The NYPD might not want to call the BLA a true “army,” but what it described sounded martial enough. The Times’s skepticism, for instance, began to fall away. The headline of its front-page story on February 17 was EVIDENCE OF “LIBERATION ARMY” SAID TO RISE. It was then, with its notoriety near a zenith, that the BLA went utterly silent. Not a single word would be heard again for months.
10
“WE GOT PRETTY SMALL”
The Weather Underground and the FBI, 1971−72
The Weather leadership’s narrow escape from the FBI in March 1971, and the unprecedented raid on one of its San Francisco apartments—what came to be known in Weather lore as “the Encirclement”—marked a turning point for the organization. Though it would continue to mount actions and issue communiqués, Weather would never again be as active or as relevant as it was during its first year underground.
Its numbers were dwindling. There is ample evidence, in fact, that after mid-1971 Weather was a far smaller organization than has been previously understood. Four hundred radicals had attended the Flint War Council. Maybe a hundred went underground. Maybe fifty remained active after the Townhouse. The precise number of later cadres may never be known, in part because many people called themselves Weathermen despite doing little clandestine work. In 1972, for example, the Los Angeles collective consisted of six or seven people who never participated in a single bombing. One estimate puts thirty-five people underground during the 1972−73 time frame, a count endorsed by several alumni. But the number who actually performed clandestine work, who carried out bombings after the middle of 1971, was smaller still.
“We lost most of the people after the Townhouse,” says Ron Fliegelman. “After the Encirclement, we lost even more. I’m telling you, we were down to ten or fifteen. The leadership, me, the Cathys [Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin], Paul Bradley. The core group, the ones who did things, was ten or twelve people, no more than fifteen.”
“That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing,” says Brian Flanagan. “People like me, who were aboveground, could do a lot more things. I mean, how many people did you really need underground at that point?”
“It’s true, we got pretty small,” says Rick Ayers. “A lot of people went up [aboveground]. We sent a lot of people up. That was actually a conscious decision. We wanted a new sort of organization, with members aboveground, where they could do more for us. So you had an underground structure where the members weren’t all fugitives.”
In the wake of the Encirclement, the leadership and the San Francisco cadres scattered. “After the Encirclement, we had to do what was essential, which was fall back on support,” recalls Ayers, who had moved to Los Angeles. “We ran to a lot of friends and asked for help, but it slowed things down, for sure. We had to devise other ways and other kinds of ID. It was like starting over. Again.” Many cadres fled to new cities and new identities to await orders that, in some cases, didn’t come for months. David Gilbert went to ground in Denver, while others fled to Seattle. Mark Rudd, now thoroughly alienated from the leadership, fled active work altogether, resettling with his girlfriend in Santa Fe. Others simply melted away. Still others fell victim to the paranoia that gripped the underground after the San Francisco raid.
One such situation involved a former Kent State student who had rented the apartment on Pine Street. As several Weather alumni tell it, the student was experimenting with gay life, and the habits he developed in San Francisco worried many. “He would pick up guys at bathhouses and bring them back to the safe houses, and you can’t do that, not without being compromised,” recalls Paul Bradley. After the Encirclement, the student was transferred to New York, where his problems continued. “None of us had dealt with gay issues at that point,” recalls Fliegelman. “He would go off and do stuff, and he could be compromised, so he ended up having to leave.”
The Encirclement obliged Robbie Roth’s busy New York collective to scatter as well. Eleanor Stein sat on the floor of its apartment in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, spread out a piece of butcher paper, and charted all the connections between the West Coast and East Coast IDs; there were enough, it was decided, that the New Yorkers needed to relocate.
“I remember it took a solid week to scrub every surface of that place, erasing every fingerprint,” recalls Jonah Raskin, a frequent visitor. “It was an unbelievable headache.”
