Jeremy Varon (33 page)

Law enforcement increased its efforts to eliminate Weatherman. A month before the explosion, FBI Director Hoover had characterized Weatherman as the “most violent, persistent and pernicious of revolutionary groups” (a distinction usually reserved for the Panthers).126 The FBI immediately began to search for Wilkerson and Boudin, as well as for Weathermen who were free on bond or under consideration for prosecution. Nearly two dozen Weathermen were named as targets for “intensive investigation,” in which designated field offices were to report weekly on their whereabouts or efforts to locate them.127 A memoran-dum explained that “identification of all Weatherman activists,” which permitted sustained surveillance and the preparation of charges, “is the key to smashing the movement.”128 The discovery in late March of a stash of dynamite in Chicago and fears that the Weathermen would react to pending indictments with a “final, desperation outburst of violence” increased the FBI’s sense of urgency.129 A measure of paranoia seemed to 176

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accompany the FBI’s efforts. In late March, the Bureau informed Nixon’s aid John Ehrlichman that a federal employee had a daughter in Weatherman, who had allegedly told him that the group planned to bomb airline passenger planes.130

On April 2, Attorney General John Mitchell personally announced a fifteen-count federal indictment of twelve Weatherleaders and named twenty-eight unindicted co-conspirators for the Days of Rage, making many of the elusive Weathermen fugitives from U.S. law.131 (In late December 1969, a Cook County grand jury had issued thirty-seven indictments against sixty-four Weathermen for alleged breeches of Illinois law.)132 The main federal charges were for “conspiracy” and “interstate travel to incite riots”—the same charges brought against the Chicago 8

defendants. Each charge held a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

In May, the FBI publicized that “one of the most intensive manhunts in

[its] history” was under way for nine of the Weatherleaders.133 To aid in its pursuit, the Bureau schemed to have Richard Starnes of the Scripps-Howard News Service write a “special visual feature story” on the nine fugitives, making use of the FBI’s own “Identification Orders” and emphasizing the Weathermen’s violent nature.134 On May 7, Starnes’s article appeared in the
Washington Daily News,
replete with descriptions of the fugitives provided by the Bureau.135 Hoover personally thanked Starnes for his “excellent article,” and the FBI noted with satisfaction that a congressman—unaware of the story’s origin—had placed it in the
Congressional Record.
136

The FBI was, however, unable to locate most Weathermen. It complained, with unintentional humor, that their “degenerate living habits, their immoral conduct, and their use of drugs” made it “extremely difficult to find informants who fit this mold and are willing to live as they do.”137 It also recognized that hundreds of communes throughout the country provided potential havens for the Weathermen. Desperately needing an arrest, on April 15, the FBI captured two Weatherwomen, Dianne Donghi and Linda Evans, but in the process blew the cover of its sole deep informant, Larry Grathwohl.138 (As part of the deception, Grathwohl had been arrested with the others, but was observed in the police station talking on friendly terms with police.) Weathermen who were more heavily sought escaped the FBI’s grasp, as dozens of sympathizers throughout America provided them with safe housing, disguises, and money.

For the left, the townhouse explosion was another chilling eruption in a climate of escalating confusion and violence. I. F. Stone, at the lib-Excesses and Limits

177

eral end of opinion, saw in the blast a cautionary tale for a society apparently willing to sacrifice its youth in a war they had rejected.139 Left-wing critics took the blast as decisive proof of the poverty of Weatherman’s approach. Detroit’s
Fifth Estate
offered a “Eulogy for SDS,”

accusing Weatherman of having finally “lost touch with political reality” altogether.140 Andrew Kopkind, still ambivalent about Weatherman, concluded that the budding armed struggle was far too small and disorganized to actually threaten state power. Yet he suggested that it might enhance the current “sense of crisis” that would force “real, existential choices” upon Americans.141 Other radicals, closer still to the Weathermen, memorialized the dead in anonymous poems. The most evocative began, “How does it feel / To be inside / An explosion / Was there time / To flash upon / The way we came?”142

