New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  The 1920 Wall Street blast was the last major episode in the postwar wave of radical attacks, in New York and across the country. Anarchists may have been sobered by the horror of the severed body parts and mangled corpses, many belonging to working-class New Yorkers, which littered Wall Street that day. Fifty years later, other radicals also recoiled from bloodshed. A Weatherman bomb injured seven police officers at the NYPD’s Centre Street headquarters on June 10, 1970, just over three months after the accidental explosion on West Eleventh Street. But these officers would be the last casualties taken by the Weathermen in New York, for following the deaths of Gold, Oughton, and Robbins, the Weather Underground had shifted its tactics. Henceforth, bombs would only be planted in secluded corners of “Amerikan” targets, with warning given to authorities to clear the area before detonation. “Targeting only buildings, not people, we switched over to ‘bombing lite,’” Rudd later noted. Over the next seven years, the Weathermen planted bombs that damaged government and corporate property but avoided human casualties. By the mid-1970s, the Weathermen claimed credit for over twenty-four bombings around the country. But weary of living on the run, most members emerged from hiding in the late 1970s and early 1980s, cutting deals with prosecutors and judges to reduce their sentences.19

  A few Weathermen, unable to give up a desperate vision of the coming revolution, persisted in violence. In October 1981, Kathy Boudin, David Gilbert, and several other Weather veterans, along with members of the militant Black Liberation Army, robbed a Brinks armored car at a mall in Nanuet, New York, killing two policemen and a guard in the process. Gilbert was sentenced to seventy-five years in prison; Boudin and some of the others were released after serving long terms. From 1983 to 1985, the Armed Resistance Unit, a Weather offshoot, bombed eight sites, including an FBI office on Staten Island, the South African consulate, and the Israeli Aircraft Industries building in Manhattan.

  With the exception of these isolated incidents, the era of the Weathermen had passed. Looking back on the era, Abbie Hoffman distilled his own lesson: “‘One cannot make an omelet without breaking some eggs,’ remarked Lenin. This attitude, however, is a far cry from the terrorism of deliberately taking innocent lives, be they in a classroom, an airplane, or an apartment building.” Several of the surviving Weather Underground bombers, continuing as activists, abandoned violence for other, more peaceful forms of political engagement.20

  While the events of the early twentieth century and the Vietnam War era were hardly identical, some striking patterns linked the two. Anarchists and Weathermen both brought the war home to comfortable, complacent, powerful New York—whether the war in question was the “class war” of the Colorado coal mines or the “imperialist war” in Southeast Asia. New York City, thousands of miles from the brutal bloodshed Weathermen viewed as enriching its Wall Street banks and midtown corporate headquarters, had to become a battlefield, a place of vengeance, and a school of revolution whose lessons the city’s own terrified media organs would trumpet around the country and the world. Narrowly symbolic acts—bombs planted at famous landmarks of business power or government authority—would be strategic shortcuts to insurrection. The invulnerable, arrogant metropolis of the ruling class, its true capital city, would be made vulnerable. Indeed, in the eyes of these militants, the very violence, racism, and greed of the Establishment proved an underlying decay that already made the system vulnerable. Surely, a few well-placed bombs had to help precipitate the coming revolution.

  But the revolution did not come, either in 1920 or in 1970—quite the opposite, in fact. Although most leftist organizations and spokesmen clearly distanced themselves from violence, the main outcome in both cases was redoubled government hostility and popular discredit for the broader Left in New York and throughout America. To no avail did radicals during the 1910s point out that the terror casualties were dwarfed by the scores of American workers killed each day in industrial accidents, or by the 25 percent of poor American children who died before adulthood, or by the one in twelve New York City corpses that had to be buried in pauper’s graves. Instead, the events of 1908 and 1914–1915 earned new accolades for the city’s twenty-odd National Guard armories, the Establishment’s first line of defense in the class war.21

