On the other hand, a careful examination of the legacy of Bruce Beyer and the antiwar movement—in league with the sexual revolution, the drug culture and general contempt for authority—will reveal the deep divisions that it has left in American society.  This has been no passing fad, because the divisions appear to be permanent.  Our national conscience is conflicted, and America's very soul is at odds with itself.

But first, let me reconstruct the Buffalo Nine case and explain, with the advantage of 50 years' hindsight, how Bruce Beyer, then only 19 years old, suddenly found himself at the head of a spontaneous movement against the Vietnam War.  While standing a towering six-feet-three, he was utterly unintimidating, with his appealing boyish countenance, beneath a long, windblown shock of blond hair.  His innocent, unrehearsed charisma immediately attracted sympathy and trust wherever he went.

Bruce had been given up by his unwed teenage mother, Pamela Lazarus, after his birth in Wilkes-Barre, PA, where his father, Joe Tipton, was playing for the city's baseball Barons (he would later be backup catcher for the Cleveland Indians in the 1948 World Series).  Adopted by Robert and Elizabeth Beyer of Buffalo, he wasn't able to trace his birth parents until after they had died.

After two and a half years at Manlius Military School, Bruce was expelled for going AWOL.  “I felt no one had the right to tell me what to do,” he told me.  He managed to graduate from Bennett High School in 1966. In the summer of 1967, while working as a night clerk at an inner city motel, he was “robbed at gunpoint [and] witnessed the police and media response when [racial] rebellion broke out on Buffalo’s East Side,” according to his reflections published in October 2017 in The Public.  “I began to make connections to the Vietnam war” and the racially and economically unfair military draft. 

That October, Bruce joined others in leaving their draft cards on the steps of the Justice Department for Attorney General Ramsey Clark.   William Sloane Coffin Jr. was among the leaders.  Arrested for disobeying an officer, Bruce was held in a cell block with Norman Mailer. The following summer—just before the church bust—Beyer and others organized an underground railroad to transport draft dodgers and military deserters to Canada. He says he was moving 30 to 40 a week.

Then, on August 19, 1968, Beyer burned his third draft notice before TV cameras, to the cheering crowd of 200 who had gathered around him at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo, where he had taken sanctuary for 12 days.  During that time, FBI agents had covertly spied on the demonstrators from an upstairs window across the street.  They carefully identified Beyer and the leaders of several antiwar groups.  

There was a daily festive scene on the church lawn, with banners and speeches, and supporters coming and going. Singer Judy Collins, then appearing at Melody Fair in North Tonawanda, dropped by a few days before the raid.

When 32 FBI agents and federal marshals, backed by 100 police officers, rushed the church, Beyer was standing at the pulpit, his sleeves rolled up, exhorting his supporters. A tape recorder nearby recorded what happened next.

“My position, as I've stated before, is that it's up to the individual to do what he thinks is right,” Beyer's voice could be heard booming.  After a short pause—during which an officer shouted through a bullhorn—Beyer’s voice rose to the pinnacle of the old church and came crashing down on the stone walls and floors like a prophecy of doom:  “No, I'm sorry sir, I cannot step outside!”  Prolonged applause followed, and the chanting began: “Hell no, we won't go!  Hell no, we won't go!”

Beyer's voice was hoarse as it rose and fell threateningly, echoing like a boogeyman's warning: “The federal government is taking some of your brothers away!” 

Louder, faster, more vehemently amid the chants, Beyer bellowed over the loudspeakers as the officers pushed through the crowd and rushed up the center aisle toward him.  “I want the federal agents to know . . . I think the system stinks! I think the FBI stinks!  You people don't know it, but you stink!  You people stink!  You people—” 

When they dragged Beyer out of the church, blood was trickling from the back of his head, where a deputy marshal had billy-clubbed him (and suffered a broken little finger), and there were blood stains on his shirt from the FBI agent who punched him in the nose (and who suffered a broken nose himself). 

Beyer was the youngest of those arrested.  Charged with assaulting federal agents were Beyer, then 19, a leader of the Draft Resistance Union; Gerald J. Gross, 24, chairman of Buffalo Youth Against War & Fascism; Raymond D. Malak, Jr., 25, a leader of the Students for a Democratic Society; and Carl Kronberg, 22, organizer of the Peace & Freedom Party; plus four others.  Their volunteer defense lawyers were Michael J. Kennedy, who had defended the Black Panthers, and Gerald J. Lefcourt, who with him had defended the Fort Hood 43 and continues today as an activist defense lawyer.  The prosecutor was Edgar NeMoyer, who ran out of challenges and couldn't reject a juror whose brother was a conscientious objector.

