Days of Rage (47 page)

For a group as aimless as Weather, dissension was probably inevitable. As the months wore on with little sense of new direction, complaints bubbled up from the ranks, especially from those few dozen members who hadn’t taken active roles in the bombings or leadership. Some were simply tired of living near the poverty line. A handful of gays and lesbians griped that leadership wasn’t attentive to their needs. The loudest complaints, though, emanated from several young women who began to self-identify as radical feminists. The Central Committee discouraged them from joining outside feminist groups, prompting gripes that the leadership had been corrupted by “white male superiority.” Efforts were made to placate these women. They were allowed to form a “women’s brigade” within the organization that bombed a Department of Health, Education and Welfare building in San Francisco in March 1974. At one point it issued an entire white paper on the importance of feminism, not that it helped; one male Weatherman recalls a “Weatherwomen’s” conclave in Marin County whose members emerged to insist that no male Weatherman could even talk with a female Weatherman without asking permission. This grousing culminated in a 1973 article in
Ms.
magazine by none other than Jane Alpert, Sam Melville’s onetime girlfriend, who had been underground for three years, mostly working as a rabbi’s secretary in Denver. Alpert, who had visited Bernardine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, and other Weathermen, announced that she was rejecting the underground because of “sexist” leadership that “exploited” women. Not long after, she surrendered to authorities.

A rare glimpse of this turmoil is afforded by a little-noticed internal history of Weather released by a band of dissidents in 1976. According to this
document, matters came to a head in October 1973, when the Central Committee, fearing open revolt, developed a plan for “reorganization.” The leadership realized that the complaints were symptoms of a far larger problem facing the group, a crisis at the core of its identity: If the Weather Underground wasn’t going to bomb things, what would it do instead? The answer turned out to be surprisingly simple. For four years they had detonated bombs to get people to read the written statements they released. What if they simply went on releasing their writings without the bombs? What if they put all their writing into one package? The idea of a book was born.

From the outset, it was Bill Ayers’s baby. By one account, he had been noodling with a political manifesto for months. According to the internal history, the Central Committee sold the idea as a program embodied in three slogans: “Educate Ourselves, Organize Ourselves, Activate Ourselves Around a Written Program.” The project was less about politics than what businessmen call team building: They needed to get everyone on the same page—literally. The job of writing the book, which took all of 1973, has been described in Ayers’s and other memoirs as a rare collaborative endeavor, with the manuscript being passed among writers throughout the organization. Borrowing a line from Mao—“a single spark can start a prairie fire”—they decided to call it
Prairie Fire: The Politics of Anti
-
Imperialism
.

The dissidents’ history, however, suggests a far more contentious process. According to this version, Ayers’s draft was “no good” and “strongly -criticized.” A second draft was authorized, this one overseen by the old Communist Party hand who had driven the Timothy Leary getaway car, Clayton Van Lydegraf. It was a poor choice. Thirty years older than his peers, Van Lydegraf was a unique figure in Weather, a doctrinaire Maoist who had been deeply involved in Seattle’s vibrant leftist politics since his days as a Boeing machinist after World War II. Bouncing among myriad communist groups, he emerged during the 1960s as a mentor to Seattle radicals and an author of several influential pamphlets, one of which caught the attention of John “JJ” Jacobs, who drew him into Weatherman. Van Lydegraf was an ardent proponent of armed struggle and disdained any retreat from it.

As it turned out, Van Lydegraf was one of two aging communists who got involved. The second was Eleanor Stein’s mother, sixty-year-old Annie Stein,
a chain-smoking activist who had long been active in New York left-wing politics. A former schoolteacher, she focused on fighting racism in the New York schools. During Weather’s “lost years” she became a political mentor to her daughter and Jeff Jones. Sometimes the couple would slip into New York to sip coffee with Annie at one of her favorite delis. Other times they would take walks in the Catskills. Annie Stein was a traditional communist who believed that a social revolution would arise only from organizing “the masses,” not from bombing buildings. By 1973 she and Van Lydegraf had become something like intellectual rivals, each determined to imprint their ideas on the leadership and in the pages of
Prairie Fire
.

