A Chance to Explain

At 3:42 one August morning in 1970, Antiwar Activist Karleton Lewis Armstrong was still making good his escape when he heard the bomb he had helped plant tear out the sides of the University of Wisconsin's Army Mathematics Research Center. Four persons were wounded and a physicist was killed. Caught in Canada early last year and finally extradited, Armstrong, 27, pleaded guilty six weeks ago in Madison, Wis., to second-degree murder and arson--but not before an unusual bit of plea bargaining. Armstrong wanted, as Attorney William Kunstler put it, "a chance to bring to his compatriots what he did and why."

The court agreed to a unique two-week mitigation hearing in which Armstrong was free, in effect, to put the war on trial and to use any witness he wanted. As if it were one final opportunity to explain their frustrations and rage at U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, 40 persons from all parts of the antiwar movement showed up to testify.

Vietvets spoke of "toe-poppers," "daisy cutters" and "dragon's teeth" --all antipersonnel maiming explosives that they had used in Viet Nam. Anthony Russo, who helped to make the Pentagon papers public, recalled that, as the war escalated, he once took a grenade to the computer room of the Rand Corporation. "I wanted to throw it in there," he testified. "Had I been younger, I think I would have done it."

Philip Berrigan argued that "men of conscience had to take a higher law into their own hands." Former Alaska Senator Ernest Gruening, 86, maintained that resisters "deserve an accolade"; but he would not comment on how Armstrong should be punished because his act "turned out rather tragically." Historian Gabriel Kolko of Toronto's York University insisted: "To condemn Karl Armstrong is to condemn a whole anguished generation. His intentions were more significant than the unanticipated consequences of his actions."

No Excuse. That was, to be sure, the critical issue. Armstrong himself testified that news of the physicist's death "really destroyed me, because in my own mind I didn't think there was any way that death could be justified." He contended that he--and others still uncaptured--had carefully planned the bombing for a time when the building was least likely to be occupied.

The prosecution argued forcibly that all the care in the world did not excuse the taking of a life. It further contended that the special hearing testimony, interesting though it may have been, had nothing to do with Armstrong, who was personally unknown to most of the witnesses. The judge did not comment directly on the relevance of the testimony. But last week he imposed a maximum sentence of 23 years, just two less than the prosecutors had asked. "Long live the revolution," shouted the defendant, who still faces related federal charges.

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