For all the acrimony heaped on Weatherman, enthusiasm for revolution had been building for months and would rush toward a crescendo in the spring of 1970, just as the group met disaster. A May 1969 graphic in DeKalb’s
News from Nowhere
captured radicals’ sense of the inexorable march toward violence. It begins by showing two “kaleidoscope”

eyes next to a hand holding a sunflower under the label “1966.” The image for 1967 has peace signs in the eyes. By 1968, the eyes bear the “ohm”

symbol for resistance. “1969” features blackened sunglasses next to a revolver and the ominous caption, “Mine eyes have seen the coming . . .”143 In November, New York City’s
Leviathan
announced its goal of transforming itself from a “magazine of the movement” into one “of the revolution.” It explained, “We began life as Jonah . . . inside the great whale that devours us all. We’re still not sure exactly . . . how to get out . . . but we’re going to learn how to rip that whale’s guts apart.”144

The following month, twenty-two-year-old David Hughey, recently captured for involvement with the Melville collective, issued his own cosmic call to arms: “Our little individual consciousness whose main concern is to be protected . . . has to start giving way to a collective consciousness . . . where the individual, rather than constantly escaping life and death . . . let’s go and flows into life and death. And in the context of repressive America this flow into life and death amounts to a very deep and strong desire to fight.”145 As such rhetoric proliferated, so too did the means for acting on it. In December, Berkeley’s “International Liberation School” published
Firearms and Self-Defense: A Handbook for
Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Easy Riders,
which covered such topics as “Shotguns” and “Gun Laws.”146

The
Berkeley Tribe
wove together the militancy, exuberance, and con-178

Excesses and Limits

ceit of radicals, as well as their international outlook. The cover of its late February–early March issue pictures a snarling globe topped by Cleaver’s proclamation: “We call for total chaos in the capitalist countries . . . we will have war.”147 Dotting the globe are reports of violence: the bombing of a Select Service office in Arizona; the destruction of a mu-nicipal building outside of Cleveland; the attack by Venezuelan guerrillas on a Mobil Oil pipeline; and the trashing of the U.S. embassy in Manila.

An editorial called for the immediate building of a “People’s Militia” to combat what it described as the “Final Krackdown” allegedly planned against local radicals.148 Later in the month, radicals answered the conviction of the Chicago 8 defendants on charges of contempt of court (they were acquitted of the more serious charges, but still potentially faced years in prison) with semi-planned rioting throughout the country.149 In both word and deed, echoes of Weatherman seemed everywhere.

Nixon’s announcement on May 1 of the hitherto secret bombings of Cambodia and the subsequent shooting of students at Kent State and Jackson State universities threw the nation’s campuses into chaos. Students shut down hundreds of universities and for a week bombed or burned ROTC buildings at a rate of four a day, amid calls for revenge or civil war.150 According to government figures, there were 281 attacks on ROTC buildings alone and a staggering 7,200 arrests on American campuses from June 1969–June 1970.151 In a special issue on “Guerrilla Warfare in the United States,”
Scanlan’s
magazine documented close to 500 acts of arson or bombings (attempted or successful) of government, corporate, police, military, and university targets in the first six months of 1970.152 In August, the New Left took its first life when four radicals bombed the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, accidentally killing a postdoctoral student, Robert Fassnacht.

A month later, Susan Saxe and Kathy Power were sought for the murder of a Boston police officer during a bank robbery meant to secure funds for radical activities. Activists of every sort fleeing prosecution or imprisonment fed the burgeoning underground—among them Jane Alpert and Patricia Swinton of the Melville collective; the former SNCC president Rap Brown, wanted for incitement to riot; Angela Davis, suspected of involvement in the bloody takeover of a Marin County courthouse by Jonathan Jackson (brother of the Soledad inmate and author George Jackson); the radical pacifists Daniel Berrigan and Mary Moylan, convicted of antidraft activities; the Madison bombers; and Saxe and Power.153 By October, Saxe, Power, and Bernardine Dohrn were on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives” list.154

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The release from prison of Huey Newton following his acquittal of murder charges and the Black Panthers’ convening of the “Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention” in the summer of 1970 promised to provide leadership and focus for the left. In September, the Weathermen helped break Timothy Leary, serving a ten-year sentence for possession of small amounts of marijuana, out of a California prison.

