Days of Rage (55 page)

As it unfolded, the conspiracy had two thrusts, one open and honest, the other secret and dishonest. The honest component would capitalize on
Prairie Fire
’s popularity by establishing a second publication, envisioned as a quarterly radical newsmagazine, called
Osawatomie
, named for the Kansas town where the abolitionist John Brown, long a Weather icon, first saw battle in 1856. The slender periodical, dense with left-wing position papers
and occasional reportage on events such as a busing controversy in Boston, debuted in 1975.

The dishonest part of the plan involved the formation of a new aboveground group whose stated purpose was spreading
Prairie Fire
’s message via discussion groups across the country. This group, the vehicle that leadership secretly hoped to ride back to national prominence, was called the Prairie Fire Distribution Committee, or PFDC, and its first twenty or so members, many of whom had physically distributed the book that summer, portrayed themselves as entirely unrelated to Weather, as simply good-hearted radicals inspired by
Prairie Fire
’s message to try to knit the disparate threads of the Left into a single tapestry. The only ones briefed on the Central Committee’s actual goals were the five close allies it had secretly selected to run the PFDC. These included Russell Neufeld; Dohrn’s sister Jennifer; Jeff Jones’s college pal Jon Lerner; and a fervent onetime Weatherman named Laura Whitehorn. At first Neufeld and Lerner resisted.

“The creation of the front organization, the secret organization, it’s one of the things I deeply regret, being a shill,” says Lerner. “I remember objecting very much to the idea, because I didn’t like the manipulative part of it, and I didn’t think it was going to work. The Laura Whitehorns of the world, they thought it was just a great idea. And I allowed myself to be bludgeoned into it, and it was about my needing to belong to the group emotionally. We were manipulating the PFDC the entire time. The entire time.”

“I don’t think I understood all of that until much later,” remembers Neufeld. “Initially I thought it was just a way to build an aboveground support group. Only later did I learn everything, and it made me very uncomfortable. For me the contradiction was, we were building this mass organization, when in fact we were manipulating them all into being pawns of our leadership. It became very manipulative.”

It all started simply enough, in the fall of 1974, when the new PFDC leaders began wooing friends during a series of picnics and parties in the Boston area. “A lot of people swallowed our entire line, that we had nothing to do with Weather,” Lerner says. “But a lot of people, including people who came to these picnics, did not join us, because I think they understood right away that this was a front for Weather. Me, I thought it was obvious.”

Neufeld and other volunteers, meanwhile, drove a battered Volkswagen bus to campuses around the country, convening discussion groups and handing out copies of
Prairie Fire.
“I was constantly being asked whether this was a front for Weather,” he recalls. “I didn’t want to lie outright, so I kept saying, ‘I really can’t talk about that.’”

To Neufeld’s surprise, they were able to sign up dozens of new members, eventually more than a hundred. PFDC chapters were established in Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Chicago. In Brooklyn Silvia Baraldini prevailed on the two dozen or so members of the Assata Shakur Defense Committee to join en masse, despite her concerns that
Prairie Fire
seemed to be deemphasizing the black struggle in favor of a classic Marxist philosophy of working alongside the “international working class.” “I read it, and I was skeptical, this glorification of white working-class stuff,” Baraldini recalls. “I was stupid. I fell for it. It wasn’t Weather, but it had that Weather mystique, and that was a powerful thing. We didn’t realize their leadership had already abandoned any pretense at being true revolutionaries and wanted only to surface and take control of the Left and enjoy the middle-class lives they had left behind. None of us knew how we were being manipulated.”

The second step in Weather’s plan was transforming the PFDC into a permanent group, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, or PFOC. The change was announced at a July 1975 convention in Boston, where doubts about Weather’s influence lingered. “I couldn’t believe how many people were buying into this,” recalls Elizabeth Fink. “To me it was blindingly obvious Weather was behind it.” It was in Boston that the third and final step of Weather’s plan was unveiled: a second PFOC conference, this one scheduled for January 1976, aimed at uniting dozens of radical groups—white, black, and Hispanic—beneath a single banner. Jeff Jones, in a bit of candor, came up with the name: the Hard Times Conference. There, the PFOC leadership, secretly controlled by the Central Committee, would be elected to lead the new coalition. Once Weather’s leadership resurfaced and dealt with its legal troubles, they would be free to take over the group outright.

