Days of Rage Read online

  Guy Goodwin, however, was just getting started.

  • • •

  After the October bombings Weatherman’s leadership gathered for a postmortem in New York. It was probably the first time all four of its members—along with its soon-to-be-named fifth, Eleanor Stein—had been in one place since Flint. It had been an incredible six months since Mendocino, a period in which they had managed to rebuild the organization, perfect a safer bomb design, and launch a sharply different kind of nationwide bombing campaign from the one JJ and Terry Robbins and many other Weathermen had envisioned. Everyone was exhausted. They needed time to rest, regroup, and plan.

  Along with members of the New York cell, the leaders rented a house near the beach in Hampton Bays, toward the eastern end of Long Island. Jeff Jones passed out the last of the California acid and led everyone in gathering seashells. On Thanksgiving Stein cooked a turkey while the men played touch football. In the evenings they smoked pot, listened to Bob Dylan’s new album, New Morning, and tried to take stock of everything that had happened in the eight frenetic months since the Townhouse. They had achieved so much. They had struck at the government in six cities. No one had been hurt. No one had been arrested. Yet, for all they had achieved, it was hard to argue that Weatherman had done much to further the underground cause. They had imagined they would be an intellectual vanguard whose actions would draw others into the underground and trigger the revolution they wanted so badly. But it wasn’t happening.

  Major protest bombings were on the rise, it was true; by one count, there were 330 in 1970, almost one a day, more than three times the number reported in 1969. Almost all, however, like the one in Madison, appeared the work of “one-off” student rage. No significant new underground groups had formed. And while Weatherman retained real prestige as the “heavy edge” of the New Left, the Madison bombing had done incalculable damage to the group’s cause, at once repelling would-be allies and demonstrating that public tolerance of radical violence was on the wane. In a Gallup poll that winter, only 8 percent of college students surveyed expressed a “highly favorable” view of Weatherman, while 47 percent had a “highly unfavorable” view, one point less than for the ultraconservative John Birch Society.3 Weatherman itself, while operational, was far smaller than it had been before the Townhouse; by Thanksgiving, it probably had less than fifty active members, perhaps as few as thirty.

  Change was in the air. You could see it on the streets. The media, from Time to the Saturday Evening Post, was calling it a revolution, but it was not at all the revolution Weatherman expected. Everyone called it something different: the Age of Aquarius, Woodstock Nation, Alternative Society, the counterculture. After five years of scoffing and hand-wringing at the riotous change in its children, much of mainstream America had begun to embrace it: the drugs, the music, the long hair, the bell-bottom pants, the distaste for authority. A best-selling book that winter, The Greening of America, by a Yale professor named Charles Reich, announced it loud and clear:

  There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. . . . This is the revolution of the new generation. . . . Their protest and rebellion, their culture, clothes, music, drugs, and liberated life-style.4

  It was true. America, it turned out, had fallen in love with everything about this groovy new counterculture—except its politics. Those like Weatherman who had predicted a revolution in America ended up being half-right. A revolution was arriving, but it was a cultural rather than a political phenomenon. It was the height of irony: Much of America wanted to dress like Bernardine Dohrn, smoke pot like Bernardine Dohrn, and listen to Bernardine Dohrn’s music, but it honestly didn’t want to hear a word she had to say. The Movement had preached endlessly about freedom, to dress as you like, eat what you like, smoke what you like: “You can do what you want” was the famous line from the 1971 movie Harold and Maude. As these new values seeped into the American mind-set during 1970, 1971, and 1972, it turned out that what most Americans wanted to do was focus not on politics—and certainly not on overthrowing the government—but on themselves. It was the dawning of what Tom Wolfe called the “Me” Decade. Terry H. Anderson gives this vivid portrait of its beginnings circa 1971:

