Obituary

Bob Leonard

- Murray Horton

This was first published in Peace Researcher 46, December 2013. MH.

Bob Leonard, who died in August 2013 in Wellington, aged 74, was the face and voice of the Anti-Bases Campaign ever since it was founded in 1987. He played a leading role in all of ABC’s campaigns, past and present. Over and above that, he was a committed peace activist all of his life. He was a leading figure in the New Zealand peace movement, which is why his death was marked by obituaries in the mainstream media (in both the Press and, more surprisingly, the National Business Review). There was also a lot more to Bob than just the peace and anti-bases activist. He lived in New Zealand for 31 years and for all of that time he was a very close friend of mine, and we were also very close ABC colleagues for nearly all of those years (the February 2011 Christchurch killer earthquake ended that, by forcing him and Barbara to immediately and permanently move to Wellington; and the trauma of that quake tipped his already very fragile health into a two year long steeply downward spiral from which he never recovered). Sadly this is the first time that I’ve had to write an obituary of an ABC Committee colleague, and also the first time I’ve had to do one for such a close friend.

Although I have filing cabinets (both of the real and the cyberspace variety) full of material by Bob, I have precious little about him. That was befitting of a man who was modest when it came to blowing his own trumpet. There is no folder of newspaper or magazine profiles of him; he doesn’t feature in my Obituary folder of clippings and profiles dating back a quarter of a century; he hardly rates a mention in any of the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) files on individuals and organisations in my possession; he never applied for any SIS Personal File on himself because he didn’t believe there would be one.

“Dr Odd Base”

So, my sole written source on Bob’s life, specifically his life in his native US and New Zealand before 1992, is a profile that I wrote about him that year. It had been commissioned by Owen Wilkes for Peacelink, the national monthly magazine of Peace Movement Aotearoa, as part of a series on Heroes Of The Peace Movement. I wrote three such profiles; two were published, and Bob’s was to be the third. But its’ publication was stymied by the 1992 demise of Peacelink, which had been produced from Hamilton for the previous six years by Co-Editors May Bass and Owen Wilkes, who were partners in print and in life (and remained so until Owen’s 2005 suicide. My obituary of Owen is in Watchdog 109, August 2005, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/09/09.htm).

But all was not lost. As a major part of my job as the Organiser for both ABC and CAFCA, I am also the longstanding Editor of Watchdog and I decided to publish it there. This is the editorial introduction I wrote for it: “We don’t normally run profiles. Indeed, you usually have to be dead to feature in these august pages. But this profile, commissioned by Owen Wilkes for Peacelink, has been orphaned by that magazine’s precipitate closure. However I reckon it’s too interesting a story to be left languishing; Bob needs no introduction to CAFCA members; the ABC is our sister organisation; and I work for both it and CAFCA. So, for all those reasons, we are running it. If it makes you feel better, we’ll categorise it as a premature obituary. Regrettably, our primitive technology doesn’t enable us to run the photos that Tony Webster especially took for Peacelink”.

So it was duly published as “Dr Odd Base” in Watchdog 70, August 1992, http://www.historicalwatchdog.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/foreign-control-watchdog-august-1992.html.  And here it is again, 21 years after it was first published. It remains the only profile of a living person ever published in Watchdog’s nearly 40 year history. Sadly, I have no idea what happened to Tony Webster’s photos of Bob which I commissioned for Peacelink. It would have been great to have had at least one of them to accompany the profile’s reappearance – and it really is an obituary this time around.

Why the peculiar title? I explained that at the end of the profile: “All our mail from the Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament arrives solemnly addressed to ‘Dr Odd Base, Box 2258, Christchurch, New Zealand’. There is a newsletter called Off Base, edited by Dr Bob Leonard, but apart from that, it’s anyone’s guess. It just struck me as strangely appropriate”. Indeed it was the subject of great hilarity at meetings of ABC, and before that, those of its predecessor, Citizens for the Demilitarisation of Harewood (CDH), when that Chinese publication was tabled with the correspondence (Off Base, which was CDH’s newsletter, was a standalone publication for 12 issues from 1984-87 inclusive and then became part of what was then called Peace Researcher incorporating Off Base. That arrangement lasted until 1994. Those 12 standalone issues of Off Base and the later 1987-94 issues as part of PR can be read as part of the online historic Peace Researchers at http://www.historicalpeaceresearcher.blogspot.co.nz/. The originals of the 12 issues were among the historical material rescued by ABC Committee members from Bob and Barbara’s quake-buggered and abandoned hillside home, in February 2013. Our thanks to ABC (and CAFCA) Committee member Lynda Boyd who then uploaded the scanned issues, after Bob’s death, as part of ABC’s tribute to Bob’s life and work.

And why did my profile of ABC’s founder and leader get published only in Watchdog, not in ABC’s Peace Researcher? For starters, I had no PR role in those days, other than as a writer (editing it was not part of my original CAFCA/ABC Organiser job description, when I started in 1991). I didn’t become Co-Editor, with Bob, until the late 1990s, and I didn’t become Editor, succeeding Bob, until the early 2000s. In 1992 PR was very much Bob’s baby – he was the Editor - and, modest chap that he was, he would never have agreed to include a profile of himself. As I said in it: “Indeed he had to be talked into this profile”.

Childhood

Robert Leslie Leonard, an only child, was born in 1938 in Reno, Nevada (“but I’ve never gambled in my life”). That sentence needs qualifying – for nearly all of his life Bob believed that he was an only child and he certainly was the only child of his parents’ marriage. But when he was well into his 60s, into the last few years of his life as it turned out, he was astonished to be contacted by a older half-brother that he never knew that he had. Jim, a decade older than Bob, was the product of a relationship between their father when he was a young man and a wealthy woman for whom he worked. Part of his job was to drive her on transcontinental road trips and, as the old joke goes, they didn’t have TV in those days. Bob’s mother died (in the 1990s) never having known about her husband’s other son. Bob was fascinated to go to Colorado and meet this whole other family that he didn’t know that he had. What’s more, they turned out to be both Republicans and Mormons, the polar opposite of Bob in terms of politics and attitude to religion (he wouldn’t have a bar of the latter). Bob was also incredulous to discover that he had a newly discovered nephew who had a military aviation background and who persisted in addressing Uncle Bob as “sir” and Aunt Barbara as “maam”, in that all-American fashion. But blood is thicker than water and the long lost brothers got on just fine (presumably as long as they didn’t mention politics or religion. Probably sex was out, too). When the whole Leonard clan  from across the US and New Zealand gathered at Lake Tahoe in the California High Sierra in October 2013 to scatter Bob’s ashes, his octogenarian brother and wife were present.

Now, back to the 1930s. The family moved permanently to neighbouring California when he was a baby. His father was a skilled worker without much formal education. He ended up working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (headed by New Zealander William Pickering, later to be Sir William). Bob grew up surrounded by guns – because the family was poor, they needed to hunt for food. Bob had a lifelong aversion to guns and told me of his horror when he discovered several hand guns in his father’s room while cleaning it up after his death. His parents were conservative Republicans (so, obviously, his older brother inherited those aspects of their father’s genes). As his daughter Andra told me, in a March 2013 e-mail: “…his Republican parents were horrified when he first grew a beard in grad school because they feared he was becoming a disreputable Berkeley hippy. In the 50's and 60's in Pasadena all the respectable folks were clean cut…:” (in the 30 odd years I knew Bob, I never saw him without a beard. I saw him once with a shaved head, when he was very sick during the long sad decline of his final couple of years, but I never saw him without a beard. Not even in old photos). Bob was old enough to remember WW2, with its blackouts and air raid sirens. He saw an internment camp for Japanese Americans: “I always thought it was a horrible thing to do, those people were Americans”.

His tertiary schooling was at Pasadena City College; then at 19 he left home to go to university at Berkeley. He graduated in 1960 with a Bachelor of Science (BSc), majoring in Forestry, followed by a one year Forestry degree from Yale, right across the other side of the US (he told me that was when he felt homesick). He was offered three different fellowships, deciding on the National Science Foundation one in plant physiology (ironically it is the NSF which has for decades provided the respectable scientific cover for the US military presence at Christchurch Airport – Harewood – which Bob was to devote considerable energy campaigning against throughout his life in Christchurch). Also in 1960 he got married to Judy Hayden, a registered Democrat, who persuaded Bob to change parties also. The marriage lasted eight years and produced three kids, Mark, Andra and Brendan (who, between them, have seven kids. The three of them live in California, Iowa and Vermont, so they’re distributed right across the US). He was a hands-on dad – quite literally in the case of one baby, whom he had to catch as it shot out of Mum while the doctors and nurses were out of the room. He loved telling that story.

Berkeley In The 60s

From 1961 to 69 he was doing his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) at Berkeley. “Those were the days of turmoil; it was a great time to be at Berkeley”. It involved a complete change in his world outlook. He had applied to be a Navy trainee pilot and only failed because of his eyesight (he wore glasses). He came from a conservative family, “so the military seemed quite a reasonable option to me” (his son, Graham, explained to me that Bob would have looked favourably at that option because it would have provided a pragmatic way to fund his university studies). If he had been accepted, his life may have turned out very differently (the thought of Captain Bob Leonard flying one of the US military’s former Starlifters – since replaced by Globemasters – into Harewood is quite startling). But instead he plunged into the radical ferment of Berkeley in the 60s. He had been involved in a successful early 60s’ campaign to stop a nuclear power plant. But Berkeley marked his introduction to radical activism, starting with the Free Speech Movement in 1964 and proceeding through the lethal battles to establish People’s Park, and the whole epic of Vietnam War protests.

He was never personally in danger of being drafted to Vietnam. Students held 1A exemption. But he was a rank and file participant in all the big California battles of the 60s, complete with long hair, beard and headband. “I was thrown in at the deep end”. He personally witnessed a man shot in the back by buckshot fired by the “Blue Meanies” (untrained, trigger-happy sheriff’s deputies). The guy survived, Bob volunteered to be a witness but nothing was ever done about it. He experienced being gassed by CS gas dropped from helicopters (it induces projectile vomiting). Bob’s first leadership role was in RIOT (Refusers of Illegal and Oppressive Taxes). The city of Berkeley was levying a surtax on electricity, which (as usual) hit the poor much more than the rich. Naturally the poor happened to be black. It involved an 18 month campaign to get it put to the ballot as a local initiative – and it was defeated. “I became a staunch advocate of public utilities and staunch enemy of anything nuclear”, positions he maintained for the rest of his life. Berkeley in the 60s was ground zero of the counter-culture (a phrase you never hear now), but I have no idea if Bob plunged into that lifestyle. Maybe he did. When I spoke at his Christchurch memorial gathering, in September 2013, I said that I’d never seen him drink alcohol – Barbara interjected from the floor that “he was at Berkeley in the 60s”, leaving us to draw our own conclusions. But if he did get into the counter-culture lifestyle in the 60s he left it there. The only time he alluded to it to me was to express his fondness for some of the Californian musicians of that era.

