Stealing the Truth
In the spring of 2019, the indictment of Julian Assange for espionage jolted me back to the times when I and my friends stole and published files that didn’t belong to us. Fifty years ago, we were radical students, fiercely opposed to the war in Vietnam and determined to do everything in our power to expose the endless lies and hidden intrigues of our government and our universities.
When these days government attacks digital media as “not real journalism,” I am reminded of my days in a small storefront in 1969 racing to get out the latest edition of the Old Mole, the radical, underground newspaper that certainly would not ever have been described as “proper journalism” but was, for those of us active in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and the anti-war movement, a critical way to tell our truths and rip away smug veils of secrecy.
The Assange case had my network of old friends excitedly emailing and posting, connecting Assange with our own efforts to reveal secrets, or comparing WikiLeaks to Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. One old friend, Jon Wiener wrote an op-ed in the LA Times linking our actions during the Harvard Strike with Assange today and concluding “If the Trump administration succeeds in extraditing Julian Assange, the Supreme Court will eventually be asked to decide whether the ordinary newsgathering process can be treated as espionage.”
I too remembered vividly our actions. But I was conflicted. Certainly, I felt Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden seemed kindred spirits, young people shocked by what they had learned, patriots determined to bring to light secrets about our government’s activities that should be known. Yet Julian Assange seems to me a much more problematic character to defend. Arrogant and possibly a rapist. A willing conspirator with the bizarre new Russian “International” – one that has flipped the old Commintern into covert support for a strange new world of racists, white supremacists, and far-right parties around the world. Assange has proven willing to promote misinformation in the name of defending his ability to reveal the secrets that the American government desperately wanted to keep hidden. It is, for me, the age-old problem of the ends justifying unacceptable means.
Certainly, the government indictment seemed designed specifically to have a chilling impact on investigative journalists and would-be leakers alike. Despite my ambivalence about Assange as I reflect on my experiences 50 years ago, I am convinced of the critical importance to our democracy of whistleblowers, stealers of secrets, revealers of hidden truths.
***
University Hall sits in the middle of Harvard Yard, grey stone surrounded by trees, grass, and the older brick buildings of the freshman dorms. Designed by Charles Bullfinch, in 1969 it housed the Harvard Deans. It also contains a large room where for years the faculty met, debated, and voted: a room with rugs on the floor, sculpted busts of famous professors, and great intellectuals scattered around, the walls adorned with gilt-framed paintings. A room of quiet and opulence, that could have existed during the Enlightenment, or held the great ante-bellum debates of the 1840’s and 1850’s. A room removed from the present, distant from the grubby realities of the everyday life of most Americans. A room of the cloistered elite.
On an April morning in 1969, the vast student movement against the Vietnam war flowed into University Hall as members of SDS occupied it, demanding an end to ROTC and all Harvard involvement in the war effort. The University had steadfastly denied the existence of any contracts that entangled it in the war effort. They also insisted that the decision to keep ROTC was totally a matter for the faculty to decide.
As the students marched into University Hall, they confronted several Deans. Since the anti-war uprising at Columbia University the prior year, Harvard had undertaken studies and debated the proper responses to a student occupation. One could reasonably have expected them to be ready. But the Deans were not and could not be. Their world view simply didn’t allow for Harvard students so completely breaking the rules and risking so much. In their view, Harvard was still a place for young gentlemen, the elite. As the students rushed in and manhandled the deans out of the building, two parallel universes collided.
A small squad of students, dressed in their uniform of jeans and work shirts, their imaginations swirling with images of the Winter Palace in 1917, stormed into the serene halls, confronting the impeccably dressed deans, many with bow ties and tasseled loafers, yelling that the Deans had to leave, now! As the shocked Deans stood up, the students walked them out the building, pushing on their recalcitrant, stiff backs, impervious to the Dean’s sputtered insistence that this was not proper, could not be allowed. One Dean, Archie Epps, the first and only African American Dean at Harvard at the time, refused to go. It took 4 of the students to bodily (and not-too gently) carry him out.
