Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

(May–September 1970)

  In the illumination of that bomb [in Madison, Wisconsin] the movement knew sin….The revolutionary mood had been fueled by the blindingly bright illusion that human history was beginning afresh because a graced generation had willed it so. Now there wasn’t enough life left to mobilize against all the death raining down.

  —TODD GITLIN,

  The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage

  Anger over the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State and Jackson State shootings reverberated throughout the country. The University of Wisconsin–Madison was famous for its violent activists and aggressive police force. In May 1970, eighty-four Wisconsin students were arrested after conducting twenty firebombings, and Governor Warren Knowles deployed 2,100 National Guardsmen to quell the campus revolt. But by late August, campus unrest turned into something more deadly.

  KARL ARMSTRONG

  (former University of Wisconsin–Madison student)

  My brother Dwight and I were watching television together in the student union and there was a special announcement about the shootings at Kent State. All of the students stopped and watched. It was really crowded in the union and we were all just aghast. My overwhelming feeling was, Now they’re killing us. It had come to killing us to stop the protests. I turned around to Dwight and all I said to him was “Army Math.” And that’s what we resolved to bomb.

  I was back and forth between Minneapolis and Madison, maybe three times after the Kent State shootings. In Minneapolis there were about two hundred thousand people out on the street marching, in a candlelight vigil. The diversity of the people protesting impressed me; maybe a quarter of the people in the march were students, and the rest were people from the community, all ages. People were just outraged.

  When I came back to Madison, it was like a war zone. All of the windows on State Street were boarded up. There was so much rioting after Kent State that a hush fell over the campus, and people were super-paranoid. I felt really sad. What I saw in Minneapolis was inspiring, and what I saw in Madison wasn’t. And yet I knew the people marching in Minneapolis didn’t really get it. I knew these protests were going to come to naught.

  I saw the movement against the war as a nascent revolutionary movement, mainly because stopping the war in a militant way basically took on the power structure. And I believed that if we were successful at stopping the war, it would just spread to all the other issues: blacks in America, women, gays, the environment. The war was the overarching glue between the different movements because our people were getting killed. The main issue, as far as I was concerned, was class. I saw myself as fighting for my class against the ruling class. I felt that my class was the cannon fodder for Vietnam.

  PAUL SOGLIN (University of Wisconsin student activist)

  In 1969–70, Jim Rowen was writing in the student newspaper, The Daily Cardinal, about the connections between the university and General Electric, and what was going on at the Army Math Research Center. I had also written a number of pieces about the connections between the university and chemical and biological warfare. The Department of Defense published technical abstracts on a monthly basis. They were books that detailed Defense Department contracts with universities and private companies. In those days you could just walk into the Engineering campus and get them, like any other reference book. So I was able to get that stuff on CBW [chemical and biological weapons].

  We were doing research on antidotes. The university’s response was “We’re doing good research.” But the reason you do research on antidotes is so that you can use CBW on your enemy without a threat to your own people. You have to have antidotes to safely handle it yourself. At one point, I went back up to the Engineering Department and all the technical abstracts were locked up; you couldn’t get to them anymore. The FBI had been there.

  You have to understand that in those days, when the Cardinal was breaking those stories, it was getting national news coverage because nobody was making the connections we were making between the university, the money, and the military. It’s hard to believe that on a campus like this you had a building that said, “No students allowed.”

  What happened was that in May of 1970, we got the disclosure about the invasion of Cambodia, the expansion of the war, and the revelation that we weren’t crackpots; that everything we were saying about the secret expansion of the war into Cambodia was true, and all hell broke loose.

  TOM MCCARTHY (Madison, Wisconsin, police officer)

  Everyone on the Madison police force celebrated after we heard about the Kent State shootings. During the riots that followed, I would taunt the kids by putting up four fingers with one hand and make a zero with the other, like a score keeper: Kent students zero, Army four.

  It’s almost impossible to describe how bad it was in Madison in those days. The riots would go from eight o’clock in the morning to four o’clock the next morning. We hated everybody. One night we were ready to go home and we were going to call it a night. We’d been battling these guys all night; helicopters were flying over where the mall is now, with spotlights. We pulled up to a barricade on Mifflin Street and when we pulled up onto the sidewalk to go around it, some guys jumped off a porch, with baseball bats with spikes driven through them, and took out our tires.

  KARL ARMSTRONG

  The Army Math building was a military facility, located on campus. This was not right. It had no place in the university. And even if it hadn’t been located on a university campus, it would have been a target. But the fact that there were demonstrations, and that the university was well aware of what this institution was all about, gave them the moral responsibility.

  We started doing some surveillance of Army Math, walking around and so forth. Army Math was only about two or three floors in a wing of Sterling Hall, which housed the astronomy and physics departments. I had in mind that when we bombed Army Math, all I wanted left was a pit in the ground. Just because I thought that would send a great message to the government, to see one of their facilities burned to a pit in the ground. A crater.