In 1969 he moved to the University of California campus at Davis, to do two years of post-doctoral work in biochemistry. Life got complicated in 1971 when he moved to Lake Tahoe as the Field Laboratory Director. He was stressed out, commuting many hundreds of kilometres every week between his workplaces in Tahoe and Davis, and his family in Berkeley (his marriage had ended). So he did something quintessentially Californian and went to an encounter group. It turned out to be a wise move, because he met Barbara Sloane there. They started living together in 72, got married in 76 and their son Graham was born in 77 (Dr Graham Leonard, who lives in Wellington and is married with a baby daughter, is now a nationally renowned scientist with the Crown Research Institute GNS Science, regularly in the media issuing dire warnings about volcanic eruptions and tsunamis).

Bob and Barbara were to spend more than 40 years together – it really was “until death do us part” – and, as Graham said in his speech at the Christchurch memorial, “Mum was the love of Dad’s life”. From 1971 to 82 the Leonards lived at Lake Tahoe. Bob was a limnologist (a lake specialist). “It was an activist job; we were generating all the information to fight the developers”. Tahoe is on the California/Nevada border, and the Nevada shore is a big time resort, with casinos. It was a high pressure job, as he had to combine being a scientist and administrator, dealing with politicians.

Reagan Refugees Move To NZ

1982 was when the Leonards took the drastic step of permanently immigrating to New Zealand. It was the Ronald Reagan presidency and the zenith of the peace movement worldwide. “When that clown Reagan was elected President in 1980, that was too much” (Bob had experienced Ronnie’s governorship of California in the 60s. See “Fuck Ronald Reagan”, by Bill Weinberg, in Watchdog 106, August 2004, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/06/17.htm, for a refreshingly honest obituary. We got hate mail for years afterwards from outraged Reaganauts). Bob and Barbara had both got involved in the bilateral nuclear freeze movement. A major factor was that they lived downwind of a nuclear power plant. “But we would never have shifted if we didn’t have a young son”. Bob was in his 40s (his life was more than half over, as it turned out) but the drastic decision to live in a faraway country for the rest of his life was no midlife crisis – it was a response to the existential crisis posed by the very real threat of nuclear war in the 80s.

But why New Zealand? Bob had never been out of the US before and his only personal experience of Kiwis was William Pickering at Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (where his father had worked) and post-grad students with whom he had worked. “We chose NZ because it was far away, isolated, under-populated, and beautiful. I wanted to get clean out of the Northern Hemisphere”. They subscribed to the Dominion (now the Dominion Post) and the Press to apply for jobs (no Internet in those days). Barbara, who had worked with computers for years, found one in Christchurch; rang them and was hired over the phone. They were granted permanent residence (NZ citizenship for all three of them followed, years later) and moved (bringing with them Barbara’s terminally ill mother, who died of cancer six months later). They were classic Reagan Refugees, but far from the only ones to come to NZ – for example, long-time ABC member and veteran Waihopai activist, Dick Keller and his wife Jane moved from the US to NZ in 1987, settling in Wellington. Dick came to ABC’s Christchurch memorial for Bob and told the crowd that it was Reagan’s re-election in 1984 that decided him and Jane to permanently shift. They arrived in the country at Christchurch Airport and, he told the memorial, they were met by the smiling faces of Bob and Barbara. Bob and Dick remained friends and ABC colleagues until Bob’s death.

Bob never regretted shifting; he loved New Zealand and Christchurch with a passion (it took the catastrophic February 2011 earthquake to force them out, permanently, to Wellington). The only things he missed about the US were his three kids and the mountains of California. Until his health completely collapsed in the last three years of his life, he made a trip to the States virtually every year to visit them and his grandkids and, in his final years, his newly discovered half-brother and his family. And, less often, his kids and grandkids visited him. The only time there has ever been a joint Peace Researcher and Watchdog mailout (in 1999), utilising all available rooms in our house, his daughter Andra and her two young sons helped out. Andra was staying with Bob and Barbara for several weeks in January/February 2011, helping to look after him as his health became extremely bad, and she was with them on February 22nd, when the killer quake struck and wrecked the house. Andra played a critical role in getting both of them out of the house and immediately out of Christchurch, ending up in Wellington – Bob never returned. As for those California mountains: the young Bob was quite the mountaineer, and there were several old photos of him in that capacity as part of the slideshow at his Christchurch memorial. He told me that the difference between Californian and New Zealand mountains was that the latter can kill you, fast and unexpectedly, due to the extreme changeability of our weather. Some times when he went on holiday to the US he went back into his beloved mountains (one memorable trip was on horseback and they slept in tents in bear country). It was entirely fitting that, in October 2013, Barbara and Graham took his ashes back to the US where almost his entire family gathered and scattered them at his beloved Lake Tahoe (where he had scattered his parents’ ashes).

Two Decades Teaching At Lincoln University

There were the inevitable cultural confusions upon arrival – Bob delighted in telling me of his incomprehension when he went to the then Post Office to arrange to get a phone connected and was asked to make the cheque to “NZedPO”, which made no sense to him. He read NZPO as “NZeePO” (over the decades he and I had many interesting and often hilarious discussions about the differences between American English, English English and New Zealand English). Early on, he and Barbara were invited to a Kiwi couple’s home for tea. So they ate a meal and went to the house expecting to drink tea. You can guess the rest. But basically they hit the ground running. Barbara had already got a job before they arrived and they bought their Huntsbury Hill home within a few months of arrival (and lived in it until the February 2011 quake wrecked it, along with most of their side of the street, and forced them to immediately abandon the house and contents and move to Wellington. At the time of writing the fate of the house and contents remains undecided). Within a couple of years Bob got a job at what was then called Lincoln College (now University) and worked there for the next 20+ years, retiring in 2007 when he was in his late 60s. This is what Ian Collins of Lincoln University sent to the Press, for Bob’s obituary (24/8/13; “Veteran Protester Learned Activism In 60s’ California”, Mike Crean):

“Dr Bob Leonard … quiet, but deeply passionate about causes. Tenacious in his beliefs. A complex character. I knew him well as a colleague here. He was someone whose time, conversation and wisdom one appreciated. The peace campaigner was only one side of him. He was passionate about stewardship of the environment. A Senior Tutor in the Soil and Physical Sciences Department here at Lincoln University. Started in 1984. He was a limnologist … a freshwater scientist. Limnology is the science of lakes and inland waterways. He was a close colleague of the late Associate Professor Graeme Buchan, an environmental physicist. Together, in 1990, they founded the popular and highly successful Lincoln University EnviroSchool programme … a campus-based biennial vacation school for environmentally-minded senior secondary school students. Largely on Bob’s initiative, Sir Edmund Hillary was approached and accepted the job of Patron of the EnviroSchool programme.  The EnviroSchools, which ran for more than a decade and won a Government award for their contributions to environmental care and education, were a real legacy that Bob could be proud of.  Ironical that Bob and Graeme, whose offices were in the same corridor, only a few doors apart, and worked closely together on environmental science, the one on water, the other on soil, should die within less than a year of each other. In 1992 a paper they co-authored on propagating environmental science and ethics was accepted for the first World Environmental and Communication Congress following the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. 

“Bob’s role in the co-founding of Lincoln University’s EnviroSchool programme deserves a mention in any obituary. Numerous participants who have grown up, gone on to university and are now in environment or conservation related careers will remember him. Academically Bob was highly qualified … he had a masters degree from Yale (in Forestry), and a PhD from the University of California. He was world-class in his understanding of scientific matters, highly praised by students for his lectures and laboratory classes, particularly chemistry. I have a testimonial here from one of his mature students, who came late in life to university, who described Bob’s Global Environmental Issuessubject as “brilliant”. But Bob never sought the limelight. He started humbly at Lincoln University as a casual staff member but was soon “snapped up” by the University, for a permanent academic position. As a limnologist his research took him to many places including Lake Baikal in Russia, in capacity the largest freshwater lake in the world, and he brought back water samples to Lincoln University for analysis as part of his research”.

Lincoln University was well represented at ABC’s Christchurch memorial for him, in September 2013. Indeed the speaker who spoke the longest was Associate Professor in Soil Science Peter Almond, the head of Bob’s old department. He detailed Bob’s academic career at Lincoln and included tributes from former colleagues and students. He told stories of Bob using paper clips instead of staples, to encourage recycling; of him browbeating the Library into setting up a paper recycling system; of him carefully monitoring the departmental printer to see how much paper was being used. He told of Bob warning colleagues not to go into his office unannounced and of strange noises coming from within, which came from Bob’s greyhounds (he ignored the ban on dogs in the building). He emphasised that Bob was a stickler for correctness in things like punctuation, which jogged my memory, and I told the crowd that during our time as Peace Researcher Co-Editors, Bob had driven me mad as an apostrophe Nazi. This, in turn, inspired Barbara, whom we had not expected to speak, to get up to talk about Bob “the pedant”, who, even when he could no longer talk in his final months, was still correcting punctuation mistakes by means of gestures and sign language. Throughout his two decades at Lincoln Bob rubbed shoulders with some household names, who were either his colleagues or his students. Long before Rodney Hide became an MP, ACT Leader and a Cabinet Minister, he was an academic at Lincoln, where Bob told me his nickname was Mr Property Rights (Bob’s all-time favourite publication in Hide’s office was titled “Property Rights and Canada Geese”). When I visited Bob one time in Burwood Hospital in 2010, I was surprised to be told that Richie McCaw had popped in to say hello. Bob had no interest in rugby (it was one of the few subjects we never discussed) and the All Blacks weren’t doing one of their PR hospital visits, so why did the All Black captain visit Bob? He’d been one of Bob’s students (Bob described him to me as “helluva nice fellow”), was at Burwood Hospital with one of his numerous rugby injuries, spotted his old lecturer was in there, and called in to his room to say hello.

