Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  At 7:30 A.M. the day after the bombing happened, I was at home in New Jersey and there was a knock on the door. It was these FBI agents, who asked me, “Do you know what happened last night?” I couldn’t believe they found me so quickly. I said, “What are you talking about?” They said, “Somebody was killed in Madison in the physics building. You would call it the Army Mathematics Research Center. We’re trying to figure out who did it.” So they showed me a list of people with lots of names on it. I didn’t recognize most of them, but some I did. I said, “There is no way these people would have ever done this.” When we get to the two names that I knew pretty well—Leo Burt and David Fine—because both of them had worked at The Daily Cardinal, I started laughing. I said, “These are the quietest, mousiest, and really the shyest people. There’s just no way. Take them off this list.” I was so certain.

  I did not know either Dwight or Karl Armstrong. Their names were on the list, but I had no idea who they were. I knew a lot about the people who were into throwing blood on buildings, acting in guerrilla theater, and being in intense debates about violence versus nonviolence. Leo Burt and David Fine were not visibly part of any of that. So I was completely sure that it wasn’t possible. Years later, it turned out that it was them. David turned himself in and served some time, but Leo’s never been found.

  KARL ARMSTRONG

  We picked up a paper in Chicago and there was an editorial in the Chicago Tribune saying that there should be the death penalty for bombers. At that point we knew we’d better stay on the run. We stopped in Ann Arbor and tried to get help from the White Panthers,*3 but they didn’t want anything to do with us. Then we drove to Toledo, Ohio, gave each other haircuts, and that’s where we split up.

  Dwight and I drove from Toledo to New York and ended up on Fifth Avenue or something, a very ritzy area. We found a parking space, slept in the car, and tried to figure out some sort of game plan. I talked to my uncle on the phone and asked if he could wire us some money, because we had about twenty bucks between us. I don’t even know if we even had that, because I remember Dwight going in and shoplifting some sandwich meat from a market. I remember because I was so pissed-off at him, risking our lives over shoplifting lunch meat. Dwight and I split up and agreed to meet a week later in Times Square.

  Finally the day came to meet Dwight. I got to Times Square at the appointed hour, and there he was. I was as happy as I had ever been in my life. We waited there for David [Fine] and Leo [Burt] to show up, but they never did. That’s when we saw the huge ticker-tape marquee: “Four men wanted in Wisconsin bombing….Four men put on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.”

  Dwight and I walked to this motel in Times Square, and I called our parents, because I knew we were going to leave New York City, but we wanted them to think we were in New York City. I talked to my father, and he asked me to give myself up. I told him, “I don’t think I can do that.” I basically just let them know we were still alive, hung up, and we immediately jumped on the subway and got out of the city.

  MARGERY TABANKIN

  In the documentary The War at Home*4 there is a scene where I am holding a press conference. I’m wearing this red crewneck sweater, with very short hair, representing the student body, saying, “We are calling for the closure of the Army Mathematics Research Center.” I was reading a big treatise written by Jim Rowen in the Daily Cardinal. Later Jim went on to work in the mayor’s office. He was also married to Susan McGovern [daughter of Senator George McGovern]. But at the time he was one of the smart graduate students who were framing what the university was doing. I wasn’t that kind of an original thinker, but I was an organizer. So I created this big student press conference and called for the university to stop being complicit with the war and to stop the secret research that was going on at the Army Mathematics Research Center.

  After the bombing, literally all I could think about was, Oh my God. I had that press conference. I created all this publicity about this, and somebody died. I was devastated, just devastated. I was surprised because, while people had started to do anarchistic stuff, like lying down to try to stop jets from taking off and throwing blood on ROTC buildings, nobody had done anything like this at this level. I never thought anybody intended for anybody to die. It was clear that this happened in the middle of the night, and they never dreamed somebody would be working there. I knew that immediately. But I still felt this unbelievable sickness in my stomach, that I was somehow connected to this experience.

  KARL ARMSTRONG

  We stole a car that we found with keys and we drove north towards the border. As we’re driving through Little Falls, New York, Dwight, with his long hair, is driving. I noticed that a local cop starts following us, and I dove for the glove compartment and read everything I could about the owner of this car. We memorized all the information in the space of a minute, and we concocted a story about why we were in this car. The cop pulled us over and asked for the registration. We gave him the registration, but it’s not ours. It didn’t match my brother’s driver’s license. We told him we’d borrowed a friend’s car, that we were in college together at the University of Wisconsin, and he let us borrow the car. The cop was just about ready to buy it, and he says, “Why don’t you follow me back to the police station, I want to look further into this.”

