Days of Rage (11 page)

“We actually believed there was going to be a revolution,” remembers a Weatherman named Paul Bradley.
*
“We believed the world was undergoing a massive transformation. We believed Third World countries would rise up and cause crises that would bring down the industrialized West, and we believed it was going to happen tomorrow, or maybe the day after tomorrow, like 1976. We really thought that would happen. I know I did.”

For the moment, it was all just talk, and crazy talk at that. But by early 1968 apocalyptic revolutionaries—“kamikazes,” one SDS report called them—were rising to the fore in every SDS chapter, prophesying the coming conflict. They always seemed to be the loudest, the angriest, the most voluble, and they refused to be shouted down. Chapter after chapter was split between armchair protesters and “action factions” who wanted action, often violent action,
right this second.
The spark could have happened anywhere. In the event, it happened at Columbia University in New York, where in April 1968 the SDS chapter’s action faction grew outraged at the segregation of a proposed gymnasium and the university’s ties to a Pentagon-sponsored think tank. After a peaceful protest, a group of SDSers occupied Hamilton Hall, Columbia’s administration building, and refused to leave until the gym was scrapped and ties to the think tank were severed. When an administrator named Henry S. Coleman went to meet them, he was taken hostage and
barricaded into his office. Police surrounded the building but declined to storm it, worried about inflaming adjoining black neighborhoods. A kind of siege ensued, with the occupying students using bullhorns to harangue crowds of the curious.

Had all this happened in San Diego, it might have been dismissed as a random instance of especially aggressive protesters. But because it happened in New York, the world’s media center, Columbia became an overnight phenomenon as images of angry, shouting students were beamed to television sets around the world. As far as the press was concerned, the star of the show was the student spokesman, a soft, husky New Jersey sophomore named Mark Rudd, whose dramatic poses—typically one fist raised, the other wrapped around a bullhorn—appeared seemingly everywhere, climaxing with the cover of
Newsweek
. For mainstream America Rudd became a dismaying symbol not only of SDS but of the Movement itself, the prototypical nice Jewish boy from the suburbs transformed into something new and angry by these strange times.

Behind the scenes, however, the driving force behind the occupation, and the man who would eventually craft the philosophical framework for Weatherman, was Rudd’s best friend, a hyperintense, motormouthed Connecticut leftist named John Jacobs, universally known as JJ. Brilliant and handsome, with a streetwise style marked by beat-up leather jackets and slicked-back hair, JJ was already a legend at Columbia when the protests began. Some thought him a prophet, some a poseur, but either way he was surely the purest voice of the apocalyptic revolutionary. Where mainstream commentators viewed Columbia as a student protest, JJ told anyone who would listen that it was far, far more: the first step toward a genuine American revolution, concrete evidence that young people working together could bring the country’s white elites to their knees. More than anyone else in the SDS universe, it was JJ who popularized the parallels between Columbia and the Cuban Revolution, who preached that a select group of hard-core rebels could, as Castro and Guevara had with Cuba, lead America into revolution. “At first everyone thought JJ was crazy,” remembers his friend Howie Machtinger. “But then events kind of caught up with him, and suddenly what he was saying seemed almost sensible.”

As outlandish as this idea might sound today, it emerged as a popular argument among apocalyptic radicals in 1968 and would endure as the rationalization behind almost every underground group of the 1970s. Known as the
foco
theory, it had been advanced in a 1967 book,
Revolution in the Revolution?
,
by a French philosophy professor named Régis Debray. A friend of Guevara’s who taught in Havana, Debray argued that small, fast-moving guerrilla groups, such as those Che commanded, could inspire a grassroots rebellion, even in the United States. Debray’s theory, in turn, drew on what leftists call vanguardism, the notion that the most politically advanced members of any “proletariat” could draw the working class into revolution. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these ideas were catnip to budding revolutionaries like JJ, many of whom had no problem imagining themselves as American Ches. Their ardor was undiminished by their hero’s inability to make the
foco
theory work in Bolivia, where soldiers had captured and executed Guevara in 1967.

