Days of Rage Read online

  One Weatherman history terms the paper, a nearly impenetrable blizzard of Marxist jargon, “an almost mystical vision of a coming political Armageddon.” (“Any close reading of the Weatherman paper,” one SDSer quipped, “will drive you blind.”) A crystallization of all JJ’s pet ideas, the paper didn’t just draw parallels between American student protests and the Third World guerrilla campaigns sprouting up around the world: It judged them all part and parcel of a single titanic global struggle between oppressed minorities and the agencies of U.S. imperialism. In other words, Mark Rudd hadn’t just acted like Che at Columbia; he was, in fact, Che’s comrade in arms. But the genius of JJ’s argument was that it allowed white radicals to portray themselves as allies of these oppressed minorities by rallying behind the one group whose leaders—from Martin Luther King to Huey Newton—the JJs of the world adored even more than Che Guevara: American blacks. “I think in our hearts what all of us wanted to be,” former SDS leader Cathy Wilkerson recalls, “was a Black Panther.”

  Wars like Vietnam came and went, but it was only the brewing revolution of American blacks, JJ prophesied, that had the potential to destroy the country. Every white revolutionary, he argued, was duty-bound to become 1969’s version of John Brown, the Civil War−era antislavery zealot. “John Brown! Live like him!” became JJ’s rallying cry. What this meant in reality was, like most protest-era rhetoric, open to interpretation. In the minds of apocalyptic radicals like JJ, white American protesters were destined to become Che-style guerrillas in the streets of America, rallying blacks and the white working class to a bloody revolution. For JJ and his allies talk of violence was no longer abstract. They wanted to bomb buildings and kill the policemen who were murdering blacks in the ghettos. Not many, it should be emphasized, shared this view: More than a few, even within the Movement, thought talk of antigovernment violence was lunacy. JJ’s group decided to name its manifesto after a Bob Dylan line: “You don’t a need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Saner SDSers twisted this into a memorable quip: “You don’t need a rectal thermometer to know who the assholes are.”

  The SDS convention took place at the Chicago Coliseum on Wednesday, June 18, 1969; nearly two thousand people attended. The Weathermen arrived as part of the larger RYM—Revolutionary Youth Movement—caucus, but both were consumed with the battle against their archrivals, PL. (The basic difference between the two groups was that PL adopted a Maoist philosophy of focusing on “workers,” while Weatherman put its emphasis on the “oppressed,” especially blacks.) The convention’s first two days were consumed with the trappings of student-leftist gatherings, angry speeches, PL chants against RYM, RYM chants against PL, even fistfights. The turning point came on Friday night, when a delegate from the Black Panthers took the microphone and read a statement that condemned PL as “counterrevolutionary traitors” who, if their ideological positions did not change, “would be dealt with as such.” It amounted to an ultimatum from the Panthers, whose approval every SDS leader sought like lost gold: Dump PL or else. PLers tried to drown out the Panthers, chanting “Read Mao” and “Bullshit!” When RYM supporters chanted the Panther slogan, “Power to the People!” PLers shouted back, “Power to the Workers!” Fistfights broke out. On stage, Mark Rudd called for a recess. As he finished, Dohrn rushed to the rostrum, eyes ablaze, and shouted that it was time to decide whether they could remain in the same organization as those who denied human rights to the oppressed. Anyone who agreed, she announced, should follow her. And with that, Dohrn and the leadership marched into an adjacent arena to decide what to do next.

  The RYM caucus and its allies, maybe six hundred people, talked there for three hours, then resumed discussions Saturday morning. The debates lasted all that day. Finally Dohrn, pacing between a set of bleachers, delivered a slow, deliberate speech that detailed the case for expelling PL from SDS. “We are not a caucus,” she concluded. “We are SDS.” And with that, a vote was taken: By a five-to-one margin, PL was expelled. The leadership, led by Dohrn and Bill Ayers, then drafted a statement listing the reasons why. Around eleven everyone filed back into the main hall, and Dohrn strode to the rostrum. For twenty minutes she laid out every PL sin, real and imagined, terming the group reactionary, anticommunist, and “objectively” racist. When she announced PL’s expulsion, chaos ensued. PLers chanted “Shame! Shame!” Dohrn led the RYM caucus out of the auditorium, leading their own chants: “Power to the People!” and “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!”