  We got to the station and the cop said, “My office is on the second floor, if you want to come up.” Meanwhile, I’m whispering to Dwight, “We’re gonna have to take him. But we won’t jump him until the plates come back as being stolen.” So we go up there in the office and give him our real IDs. On the wall of his office were posters of the Weather people and all of these antiwar people, like Bernardine Dohrn and Angela Davis. So, he puts in the call and we’re sitting there in front of the desk. He asked us where we were going, and we said, “We’re going to meet a friend of ours in Buffalo.” So we’re waiting as he checks the plate number. Meanwhile, Dwight asks to read the newspaper that’s on his desk while we’re waiting. Dwight gets the paper, and he points to the front page: There are our names on the front page of the newspaper. I’m thinking, This is really getting bad. We’re sitting in this cop shop, with no money, don’t know anybody, have a car out there that’s running out of gas, and I’m thinking, Can it get any worse? We know we’ve got to jump this guy, who was actually bigger than us. It can’t get any worse than this.

  Then the phone rings. Dwight and I are like cats ready to spring at him. We were going to jump over the desk and pin him down. He got the phone call, but I didn’t see anything on his face. Then he says, “I’m sorry, guys. Everything checks out. The car’s not stolen. You’re free to go.”

  Later we read in the newspaper that he had gotten one of the digits wrong on the license plate. When he finally got around to reading the paper, probably an hour and a half later, and discovered his mistake, he probably thought, Oh, I’ll never live that down! Poor guy. He was a nice enough guy, you know? I really felt sorry for him. I thought, This just ruined his career.

  PHIL BALL

  The moral ambiguity took up everybody’s time, especially those of us who had devoted our lives to ending the war. The reason is that we were not about to condemn the boys. We could condemn the action if we wanted to, and it was better to make sure it didn’t happen again—which it didn’t—but condemning the boys would be the height of hypocrisy, because we had all called for the downfall of Army Math. We were the ones marching and demanding, “Off Army Math! Smash Army Math!” We were the ones who broke up classes in Army Math. We were the ones who laid the moral foundation for the boys, Karl and Dwight Armstrong, David Fine, and Leo Burt. That was felt very powerfully. My God, we did this! It wasn’t just the boys. The best we could do was support them. They needed a defense fund. They needed people to speak for them. They needed the best legal help that we could get.

  KARL ARMSTRONG

  My original plan was to turn ourselves in in a brief period after the bombing. But because Robert Fassnacht, a thirty-three-year-old
physicist with three young children, had been killed and people had been injured, there was no longer any political support for us. I felt like we would just be thrown to the wolves. So I knew that we had to either stay free or get enough time between the bombing and being captured, in order to get anywhere close to a fair trial.

  When we got to Montreal, we were totally broke and really, really hungry, because we still hadn’t had anything to eat in a couple of days. I had phoned this organization. I can’t tell you their name, but they didn’t want to talk to me on the phone. They knew all about us, and after we’d gotten there they said, “Yeah, everybody in the left political community was waiting for you to show up.” They had all been following what was happening, but they were really paranoid about helping us.

  They fed us, found us this place to live, and gave us a little money for food. Then they sent our getaway car to a chop shop and disposed of it. We spent about three months in Montreal. I bought a cheap wig that I used when I went into the post office, where they had wanted posters with pictures of the four of us on the walls.

  PAUL SOGLIN

  Nationally, it changed the whole scope of the antiwar movement. Millions of Americans were sobered by what happened. There were still very large demonstrations, but now virtually all of them were peaceful. Yet on the Nixon side of the ledger, all the murder and mayhem that they created didn’t sober them, because it was still going to be another five years before the war would come to an end.

  There is no question that the bombing sucked the life out of the national antiwar movement. There is no question that it was counterproductive. If the bombing had not taken place, the movement would have been far stronger as we went into the fall of 1970 and the winter of 1971.

  KARL ARMSTRONG

  The argument has been made that it was counterproductive, at least in the short term. The movement in Madison was definitely stifled, because they had about three hundred FBI agents in town going through people’s garbage. That’s going to repress anybody’s political activity. The standard mantra is that the bombing hurt the antiwar movement, and my feeling is, yes it did, for a short time around Madison, but generally it didn’t seem to have a negative effect on the national movement.*5

  MARK RUDD (Weather Underground member)

  The bombing of the Math Army Research Center at Madison was a disaster. It caused the antiwar movement to crumble for a period of a few years in Madison, in 1970, which was still the height of the war. The war didn’t actually end until ’75. But again, a small group of people knew that they were right, and they didn’t put it up to any vote, they just went ahead and planted the bombs.

  It’s nice to be able to say that we [the Weather Underground] never harmed anybody, but in truth, we not only killed three of our own, but we were the intellectual authors of the Wisconsin action which did kill an antiwar graduate student named Fassnacht. I don’t think the public was aware of the difference between bombing buildings and hurting people. The fundamental mistake was choosing that strategy, as compared to organizing.

  PETER GREENBERG

  (University of Wisconsin student, Daily Cardinal reporter)

  Two things happened shortly after the bombing. One was a university symposium that took place a week after we got back to campus, around the eighth or ninth of September 1970. The symposium was to discuss the bombing and I was chosen to represent the Cardinal. It was me, a member of the Board of Regents—you couldn’t get more right-wing than this guy—and somebody else. I drew the short straw and had to go first. I said, “There is no way I’m going to sit here tonight and defend the bombing, but I think we need to discuss why it happened, and the history of it, to understand why it could also happen again.” That’s as far as I got. The member of the Board of Regents got up and said, “You have no right to talk in this room. You’re the murderer. A man was killed in that building.”

