Days of Rage Page 15

  “We stole it from a quarry,” says Judith Cohen, who met the “raiding party” in St. Louis and ferried the dynamite back to Milwaukee. “But once we got back, we didn’t know what to do with it. We had to go to the library to read how to, you know, make something out of it. I was torn. I remember this one guy, who knew what we were doing, he asked me, ‘Does it matter to you if you blow up innocent people? I mean, you’re keeping dynamite in a house, this could go off and people could die, what the fuck is the matter with you? Don’t you have any morals?’ You know, my jaw just kind of went up and down. I really hadn’t thought of it that way. The whole thing was just unreal. It was like we were kids playacting. It was real and not real.”

  In the event, the collective couldn’t bring themselves to actually bomb anything. The only explosions they triggered, Augustin recalls, came during “training sessions” in the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest. “There were always discussions of [actions,] but it was theoretical,” Augustin says. “We did stuff for fun, blowing things up in the forest. The theory was, we were training. In reality, we were just playing around. We didn’t have anything we wanted to do, so nothing ever happened.” Their careers as would-be saboteurs ended when a problem developed with the dynamite. “The stuff that came back was leaking, and we realized it wasn’t stable, that it could go at any time,” Cohen recalls. “So we ended up throwing it in Lake Michigan.”

  Pressure from the FBI and the Milwaukee police, meanwhile, took its toll. A detective named Harry Makoutz succeeded in befriending one of the group’s youngest members, a troubled teenager, who quickly told all. That October a trio of Weather sympathizers responded by attempting to detonate a grouping of gasoline cans on Makoutz’s front porch; they failed to explode.* In the wake of the aborted attack, the pseudo-Weathermen and many of their allies were hauled before a grand jury. “Pretty much everyone spilled their guts,” Augustin remembers.

  While no additional indictments were forthcoming, what remained of the Milwaukee collective crumbled. “I don’t even remember now how it all ended,” Augustin says. “But you know, you start with this daydream. And bit by bit, that daydream becomes reality, and that’s intimidating and difficult. Eventually it all just petered away.”

  “Yeah, I washed my hands of Weatherman,” Cohen recalls. “We were like this zombie Weather group. We were trying to be like real Weathermen, when we were dead Weathermen. For so long, you know, you’re in this delusional state, and then you emerge back into sanity.”

  • • •

  The summit meeting Bernardine Dohrn and Jeff Jones arranged took place in mid-May at a remote beach house they rented outside the northern California town of Mendocino, a haven for hippies and marijuana growers 150 miles up the coast from San Francisco. The setting was ideal, a large sunken living room lined with low couches, with bay windows overlooking the ocean, just the spot for the healing and quiet reason the two were counting on. Driving “Suzie Q” with a load of hay in back, Jones ferried everyone to the house in ones and twos, Howie Machtinger, then Kathy Boudin and Mark Rudd, looking a bit shell-shocked. Jones picked up JJ and Bill Ayers in a field near a distant bus station. Ayers later wrote that he had been struck by Jones’s placid demeanor:

  He seemed shockingly serene, and though he was sad, sad, sad about the [townhouse] deaths, and particularly attentive to me because of Diana, I think, he was in no hurry to explore any political issues with us yet. . . . He said only that we would have plenty of time to sort things out. We should try to catch our breath for now, he said. We’ll have plenty of time, he repeated, and that unremarkable phrase, a commonplace in most company, was jarring here because no comrade could have spoken it in the past several months without a barrage of derisive criticism. It was heresy, too, but it was calming, and I felt, oddly, that I wanted to cry.6