  Liberal cities turned exotic as freaks and ethnics created a hip cultural renaissance. Street art flourished; color flooded the nation. Chicanos painted murals at high schools and “walls of fire” on buildings. Black men wore jumbo Afros and the women sported vivid African dress. Young men with shaved heads and robes beat tambourines and chanted on corners, “Krishna, Krishna, Hare Krishna.” Hip capitalists invaded the streets, setting up shops: Artisans wearing bandanas and bellbottoms sold jewelry, bells, and leather, as sunlight streamed through cut glass. Communards in ragged bib overalls sold loaves of whole-wheat bread at co-ops and organically grown vegetables at farmers’ markets. Freak flags flew, curling, waving across America. Carpenters wearing ponytails moved into decaying neighborhoods, paint and lumber in hand, and began urban homesteading. Longhairs blew bubbles or lofted Frisbees in the park. Tribes of young men and women skinny-dipped at beaches and hippie hollows.5

  The irony was that even as Middle America adopted the Movement’s look and feel, the Movement itself was slowly coming apart. In part, it was due to the dawning realization that demonstrations alone would never end the war or influence the White House. Nixon had started his “Vietnamization” of the war; American soldiers had begun streaming home. Suddenly protesting the war didn’t seem so urgent. Thousands of young people were giving up politics, many of them flocking to the hippie communes springing up all over the United States. By 1971, the Associated Press estimated, three thousand communes had opened, taking in three million people. But the real problem was that the Movement had become a victim of its own success. By empowering women, it created the women’s liberation movement. By calling out corporate polluters, it helped spawn the modern environmental movement. In the countercultural mainstreaming of 1970, 1971, and 1972, these two causes and many others exploded into the national consciousness, diverting the attentions of many who had built their lives around protesting the war and racism. This shift was symbolized by the decision at Rat, the underground paper where Sam Melville’s girlfriend, Jane Alpert, once worked, to give up coverage of the “revolution” altogether and focus exclusively on women’s issues.

  “[The past two years] haven’t been good for anyone, and on balance they haven’t been good for the left at all,” the writer David Horowitz observed that winter. “The main motion is in other directions, towards new lifestyles rather than new constituencies, toward political communes and collectives rather than parties and coalitions, toward underground violence rather than aboveground organizing.”

  • • •

  Sipping coffee in the mornings at Hampton Bays, Dohrn and the others sensed they might be sliding toward the wrong side of history. They had achieved much, they agreed, but they had made mistakes, and not just at the Townhouse. They had led a banzai charge, and no one had followed. They had been stunningly arrogant, and dismissive of their critics. Worst of all, they had walked away from their only source of real power: the vast network of SDS, now in ruins. Without SDS, they had no power. Without SDS, they were isolated. They were alone.

  “By then the question was becoming ‘Why are we doing this?’” recalls Brian Flanagan. “People started saying it was a mistake jettisoning SDS, and it clearly was. Then, once you took real violence off the table, once you said we weren’t going to kill policemen, what were we gonna do, blow up bathrooms the rest of our lives?”

  They had burned too many bridges, and they knew it. That winter, for the first time, some of their aboveground allies began openly appealing for support from the rest of the Movement, something the leadership had nev
er thought would be necessary. Returning from a trip to Algiers, Jennifer Dohrn made clear that Weatherman couldn’t bring about a revolution on its own. “Revolution,” she told the Liberated Guardian, “means moving on all different kinds of levels. . . . If they’re doing a bombing, well, then we should be planning how we’re going to be out on the street [in support], not how we should be doing a bombing too. To coordinate stuff moves so many more people, and it’s really a way of increasing our strength, building solidarity among us.”

