Days of Rage (24 page)

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

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

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

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

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

07

THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY

Weatherman and the FBI, October 1970 to April 1971

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guy Goodwin, however, was just getting started.

 • • • 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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