Days of Rage (14 page)

In a 2011 interview for this book, Rudd remembered being stunned by the sudden shift in strategy. They had mused about going underground for months—every self-styled revolutionary had—but Rudd had never truly believed they would go through with it. Just as startling, he says, was how the message was delivered: by Bernardine Dohrn, with preternatural cool, “as if she were suggesting we go for supper.” As Rudd recalled it, Dohrn said, “We’ve learned from Che that the only way to make revolution is to actually begin armed struggle. . . . This is what we’ve been waiting for. The next step after the National Action is to move to a higher level of struggle, to build the underground. Street violence is an unsustainable tactic—it makes us too vulnerable and costs too much. We’ve got to be able to work clandestinely.”
⁹

Rudd couldn’t believe it: They were planning to initiate actual violence, actual bombings, actual sabotage. It was surreal. Almost as shocking was Dohrn’s final message: Weatherman’s underground would be organized not by the Weather Bureau but by a new subset of leadership they were calling the Front Four: Dohrn herself, JJ, Jeff Jones, and the pugnacious Terry Robbins. All the others—Rudd, Mellen, Howie Machtinger, even Bill Ayers—would be relegated to secondary status. Only later would many of them realize that the crucial component in this equation was the little-known Robbins, that in the words of the writers Peter Collier and David Horowitz, who published a history of Weatherman in
Rolling Stone
in 1982, there was a “subtle passing of the torch from JJ, Weatherman’s thinker, to Terry, who had proposed himself as Weatherman’s doer.” One Weatherman told them, “JJ had these fantasies, but it was Terry who was prepared to act them out.”
¹⁰

It was a fateful choice. To that point, Robbins had been a marginal member of leadership, an SDS stalwart best known as Ayers’s best friend. A chain smoker, small, dark, and intense, Robbins came across to friends as warm and funny, as the sensitive poet he was; others, noting his caustic humor and macho posturing, found him, in the words of a Weatherman ally, Jonah Raskin, “menacing.” Robbins was younger than the rest, having just turned twenty-two, but he talked tougher than almost anyone. He was the perfect fist at the end of JJ’s arm, endlessly preoccupied—obsessed, some would say—with underground warfare. He would scribble bomb designs and ideas for sabotage in a notebook, remembered by Bill Ayers in his 2001 memoir,
Fugitive Days
:

Terry studied The Blaster’s Handbook, a publication of the Explosives Department of E.I. du Pont Corporation, his cranky notebook lying open on the ratty sofa, each inflamed sketch coiled tight, busy with detail, poised to detonate on the page—pressure-trigger device, nipple time bomb, magnifying glass bomb, cigarette fuse, alarm clock time bomb, homemade grenade, walking booby trap, Bangalore torpedo, book trap, pressure-release gate trap, loose floorboard traps, whistle and pipe traps. . . .

There were detailed drawings of bridges—slab bridge, T-beam bridge, concrete cantilever bridge, truss bridge, suspension bridge—with wild X’s indicating the pattern of placements that would drop every goddamned thing into the water or the ravine below, and architectural sketches of the skeletons of numerous buildings, with the requisite accompanying fury of X’s designed to doom the thing, reduce it to chaos. There were maps of highways with notes on sabotage and destruction.

Page after page was piled with calculated steps for making high explosives with all-but-indecipherable formulae; the formula for nitroglycerin, the formula for mercury fulminate, for dynamite, for chloride of azode, for ammonium nitrate, for black powder. . . . The pigs need a strong dose of their own medicine, Terry said grimly, shoved down their throats. . . . And up their asses, too. A napalm enema for Nixon.

In retrospect, others would remember an inescapable air of violence that hung over Robbins. He came from a broken family and hinted that there had been violence; one of his many girlfriends later came forward to say he beat her. But what troubled some, including his principal lover that winter, Cathy Wilkerson, wasn’t so much his comfort with violence as his preoccupation with death. He was constantly talking about the need for Weathermen to give their lives for the revolution, how he was willing to die for the struggle. His favorite movie that season was
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
, and his favorite scene was the last, when the two outlaws meet their fates charging headlong into a volley of bullets. More than one Weatherman alumnus, discussing Robbins, uses the term “death wish.”

