Witness to the Revolution
Page 45
It was like being reborn—especially because for us the winter had been so horrible with the assassination of Fred Hampton, and the public’s seeming nonresistance to the escalation in Vietnam. Suddenly this outpouring of resistance began, and we found a lot of hope and energy in the counterculture and in the revived student movement and the growing women’s movement. It was a reminder that when people look like they’re asleep, they’re not always asleep; and a reminder of how hateful the government was. They were willing to shoot their own children. Of course, we now know they were shooting a lot of black children; but shooting white children at Kent State was shocking to white people in America. Kent State was a validation of our antigovernment rhetoric. It proved us right.
RICK AYERS (draft deserter, Weather Underground member)
Kent State made us remember that these are our people. We were not enemies. And it really pushed us back to respecting the mass movement.
MARK RUDD (Weather Underground leader)
(aka Marc William Rudnitsky, Frank Henry Koch, Anthony Goodman)*1
It was the beginning of May of ’70. And the Weather Bureau led us to California, and back to understanding our base. When you become a terrorist, your base becomes very abstracted. You’re out there, and who’s the base? When we were organizers at college campuses, we knew who the base was, and who we were organizing. But then when you become a guerrilla, you’re way out there. I think that if you look at that moment after the townhouse, Bernardine and Billy [Ayers] and Jeff [Jones] led us to believe that we could promote the politicization of the cultural movement. I give them a lot of credit for that.
Some people give the impression that the two worlds—political radicals versus the counterculture—were not connected. But those who were out in California understood how widespread the hippie and the youth movement was. That was our natural base. Those of us on the East Coast didn’t quite get it yet.
I remember arriving in California in really straight clothes that I had used as my disguise in the East, dyed-black short hair, slacks, and a dress shirt. An old comrade, a member of our San Francisco tribe, met me at the bus. He had long hair and was wearing a beaded necklace, bell-bottoms, and a bandana with a peace sign on it. He took me to an apartment in Nob Hill, where I was reunited with Weatherman friends I hadn’t seen since Flint in December. I felt as if I’d come in from the cold.
BERNARDINE DOHRN
(aka Lorraine Ann Jellins, Sharon Louise Naylor, Karen Lois DeBelius, Bernardine Rae Ohrnstein, Rose Bridges)
From my Chicago viewpoint, the counterculture seemed to be all about music and drugs; and I thought it had a lot of the trappings of selfishness. I thought caring about your well-being and peacefulness was an evasion of our responsibilities to hurl ourselves into the catastrophes of our time.
But when we went to California, we went from being working-class, west-side-of-Chicago toughs to trying to get healthy—we were very unhealthy—trying to eat well; trying to live low on the food chain; recognizing that the commune movement was on to something. Growing food, raising animals, and living on very little; acting collaboratively, owning things communally. That kind of lifestyle was a cousin of ours, and we had things to learn.
We soon came to see that there was a huge substratum that was alienated from society and that people were impelled to leave the Midwest and the East Coast to remake themselves, whether it was because they were gay and closeted, or because they were nonconformists in other ways, or because they were evading or deserting the military. We found ourselves thrust in with a lot of American life that was clandestine; people who were using other names for huge varieties of reasons; people who worked outside of the formal economy and were paid for a day’s work.
BILL AYERS (Weather Underground leader)
(aka Michael Joseph Rafferty, Jr., Jules Michael Taylor, Hank Anderson, Joe Brown)
Immediately after the townhouse explosion on March 6, we shifted and we changed back to what we were before that fateful year. Before March 6, there was a sense that you had to craft yourself as a tool of the revolution. And that means twenty-four/seven on duty and making yourself a fighter. We had contempt for everybody else, not just the hippies—but including the hippies. I had never really been to the West Coast. We bought a pickup truck and rolled down the coast to San Francisco and began picking up hitchhikers. Oh, hippie culture was magnificent! We discovered something we had known for a couple of years, which is we shared an anti-establishment instinct with the great youth culture.
It was the first time any of us had relaxed in about a year and a half. We actually breathed the air, stopped smoking, and didn’t take speed. It was kind of an unwinding. After the townhouse, Bernardine and Jeff Jones had the wisdom to see that we had just walked up to a precipice, and that we ought to think hard about what we had done. But you can’t think hard in a pressure cooker, so they slowed us all down.
We were in a house in Mendocino, where we unwound slowly. There were a lot of individual meetings, and a lot of walks on the beach, and a lot of conversation about what we’d lost. And for me, embracing my particular loss. Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Teddy Gold were friends and comrades of all of ours. For them to die in that horrible moment meant that some grieving, decompression, reflection, and debriefing was essential.
