Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  BERNARDINE DOHRN (Weather Underground leader)

  For us, the combination of the townhouse explosion and the murder of Fred Hampton was shocking, tragic, and terrible. Of course we knew them very, very well. Both Diana Oughton and Teddy Gold had been on the trip with me to Cuba. Basically what happened was that everybody in the inner circle went underground; we disappeared without any kind of orders, plan, or design.

  BRIAN FLANAGAN

  Teddy Gold was a New York working-class Jew who was very smart. He was short, stubby, wore thick glasses, and had gone to Columbia. He and I did some things. He was a year older than me. He was in a thing called “Teachers for a Democratic Society.” I guess he got a job at the Board of Education teaching somewhere, and he was a professional organizer. I can’t organize breakfast for two. I get angry at the people I’m organizing. I soldier on, but I can’t sit and convince people to agree with my point of view.

  Teddy wrote a song about me, “Lay Elrod Lay.”

  Lay Elrod lay, lay on your back a while.

  Play Elrod play, play with your toes a while.

  You thought that you could stop the Weathermen.

  But people knocked you on your can.

  MARK RUDD

  Ted wasn’t one of my closer friends, but we had been together at Columbia, and he was the vice chairman of the SDS chapter the year before I was the chairman. He was just a wonderful guy. Very smart, very energetic, loved to play playground basketball, and he became a teacher to get a draft deferment. As a teacher, he founded an organization called Teachers for a Democratic Society. His father was a liberal leftist of some sort who was involved in one of the first HMOs. Ted grew up in New York City, on the Upper West Side. He was a very creative, very humane kind of person, but he was caught up in this.

  BILL AYERS (Weather Underground leader)

  We lost Diana, Terry, and Teddy. Teddy was a friend of ours, but I was particularly close to Terry. We’d had our ups and downs, but we were joined at the hip in some ways. Terry thought we were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And Diana was the love of my life at that point—and also the object of a lot of jealousy with Terry. It was a complicated triangle.

  What the townhouse collective was planning to do was unconscionable. Had it happened, it would have been a catastrophe of major proportions. But, it didn’t happen. They killed themselves: That was a tragedy and it shouldn’t have happened. In part, it was what we called this militaristic mistake. They had jacked themselves into thinking, as Terry did explicitly think, that the bigger the mess, the better. Chaos in the mother country—I don’t agree with that.

  It was a horrible mistake. And I’m sorry they went down that track, and I’m sorry I didn’t have the wisdom or the ability to pull back, either. Did we consider it terrorism? We did. And the townhouse collective is the clear example. Did we ever pull off a terrorist act? We never did. So, it’s hard to say.

  BRIAN FLANAGAN

  Diana had been Bill Ayers’s girlfriend, and they founded the Children’s School, which was in the Midwest—it was sort of a new-age daycare center. They were both very much into children’s education. She and Billy both came out of bourgeois backgrounds. His father was chairman of Commonwealth Edison in Chicago. I think her father had even more money than Billy’s father, and she went to the best schools, Madeira and Bryn Mawr. She went to Guatemala for two years with a Quaker group. She was always into making her life one of service to people. She was a wonderful person.

  I think that Terry Robbins was crazy. At Fort Dix, the band at the dance that they wanted to bomb was a black band. It was black musicians getting working-class pay. These poor teenage girls that had big eyes for officers were going to be blown up with the band. The whole thing was just going to go. When you feel that you have right on your side, you can do some horrific things. You can take planes and fly them into buildings, and you can kill a lot of people. And then you become God. It’s unconscionable. There were other things that were going to go on that day, too, that were going to get a lot of people killed. It was going to be this bloodbath. It was like the Days of Rage. What happens the day after the Days of Rage? How do you follow? Nobody has a plan for that. What happens the day after Fort Dix? What happens the day after all this Armageddon?

