Jeremy Varon (29 page)

demise.”6 The Weathermen also became the objects of intensive federal investigations and harassment by local police. In late October, the FBI alerted its field offices that New York City’s Weathermen were “going underground and forming commando-type units which will engage in terroristic acts, including bombings, arson, and assassinations.”7 Within days, it ordered all offices to “follow the activities of any Weatherman group in their respective areas” and opened cases on all known or suspected members, citing the group’s “past violent activities and continued advocacy of revolutionary measures to overthrow the United States government.”8 Local law enforcement was quick to respond. In mid November, twenty-three Boston Weathermen were arrested on spurious attempted murder charges after someone fired shots at a Cambridge police station. Though the charges were dropped when the only witness, a teenager, confessed that the police had coerced his false testimony, local Weathermen continued to face trumped-up indictments and stiff penalties for protest activity.9

Police hostility was most intense in Chicago, home to Weatherman’s leadership in the SDS National Office. Plain-clothed “Red Squads” followed, threatened, arrested, and, on occasion, beat Chicago Weathermen.10 Fearful of a police raid on its office, the collective obtained firearms to defend itself. In the fall of 1969, the Red Squad indeed busted down the doors—with the Weathermen wisely deciding not to resist with gunfire—and hung Weatherman Robert Roth out the window by his ankles.11 However intimidating, police treatment of the Weathermen paled in comparison to the assaults on Chicago’s Black Panthers. Gunfights 154

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between the police and the Panthers periodically erupted, claiming lives on both sides. In late November, police shot dead a Panther, “Jake” Winters, in a warehouse, and the Panthers charged that he had been killed in cold blood. Russell Neufeld and Robert Roth later recalled feeling in Chicago that they were “in a war zone,” in which Weatherman’s survival depended on its developing a clandestine capacity.12

In the late fall and early winter, two events deepened Weatherman’s conviction that there was an immediate need for armed struggle. Each highlighted the dominance of race in Weatherman’s ideology and self-conception. The Chicago 8 conspiracy trial had begun on September 24, prompting demonstrations at Chicago’s federal courthouse in which dozens of protesters, including several Weathermen, were arrested.13 To the left, the trial was a transparent attempt to weaken the movement by imprisoning its leaders on essentially fraudulent charges. The defendants responded by lampooning the trial process, while also using it to indict the Vietnam War and racism.

A month into the trial, the Black Panther leader Bobby Seale was literally bound to his chair and gagged after repeatedly interrupting the proceedings to demand representation by an attorney of his choice. (He had wanted to be represented by his personal attorney, who was ill at the time, and not by the lawyers defending the Chicago 8 collectively.)14

Seale, who blasted the judge as racist in his courtroom rant, was the only black among the defendants; at the time of the August 1968 Convention, he had never even met most of those with whom he had allegedly conspired to engage in violent disruptions. The image of a black man physically restrained in an American courtroom startled people across the political spectrum. For leftists, it affirmed their view of the trial as a grim farce. To the Weathermen, the alleged lack of solidarity shown Seale by the seven white defendants and the failure of demonstrators outside the courtroom to erupt in outrage further proved that whites were not sufficiently committed to aiding the black struggle.

With stepped-up violence, the Weathermen would show their superior commitment.

Then, on December 4, the Illinois Black Panther Party chairman, Fred Hampton, aged twenty-one, and a fellow Panther, Mark Clark, aged twenty-three, were murdered during their sleep in a pre-dawn raid by Chicago police on a Panther house, just blocks from the SDS office.

The raid had been coordinated by the FBI, relying on a paid informant for floor plans and other details to plot the attack. Though the au-Excesses and Limits

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thorities claimed that the Panthers had provoked a gunfight, the latter quickly established that the police story was entirely fallacious and opened the building for the community to see evidence that Hampton and Clark had, in plain language, been assassinated. (Preposterously, the seven Panthers who survived the raid, all of whom were shot by police, were initially charged with attempting to murder their attack-ers, even though they had offered no resistance.) Especially disturbing was the sight of Hampton’s blood-drenched bed, in which he had been shot at close range. The informant, who had suspected but not known that the FBI was planning a hit on Hampton, was paid $300 for his services.15 That the youthful Hampton had been such a dedicated and inspiring figure compounded outrage at the attack. Under his leadership, the Chicago Panthers had developed a “Breakfast for Children”

program, provided work and hope for scores of poor young blacks, and worked to forge a truce between rival Chicago gangs. An overflow crowd attended Hampton’s church funeral, and thousands publicly mourned his death.

