Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  • • •

  Kathy Soliah did more than save the SLA. For weeks she had been fretting about the bad publicity the SLA was getting. So, with a group of radicals, she helped form a study group called the Bay Area Research Collective, known as BARC, which began publishing Dragon, a mimeographed journal that would become the landmark paper for underground groups. Dragon quickly grew beyond an initial focus on the SLA. Between 1975 and 1977 it would publish bombing news and communiqués from almost all the second-generation underground groups, especially those on the West Coast. But Dragon was more than just a clearinghouse for the underground. In an early announcement BARC indicated that it was affiliated with this New World Liberation Front, or NWLF.*

  This being Berkeley in 1974, no one took this kind of talk seriously, not even the FBI. The NWLF might be a genuine new underground group, or it might, like so many others, exist only on paper. But something was afoot. During a jailhouse interview in late May, the SLA’s Joe Remiro told a local author, John Bryan, of a May 25 “emergency meeting” in which a number of Bay Area radical groups had formed a new umbrella organization to coordinate the activities of the SLA, the NWLF, and others. In a subsequent issue, Dragon carried a letter, supposedly from the NWLF, in which it invited anyone and everyone to detonate their bombs in the name of the NWLF, a tactic it acknowledged made the group seem larger than it was. At least initially, the group’s invitation was met with a yawning silence.

  Then, on August 5, came the first NWLF bomb, a dud, left outside an office of the General Motors Acceptance Corp. in suburban Burlingame, California. A communiqué announced “greetings and love to the Symbionese Liberation Army.” Three nights later came another—another dud—left outside a San Francisco GM dealership. In September two NWLF bombs shattered windows late at night outside two Bay Area offices of Dean Witter, a stock brokerage firm. After that the bombs began going off, on average, every sixteen days. On October 2 one damaged a women’s bathroom at a San Francisco Sheraton; on October 5, a Sheraton in Los Angeles; on October 30, the home of a retired ITT executive in Silicon Valley; on November 6, seven meter-maid motorcycles in a Berkeley parking lot. By the end of 1974 eleven NWLF bombs had gone off, at which point the Bay Area press, long accustomed to random radical bombings, was obliged to take notice.

  The NWLF would become one of the great mysteries of the underground era. At first the FBI assumed that Bill Harris and the SLA were responsible. But NWLF bombs would still be exploding long after Harris and his acolytes were off the streets. They would go on year after year, in fact, mostly in California, until, in time, the NWLF would be credited with planting more bombs than any other underground group, more than twice as many as the Weather Underground. The truth about the group, or at least part of it, would not emerge for years.

  • • •

  Of the bombing groups that rose to public view beginning in 1974, perhaps the most surprising was the resurgent Weather Underground. It had been a long time coming. For Weather, 1972 and 1973 amounted to lost years, during which time they all but disappeared from public consciousness. Looking back today, few Weather alumni can remember much that happened then, in large part because very little did. Between May 1972, when it struck the Pentagon, and March 1974, when it attacked a federal building in San Francisco, Weather staged only two small bombings. By October 1973, when a three-year-old set of indictments against the leadership was dropped in Detroit, the New York Times called the group “dormant.”

  These were the years when the Movement slowed and then died, fracturing into dozens of radical shards. The final blow was the long, slow end of the Vietnam War, symbolized by the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, in January 1973. A few weeks later Weather issued a statement hailing the North Vietnamese “victory,” but it was a short, desultory thing, noticed by few. The fact was, for many in the underground, the end of the war brought a kind of emotional vertigo, a rare moment of celebration followed by the morning-after realization that a dominant focus of their lives had suddenly disappeared. Without the war to protest, and without any sense that their bombings had changed the American condition, Weather had all but stopped doing them.

  “We, like most of the Left, began to evaporate after the Vietnam War began ending,” recalls Paul Bradley. “By ’72 things were settling down. We read a lot, met with people, tried to raise money. There was a lot of talk about the role of armed actions, because we had done a lot of them and nothing had changed. There was a sense we should do something else, but there was no sense what that something else was.”

  For the moment, they did very little. It was during this period, in fact, that a number of Weathermen began taking actual jobs. In Los Angeles Rick Ayers worked as a housepainter and gardener. In San Francisco Bradley found work as a mechanic at a foreign-car dealership. He rode a cable car to work. His bosses adored him, handing him the garage keys, and Bradley returned their loyalty, at one point declining to attend a Weather retreat because he feared losing his job.

  At the highest levels, however, only a handful of cosmetic changes were made. The leadership was rebranded the Central Committee; at one point the group’s name was changed to the strangely corporate-sounding Weather Underground Organization. In May 1973 the New York cell roused itself to bomb a trio of police cars in Queens after a cop killed a ten-year-old black boy named Clifford Glover. Three years earlier Weatherman had been in the headlines on a regular basis. The morning after the Glover bombing the Times couldn’t even get its name straight; its article suggested the group at some point had renamed itself “Weather People.” No one knew; no one particularly cared. Coverage of the year’s second bombing that September was just as dismissive. In protest of the CIA-backed coup in Chile, Weather detonated a bomb on the ninth floor of ITT headquarters in Manhattan, demolishing several empty rooms. Responsibility calls went to the Post and the Times, which seemed skeptical that Weather even still existed.

  “If yesterday’s bombing was indeed done by people connected with the Weatherman [sic],” the Times reported, “it would be one of the few times since the fall of 1970 that the violent splinter of Students for a Democratic Society has been heard from.”

  It was, all in all, a grim period for a group of intellectual firebrands who four years earlier had been public figures, giving interviews to Time and Newsweek. Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, it appears, spent much of it in their Hermosa Beach bungalow, squiring Mona Mellis’s children to old movies and ice cream shops. Jeff Jones and the New York cell remained in their Catskills hideaway. After the dropping of federal indictments, many Weathermen were no longer fugitives; while Dohrn and others were still wanted on state charges linked to the Days of Rage, Bill Ayers and Ron Fliegelman were now free to walk into FBI headquarters without fear of arrest. Dozens of agents were still looking for dozens of Weathermen—still breaking into their families’ homes, in fact—but the only new arrest they made was dumb luck, when Howie Machtinger stumbled into a stakeout outside his brother’s Manhattan apartment in September 1973. He made bail and promptly returned underground, releasing a statement thumbing his nose at the FBI as he did.

  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 entir
e 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.”