  The whole organization wasn’t involved in the townhouse. There were various collectives throughout the country. There was one in Denver that wanted to sink an aircraft carrier. There was one in San Francisco and Seattle—there were collectives around the country. Nobody knew what the other collectives were doing, except the national leadership presumably knew most of what was going on, and J.J. had convinced them to let Terry run his show in New York in this collective. I don’t think anybody in Denver knew what was going on in New York. Nobody in New York knew what was going on in Denver. So that’s what it was. It was, “What do we do? Now we’re underground. What do we do now? Well, let’s blow up Fort Dix. Let’s organize street kids in Seattle.” It was different approaches. And that one was wrong. Historically wrong. Things like Moncada*14 and the Easter Rising*15 or the Harpers Ferry raid.*16 They were things that the people who did them knew there was no chance of success. [James] Connolly knew that there was no chance of success with the Easter Rising, but that it would set a tone for the future, that it was a noble effort. It’s very hard to make that claim for any of the things that the early Weathermen did.

  TOM HAYDEN (founder of SDS)

  The townhouse explosion was pretty stunning. I knew everybody who died. I think there are too many people who view it as the end of the sixties, because you can only have so many “ends of the sixties.” There are about ten of them. Altamont was the “end of the sixties.” The end of the sixties was really in 1975 when it came to its natural end. I didn’t think that the townhouse signified the end of the sixties, but I just felt immense sorrow and depression. I had questions of a technical nature, like, “What went wrong?” “What were they doing?” Because for a period of time, the blast was all we knew about, that people had been blasted to oblivion; there were only fingernails left.

  I just thought that they were beyond logic and sense. It confirmed what I feared. Nobody ever came to me and said, “We’re going to kill soldiers.” It was J.J.’s logic which said, “If our government is killing innocent Vietnamese, our job is to kill innocent American soldiers.” I looked at the practical morality. Like, “What the fuck are you doing? You’re carrying out an act which will reflect on everybody in the peace movement. Bring down the FBI and maybe the CIA on us. It has no rationale that can be voiced.” You might as well say that you’re organizing for Satan. It would be the political equivalent. “Hey everybody, stand on street corners, we’re Satan, join us.” Yes, there are some people that you’ll reach, but what the fuck are you doing? It’s only possible that they were doing it because they really didn’t care anymore about influencing American public opinion.

  MARK RUDD

  We decided it was too hot for me in New York, so I went and stayed with some friends of friends and hid out in Philadelphia. Which is actually a very easy place to hide out. I had a disguise, which was very short, dark-dyed hair, and I had grown some facial hair. I had gotten some ID. I hung out in Philadelphia for about three weeks, which was when the thirty-four indictments for the Days of Rage came down against me and sixty-four other Weather members, which made us all officially federal fugitives.

  BILL DYSON

  I was a case agent on the Weather Underground. My job was to run that operation. I wasn’t the original case agent; Bob Glendon was. But when they really became fugitives I ran the case. I was also a bomb technician. I started getting into bomb factories. One of the first bomb factories was the Weathermen bomb factory on Kenmore Street in Chicago. It was discovered by an exterminator on March 30, 1970. It was a rental apartment, and the exterminator was doing extermination work for the whole building. He went into that apartment, and found all of these chemicals and explosives, and called the police department. The pol
ice department called me. The bomb squad went out there, and I’m wandering around this bomb factory, and I really didn’t know very much about it. I mean, there were some dangerous chemicals there, and I’m trying to process them for evidence.

  There were big headlines in the newspaper. It was the Kenmore Street bomb factory. And so I’m wandering around with all these things, and finally, I went to my bosses and I said, “I’m going to get myself killed. I don’t know anything about this.” So ultimately, I learned everything I could about bombs.

  RICK AYERS (Bill Ayers’s brother, GI organizer)

  [My girlfriend] Melody and I were driving across the country in early April, ’70. We were having a regular phone call with the leadership, and they told us about Diana, because it was going to come out in the newspapers. Melody was very close to her, too. I remember she was on the pay phone, and she just bent over like she’d been kicked in the stomach. It was very hard.

