Flower Children Have Grown Thorns ~ by Robert E G Black

To Be Edited ~Hopefully between here and death. ~Che Peta

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21534443/Flower-Children-Have-Grown-Thorns#

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1
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
Flower Children
Have Grown Thorns

“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
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 twenty-five5 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 11thSt reet ”
3 Merrill, “18 West 11th Street,” 1-4
4 Ibid, 98-99
5 see “Likely Weatherman Bombings” list on page 35 of this document
18 West 11th Street2
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 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
7 Brian Flanagan in The Weather Underground
8 Qtd. in Kaufman, Michael, “Underground ‘Exciting’ to Gold”
Ted Gold3
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
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
10 Flint, “2d Blast Victim’s Life Is Traced”
11 Ayers, Fugitive Days, 91
12 Ibid, 191
Diana Oughton
Terry Robbins4

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
14 Hayden, Reunion, 359
15 Ayers, Fugitive Days, 145
16 Ibid, 147
17 Bill Ayers in The Weather Underground.
18 Ayers, Fugitive Days, 165-6
5

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 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 community-
change 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”
20Ibi d
21 Powers, “Underground Woman”
22Ibi d
23 Powers, “Underground Woman”
Cathy Wilkerson6
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
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

24Ibi d
25 Merrill, 70
26Gussow
27 Sampson, “Two Revolutions,” 199
Kathy Boudin7

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 over-expanding 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
29 Varon, Bringing the War Home, 21-22
30Ibi d
31 Hayden, The Port Huron Statement, 52, stress mine
32 Marcuse, One Dimensional Man
8

’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 aSteppenwolf, 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
34 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
9

those young enough to believe they should be able todo 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”
42 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
10

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
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
49 Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 471
50 Mark Rudd in The Weather Underground
51 Ayers, Fugitive Days, 125
52P ott er
53 Foner, Give Me Liberty!, 870
54 Varon, 22
Paul Potter
11

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’ 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

55Ibi d
56 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”
60P ott er
61 Bill Ayers in The Weather Underground
Bill Ayers
12

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 teach-
ins, 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
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
63 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
“Stop the Draft”
flier
13

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
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
70 Foner, 883
71 Varon, 25
72 Ayers, Fugitive Days, 116
73 Isserman and Kazin, 229
Putting flowers in the gunbarrels
14

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

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 rifle-
toting 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
75 “The Spirt of ‘68”
76 Rudd, “Che and Me”
77Ibi d
78 Tom Brokaw in 1968 with Tom Brokaw
79 “The Spirit of ‘68”
80 Mark Rudd in The Weather Underground
Mark Rudd15

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
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 mustfight.”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
82 “Bring the War Home,” stress mine.
83 Smith, “Sudden Impact”
Abbie Hoffman
“Police Riot” at the DNC, 1968
16

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
85 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.
17

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
92Ibi d
93 Ibid, 356
94 Gitlin, 357
95 Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties, 327
18

“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
97 Gilbert, SDS/WUO, 24
98Ibi d
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
19
in jails called schools, harassed by the cops andm enaced 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
[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 self-
defense and revolution as protected by the Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence.”110 In

106 Matusow, 338, stress mine
107 Hayden, Reunion, 358
108 Matusow, 341.
109 Varon, 24
110 Hayden, Rebellion and Repression, 14-5
Weatherman Logo
20

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
Weatherman, and the organization meant to fill that role. But, their initial offering was
offputting. Kirkpatrick Sale argues that theirStatem ent 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
112Ibi d
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
Todd Gitlin21
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 theirStatem ent, 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 self-
renunciation.”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
119 Todd Gitlin in The Weather Underground
120 Varon, 9
121Ibi d
122 Matusow, 339
123 Varon, 9
124 Matusow, 339-40, stress mine
125 Gitlin, 395
126 Mark Rudd in The Weather Underground
22

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
128Ibi d
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
23

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

138Ibi d
139 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.
24
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
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
147 Matusow, 341
148 Gitlin, 400
149 Matusow, 341
150 Gilbert, 18
Bernardine Dohrn
25

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
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”
152 Sale, 615
153 Savio, “An End to History”
Mario Savio
26

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,
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”
155 Hook, 146
156 Qtd. in Anderson, The Sixties, 61
157 Hook, 146
158 Marin, “Letter to Gloria Emerson”
159 Matusow, 341
“Days of Rage” flier
27

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 theDays
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 street-
fighters for smashing the windows of Volkswagens and mama-papa
grocery stores,” but he “did not, however, disapprove of trashing as a
160 Anderson, The Sixties, 157
161 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
Tom Hayden
28

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
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
168 Barber, 184
169 Sale, 601
170S mi t h
171Ibi d
Brian Flanagan
29

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

172Ibi d
173 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
30

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
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
180Ibi d
181 Gitlin, 395
182Ibi d
183 Bernardine Dohrn in The Weather Underground
184 Oglesby, “Let Us Shape the Future”
Carl Oglesby
31

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,
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
186 Hayden, Rebellion and Repression, 17
187 Todd Gitlin in The Weather Underground
188 Naomi Jaffe in The Weather Underground
Naomi Jaffe
32
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
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
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
David Gilbert
33
’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
196Ogl esby
197 Sale, 632
198 ATF survey dated 24 July 1970, cited in Sale, 632
WUO Logo
34

—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
judge presides over Panther 21 trial
Mar 6 18 West 11th Street, Greenwich Village
accidental explosion
13th Police District, Detroit203

199 Qtd. in Sale, 648
200 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.
35
May
10
National Guard Association building,
Washington, DC
Killing of students at Kent State and
Jackson State
Jun 6 San Francisco Hall of Justice204
Jun 9 New York City Police Headquarters
police repression
Jul 26 Presidio Army Base, San Francisco

11th anniversary of Cuban Revolution
Jul 27 Bank of America building, New York
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
197
1
Mar 1 United States Capitol
invasion of Laos
Aug
30
California Department of Corrections, Ferry
Building, San Francisco
killing of George Jackson
Office of California Prisons, Sacramento
Sep
17
New York Department of Corrections, Albany
killing of 29 inmates at Attica
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
ITT Headquarters, Rome
197
4
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
204 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
36
197
5
Jan
28
State Department
escalation in Vietnam
Agency for International Development and US
Defense Department offices, Oakland206
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
197
7
Feb 3 Immigration and Naturalization Services, San
Francisco

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
207 Sale, 552
208 Ibid, 553
209 Hook, x
37

their cause had, nevermind what support theor ganiz ation 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.
225 Brian Flanagan in The Weather Underground
226 Ayers, Fugitive Days, 127
227 Matusow, 343
228Ibi d
41
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 initialStatem ent, “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 wardid end. But, was the unwinnable war going to die when it did,

229Mari n
230 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
42

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 all-
time 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
237 Tom Brokaw in 1968 with Tom Brokaw
238 Wallechinsky and Wallace, The People’s Almanac, 613
239 Hayden, The Port Huron Statement, 28-9
240Ibi d
43

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 Warwas 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 Hayden, The Port Huron Statement, 28-9, stress mine
242 Gitlin, 403
44

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