Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  At the front of the house there was a set of steps up to an enclosed porch. So they had put the bottles on the windowsill of the porch. Then they went down the driveway to the garage and shoved one of these things under the gas tank of my parents’ car. So when we came downstairs, that’s what we were seeing. I remember my parents’ immediate reaction was “We’re in a burning house.”

  I remember firemen coming into the house—it was crazy with activity. I have no idea what time it was by now: three, four in the morning. My parents took me to a friend’s apartment across the street to spend the rest of the night. I must have fallen asleep—hard to believe, but I remember getting up the next morning, at my friends the Marcuses’. Their apartment was on the eighth floor. I looked out the window at my house, which was completely surrounded by New York City police. On the old bluestone sidewalk in front of our house, I could see written in red spray paint, “FREE THE PANTHER 21—VIET CONG HAVE WON.”

  GERALD LEFCOURT

  Not only did the Weathermen bomb Judge Murtagh’s house, they also blew up police headquarters [June 10, 1970] and released a statement about the Panther 21. They said it was in retaliation for the assault of Joan Bird. Joan Bird was one of the Panther 21 and when she was arrested, she was beaten mercilessly. They called ahead and said that there was an explosive device and that building should be evacuated. The so-called bomb was on the sidewalk in front of Murtagh’s house. Murtagh’s house wasn’t really bombed. All of these were political statements.

  The Panther 21 were the Weathermen’s leaders in their minds because they were at the forefront. Their lives were on the line, and that’s the way the Weathermen looked at it.

  MARK RUDD

  I remember that after the Murtagh bombing the reaction among Terry’s collective, which was known as the New York collective, was shame that it hadn’t worked. Terry Robbins and his collective had planted a bomb at the home of Judge Murtagh, who was in charge of the Panther 21 case, which was this crazy phony case where all the charges were eventually thrown out. But it was the longest-running trial in New York history at the time. And the bomb had gone off, I think it was a firebomb, and very little damage was done, and that had gotten Terry really upset. “We’ve got to up the ante.” Which actually was true of the whole trajectory of the thing.

  Todd Gitlin*7 pointed out that the media does not recognize organizing. It recognizes events. So just having a demonstration is not enough—if you had a demonstration, then you have another demonstration, it’s not enough to really get the coverage. So you have to up the ante. There always has to be something more. Eventually what happens is the media becomes your base. You’re playing to the media, rather than to the real base, which from ’65 to ’68, for example, was students. They were our base.

  GERALD LEFCOURT

  The trial was New York’s way of destroying the Panthers through the courts. They took the entire leadership of the New York area off the streets. The FBI had no black agents because J. Edgar Hoover was totally racist. He didn’t think blacks could be agents of the FBI, so instead they used informants. The Central Intelligence Agency trained what they call “Red Squads.” In New York, we had the king of all Red Squads. This was a group that was so sophisticated that they had long-term intelligence operatives.

  In the trial, we argued that the police were some of the founding members of the Black Panther Party. For example, Gene Roberts was a key witness in the Panther 21 case. He had been an intelligence operative for four or five years. He was Malcolm X’s bodyguard when he was shot. How’s that for street cred? So when the Panthers were formed, Gene Roberts came along and joined. There was another one named Ralph White. He was the head of a poverty program called the Ellesmere Tenants Council, supposedly organizing tenant strikes for bad housing. He was a cop, and he was also a section leader of the Black Panther Party. Those are just two out of five of them.

  Here’s one shocking example: Jamal Joseph was only sixteen and his grandmother asked him to stop going to the Panther office because she didn’t want him to be in harm’s way. So she told Jamal, “You can’t go there anymore.” But he went back one last time to tell everybody that he wasn’t going to be coming back, and when he went there, Ralph White said, “Let me talk to your grandmother.” So he goes with Jamal to his grandmother and says, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of him.” He took care of him all right. Jamal was in jail as a member of the Panther 21 a few days later and his life became one of serious struggle. And it was all because of a cop.

  JOHN MURTAGH, JR.

  My mother was a schoolteacher; she taught at a Catholic high school over on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx. It’s not there anymore. I went to a private Catholic school down near Yankee Stadium, run by the Christian Brothers. My brother was at Fordham Prep in the Bronx. The routine was, my mother would drive me to school, down on 164th Street in the Bronx, with an unmarked police car following her; drop me off; then they’d follow her across the Bronx and sit in the faculty lounge all day while she taught. Then at the end of the school day she got back in her car, and they followed her back, and she picked me up, and home we went. That was the routine for a year and a half after the bombing.

  I remember one night two or three detectives were sitting in the living room with my parents because they had gotten a call that there was a group from Baltimore coming to shoot up Judge Murtagh’s house. It wasn’t too long after the actual bombing. The cops wanted us to leave, but my parents’ feeling was if we start doing that, we could be going out of here every night. So they increased security at the house for a period. We had a marked police car in the front, a policeman stationed in the back, and undercover cops sitting in an unmarked car, and obviously my father was protected 24/7.

