Days of Rage Read online

  Van Lydegraf, meanwhile, drove Leary north in the camper as a second car trailed behind, monitoring a police scanner. Like Rudd, the old communist wasn’t thrilled by his duties. “I was against this whole thing from the start,” he told Leary, “and if it was up to me you’d still be rotting in jail.”4 Leary sat in the back, sipping chilled wine, all the way to their destination, a duplex in a North Oakland slum. There was no sign of pursuit. The next day Van Lydegraf drove Leary north again, heading up Interstate 5 into far northern California, where they pulled into a remote campsite deep in the woods between the towns of Lakehead and Weed. The next night Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones arrived to welcome him.

  Leary was transfixed by Dohrn. His description of her would eventually appear in countless articles. She dressed, he said, “like no one else in the out crowd,” with “cashmere sweaters and black Capezio flats,” possessed of “unforgettable sex appeal” and “the most amazing legs,” like “the rah-rah leader of the crazy motherfuckers from the Girls Athletic Association running down the aisles of American Airlines borrowing food from people’s plates.” Leary volunteered to join Weatherman underground. Dohrn demurred, saying he was far too hot. She thought he should leave the country, perhaps join the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who had fled to Algeria. They wrote a pair of communiqués around the campfire. Dohrn’s was a transparent attempt to curry favor with the counterculture:

  Dr. Leary was being held against his will and against the will of millions of kids in this country. He was a political prisoner, captured for the work he did in helping all of us begin the task of creating a new culture on the barren wasteland that has been imposed on this country by Democrats, Republicans, capitalists and creeps. LSD, and grass, like the herbs and cactus and mushrooms of the American Indians and countless civilizations that have existed on this planet, will help us make a future world where it will be possible to live in peace. Now we are at war. . . . We are outlaws, we are free!

  Leary’s was predictably florid. He wrote, in part:

  There is the day of laughing Krishna and the day of Grim Shiva. Brothers and sisters, this is a war for survival. Ask Huey and Angela. They dig it. Ask the wild free animals. . . . To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act. . . . Listen, the hour is late. Total war is upon us. Fight to live or you’ll die. Freedom is life. Freedom will live.

  The escape was news around the world and probably did more to elevate Weatherman’s visibility than any single bombing. At a press conference in San Francisco, Michael Kennedy characterized it as “a merger of dope and dynamite. . . . There is now a merger of Timothy and the Weathermen. This portends more destruction to the American government than anything in history.” In Washington a simmering J. Edgar Hoover, asked about Leary, sniped, “We’ll have him in ten days.”

  The next morning the group split up, Dohrn and the others promising to see Leary again in three days. Once again Van Lydegraf drove Leary north in the camper, eventually coming to a stop on a country lane outside the town of Monroe, northeast of Seattle. A mile down the lane stood a farmhouse occupied until a few days earlier by Bill Ayers’s brother, Rick, and his pregnant girlfriend. Rick had deserted from the army to join Weatherman and would soon emerge as its West Coast logistics expert. “I didn’t even know about Leary until afterward,” he recalls forty years later. “I just knew someone was coming. So we all cleared out.”

  Leary’s wife, Rosemary, was waiting at the house. When Dohrn and the others finally arrived, Leary insisted they all go see the Woodstock concert movie; at the theater, a totally stoned Leary, his head now shaved, ate popcorn and hollered comments at the screen while Dohrn and Jones sat behind him, wishing he would shut up.

  Both Learys had been given fake driver’s licenses. The next morning Dohrn told Leary it would be necessary to fly to Chicago to get the passports needed to travel to Algeria. “Tim was quite shocked when he found out we weren’t handing him a preprinted, ready-to-go passport,” Jones recalled. “That was a capability we did not have.”5 Rick Ayers recalls: “Leary was, like, ‘Fuck, I’m out, let’s hijack a plane and get outta here,’ and the leadership was, like, ‘Man, cool out.’”

  On September 23, having used the fake licenses to secure passports at a Chicago passport office, the Learys boarded a flight to Paris, eventually making their way to Algiers. There they held court with a host of Movement figures, including Eldridge Cleaver and Dohrn’s sister, Jennifer. It was the beginning of a multiyear international odyssey that would end in embarrassment for everyone involved.

  • • •

  The Leary escape created a surge of momentum for Weatherman, one the leadership could not afford to waste. Everyone sensed they were nearing some kind of turning point. After Kent State and the campus riots in May, there were worrisome signs that the mass movement was flagging. The Nixon White House, it was clear, could not be influenced by demonstrations, no matter how large; that era was passing. By that fall, one author notes, “activists faced three options: go underground and fight the establishment by any means necessary, drop out and do their own thing, or turn their energies toward other causes.”6

  Events beyond Weatherman’s control, meanwhile, had dealt the underground’s allure a severe blow. Early on the morning of August 24, three weeks before the Leary escape, four militants in Madison, Wisconsin, packed nearly a ton of explosives into a stolen Ford Econoline van and parked it beside the University of Wisconsin’s Sterling Hall, which housed the Army Mathematics Research Center; it was the same building Jeff Jones, during a campus appearance, had urged “trashing” a year before. The resulting explosion, exponentially larger than anything Weatherman ever attempted, could be heard thirty miles away. It gutted the six-story building. Damage was put at $6 million; at the time, it was the single most destructive act of sabotage in U.S. history. Worse, a postdoctoral researcher named Robert Fassnacht, working inside the building, was killed. He left a wife and three children.