  The June 1919 bombings prompted Attorney General Palmer to declare war on those who “seek to terrorize the country” and, using dubious legal maneuvers, to deport hundreds of foreign-born aliens, most of them having no provable connection to radical violence. The ensuing “Red Scare” helped build the career of a young Justice Department lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover, who stood on a Staten Island pier to watch the SS Buford carry 249 deported alien anarchists to the Soviet Union in 1919. Across the country, moreover, the bombings only confirmed anti-immigrant feeling and antipathy toward New York. It was natural for the “bomb massacre” to have occurred in New York, the Washington Post asserted in 1920; “rather it would have been surprising if this festering sore had not come to its horrid head.”22

  A half century later, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and other militant groups existed in a strange symbiotic relationship with Hoover’s FBI and Richard Nixon’s Justice Department, which infiltrated radical groups. Undercover federal agents incited militants to violent, self-destructive deeds in order to discredit their movements. Sure enough, bombings and strident manifestos did not win over the hearts and minds of the American masses. An April 1970 Gallup Poll found that a clear majority of Americans wanted stiff prison sentences for bombers and hijackers.23

  Perhaps the most damning verdict on terrorist bombings was that New Yorkers, and other Americans, simply forgot. Five years after the 1920 bombing, in an era of financial prosperity and a deflated left, a Wall Street Journal reporter found that young stenographers strolling through the fateful intersection of Wall and Broad Streets didn’t know about the blast. “How quickly time effaces the memory of startling events,” the paper commented. In a city bent on the future, new blood arrived, and tragedies faded. And, after all, in a city of 5.6 million, there had been fewer than 300 casualties; a New Yorker had highly favorable odds for surviving an unpredictable attack. The only “plaque” to the Wall Street explosion and its victims is the series of shrapnel pockmarks that still mottles the marble façade of the Morgan and Company edifice at 23 Wall Street. Similarly, rather than fearing another bomb after the West Eleventh Street explosion, a Greenwich Villager focused on the real estate: “In a couple of days they’ll turn it into a parking lot.” New Yorkers’ short memories consigned the terrorists of 1970, like those of 1920, to the dustbin of history. Today, few passersby know why the townhouse rebuilt on the site of 18 West Eleventh Street in 1978 differs architecturally from its stately neighbors.24

  Although largely discredited as a form of protest, bombings continued in the post-Vietnam years. Most deadly was the bomb planted in a locker near the TWA baggage claim terminal at LaGuardia Airport on December 29, 1975, which took eleven lives, probably the work of Croatian nationalists seeking their homeland’s independence from Yugoslavia. But the city’s history provided a backdrop for another blast, one that tore through the lunchtime dining room in Fraunces Tavern at Pearl and Broad Streets on January 24, 1975, killing four and injuring fifty-three. Notes left in nearby telephone booths, mimeographed on the letter head of FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional Puertorriquena, or Armed Forces of the Puerto Rican Nation) took credit for the attack.25

  The notes denounced “the Yanki government” for resisting Puerto Rican independence and accused the CIA of murdering Puerto Rican activists; they also called for the release of five “political prisoners” held in US penitentiaries. FALN’s stated target was the “reactionary corporate executives” lunching in the tavern, but the group had also picked a target of historical resonance. The original tavern building that stood on the site had hosted George Washington’s farewell to his Continental army officers on December 4, 1783; FALN was declaring that, because the United States was a nation
born in revolution, hypocrisy could be the only meaning of its withholding Puerto Rican independence.26

  New York had long played a special role, both real and symbolic, for Puerto Ricans. More than any other North American city, New York had developed early trade links with the Spanish Caribbean. By the late nineteenth century, a community of émigré Cuban and Puerto Rican merchants and workers existed in the city. So did a small but active circle of Spanish-speaking revolutionaries. The most important was José Martí, who found work in lower Manhattan as a journalist and as consul for Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina after leaving his native Cuba in 1880. Like other revolutionaries—among them Giuseppe Garibaldi (an exile on Staten Island) and Leon Trotsky (a Bronx resident before the Bolshevik Revolution)—Martí embraced New York as a temporary haven. The city, with its Cubans and Puerto Ricans yearning for independence from Spain, was for Martí an incubator for Caribbean liberation. Yet before he returned to Cuba in 1895 to die in an abortive uprising, Martí also expressed his misgivings about America, felt most poignantly in the city he called home for fifteen years. With its banks, corporations, and shipping firms controlling much of the Latin Caribbean’s sugar, coffee, and fruit crops, New York loomed as the leading edge of a North American imperialism that might well succeed Spain’s. “I have lived inside the belly of the monster and know him from within,” he wrote in 1892. New York, in the end, was simultaneously a safe haven and a menace to progress and justice.27

