June 2004

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Dave Dellinger Remembered

By Jay Craven is a film writer, director, and producer (The Year that Trembled). He gave this speech at a Dave Dellinger Memorial held at Montpelier Peace Park, June 5, 2004.

I played a role in facilitating Dave Dellinger's move to Vermont. In 1980, I was working with Doreen Kraft and Robin Lloyd to make a film about the Sandinistas' National Literacy Crusade in Nicaragua. I didn't have a clue on how to raise the money or mobilize other resources - so I called Dave. Within days, Dave had wrangled Benjamin Spock and Jonathan Kozol to write letters of support. He'd established contact for us with Peter Seeger, who performed a critical benefit concert, and made a link with actor Ossie Davis, who kindly performed the narration for the film.This man should have been a movie producer!

Police arresting David Dellenger for blocking the entrance to the CIA on April 27, 1987 to protest the CIA's role in waging wars in Central America and apartheid in South Africa. Photo © Elllen Shub

As always, Dave acted immediately and with his customary generosity - and effectiveness. During our phone conversations, Dave mentioned that he was working on his autobiography - and was looking for a place to get away and focus on it. I was pleased to have the chance to help - and I arranged for Dave to have a two-room former school house on a back road in Peacham. So, he came to Vermont that summer - of 1980 - as I remember. And he established a connection to Vermont that grew over the years, especially when he and Elizabeth bought a house, just a mile away from that old school house. And while here, they both have made extraordinary contributions to community life, to the struggle for peace and justice, and to practically every person they've met here.

I'm shooting a comedy series, "Where the Rivers Flow North," right now at one of the ancient small farms in the North Kingdom. Dave and old Yankee farmer Charles Morrison worked together as extras, sitting together for hours on the porch of a St. Johnsbury House.

Yesterday, I mentioned to Charles that I'd be here today. He asked me to give his regards to Elizabeth and remarked, "You know, I liked Dave quite a bit. He had his views. But I listened to him and I guess I learned quite a bit. And he listened to me, and well, we simply had some awfully good conversations," Charles said. "I'll miss him, if you really want to know the truth."

Vermont was the right place for Dave and Elizabeth. They gave so much and Vermonters reciprocated in kind.

I met Dave Dellinger one late night in the fall of 1970. I was a 19-year-old student activist at Boston University. I'd gotten a call the night before from Chicago 8 defendant Rennie Davis who said that he and Dave were assembling a delegation of student leaders to travel to North and South Vietnam, to meet with student leaders there and negotiate a People's Peace Treaty that would outline terms for an end to the war - and declare that American student leaders had met with their Vietnamese counterparts to declare that we were not enemies.

Rennie asked if I'd be interested in being a part of this delegation. Travel to North Vietnam? I was completely scared. But I said, "sure."

Rennie said that I'd need to be interviewed by Dave Dellinger, who would make the decision on students who would travel in the delegation.

Frankly, I was pretty intimidated. Although Dave is best and very appropriately remembered for his spiritualism, his grace, and his espousal of love, he could also be pretty tough. After all, this guy had led the siege at the '68 Chicago Convention, stood down armed troops at the Pentagon, survived solitary confinement at Danbury Prison during two prison terms for draft resistance during World War II, and driven an ambulance, unarmed, during the violent upheaval of the Spanish Civil War. And, according to Harry Belafonte, who participated in a series of telephone conversations between Dave and Martin Luther King, many of them heated, it was Dave's fierce and unyielding persistence that was key in moving King to publicly oppose the Vietnam War - a decision that had a monumental impact.

Anyway, the night after Rennie Davis called and asked me to meet Dave, I flew to Washington. I brought my college roommate with me - unsure what to expect. The taxi dropped us off at Rennie's Lanier Place apartment and we climbed the stairs and knocked on the door.

One of the strongest images of my lifetime will be the sight when the door opened, of Dave Dellinger sitting in an overstuffed chair, smoking a cigar and drinking a glass of cognac. No one else spoke. Just Dave. He asked me to sit down. And then proceeded to ask me a series of questions. What was my history of opposition to the war? Had I ever participated in civil disobedience? And, finally, if I were to go to Vietnam, would I be willing to devote my next six months to traveling and helping to organize "May Day," a massive civil disobedience demonstration in Washington the next spring? He told me the May Day slogan: "If the government won't stop the war, the people will stop the government."

I don't think I'd ever been so scared. I knew who Dave was. I'd heard him speak to thousands of students at two anti-war rallies. And here he was, smoking a cigar - looking every inch the Godfather - two years before the movie even came out. After what felt like a pretty intense hour of questioning and dialogue, and a very graphic discussion of the current situation in Vietnam, including a blow-by-blow account of Nixon's escalation of the air war, Dave finally said something funny. Thank God.