The hastily formed Buffalo Nine Defense committee packed the courtroom with 100 to 160 activists during the seven-day trial, while scores chanted, “Hell no, we won't go!” outside the courthouse windows. Beyer was convicted of two counts of assault and acquitted of a third, and the other three leaders were temporarily freed because of a hung jury.  They were retried later with others who had blocked the church door.

During his sentencing, Bruce made a statement before Federal Judge John T. Curtin, 43.  A liberal Democrat who had been appointed through the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Curtin spent a dozen years desegregating the public schools. 

“In the struggle I'm involved in, they have put people in jail,” Beyer said. “There is going to be more people standing before you in the next couple of years, some of them my dear friends.  All I can point to is the German courts during World War II, which sentenced pickpockets while genocide was being committed against six million Jews.”

“Mr. Beyer is being sentenced for assaulting federal officers – period,” the judge said before sentencing him to three years. Beyer's supporters stormed out of the courthouse, tore through downtown Buffalo and burned an effigy of Judge Curtin, then took over the administration building at the University of Buffalo. 

Bruce and his parents attended the Unitarian Universalist Church (where his father was an elder), and he had identified himself as an agnostic in his application for conscientious-objector status with his draft board earlier in 1968.  The form asked: “Do you believe in a supreme being?”

“The fact that I am an agnostic prevents me from answering yes or no,” he wrote. “I believe there is a possibility of a supreme being existing, but as to who or what it is, or whether or not I would believe in it, if I ever found out, I cannot say.”

It occurred to me that radicals who consider religion the “opiate of the people”—and lack the prospect of heavenly reward—are especially eager to work toward a more just society during their limited time in the world.

After losing his appeal, Beyer jumped his $5,000 bail (posted by his father) and fled the night of March 6, 1970, to Montreal.  He and fellow activists had cut their hair the day before to raise less suspicion at the border.  But without a passport for passage to friendly Sweden, he found himself alone in French-speaking Quebec.  

“I was afraid to go out,” he told me.  “I was living in a slum district. Behind the Montreal Police Headquarters!  But it was across the street from a movie house, and I'd watch three movies for 75 cents.  I read a lot, too, mostly Marx.”

Finally, he called his girlfriend, Heather Elizabeth Nelson.  “She came up with some money,” he said. “She said the cops hadn't missed me for a week.  Then the FBI showed up at my parents' home.  Finally, after two weeks, Heather told Dad that I had fled.  My parents got very paranoid.”

Beyer's father wrote him “a heart-breaking letter,” telling him he and Bruce's mother couldn't visit him in Canada because the FBI might be spying on them.   “That's when he really started to change,” Bruce said.  “Now he believed what I'd said about the FBI.”'

Born in Canada and raised in Buffalo, Heather left home at 19 and got pregnant after a one-night stand with a Black Panther.  Many years later she would be reunited with her daughter and grandchildren.  But along the way she would turn too radical even for Bruce Beyer.

In August, with the help of a student Heather knew in the Communist Party, Beyer fled to Sweden.   But he was the first American activist to seek asylum for a crime other than dodging the draft or deserting the military; assaulting federal officers is a felony.  “This was tricky,” he told me.

Heather arrived in Stockholm in December and enrolled in a three-month, government-paid language course at the Tanzanian embassy.  They stayed at a YMCA and picked up odd jobs. “I didn't see how I'd be able to stand living in Sweden for three months—their winters have only four hours of light a day—from 10 to 2 o'clock—and it was very depressing,” he told me.  “It was starting to become a real jail.  I really missed my American friends.  And I hated the inactivity.  We both did some work on the radio for North Vietnam, a rock program aimed toward American GIs, urging them to desert this unjustified war.”  

Beyer had hoped to make a clean start in life in Sweden, but he became disillusioned. “I found Sweden a place where cold socialism replaced cold government,” he told me.  “The government builds all the housing, but they're all pre-fabs.  The Swedes approach life clinically.  Sex . . . American tourists are attracted to porno bookstores.”

Bruce made a collect call from Sweden to his father at his office at Spencer Kellogg, where he was vice president for sales.  Bruce's eyes lit up, and he grinned like a boy, as he told me: “My dad was shocked!  The first thing he said was that the phone was tapped and was there any place he could call me back.  I said yes, Stockholm!” Next came a letter that made Bruce cry.  His father wrote of the inevitability of his and Betty's deaths, and he said he wanted Bruce to know that they supported him, and that he shouldn't return home under any circumstances. “He's worked for amnesty with some of the guys from the church bust,” Bruce said. “I'm so proud of how my parents changed and were capable of change.”

