Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  Credit 7.1

  Leaders of the Weathermen—(left to right) Jim Mellen, Peter Clapp, John Jacobs, Bill Ayers (wearing glasses), and Terry Robbins (1946–1970)—march at the front of a group of demonstrators on October 11, 1969, during the Days of Rage action in Chicago, where they attacked the police and were beaten and shot at with live bullets.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY DAYID FENTON.

  The Days of Rage were really an anarchist act, not a political act. The whole thing was emotional. That’s the main thing I would say about the Weather Underground. It was a huge emotional explosion.

  BRIAN FLANAGAN

  On the morning of October 11, we had no sleep the night before and J.J. [John Jacobs] is standing on the Haymarket statue that we’d just blown up.*3 He’s wearing a red football helmet and a black leather jacket and he gives a speech to a group of us and says, “We’ll probably lose people today. We don’t really have to win here…just the fact that we are willing to fight the police is a political victory.” When I heard that, I thought, Oh my God, I really don’t want to die. I have a lot of things I want to do with my life. It was about ten days before my birthday. I had my twenty-third birthday in jail.

  So we are marching along, and I’m not wearing a helmet. The only real piece of equipment I’m wearing is my boxing cup underneath my pants, because I don’t feel like getting hit in the balls. I boxed while I was at Columbia from ’64 to ’69 in the New York Golden Gloves and AAUs. I was a light heavyweight. So I was not afraid to fight, let’s put it that way. I knew how to fight better than other people.

  As we’re marching down the street, people are chanting and screaming and we’re headed towards point zero, which is State and Madison streets, which is basically the Times Square of Chicago. And then somebody smashes a cop through a plate glass window, and then the thing was really on. People pull out their pipes and chains. We were battling the cops. It’s just total mayhem in the streets. I didn’t have a weapon. I didn’t know what to do with a pipe. I was good with my fists. I was a street fighter, so I wound up getting into a fight. A cop jumped this girl who was next to me. And I got him, and I slugged him, and I kicked this other guy. Then I got one guy—the guy who was on the right side, I hit this guy harder than I ever hit any human being. It was an absolute perfect clock. And he went down. I can’t believe this guy ever got up after that, but within the next ten minutes, he wound up with the other guy I’d been fighting, chasing me down the street. So there’s a posse of uniform and plainclothes cops chasing me, screaming, “Get him, get him!”

  So I take off and I’m faster than any of them, and I’m going east on Madison, towards State. I’m thinking, what in the hell was I going to do to get away from these guys and save my ass?

  Now at that point, Richard Elrod was across the street talking to a reporter, and people are screaming “Get him,” and I see this suit come running across the street at me. I’m thinking, I’ve got to get up on the sidewalk to get away from this guy. He takes a flying tackle block at me, hits me, and knocks me sideways through an opening that leads to two short flights of stairs. I don’t know what happened to him after he hit me. I never touched him again. I’m knocked through the doorway and almost tumble down the stairs. So I right myself and as I try to come back up the stairs, in come about four cops and they throw me down the stairs.

  They were all beating on me, and they’re swinging at me, one guy’s going boom, boom, into my cup. He’s trying to ram me in the balls, but I’ve got the cup, so it’s not hurting me, but he really wants to rip my balls off. So they’re swinging and hitting me. I’m trying to protect my head. So now, the beating’s over, they’re tending to their friend, they throw me out on the sidewalk, and here is Elrod, lying on the sidewalk saying, “I can’t feel my legs, I can’t feel my hands.”

  Now I’m thinking, Maybe I should run, and split, but I made one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life. I said, This is it. I did what I could, we made our statement, I’m going to jail like everybody else. I quit. So they threw me into the paddy wagon and took me into a holding cell with all my Weather people. About a hundred of us were arrested. I later found out that Elrod’s neck was broken and he was partially paralyzed, and that he was a lawyer for the corporation counsel for the city of Chicago and a protégé of Mayor Daley.

  Waking up in jail the next day, my head was so sore, oh my God. Soft spots and everything. I think I still have some of them. At a hearing I had five charges against me for attempted murder, aggravated battery, felonious mob action, and resisting arrest, and my bail was set for one hundred thousand dollars. SDS had a quarter-of-a-million-dollar bail fund, and I used up a whole lot of it.

  BERNARDINE DOHRN

  Almost everybody was arrested by the second or third day. I was arrested at the women’s demonstration. Right away, before we took a step, right after speaking. So I spent the next three or four days in Cook County Jail. By that time we had three or four hundred in Cook County Jail. I remember we were doing karate on the floors of the jail. I was brought down to meet the warden of the jail. He was a very large, African American, bald man, a very intimidating physical presence. He basically said, “You’re in my jail. I run this building. And you will do what I say while you’re in this building.” I said that we didn’t ask to be here, and we weren’t breaking the law in his building. Having political discussions, and exercising, and having our meetings was not a violation of his law.

