Flower Children Have Grown Thorns

Flower Children 1 Have Grown Thorns How Weatherman Was Born from the Anti-War Movement, How It Succeeded and Why It Failed by Robert E G Black

History 152 Gordon Alexandre 1

Abbie Hoffman, in Chicago 10

2

“At 11:55 on Friday morning, March 6, 1970, Anne Hoffman was coming home and the cab driver accidentally drove past her house. As she got out of the cab, No. 18 exploded.” After checking her own house, “she rushed to No. 18 and saw two grime-covered young women coming out of the downstairs door. One (Cathy Wilkerson) was naked. The other (Kathy Boudin) was partly clad in jeans. The assumption was that their clothes were torn off in the blast.”2 These two women, another woman (Diana

18 West 11th Street

Oughton) dead inside the basement of the townhouse at No. 18, two men (Terry Robbins and Ted Gold) dead inside the house and a third man (John Jacobs), who wasn’t home at the time of the blast, made up a single collective of an organization called Weatherman. Poet James Merrill, who had grown up in the townhouse, would later write a poem about the place. “In what at least / Seemed anger the Aquarians in the basement / Had been perfecting a device / For making sense to us,”3 he would begin. He would describe the explosion as a “Fierce tongue, black / Fumes massing forth.”4 It is assumed the bomb exploded accidentally while Diana and Terry were building it. Its intended target was a noncommissioned officers dance at Fort Dix. Weatherman had already been responsible for four bombings and would be responsible for another twentyfive5 over the next seven years. Born out of the nonviolent Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Weatherman would take protest to new levels and many of its members would be sent

2

Gussow, “The House on West 11th Street” Merrill, “18 West 11th Street,” 1-4 4 Ibid, 98-99 5 see “Likely Weatherman Bombings” list on page 35 of this document 3

3 underground to hide from the FBI for years. Who were these Weathermen, and why had it come to this? Theodore “Ted” Gold was 23 at the time of the townhouse explosion. A red diaper baby, Ted considered himself a Marxist and a Communist. His father, Hyman Gold, was a prominent Jewish physician and his mother taught math at Columbia University. Ted participated in his first civil rights demonstration at age eleven. He attended public high school and was a member of

Ted Gold

the cross-country track team, the stamp club and the history and folklore society. He joined the civil rights group Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as a student at Columbia. By 1967, he was Vice Chairman of Columbia SDS. In November ’67, he was arrested —along with Mark Rudd, “leader” of the Columbia campus takeover and future leader of Weatherman—while demonstrating against a speech by Secretary of State Dean Rusk in Manhattan. After a visit to Cuba, Ted had become more militant. He blamed the populace of America for letting Vietnam happen; “Ted said the Vietnam War was an abstraction; liberals could afford to sit back and let it happen on the other side of the world. ‘We’ve got to turn New York into Saigon,’ he said.”6 As fellow Weatherman Brian Flanagan would later say, “we really wanted to give the United States and the rest of the world the sense that this country was going to be completely unlivable if the United States continued in Vietnam.”7 Ted told an old college friend that he’d been “doing a lot of exciting underground things, and I know now I’m not afraid to die.”8 When the bomb exploded at 18 West 11th Street, Ted had just returned from his first trip to the Strand Bookstore. After his death, students at Columbia tried to lower the campus flag to 6

Gitlin, The Sixties, 403 Brian Flanagan in The Weather Underground 8 Qtd. in Kaufman, Michael, “Underground ‘Exciting’ to Gold” 7

4 half staff but were dispersed by police. They managed only to write in crayon on the base of the flagpole: “In Memory of Ted Gold. Fight like him.”9 Diana Oughton was 28. She played the flute and the piano, and had learned to shoot a shotgun on her family’s shooting preserve. Her father, James Henry Oughton, Jr., was the Vice President of the family bank and had served from ’64 to ’66 in the Illinois General Assembly. She went to boarding school at 14, was

Diana Oughton

accepted by all seven sisters schools, and earned her BA from Bryn Mawr, a German language major. She tutored black children in Philadelphia, spent two years helping the poor in Guatemala as part of the American Friends Service Committee, and in SDS was part of the “Jesse James Gang” with Bill Ayers and Terry Robbins, responsible for classroom disruptions, burning exams and public critiques of courses and professors. She worked at the Children’s Community School in Ann Arbor, Michigan with Ayers. The school was run on “permissive lines” and was “closed by the state in 1968 for failing to meet state education standards.”10 On her first day there, “had a remarkable calm and quiet” and she drew pleasure “from simply being with the children… no dramatic action, no show of importance, no noisy intervention…. She walked into the space and was comfortable there.”11 October ’68, she was arrested at the Days of Rage, arguably the coming out party for Weatherman. Ayers says, “Diana was golden and fine, destined for a long and happy life.”12 At the time of the explosion, it is assumed that she had her hands on the bomb. It took 4 days to find her remains, and she was identified by a stray fingertip. Terry Robbins was 22, a formative member of Weatherman. His mother died when he was 9. His father remarried when he was 11 and, 9

Kaufman, Michael Flint, “2d Blast Victim’s Life Is Traced” 11 Ayers, Fugitive Days, 91 12 Ibid, 191 10

Terry Robbins

5 while his sister acted out, Terry buried himself in school work, finding comfort in intelligent friends and academic recognition. He graduated high school early and attended Kenyon College, a small liberal arts school where he was the only official SDS member. In the summer of ’65, he was part of the Cleveland Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). He dropped out of Kenyon College to go to the University of Michigan where he could be more politically active, along with Bill Ayers and Diana Oughton, in the Jesse James Gang of SDS. He smoked and liked to say, “any sissy can quit smoking… it takes a real man to face lung cancer.”13 Terry was arrested as a demonstration leader at Kent State and spent six weeks in jail. A “short and wiry” guy, Terry went from being a “shy introvert to a devilish charmer” in being part of Weatherman.14 He was personally involved with Cathy Wilkerson, whose radio station owning father owned the townhouse at 18 West 11th Street, and who had challenged Terry on his sexism. Terry kept a notebook of bombing plans and recipes—he thought he could make napalm by adding detergent to thicken the gasoline and motor oil in a Molotov cocktail.15 He believed “the pigs need[ed] a strong dose of their own medicine.”16 According to Ayers, Terry represented the view that it was “too late for reconciliation,” too late for nonviolence. He thought that “the best that we could do was bring about a catastrophic series of actions that would get the attention of the world.”17 Less than a year before the townhouse explosion, Terry wrote in large black letters on a subway wall “Blood to the horse’s brow and woe to those who cannot swim.” He borrowed the line from the Black Panthers. “It means a vengeful river of blood will wash through this place and soon,” he told Ayers. “Terry was sounding more Old Testament everyday.”18 His body was not identified in the ruins of the townhouse but weeks later in Weatherman’s first communiqué. 13

Ayers, Fugitive Days, 82 Hayden, Reunion, 359 15 Ayers, Fugitive Days, 145 16 Ibid, 147 17 Bill Ayers in The Weather Underground. 18 Ayers, Fugitive Days, 165-6 14

6 Cathy Wilkerson, who survived the townhouse explosion, was brought up a Quaker in Connecticut. She spent some summers as a counselor at a camp in Vermont and majored in Political Science at Swarthmore, a Quaker college outside Philadelphia. Despite her Quaker background, she

Cathy Wilkerson

considered herself “a radical most of [her] life.”19 She was “highly conscious of the A-bomb. Gradually [she] became alienated from the suburban middle-class lifestyle and the values it offered.”20 She went to Cambridge in ’63 and worked with an SDS-sponsored communitychange project. She worked at the SDS national office in Chicago and was an editor of their newsletter, New Left Notes. In ’67 she set up SDS’ regional office in Washington. She was arrested outside the Democratic National Convention in ’68 along with Kathy Boudin, who she knew from picket lines in Pennsylvania. Kathy Boudin was raised in a Jewish family with a long left-wing history. Her gransfather was a Marxist theorist, her father Leonard a lawyer who had “infuriated J. Edgar Hoover with his successful defenses of accused spies and the rights of dissenters.”21 In high school, “Kathy organized a protest against air-raid drills, introduced Pete Seeger at a fund-raising event and was elected school president.”22 She went to Bryn Mawr intending to go on to medical school but found interest instead in politics, and was classmates with Diana Oughton. She “made everyone else feel timid and conventional with her relationship with Michael Meeropol, son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and her drive to organize the staff of black maids.”23 She tired of college and spent her senior year in the Soviet Union at the University of Leningrad. She came 19

Qtd. in Charlton, “Cathlyn Wilkerson: Portrait of a Young Revolutionary” Ibid 21 Powers, “Underground Woman” 22 Ibid 23 Powers, “Underground Woman” 20

7 back to activism after “halfhearted efforts” to write an biography of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and to go to law school.24 Found buried in the rubble, among what Merrill calls “shards of blackened witness still in place,”25 along with the scattered remains of the three Weathermen, were “60 sticks of dynamite, lead pipes packed with dynamite, blasting caps and packages of dynamite taped together with fuses.” The FBI would determine that “had all the explosives detonated, the explosion would have leveled everything on both sides of

