Kathleen O'Brien
Years of Rage
The Weather Underground

It's a clear March afternoon in the city.  Sunlight glints off brownstone doorsteps and archways.  The posh neighborhood offers a calming silence even amidst the metropolitan clamor.  Its tranquility is shattered when, without the slightest warning, one out of several identical townhouses trembles violently with what becomes the first in a series of seven deafening explosions.  Flames leap from the windows as the building's façade crumbles away.  Within a matter of seconds, the townhouse has been reduced to rubble.

    This is 1970, but this isn't Vietnam.  This is New York City, and the culprits are not foreign invaders, but a militant group of homegrown radicals known as the Weather Underground.  Their target?  The US Government.

    These revolutionaries sprung from the student antiwar movement that arose in the 1960s in response to the Vietnam War.  They were unique in their use of violent acts against government institutions, which they believed would motivate people to wage a war against the oppressive capitalist system.

    Their story does not begin in 1970 — nor does it begin in 1969, when the movement was officially formed.  It instead has its origins in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s.  The concept of civil disobedience was embodied by Rosa Parks with her heroic refusal to be confined to the back of a city bus.  Blacks and whites alike admired the peaceful tactics of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.  White students took inspiration from the lunch-counter radicals of the civil rights movement and joined the struggle, a campaign that would eventually grow to encompass the fight for universal freedom.

    An organization called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) coalesced in 1962, leaving behind the more traditional League for Industrial Democracy.  The Port Huron Statement, their declaration of purpose, proclaimed "We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit" (Bloom 61).  Members of SDS were involved in the August 1963 march on Washington for jobs and freedom, and also in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964 supporting black voter registration.

    The Gulf of Tonkin incident in August of 1964 gave President Johnson a license for overseas intervention.  When their country entered the Vietnam War, the students' discomfort only grew deeper.  SDS therefore shifted the focus of its efforts from civil rights to antiwar activism.

    Student activism also grew out of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964.  The successful "Berkeley Uprising," in which the Free Speech Movement defied the university administration by demonstrating on campus, served to popularize student movements.  SDS took advantage of the situation by organizing students for community activism and antiwar protests (Boren 144).

    As the Vietnam War progressed, student outrage escalated.  In 1965, while 150,000 US troops fought in Vietnam, SDS led 15,000 protestors to Washington.   In 1967, the troops numbered 1 million, and half that many marched against the war in New York City.  By that time, troops in Vietnam were dying by the hundreds every week; Vietnamese civilian and military deaths were far greater in number.  Despite its unpopularity, the war didn’t seem to be losing steam — quite the opposite.

    The spirit of peaceful uprising seemed at its peak when April 1968 saw the assassination of one of its key figures, Martin Luther King, Jr.  Not long after that, Robert Kennedy was killed.  However, the Movement was not about to fade away.  Instead, it took on a darker tone that culminated in the splintering of SDS.

    The Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 was a turning point for both SDS and "the Movement" in general.  Antiwar groups such as the Youth International Party ("yippies") and the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE) converged on Chicago for a week of protests and alternate conventions.  SDS did not organize a protest, but many of its members participated independently.  Bloodshed marred the final day of the convention when police brutality intensified.  The police charged on a group of protestors in Grant Park, attacking with clubs and teargas.  Because this violence was not provoked in any way, many protestors concluded that peaceful actions cannot ensure a peaceful response.  Furthermore, many decided that reliance on the electoral process to enact change was futile.  Disagreement over these ideas would largely facilitate the split of SDS  (Boren 178).

    Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers were elected to the leadership of SDS in 1968, but in 1969 they became its downfall.  Announcing that SDS was "the pig" itself and criticizing its members' cowardly attachment to "white skin privilege," they brought a sudden end to the organization (salon.com).  SDS promptly shattered into three groups.  Doctrinaire Marxist-Leninists formed the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), while the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) brought together young workers and minorities under the influence of the Black Panther Party.  Meanwhile, Dohrn and Ayers gathered the more extreme fragments of SDS.  In defiance of the Bob Dylan lyric "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," they dubbed themselves the Weathermen (Peck 198).