  Literally overnight, the Madison bombing transformed the national conversation from a focus on Nixon’s misdeeds—Cambodia, Kent State—to those of self-styled revolutionaries. Midnight bombings that until that point seemed brave or romantic or even heroic suddenly appeared callous and uncaring at least, murderous at worst. For the first time a generation of militants comfortable with revolutionary rhetoric were forced to confront its consequences. “It isn’t just the radicals who set the bomb in a lighted, occupied building who are guilty,” editorialized the Wisconsin State Journal. “The blood is on the hands of anyone who has encouraged them, anyone who has talked recklessly of ‘revolution,’ anyone who has chided with mild disparagement the violence of extremists while hinting that the cause is right all the same.” Reporters who sought reactions from young radicals found many not only chagrined but prepared to denounce the use of violence altogether. “Blowing up the CIA building will not bring home the troops,” a Detroit radical observed. “Bombings are suicidal and are not bringing any change except more repression.” In a widely quoted speech at Kansas State University three weeks later, President Nixon cited the Madison bombing in a virulent denunciation of student revolutionaries, “the violent and radical few, the rock throwers and the obscenity shouters” who would “tear America down.”

  Weatherman’s leadership was determined to keep the underground option alive. Even before the Leary escape, plans had been laid for an ambitious “fall offensive” to demonstrate the group’s resurgence and reach. In late September Ron Fliegelman and others traveled from New York to Chicago for the first bombing. “That was us, New York, and some aboveground friends,” he recalls. Their action was to be a symbol of Weatherman’s Phoenix-like rise from the ashes of the Townhouse: the very same Haymarket police statue they had destroyed a year earlier. The statue had been rebuilt, but on the morning of October 5, Fliegelman detonated a dynamite bomb that destroyed it once again.*

  At a New York press confere
nce the next day, Jennifer Dohrn, taking a step toward becoming Weatherman’s aboveground spokesperson, along with the Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman, played a recording of her sister Bernardine reading Weatherman’s communiqué aloud. It promised a series of bombings “from Santa Barbara to Boston” in the days ahead and, using the group’s groovy new “youth culture” patois, struck an almost plaintive tone, all but begging Movement activists to stay the course:

  Today many student leaders have cut their hair and called for peace. They say young people shouldn’t provoke the government. And they receive in return promises of peaceful change. . . . Don’t be tricked by talk. Arm yourselves and shoot to live! We are building a culture and a society that can resist genocide. It is a culture of total resistance to mind-controlling maniacs; a culture of high-energy sisters getting it on, of hippie acid-smiles and communes and freedom to be the farthest-out people we can be.

  This time all the bombs went off.

  At 1:27 a.m. on October 8, two days after the press conference, the first demolished an empty courtroom in the Marin County Courthouse, north of San Francisco. Two months earlier police there had killed a seventeen-year-old black teenager named Jonathan Jackson who was attempting to free three San Quentin prisoners at a hearing. The bombing was carried out by Weathermen working from the Pine Street apartment in San Francisco; Mark Rudd had scouted the site. Ninety minutes later the Seattle underground group Quarter Moon Tribe, which the exiled Howard Machtinger had joined, detonated a bomb in a set of lockers in an ROTC building at the University of Washington. The explosion destroyed a vacant office. Ninety minutes later a group calling itself the Perfect Park Home Garden Society detonated a bomb against a wall of a National Guard Armory in Santa Barbara, California. Damage was minimal. (The Seattle group was directly affiliated with Weatherman; the Santa Barbara group was believed to be.)

  Twenty-four hours later, having returned from Chicago, members of the New York cell detonated a large bomb behind a telephone booth on the third floor of a traffic court in Queens. Warnings were called in; no one was injured. A communiqué said the explosion was in support of an inmate riot that week at the Queens House of Detention. Four days later a fifth and final bomb went off in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard University’s empty Center for International Affairs, Henry Kissinger’s alma mater. A communiqué took credit on behalf of Weatherman’s “women’s brigade,” initially called the Proud Eagle Tribe. This was believed to be a group of several Weatherwomen, including Kathy Boudin, and friends.