Kathy Boudin

the street,”26 not just 18 West 11th Street. To understand Weatherman, why nonviolent protest turned to bombings, one needs to look back a decade before that townhouse explosion. One needs to look at the founding of SDS in 1960 and at ‘60s American Society, an “affluent society” that hid beneath its surface issues of racial and gender inequality and waged war on the other side of the world, purportedly, to stop the spread of communism. “The very conditions requisite to producing and maintaining that affluence… brought into focus the felt concerns of life’s quality”27 and out of this disparate society grew a revolutionary student movement, which found focus first with civil rights then against the war in Vietnam, then this revolution turned violent, went underground, and withered, its energy spent on thousands of demonstrations, protests, bombings and other acts of violence. First, one must understand the problem in America. Apart from the obvious, the racial inequality and the burgeoning war in the early 60s, as stated in the founding document of SDS, “America rests in national stalemate, its goals ambiguous and tradition-bound instead of informed and clear, its democratic system apathetic and manipulated rather than ‘of, by, and for 24

Ibid Merrill, 70 26 Gussow 27 Sampson, “Two Revolutions,” 199 25

8 the people.’”28 The key words should be obvious: rests, stalemate, apathetic. The student movement saw inaction from an uncaring populace, a government that promoted the status quo, and a raging fire waiting to burn under the surface. The largest middle class in the history of the world, in which these “young dissidents were socialized, appeared politically and spiritually debilitating.” Rather than welcoming independent thought, “it encouraged unquestioning obedience to authority, the narrow pursuit of self-interest, and superficial comfort through overexpanding consumption,”29 remnants of the Baby Boom and post World War II America. These students had been born into a nation that prided itself on material goods, suburban homes, consumption and conformity. The political mainstream, as the “New Left” saw it, was “dominated by elites who preferred a docile public to an engaged one.”30 The passive act of watching television, already popular through the ‘50s, became only more so. And, while the surface of the affluent society presented itself as a place where everyone—or at least, white males—were happy with the way things were, the student movement saw things differently. “Loneliness, estrangement, isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today,” it says in the Port Huron Statement. “These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.”31 Flying in the face of President Johnson’s Great Society ideal, “the crime [was] that of a society in which the growing population aggravates the struggle for existence in the face of its possible alleviation.”32 America was in a position to accomplish all it wanted, to reach that Great Society, if only it could find its way past its problems, not the least of which were racist and imperialist tendencies. After the assassination of President Kennedy in 28

Hayden, The Port Huron Statement, 46-7 Varon, Bringing the War Home, 21-22 30 Ibid 31 Hayden, The Port Huron Statement, 52, stress mine 32 Marcuse, One Dimensional Man 29

9 ’63, the event that Don Delillo calls “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century,”33 and Tom Hayden says would “forever shadow the meaning of the sixties,” the feeling was inescapable for some of the youth of America that “the sequence of the president’s actions on the Cold War and racism soon led to his death.”34 Added to the mix was “the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the bomb, [which] brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract others we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time.”35 “The young and sensitive are quicker to spot, often intuitively, the key contradictions and sore spots of their society.”36 Trips to Guatemala like Diana Oughton’s provided firsthand knowledge of how out-of-balance the world was, how our rich society milked the rest of the world to stand on top of it. While, as Jerry Garcia said, “we would all like to be able to live an uncluttered life, a simple life, a good life… and think about moving the whole human race ahead a step,”37 mainstream America stood in the way of that. Our imperialism “set itself against the people of the whole world, including the people of the United States.”38 Terry Anderson suggests in The Sixties that “many youth believed the nation had become a Steppenwolf, a berserk monster, a cruel society that made war on peasants abroad and at home beat upon minorities, dissidents, students, and hippies.”39 Even within our own borders, racial inequality conflicted with the ideals of America, that “all men are created equal.” The Port Huron Statement refers to “the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry [that] compelled most of us from silence to activism.”40 People, especially 33

Delillo, Libra, 181 Hayden, The Port Huron Statement, 18 35 Ibid, 45-6 36 Sampson, “Two Revolutions,” 199 37 Jerry Garcia in 1968 with Tom Brokaw 38 Ashley, et al, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows” 39 Anderson, The Sixties, 131, referencing Herman Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf 40 Hayden, The Port Huron Statement, 45 34

10 those young enough to believe they should be able to do something about it, were angry “about the fact that the promises we have heard since first grade are all jive, angry that, when you get down to it, this system is nothing but the total economic and military put-down of the oppressed peoples of the world.”41 But, much of America, angry or not, affluent or not, was content to sit back and let things happen, just as Ted Gold had believed. “The great mass of people [was] structurally remote and psychologically hesitant with respect to democratic institutions,” and even those who aspired “to serious participation in social affairs,”42 had trouble accessing those institutions. “Apathy” and “inner alienation” were “the defining characteristics of American college life,” in the minds of SDS, everywhere the “cheerful emptiness of people ‘giving up’ all hope of changing things.”43 Even as the Civil Rights Movement was making progress and the war in Vietnam was escalating, most Americans felt powerless, a “resignation before the enormity of events.”44 In Steal this Movie, Abbie Hoffman explains another aspect of inaction, that of liberals who might want things changed; he says the problem with liberals is that “they see every side of an argument. What happens then? Paralysis.”45 But, as Paul Potter said, “all our lives, our destinies, our very hopes to live, depend on our ability to overcome that system,”46 to overcome the inaction and apathy. And, even as early as the Port Huron Statement, long before Weatherman came into being, the negativity included some obvious disdain, such as in the following: “some regard these national doldrums as a sign of healthy approval of the established order—but is it approval by consent or manipulated acquiescence?”47 And so, SDS was born 41

“Bring the War Home” Hayden, The Port Huron Statement, 65 43 Ibid, 63 44 Ibid, 64 45 Abbie Hoffman in Steal this Movie 46 Potter, “We Have to Name the System” 47 Hayden, The Port Huron Statement, 63-4 42

11 under the notion that “there can be a passage out of apathy.”48 While the public believed the “United States was helping to stop communism in Asia… there was not much public discussion,”49 and SDS knew that “our country was murdering millions of people.”50 Millions of lives were being extinguished in Vietnam, “each with a mother and a father, a distinct name, a mind and a body and a spirit, someone who knew him well, or cared for her or counted on her fro something or was annoyed or burdened or irritated by him; each knew something of joy or sadness or beauty or pain,”51 but no longer. At a demonstration in Washington, DC, Paul Potter used the words “cultural genocide” and described our military’s “pattern of destruction” and said we “trampled upon those things of value which give dignity and purpose to life.”52 And, even more, “the war seemed the opposite of participatory democracy,” not a war by popular consent or

Paul Potter

decision but “through secret commitments and decisions made by political elites, with no real public debate.”53 The students involved in the beginnings of SDS, many of them, “returned from trips to the South filled with a passion for organizing.”54 They had been part of SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), major players in the Civil Rights Movement. SDS grew out of people who had already had a taste for not only political action but for success. “As it rapidly spread across campuses, [SDS] bristled with optimism born of a belief in the transformative possibilities of civic initiative, critical thought, and the democratic process that it vigilantly 48

Ibid, 152 Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 471 50 Mark Rudd in The Weather Underground 51 Ayers, Fugitive Days, 125 52 Potter 53 Foner, Give Me Liberty!, 870 54 Varon, 22 49

12 practiced.”55 The members of SDS were “not the socially disinherited but the psychologically alienated, not the hungry and poverty stricken youth of the slums but a varied assortment of artist and writers, idealistic young men and women in search of a cause.”56 While SDS was nonviolent, there was, even at the start, an understanding that with protest often came violence, even if only in the form of a police beatdown. But, it was worth it to SDS. Knowing what America at large refused to know, about American imperialism, about the war in Vietnam, these “flower children [had] lost their innocence and grown their thorns,” and they believed that “our culture, to survive, must be defended.”57

Bill Ayers

Bill Ayers’ brother had been drafted, and Ayers, the son of a Chicago businessman and philanthropist, and who had run the Children’s Community School with Diana Oughton, believed that “we had to do whatever we had to do to stop the war.”58 The draft instilled in the youth of America a desperate but practical need to end the war while knowledge of the horrors of the war itself—like the massacre at My Lai—would provide the moral imperative to act. The war, in the views of SDS, “was not just happening in Vietnam… it was happening here,”59 and the “freedom to conduct that war depend[ed] on the dehumanization not only of Vietnamese people but of Americans as well.”60 SDS had had enough. In setting out to replace the capitalist system with “something more humane,”61 SDS believed that popular support would follow. “Confronted by the sordid reality of American affluence,” argues Arnold Kaufman, “it is impossible for someone to be authentically liberal without turning resolutely toward 55

Ibid Hook, Revolution, Reform & Social Justice, 1-2 57 Hoffman, “Abbie Hoffman on the Chicago Seven” 58 Bill Ayers in The Weather Underground 59 “Bring the War Home” 60 Potter 61 Bill Ayers in The Weather Underground 56