  I can remember looking out the kitchen window, and they had put one of those little police booths in the backyard. So the routine was, you had the cops out front, and then they had this little booth in the back that had a telephone in it, and there was always a guy stationed inside that. These guys were there full-time; and it was usually the same guys, so they used to play stickball on the street with me and my friends, and they would sit and eat their lunch at our little barbecue picnic table in the backyard. I remember noticing one day a cop was sitting at the table eating, and nobody was sitting with him. Even as a kid this was noticeable enough that I said something to my mother, who then explained who Frank Serpico*8 was—because he was sitting in the backyard and no one was talking to him. I have this dim memory of Frank Serpico in the backyard.

  MARK RUDD

  Terry was saying, “We’ve got to up the ante. The bomb at Judge Murtagh’s house didn’t do anything. Now we’ve got to do something.” So, he came up with—or somebody came up with—the idea to plant three antipersonnel bombs, meaning dynamite pipe bombs with nails in them, to go off at a noncommissioned officers’ dance at Fort Dix, in New Jersey. And so they were making those bombs, and had they gone off as they had hoped, they probably would have killed officers—the sergeants, corporals, and their dates, which would have been a disaster for the antiwar movement.

  I went along with Terry’s plan. I didn’t even question it. I was so caught up in the groupthink of the time. It was really a cult. Partially it was a cult because we had engaged in so many faction fights. Faction fights, in the left, are organic, they’re natural, they’re endemic. But when you’re engaged in a faction fight, it’s your group against this other group and that ultimately makes for a cult mentality.

  JOHN MURTAGH, JR.

  There were strange moments, but it became the normal routine. My father adjourned the trial [February 25, 1970], and he made a somewhat famous utterance when he said, “I’ve been called a pig one too many times,” and he basically cleared the court and said, “You’re not coming back. We’re not resuming until I get a formal apology.” And that would have been very much my father.

  I think as an adult now looking back, I somewhat sarcastically would say that my view is that people like Bill Ayers and
Bernardine Dohrn and Cathy Wilkerson were spoiled rich kids. They were extremely naïve. I obviously don’t in any way condone what the Eldridge Cleavers, the Michael Tabors, and the Panthers were doing, but you certainly can sympathize with the injustice that they experienced. But a bunch of rich college kids who played pseudo-Marxist—it’s all really cute until it starts destroying lives.

  CATHY WILKERSON (Flying Close to the Sun)*9

  Teddy Gold*10 came up from the unfinished subbasement, which held only the furnace, other house vitals, and a primitive workbench. Terry had decided that that was the safest place to work on the devices. Teddy said he needed to go to the drugstore to buy some cotton balls and he’d be right back. I nodded and kept ironing.

  A few minutes later, I was bearing down on the wrinkles on the white sheet covering the ironing board when a shock wave shot through the house. A loud rumble followed, growing in intensity. Under the thin burnt orange carpeting, my bare feet felt the old, wood floor vibrating with escalating intensity. The ironing board, too, started to tremble and then tilt as the integrity of the house was compromised somewhere deep below. I began to sink down, my feet still planted on the thin carpet as it stretched and slid across widening, disjointed gaps. I was still standing, still holding the hot iron in my right hand, my arm still obeying the signal my mind had sent fractions of a second before to press down on the crisp, white cotton. A blast reverberated through the house and in place of the ironing board, a mountain of splintered wood and brick rose up all around me. Plaster dust and little bits of debris blew out from everywhere, instantly filling the air. Even as I tried desperately to process what was happening, I noted with resignation that this was one mess I was not going to be able to clean up.

  A sharper, louder explosion then shot out from the subbasement, and as I dropped two or three feet more, I wondered if I would continue to fall down into the subbasement. I needed to put the iron down to free up my hand, but there were no surfaces anymore, just a noisy, moving, three-dimensional swirl of disintegrating house giving way to the shuddering blast waves of force that had passed through it. For a fraction of a second I worried that, with all the splinters of wood and debris flying around, the hot iron might start a fire. As the muffled noise from the second explosion persisted, I knew it didn’t matter. Besides, I couldn’t see anything; the light was gone, unable to penetrate the thick cloud of dust that now filled every space and crevice which crowded into my eyes, forcing them shut….

  In the same moment, the idea that Terry [Robbins] and Diana*11 [Oughton] were both in the subbasement overwhelmed everything else. As I forced my attention there and to them, my lungs expanded instantaneously to draw in air and dust so I could call out. As I blinked in their direction to see if maybe—I saw the glow, like an engorged sun rising up from a huge gaping hole between me and the front of the house. That lungful of dust emerged as an anguished cry, as if that was the only way to connect in the last second with the spirits as they drifted upward into some limbo that hangs around after the body is gone but before absolute death. I cried out, “Adam,” Terry’s nom de guerre, and scrambled to the edge of the crater, only to be blinded now by the brightness. Then, I heard the flames take up the silence left by the blast.

