After the episode, she secretly married Philip Berrigan and was arrested at a Delaware draft office, the first in a series of legal run-ins that at one point took her away from her children for two years. All three of their offspring, she said proudly, are activists in their own ways today.
The Berrigans and McAlister have inspired many others, including Frank Cordaro, a 57-year-old former priest from Des Moines, Iowa, who is in Baltimore this week to commemorate the Catonsville protest.
Ten years ago, on the 30th anniversary, Cordaro joined four others who tried to damage the B-52 bomber at Andrews. That cost him six months in jail, less than he expected.
"The survival of the human race really depends on the human race deciding to put away its violent and war-making ways," said Cordaro, whose affable demeanor belies the seriousness of his cause. "We Christians have a major contribution to play, not least of all because in the last 100 years, we have become the best killers."
But critics like Stephen H. Sachs, the U.S. attorney who prosecuted the Catonsville Nine, argue that such illegal acts undermine the rule of law.
`Intolerable position'
"No one can, and no one did, at the time, contest the sincerity, one might even say the bravery, of these folks," said Sachs, who later became Maryland's attorney general and ran unsuccessfully for governor.
But he described them as "true believers who believe they were Right with a capital `R' and were entitled ... to take the law into their own hands. In a democracy, that's an intolerable position."
Brendan Walsh, who helped with the Catonsville draft office raid, said he agrees that people can't go around destroying everything they hate.
"However, if there's property that has no other reason for being than to get people killed, then maybe ... it's OK to go ahead and destroy it," said Walsh, who in 1968 helped open Viva House, a Catholic worker community in Baltimore that offers a soup kitchen, legal aid and after-school education for the poor.
Other activists, though no less committed to ending war, say they're looking for different ways to achieve that end.
Mische, for one, is more committed to change through politics than to symbolic, illegal actions. These days, he says, he's focusing on supporting the presidential bid of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. He likes the Democratic hopeful's stance on the war, as well as his background as a community organizer.