  By Sunday confusion reigned. The PLers, refusing to acknowledge their expulsion, elected their own SDS leadership. At a church across town, the RYM caucus elected theirs, all prominent Weathermen: Mark Rudd as national secretary, Bill Ayers as education secretary, Jeff Jones as the interorganizational secretary. By Monday morning there were, in effect, two functioning SDSes, but everyone understood that Weatherman had carried the day, in large part because its members had taken control of the national office in the days before the convention. Possession is nine-tenths of the law; Weatherman possessed the national office, and so it possessed SDS.

  But in name only. The Weathermen who took control of SDS that summer envisioned an SDS unlike any other protest group before or since. Gone was the idea of a national office as a shaggy bureaucracy to guide SDS’s far-flung chapters. In its place the Weathermen became, in effect, an überchapter of their own, one dedicated to the leadership’s twin goals. The first was fanning out across the country to recruit members of the working class. The second was melding recruits with existing Weathermen for a massive protest march planned for October in which the new, far larger group would make its political debut, storming the streets of Chicago in an all-out attack on the police and symbols of government authority. They billed it as “the National Action,” but in time it would become known as the Days of Rage.

  • • •

  Weatherman was born into Richard Nixon’s divided America, in the final years of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. It was a country, and a time, in which dissenters were watched and wiretapped by stern federal agents with spit-shined shoes and little patience for long-haired kids who mused about bombing government buildings. Two million people marched in antiwar demonstrations in the autumn of 1969 alone, images of angry demonstrators jamming the nightly news broadcasts where a fatherly Walter Cronkite warned Middle America that the country was coming apart at the seams. President Nixon, who gained office that January in large part on his promise to crack down on protesters, had no doubt that it was, and from his first days in office he pushed the FBI to do everything possible to undermine the antiwar movement. Even before Nixon, the Bureau had been doing exactly that, engaging in a broad harassment campaign against radicals, white and black alike, called COINTELPRO, which consisted of everything from break-ins to fake letters intended to sow discord among protest groups. Weatherman had been on the FBI’s radar from its inception. Months before its leaders began planning a campaign of underground violence, the FBI sensed the threat it posed. In September 1969 Hoover’s right-hand man, William Sullivan, warned that Weatherman had “the potential to be far more damaging to the security of this nation than the Communist Party ever was, even at the height of its strength in the 1930s.”3

  For the moment, though, there wasn’t much the FBI was able to do to counter Weatherman. Agents tried to recruit informants who might signal the group’s plans, but they were all but impossible to come by; few in the Movement wanted anything to do with the FBI. Again and again, FBI memoranda moaned about the Bureau’s inability to develop a single decent informant. As one agent complained, Weatherman’s “degenerate living habits, their immoral conduct, and their use of drugs” made it “extremely difficult to find informants who fit this mold and are willing to live as they do.” That fall the Bureau’s Cincinnati office was able to insert a single informant into Weatherman’s local branch, a man named Larry Grathwohl, who would in time provide a glimpse into the group’s inner workings.

  Without informants, the Bur
eau, led by its Chicago office, relied on wiretaps to keep track of Dohrn and the others. The twenty-eight-year-old agent who eventually headed the FBI’s Weatherman investigations, William Dyson, began his wiretapping duties that summer, manning a set of taps every day from four to midnight in a windowless room deep in the Chicago bureau’s building. “I watched them become the Weathermen!” Dyson remembered years later. “I was with them when they became the Weathermen! It was exciting. I was watching history. . . . I knew more about these people than they knew about themselves.”