Nuclear Free Zone Committee

Upon arrival in Christchurch they immediately got involved with the peace movement, initially in Larry Ross’ New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone Committee (my obituary of Larry is in Watchdog 130, August 2012, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/30/17.html). “We saw it as a very viable movement”. He described his several years on the Executive of the NZ Nuclear Free Zone Committee – he ended up as Chairperson - as “a very exciting time”. In 1983 Keith Burgess founded Peace Researcher as a supplement to its newsletter. In the mid 80s Bob and others (including Barbara, Dennis Small and Keith Burgess) parted company with the Nuclear Free Zone Committee and a collective of six formed Educate for Nuclear Disarmament, which published Peace Researcher, co-edited by Bob and Dennis. There was also the short lived Nuclear Free Kiwis group, involving much the same people, plus others like current PR Co-Editor, Warren Thomson.

Although they were no longer in the same organisation, Bob and Larry still worked together on projects and remained friends, right up until Larry’s death in 2012. For example, Larry and others, including Dennis and Bob, did excellent work in analysing and exposing the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) destabilisation plots against New Zealand in the 80s, when this country was seen as posing a dangerous threat to the US, because of the nuclear free example we presented to other American allies who might get infected by what was called “the New Zealand disease” Among other projects, they organised a national speaking tour through NZ in 1986 by Ralph McGehee, a former CIA agent turned author. Decades later, in the final few years of Larry’s life (2009-11 to be precise), when a series of mini strokes had damaged his short term memory and he was living in a retirement home, Bob and I worked together with him to secure his SIS Personal File. It involved me in the most contact I’d ever had with Larry and I, and colleagues (such as Bob and Warren Thomson) had a number of highly enjoyable social gatherings with Larry in the course of it. Larry had worked very closely with the young Owen Wilkes in the 60s (that was the start of Owen’s stellar career as an international peace and anti-bases researcher and activist), so, for one of our outings, Bob and I took Larry to the Owen Wilkes memorial park bench which ABC had got the Christchurch City Council to pay for and install in Beckenham Park in 2007. Our very last trip out as a trio was after the September 2010 earthquake, when Bob could only walk with the aid of two sticks (but he could drive just fine). Larry wanted to see his old New Brighton home of 40 years which had been converted into a small business – from the outside at least, it looked fine (I don’t know how it fared in the much more destructive February 2011 quake and subsequent big aftershocks). We took Larry for lunch at the New Brighton Pier, took him for a drive around his beloved New Brighton, back through the central city and then for a visit to see leading peace activists Kate Dewes and Rob Green in their badly damaged Riccarton  home (scheduled for repair in 2014). It was a highly memorable day and it is very sad to reflect that both Bob and Larry are now dead (as is Owen).

Harewood & CDH

Bob and Barbara had been startled upon arrival in Christchurch to discover that they, the nuclear refugees, were living in a city hosting a US base. Bob was familiar with the US Air Force’s Military Airlift Command (now called the Air Mobility Command) flights from his days in Davis. Starlifters and Galaxies loaded with nuclear weapons flew over the city en route to and from Travis Air Force Base. “So when I came here, I was shocked to find the bloody things were right here”. They arrived with an American can do attitude, and American perceptions on the NZ scene. For example, Barbara’s initial concern about Harewood was that it could be a nuclear target, and emphasis was placed on the possibility of nuclear weapons being transported through it under the neither confirm nor deny policy. Bob had no previous experience of working with Communists and there was an early incident involving a Communist Party banner at a Harewood march. Bob soon politically acclimatised and dropped any such previous hangups (which became academic in the 90s, anyway, with the demise of the Communist Party). They arrived in the country at the zenith of the NZ peace movement and public interest in all things to do with peace and nuclear issues was very high. They featured in a Christchurch Star series on the peace movement, under the heading: “Searching For A Safe Place To Live”. Barbara was quoted as saying: “Our first task is to rid New Zealand of the American military presence. Failing that, we’ll probably move, at least to another part of the country”. Well, Christchurch Airport still has an American military presence, albeit in a greatly reduced role, and the Leonards did shift, involuntarily, to another part of the country – but not until nearly 30 years after they did that interview.

In 1983, whilst actively involved in the NZ Nuclear Free Zone Committee and the South Christchurch Peace Group, Bob contacted the Campaign Against Foreign Control In New Zealand (CAFCINZ, which changed its name to CAFCA later in the 80s), offering to specialise in Harewood. Despite an illogical paranoid suspicion of Americans, he was seen as a godsend (I can remember going, with my then partner, to visit him and Barbara at their home to discuss our suspicions that there was a spy in our ranks. Barbara’s immediate response was to exclaim: “You don’t think it’s us, do you?” No, we didn’t – it was a good old Kiwi). The Harewood campaign had been essentially moribund since the big anti-bases demos of the early 70s (for an succinct summary of the decades-long Harewood campaign, including Bob’s leading role in it, see Maire Leadbeater’s “The Campaign To Demilitarise Harewood”, in Peace Researcher 44, November 2012, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/44/pr44-003.htm). He became the driving force behind CDH (Citizens for the Demilitarisation of Harewood), which produced its own newsletter, Off Base (which can be read online at http://www.historicalpeaceresearcher.blogspot.co.nz/, along with the 1983-2000 issues of Peace Researcher). CDH marked the beginning of my nearly three decades of working very closely with Bob – meetings were held at our place (where I still live and work); and young Graham was put down to sleep in a sleeping bag on the lounge floor behind the couch while Bob and Barbara were at the meetings. Barbara left anti-bases activism quite early on and peace activism a few years later (moving on to other issues). CDH lasted a few years; from 1988 onwards it changed into the Christchurch ABC and Off Base became part of Peace Researcher (until 1994, when Off Base ceased). Within a few years it was just known as ABC, as there were no longer ABC groups in other cities. That remains the status quo today.

In my 1992 “Dr Odd Base” profile he said, of the Harewood campaign: “I’ve had a reasonable degree of satisfaction out of the campaign, not only because of the camaraderie of the things we’ve done there – and they are some of the highlights of my life – but simply because every time we do something, we’re a burr under the saddle of the US military. I think we’ve actually been a restraining influence on them; if we hadn’t started this in 83, we would never have known about the Pine Gap connection. The whole research element has been very important. It’s been very satisfying, the number of times we’ve gone out there and their flights have avoided Christchurch altogether. I still have some optimism that their most vulnerable point is the fact that they’re flying military intelligence flights through, ostensibly as Antarctic ones, without any governing authority” (for decades US Air Force planes routinely transited through Harewood to service the highly strategic, top secret US spy base at Pine Gap, near Alice Springs in central Australia. There is no longer evidence that Harewood is still involved in that role of servicing Pine Gap. Changes in technology and increased capabilities of aircraft are among the likely reasons why that situation has changed. MH).

Bob Epitomised Campaign

I started that 1992 profile thus: “If any one person epitomises the campaign against US military installations in Aotearoa, it has to be Dr Robert Leslie Leonard. For the whole ten years he has lived in this country, the 53 year old American has been the backbone of the campaign focused on the USAF/Navy base at Harewood. Tall, bearded, unfailingly polite, he and his well used Toyota HiAce van* have been familiar sights at many of the Waihopai demos; he’s been up Black Birch three times (once on foot); and once to Tangimoana. But it is Harewood that remains his central concern. ‘Operation Deep Freeze is a cover for the US military to have a contingency base (one of hundreds around the world), and I think it is an insult to all New Zealanders for the Americans to be blatantly using something that is ostensibly scientific for what is in reality a contingency military asset. A big element of my concern is concern for Antarctica per se, and the potential for conflict. We have one continent left to rape and pillage, and we seem to be set on doing it’. (*The well used van came to a sad end one night in 2004 when it was broken into while parked on their drive – Bob and Barbara were inside the house watching TV - burgled and set on fire, destroying it. Nobody was ever caught. Barbara specially requested that I write a Peace Researcher obituary for it. So I did: “In Fond Memory Of Bob’s Old Van”, PR 29. June 2004, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr29-98.html. MH).

“So, for a decade it’s been Bob, in his jacket and tie, who has fronted press conferences and public meetings; led marches and pickets (the tension of which has been known to trigger his asthma and migraines); and generally been identified as the leader of the campaign to demilitarise Harewood. It’s not a role with which he is fully comfortable – he is sensitive about being perceived as a ‘foreigner’ interfering in NZ business…It’s a public profile that has led to a fair degree of flak. From blinkered local MPs and politicians who shamelessly inflate the alleged monetary value of Harewood every time it is questioned; from public hysteria at times like the arson (by provocateurs unknown) of the Brevet Club Spitfire during the Triad 84 ANZUS air exercise – ‘we were smeared with that but the Police knew damned well we didn’t do it’.

“And from the same side of the fence too. Thin skinned Labour heavyweights did not take kindly to glaring loopholes in their ‘nuclear free’ law being highlighted. When Frank O’Flynn was Minister of Defence, he made a pointed reference to ‘disaffected Americans’. Bob and I appeared before a Select Committee chaired by Helen Clark – she was downright rude (but Piggy Muldoon, for his own partisan reasons, was much more attentive)…There were plenty in the peace movement, particularly in Labour’s first term (1984-87), who regarded Bob and the Harewood campaign as a bloody nuisance. Why did he have to rock the nuclear free boat? (I well remember Larry Ross telling me, more than once, that the US base’s continued presence at Harewood was the price we would have to pay for the country going nuclear free. He also said that about Waihopai. MH). ‘Those other three bases (Waihopai, Tangimoana, Black Birch) represent an entanglement that is hidden from the people of New Zealand. As symbolically effective as our nuclear free legislation is, it is paper thin. If we had a genuine crisis in this part of the world, we’d soon see just how paper thin that disentanglement is. We’re still cemented into the nuclear infrastructure and we’re not that far from an ANZUS type of situation” (the Australia, New Zealand, US military treaty that was the foundation of all New Zealand’s defence and foreign policy from its inception in 1951 until the US, under President Ronald Reagan, kicked us out in 1986. It remains in force today, but only between the US and Australia. Bob’s 21 year old quote has proven to be prescient. See Warren Thomson’s “Manoeuvred Back Into ANZUS: Subversion Of NZ’s Independence” in PR 43, May 2012, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr/43/pr43-001.htm. MH).

His Files Are A Treasure Trove

Coinciding with writing this obituary I have been, as time allows, methodically going through Bob’s ABC and peace movement papers that we rescued from his quake-buggered and abandoned house back in February 2013. Some have been chucked out as too old and no longer relevant, but I’ve kept plenty. This has provided a unique opportunity to fully appreciate the sheer extent of Bob’s work, over many years. His published output, in publications such as Off Base and Peace Researcher, is publicly available (and can be read online at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/prfront.html and http://www.historicalpeaceresearcher.blogspot.co.nz/). But the many cartons full of file boxes and folders of his papers enable me to access the full story. It has increased my admiration for his prodigious energy and work rate, because the amount of correspondence he produced just on that one topic alone – Harewood - was phenomenal (in the days when people wrote letters).  He was a scientist and was happy to apply his skills to tasks that the rest of us were not equipped or not prepared to do. To give just one example; for many years he acquired (which was a whole campaign in itself), analysed and published – complete with graphs – the official flight data recording all US military planes arriving and departing from Harewood.