  By then I was in the middle of the house, and Kathy Boudin,*12 who had been taking a shower, heard my voice and cried out for help. She had to be nearby, I thought, because the bathroom where she was showering was also in the middle of the house. I called to her, “Are you okay?” I knew that in ten or fifteen seconds we would no longer be able to get out. “I can’t see,” she said, and I knew it was because of the dust. I moved left along the edge of the crater through the gritty haze toward her voice until I could grab her hand. For a fraction of a second I thought to turn toward the front door, until I realized the absurdity of looking for a door when there was no longer any distinction between floor and ceiling or space in between. Instead, we headed toward an opening where, dimly, it looked like daylight was trying to fight its way into the dust. I groped blindly, with each bare foot seeking something solid enough to hold my weight for at least a second or two.

  The first sound of the fire sucking air in from all directions grew louder behind us, reaching out to us. As we stumbled out of the opening in the front, it was only feet behind us. I was barely able to notice another explosion as I concentrated on climbing, still holding on to Kathy and both of us barefoot, out through the hole and over more debris onto the sidewalk. Helping hands reached out to us. Kathy was in shock. Someone wrapped a coat around her, even as she protested, as she was still wet and naked from the shower. Someone else directed us down the street. “Is there anyone else in there that we should go in for?” “No,” I said, “there is no one now.” Teddy had left the house, I thought, and I knew that Terry and Diana were gone. I was overwhelmed with grief. But I knew that I was not prepared to answer anyone’s questions about what had happened, not then. “Was it a gas explosion?” someone asked. “Yes,” I said. “It must have been.” I could not think about anything but getting away to let the grief take over.

  Susan Wagner [Henry Fonda’s ex-wife], a longtime resident of the block, offered us her home, and we followed her to another set of brownstone stairs leading up to her front door. We were covered with dust and must have tracked the dirt in with us onto the light-colored carpet as we climbed another set of stairs to a second floor bedroom with an attached bath. She showed us the shower and hurriedly pulled out some of her own clothes, which she left on the bed for us. She left us in the care of a middle-aged black woman working as her maid, while she returned to the burning house to watch in fascinated horror.

  I knew that in only a few minutes, when the police arrived and ascertained that we were down the block, they would come to question us. They would know fairly quickly that this was not a freak gas explosion. We showered as quickly as possible to get the worst of the grime off, before diving, still only half-dry, into our hostess’s clothes….My first thought was to get money for a subway token so we could get out of the neighborhood as fast as possible….[With one subway token in hand] we walked [out of the building] as fast as we could without attracting attention, despite the pink patent-leather boots now on my feet, but by then, all eyes looked past us as people rushed toward the fire streaming out of the front of the building behind us….A block away, we scrambled down the stairs into the subway…the two of us went through the turnstile together….A minute later the train came and we were truly underground.

  Credit 16.2

  The house of Judge John Murtagh, who presided over the Panther 21 trial, was firebombed by the Weathermen the night of February 21, 1970. The bomb didn’t cause any injuries, and the Weathermen spray-painted a declaration on the sidewalk: “FREE THE PANTHER 21-VIET CONG HAVE WON.”

  JANE FONDA (actor, peace activist)

  Oddly enough, Susan Wagner, my ex-stepmother—who had come to Paris, and introduced me to the [American deserter] soldiers—had an apartment in Greenwich Village that was next door to the townhouse where the bomb went off in the basement. Two of the Weather Underground girls fled to Susan’s apartment. Susan loaned them some clothes. Dustin Hoffman and his wife, Anne Byrne, also lived on that block.*13

  Credit 16.3

  On March 6, 1970, three members of the Weathermen, Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Ted Gold, were killed when a bomb they were making in the basement of a Greenwich Village townhouse accidentally exploded. The house was owned by Weatherman Cathy Wilkerson’s father. Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin were also in the house during the explosion, but they survived the blast and ran away.

  MARK RUDD

  I had spent most of March 6 in New Jersey, visiting some people I knew there and establishing an alibi in case anything went wrong with the Fort Dix action. Then I came back, and to keep my alibi going I met my old friend from the Columbia Daily Spectator, Robert Friedman, and we went to see Zabriskie Point, Michelangelo Antonioni’s latest movie. At the end of Zabriskie Point they blow up an u
pper-class modern house, out in the desert, and all this crap goes up in the air, slow-mo, and then it falls to the ground. It was symbolic of the end of this culture.

  We saw Zabriskie Point together, and then I went back to the apartment that we had on Henry Street, on the Lower East Side, and other people in the collective said, “Mark, where have you been? Have you heard about the explosion?” There was a copy of The New York Times from the next day, and on the front was a picture of the townhouse, and that’s how I heard about it. We had no cellphones in those days. Nobody could get in touch with me. I just felt that I had to do something. I didn’t know what had happened at that point. But I had a backup arrangement with Kathy Boudin, and I managed to get in touch with her, and I immediately went to where she was, it was at somebody’s apartment.

  I heard the whole story. And then I set about finding the survivors, and bringing them back together again, and finding a safe place for them to stay. I was in shock, but I just kept going. At that point, I had convinced myself I was a soldier in a war, and when you’re a soldier in a war, you do things and you don’t even stop and think about them at the moment.

  BRIAN FLANAGAN

  I was in New York City when the townhouse exploded. Yeah, can’t get too deep into that period. Immediately after that, I wound up in California. So, I was in the Weather Underground in California.