After Bill Ayers’s first draft was rejected, the internal history says, responsibility for a second draft was given to an “experienced and trusted comrade”—clearly Van Lydegraf—who enrolled several of the radical feminists. Distinctions between this group’s “revolutionary” line, emphasizing Weather’s support for women and people of color, are easily lost on any mainstream reader. But they clearly led to a series of internal debates that turned ugly. The history says the Central Committee “fought tooth and nail” for their version—which included Annie Stein’s emphasis on the “international working class”—“and discouraged struggle against them by saying it was sectarian and factional.” There were arguments over almost everything, from how to “position” the book to how to publish it.

“It was really a struggle between Annie and Van,” recalls Howie Machtinger, who wrote sections of the manuscript. “They both considered themselves to the left of the Communist Party and the Chinese. But they were different. The emphasis on armed struggle, that was Van. The emphasis on organizational work with the masses, that was Annie. I read the thing as a compromise of their positions.”

A power struggle ensued, its details now all but lost to history. What is clear is that Ayers and the Central Committee won; Van Lydegraf was expelled from Weather at some point in 1974. The resulting bitterness would eventually come back to haunt everyone involved.

The completed manuscript of
Prairie Fire
, which ran to 156 pages, ended up as a wide-ranging survey of 1970s-era radical views, featuring histories of the American Left, the rise of 1960s-era radicals, SDS, and the Vietnam
War. It laid out Weather’s take on every conceivable political topic, from slavery and feminism to Native Americans and independence struggles in the African nation of Guinea-Bissau. Always, though, it circled back to the absolute necessity of violent revolutionary struggle against the U.S. government:

We are a guerrilla organization. We are Communist men and women, underground in the United States for more than four years. . . .

Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks, to make it hard to carry out its bloody functioning against the people of the world, to join the world struggle, to attack from the inside.

Our intention is to engage the enemy, to wear away at him, to harass him, to isolate him, to expose every weakness, to pounce, to reveal his vulnerability.

Our intention is to encourage the people to provoke the leaps in confidence and consciousness, to stir the imagination, to popularize power, to agitate, to organize, to join in every way possible the people’s day-to-day struggle.

Our intention is to form an underground, a clandestine political organization engaged in every form of struggle, protected from the eyes and ears and weapons of the state, a base against repression, to accumulate lessons, experience and constant practice, a base from which to attack. . . .

The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war. Revolution is the most powerful resource of the people. . . . Many people have given their lives in this struggle and many more will have to.

As the manuscript neared completion, the question became how to publish it. They decided they couldn’t risk engaging a traditional publishing house, even a radical one, so they chose to print and distribute the book themselves—no small task for a band of fugitives. But against the odds, the
production of
Prairie Fire
was a triumph of Weather’s logistical prowess. Almost everything was done in Boston, where the Central Committee’s Robbie Roth and several New Yorkers had relocated. They rented the basement of a brownstone, purchased a multilith offset printer, and put it in a back room. In the front the handy Ron Fliegelman, with help from Mark Rudd, built a Potemkin-village outer office, complete with a reception desk and filing cabinets, in case they had uninvited visitors. Fliegelman supervised the printing press. They cranked out five thousand copies of the book, each assembled by hand, with gloves. According to one participant, a second printing was done in Eugene, Oregon.

It was an ambitious project, especially given the plans to distribute the book nationally. For that, more people were needed. At that point the leadership began reaching out to more than a dozen Weathermen who had been exiled or marginalized, hoping to lure them into becoming the foot soldiers they needed. Many accepted, including Howie Machtinger, still lurking around New York, and Jeff Jones’s old pal Jon Lerner; both were assigned to a new collective in Boston. Mark Rudd, having long since abandoned New Mexico for a Pennsylvania farmhouse, came as well, moving with his girlfriend to Yonkers, New York.