Bob’s files are meticulously kept and chronologically organised, with many of his outward letters accompanied by handwritten notes of the points he wanted to make. And his handwriting is as neat as his files (I, let alone anyone else, haven’t been able to read my own handwriting for many years). I raised a wry smile when I noticed that while his personal letters were signed “Bob”, his formal ones to Prime Ministers, Ministers, MPs, Councillors, the US military, etc, were signed “Robert L Leonard” and, sometimes, “Robert L. Leonard PhD”. I laughed out loud when I read that a few of his very early formal letters started with the salutation: “Gentlepersons”. My admiration for Bob’s fantastic productivity only increased when I reflected that the ABC rescue mission had certainly not retrieved anything like all of the files and papers from Bob and Barbara’s house – we left plenty behind – and that what we did retrieve was, by necessity, grabbed on a pretty random basis (we were working in a badly damaged and dangerous house, with the contents all over the floor, with no power – I worked by torchlight in the basement where a lot of the historic papers were filed and/or strewn all over the floor, not far from where the bricks of an old chimney had smashed through the floor boards and beams from the kitchen above – and with nobody present from the family to guide us). We all owe a big vote of thanks to ABC Committee member, Robyn Dann, who volunteered to store the lot until their final fate is determined and who put her librarian’s training to good use by sorting them out before I went through them, bit by bit.

When I wrote my obituaries of Owen Wilkes and Larry Ross I had no such access to their papers (beyond what was in Larry’s SIS file, which is in my possession). Actually, going through Bob’s papers, specifically the voluminous Harewood ones, has increased my respect for Owen, because an awful lot of that correspondence was between the two of them. How sad that Owen turned his back on, firstly, the peace movement, and then, life itself. And I can empathise with Bob’s frustration that progressively worsening ill health left him telling me “I’ve got no energy” years before his health totally collapsed. Going back through his Harewood files brought back many, many memories for me, such as: the 1986 Spies Picnic (the only photo I have displayed in my office is of that, with Bob and I among the suitably disguised “spies”); the last time I got arrested was at a 1988 Harewood protest; the sheer cheek of Bob and I hiring a room at Christchurch Airport in 1989 to hold a press conference to make public a treasure trove of internal Deep Freeze documents that a mole inside the US base had leaked to Owen; our protest on the tarmac next to US Starlifters and Galaxies during a 1994 Deep Freeze open day (we called our action The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy); Bob and I holding a huge Harewood-related banner outside the entrance to the Air Force Museum in 1999 when Bill Clinton, the only US President to visit Christchurch (and only the second US President to visit NZ) was arriving for a State dinner. We knew the motorcade’s arrival was imminent when, all of a sudden, every cop present suddenly marched up and stood, literally toe to toe, in front of every picketer. As Clinton’s limo sped past, Bob, the expatriate American, could restrain himself no longer, and roared “What a waste of bloody money!”, right into the face of the unfortunate cop marking him.

Some memories are hilarious – for several years in the 1980s a group of Catholic, mainly women, peace activists called Ploughshares (not to be confused with the Ploughshares group of male Catholic peace activists who deflated the Waihopai spy base dome in 2008) held weekly pickets at Harewood, with a religious angle. In the approach to Easter one year they were performing the Stations of the Cross; Bob was among those there in solidarity. The cops arrived, ignored the women and went straight to the bearded patriarch, assuming him to be “in charge”, and asked him what was going on. The women, all good feminists, were furious and Bob was the last person to ask to explain anything religious.

The best way to appreciate Bob the Harewood campaigner is to watch, online, “Base Deception”, a 14 minute long 1994 documentary about Harewood, made for ABC by Sam Miller, and fronted throughout by Bob (it also features wonderful footage of the 1994 Hiroshima Day arrests of Moana Cole and Ciaron O’Reilly for trespass inside the base). This can be viewed at http://www.historicalpeaceresearcher.blogspot.co.nz/2013/08/base-deception.html.Our thanks are due, once again, to ABC (and CAFCA) Committee member, Lynda Boyd, who uploaded the film, after Bob’s death, as part of ABC’s tribute to Bob’s life and work. His family certainly appreciated that. Bob’s daughter Andra e-mailed me, in August 2013: “I watched it twice yesterday and it was wonderful to see my dad standing tall and to hear his strong voice discussing an issue he cared so deeply about” (Andra came to New Zealand more than once during Bob’s long sad decline and was in daily phone and/or Skype contact with him throughout his final couple of years, so she really appreciated having a movie record of him in action and in his prime). It was wonderfully appropriate that, 19 years after he made “Base Deception” with Bob, Sam Miller volunteered to film the September 2013 Christchurch memorial for Bob. At that I heard him say to Graham, Bob’s son: “Your dad was a gentleman”. And so he was. ABC got one DVD of the memorial for our archive; another two were supplied to Bob’s family, in Wellington and the US.

“I Have Never Been A Hippie”

In my 1992 “Dr Odd Base” profile I mentioned Bob “in his jacket and tie”. Bob believed that dressing the part, when necessary, helped to give respectability and credibility to both him and the issue. He took seriously any slight on either. Among his papers I found a 1996 letter that he wrote to a Blenheim cop, after an ABC protest at the Waihopai spy base led to six arrests. “I take strong exception to being described as a ’hippie type individual’. I am a university tutor with a PhD. I have spent my entire career in university teaching and research. I am married, have four grown children and four grandchildren. Without wishing to denigrate genuine hippies or the unemployed, I have never been a hippie and I have never been without a job since graduation. In other words you are very wide of the mark in your description and not only of me. On the basis of my personal knowledge, the individuals you have attempted to smear with grossly inappropriate characterisations are thoughtful and intelligent and committed to social causes, often at the cost of great personal sacrifice….You have every right to make comments of a political nature when you are speaking in a civilian capacity. However I suggest you may have exceeded your brief as a policeman with some of your remarks” (there is no reply or acknowledgement in the file).

In Peace Researcher 37, November 2008, I reported that Bob and I travelled to Blenheim, in solidarity with the three Waihopai Domebusters, who were appearing in the District Court for the depositions hearing on the charges arising from their April 2008 deflation of one of the spy base’s domes. “Bob himself had been a Waihopai defendant in that court, in 1996 but in 2008 he was there in a very different capacity, namely as a fully accredited court reporter for Peace Researcher. We only had the idea very late in the piece and were frankly surprised that our request was granted without demur by the court authorities. Not only was Bob there as a court reporter, he was the best dressed one. I had asked what was the expected dress standard and had been told jacket and tie – Bob turned out to be the only court reporter so dressed”.

But let there be no doubt that although Bob dressed respectably when the occasion required it, he made no bones about what he was or where he stood on the bases issue. “Anti-bases campaigner Bob Leonard, calling for the Bill to be ‘binned’, told the Committee that people like ‘Murray and me’ are dissenters. ‘We make no bones about it. We believe Operation Deep Freeze should be demilitarised, and that Waihopai is essentially an arm of US intelligence’, he said” (Press, 12/2/02, “Allegation Upsets Mark: Terror Bill Hearing Heated”, Martin van Beynen. Bob and I were presenting ABC’s submission on the Terrorism [Bombings and Financings] Suppression Bill, to the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Select Committee. It was the then New Zealand First MP, Ron Mark, who was “upset” at the “allegation” by the then Green MP Keith Locke that the Committee planned to hear submissions in secret).

Black Birch & Tangimoana

Of course, Harewood wasn’t the only base of concern for Bob and ABC. I have devoted so much attention to it in this obituary because it was the first and oldest of the bases (indeed it pre-dates ABC by decades) and it’s still here, albeit in a reduced form. It is the daddy of them all. And for a more pragmatic reason: as Harewood was the focus of my 1992 Dr Oddbase profile, it was the subject of nearly all of the direct quotes from Bob that I have reprinted here. Bob was also centrally involved in the 1980s and 90s campaign against the US Naval Observatory atop Black Birch Ridge, in Marlborough (prior to the 1987 creation of ABC the Black Birch campaign was organised by CAFCINZ/CAFCA). He and I were among those who walked up it on a couple of occasions (most memorably in an unseasonal spring snowfall whilst escorting a group of activists from decidedly tropical Asian and Pacific countries, in the course of ABC’s 1990 Touching the Bases Tour). On another 1980s’ occasion he held the fort at the bottom of the hill while the rest of us walked up – a cop chatted to him amiably for a long time; then happened to ask where were the people from the other vehicles? Bob cheerfully told him that we were on our way up to the US observatory. The penny dropped for the cop who immediately called for reinforcements to chase us up the hill by car – we still got there first. Tangimoana is the older of the Government Communications Security Bureau’s (GCSB) two spy bases - it does a different sort of spying to Waihopai – and, as it is in the North Island, has not been the subject of as much attention from the Christchurch-based ABC. But Bob and I still got there a couple of times – once on that 1990 Touching The Bases Tour and, most recently, in 2005. On that latter occasion our group included then Green Co-Leader Rod Donald and then Green MP Keith Locke. Rod thanked us for enabling his first ever visit there (and it was to be his only one, as he suddenly died just months later). Rod and Keith were high profile key participants at many of ABC’s Waihopai protests in the 90s and 2000s (and Keith, although now retired from Parliament, keeps coming. My obituary of Rod is in Watchdog 110, December 2005, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/10/09.htm).

On re-reading my 1992 “Dr Odd Base” profile, I was surprised at how little mention it contained of Waihopai, the spy base which had been the reason for the creation of ABC in 1987, and which has been the focus ever since of ABC’s campaign to shut it down (the most recent protest was in January 2014). In the years between 1988 and 1992 we had held our biggest, most militant and most frequent protests there, with lots of arrests and Bob was in the thick of all of that. So why was “Dr Odd Base” all about Harewood, with only passing mention of Waihopai? I can’t remember but I suspect what happened was that it was intended to the third in a series on Heroes Of The Peace Movement in Peacelink. The first two had been published – they were on my ABC Committee colleagues Don Murray and Warren Thomson (Warren rejoined the Committee after 13 years in Bangkok and is also Peace Researcher Co-Editor) – and they were focussed on Waihopai. At an intelligent guess I think Peacelink Co-Editor Owen Wilkes, who commissioned the series, asked me not to repeat that but to emphasise Harewood instead. And then Peacelink went belly up and it was left to good old Watchdog to come to the rescue and ensure that it got published at all.

