New York at War (51 page)

On July 12, 1982, some seven hundred thousand people flooded through midtown, marching from the United Nations to the Great Lawn in Central Park in support of the Second UN Special Session on Disarmament and the idea of a nuclear arms freeze. It was the largest political demonstration in American history and perhaps the most diverse. One reporter noticed “pacifists and anarchists, children and Buddhist monks, Roman Catholic bishops and Communist Party leaders” streaming by. Their ranks also included Vietnam veterans, Australian trade unionists, Japanese survivors of Nagasaki, and Montana Cowboys Against Nuclear War. Present on the speaker’s podium at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, on stages in Central Park, and in the march itself were seasoned veterans of New York’s tradition of activism, including Peter, Paul and Mary, the Bread and Puppet Theater, union leader Victor Gotbaum, Mayor Ed Koch, and Norma Becker, who once more had played a key organizational role in the day’s events. But they were also joined by Bruce Springsteen, “a punk contingent with Mohawk hair tinted fuchsia,” according to the
Times
’ Anna Quindlen, and New Yorkers who had been children during the Vietnam years.
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As always in New York, unanimity was elusive. “I think they’re oversimplifying the issue,” said a young lawyer watching the procession. “To say let’s disarm is simply naïve.” “I don’t need to be reminded that we’re all going to die,” a female passerby told a reporter. But Edwin Hernandez, a twenty-year-old City College student, felt differently. “I have a future to take care of. That’s the most basic issue there is.” Addressing the multitude, City Council president Carol Bellamy affirmed that “we shall not suffer silently the threat of nuclear holocaust.” Without realizing it, the demonstrators were embracing one of New York’s oldest traditions, that of understanding their home as a place whose vulnerability demanded action to ensure self-preservation and now, perhaps, the very survival of their city.
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CHAPTER 10

Declarations of War

Urban Terrorism, 1908–2001

I
n late 1948, an Egyptian teacher named Sayyid Qutb stepped off an Alexandria-to-New York ocean liner and into an enticing and threatening world. Qutb was a refugee; his political and religious writings had prompted Egypt’s King Farouk to order his arrest, and he was fleeing his native land, at least temporarily, for sanctuary in the United States. Qutb remained in New York for only a few weeks, before moving on to Washington, DC, and then to Greeley, Colorado, where he enrolled in classes at the Colorado State College of Education.

But New York left an indelible first impression of America on the Egyptian. He craved meaningful conversation beyond what seemed the prevailing topics of “dollars, movie stars, brands of cars.” American women, and their sexual openness, both excited and repelled him, as he had learned en route to New York. “A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid. . . . Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless.” After a conversation with his hotel’s elevator operator, he concluded that perversion was a New York City commonplace, with “pairs of boys or girls” enjoying the privacy and freedom the city offered to indulge in sinful homosexual practices. Qutb returned to Egypt in 1950 convinced that most Americans were “a reckless, deluded herd that only knows lust and money.” Their culture was blighted by adultery, alcohol, and jazz, and undermined by racism, irreligion, a soulless materialism, and a “primitive” self-indulgence.
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Back in Cairo, with his devotion to a fundamentalist Islam sharpened by his American experiences, Qutb immersed himself in the Muslim Brotherhood, a militant group often at violent odds with the secular nationalist government of President Gamal Abdul Nasser. Qutb became the Brotherhood’s intellectual voice; his writings spread widely through Islamist circles in Egypt and throughout the Middle East. In 1966, Nasser’s government tried and hanged Qutb for treason. His martyrdom, however, only confirmed Qutb’s status as a thinker who had come to understand the need for an absolutist Islam at war with
jahil-iyyah
, the “barbarity” of the modern state, and with the “corruption” of Western secularism—a corruption he had experienced at close quarters in New York, Washington, Colorado, and California. Qutb’s writings, and his personal example, would exert a lasting influence on radical fundamentalist groups in the Muslim world, including al Qaeda. On September 11, 2001, ten men influenced by Qutb’s manifestos would fly two jet liners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on the island where their spiritual guide had disembarked almost forty-two years earlier.
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Well before September 11, terrorism had become a threat to New York City, as it had to other cities around the world. Terror has always played a role in war, long before the English coined the term “terrorism” to describe the mass executions carried out by the French revolutionary government. (“Thousands of those Hell-hounds called Terrorists . . . are let loose on the people,” Edmund Burke wrote in 1795.) For millennia, generals, admirals, and common soldiers had used pillage, arson, rape, and mass murder against the noncombatant populations so essential to supporting armies in the field. If the September 1776 fire in lower Manhattan was augmented by revolutionary arsonists to deprive the British army and its Tory supporters of their base, as is likely, then it was an act of terrorism.
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Starting in the late nineteenth century, however, terrorism took on recognizably modern forms and aims. Radicals driven by new ideologies—anarchists outraged by the inequities of the existing social order, nationalists seeking independence for their homelands—resorted to assassinations and bombings to advance their causes. Their goals were to maximize their political leverage by sparking widespread fear, to gain optimal publicity in an era when public opinion was shaped by the newspaper and the telegraph (and eventually by radio, newsreels, and television), and sometimes to provoke a government backlash to drive the masses into full-fledged revolution. New York would become only one theater in the shifting international drama of twentieth-century terrorism.

But the link between Qutb’s alienation and September 11 also suggests something about New York’s persistent provocation, its recurring role as a challenge to those bent on violating it. Time and again in New York’s modern history, militants have sought to attack and prevail over the city, leaving behind a litany of obscure dates and tragedies forgotten by all but a few. The history of terrorism in New York has its own trajectory, its own declarations of war, and its own cycles of shock, grief, fear, and forgetting. Only with the mass casualties and destruction of 9/11 has that history regained relevance as prelude and background.

