Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  But it was SDS itself that propelled by far the largest resistance movement: to the military draft. The first draft-resistance groups began springing up in early 1967 and were soon widespread, many students openly burning their draft cards or wearing a popular SDS button: NOT WITH MY LIFE YOU DON’T. This kind of open defiance to government authority, along with disclosures of U.S. bombing of North Vietnamese civilians, drew tens of thousands of young people into the Movement even as its intellectual leaders, especially in SDS, began musing about ever more militant ways to confront the government. Protests alone, they could see, were no longer enough.

  As an SDSer named Dotson Rader put it:

  The meaninglessness of non-violent, “democratic” methods was becoming clear to us in the spring of 1967. The Civil Rights Movement was dead. Pacifism was dead. Some Leftists—the Trotskyites, Maoists, radical socialists . . . some of the radicals in SDS, Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, Tom Hayden—knew it early. But it took the rest of us awhile to give up the sweet life of the democratic Left for revolt.1

  One of the most striking characteristics of radical thought during the late 1960s was the flash-fire speed with which it evolved: An idea could be introduced, accepted, popularized, and taken to the “next level” in a matter of months, sometimes weeks. And so it was with the path of “resistance.” No sooner had the broader Movement plunged into the realities of draft and other resistance than the keenest thinkers began pondering what came next. Defying the government was giving way to confronting the government. And there was only one place to go, intellectually, once the government was confronted.

  It was Greg Calvert once more who first put it into words, at least publicly, in a front-page article in the New York Times in May 1967. The article, which attempted to take stock of student-resistance activities, suggested that violence was the Movement’s logical next step, a contention it supported with a quote that Calvert quickly recanted: “We are working to build a guerrilla force in an urban environment.” No other student leader seconded it, and because it suggested a tactic few in SDS had even considered, much less approved, it was broadly renounced. But not by everyone. The intellectual cat was now out of the bag, and as the Movement exploded into public consciousness during 1967’s Summer of Love, the first voices could be heard saying that Greg Calvert was onto something.

  • • •

  After years of talk and restlessness 1968 changed everything. It was as if the earth itself was exploding in protest. Suddenly, as if in concert, students and working people around the world—in France, Germany, Great Britain, Mexico, Northern Ireland, Finland, Brazil, even in China, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia—rose up and demanded that their governments change. Every night on the evening news it was as if the same roll of film were being broadcast over and over from country after country, thousands of young people holding protest signs, students leaping over barricades, steel-helmeted police and soldiers staring impassively or, increasingly, beating them down. For those in power, it felt as if the world was crumbling around them. For those in the streets, it was as if the entire world was aflame. Suddenly there was a single word on everyone’s lips: “revolution.”

  The revolution—a single global uprising of the “oppressed”—was happening, right now, all over the world and would soon come to America. It was an idea that seemed to wash over the Movement in a matter of minutes, easy to discuss, harder to grasp, harder still to actually believe. Yet it spread with stunning swiftness. In the summer of 1968, barely a year after Greg Calvert had been pilloried for suggesting that protesters become urban guerrillas, a study found that more than 350,000 young Americans considered themselves “revolutionaries.” The term, of course, meant many things to many people. For most, unwilling or unable to accept the far-fetched notion that a violent uprising might topple the government, the word “revolution” became a kind of shorthand for fundamental change. When they used it, they meant a revolution in American norms, in the power structure, in civil rights, in attitudes toward the poor and dispossessed. No sane person, it was widely assumed, believed the U.S. government could actually be overthrown.

  But others did believe it. For the hard core, for those who saw governments teetering everywhere, who felt that the Movement was doomed to failure, who despaired at the murders of change agents such as Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, 1968 bore signs of the apocalypse. For these activists, who might be called apocalyptic revolutionaries, there was a vivid and growing sense that the world was on the brink of historic, irreversible change and that the morally corrupt American government, murdering the Vietnamese, unleashing dogs on Southern blacks, and beating its protesters, was poised for imminent collapse. SDS’s leadership happened to be populated by an outsized number of Jewish students, and for many of these the notion of challenging a U.S. government they imagined as the second coming of Nazi Germany had enormous appeal. All that was needed was a push. Castro had done it in Cuba, Lenin in Russia, Mao in China. Why not in America?

  This was a powerful idea, at once outlandish and intoxicating, providing a rush of intellectual adrenaline as strong as any drug. It was also, as Kirkpatrick Sale notes in his definitive history, SDS: The Rise and Development of the Students for a Democratic Society, the inevitable result of everything that had happened to that point in the 1960s:

  Revolution: how had it come to that? It was a blend of many things: bitterness, hatred, and alienation, hope, confidence, and conviction, energy, passion, and need. It was the pattern woven by all the threads of the sixties, the inevitable product of the awakened generation as it probed deeper and deeper into the character of its nation. . . .

  There was a primary sense, begun by no more than a reading of the morning papers and developed through the new perspectives and new analyses available to the Movement now, that the evils in America were the evils of America, inextricably a part of the total system. . . . Clearly something drastic would be necessary to eradicate those evils and alter that system: various reforms had been tried, confrontation had been tried, there had been civil-rights agitation, university pressures, antiwar marches, doorbell ringing, electoral action, student power, draft resistance demonstrations, campus uprisings, even tentative political violence—all to little avail. . . .

  Worse, those who wanted peaceable change, who tried to work through approved channels, seemed to be systematically ignored, ostracized, or—as with the Kennedys and King—eliminated. More was necessary, and in the words of [one SDS leader], “What it came to that year was that people came to the conclusion that the only way to stop the war was make a revolution, and the only way to stop racism was make a revolution.” “The monster”—that was the recurrent phrase now—could not be altered, deviated, halted: it had to be destroyed.

  Apocalyptic revolutionaries represented a strident new voice in the Movement, but they were able to draw from a wellspring of ideas that weren’t entirely new: philosophies, arguments, books, and films that had sprung up around armed-resistance movements worldwide. They studied Lenin and Mao and Ho Chi Minh—it went without saying that revolutionaries were almost always communists—but their favorite blueprint was the Cuban Revolution, their icon Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Castro’s swashbuckling right-hand man. A handsome doctor, Che represented the thoughtful, “caring” revolutionary who resorted to violence only to fight an unjust government; by 1968 his poster could be found hanging in dormitories across America. The apocalyptic revolutionary’s favorite movie was The Battle of Algiers, a 1966 film that portrayed heroic Algerian guerrillas doing battle against their French occupiers. In time, once people actually began going underground, their bible would become Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, written in 1969 by a Brazilian Marxist named Carlos Marighella; it outlined dozens of strategies and tactics, analyzing weapons, outlining ways to organize a guerrilla cell, even describing the best ways to rob a bank. A number of underground newspapers would excerpt Marighella’s manual.

  “We actually believ
ed 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, hedonisti
c 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.