The uprising had been five years in the making, as opposition to the war had been building at Harvard and colleges all across America. That opposition had struggled against a river of lies. In the earliest days of opposing the war, most students were dumbfounded to realize that the President of the United States was lying. I remember passing out leaflets in 1964 and 1965 saying that LBJ was not being honest about America’s actions in Vietnam. The overwhelming response from so many Harvard students who would have claimed to be sophisticated and worldly was, “You may or may not have a point about what is happening in Vietnam, but the President of United States never lies.” After all, while we were never taught about his slaves, each of us in grade school had learned the stout lessons of George Washington’s truthfulness.
When I arrived that April morning at University Hall, solemn-faced students “guarded” the entrances. A few of the doors had been chained but the rest remained open as dozens of students flowed in and out, checking out what was going on. Outside, hundreds of students milled around the Yard. Some yelled “Bomb SDS” and jeered when an SDS person spoke to the crowd. Others were supportive. Many were just curious. The Beatle’s Revolution blared from an open window.
The students who were sitting in wanted to see the university step decisively away from anything that symbolically or actually supported that war. We assumed that there would be an inevitable call to the Cambridge police to clear the building. Some SDS members, especially those already on probation from earlier actions, were detailed to stay outside the building and, after the impending mass arrest, help organize a university-wide meeting.
Light filtered in through the tall windows, illuminating the cavernous room. Among the busts and gilded portraits, students were debating tactics, strategy, issues germane, and issues that came out of some haze. There was a sense of impending catastrophe as well as a sense of desperate purpose. Harvard being Harvard, whatever happened, would be big news and could help the anti-war cause — or hurt it.
While some students waited for whatever would happen next, others of us left the room and went to work. I reached out to members of the Old Mole, the underground paper that I had helped found. Quickly, we secured select offices to search for documentation of the university’s lies. All the file cabinets were locked. One graduate student fetched an electric drill so we could drill out the locks, but we discovered that a simple, bare metal bookend, turned sideways, held with one hand and whacked hard with the other, quickly popped the locks and would allow us to re-lock them once we were finished. Soon we were working to a muffled beat — whack pop, whack pop — as we systematically went through the private university files, taking any folder marked CIA, Department of Defense, ROTC, etc. Those files were surreptitiously wrapped in jackets and walked out; others were passed out a back window to runners ready to take them off campus to be analyzed.
I was surprised at how easy it was to gather definitive documentation that the Harvard administration, like its counterpart in Washington, had been lying. The Deans had repeatedly stated that Harvard was not doing work for the war effort or for the CIA. They had been telling the faculty one thing and then working to undermine any faculty decision against ROTC. It was all spelled out in their files, letters, and contracts. Correspondence with the Pentagon showed that they were planning to increase the ROTC program even as they declared it “extracurricular.” We found letters, such as the one from Prof Arthur Smithies, informing Dean Ford that the CIA had instructed its consultants to inform their university superiors of the relationship. While denying to us that any Harvard professors were working for the CIA, Ford hand-wrote on the Smithies letter, “Acknowledged. Should have a little confidential file on such relationships outside personnel folders?” The files revealed dozens of defense contracts including ones from Edgewood Arsenal, the center of chemical and biological weapons development. Contracts with the CIA, and internal debate about how to keep those confidential. Other letters showed great appreciation from the government for Harvard allowing then Prof. Henry Kissinger to take time off to go to South Vietnam. One letter from Dean Ford to President Pusey outlined how to get around the faculty completely on the matter of ROTC. Ironically that letter proved the most explosive.
The team at the Old Mole rushed to get the “liberated” documents out to the public. We knew we were committing a crime. We were reading private mail and contracts. And we published them as quickly and as widely as we could.
Most of us in SDS were driven by a peculiarly American sense of civic responsibility. We believed in the ideal of our nation. We believed that if the truth could be liberated and shared, American democracy would work and end that terrible war. We believed that if Harvard students saw the lies of the University, they would demand change. We believed in the power of truth. We were living the slogan: speak truth to power. Even if it meant stealing the truth.
Inside the building, I and my friends worked in haste as we expected the Harvard Administration to retake its building at any moment. Yet hours went by. Dean Ford ordered everyone to leave. The day slowly passed. Inside University Hall we had everyone decide if they were willing to get arrested. Those who did not want to get arrested and risk getting kicked out of Harvard, were to leave at the first sign of the police. We stressed over and over the need for nonviolence. Endless debates about the nature of the war, the nature of the university, and the strategy for the movement swirled inside. Outside, endless arguments between supporters and opponents. The whole campus coiled, tensed. Everyone knew something would happen, but no one knew when or what.