    Disillusioned with nonviolent protest, the Weathermen rejected civil disobedience altogether and championed a more hands-on approach to revolution.  This, of course, entailed violence.  They identified with third-world revolutionaries, particularly the National Liberation Front of Vietnam.  They felt that violent uprising was the only rational response to violent oppression, both at home and overseas.  Their slogan?  "Bring the war home."

    The Weathermen aimed to show that "white people would no longer sit by passively."  They believed that the "democratic process" was only a hoax perpetuated by the corporate government. Among their list of demands was the withdrawal of all troops from Vietnam, the release of all political prisoners of the civil rights movement, the independence of Puerto Rico, and the end of the war surtax.  They took action not only against the Vietnam War, but also against the societal structures that "made war a necessity."  Peace alone was not their goal; in fact, they aspired to launch their own war — a war against American imperialism (Bloom 449).  

    The Weathermen also dabbled in non-traditional lifestyles; they rejected consumerism, monogamy, heterosexuality, and conventional gender roles.  They insisted that monogamous relationships be broken up so that the people involved, especially the women, could "become whole people, self-reliant and independent, able to carry out whatever is necessary to the revolution" (Bloom 453).  Their lifestyle choices were integral to their political crusade.

    The mind behind many of these ideas was that of Chicago native Bernardine Dohrn.  The enigmatic leader of the Weathermen, she somehow managed to be both outspoken and elusive.  Articulate and lawyerly, she also – at times deliberately – added an aspect of sex appeal to the movement.

    Her counterpart, Bill Ayers, like many other Weathermen, came from a wealthy background.  His father was the CEO of Commonwealth Edison in Chicago and also on the board of directors of the University of Chicago.  He fronted the Weathermen alongside Dohrn, and was one of its most prominent members.

    Other Weathermen included Mark Rudd, the leader of the Columbia University chapter of SDS, and Kathy Boudin, daughter of progressive New York lawyer Leonard Boudin.  In the beginning, the Weathermen numbered in the hundreds.
   
    The violent habits of the Weathermen were apparent from the beginning. Their early tactics included "jailbreaks," during which Weathermen loudly invaded blue-collar high schools, bound and gagged the teachers and attempted to incite rebellion in the students with impassioned speeches.  By most accounts, however, this did little but alienate them.

    The first major action staged by the Weathermen was entitled the Days of Rage, a violent demonstration beginning October 8th and ending October 11th.  Kicked off by the explosion of a monument honoring policemen in Chicago's Haymarket Square, several hundred Weathermen and Weathermen supporters (rather than the anticipated "tens of thousands") stormed the city streets wearing football helmets and wielding lead pipes, venting their rage by smashing cars and shop windows — and battling police officers (Bloom 449).  

“At about 8 o’clock, 70 hardcore Weathermen marched into the park in a tight phalanx, wearing stiff new denim jackets with National Liberation Front flags stitched to the back and white motorcycle helmets with visors. They carried Vietcong flags and clubs” (Kifner, Thursday October 9th, 1969).

    In the end, 287 participants were jailed and charged 2.3 million dollars in bail.  6 were shot, and most of them were beaten (Peck 199).

    In light of this failure, the Weathermen decided against the continued use of street fighting as a protest strategy at their National War Council in Flint, Michigan that December.  This conference also resulted in the decision to go into hiding.  Now divided into small cell groups of three to five people, they fought on in secrecy.  Consequently, bombs replaced lead pipes as their weapon of choice.

    One such bomb was assembled in the home of James P. Wilkerson, a radio station owner living in New York City's Greenwich Village.  His daughter, Catherine Wilkerson, was a member of the Weathermen.  Their Greenwich Village townhouse served as a makeshift bomb factory the morning of March 6, 1970.  At approximately 11:55 AM, something went wrong.