13 radicalism.”62 SDS expected that America would join in the “worldwide outbreak of revolution against colonialism and imperialism,”63 even its own. They believed that “the sole mission of white radicals [was] to assist the colonies [including American blacks] in achieving liberation.”64 Even then, they did not set out to do violence. In fact, they found “violence to be abhorrent because it transform[ed] the target… into a depersonalized object of hate.”65 People were “flesh and blood, not symbols”66 worthy of destruction. They perhaps even subscribed to the popular view that “violence that is not sanctioned by the government is criminal or mentally ill.”67 So SDS became active, in demonstrations, in sit-ins and teachins, but not in violence. As the ‘60s progressed, as the war in Vietnam escalated, as the Civil Rights Movement hit snags—with the failure of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to achieve its aims at the Democratic National Convention in ’64, with violent reprisals from police in Birmingham and Selma and all across the South—and gave birth to the Black Panther Party, as Berkeley

“Stop the Draft” flier

campus saw the nonviolent Free Speech Movement (FSM) replaced with the more radical Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), protests were met with more and more resistance. In October of ’67 came “Stop the Draft Week” with increasing violence as the week went on. Thousands demonstrated, for example, in Oakland, temporarily shutting down an induction center there. It started nonviolently, even as demonstrators built barricades in the street, but by Friday, October 20, there was a “massive street battle”68 ensuing. 62

Kaufman, Arnold, The Radical Liberal, 15 Hayden, The Port Huron Statement, 47 64 Matusow, The Unraveling of America, 338 65 Hayden, The Port Huron Statement, 55 66 Hoffman, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, 249 67 Mark Rudd in The Weather Underground 68 Isserman and Kazin, America Divided, 184 63

14 The next day, after a week of rallies and speeches at the Lincoln Memorial in DC, some 30,000 marched to the Pentagon, “within shouting distance of the building.” Peacefully, they surrounded the building, and some put “flowers in the gunbarrels of the

Putting flowers in the gunbarrels

young soldiers who surrounded their encampment.” After a few threw rocks at the military police, “as dusk arrived, the marshals moved in with clubs and tear gas, and nearly 700 were arrested.”69 In April of 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. “the greatest outbreak of urban violence in the nation’s history followed in ghettoes across the country.”70 Around the time of King’s assassination, another piece of the birthing of Weatherman from SDS was occurring on the campus of Columbia University. Columbia had a strong SDS chapter. And, beginning in the spring, even before the death of Martin Luther King, protesters were taking action on the campus. According to Jeremy Varon, two issues dominated their attention there: the “proposed building of a university gym in Harlem and Columbia’s involvement with the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), which coordinated academic research used by the military in Vietnam.”71 Bill Ayers, in Fugitive Days, calls the gymnasium “a massive temple to jocks where only the golden youth of the Ivy League would splash in privileged splendor in their Olympic-size pool” and he says that through the IDA, “their citadel of freedom and intellectual inquiry had become a whore to war.”72 Their movement “aimed to expose campus ‘complicity’ with evil.”73 69

Ibid, 185 Foner, 883 71 Varon, 25 72 Ayers, Fugitive Days, 116 73 Isserman and Kazin, 229 70

15 An “action faction” of the Columbia SDS, which Tom Hayden calls the “seeds of the Weatherman faction,”74 including Mark Rudd, led a series of protests that led to the barricade and occupation of five buildings, “the takeover of the university”75 for several days. Rudd, later a leader of Weatherman, believed that “this country was moving toward revolution and that our actions could play a role in that development.”76

Mark Rudd

He describes his early revolutionary development like this: From the first moment I heard about Che, Ernesto Guevara, he was my man, or, rather, I was his. Brilliant, young, idealistic, a daring commander of rebels, willing to risk his life to free the people of the world, I wanted to be like him. Who wouldn’t fall for this rifletoting poet who wrote, “At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” When Che said “the duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution,” he was ordering me directly, “Do it, don’t just talk about it!” Total commitment was needed.77 The NYPD violently quashed the demonstrators and Tom Brokaw describes it thusly: “the Vietnam War, it seemed, was being fought on two fronts.”78 Mark Rudd was “picked” by the media as “the leader” of the revolt, but he says, “movements are not made by leaders.”79 Still, he claimed some victory in the occupation; “we would make the war visible in the United States.”80 In fact, after a faculty-inclusive strike, classes would be ended for the schoolyear and the IDA and the gymnasium would both be scrapped. 74

Hayden, Reunion, 282 “The Spirt of ‘68” 76 Rudd, “Che and Me” 77 Ibid 78 Tom Brokaw in 1968 with Tom Brokaw 79 “The Spirit of ‘68” 80 Mark Rudd in The Weather Underground 75

16 Following the subsequent assassination of Presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy, “everything seemed urgent now, everything was accelerating—the pace, to be sure, but also the stakes, the sense of consequences,”81 and plans were made for a large demonstration for August at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Already, SDS’ message was getting stronger, more militant. They referred to the

Abbie Hoffman

war in Vietnam as “a war in which there are only two sides, a war not for domination but for an end to domination, not for destruction but for liberation and the unchaining of human freedom. And it is a war in which we cannot ‘resist;’ it is a war in which we must fight.”82 The demonstration, as with the one that ended with the march on the Pentagon, was being organized as well by Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies and the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the Mobe), but the transition to what would become Weatherman was clearly evident in what should have been a peaceful demonstration was that was ignited by Chicago police—who Weatherman saw as “tools of the state, brutal, corrupt, oppressive minions who carried out the bidding of a government engaged in an illegal, amoral war”83—to be something much worse. Coming at the crowds with jeeps with frames of barbed wire at the front, with billy clubs and tear gas, the police sought to drive the crowds away, and when that didn’t work, “cops chased and clubbed anyone and everyone on the street, including reporters and 81

Ayers, Fugitive Days, 117 “Bring the War Home,” stress mine. 83 Smith, “Sudden Impact” 82

“Police Riot” at the DNC, 1968

17 curious bystanders.”84 “The police, like angry cattle, their nostrils flaring, stampeded through the clouds of tear gas.”85 “Police attacked them with brutal force. The bloody melee, shown live on national TV, provided spectacular images of a city, a political system, and a society out of control.”86 In the aftermath, “the air was thick with tear gas, and the streets were covered with shattered glass and abandoned backpacks, PEACE NOW! Signs and fragments of tie-dyed shirts.”87 But, SDS spoke of it as a “victory for the people in a thousand ways.” They believed that they “showed that white people would no longer sit by passively… that the ‘democratic process…’ was nothing more than a hoax, pulled off by the businessmen who really run this country… that… thousands of people are willing to fight back.” Bill Ayers suggests “this is when the rage got started in the movement…. Before this, every meeting, every rally, every demonstration was filled with singing, and afterward the singing stopped.”88 “The Report of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence labeled the disturbances in Chicago a ‘police riot’ and presented evidence of ‘unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence on many occasions.’”89 SDS described the police riot as a time “when thousands of young people came together in Chicago and tore up pig city for five days.” Even more than claiming victory in Chicago, they had demands; they demanded “that all occupational troops get out of Vietnam” and they demanded “the release of all political prisoners.”90 With the occupation at Columbia and the police riot in Chicago, the antiwar movement was indeed becoming more visible even as it became more violent. And, the violent response from authorities wasn’t reserved simply for antiwar demonstrators. In May of ’69, Berkeley 84

Brokaw, Boom!, 99 Ayers, Fugitive Days, 129 86 Varon, 27 87 Brokaw, 99 88 Ayers, Fugitive Days, 131 89 Ragsdale, The Chicago Seven, 3 90 All the SDS description comes from their “Bring the War Home” pamphlet. And, though it should go without saying, the “political prisoners” were members of other radical organizations, especially the Black Panther Party. 85

18 University fenced in a piece of their property that locals and students had built into a park. People’s Park, as it was called, was put together in an exercise of togetherness. “Local longhairs tamped down the sod next to students, housewives, neighbors, parents. Fraternity boys mixed with freaks; professors shopped for shrubs; graduate students in landscape architecture came by to propose designs.”91 What might have been a simple project came together as a complex physical symbol of “the spirits of the New Left and the Counterculture in harmonious combination… a trace of anarchist heaven on earth.”92 May 15, before sunrise, police sealed off eight square blocks while the park was bulldozed and an 8-foot fence was put up around the property. Berkeley planned to turn the land into a parking lot. By noon, several thousand people rallied and Berkeley student body president-elect Dan Siegel told them, “let’s go down there and take the park,”93 and they went. Local police came in, armed with shotguns, and for several hours they “emptied their loads of birdshot and buckshot into crowds, they shot people running away from crowds, they shot passersby and reporters, they fired at students simply walking around on the campus.”94 Alan Blanchard was blinded by birdshot. James Rector had his belly torn apart by buckshot and he would die in the hospital four days later. In all, at least 50 and as many as 100 were shot. Around 500 were arrested. Governor Reagan sent in the National Guard to get control of the situation. “’If it takes a bloodbath,’ Reagan had declared, ‘let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.’”95 As if firing on the crowd with shotguns was appeasement, by any definition. The National Guard occupied Berkeley, a helicopter even sprayed tear gas over the entire square mile of the campus. By the end of the year, People’s Park was a parking lot, and Governor Reagan was as popular as ever; in fact, according to Mervin B. Freedman and Paul Kanzer, in 91