  At that moment, this woman in the back of the room raises her hand and goes, “No, you’re the murderer!” And the regent looks at her and says, “May I remind you a man was killed in that building?” She said, “I know, it was my husband.” That was Stephanie Fassnacht.

  * * *

  *1 The explosion could be heard thirty miles away, and building repairs cost $6 million.

  *2 The Sterling Hall bombing was considered the largest act of domestic terrorism until 1995, when Timothy McVeigh bombed an Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168 people.

  *3 The White Panther Party was a left-wing radical collective of white antiracists based in Detroit, Michigan, and spearheaded by the poet and MC5 rock band manager John Sinclair.

  *4 The War at Home is a 1979 feature documentary, produced and directed by Barry Alexander Brown and Glenn Silber, about the student antiwar movement at the University of Wisconsin.

  *5 Karl Armstrong was arrested in Canada in 1972. In his 1973 trial, he pled guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison. He was released from Waupun maximum security prison in Madison after seven years. Karl’s brother Dwight was arrested in 1977 and served three years in prison. David Fine was captured in 1976, pled guilty to two felonies, and served a three-year prison term. Fine later graduated from the University of Oregon law school but was denied admission to the Oregon bar. Leo Burt is still at large.

  CHAPTER 25

  ESCAPE

  (September 1970)

  They [the Weather Underground] are not in hiding, but are invisible. They are in every tribe, commune, dormitory, farmhouse, barracks and townhouse where kids are making love, smoking dope, preparing for the future.

  —TIMOTHY LEARY,

  Confessions of a Hope Fiend

  Doom permeated the antiwar movement after the August 24 bombing of the Army Math building in Madison. Fighting fire with fire, rage with rage, locked the movement with its enemy into a dead-end battle. Two weeks later Timothy Leary escaped from a California prison with the help of the Weather Underground. The symbolic event married the two cultural and political wings of the revolution, bringing hope, as Bernardine Dohrn announced, to “the task of creating a new culture on the barren wasteland that has been imposed on this country by Democrats, Republicans, capitalists and creeps.”

  BILL AYERS (Weather Underground leader)

  We were approached by Timothy Leary’s people, who asked us to help him get out of prison and out of the country. It lit some of us up immediately. We thought it was hilarious and wonderful and funny. Others of us didn’t think it was a good idea. So we had a lot of discussion, and we ended up going ahead and doing it for a couple of reasons. One was that we thought this would be good practice, and we thought we could learn how to do it. Just like with everything else we were doing then, this was all new to us. We didn’t know how to break anybody out of jail. We would strike a blow against prison and practice for more to come. The other reason we decided to do it is they gave us money, which we sorely needed. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love said, “We’ll fund this thing.”*1

  TIMOTHY LEARY (note left behind when he escaped San Luis Obispo prison, September 12, 1970)

  IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER…AND OF THE SON…

  AND OF THE HOLY GHOST…AVE MARIA. PRISON GUARDS

  LISTEN, TO CAGE A LIVING CREATURE IS…

  A SIN AGAINST GOD

  LISTEN GUARDS…TO THE ANCIENT TRUTH….

  HE WHO ENSLAVES…IS HIMSELF ENSLAVED….

  THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THE BLACKS AND THE BROWNS

  AND THE YOUNG AND THE WILD AND THE FREE

  BILL AYERS

  Our code name for the operation was “juju eyeballs,” from the Beatles song “Come Together.” I was involved in the planning and reconnaissance, and a group of us met with Tim, once we got him out of jail. He had to do most of the work himself and he was an old man. He was almost fifty, and he had to go hand over hand on a wire, and get the fuck out of there. We left him a statue of the Buddha near a rail siding to tell him which way to go. Then he hid in the weeds, and we had a car pick him up and
take him to a camper, with a family. The camper took him north and the car took his clothing south, and left his clothes in a convenience store. We ditched the car and had another car pick that person up. So we led them south, and we went north. We got Tim and Rosemary [his wife] to Canada, and then we got them to Europe, and then to Algeria. All of that took money. But we did learn some things from it, and we felt much more engaged in the prison work. So, it wasn’t a bad thing.

  BERNARDINE DOHRN, SEPTEMBER 15, 1970, COMMUNIQUÉ

  The Weatherman Underground has had the honor and pleasure of helping Dr. Timothy Leary escape from the POW camp in San Luis Obispo, California.

  Dr. Leary was being held against his will and against the will of millions of kids in this country. He was a political prisoner, captured for the work he did in helping all of us begin the task of creating a new culture on the barren wasteland that has been imposed on this country by Democrats, Republicans, Capitalists and creeps.

  LSD and grass, like the herbs and cactus and mushrooms of the American Indians and countless civilizations that have existed on this planet, will help us make a future world where it will be possible to live in peace.

  Now we are at war….

  Our organization commits itself to the task of freeing these prisoners of war.

  We are outlaws, we are free!

  RICK AYERS