  Much as Martí had warned, the Spanish-American War of 1898 gave New York businessmen a new role to play in the former Spanish colonies. New York sugar magnates and others made sure Cuba’s and Puerto Rico’s economies remained captive markets for American manufactures and Wall Street credit; a fundamentally colonial economic relationship dictated low wages and displacement from the land for many islanders. In 1917, Congress granted Puerto Ricans US citizenship but not statehood. Following World War II, thousands took advantage of cheap fares as airlines sought to create a market for passengers between the Caribbean and North America; most settled in New York City. By 1960, New York had more than six hundred thousand Puerto Rican residents and was the cultural capital of the Puerto Rican diaspora.28

  As the city’s Puerto Rican population grew, one of the Caribbean island’s most important leaders, Pedro Albizu Campos, lived as a semi-prisoner in a New York hospital. A Harvard-educated lawyer and World War I US Army veteran, the dark-skinned Campos had been enraged by the racism he repeatedly experienced at the hands of Americans, both in Puerto Rico and on the mainland. His Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, founded in 1922, called for independence and resistance to “Yanqui” imperialism. In 1937, he was convicted of “seditious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government in Puerto Rico”; released from the Atlanta federal penitentiary in 1943, he spent the final four years of a suspended sentence ill in Columbus Hospital on East Thirty-Fourth Street.29

  As some Puerto Rican New Yorkers became radicalized in the years following World War II, they began exporting their resistance beyond the city. In November 1950, two New York followers of Campos, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, journeyed to Washington and failed in an attempt to shoot President Truman at Blair House; Torresola was killed by a mortally wounded guard. On March 1, 1954, four other New Yorkers—Lolita Lebron, Irving Flores Rodriguez, Rafael Cancel Mirada, and Andres Figueroa Cordero—opened fire from the US House of Representatives gallery, injuring five Congressmen on the floor below. “The United States of America are betraying the sacred principles of mankind in their continuous subjugation of my country,” read a note found in Lebron’s purse after the shooters were restrained by police. The five revolutionaries captured in these two events—still held in federal prisons in 1975, the year of the Fraunces Tavern explosion—were the “political prisoners” FALN wanted released.30

  Formed in the late 1960s, with roots in Puerto Rican nationalism and pro-Cuban Marxism, FALN had planted ten bombs in New York and Newark in late 1974 and early 1975. Prior to Fraunces Tavern, an FALN booby-trap device had exploded in an abandoned East Harlem tenement; a policeman, lured to the site, had been blinded in one eye. (As it happened, the officer, Angel Poggi, was Puerto Rican himself.) Between 1974 and 1982, the group set off at least 110 bombs in Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Newark, as well as New York. Incendiary cigarette packs, designed to ignite after closing hours, were put in the pockets of garments on the racks in eight New York department stores; pipe bombs exploded in or near Lincoln Center, the Defense Department’s Manhattan offices, and several corporate headquarters.31

  Identifying and tracking the FALN bombers proved difficult. In July 1978, investigators received a break when an explosion in an Elmhurst apartment led police to the bleeding body of Willie Morales, who had been building a bomb when it accidentally exploded. Morales lost his fingers and part of his face in the blast; his arrest took him out of circulation as an FALN terrorist. Yet dramatic gestures continued. In March 1980, armed FALN members raided the New York offices of George H. W. Bush’s presidential campaign on East Fifty-Ninth Street, bound ten campaign workers, and also threatened to target nuclear reactors with bombs; the masked gunmen then fled after spraying pro–Puerto Rican independence slogans on the walls. (FALN simultaneously carried out a similar raid on Jimmy Carter’s Chicago campaign headquarters.)32