The Hard Times Conference, then, became a kind of Hail Mary pass for Weather’s leadership, their last shot at regaining all they had thrown away. From the summer of 1975 on, all the PFOC’s efforts—with Jones and the
Central Committee pulling strings behind the scenes—were focused on luring radical groups to the conference, which was to be held at the University of Illinois’s Chicago campus. No group was too small to invite. Jonathan Lerner reached out to Native Americans. Silvia Baraldini recruited blacks in the South. Again and again Russell Neufeld, who moved to Chicago to supervise the preparations, was obliged to deny that Weather was involved. “Jeff was the one most involved in the day-to-day details,” he recalls. “I was constantly being asked by Jeff to carry out Weatherman’s wishes, and this troubled me. It became very manipulative. We just lied so much.”

Among the preparatory steps was an unusual “cadre school” the Central Committee convened at a home in a gated community outside the town of Bend, Oregon. About twenty Weathermen attended, including several who had been invited back into the group; most took buses across the country from Boston. They masqueraded as graduate students on an anthropology field trip. Rick Ayers, who arranged everything, posed as their professor. The purpose of the five-day retreat was teaching Weather’s new political “line,” that is, the Marxist-Leninist philosophy set out in the pages of
Prairie Fire
. Annie Stein was on hand for guidance. “That really represented Annie’s intellectual triumph,” recalls Howard Machtinger, who attended.

“We read a lot of Lenin, read and discussed, and then we had physical education, exercises, and running,” recalls Lerner. “I remember Bernardine Dohrn wearing big wedge sandals, running in these high sandals. The politics was strange, because it represented a real shift away from our early suspicion of Marxism and Lenin and was an adoption of classic commie rhetoric. It was like stepping backward into the old days. But it made people comfortable. It was known.”

The months leading up to the Hard Times Conference were a blizzard of activity. Inside Weather the leadership debated endlessly whether to publicly “surface” two, three, or all five of its members. A team of lawyers led by Kathy Boudin’s father, Leonard, was assembled to negotiate the surrenders. All were highly aware of the FBI break-ins, and at least one of the attorneys, it was later claimed, reached out to friends in the Democratic Party to see if they might strike some form of immunity deal in exchange for public testimony against the FBI.

The final weapon in Weather’s public-relations arsenal was an attempt to burnish its image in the American mainstream. It was, of all things, a movie. After reading
Prairie Fire
, a documentarian named Emile de Antonio was startled to realize that Weather was still active. “What the hell,” he mused, “is an essentially white, middle-class revolutionary group doing in America in 1975?” Through mutual friends he arranged a meeting with Jeff Jones and Eleanor Stein in the distant Brooklyn precinct of Sheepshead Bay at Lundy’s, a restaurant where Stein’s family often held celebrations. Jones immediately recognized the potential of a sympathetic film, both to clean up Weather’s image and as a fund-raising vehicle. He agreed to be interviewed once de Antonio promised to hide their faces, give the leadership “final cut,” and refuse to cooperate with any government subpoenas.

The filming, which took place over three days in Los Angeles in April 1975, was cloaked in secrecy. De Antonio and his cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, best known for
One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest
, rendezvoused with Jones in an alley. Jones handed them each a pair of sunglasses, painted black, then guided them into a waiting station wagon, which he drove aimlessly for a half hour before arriving at a Weather safe house with the windows boarded. There, behind a cheesecloth drape to guard their identities, five of the best-known Weathermen—Jones, Dohrn, Ayers, and the two Townhouse survivors, Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin—were interviewed by the filmmakers.

The resulting eighty-eight-minute film,
Underground
, spliced footage of 1960s demonstrations with shots of the five Weathermen talking in shadow. Other than a moment when Jones described the bombing of the U.S. Capitol, they kept their answers general and a bit self-righteous. There was little they hadn’t said before in one communiqué or another; some in the ranks thought the resulting procession of talking heads so boring, they referred to the film as
Jaws
. Yet Jones, after approving the final cut at Wexler’s Malibu home, thought it all grand. “I remember talking about the film with Jeff,” recalls Mark Rudd. “He was so excited about it, almost like a little kid.”