An exultant Leary exclaimed in a Weatherman communiqué: “There is no compromise with a machine. You cannot talk peace and love to a hu-manoid robot whose every Federal bureaucratic impulse is soulless, heart-less, lifeless, loveless. . . . Resist lovingly . . . passively . . . physically. . . .

To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act.”155 Leary then fled to Algeria, where he and Eldridge Cleaver forged an apparent alliance, fueling new hope of a merger of cultural and political radicals—the revolutionary marriage of acid and guns. Back in the United States, the Black Liberation Army, which had evolved from the Black Panther Party and was supported by its “International Section,”

headed by Cleaver, became increasingly active; its clandestine cells robbed banks, attacked police stations, and engaged on occasion in deadly ambushes of police.156 In a nonviolent vein, the growing feminist and gay rights movements drew more young people into activism and radically expanded the meaning of revolution. The Weathermen, long denounced as poison in the New Left’s waters, marveled at the rising tide of militancy. Taking refuge there, Dohrn recalls, “We became part of a sea of us; we were not at all the only ones.”157

The Weathermen initially gave little public indication that either their goals or tactics had changed after the townhouse explosion. Most immediately, the explosion both hastened and made more total the move underground. Those living semi-underground or awaiting indictments vanished overnight. Braley explained, “every FBI agent for a million miles was on every person”; everybody “had to be grabbed off the streets and put somewhere.”158 In the panicked process, some members were simply left behind.

News of the blast reached some Weathermen in surreal ways. Johnny Lerner was in Cuba on a “Venceremos Brigade” with three other “bor-derline” Weathermen when he heard reports of the explosion. The stranded Weathermen then went to Europe with fake ID’s and returned to the United States; though initially meaning to reconnect with the underground Weathermen, Lerner never completed the last step.159 Another of the stranded members, long conflicted about the group, did meet with Weatherleaders when back in the United States. If anything, her experi-180

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ence in Cuba cutting sugarcane increased her distance from the group.

She explained, “It was very hard work and I liked it. . . . You had the satisfaction of a big pile of sugarcane at the end of each row. . . . it felt very satisfying after the life I had been living” with the Weathermen. At the meeting, she told the Weathermen that she was “going to find a different direction in life,” and left the organization.160

Russell Neufeld had long been bothered by Weatherman’s inability

“to connect with real peoples’ lives.” Concluding that it was “ultimately mass movements that change society,” he quit the group when it submerged more deeply underground. Neufeld was walking in New York City to meet a friend when he learned of the townhouse explosion, and he then watched the details unfold on television in a hotel room with his parents (in town for a professional conference). His brother called from an apartment in Madison, Wisconsin, with Grathwohl present, leading to his spurious arrest for having allegedly bought the dynamite in the townhouse.161 Like other Weathermen, he had no idea of the existence of the New York collective, let alone its plan to attack human targets.

The explosion and the arrest, Russell confessed, left both him and his parents, “in shock” and took “a long time to accept and internalize.”162

And then there was Bill Ayers, already underground, waiting for two days near a dusty truckstop in rural America for some word from the Weatherbureau, learning finally that his best friend, Terry, and his girlfriend, Diana, were dead. His mind reeled with fantasies of consolation: Robbins, he convinced himself, was the group’s demon, who had pushed for the reckless assault; his beloved Diana, in his guilt-wracked imagin-ings, was the group’s angel, who had pleaded with Robbins and the others to stop.163

Underground did not mean inactive. On May 21, 1970, Weatherman issued its first communiqué in which Dohrn, now the group’s main leader, made a declaration of war. Describing all efforts at reform as futile, Dohrn announced that revolutionary violence “is the only way” for American rebels. The Weathermen also flaunted their success at hiding, taunting the FBI to find them “in every tribe, commune, dormitory, farmhouse, barracks and townhouse where kids are making love, smoking dope, and loading guns.” Praising the growing militancy of the youth culture, they proclaimed: “All freaks are revolutionaries, and all revolutionaries are freaks.” The communiqué concluded with the warning that within two weeks, Weatherman would attack a symbol of “Amerikan injustice.” A few days past the deadline, Weatherman claimed responsibility for the bombing of New York City police headquarters in retaliation for police Excesses and Limits