And standing shoulder to shoulder with these well-known defendants were some of the biggest and baddest names in Indian America: Dennis Banks and Russell Means, leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM), arrested at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1974 for conspiracy to take over the town; and Leonard Peltier, convicted of gunning down two FBI agents during that uprising. The case of Sgt. Clayton Lonetree, in William Kunstler’s estimation, was just the latest in a long line of government persecutions of Native Americans. He had yet to inspect the evidence or review the legal issues, but as someone keenly aware of the politics involved in this kind of high-profile case, and a self-appointed authority on racism in the military, he trusted the instincts that told him what was going on here was the unwholesome habit of blaming an individual for the failure of a larger organization. He suspected that Sergeant Lonetree was being overcharged so the Reagan administration could show it was hard on spies, that the NIS was going to outrageous lengths to try to convict this man because his arrest had been an embarrassment to the Marine Corps; and he had no doubt that if Major Henderson had his way, the march to justice for Sgt. Clayton Lonetree would be played out to a military drumbeat.
The one sticking point, of course, was that Lonetree had confessed. And that was something that Kunstler was unable to comprehend: why his client had walked up to the CIA at a Christmas party in Vienna and said, Listen, I’ve been sleeping with a Russian girl and, oh, by the way, I gave stuff to the KGB. Who did that? Nobody in his right mind. If Lonetree had kept his mouth shut, there would never have been anything to this.
Mike Stuhff also had his problems fathoming why Lonetree had voluntarily stepped forward. But Stuhff had been going to the brig and interviewing his client almost daily, and if he’d learned one thing from these visits, it was that Clayton Lonetree was not a simply understood person. His character was as complex as it was concealed. He experienced life in a very different way from most people.
Take what he’d said during an early conversation: “Mr. Stuhff, do you think you can get me out of this without my getting a dishonorable discharge?”
Stuhff had frowned. “Why do you ask?”
Lonetree was slow in answering. He liked to take his time before he responded to a question. Watching, waiting, Stuhff could only imagine where Lonetree’s thoughts would stop before they came out as a statement. “I was hoping things would work out so I could still go to work for the foreign service. You know, I always wanted to serve in a diplomatic capacity….”
Confronted with evidence that his client lacked normal reality checks, Stuhff wondered if, in addition to his unusual personality traits, there might very well be a psychological imbalance present that would be worth his knowing about. After all, Lonetree had made a number of damaging statements that were untrue and physically impossible. When told to lie, he had obeyed the command as if it were an order. Could it be that he was more susceptible to suggestion than the average Marine? Or prone to making false admissions?
The end of this line of thinking took the form of a request for a psychological evaluation, and the individual Stuhff went to was a psychologist named Tom Williams. Once before, Dr. Williams had examined a client of Mike Stuhff’s and testified for him in court. The case involved an Arizona State Police officer who went berserk one night, barricaded himself in his house with his daughter as hostage, and threatened a shootout. After an interview and psychological tests, Tom Williams, who specialized in post-traumatic stress disorder, had concluded that the police department’s precipitate actions had turned a domestic dispute into a reenactment of the officer’s combat experience in Vietnam. The verdict had been favorable to the defense in that case, and Stuhff was hoping that, after examining Clayton Lonetree, Williams would be able to come up with something just as useful.
A bearded, even-tempered man who had gotten heavy since he left the Marine Corps after two tours in Vietnam as an officer and a teaching stint at Annapolis, Tom Williams was based in Colorado at the time he was contacted about the Lonetree case. Williams instantly knew why Stuhff was coming to him: As an ex-leatherneck he understood Marines and how the Marine Corps worked. Just as a mechanic could look at the receipts for work on your car and know everything that had gone wrong, he could glance at a military service record and derive a tremendous amount of information that someone else would miss.
Credibility was also added by the fact that Williams’s father at one time had been a deputy director of the CIA.
What Williams did not know when he agreed to fly to Quantico and evaluate Clayton Lonetree was that William Kunstler was an attorney on the case. He didn’t find that out until he attended a defense-organized fund raiser in a hotel in downtown Denver. Mike Stuhff showed up, and so did Samuel Lonetree, Clayton’s grandfather, wearing a full headdress. Even AIM leader Russell Means was there. William Kunstler couldn’t make it, but a tape-recorded statement from him was played before the crowd, and even though the distortion from the cassette player, coupled with a bad sound system, made Kunstler’s raspy growl sound as though it issued from a throat not fully cleared of noises within, his inflammatory rhetoric came through loud and clear: “This is a dirty, dirty case, and the penalty is so severe that the Marine Corps ought to be ashamed of itself for the action it has taken.”
As Williams sat among Indian activists and white liberals listening to Kunstler accuse the Marines of singling out Lonetree because of his Indian heritage, he became increasingly irritated. He considered himself pro-Indian. His father was one-quarter Cherokee. He’d been in the Marines for eleven years, so he’d seen the way Native Americans were treated. And he didn’t believe for a minute that persecution of an Indian was what was going on here. Ever since the Navajo Code Talkers had distinguished themselves in World War II, Native Americans had enjoyed a decided prestige in the Corps. The expectation was that, coming from warrior cultures, they would even be special fighters: silent, efficient, dedicated.
Had he known Kunstler was part of the defense team, Williams would have thought his involvement over more carefully. Knowing what he did of the maverick attorney, and of the case, he did not think going for headlines was the smartest way to deal with an institution like the Marine Corps. It would only cause them to close ranks. But he had committed himself, and the truth was he was intrigued by the case. So he flew from Denver on to Washington, D.C., and drove down to Quantico for his date to evaluate Clayton Lonetree.
The Marine personnel at the brig were surprisingly cordial to Williams, but when one of the guards escorted him to the gun locker and asked him to leave his weapon there, Williams suspected that was because they did not know who he was and were mixing him up with a military investigator. In a comfortable office, with a guard posted outside who peered through the glass from time to time, Tom Williams met his subject and was immediately struck by Lonetree’s demeanor. One of the possibilities he had considered beforehand was that Lonetree would be angry at the Marines. When he’d been a Marine officer, Williams had done a lot of legal work, and most of the Marines he’d dealt with who had gotten into trouble were pissed off at the system. He was expecting Lonetree to be like some of those Marines, but he wasn’t. Stuhff had said he was basically a nice kid, polite, eager to help, and he was.