Waihopai

There is no need to go into a detailed account of Bob’s campaigning against Waihopai, other than to emphasise that it is, and has been since it was first announced more than a quarter of a century ago, New Zealand’s most important contribution to the covert intelligence alliance with the US, the secret ANZUS that was never interrupted or threatened by the 1980s’ “ANZUS Row” which saw NZ kicked out of ANZUS (this is the Five Eyes alliance of the electronic intelligence agencies of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ, formally known as the UKUSA Agreement). Bob’s Waihopai story is the story of ABC since it’s creation in 1987; that spy base is the reason why Citizens for the Demilitarisation of Harewood turned into the Anti-Bases Campaign. To read Bob’s/ABC’s Waihopai story, all you have to do is look through Peace Researcher, which is online at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/prfront.html, with the older 1983-2000 issues at http://www.historicalpeaceresearcher.blogspot.co.nz/. Interestingly, a number of 1990s’ Waihopai protests are not reported in Peace Researcher but in Foreign Control Watchdog (the 1974-99 issues are online at http://www.historicalwatchdog.blogspot.co.nz/. Once again, thanks are due to Lynda Boyd, of the ABC and CAFCA Committees, for uploading the historic Watchdogs). The reason for that is simply that I was (and still am) Watchdog Editor, but only a writer for PR in those days and quite often Watchdog deadlines were more convenient than those for PR.

I’ll just mention a couple of highlights of Bob’s Waihopai campaign. In 1996 he was one of the people arrested during the protest, the only time he ever got arrested. He did so deliberately in order to argue in the Blenheim District Court that the GCSB and Waihopai were acting illegally – the judge rejected those defence arguments and convicted him and two others (including Warren Thomson, Peace Researcher Co-Editor then and again now). Once again, the brief report of the case appeared in Watchdog, not PR. “Bob Leonard had a well researched defence, which cited the 1990 Bill of Rights Act, the 1993 Privacy Act and the 1982 International Telecommunications Convention (the Nairobi Convention). The judge, however, was having none of that ‘political’ stuff in his court and stuck rigidly to the narrow issue of trespass. He convicted all three, but because he deemed them ‘sincere’, imposed no penalty beyond that. Thus: there were no fines, or even any court costs, which is a good result” (Watchdog 82, August 1996 “Waihopai Update: Three Convicted And Discharged”). Bob did it all despite knowing what the impact of the stress would be on his health – a night in a cell in the Blenheim Police Station in a hot Marlborough summer brought on one of his migraines and when we drove into town the next morning to pick them up after they had been bailed, we found him coming towards us on the highway, having walked several kilometres to try and walk it off.

The Domebusters

It was another much more high profile (and ongoing) Waihopai court case which took up a lot of his time in the last few years. Bob was in the US in April 2008, making one of his regular visits to see family and friends, when the three Waihopai Domebusters – Adrian Leason, Peter Murnane and Sam Land - astonished the country by getting into the top secret spy base and deflated one of the domes concealing a satellite dish. But he made up for lost time upon his return, by plunging into assisting with their defence. I have already mentioned that Bob was Peace Researcher’s officially accredited court reporter at the depositions hearing in the Blenheim District Court later in 2008 (you can read his court report in PR 37, November 2008, “Waihopai Domebusters: The Police Present Their Case”, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr37-168.htm).When the Domebusters’ criminal trial was held in the Wellington District Court, in March 2010, the defence wanted to call Bob as an expert witness. That meant he had to wait (mainly in the corridor outside the court room) for all eight days of the trial, and could not take part in the daily protests and solidarity actions outside the court and throughout central Wellington – but he never got to present his evidence, as the Crown successfully argued that he was not what they considered to be a “real” expert, and that his evidence would add nothing to the case. But it did mean that he was present in the court for the wonderful moment when the jury announced its verdict acquitting the Domebusters of all criminal charges. And Bob’s meticulously written affidavit certainly did not go to waste. I published it in PR 40, July 2010 (“Domebusters’ Trial Suppressed Evidence: Bob Leonard’s ‘Inadmissible’ Defence Affidavit”, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr40-192b.htm).

That affidavit was also used by the defence in the 2013 Court of Appeal hearing in the Crown’s civil damages against the Domebusters (which saw the three of them ordered to pay $1.2 million. It was referred to in the Court’s October 2013 judgement dismissing the appeal. Whether they will appeal again, to the Supreme Court, is unknown at the time of writing). Bob became friends with all three Domebusters and kept in touch with them after their acquittal – for instance, he and I met with Peter Murnane in Christchurch’s former Dux de Luxe restaurant for lunch one unforgettable late 2010 day, only about half an hour after a particularly big aftershock had sent thousands of people pouring into central city streets. All three of them, plus their Christchurch lawyer Mike Knowles, visited Bob in Wellington Hospital in 2011. In the case of Sam Land, Bob was a mate of his before his 2008 dome deflation, because Sam spent several months on the ABC Committee in Christchurch in 2007.

Bob’s affidavit listed his history as an ABC researcher on Waihopai under the subheading “Peace Research: Co-founder (with Owen Wilkes) of the Anti-Bases Campaign in 1987. Researcher and writer for Peace Researcher since its first publication in 1983 (Editor/Co-Editor 1985-2003). I have been studying the Waihopai base and its functions since it was first announced, prior to construction, in 1987. Earliest information was from writings of and discussions with the late Owen Wilkes, an internationally recognised researcher on signals intelligence (SIGINT). I have read widely on the subject of SIGINT and other forms of intelligence gathering. My sources include European Parliament reports on the US Echelon system, Annual Reports of the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), writings of investigative journalist Nicky Hager, including his book “Secret Power” (1996), and numerous personal discussions with Nicky, the books “Body of Secrets” (2001) and “The Shadow Factory” (2008), both by James Bamford (authoritative sources on the National Security Agency), the book “Axis of Deceit” (2004) by Andrew Wilkie, the book “Spyworld” (1994) by Mike Frost and Michel Gratton (and many other books on intelligence), correspondence with the then Director of the GCSB (Ray Parker, Director 1988-1999), and personal research into the operation of the base. In addition, the Anti-Bases Campaign has an extensive library of media materials and our own published reports (mostly in Peace Researcher) covering the entire 20+ years of base history and protest”  (“Secret Power” was reviewed by Murray Horton in Peace Researcher 10, September 1996, http://www.scribd.com/doc/33726186/Peace-Researcher-Vol2-Issue10-Sept-1996; “Body Of Secrets” was reviewed by Nicky Hager in PR 24, December 2001, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/hagrvew.htm; “The Shadow Factory” was reviewed by Bob Leonard in PR 38, July 2009, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr38-175a.htm; “Axis Of Deceit” was reviewed by Bob Leonard in PR 32, March 2006, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr32-120a.html; and “Spyworld” was reviewed by Bob Leonard in PR 23, June 2001, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/frostspy.htm. MH).

Bob was an extremely good researcher. When we both went to Blenheim for the Domebusters’ depositions hearing in September 2008 (the only time we ever shared a motel room) we drove out to Waihopai to take advantage of the fact that the deflated dome had not yet been replaced (that happened in 2009) and for Bob to run an expert eye over the exposed satellite dish and take some measurements. In the following months he commissioned a surveyor to visit Waihopai and professionally measure the angle and direction of the dish and then commissioned a satellite expert to conclude from those measurements just which satellites were being spied on. The results were published in PR 40, July 2010, (“What Does Waihopai Spy On? Asian Civilian Telecommunications Satellites, For Starters”, by Nicky Hager, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr40-195.htm).

Uncle Sam

And, of course, I can’t conclude writing about Bob’s Waihopai campaigning without highlighting his wonderful performance as Uncle Sam at the protests in Blenheim and at Waihopai for years. As a tall bearded American he was a natural for the role and he threw himself into it with gusto. In the days when the GCSB base commander allowed us to come onto the spy base’s grounds and march up the access road to the inner gate, ABC issued passports to the “Undemocratic Republic of UKUSA” (the secret intelligence sharing agreement between the US, UK, Canada, Australia and NZ, currently referred to as Five Eyes). Uncle Sam was always present at “the border” to run his (American) eagle eye over everyone crossing into “his” territory” and he always gave a rousing speech in defence of the American Empire, telling us that he’d just flown into Harewood on a Starlifter and concluding by telling us that “you can all bugger off!”. Bob made a wonderful Devil’s Advocate, last doing it in 2008 (the role is now played, with equal gusto and complete with vintage motorbike and spyglass, by Alice Leney – who’s actually a bloke). Bob got a Christchurch costume hire business to make the suit for him, which he hired, at his own expense, every year (he refused to let ABC pay the hire cost). He provided his own hat and that now hangs on the back of my office door, as a constant reminder of Bob as Uncle Sam (it was among the stuff we rescued from his quake-buggered and abandoned house, in February 2013. It was front and centre at ABC’s Christchurch memorial for Bob, in September 2013, and went back to Waihopai in January 2014).

Bob was ABC’s Waihopai campaign, he threw himself into all aspects of it with great passion, for more than 20 years. He and I shared dozens of trips there over those years, with some pretty hairy camping adventures along the way. It forged a wonderful personal and social bond. The last time we shared a tent was at the beautiful Whites Bay Department of Conservation camp during the January 2010 protest weekend (DoC gave ABC permission to plant a native tree at Whites Bay, in memory of Bob, during the January 2014 protest weekend). He continued to take part in Waihopai protests despite the various serious health problems that plagued him from the 1990s onwards. On one memorable occasion he was the main driver of our rental van and spent the weekend in a tent, sleeping on the ground, despite just having had emergency dental surgery the day before, and been told to take it easy, and not to drive.

The very last time Bob went to Waihopai was very poignant but also indicative of his sheer pigheadedness and determination to keep campaigning to close that spy base. It was in October 2010, after his health had really packed up and he had spent several months in hospital. Wearing my Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa hat, I and my PSNA Committee colleague, Leigh Cookson, drove two very senior Philippine revolutionary movement leaders – Luis Jalandoni and his wife Coni Ledesma – from Christchurch to Waihopai as part of their national speaking tour organised by PSNA. By that stage Bob could only walk with the aid of two sticks but he could drive just fine and, to our surprise, he drove himself solo from Christchurch to Waihopai and back in order to accompany them to the base. He stayed overnight with them in Blenheim and, as precisely no members of the Blenheim public attended their meeting; we had our own “private public” meeting with them. It was most informative, enlightening and highly enjoyable night. We discussed all sorts of subjects that would probably not have come up at a public meeting.