Relations between the Chicago Panthers and the Weathermen were at once close and strained. The groups saw each other on a daily basis, and the Panthers used Weatherman’s printing press to put out their newspaper. Yet Hampton had publicly denounced the Days of Rage.

Jeff Jones recalls the Panthers being “infuriated” by Weatherman’s refusal to function simply as a support group of theirs.16 Bill Ayers confessed feeling that the Panthers’ “serve the people” ethic, by making resource-poor communities responsible for the distribution of social welfare, amounted to a “gun-toting liberalism” that failed to address the structural inequities of capitalism.17 Tensions between the groups reached a head following the police killing of Winters. In Neufeld’s recollection, the Panthers had wanted Weatherman to print their memorial poster for him; but Weatherman, lacking money for the materials, was unable to provide that help. So the Panthers, led by Hampton, stormed the Weatherman office and beat members with two-by-fours, while muttering lines from Stalin. The Weathermen were stunned by the Panthers’ eruption, attributing it to the immense pressure the Panthers were under. Neufeld was clubbed by Hampton and bears the scar on his head to this day. Asked years later if there might have been a masochistic element to the Weathermen’s relationship with the Panthers, given Weatherman’s concern over its “white skin privilege,” he answered calmly, “No, they were getting killed. They were literally under 156

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siege and they weren’t prepared to deal with it.”18 Just days after the incident, Hampton was dead.

Hampton’s murder deeply affected the Weathermen, underscoring a basic premise of theirs and the New Left as a whole: that race constituted a primary basis of oppression and vastly separated the experiences of white and black activists.19 Reflecting on the shock he felt, David Gilbert highlighted the apparent failure of whites to do enough: “There are Panthers being shot to death in their beds [and if ] we’re a revolutionary movement worth its salt we can’t just say, ‘Oh we sympathize with them.’ We have to create pressure. . . . In terms of my personal experience, it was the murder of Fred Hampton more than any other factor that compelled us to take up armed struggle.”20 At the same time, the murder led the Weathermen to wonder if the limited protection from police violence they had by virtue of being white would soon erode. Wilkerson recalls, “we were terrified” and felt “we had to mold [a] fighting force that would be effective or everybody would be killed. . . . Someone woke me up at five o’clock . . . and said ‘Fred’s Dead.’ And probably, if there’s one moment that the [Weather Underground] was born, it was that moment. It was so brutal.”21

Going underground was an ultimately ambiguous turning point for Weatherman, owing largely to a tension in the group’s basic outlook.

On the one hand, the Weathermen saw themselves as “the handful of exceptional whites” or even “race traitors” who alone among the New Left understood the imperative to support the struggles of people of color with violence.22 The result was the group’s intentional isolation from the white movement. On the other hand, Weatherman continued to believe, even as its numbers dwindled and criticism mounted, that its violence would awaken the militancy of young working-class whites, still thought vital to a successful revolution. Was the underground, then, to be part of a militant mass movement, or the final sign of the futility of trying to build such a movement?

This tension had a deeper basis in the group’s analysis. As Naomi Jaffe explained, Weatherman saw most white Americans as embodying a “real historical contradiction” in their dual identities as both “oppressors and oppressed.” The Weathermen, like others on the left, puzzled accordingly over whether whites were potentially agents of, or overwhelmingly obstacles to, radical change. Unlike others, the Weathermen asserted that this question could be answered only through violence—

that violence alone had the power to force whites to resolve their dual identities either in favor of “the oppressed” or their roles as “oppres-Excesses and Limits

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sors.” Disappointed by the response to the Days of Rage, Weatherman now looked to a clandestine fighting force to establish clear lines of battle and reduce complex issues of social and political identity to a single choice.