Gitlin, 355 Ibid 93 Ibid, 356 94 Gitlin, 357 95 Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties, 327 92

19 “Psychology of a Strike,” Reagan’s popularity actually increased “whenever campus disturbances dominate[d] newspaper headlines and television newscasts.”96 However large the local demonstration groups, popular support was still with the status quo. “Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don’t do it,”97 the first Weatherman communiqué would say. That communiqué, called a Declaration of a State of War, went on to say that “revolutionary violence is the only way.”98 What Abbie Hoffman called the “second American Revolution”99 was turning actively toward radical violence as its means. As Mark Rudd would put it, “the troubled sixties give rise to the violent seventies.”100 With this transition of ideals, SDS was finding itself divided. “The main contenders for ideological dominance were, on the one hand, the SDS mainstream,” soon to be called the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), “which saw the world through the eyes of Third World Marxists like Ho, Mao, and Che, and, on the other, the Progressive Labor party (PL), which accepted as literal truth the texts of Marx and Lenin”101 and wanted a student-worker alliance. Industrial workers “would benefit in the long run from revolution,”102 “where they played a role… their defiance [would] matter,”103 but they “enjoyed too many temporary advantages to know their real self-interest.”104 While, as Piven and Cloward put it in Poor People’s Movements, “people cannot defy institutions to which they have no access, and to which they make no contribution,”105 the workers would not be siding with the revolution. so It was believed that “only the sons and daughters of the working class—on the margin of the labor force, penned up 96

Freedman and Kanzer, “Psychology of a Strike,” 150 Gilbert, SDS/WUO, 24 98 Ibid 99 Abbie Hoffman in 1968 with Tom Brokaw and in Chicago 10 100 Mark Rudd in 1968 with Tom Brokaw 101 Matusow, 336 102 Ibid, 338 103 Piven and Cloward, Poor People’s Movements, 22 104 Matusow, 338 105 Piven and Cloward, 23 97

20 in jails called schools, harassed by the cops and menaced by the draft—might heed SDS’ call to rebel.”106 RYM, soon to birth Weatherman, included a lot of the younger members of SDS. Tom Hayden explains in Reunion: In experience, they lacked the image of hopeful, loving community rooted in the earliest years of SDS and SNCC, and had no patience for the complicated moral and political philosophizing of the Port Huron generation…. [Their] impatience was palpable. Why should the Vietnam War stop at the borders of the country we were invading? they asked. Why shouldn’t we bring it home, here and now?107 PL was expelled in accordance with a new alliance with the Black Panthers at the last national SDS convention, June 18-23, 1969. The alliance with the Panthers fell through in August, around the time of the Days of Rage. By the time Weatherman gathered for a national council in December, “it knew that neither white students, Black Panthers, nor working-class youth would help make the revolution. Indeed,” according to Allen Matusow, “the only revolutionary force in America was Weatherman itself.”108 Before it even became Weatherman, already, the new organization was re-forming what had been SDS, “the frustration of making modest demands in the mid 1960s

Weatherman Logo

[feeding] the more ambitious rebellion of the late 1960s.”109 Even Tom Hayden, never a part of Weatherman, said “we must emphasize that the government is taking political prisoners and reject the rulers’ definition that we are ‘lawbreakers’” and “we should stand on the right to selfdefense and revolution as protected by the Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence.”110 In 106

Matusow, 338, stress mine Hayden, Reunion, 358 108 Matusow, 341. 109 Varon, 24 110 Hayden, Rebellion and Repression, 14-5 107

21 the spring of ’69, “Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn and a dozen other SDS leaders in the Chicago national office constituted themselves a national collective.”111 And, this new collective demanded a new structure. They “imposed Leninist discipline on about two hundred allies in the regional offices and in some of the larger chapters.”112 They set out to “become communist cadre, completely committed to the revolution.”113 In the summer of ’69, they published their Weatherman Statement. It took its name from a line from Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows.” Terry Anderson points out in The Movement and the Sixties that, obviously, “to them, the wind was howling from the left”114 and the general public did need a

Todd Gitlin

Weatherman, and the organization meant to fill that role. But, their initial offering was offputting. Kirkpatrick Sale argues that their Statement was “inaccessible to most people… young or old, educated or not,”115 unlike SDS’ Port Huron Statement seven years earlier. It “raised obscurity and thickheadedness to new heights”116 and created a “sense of distance, exclusion, and elitism.”117 But, the thesis was simple, according to Bill Ayers: “the world was on fire.” And, to deal with that fire, Weatherman would “employ all means to transform society, peaceful if possible and violent if necessary…. [If] peaceful means [were] not possible… violence of one kind or another [was] inescapable, and… immediate resort to violence [was]

111

Matusow, 338 Ibid 113 Mark Rudd in The Weather Underground 114 Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties, 328 115 Sale, SDS, 562. 116 Gitlin 385 117 Sale, 562-3 112

22 imperative.”118 For members of SDS, like Todd Gitlin, who had been SDS President from ’63 to ’64, the transition was either “join us or ‘fuck you.’”119 Though it rose from a movement that went against the conformity of America society, Weatherman, at the beginning, used “psychologically brutal rituals to suppress the individuality of its members in hopes of turning them into ‘tools of the revolution.’”120 Along with the distancing that came from their Statement, their rigid hierarchy combined with their rebel image to project a “hyperdiscipline and severity jarring to many in the New Left.”121 In order to build a “Red Army at home to assist anti-imperial movements abroad,”122 Weatherman was rooted in a strange dichotomy, the “peculiar unity of transgression and submission, self-expression and selfrenunciation.”123 Two to three hundred “hardened revolutionaries” formed collectives of 5 to 25 members in a number of cities around the country and they worked to create “the new man,” a revolutionary who was willing to give up “possessions, bank accounts, monogamy, privacy, and, indeed, the self.”124 They isolated themselves within their collectives. The less interaction with the general public the better; “the more insulated we were from counterarguments and complicated reality,” says Todd Gitlin, “the easier it was to hold onto abstract revolutionary schemes… the revolutionary loop closed.”125 Three methods emerged to fasten members to their collectives and to their cause. The first was the “gut-check,” what Rudd describes as a person-to-person challenge to “be more violent.”126 Second were the Criticism/Self-Criticism (CSC) sessions, “the most harrowing aspect

118

Hook, 130 Todd Gitlin in The Weather Underground 120 Varon, 9 121 Ibid 122 Matusow, 339 123 Varon, 9 124 Matusow, 339-40, stress mine 125 Gitlin, 395 126 Mark Rudd in The Weather Underground 119

23 of life in the collectives… to encourage political and emotional honesty and group bonding.”127 The group would single out an individual then berate them for their flaws for “five, seven, a dozen hours or more without break.”128 Despite notions that the general public had been brainwashed into apathy, these CSC sessions worked actively to brainwash members, to break them down and rebuild them into such narrow roles within their collective that life outside it would be near impossible. The CSC sessions would create in the collective a mob “united by a common passion or idea that takes the individual out of himself.”129 As they went on, the CSC sessions were “used to compete and maneuver for power rather than to build people.”130 “Stronger Personalities often dominated the weaker as free-flowing anarchy slipped toward authoritarianism”131 within the collectives. And, just as the CSC was corrupted, so also was the third method, what Weatherman called “smash monogamy.” Smashing monogamy meant “liberating both men and women from sentimental bourgeois ties so they could give total loyalty to the anti-imperial cause,”132 so they could be “an army of lovers.”133 A noble and lofty idea, to be sure, but despite their attempts at brainwashing themselves with the CSC and challenging each other with the gut-check, the members of Weatherman were still human. Couples were “compelled to split up,”134 even married couples—Linda Whitehorn not only dropped out of graduate school but also left her husband to join Weatherman135—and they had in some collectives the “forced rotation of sex partners”136 and “group gropes.”137 The goal was “group marriage, in which all members of a 127

Varon, 58-59 Ibid 129 Hook, 146 130 Gilbert, 21 131 Anderson, The Sixties, 146 132 Matusow, 340 133 Ayers, Fugitive Days, 142 134 Matusow, 340 135 Linda Whitehorn in The Weather Underground 136 Varon, 58 137 Matusow, 340 128

24 collective would be bound in love” to the collective and “for the armed struggle.”138 In actual practice, the reach for the flower child notion of group marriage served instead to highlight a major weakness of Weatherman, “based in sexism, heterosexism and class.”139 Really, “smash monogamy was simply the latest means of maintaining male supremacy in the New Left.”140 Additionally, many “had a difficult time sharing everything, overcoming jealousies and hatred.”141 In Fugitive Days, Bill Ayers recounts how, at one point, Diana Oughton, his girlfriend at the time, was tiring of him sleeping with other women within the organization. “If this is liberation, Diana said to me one day, then why don’t I feel free?”142 Another incident, so telling that it is referenced in Allen Matusow’s The Unraveling of America and David Barber’s A Hard Rain Fell, in addition to Susan Stern’s With the Weathermen, came one night after Susan Stern’s turn at the center of a CSC. After hours of being attacked over her “egocentrism,” Susan went to bed “shell shocked.”143 She “was trying to sleep, she heard the muffled sobs of her friend Georgia, fending off Rudd in a nearby bed.”144 Earlier, Rudd had told Georgia she had to “strengthen herself to fight the reactionary tendencies within the collective.” Now, Georgia told him “‘I don’t want you. I want Mike,’ she pleaded. ‘I can’t help it. I love him.’ As Rudd prepared to take what he wanted, he whispered endearingly, ‘You have to put the demands of your collective above your love. Nothing comes before the collective.’ Lying there with her hands clamped over her ears, Susan Stern was struck by an idea she tried desperately to repress. ‘Perhaps,’ she thought, ‘Weatherman is wrong.’”145 It is in talking about “smash monogamy,” not about any of the bombings or even those who died at 18 West 11th Street, that Rudd, in The 138