The explosion tore through the red brick façade and scattered debris out onto the tree-lined Greenwich Village street. The shock wave shattered windows up and down the block. As smoke billowed from the wreckage, police officers pulled two dazed and bleeding women out of what had been the building’s first floor. Within minutes, as firefighters arrived, two smaller blasts sent flames rolling up through the four stories of the building as the front wall collapsed into a pile of burning rubble. The actor Dustin Hoffman carried paintings and a Tiffany lampshade out of his damaged house next door before police barred him from reentering. As firefighters’ hoses poured water into the site and police pushed spectators away, the two unidentified women, who had taken shelter in the apartment of a neighbor, fled the scene, disappearing into thin air. It was the afternoon of March 6, 1970, and the townhouse that had stood for 125 years at 18 West Eleventh Street was no more, the evident casualty of a gas main leak and explosion.
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But, as the police soon discovered, the explosion was no ordinary accident. Sifting through the Eleventh Street rubble, investigators found fifty-seven sticks of dynamite and four homemade pipe bombs. Buried under the wreckage were also the remains of one woman and two men—twenty-eight-year-old Diana Oughton, twenty-three-year-old Ted Gold, and another man eventually identified as twenty-one-year-old Terry Robbins. All had been members of the antiwar group Students for a Democratic Society and of its offshoot, the Weathermen. The two fleeing women, Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin, were also identified as members of the Weathermen; the townhouse belonged to Wilkerson’s father, a retired advertising executive who was abroad at the time. The truth was soon clear: the townhouse’s basement had been a clandestine bomb factory. Somehow, something had gone wrong, and a bomb in the making had exploded, rupturing and igniting the building’s gas line and killing Gold, Oughton, and Robbins.
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The townhouse explosion happened at a time of great turbulence in New York and around the country. Rallies against the Vietnam War, campus takeovers, marches by Black Panthers, protests by feminists and gay activists: New York in 1970 was a city at war with itself. Nationally, the 1969–1970 school year witnessed 247 arson cases and nearly 250 bombings on college campuses, most tied to racial or war-related policies. On the Lower East Side, Abbie Hoffman later claimed, “I was approached by several arms dealers during this period with offers of hand weapons, machine guns, plastiques, bazookas, mortars. ‘You name it,’ one dealer said, ‘I can get you a tank, even a jet!’” But for the majority of the city’s blue-collar, middle-class, and affluent white residents, New York was a place of longed-for privacy and security, a domain of apartments and houses where, its denizens hoped, violence would remain a distant reality consigned to news reports from Vietnam, Chicago, Berkeley, or still-segregated Harlem, watched in the safety of the family living room.
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A charred void marks the former location of 18 West Eleventh Street, March 1970. PHOTO BY CO RENTMEESTER / TIME LIFE PICTURES / GETTY IMAGES.

Ted Gold, himself the product of a middle-class upbringing on the Upper West Side, saw things differently. He had been a leader of the 1968 student sit-in at Columbia and was a seasoned veteran of militant antiwar activism. “We’ve got to turn New York into Saigon,” he told an old college friend over a drink in the West End Bar on Broadway shortly before his death. The Saigon he envisioned was the Saigon of the Tet offensive, when Vietcong guerillas brought war into the sanctum of that city’s US embassy compound. In 1969, Gold, his Columbia comrade Mark Rudd, and a network of other former SDS members formed the Weathermen (later renamed the Weather Underground) to bring armed revolution to the streets of America.
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The roots of the Weathermen lay deep in the idealism of the student civil rights, antiwar, and community organizing movements. But as the Vietnam War dragged on, as the student left became more defiant, and as the government’s reactive crackdown intensified, a select few young radicals turned, partly in desperation, to destruction as a tool for change. “After a certain amount of frustration you decide that at least you can make yourself into a brick and hurl yourself,” one SDS member commented in 1969.
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“A mass revolutionary movement” was needed, the Weathermen’s founding manifesto declared, something “akin to the Red Guard in China . . . a movement with a full willingness to participate in the violent and illegal struggle.” That manifesto and others amounted to declarations of war against the entire American military-industrial complex. Along with Robbins, Oughton, Wilkerson, Boudin, and John Jacobs, Gold formed a New York collective of the Weathermen dedicated to the idea that only a violent response could end the violence manifested by the United States in Southeast Asia, in the domestic persecution of black activists, and in the malign neglect that left the poor to languish in their poverty. “We were going to bring the war home,” Jacobs later recalled. “‘Turn the imperialists’ war into a civil war,’ in Lenin’s words. And we were going to kick ass.”
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Behind the elegant nineteenth-century façade on quiet West Eleventh Street, the homegrown militants had found the perfect safe house. Already, in the early morning of February 21, 1970, two weeks before the deadly explosion in Greenwich Village, members of the collective had planted three gasoline bombs in front of the house of Judge John Murtagh in the Inwood section of northern Manhattan. They scrawled “Vietcong Have Won” and “Free the Panther 21” in red letters on the sidewalk but left no mark identifying themselves. Murtagh was presiding over pretrial hearings in the case of twenty-one members of the Black Panther Party arrested for allegedly planning to bomb Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and three other midtown department stores at the height of the Easter 1969 shopping season. Nobody was hurt when the Inwood gas bombs exploded, nor were there injuries when small bombs exploded that same morning in front of the Charles Street police precinct in Greenwich Village and at army and navy recruiting booths on the edge of the Brooklyn College campus.
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