Early in the morning, hundreds of police stormed the campus, evicted us from University Hall, arrested hundreds, and beat anyone they thought was possibly a supporter. Many of the police summoned to Harvard Yard early in the predawn hours of that April morning simmered with rage — rage at Harvard, rage at its elite, rage at the pampered students who were “throwing away” a privilege that so many cops would have died to give their own kids. Some of them had fought in Vietnam and their sacrifices required that the war be necessary. All of them had friends from their blue-collar neighborhoods who were killed or maimed in the war. Many of them had grandparents who had seen the signs “no Irish need apply.” Everything about Harvard reeked to them of affluence, elitism, privilege — and they were not wrong. And now the elite masters of the universe could not even take care of their own campus. Many of those men marching into Harvard Yard that morning marched with generations of well-earned resentments merged with new angers at us, the anti-war students. The job they were assigned that day gave them a once in a lifetime opportunity to let loose for one paroxysm of officially sanctioned violence. Across the university, people were stunned by the police violence called down by the Harvard Administration. A massive strike was called. 10,000 or more students marched into Harvard Stadium in support of abolishing ROTC, creating an African American Studies Department, and treating tenants and the community better.
Everywhere people were reading and discussing special daily editions of the Old Mole that we rushed into print, with copies of letters and contracts that exposed the lies Harvard had been telling. In those days before the internet and smartphones, the printed word was what we had. One day we published the Ford letter documenting how he proposed to get around growing faculty opposition to ROTC. Another day we published a list of contracts with the CIA. Another day files showing the contracts directly related to the American military. Each day the Harvard Administration was stunned. Those faculty opposed to ROTC on campus became outraged when they read letters and memos outlining how the administration intended to lie to them. Soon every Harvard student could read the details of contracts Harvard had with the national security state, contracts that had Harvard enmeshed in the war effort, and correspondence that showed the institution was proud of it. Contracts they had said did not exist.
In the end, Harvard gave in to the strikers’ demands. The Harvard Strike was a huge story in all national media, on the cover of both Time and Life. While President Pusey claimed at one point that it was our opening the files that forced him to call in the police, there was no serious pursuit of those of us who had actually popped the files and purloined what we found inside.
None of us who had stolen Harvard’s secrets were prosecuted. (Although there was a vindictive prosecution of those who had placed a hand on the Deans’ backs and pushed them out the doors.) Perhaps in those more innocent days the very fact that what we stole had revealed truth, clarifying the fundamental, repeated dishonesty of Harvard, was enough for many people to forgive us. Or perhaps in those more naïve times, Harvard being shown to be lying was a greater shock than that some young people would break into private files.
Recently we have had a President whose own supporters admit lies constantly. In our jaded and cynical times, we expect lying and deception to be rampant. The internet and social media mean that stolen secrets are instantly available to millions but so too are lies, doctored videos, and fictions made to seem real. Back then we still had the ability to be shocked. The national security state had constructed a web of lies and secrecy to obscure and justify their imperial policies. Over the course of the next 5 years, much of the structure of secrecy came tumbling down. I had a small part in revealing some of those hidden truths.
***
One evening in the cold months of early 1967, my phone rang. A strange voice, obviously from New York asked, “Is this Michael Ansara?”
“Yes.”
“This is Sol Stern from Ramparts. Bob Scheer says you are our man in Boston.”
“Well . . . OK.”
“Listen I need you to do some work for us right away. I cannot tell you what it is about. I am calling you from a phone booth. Will you do it?”
“Well, what kind of work and are you willing to pay me for it?”
“It is research into two Boston based foundations. We will pay you $500.” 500 dollars was a lot of money. I had no idea how to research foundations, but I thought, what the hell. I could really use the money.
“Sure. What exactly do you want me to do?”
“I can’t tell you anything more than to find everything you can on the Sidney & Esther Rabb Foundation and Independence Foundation. They are based in Boston. I will call you in several days. You cannot call me. You cannot tell anyone what you are doing. You cannot mention the name Ramparts. Can I count on you?”
“I guess so. Sure. Yes.”