Ibid Gilbert, 20 140 Barber, A Hard Rain Fell, 196 141 Anderson, The Sixties, 146 142 Ayers, Fugitive Days, 142 143 Barber, 196 144 Matusow, 340 145 This version of the story is from Matusow, 340-1, citing Stern’s book. 139

25 Weather Underground, says there are “things that I am not proud of.”146 Perhaps this very incident is on his mind when he says these words. Another one of the darker aspects—excepting the bombings, of course—of Weatherman came in late ’69, after the Manson murders. “The latest Weather hero was Charles Manson.”147 At Weatherman’s Nation War Council in Flint, Michigan around Christmas, Bernardine Dohrn, the voice of Weatherman’s communiqués, said “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then

Bernardine Dohrn

they shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!”148 That victim was Robert La Bianca. “And, they celebrated the death of Sharon Tate in her eighth month of pregnancy because no white baby born in the mother country of the empire deserved to live.”149 The favored greeting at the Flint War Council was fingers raised like a fork. Death fascinated Weatherman. Bernardine Dohrn, child of a Jewish father and a Christian Scientist mother, was a cheerleader at Whitefish Bay High School, treasurer of the Modern Dance Club, a member of the National Honor Society, and editor of her school paper. She graduated with honors from the University of Chicago with a BA in Political Science then received her law degree from the university’s law school. She had worked for the National Lawyers Guild in New York as recently as ’67, and now she was digging the gruesome murders of Robert La Bianca, Sharon Tate and others. Weatherman member David Gilbert says “our sickening and inexcusable glorification of violence… grievously contradicted the humanist basis for our politics and militancy.”150 For the public at large and “for the mass media, the acidhead Charles Manson was readymade as the monster 146

Mark Rudd in The Weather Underground Matusow, 341 148 Gitlin, 400 149 Matusow, 341 150 Gilbert, 18 147

26 lurking in the heart of every longhair, the rough beast slouching to Beverly Hills to be born for the next millennium.”151 Weatherman was such an insular organization so early on in its history that even those who should have supported its cause couldn’t stick with them. One Wisconsin SDSer even went so far as to parody the title of their original statement, saying “You don’t need a rectal thermometer to know who the assholes are.”152 And, so, formed and still forming out of the broken SDS, Weatherman began its series of bombings October 6, 1969, with a bomb placed at the feet of the Haymarket Police statue in Chicago to inaugurate the Days of Rage. Weatherman took to heart, perhaps a little too, at the same time, literally and

Mario Savio

figuratively, the words of Mario Savio five years earlier during the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley: There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And, you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that, unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.153 Savio’s version of putting bodies on the gears involved sit-ins, teach-ins, rallies. Weatherman’s Days of Rage intended to demonstrate their righteous fury to a degree no demonstration had yet. SDS’ publication about the event was called “Bring the War Home.” Even the title says something of the change already coming. “It was of course, a double entendre,” says Robert 151

Gitlin, 404, alluding of course to W.B. Yeats’ apocalyptic poem, “Second Coming” Sale, 615 153 Savio, “An End to History” 152

27 Dreyfuss. “First, of course, it was a play on an earlier, more modest slogan (‘Bring the Boys Home’). But it had a more threatening interpretation: that the Vietnam War had so divided the country that it was time to instigate a political war at home.”154 Sidney Hook suggests in Revolution, Reform & Social Justice that “where criminal violence can be interpreted as a blow for collective freedom, it provides absolution in advance for the most callous kind of inhumanities.”155 As long as they believed in the righteousness of their cause, violent means was justified from the start in the minds of Weatherman. After all, even Presidential hopeful, Barry Goldwater, had said just a few years earlier that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”156 Additionally, “when the individual member of a crowd is caught up in violence,” as the members of Weatherman would be, “he tends to think of himself as a disinterested—even an unselfish—agent of a collective will.”157 Journalist Peter Marin suggests that “the violence of the Weathermen is evidence of two things: first that they saw their nation and its evils clearly, and, secondly, that they had no adequate response to what they saw, and so were driven to ends which partook perhaps too much of the evils they discovered.”158 They were driven to violence. On the first night of the Days of Rage, October 8, 1969,

“Days of Rage” flier

eighty Weathermen marched into Lincoln Park in Chicago, chanting “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win” and “revolution’s begun! Off the Pig! Pick up the gun!” They were prepared for police violence; they wore helmets. They expected “to find ten to twenty thousand kids ready for war. No more than a few hundred were there.”159 A year earlier, at the Democratic National 154

Dreyfuss, “Bring the War Home” Hook, 146 156 Qtd. in Anderson, The Sixties, 61 157 Hook, 146 158 Marin, “Letter to Gloria Emerson” 159 Matusow, 341 155

28 Convention, there had been the thousands that Weatherman hoped for now. But, “in a stark demonstration of how much support militants ever had, about 300 appeared—while two months earlier 400,000 went to Woodstock and a week later, a few million participated in the antiwar Moratorium.”160 Tom Hayden, on trial in Chicago161 for his part in the rioting a year before, showed up in Lincoln Park to tell demonstrators he supported their attack. In Reunion, he describes the scene as “otherworldly, like a tribal cult gathering in anticipation of a powerful, life-altering, and traumatic ritual.”162 “Anything that intensifies our resistance to this war is in the service of humanity,” he told the crowd. “The Weathermen are setting the terms for all of us now. Tear this monster down!”163 A founding member of SDS, and the author of its Port Huron Statement, Hayden saw Weatherman “not as an aberration but as ‘the natural final generation of SDS, the true inheritors of everything that happened from 1960 on,” but he also said “they were not the conscience of their generation, but more like its id.”164 “Vastly outnumbered by police on that first night of the Days of Rage, most were quickly beaten and arrested.”165 Others charged down the street, breaking windows, acting out a “new slogan: Smash the Glass of the Ruling Class.”166 Abbie Hoffman “castigated the streetfighters for smashing the windows of Volkswagens and mama-papa grocery stores,” but he “did not, however, disapprove of trashing as a 160

Tom Hayden

Anderson, The Sixties, 157 Tom Hayden, then part of SDS and the Mobe, was on trial along with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of YIP, Dave Dellinger of the Resistance and the Mobe, Rennie Davis of SDS and the Mobe, Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers and John Froines and Lee Weiner of the Mobe. Collectively, they were known as the Chicago 8 or the Conspiracy 8 162 Hayden, Reunion, 361 163 This version of Hayden’s speech comes from Ayers’ Fugitive Days, 169. Hayden’s own version in Reunion is a little tamer 164 Matusow, 342 165 Ibid, 341 166 Adelson, SDS, 247 161

29 tactic and urged the Weatherpeople to move their act to Washington and rampage through the halls of government buildings.”167 “When the action was over, sixty minutes after it began, police had arrested seventy-five… shot and wounded seven… and suffered twenty-one injuries themselves” and 2600 National Guardsmen were called out “to contain the handful of Weathermen”168 who might come the next day. Shortly after the battle ended, journalist KirkPatrick Sale watched as a “tall, hunched figure in a coat and tie suddenly emerged from the darkness, looked around as if bewildered, stood a moment, and walked quickly off: it was Mark Rudd, in ‘straight’ disguise, a general who it seems had decided not to march with his troops.”169 Perhaps it was this moment Rudd had in mind when he spoke of not being proud. The days that followed amounted to even less of what Weatherman wanted to happen during the Days of Rage. On the 4th day, Brian Flanagan, 22, had a run in with lawyer and sheriff hopeful Richard Elrod while running from police that would leave Elrod with a broken neck, quadriparetic (not paralyzed but having significant weakness in all four limbs). Flanagan, whose father was an

Brian Flanagan

advertising executive and whose mother left teaching to become a stockbroker, “from an early age, 11 or 12… had really come to admire Fidel Castro.”170 He studied philosophy and economics at Columbia but was an indifferent student. “Whatever passions academics failed to arouse, however, the rising opposition to the Vietnam War supplied.”171 He dropped in the on the occasional SDS meeting, then began attending demonstrations and following Mark Rudd. Flanagan had helped seize the mathematics building in the Columbia takeover, and he would be 167

Hoffman, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, 246 Barber, 184 169 Sale, 601 170 Smith 171 Ibid 168

