Days of Rage (2 page)

BILL AYERS:
effusive child of wealth, enthusiastic writer, named to national leadership after the Townhouse bombing

ELEANOR STEIN:
New York cell, national leadership, later married Jeff Jones

ROBBIE ROTH:
thoughtful Columbia University SDSer, New York cell, named to national leadership after Townhouse

MARK RUDD:
hero of 1968 Columbia protests, early Weatherman leader, eventually marginalized

JOHN JACOBS, AKA “JJ”:
Columbia organizer, Weatherman’s intellectual pioneer, principal author of founding Weatherman paper

TERRY ROBBINS:
SDS organizer, Bill Ayers’s best friend, intense and dedicated, leader of Townhouse cell

CATHY WILKERSON:
Townhouse survivor, later West Coast bomb maker

KATHY BOUDIN:
Townhouse survivor, longtime Weatherman

HOWARD MACHTINGER:
University of Chicago PhD candidate and intellectual, led first West Coast “actions”

“PAUL BRADLEY”:
pseudonym for San Francisco cadre active in California bombings

“MARVIN DOYLE”:
pseudonym for Bay Area radical who worked closely with national leadership circa 1971–72

RON FLIEGELMAN:
New York cell, explosives expert

RICK AYERS:
Bill Ayers’s brother, organized West Coast logistics

ANNIE STEIN:
Eleanor Stein’s mother, political adviser

CLAYTON VAN LYDEGRAF:
aging Seattle radical, Weatherman cadre, later led purge of Weather Underground and Prairie Fire Organizing Committee

BLACK LIBERATION ARMY, AKA BLA, 1971 TO 1973

ELDRIDGE CLEAVER:
famed radical writer, BLA’s intellectual leader

DONALD COX, AKA “D.C.”:
BLA’s military strategist

SEKOU ODINGA, AKA NATHANIEL BURNS:
Cleaver’s number three in Algiers, most important black militant of underground era

LUMUMBA SHAKUR:
Odinga’s boyhood friend, BLA adviser

ZAYD SHAKUR:
Lumumba’s brother, BLA intellectual

RICHARD “DHORUBA” MOORE, AKA DHORUBA BIN-WAHAD:
rangy, motor-mouthed street intellectual, instrumental in BLA’s formation

JOHN THOMAS:
Army veteran, leader of Georgia training camp

THOMAS “BLOOD” MCCREARY:
Brooklyn soldier

TWYMON MEYERS:
trigger-happy soldier, probably most violent revolutionary of the underground era

RONALD CARTER:
Army veteran, leader of Cleveland cell, prime suspect in Foster-Laurie murders, January 1972

JOANNE CHESIMARD, AKA ASSATA SHAKUR:
last BLA leader

SYMBIONESE LIBERATION ARMY, 1973 TO 1975

DONALD DEFREEZE, AKA CINQUE:
escaped California convict, Berkeley radical, founder and first leader of the SLA

MIZMOON SOLTYSIK:
DeFreeze’s lover and aide-de-camp

BILL AND EMILY HARRIS:
strident SLA members

KATHLEEN SOLIAH:
SLA supporter turned recruit

PATTY HEARST:
California heiress, SLA member

FALN, 1974 TO 1980

OSCAR LÓPEZ:
leader, onetime Chicago community organizer

CARLOS TORRES:
López’s number two

MARIE HAYDEE TORRES:
Torres’s wife, convicted of 1977 Mobil Oil bombing

GUILLERMO “WILLIE” MORALES:
FALN soldier, bomb maker

DYLCIA PAGAN:
FALN member, mother of Morales’s child

DON WOFFORD AND LOU VIZI:
FBI pursuers

SAM MELVILLE JONATHAN JACKSON UNIT, AKA UNITED FREEDOM FRONT, 1976 TO 1984

RAY LUC LEVASSEUR:
charismatic leader, noted Maine radical

TOM MANNING:
Levasseur’s number two man, convicted in 1981 murder of New Jersey State Trooper Philip Lamonaco

PAT GROS LEVASSEUR:
mother of Levasseur’s three daughters

CAROL MANNING:
Tom’s wife

JAAN LAAMAN:
onetime SDS radical, late recruit

RICHARD WILLIAMS:
recruit, convicted in Lamonaco murder

KAZI TOURE:
recruit

LEN CROSS:
FBI pursuer

MUTULU SHAKUR GROUP, AKA “THE FAMILY,” 1977 TO 1981

MUTULU SHAKUR:
leader, longtime New York radical, acupuncturist, stepfather of the late rapper Tupac Shakur

SEKOU ODINGA:
co-leader, governor on Shakur’s engine

TYRONE RISON, AKA “LB”:
Army veteran, subleader

MARILYN BUCK:
leader of white-radical contingent, among most determined white radicals of the underground era

SILVIA BARALDINI:
intense Italian-born radical, moved from Prairie Fire Organizing Committee to May 19 Community Organization to Shakur’s group

ALSO . . .

SAM MELVILLE AND JANE ALPERT:
underground pioneers

GEORGE JACKSON:
California convict, would-be underground messiah

PROLOGUE

The woman sitting across from me in a bustling Brooklyn diner is a sixty-eight-year-old grandmother now, freckled and still very attractive. She has warm eyes and short silver hair combed over her ears. She wears a long-sleeved pink blouse. At her side her five-month-old grandson burbles in his stroller. By training she is a math teacher. She has taught almost thirty years in the New York schools. This was what she decided to do when she got out of jail.

