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SPEAKER 1: Did you ever pause and look back and say, here's the guy that was an avowed Conservative who'd been through ROTC?

SPEAKER 2: President of my fraternity.

SPEAKER 1: A frat boy. And yet in such a short time, you had gone through-- I mean, then you talked about an epiphany. But really, this was a progression that you went through that took a number of years.

SPEAKER 2: It certainly does. And in some ways, I think about it maybe from my working class background, my parents. I remember my mother saying, well, you can't always fight city hall. But sometimes, I felt it had to do things. And my mother was kind of a good experience because she would-- My parents are divorced way back before it was very fashionable [INAUDIBLE]. And she had to work 40 hours a week to support us. And yet she was the only mother who had the time to be a Cub Scout leader and all these other things.

So I kind of had a certain sense of energy and things are doing there. But it is a progression. But I think having a certain characteristics, willing to look at different things like that, which leads you to want to try out new things.

SPEAKER 1: Tell me about your little visit to Winona.

SPEAKER 2: Just before the great student strike of 1970, there had been a draft board raid where the Minneapolis and the St. Paul and the state headquarters had all had their files destroyed. And then there was a student strike. And as that things wound down from that, people decided, well, maybe they should take these draft board actions out into the countryside or to the smaller towns around Minnesota.

There had been a number of draft board raids, especially most well-known by the Berrigans, the Catholic priests. A lot of the Catholic left. And I had been invited to be involved with an earlier draft board action, but that was a little too frightening for me. And I just wasn't quite ready for that yet. But by July 1970, when we did that, I was ready for it. I knew this is what we had to do, even though we weren't going to stand around like all these other actions that have been.

We were going to call ourselves the Minnesota committee to save lives because the death toll from the war was just enormous. All the bombing and killing, destroying, really got to you. You wanted to just change that. Plus, we wanted to dedicate our action to George Crocker, who had just gone to jail for draft resistance. So we had some 16 different draft boards ready to go, cased out. We'd been doing it for a couple of months.

And so we just took the number of people we had for a number of boards that we could do. And that fateful night of July 10th, 1970, we entered. I was part of a group of three with Brad Beneke and Peter Simmons. And we entered the Winona draft board and had broken in after midnight and had just started opening up the files. And lo and behold, here comes from this adjoining room, these guys running in with these kind of sport jackets on. And I thought, my goodness, this changes things.

And at first I thought, well, maybe we were so clumsy. People in town had noticed that we were breaking in and all that. But then they identified themselves eventually as the FBI and handcuffed us.

SPEAKER 1: So had somebody snitched?

SPEAKER 2: Well, that's what they say. We still don't know for sure who it was. I mean, there were some people who dropped out along the way. And it's possible that they could have been bugging phones or tapping or having directional devices on cars because some of the people who had taken moral responsibility for this earlier draft board action was called the Beaver 55. Some of their same cars were used for casing these other places. And we know that they were casing out.

They were at three places that we went. With a total of eight, we were known as the Minnesota Eight. But they were not at the Wabasha. And there, all the files were destroyed. In fact, years later, people came up and told me how they had gotten out of the draft because their file was destroyed there and thanked us. But I had a lot of other different places, too.

We'd hear from sons and daughters of sheriffs and whatever else that were staking out these other draft boards. So people suspect whoever, whoever. But in the long run, it didn't matter all that much. So that was the start of a great adventure.

SPEAKER 1: So you shortly thereafter found yourself in federal court in St. Paul, I believe.

SPEAKER 2: Yes, with old Judge Devitt. I know he's highly honored and revered by so many people in the legal profession. But he was just this railroading type of a judge and that we were very circumscribed in how we could do our defense. We had three different trials for each of the three cities we were arrested in. But we couldn't present any defense because we didn't want to have to talk about-- perhaps who these other people were in Wabasha and give them away.

And he made it very difficult for our defense and what we were doing. And I defended myself and had a great amount of fun. And Ken Tilsen was our lawyer there. And he's very good. Very good. Excellent. I learned a lot about the law from him close up. And there was huge illegal marches while we were being held in jail. And I think that's one reason why we had our bail dropped from $50,000-- back then, that was an enormous sum-- to $10,000, which was a bit more doable.

Eventually, we had our charges dropped too from attempted sabotage, actually, of national defense materials. So when you hear sabotage, well, that's a pretty heavy charge there. And so they had planned this in advance. But it was eventually dropped to a more easily winnable from the government's point of view.