Ramparts, under the leadership of the flamboyant Warren Hinkle, was the principal popular publication of the New Left. Glossy, well designed, totally willing to tackle any subject, its circulation soon outstripped the staid Nation and New Republic. Bob Scheer, a key editor, ran for Congress on an anti-war platform. I had met him at national anti-war conferences.
I had no real idea what they were hoping I might find, nor how to look for it. Since foundations seemed to me to be in the realm of professional fundraisers, I reached out to the one person I thought could help me, a key fundraiser for Democratic campaigns in New England, George Sommaripa. Tall, rail-thin, frail because of childhood polio, George had a burning intensity that was evident in his support for social change.
George explained that I should go to the IRS and say I was working for him. I headed off to the IRS in the hideous Federal office building next to City Hall. I talked with a nameless clerk who was officious, rude, and adamant that I was entitled to no information.
When I reported my failure to George, he was furious. The regional IRS director was a Democratic appointee and an acquaintance. George immediately called him, read him the riot act, starting with, “How can you treat one of my guys so poorly!” He implied, without exactly saying it, that I was doing Democratic Party work. George sent me back with a letter on his firm’s stationery. Upon arriving at the IRS offices, George’s letter and call changed everything. I was politely ushered into a back room and left alone. Soon there was a knock on the door and the same harried clerk who obviously had been yelled at, entered and plopped down several large files, and without a word left me alone with them.
George had explained that all I would be able to see was the top pages of Form 990, all that was, and is, available to the public. Going through the folders, I quickly realized that they had given me the entire files for the last 3 years for each of the foundations.
I realized that if I proceeded to look through the entire files, including the many pages that were not public, at the very least I was breaking IRS rules and probably breaking federal law. I never hesitated.
The files quickly revealed a clear pattern. Both foundations were vanilla charities with donations to very local organizations. Amid the many small grants, there were very large grants that leapt off the pages, grants to national and international organizations. Most of the income came from the families that created the foundations, yet there were a series of non-family contributions which matched exactly the large donations to national and international organizations. $50,000 would come in from a non-family source and $50,000 would go out to one of the anomalous organizations — a rather obvious pass-through of the funds.
Quickly I compiled a list of organizations that had received money and a list of foundations and funds that had donated the passed-through amounts. Some of both were based in Massachusetts. I went back to the front desk and asked for information on those. Not aware or not caring that he was giving me the entire files, including confidential material not to be released to the public, the IRS clerk silently brought me what I asked for. Again, there was a clear pattern of money being passed through. The list of organizations receiving the money kept growing: the National Student Association, the Asia Society, the International Student Conference, the American Friends of Africa. American Friends of the Middle East, the Congress of Cultural Freedom, the American Fund for Free Jurists, the Independent Research Service, on and on. The money being passed through had originated with a series of obscure foundations or funds run out of law offices around the country. The officers and directors for those originating funds were almost all lawyers.
In the quiet of the Boston Public Library, I pored over Martindale and Hubbell listings for the law firms and the biographies of their many lawyers. I kept searching for something in common, some pattern. The one commonality among the lawyers and law firms involved with the funding was that a founder or senior partner of each law firm had served with the Office of Strategic Services, (OSS) during World War II. The OSS was the direct predecessor to the CIA.
I had uncovered a massive money-laundering scheme by the CIA to fund dozens of domestic and international organizations. I was stunned that it should be this easy to unravel.
I counted dozens of funding sources and almost 100 nonprofit organizations receiving the funds. I could barely wait for Sol Stern’s call. When he finally rang, I rattled on and on, and he had to repeatedly ask me to slow down. I never explained exactly how I discovered all the information I was providing him.
Sol said that he had been hoping that I would be able to confirm a tip that the National Student Association (NSA) had been funded by the CIA for years, first to counter Soviet-funded student groups active internationally. There were vicious ideological fights at international conferences of young leaders from around the world, many of whom would become the rulers of their countries. Soon the CIA was using the NSA’s international programs to gather information on those future leaders and, where possible, to recruit some of them. Over the years, the operation at the NSA expanded and became an important covert arm of the CIA. Yet it seemed clear to me that this was only one part of a much larger pattern of infiltration and manipulation, all of which was certainly illegal.
I kept saying, “This is so much bigger. There are 100 or more organizations that have been funded by the CIA.” Soon I was in New York meeting with Warren Hinkle, Sol Stern, and Bob Scheer. They drew the erroneous conclusion that they had found an ace investigative reporter. I joined their small team of researchers looking into the organizations that had been funded by the CIA.