Her name is Cathy Wilkerson, and many years ago she was briefly famous. In her twenties she belonged to the Weather Underground, the militant group that famously declared war on the United States in 1970. Its favored weapons were bombs, which it spent six long years detonating in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Washington. It was Wilkerson’s family townhouse in Greenwich Village that was destroyed in the group’s most infamous bombing, on March 6, 1970. The accidental explosion killed three of her closest friends, including her lover. She was one of two survivors who crawled from the rubble and made their way underground.

Years ago Wilkerson wrote a memoir of her radical youth, called
Flying Close to the Sun
. But as several of her peers did in their own books, she left out almost all details of her underground career. There is page after page about being lonely and penniless and adrift, but she has never explained what she
actually did underground. There is almost nothing about her clandestine work, about her role in the bombings. This is our sixth meeting, and while she is happy to discuss old friends and old politics, she has sweetly resisted my entreaties to discuss her involvement in what are euphemistically known as the Weather Underground’s “political actions.”

Another Weatherman alumnus, however, has told me. He is the father of Wilkerson’s adult daughter, in fact, and though they rarely speak, he happens to live four blocks away. Even though he perfected the group’s bomb design and served for years as its explosives guru, he—unlike Wilkerson—has never been publicly identified. A grandfather with a patchy white beard, he can be seen most mornings walking a tiny white poodle through the streets of his neighborhood, which is called Park Slope.

“So,” I say, “I’ve been told what your role was.”

Her eyelids flutter. She reaches down and begins to rock the stroller. “You think you know?” she says.

“Yes,” I say. “You were the West Coast bomb maker.”

There is a long pause. She glances down at her grandson. He begins to spit up. She reaches down, wipes off his chin, and takes him into her arms, gently sliding a bottle between his lips.

“Look,” she finally says. “I felt I had a responsibility to make the design safe after the Townhouse.” The bomb design, she means. “I didn’t want any more people to die.”

And then she begins to talk about that secret life, about the bombs she built and detonated, mostly in the San Francisco area, all those years ago. The story she tells is like many I heard from those who joined Weather and other radical underground groups of the 1970s, who mistakenly believed the country was on the brink of a genuine political revolution, who thought that violence would speed the change. It is elusive and impressionistic, a mixture of pride and embarrassment, marked with memory lapses that may or may not be convenient.

Interviews for this book, many of which took months to negotiate and arrange, played out across the country and beyond, at a Mexican restaurant in Berkeley, a remote farmhouse in Maine, a North Carolina hotel, a series of cafés in Rome, a Senegalese buffet in Harlem, a taco joint in Albuquerque, a
tenement beside the Brooklyn Bridge, the homes of retired FBI agents in New Jersey, California, and elsewhere, as well as a prison or two. Like many of those I saw, Wilkerson is angry at some of her old friends and, forty-odd years later, still grappling to make sense of what she did.

“It’s all so fantastic to me now,” she says as we rise to leave. “It’s just so absurd I participated in all this.”

“The challenge for me,” I say on the sidewalk outside, “is to explain to people today why this all didn’t seem as insane then as it does now.”

“Yes,” she says, stepping into a morning rain. “That’s it exactly.”

 • • • 

Imagine if this happened today: Hundreds of young Americans—white, black, and Hispanic—disappear from their everyday lives and secretly form urban guerrilla groups. Dedicated to confronting the government and righting society’s wrongs, they smuggle bombs into skyscrapers and federal buildings and detonate them from coast to coast. They strike inside the Pentagon, inside the U.S. Capitol, at a courthouse in Boston, at dozens of multinational corporations, at a Wall Street restaurant packed with lunchtime diners. People die. They rob banks, dozens of them, launch raids on National Guard arsenals, and assassinate policemen, in New York, in San Francisco, in Atlanta. There are deadly shoot-outs and daring jailbreaks, illegal government break-ins and a scandal in Washington.

This was a slice of America during the tumultuous 1970s, a decade when self-styled radical “revolutionaries” formed something unique in postcolonial U.S. history: an underground resistance movement. Given little credibility by the press, all but ignored by historians, their bombings and robberies and shoot-outs stretched from Seattle to Miami, from Los Angeles to Maine. And even if the movement’s goals were patently unachievable and its members little more than onetime student leftists who clung to utopian dreams of the 1960s, this in no way diminished the intensity of the shadowy conflict that few in America understood at the time and even fewer remember clearly today.

In fact, the most startling thing about the 1970s-era underground is how
thoroughly it has been forgotten. “People always ask why I did what I did, and I tell them I was a soldier in a war,” recalls a heralded black militant named Sekou Odinga, who remained underground from 1969 until his capture in 1981. “And they always say, ‘What war?’”

Call it war or something else, but it was real, and it was deadly. Arrayed against the government were a half-dozen significant underground groups—and many more that yearned to be—which, while notionally independent of one another, often shared members, tactics, and attorneys. Of these, only the Weather Underground, the first and by far the largest, has earned any real analysis. The Symbionese Liberation Army, a ragtag collection of California ex-cons and radicals who pulled off the underground’s most infamous action, the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst in 1974, was widely dismissed as a pack of loonies. Many doubted that the Black Liberation Army, a murderous offspring of the Black Panthers, even existed. A Puerto Rican independence group known as the FALN, the most determined bombers in U.S. history, remains cloaked in secrecy to this day; not one of its members has ever spoken a meaningful word about its operations. The United Freedom Front, a revolutionary cell consisting of three blue-collar couples and their nine children, robbed banks and bombed buildings well into the 1980s. An interracial group of radicals called the Family did much the same, yet remained so obscure that no one even knew it existed until a fateful afternoon in 1981 when an armored-car robbery went badly awry, three people died, and America was reintroduced to a movement it had assumed dead years before.
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