I said I would do everything Dave asked me to do - and I did. That night changed my life and prompted me to face the fears that I felt at the prospect of this kind of bold activism. It marked the beginning of an extraordinary journey that would not have been possible without that turn of events. The May Day actions of 1971 were the largest nonviolent civil disobedience protests in US history, with more than 14,000 people arrested.

Dave wielded a singular influence in leading an anti-war movement that grew out of his unique experience of the long and turbulent American 20th century. No one living today could duplicate that experience. Which is not to say that there won't be new leaders who have great impact and who have learned from the strengths and weaknesses of the movements that Dave helped lead. But Dave was an actor on the world stage at a unique time and among an extraordinary cast of characters. His long life provided an opportunity for an historical impact that spanned the entire century. Dave extended his unique articulation of protest, progressivism, and civil disobedience from the 1930s all the way into the 21st century.

Dave helped launch me and many others along the path that prompted the continual growth and shifting of the American traditions of protest and civil disobedience. He learned from every young activist he met, which always distinguished him from other older activists who often lacked that same ability to easily cross generational boundaries. As a result, he remained forever young in his thinking.

Dave was friendly to his critics and critical to his friends. In 1971, I traveled to Cuba for Dave, when he could not attend the July 26th celebrations, because he was on court restriction related to the Chicago 8 trial. Dave was considered a good friend of the Cuban revolution. But Dave placed one requirement on me for that remarkable trip. He instructed me to present a letter to Fidel Castro that asked very hard questions and was sharply critical of the Cuban government's treatment of gay people. He demanded that while I was in Cuba, I be given access to leading Cuban writers and artists whom Dave knew to be gay.

I wasn't sure that this was the ideal way to ingratiate myself. But the Cubans respected Dave; they took his challenge seriously, and did everything for me that Dave asked.

I returned with a pretty full and fairly nuanced view of the situation, which Dave continued to press in his writing and correspondence with the Cubans.

My old Yippie friend Stew Albert wrote me after Dave's death to remind me of how Dave was the one non-Yippie to whom he always felt a special bond. Stew described how Dave's reputation as a lifelong pacifist had many sides. Stew explained how, during the Chicago 8 trial of 1968-69, Judge Julius Hoffman had Panther defendant Bobby Seale bound and gagged. Dave protested the loudest, Stew said, and the lifelong pacifist "got in some real shoving matches with the Federal Marshals."

Stew remembered how, at the end of the day, his co-defendants all asked Dave how he, as a pacifist, could be so rough and tough. "He replied with a twinkle in his eye that shoving can be a form of nonviolence if it is done at the right time and to resist evil."

When his co-defendants teased him about it, the former burly college wrestler then looked around the room, declaring that he could "take" all the defendants except for Bobby Seale. Although Stew wasn't a defendant, he looked at him and said, "but I'm not sure about Stew."

"Dave was really great," Stew said, "because every once in a while he could be so magnificently unpredictable."

close reading of Nixon's White House tapes shows how Richard Nixon had a running obsession with Dave, which suggests that he harbored a nagging fear of one day having to turn the White House over to him. This is just one example of Dave's slogan, "We have more power than we know."

I want to close by remembering words spoken by the South African writer, Njabulo Ndebele, at my son's recent Wesleyan University graduation just two days before Dave's death. Ndeble's words prompted me to think, quite vividly, of Dave. Ndebele invited the graduates to consider how his country avoided racial war while throwing off decades of oppression. He mused at how the contending races had resolved their deep conflict without declaring victors and losers.

"What most of us recognized, at the very last moment," Ndebele said, "was just how much we needed each other. We realized that violent confrontation promised only destruction and a long life of shared misery. It was a choice we made. It was a choice against the habit to march into final battle. The two camps recognized mutual vulnerability through exposing themselves to considerable risk," he said. "In doing so, both sides resisted the attractive habit to be "tough." Being tough would have meant going to war, whatever the price. Each would have convinced themselves that truth was on their side. But thankfully, our leaders realized that being tough in this way had caused much misery. Caught in the clutches of danger, they discovered a new meaning of toughness, something much harder to do. They discovered that being tough was not so much about going to war, but in choosing to avoid it."

Ndebele continued, "In doing so, South Africans gave up one-dimensional ways of thinking about one another. They became more tolerant, more accepting of personal or group faults. That has been the greatest revolution: the transformation of deeply held personal and group beliefs."

David Dellinger was this kind of tough guy. Dave fought for this kind of revolution. In a world of nuclear arms, terrorism, and pre-emptive war, Dave's views were considered radical. But they are views that, thanks to his tireless lifetime of work, will live beyond him.

Dave Dellinger's books include Yale to Jail, Power Than We Know, and Nonviolence.

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