  Unlike the Weather Underground, FALN never renounced taking the blood of incidental victims; bringing war to America, in their opinion, required it. On New Year’s Eve 1982, in their last major attack, the group planted five dynamite devices, wired to pocket watches and nine-volt batteries, in Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes outside police headquarters and the Federal Building in lower Manhattan, the Foley Square Federal Courthouse, and the Federal Courthouse in downtown Brooklyn. The Federal Building bomb blew out several floors of windows into the street below. The police headquarters bomb tore the leg off patrolman Rocco Pascarella, who, despite his agony, was able to describe the KFC box he had seen. Trying to defuse two bombs at Foley Square, bomb squad detectives Tony Senft and Richie Pastorella were blown into the air when one of the KFC boxes exploded. Both men were severely injured.33

  A series of arrests finally helped to quell the FALN campaign. The group’s terrorism had not brought independence for Puerto Rico, but it had divided New York’s Puerto Rican community against itself. “Because of the horror of what they’ve done, I don’t think these killers are going to get much support from Puerto Ricans,” the head of a police anti-FALN task force commented after Fraunces Tavern. Indeed, dozens of tips were offered by Puerto Rican New Yorkers trying to help the police run down the culprits.34

  An old paradox resurfaced: newcomers to the city found in New York a home, but also a political and economic order some blamed for their homeland’s troubles. The largest Puerto Rican metropolis in the world was also a target for the island’s angry nationalists. Nothing indicated to New Yorkers that in the future, religion, not nationalism or Marxism, would elicit declarations of war against their city.

  At 12:18 PM on February 26, 1993, a 1,200-pound urea nitrate bomb, planted in a rental van parked in a subbasement garage beneath the World Trade Center’s North Tower, erupted through four floors of reinforced concrete, instantly killing a female office worker, a male hotel worker, and three men lunching nearby. A fifth man, thrown by the blast, died of a heart attack induced by internal injuries. Dozens of cars in the garage burst into flame. People elsewhere in the complex, feeling the floor shudder under them, thought a plane might have hit the building. As police vehicles, ambulances, and fire trucks rushed to the scene, a chaotic evacuation began from the upper floors down the staircases of both towers of the World Trade Center. Fifty thousand people fled the building complex. Over one thousand, many covered in the soot that poured out of wall ducts and up elevator shafts, suffered from smoke inhalation. Dozens spent hours in elevators stuck between floors. Against a backdrop of light snow flurries, gray smoke wafted into the afternoon sky over lower Manhattan.35<
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  Watching from the window of the J & R Music World store two blocks away on Park Row, an Egyptian named Mahmud Abouhalima was disappointed that the visible damage from the blast seemed so minimal. His comrade Ramzi Yousef, who was across the Hudson River on the Jersey City waterfront, was also chagrined; he had anticipated that the explosion would topple the North Tower sideways into the South Tower, with both buildings collapsing to kill a quarter of a million people in crowded downtown Manhattan.36

  Police help a woman flee the first terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center, February 26, 1993. PHOTO BY KEN MURRAY / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE VIA GETTY IMAGES.

  It was not long before Americans received an explanation for this latest deadly bombing. “The terrorism that Israel practices (Which is supported by America) must be faced with a similar one,” lectured a letter, signed “the Liberation Army,” that arrived at the New York Times several days later. “The dictatorship and terrorism (also supported by America) that some countries are practicing against their own people must also be faced with terrorism.” Americans needed to know that their civilian deaths were no more tragic “than those who are getting killed by the American weapons and support.” The letter demanded discontinuation of all American aid to Israel; otherwise other targets, including nuclear ones, would be attacked.37

  Authorities had worried since the mid-1980s that Muslim extremists might plan to target the Twin Towers, but the actual attack, launched by other assailants, caught the city totally off guard. The contained nature of the mayhem allowed many to react calmly, even with bravado. “It’s just another day at the park,” a New York Stock Exchange trader told a reporter. But the confusion and shock of the first day, when the cause of the explosion was unknown, also left many feeling edgy and bewildered. “People were saying, ‘Is it Bosnia? Somalia? Saddam Hussein?’” a tourist from California commented. “Then it was, like, ‘What’s next? The Chrysler Building?’” On a Tribeca street corner, Joan Weiss felt overwhelmed. “No one feels safe anymore. . . . You never know if you’re going to come home alive.”38