Compounding the confusion, the group spoke of violence with a double or even triple voice. “Bring the war home,” Weatherman’s slogan in 1969–70, ostensibly called for armed socialist revolution in the United States, but as Dohrn suggested years later, it much more plausibly implied hastening the end of the war in Vietnam by raising its social cost through militant protest. Individual Weathermen may have been committed to the latter, while overtly pledged to the former.23

Neufeld confessed to just this, believing deep down that “the most”

Weatherman “could do was disrupt the empire.”24 Finally, as Ayers suggested, the whole idea of “bringing the war home” may have ultimately been a metaphor. Like the slogan “The Vietnamese will win,” it conveyed New Leftists’ outrage, their naïvely optimistic view of the direction of world history, and their threat to the U.S. establishment—figured as a “doomed and helpless but temporarily destructive giant”—that it would face the escalating wrath of the young unless it did the right thing.25

The move of individual Weathermen into the underground came in different ways and meant different things. According to Neufeld, to avoid arrest while doing even legal things like printing
FIRE!
eventually required the Chicago Weathermen to function surreptitiously. In such a climate, “trying to have a legal, mass movement” seemed “foolhardy and delusional.” For him, “there was never a decision to go [underground].

It just kind of happened.”26 Roth, although seized with horror by Hampton’s murder, was also gripped by a sense of personal responsibility: “It was like I was on a path . . . scared but determined. I thought this is going to make a difference . . . and if not us, who?”27 For Scott Braley, the die had been cast the previous summer. He recalls walking in the woods with a dear friend, a future Weatherwoman, and the two saying to each other, “‘This is leading to revolutionary struggle, probably armed struggle. . . . We might or might not live through it.’ . . . We acknowledged we weren’t sure it was right, [but we] made a vow that we would go down this road [and would never] be any of these horrible people that write turncoat books, ‘I was a dupe of the Communist Party.’ We were doing this consciously.”28

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Never could read no road map

And I don’t know what the weather might do

But hear that witch wind whinin’

See that Dog Star shinin’

I’ve got a feelin’ there’s no time to lose.

The Grateful Dead, “Saint of Circumstance”

(lyrics by John Perry Barlow)

If the Days of Rage were, at least in Weatherman’s design, a moment of pure or unmediated action, Weatherman’s “War Council” in Flint, Michigan, was a massive indulgence in symbols, a dizzying play of signs, mostly exhorting Weatherman’s own members to more intense action. The meeting, held in late December 1969, in a black-owned ballroom in a poor neighborhood, was still technically a meeting of SDS’s national council.

By that point, however, few SDSers recognized Weatherman’s leadership or participated in the conference. The handful of non-Weathermen at Flint included representatives of Detroit’s White Panthers (a militant group that advocated cultural rebellion and armed resistance), the Bay Area Revolutionary Union (a theoretically minded Marxist-Leninist cell), and RYM II, as well as several unaffiliated teenagers. The “War Council” also attracted the interest of the FBI, which just days before the meeting compiled its initial field reports on the Weathermen, identifying approximately 270 members, 85 of whom were already on its special “Security Index.”29

At Flint, agents diligently recorded the identities of most of the 300 or so people in attendance and established who had written checks to rent the auditorium.30

Weatherman had advertised the Flint event as a political and cultural happening—in the words of the Liberation News Service (LNS), an “out-asight international youth culture freak show.”31 The Weathermen would try, in a familiar and frequently vexing gesture of the New Left, to blend militant politics with the libertine spirit of the counterculture. According to the Weatherwoman Susan Stern, Flint was Weatherman’s “attempt to give the movement and the counterculture another chance before [giving] up on white-skinned Americans altogether.”32 Yet the event disappointed anyone expecting a genuine interest in making allies on the part of the Weathermen.

Weatherman had two very serious agendas at Flint. Midway through the gathering, the Weatherbureau announced the plan to go underground.