  So we hatched a plan. We read the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I believe it was under “Explosives.” They made it really handy for me. That was the obvious place to look. If the Encyclopaedia Britannica didn’t have it, it couldn’t be done.

  We rented a trailer and stole three barrels—fifty-five-gallon drums—from a service station. Then we ripped off a van outside the computer science building. We went to a farmers’ co-op near Baraboo, asked them to scoop a couple thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate into these barrels—I think by weight it was 5 percent fuel oil in the barrels—and we hoisted the barrels into the van. We might have used a stick of dynamite for each barrel just for detonation.

  We spent a little over a week surveying the building. We would note traffic, people walking around, when the security guard was going in and out of the building. We decided that Monday morning, August 24, sometime between three and four in the morning, was the optimum time for doing the bombing, because there wasn’t any car or foot traffic, and it was after the security guard left the building. At about 3 A.M. we drove off.

  It was a beautiful summer night—very, very quiet. David Fine was out in front of the building, surveying, and he was supposed to come back when the coast was clear, when the security guards were gone. He came back and said everything was ready to go. But unfortunately, his lookout was stationed in the wrong place, because he never checked down the alley. He was out in front, in the bushes by the chemistry building, watching from there. He had a view of the front of Sterling Hall, but if he had just gone down the alley, he would have seen that there were lights on in the building and we probably would have scotched the whole operation.

  So, I drive up to Army Math, turn the corner into the alley, and see that there are lights on in the fourth floor and in a basement room. I said, “Oh shit,” and just kept driving up the steep ramp. So now we’re kind of half-committed. To get the van out of there we’d have to back it out, which was doa
ble, but just psychologically, it was like, we were there. So I got out of the vehicle and checked the basement room. If I spotted anyone, I was going to break the window and warn them that we were ready to blow up the building. I walked up and down the length of the room twice, looking in the windows, making sure I didn’t miss anything. There was no one in the room, so it was my conclusion that somebody had just left the lights on.

  The fourth-floor windows were also lit up. I thought, Well, we didn’t find anybody in the room down here, right? David didn’t see anybody walk in or out of the building. It caught us totally by surprise, because we figured David would have told us about these lights on in the building. And so, my assumption was that if the janitor left the lights on down here, he could very well have left the lights on up above. But we knew that there was a chance that there might be somebody in there. That’s when I turned to my confederates, who were looking at me, and I made some comment like, “The building needs to be bombed. This is basically the only time we are going to be able to do it. We’ve taken all the precautions that we possibly could. It’s probably not going to be any better any other time.”

  Basically they left it up to me to decide what to do. I said, “Light the fuse.” So we lit the fuse, locked the van door, and walked about fifty yards, where David could see us from a phone. He made the call to the Madison police and said something like, “Listen pigs, listen good. We have bombed the Army Math Research Center.” So he made that call, and we all got back to the car at the same time and drove off. When we were two blocks away, the bomb went off.

  JACK CIPPERLY (University of Wisconsin assistant dean)

  The night the bomb went off, my asthma kept me up. I was awake and I heard the explosion. We lived about four miles from the campus. Kate said, “Oh, it’s thunder.” I said, “Boy, that sounds like it’s a 155[mm] howitzer.” So I jumped in the car and went right down to the campus; it was deathly quiet. There was computer paper in all the trees. There was broken glass in all the buildings. I went up to the edge of Sterling Hall and there were four black things like this on the ground, and they were flat. I knew many of the police officers there, and I asked one I knew, “What are those things down there?” It looked like the building was under construction, because it was so torn up. And he said, “Those are tires from a van.” In other words, the explosion was so powerful that it flattened out the tires.

  KARL ARMSTRONG

  As the bomb went off, it lifted up our car, and we could hear the panes of glass falling out of storefront windows all the way down University Avenue—one after another, falling out of the windows. Apparently it blew out like three or four blocks’ worth of store windows. At the very same moment, when the bomb went off, my first reaction was, “Oh shit.” I knew that it had gone off two minutes before it should have, which wasn’t really enough time for people to get out. I just had this feeling that something bad had happened.

  We headed further south, about another mile and a half from there, and Dwight said, “Look. You’ve got to see this.” I was in no mood to see anything, but everyone got out of the car and looked back: There was a mushroom cloud of burning debris, which was probably like four or five hundred feet high above the building, just glowing red.

  JACK CIPPERLY

  My neighbor was a firefighter at that time. They had to go into Sterling Hall, which was full of water. They looked down and there was a door, and inside, behind the door, was a body. They had to get the Jaws of Life and they saved that guy; he got out and lived. Everybody was so stunned that they came by and just looked. It was very quiet.