The whereabouts of the West Coast leadership—Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones—after they left San Francisco in spring 1971 have remained a secret for forty years. In his memoir Fugitive Days, Bill Ayers portrays their lives as nomadic, moving between working-class hideouts, including “a perch above a goat shed on a commune, and later in the groundskeepers’ quarters of a mansion near Laurel Canyon [in Los Angeles]” as well as “a basement room in a monastery in Mundelein [Illinois] . . . and a stone house on the Olympic Peninsula [in Washington state].” However complete this list may be, the one place Ayers doesn’t mention is the actual home the leadership found shortly after the Encirclement, which would serve as the group’s informal West Coast headquarters for several years. It was not, as Ayers wanted his readers to believe, some decrepit flat in an out-of-the-way slum. In fact, it was a sunny bungalow just steps from the ocean in Hermosa Beach, an Orange County beach community thronged with surfers and hippies.
“It was really cozy, you could hear the surf,” recalls Marvin Doyle. “It was on this little street on an alley, jammed in against other similar places, with a postage-stamp-sized patio. The rooms were decorated in ‘tasteful hippie.’ Bernardine had rococo tastes, a lot of pillows and nice patterned cloths on the furniture, in rich colors and textures. I remember she used madras bedspreads for curtains.”
The Bay Area, however, was far too important for Weather to abandon. From the moment they left, in fact, Dohrn was determined to reestablish a presence there. “It was a power center, of the Left, and you didn’t want the FBI to beat you, you wanted to show them you couldn’t be defeated, that you could come back hard and fast,” recalls Doyle, who, in the absence of other San Francisco cadres, emerged as a key intermediary in Dohrn’s orbit. The first Weatherman to return to the city was Paul Bradley, who was developing a lifelong love for the area. He managed to rent a secluded carriage house on Vallejo Street in the Russian Hill section; it was perfect, nestled in a garden behind an apartment building, with a single entrance to the street. Bradley lived there for several years; out-of-town visitors, including the leadership, were always welcome. Later a second flat was rented, in the Sunset area. Once he was established, Dohrn asked him to approach Doyle.
Thin, with long, scraggly hair, Doyle had lingered on the edges of Weather for the previous year. Bradley had approached him months earlier and asked to use his telephone for calls and his home address as a mail drop. Wary but secretly thrilled, Doyle had agreed. At one point, aware that he was being considered for active membership, he had ridden with Bradley to the Point Reyes National Seashore, north of San Francisco, for a rendezvous with Dohrn, who dazzled him. “She was spellbinding,” Doyle recalls. “Sexy, brilliant, and immensely articulate. And she had this boldness, on a higher level than I’d ever been exposed to. The power and the intellect, she just blew you away.”
Then, in the weeks after the Encirclement, Bradley came to him once more. “Man, we’re really desperate for cash,” Bradley said, and Doyle handed over his last $1,500 from a fellowship. After that, Doyle’s responsibilities grew. One day that spring a Weatherman drove him to a remote garage in the Sunset district, which to Doyle’s surprise held not only Jeff Jones’s beloved pickup truck, Suzie Q, but all of Jones’s and Dohrn’s belongings, abandoned after the Encirclement. After wiping the truck for fingerprints—it was later sold—the men loaded everything into a camper, after which Bradley arrived and told Doyle to drive. Without a clue about their destination, Doyle drove south, arriving later that day south of Los Angeles, where he drove into a warren of alleys alongside the
ocean in Hermosa Beach. It was there that Doyle saw the leadership’s new home and forged a relationship with Dohrn.
For weeks after the Encirclement, Dohrn remained leery of San Francisco. But Weather had many allies in the Bay Area, so she began slipping into the city on a regular basis, often meeting Doyle in parks and at restaurants. “We would sit and talk for like two hours, in Ghirardelli Square a lot and elsewhere,” he remembers. “She would say, ‘Go do this, go talk to this guy and say this.’ We hit it off real well. I basically became her gopher.” And, in time, her lover. “Yeah, I remember she returned from the East at one point, to L.A., and with this other couple we went to a Grateful Dead concert,” Doyle recalls. “We ended up in bed. We had a kind of summer fling.”