Beyer made only a few friends in Sweden—mostly draft and military deserters—and many of them began returning home to face the music.   He became Heather's third husband in a ceremony in City Hall with the Tasmanian ambassador officiating. After he received a Swedish passport, he and Heather left for Canada in spring 1972.  “We soon parted but have remained friends,” Bruce told me.

Actually, Heather invited a lesbian friend to their Toronto apartment and retired to the bedroom. “I remember being in the other room going, 'Um, I’m not so sure I like this.' Getting up and walking around and around this park at four in the morning,” Beyer told Ariel Levy, whose article appeared in the New Yorker on March 2, 2009.  In 1976, Heather and her lover and another lesbian couple bought “a crumbling farm 70 miles outside Toronto, imagining that they’d create a thriving patch of Women’s Land where they could live by their own principles and grow their own vegetables,” Levy wrote.

More on that farm later . . .

“I got money from my parents to go to Toronto,” he recalled. “Three of the Buffalo Nine met me at the airport and we celebrated all night. But then they went home.  For the first time it really hit me that it was impossible for me to visit home.”

In this abandoned casket factory now, Beyer lived in a corner of a large, open-spaced area with a row of dirty industrial windows, a few of them brightened with flowerpots.   Smoke and steam could be seen rising in the distance.   Built in 1884 by the National Casket Co., this five-story brick building at 89-91 Niagara St., near Bathurst St., was just a few blocks from the Toronto harbor.

As we munched on hamburgers and fries and sipped Molson beer over a wooden box serving as a table, a black kitten dropped in and began playing with a string and a chicken feather. Beyer had an easy laugh, bereft of any bitterness over his situation.   He lit another cigarette and told me he was now a landed immigrant and could apply for Canadian citizenship in another four years. 

He had been working with juvenile delinquents for the past two years at Opportunity House, at 301 Broadview Ave., ministering to 60 troubled boys and girls from 14 to 16 years old. But it had lately become “just a job,” so he planned to quit, go on unemployment and work on a book at a 115-acre farm about two hours north of Toronto.  Open to American ex-patriots, it had hardwoods, maples and pines, overlooking a 1,400-foot valley and a 35-mile view into the distance. “It's relaxing there,” he said, “but I'm more oriented to the city to consider farming full-time.  But I get to slow down, cut firewood, dig gardens and even do some welding.”

I suspect this is where he developed his interest in woodworking and furniture making, which would become his living back in Buffalo.  Bruce gave me the impression that the farm was owned by Canadians friendly to American political activists. But in a letter to me about my planned meeting with Bruce, his father wrote, “Bruce works in Toronto but is on vacation up at a farm that he and another person own,” possibly referring to Heather.

In 1978, after a year on the road with a girlfriend, Heather returned to Canada to sell her share of the farm and link up with a new girlfriend.  Eventually she emerged as the leader of a lesbian band calling themselves the Van Dykes.   By 1980, according to Levy, she had become “a kingpin in the local S & M scene” in Seattle—her final stop on the free-sex train that had left the station during the 1960s.

Meanwhile, Bruce's parents were able to visit him in Toronto, and for four years his father hadn't once mentioned the $5,000 bail he had forfeited.  By September 1974, nearly a year after my interview with Bruce, the war had ended and his father had become a member of a Toronto group calling for a boycott of President Gerald Ford's limited amnesty offer, which didn't cover assault and other criminal charges.

Robert Beyer recalled that as an officer with Spencer Kellogg, a division of Textron, he had worked overseas in Asia and Latin America and “I was terribly naïve—I tended to accept what I was told about our foreign policy.  But now I've come to realize that our policy of containment [of Communism] has been terribly hazardous.  It's been misused; there have been incredible errors.”

I asked Bruce whether it was all worth it.

“Anyone who was involved in the antiwar movement in the sixties has to feel a sense of triumph now,” he replied.  “We were telling who the real criminals were in society.  Well, that's what we told you, and a hundred thousand of your children had to leave the country to tell you.”