While I was buried in the details of research, a major drama was unfolding around the release of the information. In an attempt to control the narrative, the CIA and the NSA thought they might be able to defang Ramparts by beating them to the punch. The NSA would hold a press conference announcing that there had been some funding in the past but that they had ended it. Once Hinckle and Scheer got wind of the possible NSA pre-emptive strike, they realized that Ramparts could not publish in time to beat the press conference. Their way to break the story and get the credit for it was to cut a deal with the New York Times. Ramparts gave them all the research that we had compiled on the vast web of organizations and funding. In exchange, the Times provided credit and advance publicity about the upcoming issue of Ramparts, including a full-page ad for the magazine.
I was only superficially aware of the “firestorm” that the Ramparts exposé unleashed. The crisis went all the way to Oval Office where the top security people and LBJ debated how to deal with the mess. An extensive covert operation was mounted targeting Ramparts. Soon there would be attempts to cut off funding, to get the IRS to strike at the magazine; there would be illegal “black bag” break-ins, and every effort made to discredit and defame Ramparts, link it to Soviet espionage efforts, undermine it in every possible way. However, the campaign to end the magazine, or at the least severely damage its credibility, failed.
The Ramparts stories set off a chain of discoveries and revelations. The investigative journalist Seymour (Cy) Hersh, of Mai Lai fame, was one of several reporters beginning to pry the cover off the massive web of secret operations that the CIA had been carrying out for years. Then came Watergate and more revelations of a different sort. All these revelations resulted in a Senate investigation led by the iconoclastic young Senator, Frank Church. The report of that committee still makes for chilling reading. For the first time, the assassinations and attempted assassinations, the overthrow of the elected Prime Minister Mosaddegh in Iran and of the elected President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, attempts to kill Fidel Castro, US involvement in the overthrow of President Salvadore Allende in Chile, and much more were all officially confirmed as CIA operations. The FBI and CIA had covertly opened the mail of Americans for decades. The agency experimented on Americans, including large numbers of prison inmates and military personnel, in an attempt to discover the key to mind control. One American, part of an experiment testing LSD, jumped out a window to his death. The Church Committee began revealing the national security state and some of its most closely kept secrets.
These stories fed the narrative of a rogue agency, an agency out of control. That was fiction. In 1976, a more critical draft congressional report, which was never officially released, stated, “All evidence in hand suggests that the CIA, far from being out of control, has been utterly responsive to the instructions of the President and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.”
The national security state fought back. Using as a pretext the assassination of the CIA station chief in Greece, whose identity had never been released by the Church Committee, some now-familiar names led an assault on the committee: Donald Rumsfeld, President Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff, and Dick Cheney, then Deputy Chief of Staff, supported by CIA Director Colby and such heavyweights as Henry Kissinger. They were able to preserve the Agency and its abilities to operate in the dark. While the covert funding program was ended, over time Congress returned to the habit of abrogating its responsibilities. The National Security State was ready to grow exponentially once the towers fell on 9/11. Soon there would be new secrets that would impel Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden to risk their freedoms to reveal. They would choose WikiLeaks as their major conduit to release those secrets. And WikiLeaks remains the problematic child of Julian Assange.
We had seen conspiracies that needed to be exposed. But there is a universe of difference between exposing real conspiracies and actively fabricating false ones. In August of 2016, Julian Assange cynically attempted to obscure the fact that he had received the DNC emails as a part of a Russian operation to influence the outcome of the upcoming presidential elections. Assange hinted that a possible source for him had been Seth Rich, a young DNC staffer who had earlier that summer been murdered in a botched robbery attempt. Rich had nothing to do with WikiLeaks. His murder had nothing to do with the emails. Still, while the young man’s parents were grieving and attempting to make sense of his random murder, Assange intentionally gave life to a conspiracy theory. He claimed his own need for secrecy by pointing to Rich’s murder saying he was anxious for the safety of sources. All this was a ploy to obscure the truth.
Watching YouTube videos of Assange adroitly manipulating and obscuring the truth through hints and suggestions, I was taken back to 1968, and a choice about disinformation.