    A deadly mistake leveled the house at 18 West 11th street to the ground and resulted in the death of three of its occupants.  Weathermen Theodore Gold, Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins were killed in the blast.  Catherine Wilkerson and another woman, presumed to be Kathy Boudin, escaped the conflagration and managed to evade the authorities as well.

    The police first assumed the explosion, which shattered sixth-floor windows across the street, resulted from a gas leak, but investigations revealed dynamite to be the cause.  Found in the basement was a mound of soggy leaflets published by Weathermen and SDS (Robinson, Tuesday March 10, 1970).

    The Weathermen's activities from this point on are less certain.  From within the veil of secrecy, they made their presence known through two means: communiqués, and bombs.

    Prior to each bombing, the Weathermen would normally issue a warning via telephone, in order to prevent casualties.  They did not, after all, aim to cause physical harm to anyone; their targets were not people or even buildings themselves, but the institutions they represented – such as militarism and capitalism.  Therefore, these attacks were purely symbolic in nature.

    The bombings began on June 6, 1970 with an attack on the New York City police headquarters.  This was followed up by the July 26 bombings of a military base in San Francisco and a Bank of America in Manhattan.  Following every bombing, a Weatherman communiqué was released claiming credit for the attack.

    Later that year, on September 13, the Weathermen orchestrated Timothy Leary's escape from prison.  Leary, a Harvard psychologist who became notorious for concocting and promoting LSD, was imprisoned on drug charges.  That October saw more bombings: the Weathermen struck Chicago's Haymarket Square, a courthouse in Marin County, California, and a court building in Long Island, New York.

    On December 10, the Weathermen issued a communiqué in which they re-christened themselves The Weather Underground.  The name change occurred largely because the female majority – 70% – disliked the sexist label "Weathermen."

    The bombing campaign continued throughout 1971.  Their targets included the US Capitol, prison offices in San Francisco, Sacramento, and San Mateo, California, the New York commissioner of corrections' offices, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology office of former presidential advisor and Vietnam War supporter McGeorge Bundy.

    In May 1972 the Weather Underground bombed the air force wing of the Pentagon.  Even when faced with government indictments of conspiracy in December 1972, they fought on.

    In 1974, the Weather Underground published "Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism."  Their first statement of purpose since 1969's call to "Bring the War Home," "Prairie Fire" was a thoughtful piece that included both self-criticism and planning for the future.

    1975 witnessed an attack on the Washington D.C. offices of the Agency for International Development, as well as the Oakland, California offices of the Department of Defense on January 23.  Also attacked were Banco de Ponce offices in New York City's Rockefeller Center and the Salt Lake City headquarters of the Kennecott Corporation on June 16.
   
    In spite of their fervor, the end of the Weather Underground was nearing.  In 1976, the group was torn apart by conflicting views on race, gender, and organizational approaches.  It split into two factions, which did not take long to dissolve themselves.
   
    The Weathermen themselves lived on, each following divergent paths.  Bernardine Dohrn and her husband, Bill Ayers, settled in New York, still firmly lodged in the underground.  They did not surface until a decade after the last of the bombings, when they turned themselves in to the Chicago police department — only to find the majority of the charges against them dropped on account of to improper FBI surveillance.  They got away with fines and probation. Dohrn and Ayers are now professors (teaching law and education) in Chicago, where they have raised three children — including their friend Kathy Boudin’s son (Ayers 292).

    Boudin herself was not so fortunate in her experiences with the law.  Following her participation in an armed robbery that resulted in the deaths of a guard and two police officers in 1981, Boudin pleaded guilty shortly afterward and spent 22 years in prison.  She was granted parole in October of 2003.

    Today the Weather Underground is a subject of great controversy on both ends of the political spectrum.  Their violent tactics found few supporters both then and now, and their actions have spurred many a debate over the effectiveness of terrorism.  There have been countless essays, books and films on the subject of the Weather Underground.  Although they never managed to bring about revolution, they did embed themselves in the memory of a nation, and are certain to be a source of contention for years to come.