  The bombings prompted a blizzard of bomb threats around the country, including dozens phoned in to major airports—so many that the Federal Aviation Administration was obliged to issue a nationwide alert calling for tightened security measures. At the Pentagon senior officials issued an order for increased National Guard security at military installations. In Washington, D.C., Attorney General John Mitchell termed the attacks the work of “psychopaths.” In Key Biscayne, Florida, the White House press secretary, Ron Ziegler, told reporters that the president had ordered the FBI to investigate. A new crime bill had been introduced, to which Republicans had added a clause doubling fines and jail time for bombings and making it a federal crime to bomb any building whose occupants received federal funding. Nixon, Ziegler said, had told White House staff that the new bombings “are further evidence of the need for speedy Congressional action.” Reaction in the mainstream press followed suit. As a Times editorial put it:

  Presumably the Weatherman and their ilk believe their outrages are furthering the cause of revolution in this “oppressive society.” The reverse is much more the case. Every building bombed, every person killed or wounded by bombs horrifies and makes more angry the great majority of the American people who abhor all political violence. . . . The bombings and other acts of terrorism are helping move this nation to the right; they foster repression and reaction.7

  It was a valid point. It wasn’t just the White House that was cracking down. In state legislatures, public dismay at radical bombings had triggered a rush to pass new restrictions on the sale and storage of dynamite. A Senate investigation revealed that thefts of dynamite from quarries and construction sites had risen from 12,381 pounds in 1969 to 18,989 pounds in just the first five months of 1970. Yet, as Ron Fliegelman had shown, dynamite could be purchased far more easily than stolen. In Michigan a pair of UPI reporters walked into a hardware store and, without showing identification or signing any paperwork, were able to buy twelve sticks of dynamite for just $3. When the two reporters walked into a pharmacy next door, they were forced to prove they were twenty-one and sign a logbook before being allowed to buy a two-ounce bottle of cough syrup containing codeine. At the beginning of 1970, some twenty-three states had little or no dynamite regulation; by that fall, perhaps unsurprisingly, almost all had passed or were considering new restrictions on dynamite sales.8

  Not that it mattered to Weatherman. By one alumnus’s estimate the group already had enough dynamite under lock and key to allow it to bomb a new building every month for the next thirty years.

  07

  THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY

  Weatherman and the FBI, October 1970 to April 1971

  Hundreds of anonymous tips flowed into FBI offices after the October bombings, most of them spurious, as with the caller who claimed that Weatherman was planning to steal biological weapons from the army’s Fort Detrick, in Maryland, and poison a major city’s water supply. The attacks put enormous pressure on the FBI to make arrests, but while any number of radicals were detained that autumn, none were Weathermen. It was, in fact, a wildly uneven manhunt. The group was a top priority for the New York, Chicago, and San Francisco offices, but despite all the demands and directives from headquarters, a number of FBI stations had simply refused to form Weatherman squads, seeing no pressing local need. When Wesley Swearingen, a veteran agent involved in both the Sam Melville and Townhouse investigations, was transferred from New York to Los Angeles that spring, he asked to be assigned to the Weatherman squad. He was told there wasn’t one. “Wes, you don’t understand,” a supervisor told him. “There are no Weathermen in Los Angeles.”1

  Almost immediately, however, Swearingen found one. The owner of a construction-supply store in Tucson had called police, suspicious of a young man to whom he had sold fifty pounds of dynamite. The man had showed a California driver’s license in the name of William Allen Friedman. When another agent showed it to Swearingen, he recognized the photo as John Fuerst, the Columbia SDSer who had headed the Cleveland collective until fleeing after the Townhouse. Swearingen traced “William Friedman” to an address in the beachside town of Venice, California, swiftly identifying five other radicals at the same address.

  “Hell,” Swearingen said, “these are Weathermen.”

  Reluctantly the Los Angeles FBI office formed a Weatherman squad. Fuerst had vanished, but Swearingen alone eventually opened more than two hundred wiretaps. When these found little to prove that the remaining five radicals in Venice were Weathermen—they apparently weren’t—Swearingen and other agents followed in Squad 47’s footsteps and began breaking into the homes and offices of their friends.

  The Fuerst investigation opened a new front in the government’s pursuit of Weatherman. It was led by a sharply dressed Washington lawyer named Guy L. Goodwin. As the newly named chief of the Justice Department’s special litigation service of the internal security and criminal division, Goodwin would become Weatherman’s own Inspector Javert, a relentless prosecutor who used grand juries to interrogate—terrorize, his critics charged—just about anyone ever linked to the group. The syndicated columnist Jack Anderson termed him President Nixon’s “Witch-Finder General.” In fact, Goodwin was a liberal Democrat who was deeply opposed to the Vietnam War and secretly disdainful of the Nixon administration. But he put his job first. In time, acting as a kind of traveling prosecutor, he would convene more than a dozen grand juries across the country, remaining calm and pro
fessional even in the face of the angriest Weather supporters. Once, when demonstrators pelted him with urine and oil outside a Seattle courthouse, Goodwin shrugged and told an associate, “Calm down. Kids will be kids.”2

  In one of his first grand juries, Goodwin subpoenaed the five Venice suspects to testify in Tucson. The only concrete evidence he could muster was the fact that Fuerst had used one of their cars. When all refused to testify, Goodwin had them jailed for contempt. In the meantime, Wes Swearingen and other Los Angeles agents burglarized all their new residences and then the homes of four of their attorneys; no usable evidence was ever found. When the grand jury expired six months later, the “Tucson Five,” as they were known by then, were freed. Goodwin subpoenaed them once more. Facing eighteen more months in jail, three testified. Cited for contempt, another appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which reversed the citation. Fuerst was eventually indicted but never captured. Many years later he turned himself in to authorities in Tucson. The case was dismissed.