Dohrn’s sudden availability, it would appear, coincided with the breakup of her relationship with Jones. Neither has ever spoken publicly about what happened. Some within the organization blamed Jones for the Encirclement, leading to speculation that Dohrn had soured on him as a result. The fact that she subsequently entered into a long-term relationship with Bill Ayers led still others to believe there had been a love triangle at work. Whatever happened, the dissolution of the Dohrn-Jones union had a few obvious repercussions. “It was a big deal,” recalls Paul Bradley, who was close to Dohrn. “My memory is the three of them kept it pretty close to the vest until the last minute, when an announcement was made. It actually went surprisingly smoothly.”
After the breakup, Jones decided to relocate to the East Coast. Eleanor Stein happened to be visiting from New York, and the two drove across the country. They eventually arrived at what would become Weather’s ad hoc New York headquarters, a remote four-bedroom rental house with a pond on an acre of land deep in the Catskill Mountains, a few hours’ drive north of Manhattan. The New York cell had moved in after the Encirclement; Ron Fliegelman and one or two others lived there with Stein and Jones for more than a year. Taking long walks, watching the morning mist rise over the Pepacton Reservoir, Jones began to relax, even after he saw his wanted poster at the post office in the nearest town, Delhi. He started a garden, planting cucumbers and tomatoes. He and Stein were opposites—a communist-raised New York intellectual and a California surfer type—but in those early days in the Catskills, they fell in love. Like Dohrn and Ayers, they would eventually marry. Forty years later both couples remain together.
Jeff Jones’s tranquil new life in the mountains was in many ways a symbol of the changes the Weather Underground was undergoing. The New York Times began printing the Pentagon Papers that June; the antiwar movement was slowing noticeably. They had gone underground with dreams of triggering a Castro-style revolution in America. It hadn’t happened. Only the deluded still believed it would. By any measure, their grand vision of rallying young Americans to a bloody revolution had failed; they had succeeded only in surviving. At a bungalow in Hermosa Beach, at a secluded carriage house on San Francisco’s Russian Hill, at a dewy rental house in the Catskills, what remained of the Weathermen needed time to take stock.
“After the Encirclement, things really slowed down,” says Rick Ayers. “It began a time when things were much slower, more time between actions, more time to think. Everybody needed to chill out.”
Nowhere was the change in tone more evident than in the group’s new approach to bombings. Until the Encirclement, Weather had always taken the initiative; afterward, almost all its bombings were staged in reaction to specific events. A case in point was the first action it carried out after the San Francisco raids: the twin California bombings described by Marvin Doyle in chapter 6. They came in retaliation for the August 21 killing at San Quentin State Prison of a charismatic inmate named George Jackson, whose best-selling memoir, Soledad Brother, had fueled a newfound interest in prison conditions in Bay Area radical circles. The planning was done at the new Sunset apartment. “It was a typical San Francisco apartment, elongated windows, scruffy furniture,” Doyle recalls. “A lot of hanging out there, a lot of intense meetings, people coming and going. That’s where Ron and people from New York would stay when they came out. That was kind of the center of gravity the whole summer.”
The bomb Doyle and Paul Bradley placed above a second-floor ceiling tile in the Department of Corrections office in San Francisco’s historic Ferry Building demolished a small psychiatric clinic. A second bomb wrecked a sixth-floor restroom at the department’s headquarters in Sacramento. No one was injured in either explosion. The communiqué, mailed to the San Francisco Examiner, was a departure from previous Weather missives, a lengthy diatribe denouncing the treatment of American blacks and especially black prisoners: “Black and Brown people inside the jails are doing all they can—must they fight alone even now? White people on the outside have a deep responsibility to enter the battle at every level. Each of us can turn our grief into the righteous anger and our anger into action. Two small bombs do not cool our rage. . . . We view our actions as simply a first expression of our love and respect for George Jackson and the warriors of San Quentin.”
Weather’s interest in prison conditions deepened two weeks later, on September 13, when the killing of twenty-nine inmates and ten state personnel during a rebellion at New York’s Attica prison sparked widespread calls for reform. The New York cell, comfortably ensconced in their Catskill Mountains hideaway, staged their first post-Encirclement action four days later. Ron Fliegelman, as usual, built the bomb, which was smuggled into a ninth-floor washroom outside the offices of Russell G. Oswald, commissioner of the New York Department of Correctional Services in Albany. Early that evening a warning was called in to the Albany Times-Union. The building was quickly cleared, and at seven thirty the bomb detonated, destroying the washroom. No one was injured. “Tonight we attacked the head offices of the New York State Department of Corrections,” the forthcoming communiqué read. “We must continue to make the Rockefellers, Oswalds, Reagans and Nixons pay for their crimes. We only wish we could do more to show the courageous prisoners at Attica, San Quentin and the other 20th century slave ships that they are not alone in their fight for the right to live.”