  Instead of the heated debate most of the attendees expected, they were met by the unlikely sight of Dohrn in the kitchen, leaning over a pot of boiling pasta. Jones announced that meetings wouldn’t even begin for a day or two. Until then, he said, they should all try to relax and enjoy one another’s company. Everyone appeared relieved but JJ, who wouldn’t shut up, going on and on about the battle plans they needed to draw up to avenge Terry and Diana and Teddy. They ate together, then watched the sun set over the Pacific and took long walks in the surrounding hills; after dinner they drank wine and smoked joints and talked about nothing. Both Dohrn and Jones paid special attention to Ayers, who was key to their plans. Dohrn took him for a walk and cried. Jones took him for a stroll alongside an adjoining cliff and said, “Bill, your best friend just killed your girlfriend, and it’s okay for you to be angry about that and mourn.”7

  While personal issues were important, everyone understood there were larger issues on the table. It wasn’t just studying their mistakes. In the four months since they had closed the SDS office, change within the Movement had accelerated. Everyone felt it. On April 30, 1970, President Nixon had announced that the United States was invading Cambodia. The campuses exploded. On May 4 National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio fired into a crowd of protesters, killing four. Protests grew so widespread, and so virulent, that more than five hundred campuses were closed. But what struck many observers, especially those in Weatherman, was not what protesters were doing; it was who they were. Hundreds of thousands of hippies and “freaks” were pouring into the Movement, transforming it into something new and unfamiliar. What remained of the New Left was being lost in a sea of tie-dye and LSD; if Weatherman was to survive, it would need to swim with the new tide.

  It was just one of so many things they had to deal with that week. Finally, after two or three days, with everyone but JJ able to relax, they began the meetings. Forty years later, everyone involved has a different memory of what was said and in what order. But much of the talk revolved around what went wrong at the Townhouse. “There were actually three arguments about the Townhouse,” Howie Machtinger recalls. “JJ’s view was, yeah, we screwed up, but we’ll do better next time. Cathy Wilkerson argued that things went wrong because the collective was sexist, that everything had gone crazy because men monopolized the weapons. I thought that was beside the point. It was Bernardine who played the essential role in putting things back together. She is the one who saw clearly the contradiction between white privilege and crazy actions like Terry planned. So her argument was, you have to remove any legitimacy for that kind of action.”

  This was a jarring moment for everyone: What Dohrn was saying refuted almost everything most had been expecting for months: We won’t kill people. Not even policemen. Dohrn stated clearly that JJ and Terry’s proposed action at Fort Dix represented the very worst kind of politics. It would have turned millions of Americans against them. There could be no more actions like it. What Dohrn proposed adopting instead, and what Weatherman became, was what might be called the Sam Melville model of underground operations. They would bomb buildings of symbolic importance—courthouses, military bases, police stations—but only after warnings, and only at times when the buildings were likely to be empty. Weatherman had to be more “life affirming,” Dohrn said, more in line with the mass protests breaking out everywhere. Their bombings, she said again and again, must push the mass movement toward renewed militancy. She called the new strategy “armed propaganda.” A writer for the Berkeley Tribe called it “responsible terrorism.”

  “Weatherman never understood violence, we didn’t,” remembers Cathy Wilkerson. “It was purely an abstraction, until it wasn’t. Then we were like Lady Macbeth. What do you do when you have blood on your hands? For us, we decided to take violence out of the equation.”

  No one but JJ had the will to oppose Dohrn. Dealing with her onetime lover, the young man who had spearheaded the writing of the original Weatherman paper, who had done more than anyone to push them into forming an American guerrilla force, was Dohrn’s final task. On the last day she made the announcement. She had taken JJ aside first, a
lone, to break the news. As Bill Ayers remembered it, she told JJ, “‘Where we’re going . . . you’re not welcome.’ She said it slowly, formally, representing a consensus, and with that [JJ] was expelled.” Mark Rudd, JJ’s closest friend, was dismissed from the leadership. He would be allowed to stay on as a cadre in the San Francisco tribe.

  That night Rudd and JJ retired to a bar in nearby Fort Bragg, where they drank and played pool. JJ was surprisingly sanguine. Rudd wrote that JJ told him:

  “Someone has to take the blame. Bernardine, Billy, and Jeff are right about the military error.”

  “But everyone knew what was being planned,” I said. . . .