  While the FBI lingered in the shadows, the day-to-day responsibility for monitoring Weatherman fell to Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago police. In the days when U.S. police departments viewed harassing student protesters as part of their daily jobs, the Chicago force employed an especially nasty “Red Squad” that relentlessly targeted the Weathermen, staking out the national office, following the leadership at all hours, and sometimes arresting them. Dohrn and JJ, for example, spent a night in jail after police found drugs in their car at a traffic stop. In one memorable episode, a Columbia Weatherman named Robbie Roth—who would later become one of the Weather Underground’s five leaders—was sitting in a third-floor apartment with two young women when a trio of detectives appeared at the door and began questioning them. Roth sensed that the men had been drinking; he could smell it on their breath. The climax of his interrogation, Roth says, came when the three pushed him out a window and dangled him by his ankles. One of Dohrn’s friends, an earnest activist named Russell Neufeld, experienced an even more harrowing brush with the Chicago police. Arrested with two other Weathermen at a demonstration outside the federal building on September 26, Neufeld was dragged inside nearby police headquarters. “I was standing there with a guy named Joe Kelly, and these cops put .38-caliber guns in our mouths and said if we moved, they would blow our brains out,” Neufeld recalls. “Then they took Danny Cohen and pistol-whipped him. I swear, they broke every bone in Danny’s face, blood everywhere. Joe and I stood there with guns in our mouths, forced to watch. It was horrible.”

  • • •

  While the FBI and Chicago police looked on, the new Weatherman leaders of SDS embarked on an uproarious six-month period, the second half of 1969, that would come to define them. It was then that the group’s most bizarre behaviors took place: the street brawls, the women running topless through high schools, the forced breakups of Weatherman couples, the orgies. All of it was designed to transform Weatherman’s five hundred or so core followers into the makings of JJ’s dream: an “urban fighting force” to rally the working class toward revolution. Almost everything that happened that summer and fall, in fact, was designed in some way to “toughen up” a band of coffeehouse intellectuals whose only experience with actual violence, other than watching The Battle of Algiers, was throwing the occasional rock during a street demonstration. “We have one task,” Bill Ayers announced at meeting after meeting, “and that is to make ourselves into tools of the revolution.” The idea wasn’t to go underground—not yet, anyway. For the moment, the focus was to be on recruiting, violent street demonstrations, and, come the fall, the Days of Rage in Chicago.

  Few outside Weatherman itself thought that any of this, especially the Days of Rage, made much sense. When Mark Rudd met with leaders of the group that organized the largest mass protests of the era, the National Mobilization Committee—the “Mobe”—they adamantly refused to join forces, arguing that street fighting and battling police were counterproductive. The Panthers too thought the Days of Rage a bad idea. The Chicago Panthers’ charismatic young leader, Fred Hampton, held shouting matches with Dohrn and other leaders; the Panthers refused to help, and Hampton actually went public with his opposition, calling the Days of Rage “Custeristic.”

  Inside Weatherman, especially in its male-dominated upper reaches, the surest way to lose face was to share these doubts. JJ set a macho tone, and a number of those who trailed in his wake, including Bill Ayers, Terry Robbins, and Howie Machtinger, were short young men who seemed to compensate by adopting façades of arrogant swagger, scoffing at anyone who dared question Weather dogma; several of them had begun carrying guns. When Rudd made the mistake of questioning the Days of Rage, Ayers and Robbins snorted. “How could you succumb to that liberal bullshit?” Robbins demanded. “We’ve got to do it. It’s the only strategy to build the revolution.” As Rudd wrote later, “The scene plays in my memory like a grade-B gangster flick. Billy looks on in smirking contempt as Terry dismisses me with a flick of his ever-present cigarette. ‘How could you be so weak?’ That settled it.”