Bob was always prepared to, quite literally, go the extra mile when it came to Waihopai and international visitors. In 2005 he met a party of visiting Japanese peace activists in Christchurch and was supposed to go with them on the train to Blenheim. Here is his account of what happened: “Tuesday started early and traumatically. I was to be the Waihopai guide and accompany the Japanese party on the TranzCoastal train. But I missed the train departure to Picton by five minutes due to an incorrect time provided by some unknown travel agent. Not to be deterred I returned home and drove my car to Waihopai, arriving with about 30 minutes to spare in order meet the delegation at 3 p.m. at  the farm gate (the outer gate to the base, from the public road). Cell phones do have their uses as I was able to inform the delegation that all was not lost and that I would be waiting for them at Waihopai (over the years I have slightly moderated my attitude toward mobile phones. I no longer have the urge to smash mine, and have even been known to successfully complete a call or two)” (PR 32, March 2006, “Japanese Delegation Visits Harewood And Waihopai With ABC”, Bob Leonard, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr32-124.html).

Peace Researcher

There was more to Bob’s ABC work than protests. As he said in his Domebusters’ trial affidavit, he was a researcher and writer for Peace Researcher since its first publication in 1983 (Editor/Co-Editor 1985-2003). PR was very much Bob’s baby for the best part of 20 years. For many years he was solely in charge of all dealings with our backyard printer Ray Butterfield (his obituary of Ray is in PR 31, October 2005, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr31-117.html). I changed to our present printers when I became Co-Editor. In the early days Bob did the layout and for years he was responsible for printing the address labels (as time passed he was relieved of those jobs). Although founded by Keith Burgess and pre-dating ABC, Bob took charge of it in 1985 and in the 90s it became ABC’s newsletter. At various times from the 80s to the 2000s he was Co-Editor with Dennis Small, Warren Thomson and me (all three of us spoke at his Christchurch memorial in September 2013). I became sole Editor in 2003 until Warren Thomson rejoined as Co-Editor in 2011. As I said in the article announcing his editorial retirement: “He has set a very high standard of editorship and he takes the ‘researcher’ part of the title very seriously, bringing the rigorous standards of a professional scientist to bear upon it. Not to mention the punctuation pedantry of the practising pedagogue. Writers (including myself) and layout artists will breathe a sigh of relief that our sloppiness will now go unpunished, if not unremarked”. He continued as a writer for PR (his last article was “US Bases In Okinawa: Japan’s New Premier Challenges Obama” in PR 39, January 2010, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr39-188.htm. The massive anti-bases campaign waged by the Okinawan people was of particular interest to Bob and the subject of several articles by him over the years). He was wonderfully pigheaded and possessive about PR. On one memorable occasion at the end of the century he collected the master copy from our then Layout Editor Melanie Thomson to proofread and correct – and disappeared. He had been very ill when he painstakingly climbed up Melanie’s vertiginous Cashmere drive. Things only got worse and he ended up in hospital, from where he rang to tell me not to worry, that he had the master copy and that he would get it proofread, corrected and thence on to me and the printers once he got out. I went to the hospital and got it off the silly old bugger.

Speaking Tours & Submissions

ABC organised national speaking tours by two international experts – Mike Frost, from Canada, in 2001, and Cora Fabros, from the Philippines, in 2008. Bob was centrally involved in both of those. He and Barbara hosted Mike and his wife Carole in Christchurch, and Bob accompanied Mike for part of his tour (his report on the Frost tour is in PR 24, December 2001, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/frost.htm). In 2008 he accompanied Cora for her whole tour – his report on that is in PR 37, November 2008, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr37-169.htm.

He wrote nearly all of ABC’s submissions, which you can read on the ABC Website at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/submissions.html. One of them was remarkably prescient, namely his 2001 submission to the Intelligence and Security Committee on the GCSB Act that was hastily and controversially replaced by the Government in 2013. Here are a couple of extracts: “Oversight of our intelligence agencies is a facade. With the best of intentions, no Government committee and no Inspector General could possibly oversee the inner workings of New Zealand’s intelligence activities. Those activities are carried out in complete secret under the rules set by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States. Nobody outside the intelligence community, including so-called oversight personnel, have total access to the operational details of the GCS… Ineffective oversight leads to abuses. The worst abuse is likely to be domestic spying on our own citizens” (which is exactly what happened and what has been legalised by the new GCSB Act). Our submission's succinct recommendations were that that “the GCSB and its facilities do not operate in the interests of Aotearoa/New Zealand and should not be given legal status by the proposed Bill; and the GCSB and all its ties to overseas intelligence agencies should be terminated and the Waihopai and Tangimoana stations should be closed immediately by our Parliament”. That remains our position today. Bob’s full 2001 submission on behalf of ABC (it’s very brief) can be read at http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/gcsbsub.html).

I’ve already mentioned the couple of occasions on which he and I appeared before Parliamentary Select Committees. In 1996 Bob and Warren Thomson appeared before the Intelligence and Security Committee (which is a Committee of Government, not a Select Committee of Parliament), to speak to ABC’s submission on the Intelligence and Security Agencies Bill (ABC was concerned not only about the GCSB but also the Security Intelligence Service [SIS], and remains so today). Bob’s report on the hearing is in PR 8, March 1996, http://www.scribd.com/doc/33726181/Peace-Researcher-Vol2-Issue08-Mar-1996. He concluded: “All in all it was an interesting day. It isn’t often that two hippy protesters get to spend a day in the presence of the Wellington power elite. We learned a lot. But did the Committee?”

He did innumerable media interviews and spoke at public meetings throughout the country (the last of which was in Auckland, just after the Domebusters’ acquittal by the Wellington jury in 2010. Almost immediately after that his health collapsed spectacularly, putting him in hospital for several months and starting the steep downward decline that ended with his 2013 death). He was part of an NZ peace movement delegation to an international conference in Athens in the 80s; he took part in a 1992 mass action at the US nuclear test site in Nevada. “Base Deception” was not the only peace movement documentary with which he was involved – in the early 1980s he and I accompanied Vanguard Films up both Black Birch and Mt John (where the former US Air Force observatory had been the target of a very militant campaign in the 70s) when they were filming “Islands Of The Empire”. His activities and achievements in ABC, not to mention the broader peace movement, are too numerous to list. He was a genuine (non-violent) warrior for peace. He abhorred violence so much, whether to humans or animals, that I’m aware of him having walked out of at least two major movies, one of them an Oscar winner (Becky and I witnessed that walkout, by chance). But I repeat - he was the face and voice and engine, indeed the soul, of the Anti-Bases Campaign.

CAFCA & Organiser Account

Nor was ABC the only organisation with which Bob was actively involved. He was an active member of CAFCA from 1984 (when it was still CAFCINZ) until 2010 inclusive, doing things like regularly helping at Watchdog mailouts and being among the hardy few to attend the Annual General Meetings. He loved to attend the events to announce the winner/s of the annual Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand, most recently the Wellington one in 2010. He was in town for the Domebusters’ trial, so he brought his Wellington resident son Graham along and afterwards the three of us went downtown for a coffee. It was a great night.

Bad health didn’t stop his enjoyment of Watchdog – in 2010 I took his copy of the latest issue into Christchurch Hospital, where I was startled to be told that he could be found in “the boneyard” (medical humour for where patients got plaster fitted or removed). Even more startling was that it was staffed by uniformed Army medics, getting in some practice before their deployment to Afghanistan. In my 1992 “Dr Odd Base” profile I wrote: “In some CAFCA activities, such as protests at the 1989 Mont Pelerin Society regional conference in Christchurch, he has been extremely active” (see “Bludgers’ Prizegiving: Mont Pelerin Society Conference Protest” in Watchdog 63, April 1990; http://www.historicalwatchdog.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/foreign-control-watchdog-april-1990.html).

From 1993-2010 Bob was in charge of the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account, which provides my income. So, basically, he was an extra member of the CAFCA Committee for all those years. He was my paymaster for that period and he made a very good job of it. Every year he presented the Organiser Account’s financial report to CAFCA’s AGM. He last did that in September 2010; just a fortnight after the first big quake had started the seismic sequence that was to drive him out of his home and out of Christchurch. It was also not long after he had been seriously ill and hospitalised for months, and could only walk and stand with the aid of a walking frame, and needed to use the disability ramp to get into the venue. That was to be the last of his annual Organiser Account’s financial reports to be published in Watchdog. He never let ill health stop him getting my pay cheque to me, if at all humanly possible – on one occasion, when afflicted by a debilitating attack of Ménière’s disease (a vicious inner ear condition which completely buggers your balance) he could drive just fine but could not stand or walk without difficulty. He drove to our place, then felt his way along the hall wall in order to stay upright, and then gave me my pay cheque. In 2010, when he spent months in Christchurch and Burwood Hospitals, I took the Organiser chequebook to him to get cheques signed. His replacement, Warren Brewer of the CAFCA Committee, set up a fortnightly automatic payment so that I am no longer dependent on getting my pay via cheque.

PSNA

Bob was an active member of the Philippines Solidarity Network of Aotearoa (PSNA) from 2000-2010. I’ve already mentioned the several weeks he spent accompanying Filipina anti-bases and anti-nuclear activist Cora Fabros on her 2008 national speaking tour (although that was an ABC, not PSNA, project); and his last ever trip to Waihopai, in October 2010, in order to accompany senior Filipino political activists Luis Jalandoni and his wife Coni Ledesma, who were on a national speaking tour organised by PSNA. Whenever possible, Bob attended the Christchurch meetings of Filipino activists that PSNA brought to NZ. Although he never went there, Bob was actively interested in the Philippines long before he joined PSNA in 2000. As a non-violent direct action activist he was inspired by how the Philippine people non-violently used People Power to get rid of the detested dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. As a veteran anti-bases campaigner he was particularly inspired by how the Philippine people got rid of the US bases in 1991 after decades of struggle (PR regularly ran articles about the Philippines, as Watchdog had done before it, back in the 80s). And his friendship to the Filipino people included the Filipinos that he came to know in Christchurch. He was a very dear friend to my wife Becky and to all her four sisters and their mother, whom he met when they stayed with us on various visits over the years, most recently in early 2010. He was particularly fond of our niece who lived with us for 5½ years (2005-11) while studying here. When she went home in January 2011 he was in Christchurch Hospital – she made a point of visiting him to say goodbye, as one of her last acts before leaving.

