the History and Political Science Department. Noted for his outstanding character and gentle manners, the faculty held him in great respect, with administrators knowing he was a rock that they could depend upon, whose fair judgments and consistently sound collegiate outlook they could rest assured to find in his apt comments, good advice, and proper actions. But his greatest noted quality as a professor came in his love of teaching, which was marked by splendid lectures infused with inspiring principles and insights. His enlightening courses lit the path for the life journey of generations of students.

One could not be in his company long ere he would mention a book on a subject or on one he was reading, for in this darkening age when reading and books have increasingly become a negative character quality among so much of academia, his reliance on these foundation building blocks of knowledge was a joy to hear. Indeed, at his home one could not go far without coming into contact with these repositories of our accomplishments in civilization and transmitter of ideas. His near neighbor was the indefatigable assassination scholar Harold Weisberg whose friendship with Professor McKnight over the years grew in their common causes.

As he taught and read, he became more disenchanted with the literature and press coverage on the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The result came to an exceptional well-written history, The Last Crusade; Martin Luther King, Jr., the FBI and the Poor People’s Campaign on the largely neglected but as he found to be the lynchpin of understanding the last years of the civil rights movement and indeed an unhappy influence on the course of American history.

In the course of his labor, he became friend and boon companion with Clayton Ogilvie who had similar interests and unusual skill for digitizing documents. Professor McKnight negotiated with Hood College’s librarians to become the repository of Harold’s records and personal papers that filled approximately 150 four-drawer file cabinets. Here are deposited hundreds of thousands of pages of FBI FOIA documents garnered by Weisberg (with the legal work of his attorney Jim Lesar) in fiercely contested lawsuits as well as his archival records. The records of critics Sylvia Meagher, Ray Marcus, Hal Verb and others were later added. In the days preceding Harold’s passing Ogilvie, in turn, committed to Harold that he would digitize all of his record to ensure his legacy of open access to his records would continue. In the last two years preceding Gerry McKnight’s passing, Ogilvie, in turn made the same commitment that Gerry’s records would also be digitized and preserved like Harold’s. Freely available over the net, they have become an often-used resource for students and scholars, both in the United States and in foreign lands. The digital records constitute solid pillars in a temple monument erected for the study of American History in the last half the 20^th century.

Professor McKnight organized and hosted several JFK assassination conferences at Hood College and traveled to present at the Dallas-UK in Canterbury, England. His last JFK lecture appearance was at the Mid-America conference in Springfield, Missouri.

In 2005 he published his superbly researched and organized Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why.

Supplementing the documents to be found in the Harold Weisberg Archive, Gerry frequented the National Archives to augment his knowledge base to draft his book on the Warren Commission. Among Gerry’s many points to be found in Breach of Trust was that Commission staff included spies inserted by the Department of Justice and the Central Intelligence Agency; the Commission’s work was stained by the corruption and manipulation of the military. One member acted as an informer for the CIA, another for the FBI. Incompetent and prejudicial information that would not be permitted in a formal judicial proceeding was free to enter the record from state and primarily federal investigators to make a prosecutorial indictment. Gerry was able to document the suppression of material that would have exculpated Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin, in favor of editing critical assassination reconstruction timelines and ignoring witness statements that were inconveniently subverting their preconceived solutions to the crime.

All the Commission’s efforts and those of subsequent “investigative” agencies’ efforts that followed seemed designed to deflect an impartial assessment of the facts left a rich documentary record for diligent scholars such as Professor McKnight to examine. Gerry was a scholar; he knew his craft well knew; he taught his students how to research and document their findings as they carefully read the primary documentary evidence. He left behind an exemplar for investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy’s murder as forensic investigation free of political Procrustean artifice.

In retirement, as disease wracked his body and age limited his mobility, he remained hard at work assembling and organizing his many notes taken from government documents at the National Archives to prepare an addendum to his Breach of Trust. He sought to write the history of the critical first ten days of the Warren Commission inquiry and the background of the man wrongly charged with the crime. As weakness slowed his steps, and his mind began to wander, he bequeathed his notes, his documents and his initial chapters to the Harold Weisberg Archive to serve as catalyst for a new generation of historical researcher to pick up his mantle and to rid the historical record of its circumambulations and obfuscations. He thought American CAN handle the truth!