  Yet even those whom Weatherman most wanted to emulate, the leaders of revolutionary Cuba, had their doubts. The extent of Weatherman’s ties to the Cuban government has been a source of speculation for more than forty years, the subject of multiple FBI investigations that ended up proving little. It is clear that several Weathermen, including Ayers, enjoyed contacts with Cuban diplomats in New York and Canada that would endure for years to come. The genesis of the relationship can be traced at least to the days immediately after Weatherman took control of SDS, when Dohrn led a group, part of a larger delegation of protesters, in an extended visit to Havana. The Cubans treated Dohrn like visiting royalty, featuring her in government magazines and introducing her to dignitaries from throughout the revolutionary world. The highlight of the visit was a meeting with a delegation from North Vietnam, which seemed far more eager to discuss formation of a Viet Cong−style underground in America than half measures like street fighting. Their message was mixed: Even as they lectured Dohrn on ways this underground could be formed, they cautioned her “about not getting too far ahead of the masses,” in Mark Rudd’s words, which was exactly what Weatherman was doing. In the end, after giving the Weathermen rings forged from the metal of downed U.S. fighter planes, a North Vietnamese delegate simply urged the Weathermen to do their best. “The war is entering its final phase,” he told Dohrn. “You must begin to wage armed struggle as soon as possible to become the vanguard and take leadership of the revolution.”

  Back in the United States, JJ and the other new SDS leaders were already preparing the ground. Within days of their convention victory, detachments of Weathermen, more than two hundred in all, began arriving in cities across the country: thirty in both Seattle and New York; twenty-five in Columbus, Ohio; fifteen in Denver; plus smaller groups scattered throughout the Midwest, in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. In each, members lived together in “collectives.” The leadership, based in Chicago and now known as the Weather Bureau—JJ, Rudd, Ayers, Jeff Jones, and others—traveled among them, leading the collectives in increasingly outlandish protests aimed at rallying the working class, to whom they referred as “greasers” or, more commonly, “the grease.” Their most common tactic was a series of “invasions” they mounted of blue-collar high schools and community colleges, in which Weathermen ran through the halls screaming and urging students to join them at the Days of Rage. In August, in the Detroit suburb of Warren, a group of Weatherwomen took over a classroom at Macomb Community College during exams and lectured the thirty or so confused students on the evils of racism and imperialism; when the teacher called the police, the Weatherwomen were arrested. A month later, in Pittsburgh, twenty-six Weatherwomen stormed the halls of South Hills High School, tossing leaflets, waving a North Vietnamese flag, and, when this didn’t sufficiently engage male students, lifting their skirts and exposing their breasts. Once again, most of the Weatherwomen ended up in jail.

  All through July, August, and into September, Weathermen led similar protests around the country, brawling with PLers in Boston and New York and fighting with police in Seattle and in Detroit, where on September 27 JJ led a march of sixty Weathermen that turned violent, the protesters pelting police with rocks and bottles. These actions were successful insofar as they boosted morale in the ranks and created a sense that Weatherman was actually “doing something.” The problem, it soon be
came apparent, was that, for all the effort, Weatherman wasn’t finding much of anyone in the “working class” who wanted to join its revolution. In several cases its representatives ended up in shoving matches with the very people they were trying to befriend. When Mark Rudd tried to recruit a band of tough-looking teens at a Milwaukee hamburger joint, they beat him so badly he had to be hospitalized.

  Rudd, in fact, though he was still the symbol of SDS to many, was proving a less-than-inspiring leader. A telling snapshot, offered in Kirkpatrick Sale’s SDS, came during his appearance at Columbia on September 25, in a speech in which he implored the audience to prepare for the revolution. “I’ve got myself a gun—has everyone here got a gun?” Rudd all but sneered. “Anyone? No? We-e-ll, you’d better fuckin’ get your shit together!” When a non-Weatherman SDSer named Paul Rockwell approached the stage, insisting he had heard enough, Rudd took two menacing steps toward him. Rockwell barreled into Rudd and slammed him into the podium, at which point Rudd simply shrugged and slunk to one side of the stage. “Rudd’s face was a picture of stunned fear,” Sale wrote, “all his rhetoric having done nothing to overcome his ingrained middle-class unfamiliarity with, and anxiety about, violence.”