Days of Rage (19 page)

The call went out. In ones and twos, many of the remaining cadres began to trickle into the Bay Area over the next few weeks. Most were now officially fugitives, having failed to show up for court appearances on the Chicago indictments. Bill Ayers used a stolen credit card to rent a car and drove it cross-country with JJ, who spent the trip arguing the need for more and larger actions. After a month lying low in Philadelphia, Mark Rudd borrowed money from his parents and flew west, as did Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin. “There was Weather debris—that’s what we called ourselves—coming into Berkeley at the rate of three a day,” recalls Brian Flanagan, among the first arrivals. “Others we never found. They were just gone.”

Many of the newcomers crowded into a first-floor apartment they had rented in April on Pine Street, on the Tenderloin side of Nob Hill. When that filled up, a second flat was rented nearby. Dohrn and Jones greeted each new arrival in person; hugs and tears were the order of the day. Gradually the post-Townhouse gloom began to lift. In its place a wave of relief swept the group. They had survived. They were among friends. They were free. “There was a certain amount of exhilaration that we’d gotten away with what we’d gotten away with,” recalls Paul Bradley. “We weren’t in jail like we were supposed to be. We were living in this beautiful city and going to the beach. So, yeah, it was good.”

This “new” incarnation of Weatherman began to develop a style sharply different from its Midwest and East Coast origins. As wonky student leftists, SDS members had dressed conservatively, by ’60s standards; the men had short hair. In San Francisco many Weathermen finally came face-to-face with what they insisted on calling “youth culture,” that is, hippies, adorned with
long hair, beards, beads, and bell-bottoms. In barely a year, while the Weather leadership had been consumed with purges, riots, and bombs, these shaggy kids seemed to have taken over a series of ever-larger antiwar demonstrations.

Sensing the change, and needing to blend into the Bay Area’s laid-back Left, the Weathermen embraced the new look. Jeff Jones took the lead, growing a bushy beard and donning a leather cowboy hat; he acquired a pickup truck adorned with a large red rose and named it Suzie Q. Bill Ayers sported a leather vest and beads with no shirt, while Dohrn wore Grace Slick−style fishnet tops with no bra, a look that—if nothing else—kept men from staring at her face. The new hippie vibe tended to unsettle their militant friends back east. “It did seem like the California people had a different style,” recalls Jonah Raskin, who visited Dohrn and Jones later that year. “I mean, no one in New York was driving around in a pickup truck with a red rose.”

Others, however, sensed that the change was needed. “People had been overheated, you know, in Chicago,” remembers Rick Ayers, Bill Ayers’s brother, who had left the army to join Weatherman, “and before long, they realized we had to calm down, be cool, think, plan for the long term. The weird thing was, being underground, suddenly everyone was a lot calmer, a lot more zen. It was like, ‘Eh, let’s have another cup of tea.’ Chill out. Relax. You know, we took our time.”

While the leadership regrouped in San Francisco, what remained of Weather’s underground structure collapsed as quickly as the townhouse itself. “It was crazy how many people we lost,” recalls Brian Flanagan. “I remember asking Jeff Jones at one point, you know, what happened to Denver? And he kind of sighed and said, ‘Those people are so far underground they don’t even know they’re still members.’” The Midwestern tribes—Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo—simply disappeared. Scores of Weathermen found themselves cast adrift, still committed to armed struggle but unable to regain contact. The teenaged Joanna Zilsel and a girlfriend left Cleveland headed for California, with vague plans of finding other Weathermen. They never did. Zilsel ended up in British Columbia, where she lives to this day.

Many settled back into “normal” lives within the Movement, where they would form a bulwark of Weather’s aboveground support. But others refused
to give up. One or two, such as Seattle’s “Quarter Moon Tribe,” later forged ties with Weather, functioning as minor-league affiliates. Still others struck out on their own.

A group of veterans of the Weather collective in Milwaukee formed around a young activist named Judith Cohen and two others; they had all been purged but kept the collective alive in hopes of regaining leadership’s favor. “We decided to form a ‘purgee’ group,” Cohen recalls. “This was my chance to get back in. We did some great little actions, on campuses, against ROTC, almost riots, busting into classrooms, a lot of civil disobedience. We weren’t Weathermen. We were trying to be Weathermen, hoping they would invite us back in.”

After the Townhouse, Cohen’s group managed to recruit a half-dozen other local radicals, including a nineteen-year-old named Kirk Augustin, who had been at Flint and whose factory job paid the rent at the group’s two apartments, near Marquette University. “The problem was, we didn’t have a clue what to do,” Augustin recalls. “The [national] leadership might issue these communiqués, but below that, it was just people trying to survive. These people, they were students, they didn’t know how to make money, or fix a car, much less make a bomb. They had lived off their parents before that. To think of it as cadres and safe houses, that’s too romantic. At our level, it was all about survival. The people in Milwaukee, they had been abandoned. We were supposed to try and do [actions]. That’s a difficult thing to do. And essentially nothing got done. So everyone was constantly blaming each other, with all these constant power struggles and factions.”

That summer the Milwaukee collective did its best to scout targets, mainly military installations. Several in the group went so far as to steal dynamite from a site in Lexington, Kentucky, that August. Augustin, now a software engineer in Oregon, demurs when asked whether this is true. “Uh . . . , let’s just say it wouldn’t be that hard to do,” he says. “Getting explosives was easy.”

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

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

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

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

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

 • • • 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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