  SDS NEW LEFT NOTES, OCTOBER 1969

  (after the Days of Rage)

  We did what we set out to do, and in the process turned a corner. FROM HERE ON IN IT’S ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER—WITH WHITE YOUTH JOINING IN THE FIGHT AND TAKING THE NECESSARY RISKS. PIG AMERIKA—BEWARE: THERE’S AN ARMY GROWING RIGHT IN YOUR GUTS, AND IT’S GOING TO HELP BRING YOU DOWN.*4

  MARK RUDD

  We made a decision to go underground toward the latter part of 1969, after the Days of Rage, which was a failure. But like a lot of failures, there’s always the tendency to double down. Days of Rage didn’t work out. People didn’t come. So we said, well, we’ve got to get even more serious about it. So, intellectually, I was still committed to that course, but somehow in my deepest gut I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t strong enough; I wasn’t the revolutionary fighter that I was posing as.

  It took a long time for me to first understand that our strategy was wrong. It was doomed to failure. I was loyal to my friends. However, very early on, even before we went underground, I realized that I could not be the revolutionary hero that I needed to be. I couldn’t pose as being a revolutionary hero anymore, because I was just this kid from New Jersey. I didn’t know anything. I wasn’t particularly brave, and I didn’t particularly want to die. I saw it as my own failure.

  I believe that results are what counts, and had we not been so enamored of our own heroic morality, we might have been able to judge the fact that our theories were not working. For example, nobody came to the Days of Rage. But we were deeply involved in our rightness.

  FBI REPORT

  As reported by the Statistical Section of the Records and Identification Division of the Chicago Police Department, 287 arrests occurred for various charges of mob action, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, aggravated battery and other offenses during the Weatherman “Days of Rage” mob activity October 8 through 11, 1969. During this period 59 police officers sustained personal injury including abrasions, contusions, cuts and bruises on the arms, legs, groins, body and head; human bites on the arms and hands, loose teeth and injury to eyes and ears….*5

  DAVID HARRIS (draft resistance organizer)

  By 1969, suddenly the most visible part of the movement was the Weathermen. Who are these people? They haven’t done shit. They’re spouting this stuff, “Oh, we tried nonviolence.” Oh, did you? Where was that, in your three months at Bryn Mawr? Is that what you did? First they were a bunch of white kids trying to pretend they were like black people. They had this bullshit revolution they were talking about. What did t
hey do? They blew up a urinal in the Capitol Building [in 1971]. There’s the Weathermen for you. They talked a lot of talk and got a lot of ink, and they didn’t deserve any of it. They didn’t do any work and they hadn’t been in the movement long enough to be given any kind of stature like that. They were rich kids playing out fantasies. Today we call it a virtual revolution. It’s like this big pretend game.

  So needless to say, I didn’t like these guys. Didn’t like what they stood for. Our ethos was we never called anybody pigs. We’re trying to get the cops to come over to our side. I went to high school with the cops. As soon as the movement got into a place where it started saying, “You’re either with us or against us,” the movement died. What worked for us was that we always were open and inclusive. We always took new people in, and we recognized that everybody started out on the wrong side. All of us had gone through a transformation to get to where we were. Our movement would thrive because everybody was going to go through that transformation, and we had to empower that transformation, which means we had to embrace whoever was out there. And that included the police.

  MARK RUDD

  The Weather made a fundamental mistake in forgetting about base-level organizing, which is relationship building, coalition building, all the things that built the antiwar movement up to that time, had built the civil rights movement, had built the labor movement. That’s all we did, up until ’68. But then we made such a big leap, and got so much press, and publicity. It went to our heads. Our actions, our guts, our courage, holding buildings at Columbia, we identified that as being what built the movement. Also, that dovetailed with Che Guevara’s theories of taking action. Which if we had looked at it objectively and dispassionately, all of Che Guevara’s theories were proven wrong by ’67. Everything he tried had turned to shit. He died behind these theories, but we weren’t willing to reject them, because we knew they were right. We were so arrogant.

  DAVID HARRIS

  What had been a movement of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience and community organizing freaked out in 1969. We had been the New Left, which meant we had values and were looking for new ways to express them. Everything started in ’68 and reached fruition in ’69, all this neo-Marxist bullshit. I am not a Marxist. I’ve never been a Marxist, and I have no interest in being a Marxist. So there was this dynamic in the movement over the years of everybody trying to be more radical than six months ago. That eventually played itself out into all these white kids pretending they were Black Panthers, and Black Panthers pretending they were third-world revolutionaries. And all of it was bullshit. When I was on the streets organizing, I would often get heckled by SDS members. There were a bunch of Marxist assholes in SDS in Los Angeles, and they’d come out and literally heckle us.

  They were threatened, because we were saying to them, “Where’s your draft card, sucker? Oh, you’re the big revolutionary, but you can’t put your ass where you want everybody else to put theirs, can you?” That was the issue. They derided us as martyrs. We weren’t revolutionaries. “Oh, you guys are all middle class,” they would say, and I’d say, “Well, what the fuck are you, man? You’re a goddamn college student. Of course you’re middle class. We’re here to organize the middle class, don’t you get it? We’re not here to pretend that we’re something we’re not.”