After the postmortem, the leadership scattered, some, like Bill Ayers, heading to a massive antiwar demonstration in Washington, and others, like
Mark Rudd, touring the collectives, making sure everyone understood leadership’s latest pronouncements while assessing each cadre’s capability for supervised violence. Weatherman’s cultlike trappings, especially the withering crit/self-crit sessions, seemed to grow even more intense during this period as leadership attempted to break down the last vestiges of individuality in its followers, who strived in turn to parade their combat readiness. One story, probably apocryphal, tells of a young Weatherman who strangled a cat in front of his peers to demonstrate his willingness to kill.

Rudd wrote in his excellent 2009 memoir,
Underground:

[This] was the most notorious Weatherman period—more group sex, LSD acid tests, orgiastic rock music, violent street actions, and constant criticism, self-criticism sessions . . . [more] orgies to prove our revolutionary love for each other. . . . We were by now a classic cult, true believers surrounded by a hostile world that we rejected and that rejected us in return. We had a holy faith, revolution, which could not be shaken, as well as a strategy to get there, the foco theory. . . . We were the latest in a long line of revolutionaries from Mao to Fidel to Che to Ho Chi Minh, and the only white people prepared to engage in guerrilla warfare within the homeland.

Then, just before dawn on the morning of December 4, came the moment that for many Weathermen erased any doubt about the rumors of going underground. The telephone calls ricocheted from apartment to apartment with the stunning news: The Chicago police had murdered Panthers leader Fred Hampton in his bed. They had stormed the rooms where he and eight other Panthers were staying; an FBI informant had slipped him a powerful barbiturate, and Hampton was still asleep beside his girlfriend when police shot him twice in the head. For once radical propaganda was accurate: It amounted to an official assassination. Almost every Weatherman had the same thought: Am I next? “Was this our Kristallnacht?” Wilkerson wondered.
¹¹
When the Panthers opened Hampton’s apartment to show his bloody mattress to the public, hundreds filed by in astonishment, including Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and many other Weathermen. For most it was the final straw, the moment when their intellectual grasp of armed struggle gave way to rage. “It was the murder of Fred Hampton more than any other factor that compelled us to take up armed struggle,” a Weatherman named David Gilbert wrote later. At a viewing of the body, Ayers pulled off the ring a Vietnamese activist had given him and placed it in Hampton’s hands. As Ayers wrote later, “We were ready now, our dress rehearsal behind us, to plunge headlong into the whirlpool of violence.”
¹²

It was December 1969. Fred Hampton’s murder was just one of a series of ominous events that heralded the nightmarish end of a tortured decade. Two days later in Altamont, California, Hells Angels knifed and killed a teenager in the unruly crowd watching Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones perform at the infamous concert. The papers were still jammed with lurid stories of the massacre of five people at the hands of Charles Manson’s hippie cult four months earlier. In later years each of these events would be cited as the unofficial end of the Age of Aquarius, or the death of the ’60s, or the passing of the Woodstock Generation’s dreams of love and hope.

But few gatherings illustrated the dark borderlands between the end of the ’60s and the onset of the ’70s more clearly than the one Weatherman held in the days between Christmas 1969 and New Year’s 1970. Billed as the National War Council, or “Wargasm,” it was the pep rally from Hell, a five-day orgy of violent rhetoric intended to set the stage for the underground revolution the leadership was now ready to begin. It was held in a tumbledown dance hall in the heart of a Flint, Michigan, ghetto; on his arrival, Mark Rudd, who continued to have doubts about their plans, fingered a hole in the plywood front door, the result of a shotgun slug that had killed a patron just the night before, and thought, “How appropriate.” The Detroit collective had handled the decorations, hanging large psychedelic portraits of Castro, Che, Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Malcolm X, and Eldridge Cleaver. One wall was lined with posters of the fallen Fred Hampton. Above the stage they had hung their centerpiece, a six-foot cardboard machine gun.

Four hundred Weathermen and friends attended, all watched closely by local police, who patrolled the parking lots. The days were filled with calisthenics, karate classes, workshops; evenings, with Weatherman songs written by a popular Columbia SDSer named Ted Gold and others (“I’m dreaming of a white riot, just like the one October Eighth”), increasingly violent speeches,
frenetic dancing, and copious amounts of illegal drugs. Every speaker tried to top the one before. “It’s a wonderful thing to hit a pig,” Rudd found himself telling the crowd. “It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building.” JJ hit the high notes. “We’re against everything that’s good and decent in honky America,” he declared. “We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmare.”