By the spring of 1974 the book was ready to be released. As if needing to remind the public it still existed, Weather then launched a trio of new attacks, its first since the ITT bombing six months earlier. In protest of the SLA killings, the San Francisco cell bombed an office of the California attorney general. In New York, as a protest against the state’s draconian drug laws, Fliegelman made a stink bomb his group rolled into a banquet feting Governor Nelson Rockefeller. “Yeah, a stink bomb, why not?” Fliegelman says today. “I guess we were trying to change things up a little.” The final action came on June 13, barely a month before
Prairie Fire
’s release, when Weather detonated a large bomb that wrecked most of the twenty-ninth floor of Gulf Oil headquarters in Pittsburgh. Exactly as a traditional publisher might arrange a book excerpt in the pages of
Time
or
Newsweek
, Weather included an excerpt from
Prairie Fire
in its communiqué.

“Some of those late actions, I think we got a little sloppy, maybe a little dangerous,” Fliegelman recalls. “I remember one time one of us took a bomb
on an airplane, which we shouldn’t have done.” Asked if this was the Gulf action in Pittsburgh, a rare Weather bombing off the coasts, he shrugs and says, “Maybe.”

Finally, everything was set. On the night of July 23, 1974, teams of volunteers dropped off copies of
Prairie Fire
at alternative bookstores and radical organizations in a dozen cities, from San Francisco to Madison, Wisconsin, to Philadelphia and New York. Silvia Baraldini never forgot walking into the Brooklyn Women’s School to find them. “They just arrived, out of nowhere, a big pile of books,” she says. “We were all told we had to study this book. And we did. Our desire to read the book was due to the mystique of Weatherman. We thought they were doing important things. They were
underground
.”

Prairie Fire
was widely read in radical circles and noticed in the mainstream, garnering a brief article in the
New York Times
. For the leadership, the taste of relevancy proved intoxicating and would lead to a series of plans that transformed what remained of the organization. The book’s impact was felt outside the group as well. Like
Dragon
,
Prairie Fire
served as an invitation to new groups to take up the cause of “armed struggle” even as Weather’s leaders, increasingly preoccupied with the printed word, showed little interest in new bombings themselves. Others heard the call, however, and within months of
Prairie Fire’
s appearance, they began to strike.

 • • • 

On its face, it was just another political rally, nearly twenty thousand people streaming into Madison Square Garden carrying angry placards and posters that night, October 27, 1974, three months after
Prairie Fire
’s publication. They had come to hear radical icons, such as Angela Davis and Jane Fonda, raise their fists and deliver speeches calling for change. What almost no one understood, save perhaps for the handful of people building the bombs, was that this rally heralded not only the debut of a new political movement but a new barrage of political terror, all the work of a group of militants who would emerge as the most determined bombers in U.S. history. All but forgotten today, they would go on to bomb dozens of U.S. skyscrapers and landmarks,
raid presidential campaign offices, and kill more innocents than any other underground group.

They weren’t black nationalists. They weren’t aging hippies. Or the Palestinians, or the Croatians, or any of the other groups that resorted to terror tactics around the world during the 1970s. They were Puerto Ricans.

Their first bomb, though no one realized it at the time, had exploded at 12:55 a.m. on a hot summer night two months before the Garden rally, on August 31, 1974, in Damrosch Park outside Lincoln Center on Manhattan’s West Side. The explosion did little but tear up a row of hedges. Sifting through the debris, the NYPD bomb squad found the remains of several propane tanks. No one claimed responsibility, and the incident was quickly forgotten.

A month later, on the night of September 28, two small bombs exploded across the river in Newark, New Jersey, in an alley between City Hall and police headquarters. No one was injured; there was no communiqué. The blasts came in the wake of rioting in which two Puerto Ricans had been killed. At the time Newark police had no clue the incidents were linked.