  “It doesn’t matter. We have to create the fiction that they were always right so that they can lead the organization.”

  Inevitably, the subject turned to one of JJ’s favorite novels, Darkness at Noon, about the Stalin-era purges. “I always respected the fact that the old Bolshevik confessed for the sake of the revolution,” JJ said. “There had to be a single unified revolutionary party, even under Stalin’s leadership. The individual doesn’t count; it’s only the party and its place in history that’s important.”

  He laughed. “At least they’re not going to liquidate me,” he said. “I’ll be back.”8

  But JJ never came back. In fact, he never really recovered. Wanted by the FBI, he would wander the United States and Mexico for years, eventually settling in Vancouver. There, calling himself Wayne Curry, he worked odd jobs, ultimately making a living as a low-level marijuana dealer. He died of cancer in 1997, forgotten.

  As sad as it was to his friends, Rudd wrote years later, “JJ’s expulsion was a brilliant maneuver that successfully rewrote history. Suddenly no one remembered how universally accepted the old ‘Fight the people, all white people are guilty’ line was.” No one would remember that they had tried to kill policemen. “Weather’s history,” Rudd wrote, “had been conveniently cleaned.” A myth was born. “The myth, and this is always Bill Ayers’s line, is that Weather never set out to kill people, and it’s not true—we did,” says Howie Machtinger. “You know, policemen were fair game. What Terry was gonna do, while it was over our line, it wasn’t that far over our line, not like everyone said later. I mean, he wasn’t on a different planet from where we were.”

  • • •

  When the meetings ended, Dohrn sat down with a tape recorder and, in a single take, dictated Weatherman’s first communiqué. Her voice was calm, her tone the thoughtful grad student. “Hello, this is Bernardine Dohrn,” she began. “I’m going to read a declaration of war.”

  This initial declaration, soon to be quoted in newspapers around the country, gave no hint of the group’s proposed retreat from murderous violence; if anything, it celebrated violence. The statement is notable in that it makes only a single reference to the war; as Dohrn makes clear, Weatherman’s true motivation was fighting alongside the blacks they imagined were in revolt against the U.S. government:

  Black people have been fighting almost alone for years. We’ve known that our job is to lead white kids to armed revolution. . . . Kids know that the lines are drawn; revolution is touching all of our lives. Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way. Now we are adapting the classic guerrilla strategy of [Uruguay’s] Tupamaros to our own situation here in the most technically advanced country in the world. . . .

  Within the next fourteen days we will attack a symbol or institution of Amerikan injustice. This is the way we celebrate the example of Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown and all black revolutionaries who first inspired us by their fight behind enemy lines for the liberation of their people.

  Never again will they fight alone.

  It was a bold and, especially given the humiliation of the Townhouse, astonishingly arrogant statement. Weatherman was a shell of its former self; it had lost hundreds of supporters and dozens of members. Many believed it could never survive the emotional wreckage of the Townhouse. Yet Weatherman’s challenge now was as much technical as logistical. If it was to actually carry out a “war” against the U.S. government, it needed to find a way to do so without getting any more of its members killed. The bomb Terry Robbins had been building had no “safety switch,” that is, no way to test it short of detonation. Their first task, Dohrn and Jones were uncomfortably aware, was finding a way to build a safe bomb. “There was a flaw in our design,” Cathy Wilkerson recalls. “Howie and the San Francisco people, they had been lucky, because the design wasn’t safe, it was primitive. I was eager to fix it, for any number of reasons. I was eager to learn. There was a sense I was responsible for the Townhouse. And yes, a part of me wanted to finish what Terry had started.”

