Jeremy Varon (63 page)

“New Socialist Man.”

99. Quoted in Raskin,
For the Hell of It,
188.

100.
Berkeley Tribe,
December 12–19, 1969; January 9–15, 1970, 5.

101.
Ann Arbor Argus,
May 24–June 9, 1969, 11.

102. Yet Stern also described the Manson gang’s murder of the pregnant Sharon Tate as a potentially regenerative or redemptive act. She saw Manson as the “death rattle of the children of the old movement, the decade of SDS. Sharon Tate’s white baby [in fact murdered] would be reborn underground, and it would live to become a symbol of revolutionary spirit and integrity to a confused and dispirited American youth” (Stern,
With the Weathermen,
205).

103. “Weather Letter” in
Weatherman,
ed. H. Jacobs, 458.

104. See Robin Morgan,
The Demon Lover
(New York: Norton, 1988), as well as her 1970 tract “Good-bye to All That,” in
Sisterhood Is Powerful: An
Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement,
ed. id. (New York: Vintage Books, 1970).

105.
RAT
1, no. 26 (1969): 7.

106. On projection, scapegoating, and sacrifice, see LaCapra, cited n. 92

above; Peter Stallybrass and Allon White,
The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986); René Girard,
Violence and
the Sacred,
trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); and Mary Douglas,
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
(London: Routledge, 1966).

107. Palmer interview; Robin Palmer, “First American Soldier Was a Vietcong,”
RAT,
December 1969.

108. On the purges, see Grathwohl,
Bringing America Down,
112–22, and Stern,
With the Weathermen,
207–48.

109. Dohrn interview.

110. Interview with anonymous Weatherwoman.

111. Mellen interview, 20.

112. Ibid., 38.

113. Grathwohl,
Bringing America Down,
135–52.

114. Ibid.; Jones interview.

115.
WUR,
133–36. Neufeld interview.

116. Ayers,
Fugitive Days,
145.

117. Ayers interview. The former
Ramparts
editors David Horowitz and Peter Collier profiled Robbins in a largely vituperative piece for
Rolling Stone,
written while they were converting to neoconservatism. See “Doing It: The Inside Story of the Weather Underground,”
Rolling Stone,
September 30, 1982.

118. Palmer interview.

119. Accounts from
NYT,
March 7–16, 1970; Sale,
SDS,
1–6; Powers,
Diana,
1–10;
WUR,
25.

120. FBI memo, Brennen to Sullivan, March 13, 1970. FBI-WUO.

121. Weather Underground, “New Morning,” in Powers,
Diana,
217–18. In interviews, Palmer and Ayers revealed the target of the bombs.

122. Recall the shooting of James Rector in 1969. On government abuses, see Ward Churchill and Jim Van der Wall,
The COINTELPRO Papers: Docu-338

Notes to Pages 175–78

ment’s from the FBI’s Secret Wars against Domestic Dissent
(Boston: South End Press, 1990), and James Kirkpatrick Davis,
The FBI’s Domestic Counterintelligence Program
(New York: Praeger, 1992).

123.
NYT
coverage, March 7–16, 1970; quotation, March 13, A38.

124. Powers’s articles became the book
Diana: The Making of a Terrorist.

125. Sale and Miller exemplify this view.

126.
WUR,
38.

127. Airtel, FBI director to SAC, Albany, March 19, 1970. FBI-WUO.

128. FBI memo, Brennen to Sullivan, March 26, 1970, 4. FBI-WUO.

129. Ibid.

130. FBI liaison to John D. Ehrlichman, February 24, 1970. FBI-WUO.

131.
WUR,
26–28.

132.
WUR,
131.

133.
WUR,
27–28.

134. FBI memo, Bishop to DeLoach, April 28, 1970. FBI-WUO.

135. Starnes described Wilkerson as a “slender, brown-eyed beauty . . . who reportedly plays both harp and guitar”; the next line noted that she was wanted for homicide. The article is enclosed in FBI memo, Bishop to DeLoach, May 8, 1970. FBI-WUO.