  It just meant it was very real. There were some people, like Terry, who you might think, Yeah, that guy might die, because he was a helluva militant and daring guy. But Diana was a real gentle soul. She had gone to Guatemala with the Quakers. I don’t like the way she gets painted sometimes in the media as the innocent who got sucked in by these bad SDS men. She was very militant, and she was definitely committed to the work they were doing there. But she was someone you just wouldn’t picture dying. It’s the price of love. We were young, so it was a big shock for us.

  MARK RUDD

  On April 15, I was meeting Linda Evans, a new Weather Bureau member, at a coffee shop on Twenty-third Street. I was a little early for our 9 A.M. meeting, and I was waiting, and I noticed a bunch of guys in brand-new tie-dye jeans, and I said to myself, “Guys in new tie-dye jeans? I think I’ll get the fuck out of here!” I threw a dollar down and raced out the door, and these guys raced after me. I’m running down Twenty-third Street, and I go down into the subway on the east side of the street, and there was no train. So I went out another exit, and there was a bus. I hopped onto the bus—I had a bunch of coins, I threw them in the collector, and then I looked back and they were right there by the bus, looking around for me, and they were holding walkie-talkies. So I threw myself on the floor of the bus—I guess nobody particularly thought it was that odd. The bus left. And I’m gone. Then I made my way to California.*17

  BILL DYSON

  J. Edgar Hoover was opposed to undercover operations. I was undercover to a certain extent, if you can believe that. I was a terrible undercover agent, in the sense that I could not give my false name, Ralph Floyd, without putting my hand up. I mean, it was just automatic. I guess because I was brought up too honest, and I’m not a good actor. I am what I am. I could do it to a certain extent, but I didn’t feel comfortable. You have to be a good actor, to look somebody right in the eye and lie to them. Most FBI agents, and most police officers, cannot be good undercover agents for any length of time. Anybody can do it for one shot. Anybody can make a drug pickup, or something like that. But if you have to get with these people, it becomes difficult. Hoover was opposed to it, but we did it anyway, especially after Hoover passed on, there were undercover operations.

  The beards were the people who would do surveillance and look like they were undercover. They didn’t look like FBI agents, because they would grow beards. Hoover was very big on how you looked. You had to wear a suit. He liked white shirts, as opposed to colored shirts. He wanted you to wear a fedora. He wanted you to dress respectfully. He wanted you to look, I guess, like a lawyer. But of course, when you’re doing surveillance that becomes a problem. So you dress in smart clothes. Well, when you’re talking about the 1960s where everybody’s got long hair and all that sort of stuff, that don’t work. So we did have the beards. And that name [“beards”] was given just because the agents didn’t look like agents.

  There were undercover FBI agents who were trying to penetrate the Weather Underground. It just didn’t work because it’s not that easy. It wasn’t because the guys didn’t look the role; it wasn’t because they were out of place age-wise. Maybe they were a little bit older than some of the others—you have to be a minimum of twenty-three to join the FBI. But most of the agents were twenty-six or twenty-seven, so it wasn’t as though they were college students. Undercover operations are very, very difficult, especially if you don’t have an entrée. The only thing you can do is start attending meetings, and hope somebody will come up to you, or tap you. Keep in mind that by the time we’re doing this, these people are clandestine. We were trying to cast ourselves out into the local neighborhoods and hope we could find these individuals.

  There was one time, it would have been around 1970, when I was sent to Canada. And that was extraordinary, sending somebody out of the country. It was to try to see if I could find the Weathermen, because I was one of the few people that could recognize them by sight. A lot of these undercover agents had never worked the Weathermen. They didn’t know who they were. So I went up through Seattle, to get into Canada, and I couldn’t find anybody. I knew some of the people were up there, but I just couldn’t find them. I was not a good undercover agent. I was uncomfortable. And I was also nervous. My hair is naturally curly, so when I grew it out I couldn’t have an Afro, because I’m not black, so it was called an Anglo. I had a beard, and it was miserable, because my hair is curly, and it would ingrow, and there’d be blood all over the pillow when I slept at night. It was horrible. I didn’t feel comfortable, and I didn’t succeed.