  PAUL SOGLIN

  I was in bed, and I felt the explosion. I picked up the phone, called the dispatcher at the Fire Department, and said, “What was that?” The dispatcher said, “The Army Math Research Center.” I slipped on my jeans and drove over to University Avenue. There were one or two fire trucks and about eight people there; I was one of the first people to arrive. There weren’t more than half a dozen civilians. I walked around, but I didn’t walk into the area. I didn’t want to be seen there. So I stayed on University Avenue, looking at the debris that had come into the street from over the chemistry building. Within a matter of minutes there were hundreds of people there. Everybody was so preoccupied with the building that I got into my car and I left. I didn’t want to be seen there; I didn’t want to be photographed. I knew I was going to have to answer one way or another for this, and if I was there that early, someone might try to link me to it. I drove back home.

  PHIL BALL (University of Wisconsin student, Vietnam vet)

  I walked down Langdon Street, still not knowing the bomb had gone off. It was seven thirty in the morning, and I didn’t know. I got to the corner and I noticed something funny; something was in the air. I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then I recognized the smell: It was the dust, the particulate matter in the air. There was so much of it. I walked down University Avenue, and there was chaos.

  The building was a smoldering mass that stood still in form. The outline of the building was still discernible. All the windows were blown out. There was rubble everywhere. Most of the trees were gone: nothing left but a couple of stubs. I looked across the street: Windows were blown out of the church. Everything that faced Army Math was damaged, but not caved in. The inside of the chemistry and pharmacy building, which was on the corner of Charter and University, right next to Army Math, was gutted.*1

  Credit 24.1

  Karl and Dwight Armstrong, Leo Burt, and David Fine bombed the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Sterling Hall, also known as the Army Math building, on August 24, 1970, killing a graduate student by mistake. It was considered the worst act of domestic terrorism until the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

  KARL ARMSTRONG

  We continued driving south around the city, with the radio on. The first report was that there was a bombing, but they said there didn’t appear to be any injuries. So we stopped at this truck stop to celebrate with a glass of Coca-Cola—a quiet celebration to congratulate each other. I was so relieved when I heard that on the radio. It was just weighing on me.

  We were driving through Waunakee when another report came over the radio. They’re pulling a body out of the building. Everybody just groaned. And I remember that David Fine was in the backseat crying. It was everything we could do to just keep control of ourselves. That went on for a while. We got on Highway 12, and no one was talking or saying anything. So I said, “Well, maybe with the passage of time, we’ll feel differently about this.”

  PAUL SOGLIN

  I was on the City Council in my second term. I had been elected in April 1968, and reelected in April of 1970. Murray Fromson, a CBS reporter, called me, because we had done previous interviews. “Paul, you must have some idea who it is.” But I didn’t. As the days went by, it came out that there had been the death, and the suspects were identified. I was in the kitchen with Rena Steinzor, the editor of the Cardinal, talking about it, and she said something so simple. She said, “I asked myself whether I had the capability of doing something like that, and when I instantly came to the answer, ‘No,’ I knew the bombing was morally wrong.” Everybody was wrestling with the morality of it. What Rena said was really very simple, and very eloquent: “I knew I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the capacity. I knew it was morally wrong.”

  The place was swarming with FBI, and everybody was paranoid. We were angry with the bombers. We thought that they had no right, on behalf of the rest of us in the movement, to do that.

  JACK CIPPERLY

  To me, the bombing was a bridge too far. In other words, it sort of put a damper on a lot of the demonstrations, because Robert Fassnacht was killed. It just looked like that was too much. It went too far.

  TOM MCCARTHY

  After the bomb went off, we had a meeting with the FBI, the university police, and the sheriff’s department, in the conference room of the chief’s office. [Wilbur] Emery, the [Madison] police chief, told the FBI right there that in this bo
mb case, “if you do not share information that you get with us, you can leave right now.” But they never shared anything, and in a way I don’t blame them, because would you want to share with Chicago police what you find out?

  BILL DYSON (FBI agent)

  We knew it was horrible when the first reports came in. Of course, it got national attention, worldwide attention, and the FBI and local police were there immediately. The fact that somebody was killed gave it federal jurisdiction. After the bombing, I went up there. At first, the idea was that it was the Weather Underground. But it soon became apparent that it wasn’t, and these people were would-be Weathermen, if anything. When I saw the building, I had never seen that type of devastation. They called the university Plywood University for a year after, because it blew out almost every window on the campus. It took a year to try to get the windows fixed. It was horrific damage.

  I thought, Oh my God, this was the worst terrorist attack we’ve had in the United States since the Wall Street bombing in 1920, which killed thirty people and was allegedly done by anarchists. They blew up a horse cart in downtown New York City on Wall Street. But other than that, there’d never been an attack like this in the United States. So it was the Oklahoma City of its day. They were able to trace back the truck that was used to bring in the 1,950 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer that did it.*2

  MARGERY TABANKIN

  (University of Wisconsin student activist)