30 part of Weatherman to put some “teeth… into this resistance.”172 To this day, Flanagan and Elrod dispute the specific cause of the injury, Flanagan kicking Elrod repeatedly or Elrod hitting his head on the side of a building as he tackled Flanagan to the ground. Flanagan would be tried and found not guilty. After the Days of Rage, “there was a sense that we were pretty isolated, we were marginal.”173 The Black Panthers and SDS condemned Weatherman as “this was not revolution, simply nihilism.”174 For many in Weatherman, “that first night was a collision with reality.”175 For others, “failure was simply redefined as success:” the few who showed up “were the only people ‘ready’ enough, brave enough, to push on through to the other side.”176 Already, things weren’t going as Weatherman hoped. Meanwhile, a more “acceptable” form of protest went on with the October 15 Moratorium in ’69. Todd Gitlin calls the Moratorium the “supreme moment” of the moderates, a day when millions decided “not to do business-as-usual, but took part in a cascade of local demonstrations, vigils, church services, petition drives, replete with respectable speechmakers and sympathetic media fanfare.”177 An airplane skywrote a peace symbol over Boston, a judge in Baltimore interrupted proceedings for reflection, 200 Vassar coeds handed flowers to West Points cadets and sang “America the Beautiful,” while some across the nation simply wore black arm bands, as “many more citizens” were “yearning” for peace.178 Trying to get in the action for the second Moratorium a month later, Bill Ayers and three other Weathermen told Moratorium leaders that “a $20,000 payment toward their Days of Rage legal expenses might avert violence 172

Ibid Bill Ayers in The Weather Underground 174 Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties, 329 175 Bill Ayers in The Weather Underground 176 Hayden, Reunion, 360 177 Gitlin, 379 178 Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties, 330-1 173

31 in the Washington streets.”179 Seeing this as blackmail, they said no. On November 13, Weatherman took to the streets in Washington, “led a splinter march on the South Vietnamese embassy, fought with the police, trashed store windows [and] garnered headlines.”180 Two days later, a crowd near three quarters of a million strong, the largest single protest in American history, gathered around the Washington Monument for the second Moratorium. Militants, led not by Weatherman but by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the Yippies, marched on the Justice Department, with NLF flags, smoke bombs, rocks and bottles, bringing “forth the obligatory tear gas”181 from the police. This “Justice Department sideshow” was the lead story instead of the mass march, but Weatherman would not settle for such “parasitical influence.”182 Weatherman wanted something bigger, something better. In December, in response to the police killing of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, Weatherman bombed several parked Chicago police cars. Bernardine Dohrn says in The Weather Underground that “we felt that the murder of Fred required us to be more grave, more serious, more determined to raise the stakes.”183 Ironically, the members of Weatherman had to become like the generals

Carl Oglesby

SDSer Carl Oglesby had spoken of in his antiwar speech in ’65. “People become instruments,” he had said. “Generals do not hear the screams of the bombed… for to do so is to be that much less the general.”184 Weatherman members had to become instruments in their war just as soldiers and generals had become instruments in the war in Vietnam. They had to separate themselves from the screams of their victims, if they were to have any, so they could continue the mission. 179

Gitlin, 394 Ibid 181 Gitlin, 395 182 Ibid 183 Bernardine Dohrn in The Weather Underground 184 Oglesby, “Let Us Shape the Future” 180

32 Weatherman bombed parked police cars in Berkeley next. Then, in late February, they firebombed the house of Judge John Murtagh, who was presiding over the Panther 21 trial. The firebomb wasn’t very successful, so Weatherman invested in some dynamite. With things already not going as planned, they upped the ante. And,

Naomi Jaffe

they still expected popular support to follow eventually, just as they said in their original Statement: “If we, as revolutionaries, are capable of understanding the necessity to smash imperialism and build socialism, then the masses of people who we want to fight along with us are capable of that understanding.”185 And, as Tom Hayden says in Rebellion and Repression, “if we keep a fighting spirit and define the issues over and over, the people will support us as their warriors.”186 Their mission was supposed to be going better. In the face of the limited fire at Judge Murtagh’s, Weatherman would make sure the next attack was bigger and better as they joined the “tradition” that “ordinary life is dispensable”187 for a cause. Weatherman Naomi Jaffe says in The Weather Underground that “it was totally insane… but it fit into a period of revolution in the whole world,”188 in Cuba and Angola, in the Congo and Mexico, in France and in China and in Vietnam. Naomi Jaffe grew up on a small family farm run by her Jewish parents and she had Communist relatives. Her father raised poultry. Her mother was a schoolteacher. She studied Marxism at Brandeis University and founded a branch of SDS at the New School for Social Research where she was working toward a graduate degree in Sociology. It was there she formed a friendship with David Gilbert. She was part of the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH) protest at the Miss America Pageant in 1969. She would be a

185

Ashley et al Hayden, Rebellion and Repression, 17 187 Todd Gitlin in The Weather Underground 188 Naomi Jaffe in The Weather Underground 186

33 founding member of Weatherman but was never a part of the leadership, as she wanted more focus on feminist issues. “We were freedom fighters,” Bill Ayers insists in Fugitive Days. “We came to it in the spirit of John Brown and Nat Turner, in the name of liberty.”189 So, the collective at the 18 West 11th Street townhouse had their cache of dynamite—their first target a dance at Fort Dix, not active soldiers in the war but noncommissioned officers and their wives— there were no longer any “innocent Americans… all guilty. All Americans [were] legitimate targets for attack.”190 Other collectives had their dynamite as well; on the same day as the townhouse explosion, a stash of explosives was found in Detroit while Bill Ayers and other Weathermen were reported to be in the area. Weatherman would “mobilize the struggle so sharply and in so many places that the imperialist cannot possibly deal with it all.”191 Weatherman was “shaken by the deaths” at the townhouse and it “abandoned plans for assaults on military personnel and police.”192 Bill Ayers says “we were very careful from the moment of the townhouse on to be sure we weren’t going to hurt anybody.”193 And, David Gilbert says, “our goal was to not hurt any people… but we wanted to pick

David Gilbert

targets to show to the people who was responsible for what was really going on.”194 Inspired in his youth by the Greensboro sit-ins and the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement, Gilbert had been a part of CORE at age 17 and he helped found Columbia University’s chapter of SDS. He worked as a tutor in Harlem and saw Malcolm X speak at Barnard College in ’65. In spring of

189

Ayers, Fugitive Days, 190 Mark Rudd in The Weather Underground 191 Ashley et al 192 Varon, 10 193 Bill Ayers in The Weather Underground 194 David Gilbert in The Weather Underground 190

34 ’67, he would offer a radical education counter-course for Columbia underclassmen in a campus lounge. When he joined Weatherman, he was friends with Ted Gold. Their tactics would change, as they made an effort to avoid human collateral damage, but still their cause remained. As Bernardine Dohrn would say in the 5th Communiqué, they believed they were “bringing a pitiful, helpless giant to its knees.”195 A big change from Carl Oglesby’s description of America just a few years earlier, as “a colossus that does not want to be changed.”196 Despite the townhouse explosion and any reservations it gave to the Weathermen, Weatherman was moving forward under the impression that it was making headway in the fight against the war in Vietnam. It is worth noting that not all the bombings came from Weatherman. One of the most famous bombings, that of Sterling hall at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, which resulted in the death of a physics researcher, was committed by four young people with no ties to Weatherman. According to Kirkpatrick Sale, from September of ’69 to May of ’70, “by an extremely conservative estimate, there were no fewer than 174 major bombings and attempts on campus, and at least seventy more off campus incidents associated with the white left, a rate of roughly one a day,”197 while a more extensive ATF survey198 shows at least 5,000 bombings and attempts during this period. But, all told, only “eight major bombings” were “publicly admitted and defended” by Weatherman over the course of two years. And, with one exception—Leslie Bacon, arrested then released—no member of Weatherman was arrested, much less convicted for any of them. With more attention from authorities—including an FBI task force specifically assigned to tracking down and stopping Weatherman 195

Bernardine Dohrn in The Weather Underground Oglesby 197 Sale, 632 198 ATF survey dated 24 July 1970, cited in Sale, 632 196

WUO Logo

35 —the organization evolved again. It became the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), and members went into hiding, some having contact with other members only when a meeting was scheduled. May 21, 1970, the Weather Underground issued its first underground communiqué, promising an attack on a “symbol or institution of Amerikan injustice”199 within the next two weeks. Nineteen days later, on June 9, a devastating blast went off at the headquarters of the NYPD. With seven minor injuries to policemen, “this was Weatherman’s first large and publicly acknowledged bombing.”200 Over the next seven years, 21 more bombings would follow for which Weatherman would take credit, with various reasons given. Their issues were not always about the war, but also solidarity with rioting prisoners or striking cement workers in Puerto Rico or in response to murdered blacks by the police. At one point, according to Alan Adelson in his 1972 profile of SDS, the remaining SDS “was actually afraid it would become one of the Weathermen’s bombing targets,”201 though that seems like an unlikely possibility, given Weatherman’s change in tactics after the townhouse. Likely Weatherman Bombings202 Date