  A more plaintive note was struck by two imprisoned Weatherwomen, Linda Evans and Judy Clark, who released a letter from a Chicago jail in which they appealed to their fellow radicals not to forget Weatherman. “I wonder how many old friends of people who are underground think to talk about them with people,” Clark wrote. “Think how effective it would be in making those underground figures into real life and blood people, massifying that understanding so that more and more people can develop a consciousness about aiding and abetting fugitives, developing their own sense of security, breaking down that feeling of separateness between under[ground] and over[ground].” Evans added: “[This] makes them real people, not superstar myths. People don’t seem to understand how important the creation of the underground is to the future of the struggle—how important it is for all of us to help them survive—support them totally, openly when they have the misfortune to get caught. . . . Talk with friends about ways they survive, ways we can help them—just to make the whole thing more real than visions of people hiding in basements, putting on wigs occasionally to carry a bomb into a building.”

  “Superstar myths” hiding in basements: Eight months after the Townhouse, that’s what they had become. Somehow, Dohrn knew, they had to begin to rebuild all those bridges, make themselves real again to the Movement. They started writing in the mornings after coffee, all of them contributing to the essay they decided to call, in another nod to Dylan, “New Morning, Changing Weather.” It was the longest and most mature document they had produced to date. Gone was much of the hippie-dippy “youth culture” jargon that came to be associated with Jeff Jones and Bill Ayers. In its place was something they had never tried before, genuine humility, infused into a sober accounting of Weatherman’s first year. The tone came to be identified with Dohrn; when “New Morning” was released, on December 6, 1970, only her signature was appended.

  “New Morning” was a stark admission not only of Weatherman’s failure to draw others into revolutionary violence but of how thoroughly the world had moved away from its tactics in just a year. “It has been nine months since the townhouse explosion,” it read. “In that time, the future of our revolution has changed decisively.” Weatherman, too, needed to change, the statement went on. In language that represented a sharp reversal from communiqués issued as recently as that September, it rejected almost everything Weatherman had represented up to the Townhouse, admitting that “the townhouse forever destroyed our belief that armed struggle is the only real revolutionary struggle.” It acknowledged its “military error” and apologized not only for its “technical inexperience” but for a tendency “to consider only bombings or picking up the gun as revolutionary, with the glorification of the heavier the better.” Gone were the calls for supporting black revolutionaries. In their place were more attempts to reach out to hippies and freaks, announcing that “grass and organic consciousness expanding drugs” were now “weapons of the revolution.” Dohrn even changed the name of the group, rejecting “Weatherman” as sexist. They would now be called the Weather Underground.

  “New Morning” drew criticism from a number of leading radicals, none more important than the Panther 21, the group of New York Black Panthers still engaged in a mass conspiracy trial. The “21” issued an open letter criticizing Weather’s retreat from revolutionary violence, as well as its unwillingness to raise money or help the jailed Panthers in any significant way. The letter put Weather’s leadership in a delicate position. Everyone knew what many Panthers wanted to do: kill policemen, the exact strategy Weather had now disavowed. The 21’s letter, in effect, forced Weather to publicly choose between its old principles and those it would now embrace, supporting black revolutionaries or renouncing deadly violence. In the end, in a decision that came back to haunt everyone involved, Dohrn decided to take what many saw as the coward’s way out. The leadership responded to the 21 with complete silence. They said nothing.

  “That right there is the moment when they abandoned the blacks, abandoned everything they ever said about helping the blacks, and we all knew it,” says one radical attorney of the period. “Bernardine, Billy, that pretty boy Jeff Jones, all of them, they decided they didn’t want to die, they didn’t want to go to jail. So they walked out on everything they believed so they could stay free and stay alive.”

  • • •

  After “New Morning” the New York leadership returned to their apartment on Amity Street in Brooklyn, the others to San Francisco. It was around this time, it appears, that Dohrn, Jones, and Ayers abandoned their Sausalito houseboat for a modern gated home in the waterside suburb of Tiburon. At least two friends remember visiting them there. “They were living in a big, glamorous house in Tiburon, with a beautiful deck, four bedrooms, totally empty,” recalls Jon Lerner. “I remember I walked into the kitchen, and someone looked outside and noticed an unmarked panel van across the street. The three of them panicked and said, ‘Let’s get outta here,’ and so we packed them up and left. I assume they went back at some point. It was a false alarm.”