136. Letter, J. Edgar Hoover to Richard Starnes, May 8, 1970; FBI memo, Bishop to DeLoach, May 8, 1970. FBI-WUO.

137. FBI memo, Brennen to Sullivan, March 10, 1970, FBI-WUO.

138. On the bust, see Grathwohl,
Bringing America Down,
and “Linda Evans,”
Ann Arbor Argus,
April 22, 1970, 15.

139. Stone, “Where the Fuse on That Dynamite Leads,” 491–95.

140.
Fifth Estate,
April 16–22, 1970, 8.

141. Andrew Kopkind, “The Radical Bombers,” in
Weatherman,
ed. H. Jacobs, 496–503.

142.
Berkeley Tribe,
May 29, 1970, 3.

143.
News from Nowhere
1, no. 8 (May 1969): 7.

144.
Leviathan,
November 1969, 3.

145.
RAT,
December 1969, 3.

146. International Liberation School / Red Mountain Tribe,
Firearms and Self-Defense: A Handbook for Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Easy Riders
(Berkeley, Calif.: ILS / Red Mountain Tribe, 1969). Hoover Institution, box 39.

147.
Berkeley Tribe,
February 27–March 6, 1970. In the summer and fall, the
Quicksilver Times
printed a manual on how to make explosives titled the
Weatherman Handbook.

148. Such worries were, it turns out, far from paranoia. In 2002, through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the
San Francisco Chronicle
obtained FBI documents revealing a long history of FBI spying on Berkeley activists (among them professors and administrators), as well as plans to round up and intern dissidents in the event of a major domestic crisis. See www.sfgate.com/news/special pages/2002/campus files.

149. The contempt of court convictions, which held sentences of several years in prison, were later appealed and dismissed.

Notes to Pages 178–81

339

150. Sale,
SDS,
637. Sale counts 169 campus bombings or arsons between May 1 and May 7 alone.

151.
WUR,
7.

152.
Scanlan’s
1, no. 8 (January 1971).

153. On Davis, see Bettina Aptheker,
The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997).

154.
WUR,
36.

155. Weatherman, “Communiqué 4” in
WUR,
8.

156. No reliable history of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) exists. Government sources have a natural bias and do not remotely untangle the complexities of this essentially covert organization. Writings by those in or affiliated with the BLA are themselves vague on details (partly for reasons of security) and often contradictory. The conventional view has been that the BLA formed in 1971

when the International Section of the Black Panther Party (BPP), under Cleaver’s charge, was formally expelled by the Oakland Panthers, headed by Huey Newton; this division, it is assumed, both signaled and precipitated a broader split within the organization, with those on the East Coast and in Los Angeles siding with Cleaver and opting for armed struggle, and those on the West Coast (excluding LA) following Newton to pursue other kinds of “revolutionary” activity. For this view, see Jalil Muntaqim,
On the Black Liberation Army
(1979; reprint, n.p., N.J.: Anarchist Black Cross Federation, 1997). Yet Akinyele Omowale Umoja has recently argued that armed self-defense units amounting to a “Black Liberation Army” had in fact formed in the deep South during the Civil Rights movement; that the BPP created underground, BLA-style cadres virtually from its inception in 1966; and that black radicals throughout the country, such as the northern-based Revolutionary Action Movement, formed BLA units in the mid and late 1960s independent of the Panthers’ direct leadership.

Akinyele Omowale Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and the Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party,” in
Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party,
ed. Cleaver and Katsiaficas, 1–19. In yet another view, Russell Shoats, a BLA member still in prison, contends that the BLA as such was ordered into existence by the BPP leadership in 1969, but that Newton and the Oakland Panthers quickly turned on key BLA leaders. Russell Shoats, “Black Fighting Formations,” in ibid., 128–38.

157. Dohrn interview.

158. Braley interview.

159. Johnathan Lerner,
Washington Post
at www.washingtinpost.com/

wp-dyn/articles/A41899–2002Feb20.html.

160. Interview with anonymous Weatherwoman.

161. His lawyer quickly established that Neufeld did not remotely match the physical description of the person who had bought the dynamite. Neufeld interview.

162. Neufeld interview.

163. Ayers,
Fugitive Days,
1–3.

164. The indictment actually named thirteen people, including the FBI informant Larry Grathwohl. Ten of the twelve were already sought on federal or 340

Notes to Pages 181–87

local charges. Among those indicted were Rudd, Dohrn, Ayers, Boudin, Evans, Neufeld, and Jaffe.
WUR,
32.

165. The Weathermen, “Communiqué 3,” in
Outlaws of Amerika: Communiqués from the Weather Underground
(New York : Liberated Guardian Collective, 1971), 8.

