The Priest, the Nun and Henry Kissinger

Five days in the life of a reporter during the summer of 1972

Thursday June 20, 1972

The trial of the Harrisburg Seven begins in five days. Two of the seven are a former Catholic nun and priest, now married, an unlikely duo to be accused of conspiracy to kidnap Henry Kissinger, national security advisor to Richard Nixon. I stumbled upon this story early in my journalistic career and it has everything I could wish for – religious anti-war activism and extremism, felony crime and the hint of sex. Best of all, I have a front-row seat.

Agnes is a main character in this story. Hurricane Agnes makes landfall near Panama City, Florida, and works her way up the Atlantic Coast. Pennsylvania is going to be hit hard just as the trial is starting and the Governor warns that the Susquahanna River will likely overflow.

Andrew Shapiro, Clerk of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania eats a TV dinner off a TV tray while watching All in the Family and the pouring rain. He wonders whether the trial venue might move as the courthouse is only a few blocks from the river. He also wonders whether to attend the gathering at his friend’s house tomorrow night. Sister Margaret Appleton is speaking to a group of Jewish anti-war activists about her upcoming trial. Attending might be seen as a conflict.

Friday June 21, 1972

7:15pm

Sister Margaret arrives at the suburban home of attorney Miriam Levi. While not officially representing the Harrisburg Seven, Miriam is assisting the defence by reviewing a large amount of material that suddenly appeared, including letters between the defendants. With the defence team overwhelmed with trial preparations, Miriam has agreed to flag anything that might be particularly helpful to the defence or harmful if seen by the prosecution.

Sister Margaret speaks for about an hour and then takes questions from about twenty of Miriam’s friends and neighbours who braved Agnes to hear her.

No, Margaret says, they had not planned to kidnap Kissinger. One of the Harrisburg Seven is an aspiring novelist and his letters include musings about the kidnapping of Kissinger by a former priest and nun, now married. Kissinger’s favourite comfort food was pastrami on rye with coleslaw and Russian dressing from the K-Top Deli on K Street in Washington, DC. Here, he would be slipped a message indicating that a limousine with diplomatic plates would be outside the deli when he finished and would he please get in for an urgent conversation. Once inside, he would be drugged and taken to a prepared location where he would be coerced into ending the war in Vietnam.

The defence strategy is simple: the story is clearly ludicrous.

However, some of the letters Miriam recently reviewed sound more serious and could be incriminating. After Sister Margaret’s presentation, Miriam and Sally Kennelman – lead defence attorney – meet at Bob’s Big Boy on Route 22 and discuss whether to destroy those documents.

Saturday June 22, 1972

3:15am

Miriam drives from Bob’s Big Boy to her office, loads boxes of documents and her shredding machine into her car and drives home. She had decided it would be safer to destroy the material at home, as she shares office space with other lawyers and the shredder was noisy. 

Once home, with the help of her son Mark, age thirteen, a shredding operation is established in their basement. There are four cartons of documents, and the shredder only takes a few pages at a time, with each feed taking about ten seconds. Mark calculates that this would be a ten-hour job. He begins shredding.

Sunday June 23, 1972

It rains hard throughout the next day and night and now there is a thin layer of water on the concrete floor of the basement – and Agnes is just getting started. Miriam decides they should stay with her parents in Philadelphia until the hurricane passes. A few days’ pause in shredding should be ok.

Monday June 24, 1972

8.30am

Sally Kennelman phones Miriam to say that the prosecutors were seeking a search warrant for her house. Due to a technicality, she and the defendants do not enjoy attorney-client privilege. She and Mark immediately head back to Harrisburg, but Agnes slows Turnpike traffic to only thirty miles per hour. Mark calculates it will take five hours to get home. They hope to arrive prior to the search warrant being executed so they can remove the documents.

Miriam suspects that someone who attended Sister Appleton’s talk may have alerted the prosecutor that material was in the house. She knew everyone there; they were all her neighbours. However, they were not all friends. Cathy Brodsky is a neighbour but not a friend – they had a falling-out a few years earlier when Cathy’s dog, a German shepherd named Ralphy, had disappeared. Cathy suspected that Miriam had kidnapped Ralphy and taken her to a farm somewhere north of Harrisburg. Then again, it could have been Andrew Shapiro, Clerk of the Court, and neighbour. He surprised Miriam by attending. But he is a friend. Perhaps he had even tipped-off Sally about the search warrant.

2:38pm

As Miriam and Mark approach their neighbourhood, they find themselves behind a row of three cars, one of which was a police car. They follow these cars right up to their house. The police and investigators have a search warrant. They enter the house and go down into the basement, which is flooded with three feet of water. Hundreds of sheets of paper float on the water. Many sheets are gathered and inspected but none include legible writing. Agnes managed to melt the words off the pages.

Tuesday July 17, 1972

The Harrisburg Seven episode ends in a mistrial due to lack of evidence, among other technical reasons.

Mark Levi, Staff Writer

The Northside Ledger

Official Student Newspaper of Northside Junior High School