Gerald D. McKnight has departed this plain of existence. He has paid his obol to the boatman Charon, who, as flights of angels sung, rowed him across the dark and roiling waters of the river of mortality to a port in the Elysian Fields. We know that then the trumpets sounded from the other side to welcome him home.

* * *

David R. Wrone, Ph.D. is a former professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, where he taught American history, Indian history and the JFK assassination for 35 years. He has published numerous book reviews on the subject and edited The Legal Proceedings of Harold Weisbergv General Services Administration (1975), the court record on the fight to obtain the January 27, 1964 executive session transcript of the Warren Commission, and co-edited, with D. Guth, The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Comprehensive Historical and Legal Bibliography, 1963-1979 (Greenwood Press, 1980). He is also author of the newly published, The Zapruder Film (University Press of Kansas). In his 40 years of research and reading on the assassination, he has concentrated on the evidence found in files of the FBI and has sued the government for Zapruder film records, especially relating to its acquisition and purchase. Professor Wrone received his Ph.D. in American history from the University of Illinois-Urbana. He is an esteemed member of the AARC’s Board of Directors.

Eugenio Martinez, Watergate burglar pardoned by Reagan, dies at 98

Watergate burglars, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, James McCord, Jr., Bernard Barker, Frank Sturgis.

Feb. 4, 2021 at 2:32 pm Updated Feb. 5, 2021 at 9:31 am

Harrison Smith

The Washington Post

Eugenio Martínez, a Cuban exile who worked for the CIA, sought to overthrow Fidel Castro and inadvertently helped topple another political leader, Richard M. Nixon, after being arrested with four other burglars at the Watergate office building, died Jan. 30 at his daughter’s home in Minneola, Fla. He was 98.

His death was announced by Children of the Brigade 2506, which did not cite a cause. The group is named for the CIA-sponsored Cuban exiles who attempted to topple Castro’s regime at the Bay of Pigs in 1961. Martínez said he was a part of the bungled invasion, which ended with the capture or death of anti-communist forces waiting in vain for backup.

“I can’t help seeing the whole Watergate affair as a repetition of the Bay of Pigs,” he told Harper’s magazine in 1974. “The invasion was a fiasco for the United States and a tragedy for the Cubans.”

Martínez was the last surviving Watergate burglar, often described as one of the “foot soldiers” in the 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington. The arrest of the burglars led to congressional investigations and, ultimately, to Nixon’s resignation on Aug. 9, 1974, as he acknowledged that he did not have the votes to escape impeachment.

Aside from Nixon himself, who was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, Martínez was the only person embroiled in the scandal to receive a pardon, which President Ronald Reagan signed in 1983. In his telling, he had been duped into participating in the burglary by Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer who helped plan the Bay of Pigs invasion before becoming a White House “plumber,” tasked with plugging leaks and sabotaging Nixon’s enemies.

By the time he met Hunt in 1971, Martínez had been working with the CIA for a decade, smuggling guns and ammunition into Cuba and ferrying people to and from the country by boat. Those maritime missions stopped in the mid-1960s, when the agency put him on a part-time retainer of $100 a month, according to a CIA memo. But over lunch in Miami on the 10th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs, Hunt told him that the effort to liberate Cuba was not over.

“You’re going to be active again,” he said.

A few months later, Hunt enlisted Martínez for a clandestine operation, a “national security” job that was said to involve an alleged traitor. In fact, the mission was to break into the office of psychiatrist Lewis Fielding and dig up dirt on one of his patients, Daniel Ellsberg, who had embarrassed the Nixon administration by leaking the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. government’s top-secret history of the Vietnam War.

“I have learned since that anyone who dissents can be called — even falsely — a traitor,” Martínez told The Miami Herald in 1997. “But at the time I was happy. We had received help to free Cuba; now I could help the United States.”

Martínez broke into Fielding’s office on Sept. 3, 1971, working with two fellow Bay of Pigs veterans, including his longtime friend Bernard Barker. As Martínez recalled it, Hunt celebrated by opening a bottle of Champagne, even though they found nothing significant. He soon recruited Martínez and Barker for another break-in, this time to look for evidence that Cuba and other foreign governments were donating to George McGovern’s presidential campaign.

Their target was the DNC headquarters on the sixth floor of the Watergate building, where the burglars were arrested by plainclothes police officers early on June 17, 1972, after a security guard noticed masking tape covering locks on a stairwell door.