He paused.  The cat was pulling the shoelaces on his work boots.  He continued:

“I kept telling them that Vietnam was not a mistake—it was a logical outgrowth of American foreign policy since the end of World War II.  So is Watergate.  The sixties movement began and made Watergate possible.  True, we partly caused the government's paranoia and its spy reactions to us. The government was responsible for instigating so many acts—like Tommy the Traveler [an undercover agent]—I knew him at meetings; he had a pistol; nobody else was at that level.  Revolution was just a fantasy to us. . .”

Just before returning to the United States in October 1977, Bruce released a statement to the media: “The time has come for me to come home. I have reached the point where I can no longer tolerate the separation I feel from my family and friends.  I do not want to wake up at the age of fifty still feeling separated. . . nor can I allow my fear of prison to rule my life.”

A month before his return, Bruce told me by phone: “I wish I had fought the draft charge, and not [incurred] the assault charge.  That blew my whole cause for taking sanctuary.”

Before crossing the Peace Bridge from Fort Erie, Ontario, Beyer met with family and supporters in an old church, now used as a union hall.  Weeping, he was led to a back room to compose himself.  Then, standing on a platform, he made a statement.  His frayed shirt sleeves rolled up, and a cigarette in his hand, Beyer fought back tears as he said that he had been “treated with dignity and respect” by the people of Sweden and Canada. “I cannot help but think today that if we had been listened to, the lives of 54,000 Americans in Vietnam might have been saved,” he said.  “There is only one way to close the book on Vietnam, and that is by ensuring that no more Vietnams be allowed to happen.”

Ramsey Clark – who had been attorney general when Bruce left his draft card on the steps of the Justice Department but now was against the war in Vietnam– was to represent him.  “Bruce,” he replied, “I'm the one who got you into this, and I owe you a chance to resolve it.”

I was there for the Buffalo Evening News on October 20, 1977, when Bruce Beyer walked across the Peace Bridge – arm-in-arm with his father and attorney –  to turn himself in to federal authorities, while a hundred sympathizers held their clenched fists high in silence, as he had requested.

“Thank you for coming – I really appreciate it,” he shouted to them.  Looking at them as he walked toward two U.S. Marshals to surrender, he saw familiar faces, both young and old, from the crowds that had demonstrated during his trial a decade earlier.  Not a sound could be heard except the clicking of press cameras and a bus cranking through its gears in the distance.

Taken to court, Bruce was released by Judge Curtin without bail while he decided his fate.  A year later, Curtin reduced his sentence to 30 days, with 19 days already served in 1970 at the Erie County Correctional Facility.

Bruce was especially gladdened by the political conversion of his conventional father and mother, the vindication of his stand on the Vietnam War, the downfall of Richard Nixon, and the end of the draft.  He continued demonstrating for his causes, finally returning in October 2017 to the steps of the Justice Department, where 50 years earlier he had turned in his draft card.

For many years Beyer lived on Buffalo's impoverished East Side, upstairs from his woodworking shop.  For the past 17 years he had operated Woodbutcher's Shop at 688 Clinton St., near Emslie St.  After branching out into home remodeling, he was generating about $77,000 in annual revenues. Bruce officially identified himself as a Democrat and a Christian.  He and his wife of 28 years, Mary Biggie Beyer, raised three daughters, Liz Beyer Partin, Amy Rodriguez and Bridget Baumer, and a son, Brian.   Their eighth grandchild was named Bruce Beyer.

Covering the anti-war movement was my personal encounter with the social upheaval of the 1960s and early 1970s that would give rise to the feminist movement and later the homosexual movement.  It would leave us hopelessly divided over abortion and same-sex marriage.  I had privately admired the courage and altruism of Bruce Beyer and his supporters.  I didn't fully understand the dark side of that bitter social revolution. 

But one day, I found myself trapped outside the courthouse by a mob of protesters and couldn't reach the door to get inside for the next session.  Then a very peculiar thing happened.  A grotesque chant began arising out of the mass.  It consisted of the word God following by the F-word; God and the F-word.  These “idealistic” young protesters had invented a new profanity.  A letter carrier trapped with me was hugging his mail bag, frozen in time as he, too, couldn't quite process this reprehensible war cry.

I noticed something else about the protesters as I covered the daily drama of the trial. They had no sense of humor, no authentic joy.  One day, when the prosecutor scored a major point, a defense lawyer stood up and mocked it, then turned to the crowded courtroom and led his followers in laughter.  But it was more like the laughter of mannequins, for I could hear the artificiality of their howls, and I could see the insincerity of their grimacing faces, which lacked the crinkling around the eyes that occurred in a genuine Bruce Beyer smile.  

In the end, he was head and shoulders above them all.