Target

Reason Given

196 9

Oct 6

Haymarket Police Statue, Chicago

kicking off the Days of Rage

Dec 6

several parked Chicago police cars

killing of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark

197 0

Feb 13

several parked Berkeley police cars

Feb 21

house of Judge John Murtagh

Mar 6 18 West 11th Street, Greenwich Village

judge presides over Panther 21 trial accidental explosion

13th Police District, Detroit203 199

Qtd. in Sale, 648 Sale, 648 201 Adelson, xi 202 Compiled from Gilbert, Varon, The Weather Underground, Barber and Wickre 203 34 sticks of dynamite found and Ayers and others are reported in town “for the purpose of bombing a police facility.” In Fugitive Days, Ayers describes how they hid dynamite in a vent in an empty hallway, but the fuse never burned all the way. 200

36 May 10

National Guard Association building, Washington, DC

Jun 6

San Francisco Hall of Justice204

Jun 9

New York City Police Headquarters

Jul 26 Presidio Army Base, San Francisco

Killing of students at Kent State and Jackson State police repression 11th anniversary of Cuban Revolution

Jul 27 Bank of America building, New York

197 1

Oct 6

Haymarket Police Statue, Chicago… again205

Oct 8

Marin County Courthouse Hall of Justice

killing of Jonathan Jackson, William Christmas and James McClain

Oct 10

Long Island Courthouse, Queens

support for New York prison riots

Oct 14

Harvard Center for International Affairs

War in Vietnam

Mar 1 United States Capitol

invasion of Laos

Aug 30

killing of George Jackson

California Department of Corrections, Ferry Building, San Francisco Office of California Prisons, Sacramento

Sep 17

New York Department of Corrections, Albany

Oct 15

Hermann Building Center for International Affairs, MIT, office of William Bundy

197 2

May 19

Air Force wing of the Pentagon

US bombing raid in Hanoi and mining of Vietnam harbors

197 3

May 18

parked police cars at 103rd Police Precinct, New York City

killing of black 10-year old, Clifford Glover

Sep 28

ITT Headquarters, New York City

ITT’s role in Chilean coup

197 4

204

killing of 29 inmates at Attica

ITT Headquarters, Rome

Mar 6 Department of Health, Education and Welfare, San Francisco

sterilization of poor women

May 31

office of California Attorney General Evelle Younger

killing of 6 members of the Symbionese Liberation Army

Jun 17

Gulf Oil Headquarters, Pittsburgh

company’s actions in Angola

Sep 11

Anaconda American Brass Company building, Oakland

company’s involvement in Chilean coup

WUO sent a letter claiming credit for this bombing, but no explosion took place. Months later, an unexploded device was located by workmen 205 In Haymarket Revisited, William J. Adelman describes how “the statue’s empty, graffiti-marked pedestal stood on its platform as an anarchist monument” for the next three decades

37 197 5

197 7

Jan 28

State Department

escalation in Vietnam

Jun 16

Banco de Ponce, New York City

solidarity with striking Puerto Rican cement workers

Sep 4

Kennecott Corporation

company’s involvement in Chilean coup

Feb 3

Immigration and Naturalization Services, San Francisco

Agency for International Development and US Defense Department offices, Oakland206

While underground, Weatherman faced the daunting prospect of a disapproving populace and federal investigators. But, problems with the police were not new. Before Weatherman, SDS leaders were regular targets for municipal police, harassment or “wrung-in charges.”207 Mark Rudd and fellow Columbia SDSer Peter Clapp were arrested in upstate New York for allegedly having two ounces of marijuana. Bill Ayers was arrested for assault in Michigan. Connie Ullman was arrested for vagrancy in Texas and four members of the labor committee in Philadelphia were arrested for possession of explosives, never substantiated. Such repression almost certainly helped lead to the breakdown of SDS, proving to be “ultimately very debilitating for SDS both nationally and locally, exacerbating the paranoid style, wearing down individuals and eating into groups… exhausting both finances and energy… casting the dark realization of what the stakes”208 were. And, “as the atmosphere of crisis [was] prolonged, doubts ar[o]se, directly related to the erosion of basic loyalties, whether the stakes [were] worth the risks.”209 The “climate of intentional violence” gave Nixon the rationale to “intensify the surveillance, harassment, and prosecution of black and white activists, culminating in the notorious Huston Plan, which lifted restrictions on wiretapping, mail-opening, surreptitious entry, and other illegal

206

A bomb disposal squad set off the device in the street after it failed to detonate as intended Sale, 552 208 Ibid, 553 209 Hook, x 207

38 measures.”210 And, that was before. Now, living underground, without real jobs or salaries, living off friendly donations and temporary, under-the-table jobs, the paranoia would only be ramped up. Fighting a war with imperialist America and believing it was winning, Weatherman as an entity was, arguably, going strong, with each bombing earning headlines and attention to the cause. But, for its members, it was debilitating. Many would last for years in hiding; Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, married with two kids, would not turn themselves in until 1980. But, life was hard, and support from the public was waning—and there had never been much support for Weatherman—if not already gone. While it may be true that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,”211 as John Kennedy said and Martin Luther King liked to reiterate, America was more the Colossus that didn’t want to change than the pitiful giant being brought to its knees. “Marches on Washington [had] intensified”212 the war for a time. And, “the more militant and disruptive the antiwar people, the more support would flow to Nixon as a pillar of strength and sanity against them.”213 But, the war in Vietnam died down, and the antiwar movement lost its fire; “organizers and leaders cannot prevent the ebbing of protest.”214 What remained of the New Left was scattered, isolated, even as it continued to lash out. Gradually, Weatherman was rounded up or members turned themselves in. “Never ‘broken’ by the FBI” Weatherman “disbanded voluntarily in 1976,”215 though pieces of it remained active. Some members moved on to other organizations. Laura Whitehorn would join the Armed Resistance Unit and would be arrested in ’85 and charged 210

Burns, Social Movements of the 1960s, 109 Kennedy, “Address to Diplomatic Corps of the Latin American Republics” 212 Brian Flanagan in The Weather Underground 213 Todd Gitlin in The Weather Underground 214 Piven and Cloward, 37 215 Varon, 10 211

Laura Whitehorn

39 with a string of bombings. She would spend 14 years in prison. David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, survivor of the townhouse explosion, would join up with the Black Liberation Front and, in 1981, they would be involved in a botched armored car robbery that would leave 2 policemen and a security guard dead. Gilbert would receive three consecutive 25-year sentences. Boudin would make a plea bargain in exchange for a 20-year sentence. Charges against Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn would be dropped due to numerous illegal tactics used by the FBI in trying to capture them, including an attempt at kidnapping their son. Ayers would go on to be a professor of education at the University of Illinois. Dohrn would teach at Northwestern University’s law school and would serve as the Director of the Children and Family Justice Center. They would raise their two children and would be the legal guardians of Chesa Boudin, son to Kathy and David Gilbert. Mark Rudd would leave Weatherman in 1970 but would not surrender until ’77. He would go on to teach math at Central New Mexico Community College in Albuquerque. He has since retired, though he remains a part of the new incarnation of SDS. Brian Flanagan would go on to own a bar in New York City and he would win $23,000 on Jeopardy. Cathy Wilkerson, survivor of the townhouse explosion, would surrender to authorities in 1980. She would be charged with possession of dynamite (relating to the townhouse) and sentenced to 3 years. She would be released on a sentencing technicality after only 11 months served and would, like many of the Weatherman members, become a teacher.216 Absent significant legal retribution, living free lives, the members of Weatherman, for the most part, still defend their actions while with Weatherman. They even sometimes claim victory in that the war in Vietnam did end. And, their actions were, as far as they see it, an

216

This paragraph is a compilation from many sources but owes a great deal to the concluding moments of The Weather Underground

40 inevitable part of the ‘60s. A congressional report from ’68 would agree: “A climate that tends toward approval and encouragement of violence as a form of protest has been created by white terrorism against nonviolent protest,”217 it says. Nonviolent means would have to be left behind if violent repression was the response. As, Arnold Kaufman put it, authorities have “an inability to understand the dialectic of disorder, and a consequent tendency to cope with disorder by beating people over the head.”218 In Poor People’s Movements, Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward argue that there are three “responses to disruption”219 that come from the authorities: to ignore it, to punish it, and to conciliate it. At Columbia, SDS won some conciliation. But, by the time of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago just a few months later, the authorities set out only to punish. At Kent State in 1970, National Guardsmen shot and killed 4, “fatalities in the new American Civil War,”220 according to Allen J. Matusow. “Authoritarian and reactionary tendencies” like these “are a rising obstacle to the small, voiceless, poor, and isolated democratic movements,”221 and, as discussed above, more violent response by protesters inevitable. So then, given their success, and their eventual lack of retribution, why did Weatherman collapse? Matusow argues that the reasons for the collapse of SDS and also later Weatherman were not hard to find: “government repression, de-escalation of the Vietnam War [and] loss of moral authority as a consequence of movement violence.”222 In fact, David Gilbert lists as the one of the three reasons for the demise of Weatherman (along with COINTELPRO and not doing “nearly enough to develop anti-war consciousness into a deeper anti-racism and antiimperialism”223) as them losing their strongest base with the end of the war. Whatever support 217

“Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders” Kaufman, Arnold, 15 219 Piven, 27. 220 Matusow, 342 221 Hayden, The Port Huron Statement, 153 222 Matusow, 343 223 Gilbert, 23 218