“There was no floor plan of the building; no one knew the disposition of the elevators, how many guards there were, or even what time the guards checked the building … There weren’t even any contingency plans,” Martínez told Harper’s. It didn’t help, he said, that he was “not feeling too good” on the evening of the burglary: “I had just gotten my divorce that day and had gone from the court to the airport and from the airport to the Watergate.”

Along with Martínez and Barker, the burglary team included Frank Sturgis and Virgilio González, two other Miamians who said they had participated in CIA operations against Castro. A fifth burglar, James McCord Jr., was a retired CIA officer working for Nixon’s campaign organization, the Committee for the Re-Election of the President.

The Washington Post reported that the men wore rubber surgical gloves and were carrying bugging devices, lock picks, cameras and “three pen-sized tear gas guns,” among other items. Martínez, who was assigned to take photos during both the Fielding and Watergate burglaries, also had a key to a DNC secretary’s desk drawer, leading to speculation that the burglars may have had inside help.

He never explained why he had the key.

Martínez pleaded guilty to conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping charges in January 1973, and was also found guilty of conspiracy for his role in the Fielding break-in. (That conviction was reversed on appeal.) He served 15 months in prison, about as long as the other Watergate burglars; two organizers of the break-in, Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, were convicted as well.

Behind bars, Martínez stewed, thinking: “What the hell am I guilty of? Trusting the United States?” He and the three other Miamian burglars sued former officials in the Nixon campaign, saying they were tricked into believing they were working for a national security agency. They received $50,000 each through an out-of-court settlement in 1977, and all four petitioned for presidential pardons.

By some accounts, Martínez’s pardon was the result of a final chapter in his life as a covert operative. According to former CIA officer Félix Rodríguez and documentary filmmaker Shane O’Sullivan, author of the book “Dirty Tricks: Nixon, Watergate and the CIA,” Martínez worked as a double agent starting in 1977, providing intelligence to the FBI after meeting with Cuban intelligence officials in Mexico, Jamaica and Havana.

In Rodríguez’s telling, Martínez reached out to the CIA after being contacted by the Cubans, who apparently thought he had become disillusioned by Watergate. The agency told him to contact the FBI, resulting in an arrangement that was later documented in CIA agency memos — and that apparently contributed to his presidential pardon in 1983.

Reagan denied similar requests from Hunt and Jeb Stuart Magruder, another Watergate conspirator.

“I have been carrying around for 12 years the label of burglar,” said Martínez.

“I believe [Reagan] has given me the chance to show the American people that the burglar of the Watergate was a good citizen before, and has been a good citizen after.”

Eugenio Rolando Martínez Careaga was born July 7 or 8, 1922, in what is now the city of Artemisa, Cuba. He rarely spoke about his early years, but presentencing reports and CIA memos say that his parents were farmers, and that his father made a fortune after going into the real estate business. Complete information on survivors was not available.

Martínez was nicknamed Musculito — Little Muscle — for his athletic physique, and studied medicine at the University of Havana before dropping out to support the family after his father became sick. Inspired by an uncle, a pineapple exporter who was active in politics, he began to oppose President Fulgencio Batista.

After Castro came to power in 1959, Martínez left the country. He settled in Miami, worked as a sailor and joined a salvage company that was apparently a front for the CIA. An agency memo reported that he was recruited in 1961 and captained a six-person crew on “hazardous missions to accomplish exfiltrations” from Cuba.

“Mr. Martínez was a loyal and reliable employee … willingly endangering his own life for the cause of the missions in which he strongly believed,” the memo concluded. He was officially “terminated” from the agency on the day of the Watergate break-in.

Martínez later worked in real estate and leased Chevrolets in Miami, where his clandestine exploits made him a hero to many Cubans. “Give me a hundred men like Eugenio Martínez,” a character declares in “Harlot’s Ghost,” a CIA novel by Norman Mailer, “and I will take Cuba myself.”

For decades, he remained frustrated that he had been unable to oust Castro at the Bay of Pigs, or see the country’s Communist regime collapse. “After 75 years, I cannot abandon my vision,” he told the Herald in 1997. “I will not go to Cuba until Cuba is free. I cannot shake the hand of someone who killed so many.”

Still, he added, “When you get to be my age, you are like the elephant who must go home to die. I don’t even know where my father and my mother are buried. I would go home to die.”

This story was originally published at washingtonpost.com. Read it here.