I had once again been summoned to New York by Warren Hinckle. Ramparts had received a potentially explosive dossier. The dossier purported to be from a Western European intelligence agency. It documented CIA manipulation of Lee Harvey Oswald; it purported to show that the CIA, working with embittered Cuban exile veterans of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, had been responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy. We embarked on an urgent investigation, doing our best to trace the provenance of the dossier.
After several weeks of work, there was a final meeting in Hinckle’s hotel suite that I remember vividly, largely because it was dominated by Warren and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, attending as an unofficial representative of the Kennedy family. Both men were large in body and presence, florid and voluble. Moynihan, either coming from or going to a black-tie event, was dressed in a tuxedo. Warren habitually wore patent leather shoes and a bathrobe. I remember being fascinated by the dress of both men while we debated the merits of publishing the dossier.
Ramparts had published many articles poking holes in the Warren Commission Report and its conclusion of a lone gunman. This dossier would be sensational. It would drive up circulation. It would fit with our ongoing exposés of what the CIA and the national security state had been doing. Warren was itching to run with it.
There was only one problem. I and the other researchers were convinced it originated in Eastern Europe and was part of an ongoing campaign of Soviet disinformation. We could not substantiate it. We argued against using the information in the dossier.
It was never published.
Unlike Assange, we were fervently committed to the truth. We believed we were reforming America. We entertained wild conspiracy theories all the time — after all, we had exposed so many and lived through so much that was improbable — but we would never publish anything that we could not fact check rigorously.
Daniel Ellsberg did more than anyone to reveal the truths behind the war in Vietnam. His stealing of the top-secret Pentagon Papers was an act of moral courage and conviction. He didn’t lie about his role. He didn’t peddle conspiracy theories to deflect responsibility. He was militant in his pursuit of truth.
Today, technology makes it possible to expose secrets in seconds, to reach millions in minutes. The same technology allows some to propagate lies and distortions on a vast scale at warp speed. But it is not the technology that creates the lies. Specific people make the decision to distort, to lie, to use the technology to create “alternative facts.” And they do it all for gain: ratings, money, power.
While I do not doubt that some like Ed Snowden and Chelsea Manning are idealistic leakers, there is a vast and intricate complex devoted to distortion. The Russian effort is increasingly well documented as it has successfully played a role in disrupting American elections, the Brexit campaign, interference and disinformation in France, Hungary, Italy, and elsewhere. Here in the US, there is a right-wing machine all too willing to say anything to gain partisan advantage. Fox News and the Republicans have never apologized for, or formally retracted, their wild claims about the death of Seth Rich, the pain caused to his parents. And those lies are only a fraction of the deceit that has been pouring out over the airwaves and across the internet.
Still, there are facts. There are truths even if they sometimes seem elusive. And there are those determined to hide those truths. In our democracy, lies are corrosive. Secrets are dangerous. So too are unsupported conspiracy theories. A democracy can only function when there is a well-educated citizenry imbued with democratic values and armed with facts.
That was true 50 years ago when our leaders lied again and again as part of an effort to fight an immoral and disastrous war. It was true 50 years ago when the CIA thought it could manipulate dozens of American organizations through massive covert funding. And it remains true today.
Those of us committed to stealing secrets must also be uncompromisingly committed to the truth, to the pursuit of facts. Julian Assange fails that test. And that separates him from the efforts of those of us who stole secrets in the 1960’s. His lies make it harder to do what we need to do: defend the rights of all journalists, whether they be scruffy or buttoned up, new media or traditional, to bring out the truths upon which our democracy depends.
Caught up in the civil rights movement in Boston at age 13, Michael Ansara spent decades as an activist and organizer. He was a regional organizer for Students for A Democratic Society, Chair of the ‘69 Harvard Strike Committee, spent ten years organizing against the war in Vietnam, helped found the Old Mole, was researcher for Ramparts Magazine, became a community organizer, was an op-ed writer for the Boston Globe, was director of Mass Fair Share, worked on voter registration efforts and numerous political campaigns and owned and operated several companies. In the last 15 years he has been a co-founder of Mass Poetry, a writer of poems and essays, a board member of Indivisible Massachusetts and an organizer of Together for 2020. His essays and poems have appeared in Solstice, Ibbetson Street, Salamander, MidAmerica Poetry Review, Muddy River Poetry Review and Vox.