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.
In January 1970 the first of the Weathermen began going “underground.” The term itself had many meanings to many people, but in general being underground in America during the 1970s simply meant living under an assumed identity. The underground wasn’t a place; it was a lifestyle, a fugitive lifestyle. There were many shades of it, though, especially with Weatherman. Some, as in Sam Melville’s circle, never got around to adopting new identities and performed clandestine duties while carrying their actual identification. Then there were the “aboveground” supporters, of whom Weatherman had many, perhaps hundreds, far more than any subsequent underground group. These would include onetime SDSers, purged Weathermen, friends, family, and others in the Movement; by far the most useful were an array of determined radical attorneys. These people helped with a range of tasks, raising money, arranging secret meetings, and acting as couriers. From time to time some even pitched in to help with the group’s bombings.
There is a mistaken notion that Weatherman somehow created the underground; it didn’t. In fact, by the time its first members began to disappear, a new kind of underground had been thriving in the United States for several years. By far its largest concentration of members were military deserters and draft dodgers fleeing service in Vietnam. The Pentagon listed 73,121 deserters in 1969, 89,088 more in 1970. Many turned themselves in, were arrested, or fled to Canada. But draft-resistance groups estimated that between 35,000 and 50,000 deserters were living underground in the United States in 1970. The FBI’s central computer listed 75,000 additional criminal fugitives. Even assuming some overlap between these groups, the hundred or so Weathermen amounted to a handful of new fish in a teeming underground sea.
This new American underground was enabled by a loose network of service providers, from sellers of false ID and cross-border smugglers to people who would provide safe haven, sometimes in the new communes springing up around the country. One of the most surprising things about living underground, in fact, was how often members helped out fellow travelers; Weatherman cells would later shelter several outside fugitives. There were even specialized undergrounds, such as an archipelago of black supporters who sheltered fugitive Black Panthers, and a disciplined Catholic underground that helped hide draft resisters and other Movement figures. While the underground was not a place, certain places did draw the underground, especially cities with vibrant Movement politics. New York and the San Francisco Bay Area were the most popular, along with Boston and Seattle, where many Weathermen would eventually find sanctuary.
Living underground required self-discipline. By late 1969 lists of dos and don’ts were appearing regularly in the radical press. Among them: Avoid automobiles whenever possible; drivers are stopped and asked for identification far more than individuals using public transportation. Never drive at night; that’s when most traffic stops are made. Avoid drugs and alcohol unless in a secure environment; both impair judgment. Assume that every telephone is tapped. If a phone must be used, make it a pay phone. One fugitive gave this advice in the Liberated Guardian newspaper:
Cities are generally safer than rural areas or small towns. Avoid communes. Don’t wear clothes that are likely to draw suspicion (i.e., military boots or jackets if you were in the Army). Don’t turn up at well-known pads. . . . Your involvement in movement activities is up to you. But be aware that your jeopardy increases with the amount of involvement. . . . Once you have a name stick to it, unless you blow it and have to start again. . . . Use only a few trustworthy contacts in different locations to channel your mail. Place your letter in an envelope, omit the return address, send it in another envelope. . . . Avoid leaving fingerprints anywhere, wear gloves in handling letters. . . . Libraries are cool [but] don’t check out books with suspicious titles [and] stay away from the out-of-town newspaper rack.
By 1970, thanks to the influx of deserters and draft dodgers, the underground had taken on a decidedly left-wing flavor. An armed robber who escaped from a Midwestern prison that year was startled to find how Movement sympathizers had transformed life on the run. Sitting in New York’s Washington Square, he sang their praises to a New York Times reporter:
The Movement people are fabulous. They have a real underground that takes care of you. No matter where I went they made sure I had something to eat, they introduced me to others, they made me feel safe. . . . I’ve only been here three weeks now, but I feel completely different from all the other times I’ve been on the run. It’s not a hassle like it was alone. I’m part of a community. The underground is much bigger than you’d think. It’s all around. I could go from place to place for weeks and there’d always be a place I could stay and people to take care of me. . . . Whether you call us criminals or radicals, we’ve all been [screwed] by society, we’re all on the lam together.
Among the first Weathermen to enter this strange new world was Jeff Jones, who related his introduction to it in his son Thai Jones’s 2004 book, A Radical Line. His journey began in San Francisco that January, at a meal in a Chinatown restaurant, with “a man in a trench coat whom he had never seen before and would never see again.” The man helped draft dodgers. After dim sum and tea, the stranger dipped into his pocket and, in exchange for cash, handed Jones an envelope filled with blank government documents: birth and baptismal certificates and draft cards. All Jones had to do was fill in the blanks and overnight he could be someone else.
As scores of Weathermen would do in the coming months, Jones began constructing not one but several false identities; if one was discovered, he had a second ready. Classifying himself 4F, he typed in names on the draft cards, sticking to “J” names: John, Jake, Jason. With a draft card and a false birth certificate, he was able to enroll in a three-hour driving course to obtain a California driver’s license. By his own reckoning, Jones would take ve
rsions of this course more than twenty times. He researched which states required the least information for a license and spent weeks haunting small-town and out-of-the-way Department of Motor Vehicles offices.
“Building” false identities became a never-ending job for most people in the underground. In those early days, when a man in a trench coat couldn’t be found, many Weathermen resorted to stealing purses and wallets and using driver’s licenses they found inside. Eventually, petty theft came to be frowned upon as an unacceptable risk; worse, once a license was reported stolen, its use could get the thief arrested. Bill Ayers recalled once using a stolen license and credit card to rent a fancy car and buy new clothes, until Jeff Jones showed him how foolish he was being. (Shoplifting, however, was a common pastime; when Cathy Wilkerson needed a winter coat on her arrival in New York, she walked out of a boutique with one.) In time even dealing with ID brokers was deemed too risky. By the spring, most Weathermen had begun building false identities employing an old Communist Party trick: using the birth certificates of long-dead infants to file for Social Security cards and other government identification papers. Dead babies could be identified by searching old newspapers or, as Ayers did more than once, walking the grounds of remote cemeteries in search of infant graves dated between 1940 and 1950. Collecting their birth certificates became a “small industry,” Ayers recalled; soon the group would amass hundreds of them.
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