Veterans of the Columbia occupation, which ended with police storming the occupied buildings and arresting many of the protesters, would eventually constitute the largest single group of Weathermen. In Columbia’s aftermath, both JJ and Mark Rudd emerged as stars in the SDS firmament. While Rudd embarked on months of fund-raising trips, JJ fatefully fell in with another up-and-comer, a strikingly attractive twenty-six-year-old law student named Bernardine Dohrn. Dohrn was destined to become the glamorous leading lady of the American underground, unquestionably brilliant, cool, focused, militant, and highly sexual; J. Edgar Hoover would dub her “La Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left.” A high school cheerleader in her Wisconsin hometown, she graduated from the University of Chicago in 1963 and, while working toward her law degree, began assisting a host of protest groups, including SDS.

Clad in a tight miniskirt and knee-high Italian boots, Dohrn burst onto the scene at Columbia, where she helped arrange bail bonds. Everyone who met her—every man, at least—seemed mesmerized. “Every guy I knew at Columbia, every single one, wanted to fuck her,” remembers one SDSer, and Dohrn knew it. She liked to wear a button with the slogan
CUNNILINGUS IS COOL, FELLATIO IS FUN
. She and JJ were immediately smitten with each other. “Bernardine would be arguing political points at the table with blouse open to the navel, sort of leering at JJ,” an SDSer named Steve Tappis recalled. “I
couldn’t concentrate on the arguments. Finally, I said, ‘Bernardine! Would you please button your blouse?’ She just pulled out one of her breasts and, in that cold way of hers, said, ‘You like this tit? Take it.’” Another SDSer, Jim Mellen, recalled, “She used sex to explore and cement political alliances. Sex for her was a form of ideological activity.”
²
Yet even many SDS women soon idolized Dohrn. Everyone “wanted to be in her favor, to be like her,” a Weatherman named Susan Stern said years later. “She possessed a splendor all her own, like a queen . . . a high priestess, a mythological silhouette.”

In the summer of 1968, buoyed by her sudden popularity, Dohrn mounted an out-of-left-field bid to become SDS’s “inter-organizational secretary”—one of three coequal leadership positions—and, to widespread surprise, won election at the national convention that June. More than a few found her too beautiful to take seriously. When one questioner asked whether she was in fact a socialist, Dohrn took a moment, looked the man square in the eyes, and memorably replied, “I consider myself a revolutionary communist.”

Together Dohrn and JJ became a force of nature in the SDS universe; years later, friends would term their loud bouts of sex “animal mating.” From the beginning, they had their eyes on seizing overall control of SDS. They were stars, and that summer they took their newfound fame and ambitions to Chicago, which was the site not only of SDS’s national headquarters but of that August’s Democratic National Convention, which drew thousands of protesters into pitched battles with Chicago police. Their apartment, near downtown, became the epicenter of SDS politics, especially for those who shared JJ’s apocalyptic views. Many of the brightest SDSers, including several who would achieve prominence in Weatherman, swung by that autumn to crash, drop acid, and ogle Dohrn as they listened to JJ’s rambling, amphetamine-fueled soliloquies on Che and Debray and every other revolutionary topic imaginable. One was Jeff Jones, a handsome Southern California kid who looked—and some thought acted—like a dim-witted blond surfer. Another was Howie Machtinger, a scrappy University of Chicago PhD candidate. An SDS contingent from Ann Arbor, Michigan, was especially significant. It was led by Jim Mellen, a thirty-five-year-old activist; his protégé Bill Ayers, a lippy, hedonistic rich kid whose father was chairman of Chicago’s Commonwealth Edison; Ayers’s girlfriend, Diana Oughton; and their close friend Terry Robbins, a wiry, intense SDS ambassador at Kent State.

As this group coalesced around JJ and Dohrn in the winter of 1968−69, political violence was spreading on campuses across the country, much of it fueled by the Vietnam War’s escalation and the new Nixon administration’s vow to crack down on student protesters. By one count, incidents of bombings and arson, mostly Molotov cocktails thrown in the night, had increased to forty-one that fall, a 300 percent rise from the spring. ROTC facilities burned in Delaware, Texas, Berkeley, and Oregon and at Washington University in St. Louis, where an SDSer was convicted of arson. Campus buildings were bombed at Georgetown, the University of Michigan, New York University, and four California colleges. When the ROTC building at the University of Washington burned, students danced by the light of the flames, chanting, “This is number one / And the fun has just begun / Burn it down, burn it down, burn it down.” For the first time underground newspapers began publishing instructions on the making of Molotov cocktails. Homemade bombing manuals began circulating at SDS meetings and rock concerts. A rash of bombings occurred in Detroit that winter; small devices exploded five times outside the city halls in Oakland and San Francisco.