BERNARDINE DOHRN
I was definitely arguing that what would have happened, but for the accident in the townhouse, would have been a crime, and would have had terrible consequences for the antiwar movement as a whole and that we couldn’t match the military strength of the greatest military power in human history. But we could match other strengths: We were smarter, more mobile, filled with surprises for them, and stronger than they thought because of the number of people who were disaffected from the American dream—people who were not buying it, dropped out of school having learned what really motivated universities, which was not the citadel of learning, but a cover for military and corporate power.
BILL AYERS
The group in Mendocino was mostly the Weather Bureau, all of us who had written the Weatherman statement, all of us who became the central committee, and some who weren’t on the central committee. It was Bernardine, Jeff, J.J. [John Jacobs], me. There was someone we called Sonia Sanchez, who signed a lot of the communiqués, another guy we called Jimmy, and five or six others who haven’t revealed themselves.
We came out of that determined not to turn back from what we’d gotten ourselves into. That is, we still thought we needed a clandestine network to survive the impending American fascism. We were sure of that. We still felt that we ought to take the war to the war-makers, and we ought to disable B-52s, and we ought to issue a screaming alarm to the American people that the society was going to uncork, and that this war and the attack on the black movement was the uncorking. So, we didn’t pull back from any of that.
What we pulled back from was the speed-fueled, no sleep, make yourself an instrument of war, objectifying of ourselves. And there was a determination to resubjectify ourselves: “You have a mind of your own. You don’t have to think like the rest of us.” There was a lot of reading going on. We were reading Native American authors, like Crazy Horse, by Mari Sandoz—that was hugely important for us. We read revolutionary works, but it was stuff that was more out of the humanistic tradition.
The other piece coming out of the meetings in Mendocino was that a bright line was drawn, and I have to credit Jeff and Bernardine with drawing this line. They said, “We’re not about hurting anybody.” We carried guns in the summer of ’69. We stopped carrying guns. I carried a gun for about nine months—carried it onto airplanes, carried it everywhere I went. Whenever I spoke, I had a gun in the back of my belt. We were walking in uncharted territory.
MARK RUDD
I knew they [the leadership] knew about the townhouse plans, but a certain myth was turned. It’s like organic Stalinism, where you rewrite history because it has to be rewritten that the new leadership has always been right.
We argued to ourselves that we had a role to play from underground, but also that we were wrong to think that that was the highest form of life, and that a mass movement had to be rebuilt, an antiracist mass movement; and certainly by that time there was the women’s movement. We had a role to play from underground that would give us a loud voice, but it had to be a moral voice; and we were not going to take lives, not innocent lives, and not even guilty lives.
BILL AYERS
After March 6 [the townhouse bombing] we had a big struggle about which way to go, and J.J. believed that what they were doing in the townhouse was the right thing, but nobody else went there. We were determined to go forward as an organization, united. And one of the principles was that we would try to not risk people’s lives. J.J. thought we were going on what he called a “revisionist road,” and we were giving up on the revolution, so we expelled him and he went out on his own. J.J. was Mark Rudd’s closest confidant at Columbia, and they were both powerful in our little circle. Mark was torn, but J.J. was his close partner, and so Mark left also. But that was it. That was the limit of what we lost in that struggle.
BRIAN FLANAGAN (Weathermen member)
Basically, J.J. talked the Weather Bureau into giving Terry Robbins free rein to do his thing at Cathy Wilkerson’s father’s townhouse, which is the reason that J.J. was eventually expelled from the organization.
MARK RUDD
(Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen)*2
After a few days, Bernardine announced that JJ would have to leave the organization. He had to go out on his own, she said, to learn about the emerging youth culture and “to get his head straight.” She also confirmed my demotion in the organization: I would be brought into the San Francisco tribe as a cadre in order to reeducate myself about the youth culture. I had been too close to JJ and was completely expelled from leadership.
That night JJ and I went out to a bar in Fort Bragg, a slightly larger working-class town up the coast from Mendocino. We drank and played pool. In the background Creedence Clearwater Revival played on the jukebox….
Hope you got your things together.
Hope you are quite prepared to die.
Looks like we’re in for nasty weather.
One eye is taken for an eye.
JJ agreed he had to leave the group. “I’m accepting my expulsion for the good of the organization,” he told me. “Someone has to take the blame. Bernardine, Billy, and Jeff are right about the military error.”
“But everyone knew what was being planned,” I said. “We were all together in New York with Terry the week before the action, and nobody raised any objections.”
“It doesn’t matter. We have to create the fiction that they were always right so that they can lead the organization,” he replied….
I was sad for JJ, but I also agreed with the criticism of his “militarism.” Plus, I had gotten off easy: At least I wasn’t being cast out.
BILL DYSON (FBI agent)
There were a lot of them—at least a hundred—when they first went underground. Now, problem is we don’t really know what happened. Some of these people like Mark Rudd—all of a sudden, they’re just sort of sloughed off. I think Barry Stein was another one, just sort of sloughed off. All of a sudden they’re underground, and they’re not with the people anymore. I mentioned Caroline Tanner. She went underground, and as far as I know, she never did any bombings or anything. It was like if you really weren’t all that strong for what they wanted, you were gone.