The film was to be released in mid-1976, but it began generating news months before. De Antonio was served with a subpoena, and he responded by holding a press conference where he brandished a petition of support from
thirty-two Hollywood grandees, including Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, and Mel Brooks. The ensuing publicity obliged the government to back off, and it eventually allowed de Antonio to market the movie as “the film the FBI didn’t want you to see.”

Underground
’s release was still months away on Friday, January 30, 1976, when the first delegates began arriving at the University of Illinois’s Chicago campus for the Hard Times Conference. Russell Neufeld watched nervously as they wandered in and registered. He knew what was riding on the conference’s success. “This was the moment, this was huge,” he remembers. “This was the one way Weather’s leadership could come back to relevance.” The turnout was promising, more than two thousand delegates in all, representing dozens of radical groups, from the Puerto Rican Socialist Party and the American Indian Movement to the Black Workers Coalition and the Republic of New Afrika. Clearly, Neufeld saw, they had tapped into some kind of yearning for a national radical coalition. Meanwhile Jeff Jones and Eleanor Stein paced a nearby hotel room, unable to attend. In the auditorium Annie Stein stood behind the curtain, watching, darting off every now and then to relay reports of the proceedings to Jones and her daughter.

Everything began smoothly enough. Jennifer Dohrn delivered an opening address calling on the delegates to devise a new agenda for the Left that would empower and protect the working class. “We have to develop a program for the working class as a whole in this period to fight the [economic] depression,” she said. It was soon clear, however, that the conference’s organizers, who were all white, did not fully comprehend the needs of the delegates, who weren’t.

“I was almost lynched by a group of vegetarians because I hadn’t provided enough nonmeat meals in the cafeteria,” Neufeld recalls with a shudder. “There were a lot of little things like that, stuff I just didn’t understand. Every time something went wrong, I was constantly being accused of being a racist. That was just devastating to me. I felt I was fucking up, like my head was just going to explode.”

Much of the conference work was done in breakout groups, and by Saturday it was clear that many of them had little interest in the conference’s agenda. A Black Caucus formed, and word soon spread that it was none too
pleased with the emphasis on “working class” issues over black issues. A feminist caucus arose as well and was just as incensed at the lack of attention being paid to women’s issues. “Jeff Jones wanted these people ordered and controlled, and there was just no way,” Neufeld says. “My pushback [to him] was to respect the process, that people had opinions, that they couldn’t be ordered around.”

The ominous rumblings finally broke into the open during the closing session, when black delegates spent nearly an hour excoriating the organizers as racists and demanding that any new radical coalition be run by blacks. By nightfall confusion reigned. “I don’t think [Jeff] initially appreciated how bad it was,” Neufeld says. “In fact, I know he didn’t. And it was bad. Very bad.”

By that evening it was clear there would be no radical coalition for Weather or anyone else to control. Recriminations began the next morning, when thirty PFOCers gathered in a member’s Chicago apartment. “That’s when I first heard some of the non-Weather people start saying things like ‘Where did this whole conference idea come from?’” recalls Lerner. “They were finally starting to smell the rat.”

An investigation of sorts was soon under way. It was spearheaded by a band of West Coast members led by none other than Clayton Van Lydegraf, the graying communist lifer who, having been thrown out of Weather, had joined the PFOC. Granted an opportunity to take his revenge, he proceeded to do so with grim determination, practically overnight emerging as the PFOC’s avenging angel. One by one, he and his acolytes pulled in Neufeld and other PFOC leaders and grilled them, a process that soon devolved into a Stalin-like purge—“everything but the bullets,” as one participant put it.

“I remember Clayton came to New York and that’s when we first heard of Weather’s plan and resurfacing and all that,” remembers Silvia Baraldini. “We heard there was a huge confrontation between Clayton and Annie Stein. We were just amazed. How could they actually believe they could resurface and take control of the Movement when people like the BLA were struggling to survive and they’ve been living well? It was just incredibly arrogant. Everyone was outraged.”