  In San Francisco, Wilkerson, Paul Bradley, and several others obtained chemistry and explosives manuals and began studying bomb design. “We just went to the store and bought books,” Wilkerson recalls. “Popular Mechanics magazines. I needed all that stuff. I needed to figure out how electricity works. Protons, neutrons, I didn’t know any of that stuff.” The most serious work, however, was done back east. Even before Mendocino, Jeff Jones had returned to New York and sat down on a Central Park bench with Ron Fliegelman. “We were talking about the Townhouse, and I said, ‘I don’t want this to happen again,’” Fliegelman recalls. “He was talking politics, you know, ‘This wouldn’t have happened without bad politics,’ and I said, basically, that’s crap. You either know how to build something or you don’t. He said, ‘Well, what do we do?’ And I said, ‘This can never happen again. I’ll take care of it.’ And I did.”

  In all the thousands of words written about Weatherman in the past forty years, including six memoirs, three other books, two films, and countless news articles, not one devotes a single sentence to Ron Fliegelman. Yet it was Fliegelman who emerged as the group’s unsung hero. Beginning that day in Central Park, he devoted hundreds of hours to the study of explosives and, in the process, became what Weatherman desperately needed: its bomb guru. “Without him,” says Brian Flanagan, “there would be no Weather Underground.”

  In a group that at that point had shrunk to barely thirty or so members, many of whom were effete intellectuals, Fliegelman was the one person who knew how to strip down and reassemble guns, motorcycles, and radios, who knew how to weld, who could fix almost anything. He had always been this way. The son of a suburban Philadelphia doctor, Fliegelman had from an early age been fascinated by how things work. His grandfather, a steelworker, never objected when he returned home to find that little Ron had taken apart the alarm clock. By his teens he could disassemble and rebuild any kind of engine. He was never much in the classroom, dropping out of two colleges before washing up at Goddard College in Vermont, where Russell Neufeld, who became his lifelong friend, invited him to join Weatherman in Chicago. When SDS ran out of money to pay its printer, Fliegelman took over himself, cranking out hundreds of leaflets before crushing his hand in the machinery. Aimless up to that point in life, he discovered in Weatherman a new purpose, a new meaning. “I knew none of these people, and they didn’t know me,” he recalls. “But I was opposed to the war and racism, and I thought, ‘This is pretty cool.’”

  Squat and stout, with a bushy black beard, Fliegelman plunged headlong into the study of dynamite. “Everyone was afraid of the stuff, for good reason,” he says. “What we were dealing with was a group of intellectuals who didn’t know how to do anything with their hands. I did. I wasn’t afraid of it, I knew it could be handled. When you’re young and you’re confident, you can do anything. So, yeah, you play with it, and try to build something. The timer is the whole thing, right? It’s just electricity going into the blasting cap. Eventually I came up with a thing where I inserted a lightbulb, and when the bulb lit, the circuit was complete, and we were able to test things that way. If the light came on, it worked. The rest of it is simple.”

  It is perhaps appropriate that Weatherman’s two prin
cipal bomb makers, Ron Fliegelman and Cathy Wilkerson, would in time come together and have a child. Forty years later Wilkerson, while acknowledging Fliegelman’s primacy in explosives, isn’t so certain her onetime boyfriend should take sole credit for Weatherman’s bomb design. Fliegelman, however, has no doubt. “New York fixed the problem,” he says with emphasis. “And we taught it to San Francisco. Cathy was the only technical one out there. She knew how to build the thing, but she was the only one out there who could do it.” In the years to come, Fliegelman reckons he personally built the vast majority of the group’s bombs, flying to the Bay Area on a number of occasions. “Maybe they did two or three things without me,” he says, “but I doubt it.”

  • • •

  In Weatherman’s May 21 declaration of war, Dohrn had promised to attack a major symbol of American power within fourteen days. In Weather lore, and in previous histories, that is what they did. But the reality, according to several alumni, was not only far more complicated but far more embarrassing, not to mention harmful to the myth that Weather had now dedicated itself to solely nonviolent actions.

  The actual “battle plan,” such as it was, consisted of at least three actions. The first suggests that, its own propaganda aside, Weatherman was still actively considering high crimes. It went beyond anything ever attempted in radical circles to that point, and had it been successful, it might have altered the history of the underground. The action involved a small coterie of Weathermen led by Howie Machtinger, who related his version of events to the author in 2011.