Environment, Buses & Dogs

He summed it very succinctly in my “Dr Odd Base” profile: “Activism is where you find your soul mates”. That article went on to say: “Bob has not confined himself to the peace movement. ‘I’ve had a long interest in environmental issues, starting in California. As a professional ecologist, I know the pillaging that goes on. We’re wreaking havoc. The place where I’m having most impact is at Lincoln as a teacher’. In recent years he’s worked with Barbara on the woodchipping campaign. They belong to Greenpeace and Forest and Bird. Most recently he was involved in Power for our Future, ‘focusing beyond Manapouri’. Press readers know him as a spokesperson for Buswatch, which was formed in response to the deregulation of Christchurch bus services. ‘It’s an environmental issue. Our cities are being destroyed by automobiles. I advocate anything that gets rid of automobiles’ (and, true to his principles, he takes two buses a day to get out to Lincoln”. But, in latter years, the decline in bus services and the inhospitable nature of midwinter bus transfers in Cathedral Square meant that he had to drive to work at Lincoln). He was no armchair environmentalist – for example, he was one of those who sat in front of logging trucks in one 1993 West Coast native forests protest. Bob was a grassroots member of the Green Party for years; and was also centrally involved in the Canterbury Environmental Trust, which built and ran the Environmental Education Centre in Craigieburn Forest Park, in the Canterbury high country. One of Bob’s long term colleagues from the Trust spoke at ABC’s Christchurch memorial for him.

One final quote from “Dr Odd Base”: “They also spend time at their bach and acre of land at Peel Forest (South Canterbury), where they are steadily planting native trees. They are foster parents for Dogwatch, and have fostered about 20 dogs over the years (the permanent canine population is four). There are two cats and an owl and a hawk. Barbara has a Department of Conservation permit to care for injured raptors (birds of prey), and they’ve cared for about a dozen birds over the years. These decidedly carnivorous dogs, cats and birds share the house with a human family of vegetarians”. Those two things – Peel Forest and dogs (but no more cats) - remained constant over the next 20 years. Bob and Barbara only sold their Peel Forest place at the beginning of 2010. ABC Committee members visited and/or stayed there several times; it was one of the most pleasant places where we held our annual strategy meetings, broken up by walks in the beautiful forest or by fun things like badminton on the big lawn (other places ABC has held strategy meetings have included Taylor’s Mistake and Little River, both on Banks Peninsula, and Waikawa Bay, near Picton. It was at the latter, in 1998, that we threw a surprise 60th birthday party for Bob, who had just had major surgery very recently. That was one of the social highlights of his time with ABC).

He was a passionate dog man, always had a house and/or his “dogmobile” full of them, and he and Barbara volunteered at Dogwatch for many years (I’m a cat man, not a dog man, and had the misfortune, on many occasions, of travelling in the dogmobile, sometimes complete with the huge greyhounds that he and Barbara re-homed in recent years, after those dogs had finished their racing careers). I remember Owen Wilkes asking me once: “Does he still have the house full of mad dogs?” The answer was yes, and when he and Barbara had to flee Christchurch immediately after the February 2011 quake, they took the one surviving dog with them (not a greyhound). So far as I know Barbara still has him with her in Wellington.

I have two personal anecdotes about Bob and dogs, both from very recent years. At one ABC Committee meeting at Robyn Dann’s house, Bob got a call from Barbara to say one of their greyhounds was missing. Bob immediately swung into action and told me that if I wanted a ride home, I’d have to go with him. So, off we went, at night, up deserted streets on Huntsbury Hill, where they lived. But I drew the line when Bob told me, in all seriousness, to stand in the middle of the road and shout out: “Here, Sweetie” (the bloody dog’s name). Fortunately Barbara informed him that Sweetie had rematerialised, before it became necessary for me to do so. The other story involved Robyn’s huge and enthusiastic dog, Cho, who loved Bob with, well, doglike devotion (by contrast she sat on me at meetings, which constituted a major risk to life and limb). In late 2010, after Bob had spent several months in hospital and could only walk with the aid of two sticks (but he could drive OK), he resumed attending ABC Committee meetings at Robyn’s. As he arrived at one, Cho was inside and was so excited at the sound of her old mate outside that she jumped straight through the closed window, glass and all, to get to him (she emerged unscathed – no brain, no pain). When Robyn rang her insurance company, she told them this was probably the only claim in Christchurch in late 2010 not arising from an earthquake. Dennis Small, Bob’s long time colleague and friend, brought the house down at ABC’s September 2013 memorial by telling a story that arose from their mutual involvement in Dogwatch. Dennis tried to tame a traumatised dog that had been abused and for his troubles got bitten in a sensitive place. Bob insisted that he would help out on another such attempt, with the result that the dog lunged at him, bit him in the same sensitive place and put him in hospital (I’ll stick with cats).

Many Years Of Serious Health Problems

It is now necessary to deal with the subject of his health, which formed the untold back story to so much of the final third of his life. When I first met Bob 31 years ago he suffered from manageable problems such as asthma and migraines (I have some experience of both; firsthand in the case of the odd asthma attack, and second hand in the case of my former partner of 18 years, who regularly suffered crippling migraines – and still does, as far as I know). But, from the late 1990s onwards, Bob’s health got dramatically and irreversibly worse. He had multiple problems, quite often at the same time. It started with the Ménière’s disease (a vicious inner ear condition which completely buggers your balance) which I’ve already mentioned. The first time he suffered an attack of that it put him in hospital with what the doctors thought was a heart attack. He continued to suffer those attacks, and be hospitalised because of them, for the rest of his life. He also had an irregular heart beat problem, which also hospitalised him now and again. He was in hospital with pneumonia on more than one occasion. But the biggie, which ultimately killed him, was cancer. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1998, aged 59 (he went straight to the emergency department of Christchurch Hospital after coming to an ABC meeting in absolute agony). He had major surgery that year but no other kind of cancer treatment. For the next 12 years he was living with all these heath problems whilst still working at Lincoln University and being a central figure in everything that ABC was doing. As the years went by his energy levels fell and fell, and the number of pills he had to take grew and grew. Not that he took it quietly – he was a terrible hospital patient. I witnessed him one time threatening to throw a chair through a Christchurch Hospital window unless the staff got him some more effective pain relief. As a vegetarian (he defined himself as a “fishatarian”) he got into all sorts of rows with the poor staff about the food.

In 2009 he knew that something was wrong, because one hip was really hurting him. When we shared a tent at the January 2010 Waihopai protest, he told me that would be the last time he would sleep on the ground, as it was too painful (and that turned out to be his last ever Waihopai protest). He spent a week and half in Wellington in March 2010 waiting, fruitlessly, to be called as an expert defence witness at the Domebusters’ criminal trial. He had to keep pacing the District Court corridors to calm the pain in his hip. After they were acquitted, he had one more speaking gig, in Auckland, and that turned out to be that. Shortly after coming home, one of his dogs broke his arm (ripping his shoulder out of its socket) by suddenly taking off after something while Bob was holding the lead, pulling him over (as I said, I’ll stick to cats). While he was recuperating from that he had an X ray on his hip and the verdict was bad – it had been eaten away by cancer that had sat there undiagnosed for 12 years (Bob was so pissed off by his GP that he promptly changed doctor) and there was a danger that something as mundane as walking could cause it to snap. He was ordered into Christchurch Hospital immediately for a hip replacement. He ended up spending several months in there and at Burwood Hospital. He was told that he would eventually walk again, with a slight limp and maybe needing a walking stick. That turned out to be wildly optimistic. Bob never walked again unaided. He got out of Burwood in midwinter 2010 (Warren Thomson and I took him home) and started the process of recovery. Although he couldn’t walk unaided he could drive just fine and enjoyed the independence that gave him. He resumed attending ABC meetings, right up until the end of the year; as I‘ve already mentioned, he made his last ever visit to Waihopai, in October 2010, driving himself there and back, unaccompanied, in order to join Filipino political activists who were visiting the base. He planned to take part in the January 2011 Waihopai protest and booked himself into a motel, as his days in tents were over. It wasn’t to be – at the end of 2010 he was diagnosed with brain cancer (he told us that he could feel that something was not right in his head) and immediately sent back to Christchurch Hospital for brain surgery, to be followed by radiotherapy. He spent all of January 2011 in hospital, missing Waihopai.

Quakes Were Last Straw

The final killer ingredient in this toxic brew was the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes – 12,000 of them (although Bob was gone long before they had basically run their course by the end of 2011) – we’re still getting them, now and again, and will do for years. The first, and biggest, struck in September 2010 and started off the whole seismic catastrophe. Bob was at home slowly recovering from months in hospital and regaining limited mobility. The house was structurally damaged and continued getting more and more damaged as the thousands of aftershocks continued to strike at any time of the day or night. Bob hurriedly terminated one phone conversation with me as he’d been told to keep clear of his desk in case a disused brick chimney came crashing through the ceiling above it. The family wanted him to move to Wellington but he repeatedly told his ABC colleagues: “I’ve survived a 7.1 earthquake, so why would I want to move to Wellington, which is on a major fault line?” But he also described himself to us as “traumatised” and I saw the evidence of that for myself. It was not as if he was unused to quakes – he came from California, after all – but the combination of very, very fragile health and relentless earthquakes was to prove too much for him.

In February 2011, following his brain surgery and weeks in hospital in January, he had a week of radiotherapy to the head. The family had been warned that there was a risk of brain damage (and it subsequently emerged that the treatment destroyed his short term memory, which caused all sorts of major problems). His daughter Andra came from California for several weeks to help Barbara look after him. He finished his week of radiotherapy on a Friday and Andra brought him straight to our place. It was the first time Becky and I had seen her this century and it was lovely to see Bob’s smiling face, even though his mobility was strictly limited. To mark the occasion Becky took a group photo of all four of us on our dining room couch. None of us knew at the time that it was to be our last ever photo with Bob; the last time Becky ever saw him, and his last visit to our home, which he had visited countless times over nearly 30 years for meetings, mailouts, Waihopai workbees, dinners and parties. We trusted him so much that he permanently had a key to the door, in case he needed to access my office while we were away (and he had done so). It was as much his home as ours.