But it was Dohrn’s speech that people would talk about for years to come. For once she shed her cool façade and practically screamed for the crowd to avenge the murder of Fred Hampton by bringing violence and chaos, writ large or small, to white America. She told a story of an airline flight where, she claimed, she and JJ had run down the aisles stealing food from the other passengers’ trays. “
That’s
what we’re about,” she shouted, “being crazy motherfuckers and scaring the shit out of Honky America.” She climaxed by heaping praise on the wild-eyed Charles Manson for his cult’s murders, including that of Sharon Tate and Tate’s unborn baby. “Dig it!” she famously cried. “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!” Soon everyone in the hall was raising their hands in four-finger salutes, signifying the fork shoved into the pregnant Sharon Tate’s belly.

Most nights many of the delegates repaired to the nave of a nearby Catholic church for marathon bouts of group sex. Between all the orgies and the speeches and the karate classes, there was endless speculation about what the leadership was planning. No one was entirely sure what they would be asked to do, although it was assumed that bombings would be part of it. But what else? In one gathering they debated whether killing a white baby was a properly revolutionary act. Behind closed doors, meanwhile, the leadership was in fact finalizing a battle plan, discussing the whats and hows and whens of a struggle that until that point had been purely hypothetical. On New Year’s Day 1970, as the last of the attendees rubbed their eyes at the dawn of a new decade, only one thing seemed certain: The Weathermen were going to war.

04

“AS TO KILLING PEOPLE, WE WERE PREPARED TO DO THAT”

Weatherman, January to March 1970

In the first days after Flint the Weatherman leadership began transitioning the group from a band of brainy protesters into something the country had never seen before: a true combat force determined to launch guerrilla warfare in the streets of America. They were the intellectual vanguard, they believed, and the Movement would follow them into bloody revolution, just as Castro had done in Cuba. Things, needless to say, would not go as planned. Those first two and a half months of 1970 proved the crucial period in determining Weatherman’s fate. It entered with a defined public identity, laid detailed plans to adopt a new one, and by mid-March was on its way to becoming something else entirely. It is a period whose details few Weathermen have wanted to discuss publicly. It is the period, bluntly put, when Weatherman set out to kill people.

January began with the generals—Dohrn, Jeff Jones, & Co.—choosing their soldiers. Not everyone who’d been at Flint would go underground—far from it. The days afterward, in fact, are remembered as some of the most emotionally brutal in Weatherman’s history, a time when the leadership spread
across the country and purged the collectives of everyone they felt wasn’t ready to be remade into an armed revolutionary. Anyone who wasn’t willing to shed the trappings of bourgeois life—a wife, a boyfriend, a child, a job, anything—was unceremoniously thrown out of Weatherman. Anyone who questioned the leadership, who deviated from the political line, who hadn’t demonstrated adequate bravery at the Days of Rage, who was considered weak or undependable or the least bit tentative: out. JJ christened this period “the consolidation.”

“Everyone was waiting for what we called a ‘tap on the shoulder’; we would say, I hope I get the tap on the shoulder,” recalls Jonathan Lerner. “If you were tapped, you didn’t talk about it. All that January people were sitting around waiting for the tap on the shoulder, which everyone wanted, because that was the thing to be: Go underground, be a fighter.”

The purges began on January 2, when Bill Ayers arrived in Cincinnati to examine its collective. Mark Rudd took Cleveland, while Russ Neufeld and Cathy Wilkerson began slashing the deadwood out of Seattle on January 25. The purges led to the exile of probably a hundred or more Weathermen. Entire collectives disappeared in a matter of days, including Los Angeles, Denver, and Chicago. Seattle simply imploded, many of its members joining rival groups that soon melted into nothingness. No one was spared, though some of those who didn’t make the cut were given consolation assignments; Jon Lerner, crushed by his rejection, was sent with three others on a mission to Cuba. Not everyone had to be purged. Many decided they simply didn’t have the stomach for underground combat; some, like Neufeld and Brian Flanagan, decided they were better suited to help Weatherman in other ways. Still others, such as Jim Mellen, one of the Weatherman paper’s eleven signers, thought the whole idea of guerrilla war was crazy. Mellen was watching the Super Bowl with JJ, Dohrn, and Ayers in Chicago when JJ remarked that anyone who quit now would have to be killed. For Mellen it was the final straw; he walked out of the house at halftime, never to return.
¹
Within weeks there were probably no more than 150 active Weathermen left. Those who survived, however, were exactly the kind of people the leadership wanted: obedient soldiers, stripped of individualism, ready to attack “Amerika.” A
symbolic end to their old lives came when the leadership closed SDS headquarters and donated its files to the University of Wisconsin. SDS was now officially dead.