To apocalyptic revolutionaries, it was a sign of the coming conflict. In Chicago, JJ and Dohrn were emboldened. By the spring, when they relocated to a spartan apartment on North Winthrop Avenue—JJ, it was said, had demolished their furniture in an LSD rampage—their circle had begun to think of themselves as the future of SDS and of the Movement. They planned to run for all the top leadership positions at the SDS convention that June, but to win they would need to defeat a set of rivals who were, if anything, even more strident and doctrinaire than they: a hard-core Maoist group called Progressive Labor, known as PL. As a statement of principles and a way of contrasting themselves with PL, they began writing what would become a defining, sixteen-thousand-word manifesto: the infamous “Weatherman paper.” Chewing amphetamines like gum, JJ banged out most of it on a typewriter in the kitchen, passing around pages for the others to review. When they were done, he and ten others, including Dohrn, Mark Rudd, Jeff Jones, Howie Machtinger, Jim Mellen, Terry Robbins, and Bill Ayers, signed their names.

One Weatherman history terms the paper, a nearly impenetrable blizzard of Marxist jargon, “an almost mystical vision of a coming political Armageddon.” (“Any close reading of the Weatherman paper,” one SDSer quipped, “will drive you blind.”) A crystallization of all JJ’s pet ideas, the paper didn’t just draw parallels between American student protests and the Third World guerrilla campaigns sprouting up around the world: It judged them all part and parcel of a single titanic global struggle between oppressed minorities and the agencies of U.S. imperialism. In other words, Mark Rudd hadn’t just acted like Che at Columbia; he was, in fact, Che’s comrade in arms. But the genius of JJ’s argument was that it allowed white radicals to portray themselves as allies of these oppressed minorities by rallying behind the one group whose leaders—from Martin Luther King to Huey Newton—the JJs of the world adored even more than Che Guevara: American blacks. “I think in our hearts what all of us wanted to be,” former SDS leader Cathy Wilkerson recalls, “was a Black Panther.”

Wars like Vietnam came and went, but it was only the brewing revolution of American blacks, JJ prophesied, that had the potential to destroy the country. Every white revolutionary, he argued, was duty-bound to become 1969’s version of John Brown, the Civil War−era antislavery zealot. “John Brown! Live like him!” became JJ’s rallying cry. What this meant in reality was, like most protest-era rhetoric, open to interpretation. In the minds of apocalyptic radicals like JJ, white American protesters were destined to become Che-style guerrillas in the streets of America, rallying blacks and the white working class to a bloody revolution. For JJ and his allies talk of violence was no longer abstract. They wanted to bomb buildings and kill the policemen who were murdering blacks in the ghettos. Not many, it should be emphasized, shared this view: More than a few, even within the Movement, thought talk of antigovernment violence was lunacy. JJ’s group decided to name its manifesto after a Bob Dylan line: “You don’t a need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Saner SDSers twisted this into a memorable quip: “You don’t need a rectal thermometer to know who the assholes are.”

The SDS convention took place at the Chicago Coliseum on Wednesday, June 18, 1969; nearly two thousand people attended. The Weathermen arrived as part of the larger RYM—Revolutionary Youth Movement—caucus, but both were consumed with the battle against their archrivals, PL. (The basic difference between the two groups was that PL adopted a Maoist philosophy of focusing on “workers,” while Weatherman put its emphasis on the “oppressed,” especially blacks.) The convention’s first two days were consumed with the trappings of student-leftist gatherings, angry speeches, PL chants against RYM, RYM chants against PL, even fistfights. The turning point came on Friday night, when a delegate from the Black Panthers took the microphone and read a statement that condemned PL as “counterrevolutionary traitors” who, if their ideological positions did not change, “would be dealt with as such.” It amounted to an ultimatum from the Panthers, whose approval every SDS leader sought like lost gold: Dump PL or else. PLers tried to drown out the Panthers, chanting “Read Mao” and “Bullshit!” When RYM supporters chanted the Panther slogan, “Power to the People!” PLers shouted back, “Power to the Workers!” Fistfights broke out. On stage, Mark Rudd called for a recess. As he finished, Dohrn rushed to the rostrum, eyes ablaze, and shouted that it was time to decide whether they could remain in the same organization as those who denied human rights to the oppressed. Anyone who agreed, she announced, should follow her. And with that, Dohrn and the leadership marched into an adjacent arena to decide what to do next.