Fleeing Home & Christchurch For Good

The killer quake struck the following Tuesday afternoon and that was the last straw for Bob. He never told me (or anybody) what happened; he told me: “I don’t want to think about it”; it was too traumatic for him, and, I have no doubt, hastened his precipitous decline and death. For a first person account of what happened at the Leonard home that day I am indebted to an e-mail from Andra several weeks later, from Wellington (11/3/11). It is a terrifyingly vivid description of that quake in microcosm – what happened to one family in one house (a story repeated by hundreds of thousands of people in tens of thousands of houses and buildings). When the quake struck she was taking one of the dogs for a walk up Huntsbury Hill: “It was like there was a monster inside (the Earth) that wanted to get out…Then I looked towards the city centre and saw tendrils of grey dust wafting upwards. That’s when I realised how destructive the quake had been…

“When I got to the house, everything that could hit the floor had. Plants, books, shelves, lamps, knives, and dust all over the place. Dad had been standing in the kitchen preparing lunch. He grabbed onto the stove for balance and it kept him upright, but bounced a couple of feet out from the wall. He said he wasn’t sure what was happening at first, he was just holding on for dear life. Barbara was in the front office working on the computer. She says she just closed the computer and waited for things to stop falling.

“When I walked in the front door, Dad was standing in the kitchen while Barbara was in the hallway trying to use a stick to shut off power to the house, since water was leaking from the ceiling through the electrical circuit box. Once we were sure the power was off, Dad sat back down in his armchair and Barbara and I tried to assess the actual damage. As you well know, we kept having aftershocks, so we decided to pack up some emergency supplies in case we needed to evacuate. After about an hour my dad was so upset by the continuing aftershocks that I suggested that he get in the car and I would drive it to the top of the driveway, where he could be in the open and feel safer. He agreed to that.

“Barbara and I continued to look for essential supplies and pile them in the driveway. The last thing she wanted was the safe full of photos in the flat. As we entered the doorway to the flat, the 12th aftershock hit, the one that was about 5.9.There was a huge crash as the brick chimneypiece in the kitchen came tumbling down across the room and hit the door we had just walked through. I was able to hold it open enough to squeeze back through into the living room. We didn’t stop to see how much damage had been done in the kitchen – we just walked shakily out the front door. Graham later told us that some of the bricks had punched through the floor to the basement below. Good thing none of us was in the kitchen at that point.

“That was pretty much the point when we decided to leave Christchurch. The house was clearly uninhabitable and we needed to get my dad away to a place that wasn’t continually shaking. He suggested we head south towards Lincoln and then start looking for a motel to stay in. So we loaded the dogs in the car, took one container of water, gave the rest to the neighbours and headed out. My dad hasn’t wanted to discuss the earthquake with anybody. He says the experience comes back too vividly and he can’t bear it. I think it was much more terrifying to be inside a building with everything falling and crashing. I am lucky that I was outside when it struck and didn’t experience the initial devastation…”.

Becky and I had no idea what had happened to Bob. We had no power, water, toilet or mobile phone for five days, but we had a working landline, so we tried ringing him, to no avail. The day after the quake we went to their house - we had to park at the bottom of the hill and walk up, as the road was closed. There was a huge rip in it, as if it had been stabbed and slashed with a giant knife. We found the house wide open, in complete chaos and obviously abandoned. There was a big jolt while we were there, so we got out of it fast. I actually reported Bob missing to the Police – they rang me back days later to say they couldn’t find him. By that stage Bob had rung me to say that the three of them were safe and well, and in a motel down south. A few days after the quake they came back to Christchurch and immediately headed on to Wellington. Bob never returned to Christchurch and never saw his home again. That was the end of his 29 years in Christchurch and very much the beginning of the end of his life.

Final Two Years

Bob had always loved Wellington and had a great time whenever he had visited, primarily to see Graham and Lisa. But the cruel irony is that when he was actually living there, he was far too sick to enjoy what the city has to offer. His health just basically collapsed. Nor did he escape earthquakes, namely the big ones of July and August 2013 with their whole sequence of thousands of aftershocks (he told his family he thought they were “wimpy” by comparison to the Christchurch ones). He spent a lot of his final two years in hospital and ended up in the hospital wing of a rest home. We had some contact throughout that period – he missed my March 2011 60th birthday party, which he had planned to attend. So he rang to wish me happy birthday and to urge me: “Get out of that demolition zone and come up here!” (leaving town had never seriously crossed my mind and if I did want to escape earthquakes I wouldn’t go to Wellington to live). I visited him three times, most recently in May 2013.

I’m not going to go into detail about his condition in his final two years, because he is entitled to privacy and dignity. But, I will say that his condition acted as a powerful motivating force on me. Every time I felt reluctant to go for my daily walk if the weather was inclement, I just thought “we take mobility for granted; poor old Bob can’t go for a walk; so, note to self, use it or lose it”. And out I’d go. When Graham rang me in August 2013 to tell me that his father was dead, I didn’t feel sad or upset, I didn‘t cry (although writing this has brought on some tears). No, I felt great relief that Bob was now freed from terrible suffering, and at peace. The fact of the matter is that the Bob that I knew and loved had already died a couple of years earlier. His family and friends were now free to remember him as he had been and to celebrate his remarkable life.

Throughout my nearly 45 years as a political activist I have been lucky enough to have had two very long, enduring and extremely productive partnerships with colleagues who are also very close friends; one each from ABC and CAFCA, namely Bob Leonard (for 30 years) and Bill Rosenberg (40+). Both of them were founders and leaders of their respective groups; both brilliant researchers, writers, speakers, strategists and activists; both with an absolute passion for their group and their issue. They had many similarities and things in common – they were each a member of the other’s group; they were friends and colleagues; each had a PhD (my wife Becky unfailingly refers to them as “Dr Bob” and “Dr Bill”); for several years they both worked at Lincoln University and they jointly campaigned to preserve bus services to there; Bill had worked with Barbara in a private company in the 80s and was also a member with her that same decade of Computer Professionals for the Prevention of Accidental Nuclear War; both permanently moved to Wellington within two years of each other, although Bill’s relocation was entirely voluntary and nothing to do with Christchurch earthquakes (which he missed in their entirety). In each case Bob and Bill’s style perfectly complemented mine, which made for a very effective political double act. Sadly, my partnership with Bob has now come to an end (in reality it did so in 2010); the one with Bill is very much alive and well.

This is the longest obituary I’ve ever written and I make no apology for that. Bob is worth every syllable of it. As I’ve said, his story is also the story of ABC and its predecessors. And it’s very much my story too, because I’ve been in ABC et al from the start. This is as much my autobiography as it is his obituary. Bob was not an uncritical colleague and friend, and that is just as it should be. It was only in 2013, when going through his papers which ABC rescued from his house that I came across the following from his file on the 2001 Mike Frost speaking tour (which I organised). Frost and I had had a disagreement about money, namely the old chestnut of who was going to pay for what. Bob e-mailed him (27/5/01) to pour oil on troubled waters: “This is just a personal message to you. I’m sure you know by now that Murray can be very blunt…Murray is a great guy and a brilliant worker. I’ve worked with him for nearly 20 years. But he sure can get up people’s noses. I think you need to know that. Thanks for your patience and understanding. Please keep this message to yourself”. That worked. Frost replied to Bob, the same day: “Thanks for this, Bob. It clears up a lot of unpleasant feelings…Your email to me will go no further. I’m pretty good at keeping secrets!” And, indeed, I would never have found out about this piece of interpersonal diplomacy if not for the unique situation created by the quakes.

Part Of Each Other’s Families

Bob was a close friend not only of me but of my family, and we were like part of his family. He was a friend and colleague of my former partner Christine Bird, who was a founder and leader of both CAFCINZ/CAFCA and CDH, and founder of ABC, until she permanently moved to Australia at the end of 1987. Reading through Bob’s Harewood files has reminded of just what a leading role she played in the anti-bases campaigns of the 80s. She and Bob last met at the 2008 Christchurch event to announce the winner of the annual Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand. And Bob was particularly close to my wife Becky. They were colleagues – Becky attended ABC meetings throughout the 90s; she has been Peace Researcher’s Layout Editor since the turn of the century; she has done all sorts of other things for ABC. And they were good friends. She told me that Bob was a “gentleman” and she was happy to be called “love” by him, because it was genuine and not used in the condescending sense that such words are by men to women. They really cared for each other – when Becky was sick a decade ago it was Bob and Barbara who came to the house with food (an enormous quantity of Chinese takeaways) because he said that they couldn’t bear the thought of Becky having to rely on my cooking! One year in the 90s, when Becky was in the Philippines for Christmas, they were so concerned about me having to live on my own cooking that they kindly invited me to their place to share their vegetarian Christmas dinner. Throughout his final two years of increasingly dire health in Wellington Becky constantly urged me to ring and/or visit him. For his 74th, and final, birthday in 2012, she included a birthday card with the Peace Researcher we posted him. She was very upset when I told her of his death. She had to get to Manila for a family deadline in September 2013 – she delayed her departure by a couple of days, cutting that deadline very fine, so that she could participate in ABC’s memorial for Bob.

We were particularly close throughout 2010, his last full year in Christchurch, and we spent a lot of time together, from his hospital wards to my local café (sadly, also a victim of the February 2011 quake). We talked about everything, including death – he was a scientist and had no doubt that “death marks the extinction of consciousness”. That may be so but my memories of Bob, and those of innumerable other people, will never be extinguished. He was a great friend (who also cured me of any prejudice I may have had towards Americans), and someone who will be badly missed by all who knew him.

He Was A Great Believer That Life Must Go On

And what better way than with new life. A few hours after Graham rang me to tell me that Bob had died I was texted by ABC Committee member Lynda Boyd to say that her sister Jenny (also a Committee member) had given birth to a daughter, her first child. So; the ABC Committee’s first death and first birth, both on the same day. What a bloody day! Bob loved kids – one of the loveliest photos he ever e-mailed me (which I regret not keeping) was of him, the ecstatic granddad, holding a newborn grandkid in the US. He lived long enough to see Graham’s first child, also a daughter, born a few months before his death. He would have loved to have seen Jenny’s baby. Fly free, old friend. And if you turn out to be wrong about the extinction of consciousness, I’ll see you again. I look forward to that. As always, we will have a lot to talk about and laugh about.

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The full version of this, in Peace Researcher 46, December 2013, included an edited selection of tributes to Bob from various people and a report on ABC’s September 2013 Christchurch memorial gathering for him. These have had to be culled from Watchdog because of our being informed, very late in the piece, that our printers have had to reinstate a previous size limit because of a change to their printing equipment. By the time we were told that, the amount of copy for this issue was already way over that limit (and I wouldn’t have written such a long obituary of Bob if I’d known about it in advance), so things have had to be cut or held over until the next issue. It also means that we are unable to do anything more than mention other CAFCA members who died in the second half of 2013, namely Bera MacClement, John Bentley (both of Auckland) and Mark Sadler (of Christchurch). I particularly want to pay tribute to Bera, who was a pledger for decades to the CAFCA/ABC Organiser Account which provides my income. I couldn’t do what I do without people like her. MH.


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