The final Weather Underground bombing of 1971 came on October 15, when the group’s “Proud Eagle” affiliate detonated a small bomb above a ceiling panel in a fourth-floor women’s restroom at the Grover M. Hermann Building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The early-morning explosion slightly damaged an adjacent office used by the onetime White House aide William Bundy. A two-page communiqué sent to the Boston Globe blamed Bundy’s role in crafting the war in Vietnam.
• • •
When Weathermen did get around to bombing things, the preparation and execution remained fraught with risk. Long-haired young people lingering outside courthouses and police stations late at night tended to draw attention in the early 1970s. It occurred to Dohrn, and to others in the leadership, that disguises alone wouldn’t ensure their safety. Thus the question arose: What could they take along to reliably deflect a policeman’s curiosity? One answer was children.
No beat cop, they reasoned, would suspect a family with kids out for an evening stroll. It was a brilliant idea; the only problem was, no one in Weather had children. A handful of supporters did, however, and this was how one of Dohrn’s friends, the Chicago attorney Dennis Cunningham, saw his family drawn into clandestineness. Cunningham, as we have seen, had emerged as a key conduit for the money that paid the leadership’s living expenses. He adored Dohrn and considered her one of the most talented minds he had ever encountered.
If anything, Cunningham’s wife, Mona, a tall, thin actress in Chicago’s Second City theater troupe, was even more dazzled. A budding revolutionary herself, Mona had actually attended the Flint Wargasm, taking along Marvin Doyle, who happened to be a relative of her husband’s. Mona was so smitten by Dohrn, in fact, that when she gave birth to her fourth child, in June 1970, she named her Bernadine. The Cunninghams, however, had been having marital troubles, and their work with the underg
round added a new strain to their disagreements. Then, in the fall of 1970, Dohrn invited the couple to California. It was a relaxing trip; the Cunninghams accompanied Dohrn and Jeff Jones on a tour of California campgrounds in an old camper. It was during this trip, Cunningham recalls, that Dohrn floated the idea of the couple joining them underground.
“She said, you know, ‘Maybe you should just fade out, disappear and come out here, maybe [live] down around Santa Rosa,’” Cunningham recalls. “It made no sense to me. What would I do? I couldn’t figure out what the fuck she was talking about.” In Chicago Cunningham had a bustling practice defending all manner of radicals, including the late Fred Hampton and many other black activists. He couldn’t just leave. But Mona Cunningham seemed intrigued. Dohrn was surprisingly candid, encouraging Mona to come alone, Dennis recalls: “She was like all of them, Mark Rudd, all of them, she just came out and said it, ‘You’re really going to stay in this fucking monogamy?’”
After a tense discussion, Dennis announced he was returning to Chicago. Mona stayed behind, Dennis says, “to learn about things. I think she stayed a week or ten days before she came back to Chicago.” As that winter wore on, Mona talked often of going underground. Eventually, the following June, the Cunninghams separated.
Which is how, in the summer of 1971, Mona Cunningham, now going by her maiden name, Mona Mellis, left Chicago and moved west, initially into an Oregon commune, then into a flat in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. She brought all four of her children: Delia, who turned eight that year; her younger brother, Joey; another daughter, Miranda; and the baby, Bernadine. Dohrn welcomed Mona with open arms, continuing what would become a long friendship; the two often referred to themselves as sisters. At the same time, Mona began an extended affair with Bill Ayers. But of all the relationships renewed by the Mellis family’s move to San Francisco, it was the one between Dohrn and eight-year-old Delia Mellis that would endure. Dohrn “was like a favorite aunt, or an older sister, just very cool and very fun to be with,” remembers Delia, today a faculty member affiliated with Bard College in New York.
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