  BERNARDINE DOHRN

  I said goodbye to my parents, who lived in Florida, who had just turned sixty-five and retired. I didn’t literally say “goodbye,” I just did a visit. But I knew I wasn’t going to see them again, and it was pretty terrible. There was no way to explain it to them. I don’t even know if they’d ever met anybody who was against the war. They wanted me to teach for two years, get married, and have a good life. That wasn’t my plan. But I did go say goodbye to them, and I also went with Jeff Jones down to see his parents in L.A., to say goodbye to them. This was in January, February. We disappeared maybe a week after the townhouse. By then we had dates to show up in Chicago for court appearances [after the Days of Rage indictments]. And so when that happened, the warrants were put out for our arrest in Chicago. I dyed my hair blond, the dream of every girl growing up in the Midwest.

  We had endless meetings. We made a couple of rules at the beginning, which was to recognize the strengths that the police and the FBI had. We almost never used the telephone—never to family members, never to friends or old roommates. We saw the phone as one of their strengths, and our weaknesses. And we saw automobiles as one of their strengths, because there was a national registry system for auto thefts. They were good at that. We agreed that we would not go near old neighborhoods that were political centers. We wouldn’t go to Berkeley; we wouldn’t go to Madison; we wouldn’t go to the parts of every city that were known as centers of youth and students and activism and hippies; we would be very disciplined about those matters. We would try to rebuild our connections to people who went underground. And then of course we spent the next six months having an internal debate about what the meaning of the townhouse was, who we were going to be, and whether we were going to be a military force or a political force.

  CATHY WILKERSON (Flying Close to the Sun)*18

  My picture was on a wanted poster, posted in post offices around the country; I was wanted for murder. The FBI was busy, contacting everyone in my family, I had heard, and putting pressure on those they considered to be weak links.

  TOM HAYDEN

  The bombing as an act of defiance was totally isolated. The revolutionary black movement had fallen apart. There were revolutionaries in prison, but for the most part there was a mass movement of an eclectic sensibility, around ending the war in Vietnam. Earth Day. Feminism. Flower power. And the Weather Underground was in it invisibly. What’s surprising to me was that my premise turned out to be accurate—public opinion can be turned around. But there
was no SDS to lead it. And it didn’t seem to need any leadership. What had happened was after the disintegration of SDS in 1969, the millions of people that identified with SDS just went their own way into other movements. Like the McCarthy campaign, they were in the Earth Day celebrations [April 22, 1970], the back-to-the-land movement, the commune movement in Colorado, in Oregon, in Northern California—it was massive. I don’t know the numbers, but there were thousands of people that went back to the land. And they were interchangeable with the old SDS. They were just another decade’s version. The ecology movement really captured a lot of their energy.

  * * *

  *1 Terry Robbins was twenty-one years old, and a Kenyon College dropout.

  *2 Cathy Wilkerson’s father, James Platt Wilkerson, was a wealthy advertising executive who was on vacation in the Caribbean in March 1970. Cathy, the second of three Wilkerson daughters, grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, attended an all-girls boarding school in Massachusetts, and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1966.

  *3 In February 1970 thirteen members of the Black Panther Party (there were twenty-one defendants originally) sat trial in New York State Supreme Court for conspiring to bomb department stores, police stations, the New York Botanical Garden (located in the Bronx), subway switching stations, and a district school office in Queens. Very little physical evidence of the outlandish alleged crimes was produced by the prosecution, and the trial was viewed by many on the left as a sham aimed at destroying the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party. The seventeen-month trial was the longest and most expensive in New York State history. Although the jury acquitted the Panthers of all 156 charges on May 12, 1971, the New York Panther chapter was crippled by the trial and the two-year-long incarcerations.