  MARK RUDD

  It was a macho dead end; it played into the hands of the government very well. We destroyed SDS at the height of the war. Don’t you think that’s what the FBI wanted us to do? Maybe I was a paid informer. I mean, I could have been, except I know I wasn’t. And I know that none of us were. We just did it because of our own arrogance. That’s why I have a bumper sticker on my car that says, “Don’t Believe Everything You Think.”

  We gave Nixon the ammunition to use against the entire movement. Our arrogance undermined the entire antiwar movement.

  * * *

  *1 In April 1969, more than three hundred students occupied Harvard’s main administration building, University Hall, for fourteen hours until they were forcibly removed and severely beaten by a hundred Cambridge police officers. Students then rioted in Harvard Square, fighting police, burning three police cars, and trashing stores. More than three hundred arrests were made.

  *2 I interviewed Bill Dyson at his home in Florida on January 20, 2014, but this last paragraph is taken from Dyson’s FBI oral history interview, January 15, 2008.

  *3 Four days before the Days of Rage, on October 6, 1969, the Weathermen bombed a monument in Chicago’s Haymarket Square that was a memorial to the seven police officers killed in 1886 by anarchists (who were later hanged) and workers who were on strike demanding an eight-hour workday.

  *4 Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS, p. 613.

  *5 FBI Weather Underground summary dated August 20, 1976.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE CHICAGO EIGHT

  (September–November 1969)

  For us as a generation the courtroom and jails may be becoming more important than the universities.

  —JERRY RUBIN, We Are Everywhere

  For three days during the Democratic National Convention in August 1968, the nation watched as the Chicago police and antiwar protesters clashed in a series of violent riots. “The whole world is watching” became the protesters’ refrain as they were bludgeoned by Mayor Richard Daley’s policemen’s nightsticks. The whole world continued to watch a year and a half later as eight movement leaders were charged with conspiring to use interstate commerce to “incite, organize, promote and encourage” riots at the Democratic convention.

  The Chicago Eight (later Seven) conspiracy trial (United States v. Dellinger et al.) opened on September 28, 1969. Seventy-three-year-old judge Julius Hoffman presided for five months over what was called “the political trial of the century.” Developments in the Chicago courtroom captivated the nation and became a mainstay on the evening television news. William Kunstler, the lead defense attorney, pursued a strategy of putting the Vietnam War on trial and wore a black armband to court to commemorate the war dead. The defendants mocked the premise of the trial by turning the courtroom into a stage for their ribald, countercultural antics, and Judge Hoffman played the conservative, angry lead like someone right out of central casting. The division between the government and the defendants soon came to symbolize the nationwide cultural and political split.

  GERALD LEFCOURT (Abbie Hoffman’s lawyer)

  The case was called The United States v. Dellinger because Dave Dellinger*1 was supposedly the architect of the conspiracy. The government picked out leaders from various parts of the antiwar and civil rights movement. I guess they were a conspiracy in what they believed. They were trying to stop the war and end racism and poverty.

  I remember the arraignment day [April 9, 1969]. The first day we all had to go to Chicago. The defendants barely knew each other. We’re all in a room, lawyers and defendants. Bobby Seale was asking lawyers for cards and he asked Dave Dellinger for his card thinking he was one of the lawyers instead of being his codefendant. Some conspiracy.

  Bobby Seale’s lawyer was Charles R. Garry. Garry needed a gallbladder operation. He was seeking adjournment for a month or two and Judge Hoffman refused. So Bobby showed up for trial in September without a lawyer.

  STEVE WASSERMAN (Berkeley student activist)

  The Chicago Eight trial was significant because the eight people charged embodied and represented the rest of us. Bobby Seale, the cofounder of the Black Panther Party, was a proud, defiant, unbowed, and enormously articulate black American; Tom Hayden with his Catholic midwestern roots was an organizer extraordinaire and something of a theorist of radical change; Rennie Davis was an activist of striking intensity of purpose and plainspoken common sense; David Dellinger, the oldest of the defendants, a graduate of Yale who had gone to prison as a pacifist during the Second World War, was a stalwart elder statesman of dissent; Lee Weiner and John Froines, among the least known of the eight defendants, seemed to be ordinary citizens, like so many other Ameri
cans, whose activism had been spurred by deepening outrage over the continuing horror that was the Vietnam War; and rounding out the group were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, gifted rapscallions who had their fingers on the pulse of the counterculture—a counterculture dubbed Woodstock Nation.

  Credit 8.1

  The Chicago Eight defendants—(top, left to right) Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, (bottom, left to right) Bobby Seale, Lee Weiner, John Froines, and Dave Dellinger—were charged with conspiracy and inciting a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

  Whoever you were you could see a reflection of yourself in one or another of the defendants—unless, of course, you were a woman, since there weren’t any in this case. Still, the defendants appeared to be a more pronounced, edgier, more daring version of oneself. It wasn’t only they who were on trial. It felt as if our whole generation had been indicted. Even if you had only gone to a single protest, you could easily imagine yourself as, say, John Froines, a graduate student essentially minding his own business but roused to action by what the government was doing in his name. You didn’t have to be in the upper echelons of the movement’s leadership to feel that you too were under attack, that your fate was bound up with theirs.