166. Weather Underground, “New Morning,” in Powers,
Diana,
215–16.

The Weathermen sent their communiqués to underground newspapers such as the
Liberated Guardian
but also sometimes to mainstream media like the Associated Press. Weatherman’s early communiqués were reprinted in
Outlaws of
Amerika.

167.
Chicago Seed,
October 15, 1970, cover; 3.

168. Jones interview.

169. Dohrn interview.

170. Kevin Gellies, “The Last Radical,”
Vancouver Magazine,
November 1998, 86, 100.

171. Ayers interview.

172. Weather Underground, “New Morning,” 215–16. Subsequent quotations from 216–25. The communiqué referred to Dylan’s recent record
New
Morning,
in which Dylan made another stylistic and thematic departure. The Weathermen allegedly listened to the record while composing the communiqué in California. Coller and Horowitz, “Doing It,” 36.

173. I refer to the group in its pre-1971 incarnation as Weatherman and as the Weather Underground for the period following, though this distinction will at times be impossible to sustain for contextual reasons.

174. Jaffe interview.

175. Dohrn interview.

176. Ayers interview.

177. Ayers interview.

178. Braley interview.

179. “Open Letter to Weatherman Underground from Panther 21,”
Liberated Guardian,
February 25, 1971, 16–17.

180. Only thirteen of the original twenty-one ultimately stood trial, on 156

separate charges. Churchill, “‘To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy,’” 103. See Murray Kempton,
The Briar Patch: The Trial of the Panther 21
(1973; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1997).

181. Umoja alleges that the Panther 21 were formally expelled
because
of the public letter to the Weathermen, which implicitly criticized the national BPP

leadership. Tensions between the Panther leadership and the Panther 21 certainly predated the letter, which was probably something of a last straw. Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance,” 9–10.

182. Palmer interview.
WUR,
37–38.

183. Roth interview.

184. Gilbert, Columbia, 214.

185. Ibid., 217.

186. Ron Chepesiuk,
Sixties Radicals Then and Now: Candid Conversations
with Those Who Shaped the Era
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1994), 236.

187. Weiss interview.

Notes to Pages 187–95

341

188. Ayers interview.

189. Daniel Berrigan, “Letter to the Weathermen,” in Salisbury,
Behind the
Lines,
15–16.

190. Ibid., 15.

191. Dellinger,
More Power Than We Know,
119.

192. Marcuse, “Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition,” 103.

193. Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” 103.

194. Marcuse, “Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition,” 103. Marcuse suggests that moral and historical judgments on violence are based on different criteria. Nowhere does he indicate that one standard can be fully abandoned for the other, but nowhere does he suggest how the two may be reconciled.

195. Marcuse,
Essay on Liberation,
72.

196.
Rag,
November 26–December 6, 1969.

197.
Leviathan,
November 1969, 22.

198.

Sergei Nechayev, “Catechism of a Revolutionist,” in
The Terrorism
Reader: A Historical Anthology,
ed. Walter Laqueur (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), 68–69.

199. Gilbert, Columbia, 210.

200. Ibid., 217–18.

201. Jaffe interview.

202. Weiss interview.

203. Dohrn interview.

204. Ayers interview.

205. Ibid.

206. Albert Camus,
The Just Assassins,
in
Caligula and Three Other Plays,
trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Random House, 1958), x.

207. Camus,
Rebel,
25.

208. Camus,
Caligula and Three Other Plays,
x.

209. Roth interview.

210. The relationship of the Weather Underground to other armed groups in the 1970s is the murkiest part of the group’s history, about which former members essentially decline comment. My commentary is therefore necessarily general and based on informed speculations.

211. Ayers,
Fugitive Days,
146.

212. Ibid.

213. Cathy Wilkerson, “Review of
Fugitive Days,
”
Z Magazine;
on-line edition, December 2001.

214. Wells,
War Within,
492. These sentiments were likely the exception among Vietnam veterans, the great majority of whom did not even see active combat. Nonetheless, veterans were among the most active in publicizing the brutality of U.S. conduct, and veterans organization were among the most important in the antiwar movement. See Richard Moser,
The New Winter Soldiers: GI
and Veteran Dissent during the Vietnam Era
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996). Moser (132) estimates that 20–25 percent of service people were activists against the war in Vietnam and that as many as half of all soldiers and veterans during the Vietnam era opposed the war.