TOM HAYDEN (founder, SDS)
I think they went into utter shock. The reason they disappeared for a time was that they had a soul-searching process. J.J. got blamed for the townhouse bombing. But there’s never a sole figure of blame. He was the scapegoat. On the other hand, there were people who didn’t know what the plan was, and they were legitimately shocked. In the middle were people that sort of knew but didn’t do anything about it. They couldn’t deal with it, or they were in partial denial. So the townhouse bomb blows up a lot of assumptions and a lot of denial and they go into retreat.
This is where Bernardine ascended as the new leader of the Weather Underground. And it’s a kinder, gentler, earth mother, hippie organization, in time. Instead of self-hating for white privilege, they’ve concluded that they actually love the white youth culture. They’ve taken the Weathermen analysis to the limit of white revolutionary youth.
MAY 21, 1970, FIRST WEATHERMEN COMMUNIQUÉ
Hello. This is Bernardine Dohrn.
I’m going to read A DECLARATION OF A STATE OF WAR.
All over the world, people fighting Amerikan imperialism look to Amerika’s youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire.
Black people have been fighting almost alone for years. We’ve known that our job is to lead white kids to armed revolution. We never intended to spend the next five or twenty-five years in jail. Ever since SDS became revolutionary, we’ve been trying to show how it is possible to overcome the frustration and impotence that comes from trying to reform this system. Kids know that the lines are drawn; revolution is touching all of our lives. Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way.*3
MARK RUDD (Underground)*4
It was suitably contradictory, first extolling the mass struggle against U.S. imperialism but then claiming that our task was “to lead white kids into armed revolution,” appropriating the guerilla strategy of the Vietcong and the Tupamaros of Uruguay.
The communiqué confirmed Terry as the third person killed in the townhouse, since his body had been so mangled as to have been questionably identified.
MAY 21, 1970, FIRST WEATHERMEN COMMUNIQUÉ
The twelve Weathermen who were indicted for leading last October’s riots in Chicago have never left the country. Terry [Robbins] is dead, Linda [Evans] was captured by a pig informer, but the rest of us move freely in and out of every city and youth scene in this country. We’re not in hiding, but we’re invisible.
There are several hundred members of the Weatherman underground and some of us face more years in jail than the 50,000 deserters and draft dodgers now in Canada. Already many of them are coming back to join us in the underground or to return to The Man’s army and tear it up from inside along with those who never left.
We fight in many ways. Dope is one of our weapons. The laws against marijuana mean that millions of us are outlaws long before we actually split. Guns and grass are united in the youth underground.
Freaks are revolutionaries and revolutionaries are freaks. If you want to find us, this is where we are. In every tribe, commune, dormitory, farmhouse, barracks, and townhouse where kids are making love, smoking dope and loading guns—fugitives from Amerikan justice are free to go….
Within the next fourteen days we will attack a symbol or institution of Amerikan injustice. This is the way we celebrate the example of Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown and all black revolutionaries who first inspired us by their fight behind enemy lines for the liberation of their people.
MARK RUDD (Underground)*5
Eighteen days later, on June 9, a bomb was set off inside the New York City police headquarters. Due to a phoned-in warning, no one was seriously injured. A statement entitled “The Second Communiqué from the Weatherman Underground” was received by the press the next day.*6
BRIAN FLANAGAN
There’s an old anarchist saying, “propaganda of the deed,” and that’s what we became. We weren’t recruiting any new people, and our bombings became a spectator sport. The police headquarters was great. The Capitol bathroom [bombing] was even better.*7 So what are we going to do? Eventually blow up the Statue of Liberty? I mean, where does this thing go?
A really nice thing about Weather was we could respond. We had the wherewithal and the power and the ability to respond quickly to things that happened. To hit Oswald’s office in Albany aft
er the Attica massacre*8 for example. It felt good to be able to do those things and read about them in the paper the next day. But still, it’s just a symbolic attack. It was symbolic action in response to something that the other side did. The criticism was it turned the revolution into a spectator sport. But it did make you feel good. I loved those bombings. Any time Weather blew up anything, everybody was happy and we’d have a little party.
BILL DYSON
I kept the official list of the number of Weather Underground bombings between 1970 and 1974. It was thirty-eight. Well, it was amazing. And that was part of my story I used to tell classes [of young FBI agents]. I told them that I was a case agent on the Weather Underground. My job was to run that operation. And I said, “Tell me, class, how many of these bombings or attacks do you think I solved?” And somebody would say, “Oh, ten of them, fifteen.” I’d say, “Come on, come on, come on!” Eventually somebody would say, “None.” I said, “You got it!” Then I’d say, “Why are you listening to me? Why would you want to listen to me in this class? I didn’t solve a thing. I was a total failure.” And then I’d go on, and build it from there.