  The Tiburon house symbolized a dichotomy that was beginning to trouble many in Weather’s lower ranks. While leadership lived in a waterfront home, their followers, many still huddled in a single apartment on Pine Street in San Francisco, were living on the edge of poverty. The resentment would grow in the coming months. “They wouldn’t let us have jobs, you know, they would give us twenty bucks now and then,” says Cathy Wilkerson, who remains resentful forty years later. “In time the difference between the top and the bottom became really gross. Offensive. Their position was that if you wanted money, you should raise money. Well, most of us couldn’t do that. They would go to good restaurants that we could not afford. If we went with them, we had to pay for ourselves, unless business was discussed, and they would pay.”

  One Weather alumnus remembers visiting Bill Ayers and opening the refrigerator to find a stick of butter. “Butter!” he exclaims today. “I couldn’t afford a piece of bread, and they had butter!” Ayers’s brother Rick was especially incensed. At one point, while underground in Los Angeles, he was so poor he lived for months in a tent in a city park. “They never seemed to have jobs,” he recalled. “They lived off radical lawyers and moneyed friends who told them what they wanted to hear—what courageous revolutionaries they were—while all the rest of us did the shit work and went around blowing things up to maintain their reputations. While some of us were dangerously poor, they always ate good food and they always slept between clean sheets.”6

  For the leadership, at least, life was good—so good that worries of complacency set in. “There were a lot of people who were getting sloppy, their IDs were bad, their wigs were bad, their hair dye was bad,” remembers Rick Ayers, who warned his brother they were taking too many chances. “I was a stickler. I recall I really thought they were getting sloppy in San Francisco, and I told them so.”

  Rick’s concerns rose that winter when, during a single two-month period, a number of Weathermen survived encounters with their FBI pursuers. The first was Rick Ayers himself, who was then living in a remote farmhouse north of Seattle. His girlfriend had given birth that summer, and at one point the couple crossed into Canada to register their daughter under their real names in Vancouver. Not long after, their landlord’s teenaged son warned them that federal agents had arrived to arrest them. “We were gone within an hour,” Ayers recalls. “We lost the car and everything else. Apparently we had been photographed at the Vancouver train stat
ion, and it had taken them months to find us.” (It was after this episode that Ayers relocated to Los Angeles.)

  The second incident involved one of Weather’s young attorneys, a Harvard graduate named Donald Stang. On January 22, 1971, security guards at the Standard Oil building on Bush Street in San Francisco discovered Stang in an eleventh-floor restroom. Over his head they saw he had unscrewed a ceiling vent. When police were called, they found he was carrying a diagram of what appeared to be the building’s heating system. With no evidence of any crime, Stang was not arrested, but the FBI clearly believed he was scouting a location to be bombed.*

  By far the most dangerous encounter occurred a month earlier, on December 16, on Manhattan’s East Side. Bill Ayers and several others, including Ron Fliegelman, decided to take in a movie at a theater on East Sixty-eighth Street, which happened to be around the corner from the FBI’s New York offices. Fliegelman was with his new girlfriend, Judy Clark. As luck would have it, an FBI agent passing the theater recognized Clark as she walked inside. “There were four or five of us in the theater,” recalls Fliegelman. “We knew something was wrong. Someone in front of us was looking back at us. I remember somebody came back and asked Judy who she was, then asked her to come back with them. At the back, she ran. And they had to run after her. There was an emergency exit by the screen, and we all went to that and got away. It was close.”

  Even as Clark broke into a run, her FBI pursuers watched in amazement as she pulled out a notebook and actually began eating its pages. “When we caught her, oh, God, she was kicking and screaming and spitting at us,” recalls Don Shackleford, a Squad 47 agent who helped make the arrest. “She called us every name in the book.”