41 their cause had, nevermind what support the organization had, was lost. And, “like every other terrorist group before them, the Weathermen had discovered you can’t accomplish anything without tremendous support from the people.”224 And, Brian Flanagan calls their “moral high ground” a “dangerous ethical position that we fell into [and] the Vietnam War made us a little crazy.”225 The Civil Rights Movement, before the emergence of the Panthers, retained its moral high ground, as did SDS in the antiwar movement. Weatherman conceded some of that ground to fight on a more practical level. Ideology wasn’t doing it. Marches weren’t doing it. And, so it came to violence. Diana Oughton once warned Terry Robbins: “You know you can catch the very disease you’re fighting, Terry. You want to stop war, you become warlike. You want to fight inhumanity, and you become inhumane. It’s contagion through combat, and then what’s the point?”226 A sidenote: Ayers raises the notion that Diana may have deliberately set off the explosion in the townhouse, or that the accident may have happened not while constructing the bomb but while trying to dismantle it, but there is no evidence to back up either of these options. “In truth, the New Left never found a solution to the ideological problem because none was possible,”227 says Matusow in The Unraveling of America. “Their critique [of “plastic” American civilization] was more aesthetic then political,”228 he suggests. Peter Marin would agree that “they were not… essentially political, no matter how political their rhetoric got.” He calls them “moral apocalyptists” and quintessentially American, partaking, ironically and yet unavoidably, of precisely the values (or the absence of values) they abhorred. They had discovered the moral void at the heart of American life; they were shocked, astonished, transformed,; but they had 224

Adelson, SDS, 248. The use of the word “terrorist” is, of course, debatable. Brian Flanagan in The Weather Underground 226 Ayers, Fugitive Days, 127 227 Matusow, 343 228 Ibid 225

42 nowhere to go with their vision of the void but straight into it, and in they went, losing themselves, perhaps, in what they feared and opposed. It could not–given the nature of the nature of the nation and age–have been otherwise.229 Matusow calls Weatherman, especially in their initial Statement, “turgid in style, unsteady in logic, reliant on the dead language of Marxism” but still he says “Weatherman was SDS’s last and worst attempt to fashion an ideology for the radical movement.”230 With more popular support, if the war had dragged on even longer perhaps, Weatherman might have accomplished more instead of being “some romantic misguided footnote”231 added to any discussion about the ‘60s or the Student Movement. But, the United States lacked the “seething mass discontent and the near-total denial of democratic rights—both prerequisites for armed struggle according to its Third World theorists—that made revolutionary violence… transparently legitimate.”232 But, was there a solution, a middle ground between the cause and its eventual methods that might have found more support? David Gilbert says “there is still no clear-cut successful model for combining the two critical needs of a fully democratic internal process and of tight discipline for fighting a ruthless state.”233 Tom Hayden, in Reunion, suggests that “the New Left had served its major purpose and faded away, leaving only sectarian ashes… the Weathermen had steadily lost their purpose and their bearings.”234 But, whether or not Weatherman was able to hold itself together over the years, whether or not it was able to find popular support, as Piven and Cloward put it, “protesters win, if they win at all, what historical circumstance has already made ready to be conceded,”235 and the war did end. But, was the unwinnable war going to die when it did, 229

Marin Matusow, 338 231 Hoffman, Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, 250 232 Varon, 10 233 Gilbert, 21 234 Hayden, Reunion, 460-1 235 Piven, 36 230

43 Weatherman or not? Was, perhaps, the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which “revealed how successive presidents had misled the American people”236 about the war in Vietnam, just as important a trigger to imploding the war effort? Did Weatherman really lose, even with the war ended, since, as Tom Brokaw suggests, we’re more conservative now because “the Left went too far?”237 Weatherman succeeded inasmuch as it made a name for itself, achieved notoriety and eluded the authorities and even retribution. The FBI’s most wanted list was “inflated to an alltime peak with the inclusion of radical fugitives” like Bernardine Dohrn, who “shared the Top Ten title with 15 others”238 at one point. Free and clear as the years went on, how can Weatherman be called a failure, when its original cause, ending the war in Vietnam, was achieved? Weatherman fought its fight and achieved victory, at least in part. Tom Hayden suggests some major ways in which the New Left succeeded: 1. “American democracy indeed became more participatory.”239 The Civil Rights Movement earned the vote for blacks, by the end of the decade the “Brown movement” was making headway for Mexican Americans, and the Women’s Liberation Movement was increasing women’s influence, socially, culturally, and politically. 2. “There were structural or institutional changes that redistributed political access and power.”240 On campuses across the country, colleges were instituting new classes, and whole new programs—like Black Studies or Women’s Studies—raising out of obscurity those who would have been ignored a decade earlier and providing direct influence on curricula to the youth of the nation. Similarly, organizations like 236

Foner, 900 Tom Brokaw in 1968 with Tom Brokaw 238 Wallechinsky and Wallace, The People’s Almanac, 613 239 Hayden, The Port Huron Statement, 28-9 240 Ibid 237

44 SDS had taught many how to get the attention of Washington, with or without violence. Young people knew how to be heard. 3. “The Vietnam War was ended and the Cold War model was challenged.”241 The Cold War wouldn’t really end until the ‘80s, but militarily, our containment strategy had been challenged and proven inadequate. And, indeed, the War in Vietnam was brought to an end, even if it took the Great Society with it. Todd Gitlin had a more negative view, though; “the best to be said for the Weathermen,” he says, “is that for all their rant and bombs, in eleven years underground they killed nobody but themselves.”242 Of course, in those same eleven years, how many did the United States kill? Two unwinnable wars, our government’s in Vietnam and Weatherman’s here—if success is measured in lives lost, or rather the reciprocal, then Weatherman was, by far, more victorious than our military ever was in Vietnam.

241 242

Hayden, The Port Huron Statement, 28-9, stress mine Gitlin, 403

45 Bibliography “Bring the War Home.” SDS, 1968. “Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders.” Washington, DC, 1968. “The Spirit of ’68: An SDS Radical Returns to Columbia, Disappointed.” New York 28 Apr. 2008: 18. 1968 with Tom Brokaw. Peacock, 2007. Adelson, Alan. SDS. New York: Scribner’s, 1972. Anderson, Terry H. The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to Wounded Knee. New York: Oxford U, 1995. ---. The Sixties. 3rd ed. New York: Pearson, 2007. Ashley, Karin, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, John Jacobs, Jeff Jones, Gerry Long, Home Machtinger, Jim Mellen, Terry Robbins, Mark Rudd and Steve Tappis. “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows.” New Left Notes 18 June 1969. Barber, David. A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why It Failed. Jackson: UP of MS, 2008. Brokaw, Tom. Boom! Voices of the Sixties: Personal Reflections on the ‘60s and Today. New York: Random, 2007. Burns, Stewart. Social Movements of the 1960s: Searching for Democracy. New York: Twayne, 1990. Charlton, Linda. “Cathlyn Wilkerson: Portrait of a Young Revolutionary.” New York Times 16 Mar. 1970, 49. Chicago 10. Dir. Brett Morgen. Consolidated, 2007. Delillo, Don. Libra. New York: Viking, 1988. Dreyfuss, Robert. “Bring the War Home.” Tompaine.com. 9 August 2006. Flint, Jerry M. “2d Blast Victim’s Life Is Traced.” New York Times 19 Mar. 1970, 34. Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty! An American History. Vol 2. New York: Norton, 2006. Freedman, Mervin B. and Paul Kanzer. “Psychology of a Strike.” Student Activism and Protest. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1970. 142-157.

46

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47 Oglesby, Carl. “Let Us Shape the Future.” Washington, DC, 27 Nov. 1965. Piven, Frances Fox and Richard A. Cloward. Poor People’s Movements. New York: Vintage, 1978. Potter, Paul. “We Have to Name the System.” Washington, DC, 17 Apr. 1965. Powers, Thomas. “Underground Woman.” New York Times 2 Nov. 2003, sec. 7: 9. Ragsdale, Bruce A. The Chicago Seven: 1960s Radicalism in the Federal Courts. Washington, DC: Federal Judicial Center, 2008. Rudd, Mark. “Che and Me” (A revised version of a talk given April 10, 2008 to the Peace Studies Program at Oregon State University). MarkRudd.com. Sale, Kirkpatrick. SDS. New York: Random, 1973. Sampson, Edward E. “Two Revolutions.” Student Activism and Protest. San Francisco: JosseyBass, 1970. 142-157. Savio, Mario. “An End to History.” Berkeley, 1 Oct. 1964. Smith, Bryan. “Sudden Impact.” Chicago December 2006. Steal this Movie. Dir. Robert Greenwald. Ardent, 2002. Varon, Jeremy. Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies. Berkeley: U of CA, 2004. Wallechinsky, David and Irving Wallace. The People’s Almanac. Garden City: Doubleday, 1975. Weather Underground, The. Dir. Sam Green. Free History, 2002. Wickre, Jim. “Timeline of Bill Ayers and the Weatherman Underground.” Blogspot.com 5 Oct. 2008. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present. 1980. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.