Days of Rage (15 page)

In January 1970 the first of the Weathermen began going “underground.” The term itself had many meanings to many people, but in general being underground in America during the 1970s simply meant living under an assumed identity. The underground wasn’t a place; it was a lifestyle, a fugitive lifestyle. There were many shades of it, though, especially with Weatherman. Some, as in Sam Melville’s circle, never got around to adopting new identities and performed clandestine duties while carrying their actual identification. Then there were the “aboveground” supporters, of whom Weatherman had many, perhaps hundreds, far more than any subsequent underground group. These would include onetime SDSers, purged Weathermen, friends, family, and others in the Movement; by far the most useful were an array of determined radical attorneys. These people helped with a range of tasks, raising money, arranging secret meetings, and acting as couriers. From time to time some even pitched in to help with the group’s bombings.

There is a mistaken notion that Weatherman somehow created the underground; it didn’t. In fact, by the time its first members began to disappear, a new kind of underground had been thriving in the United States for several years. By far its largest concentration of members were military deserters and draft dodgers fleeing service in Vietnam. The Pentagon listed 73,121 deserters in 1969, 89,088 more in 1970. Many turned themselves in, were arrested, or fled to Canada. But draft-resistance groups estimated that between 35,000 and 50,000 deserters were living underground in the United States in 1970. The FBI’s central computer listed 75,000 additional criminal fugitives. Even assuming some overlap between these groups, the hundred or so Weathermen amounted to a handful of new fish in a teeming underground sea.

This new American underground was enabled by a loose network of service providers, from sellers of false ID and cross-border smugglers to people who would provide safe haven, sometimes in the new communes springing up around the country. One of the most surprising things about living underground, in fact, was how often members helped out fellow travelers;
Weatherman cells would later shelter several outside fugitives. There were even specialized undergrounds, such as an archipelago of black supporters who sheltered fugitive Black Panthers, and a disciplined Catholic underground that helped hide draft resisters and other Movement figures. While the underground was not a place, certain places did draw the underground, especially cities with vibrant Movement politics. New York and the San Francisco Bay Area were the most popular, along with Boston and Seattle, where many Weathermen would eventually find sanctuary.

Living underground required self-discipline. By late 1969 lists of dos and don’ts were appearing regularly in the radical press. Among them: Avoid automobiles whenever possible; drivers are stopped and asked for identification far more than individuals using public transportation. Never drive at night; that’s when most traffic stops are made. Avoid drugs and alcohol unless in a secure environment; both impair judgment. Assume that every telephone is tapped. If a phone must be used, make it a pay phone. One fugitive gave this advice in the
Liberated Guardian
newspaper:

Cities are generally safer than rural areas or small towns. Avoid communes. Don’t wear clothes that are likely to draw suspicion (i.e., military boots or jackets if you were in the Army). Don’t turn up at well-known pads. . . . Your involvement in movement activities is up to you. But be aware that your jeopardy increases with the amount of involvement. . . . Once you have a name stick to it, unless you blow it and have to start again. . . . Use only a few trustworthy contacts in different locations to channel your mail. Place your letter in an envelope, omit the return address, send it in another envelope. . . . Avoid leaving fingerprints anywhere, wear gloves in handling letters. . . . Libraries are cool [but] don’t check out books with suspicious titles [and] stay away from the out-of-town newspaper rack.

By 1970, thanks to the influx of deserters and draft dodgers, the underground had taken on a decidedly left-wing flavor. An armed robber who escaped from a Midwestern prison that year was startled to find how Movement sympathizers had transformed life on the run. Sitting in New York’s Washington Square, he sang their praises to a
New York Times
reporter:

The Movement people are fabulous. They have a real underground that takes care of you. No matter where I went they made sure I had something to eat, they introduced me to others, they made me feel safe. . . . I’ve only been here three weeks now, but I feel completely different from all the other times I’ve been on the run. It’s not a hassle like it was alone. I’m part of a community. The underground is much bigger than you’d think. It’s all around. I could go from place to place for weeks and there’d always be a place I could stay and people to take care of me. . . . Whether you call us criminals or radicals, we’ve all been [screwed] by society, we’re all on the lam together.

Among the first Weathermen to enter this strange new world was Jeff Jones, who related his introduction to it in his son Thai Jones’s 2004 book,
A Radical Line
. His journey began in San Francisco that January, at a meal in a Chinatown restaurant, with “a man in a trench coat whom he had never seen before and would never see again.” The man helped draft dodgers. After dim sum and tea, the stranger dipped into his pocket and, in exchange for cash, handed Jones an envelope filled with blank government documents: birth and baptismal certificates and draft cards. All Jones had to do was fill in the blanks and overnight he could be someone else.

As scores of Weathermen would do in the coming months, Jones began constructing not one but several false identities; if one was discovered, he had a second ready. Classifying himself 4F, he typed in names on the draft cards, sticking to “J” names: John, Jake, Jason. With a draft card and a false birth certificate, he was able to enroll in a three-hour driving course to obtain a California driver’s license. By his own reckoning, Jones would take versions of this course more than twenty times. He researched which states required the least information for a license and spent weeks haunting small-town and out-of-the-way Department of Motor Vehicles offices.

“Building” false identities became a never-ending job for most people in the underground. In those early days, when a man in a trench coat couldn’t be found, many Weathermen resorted to stealing purses and wallets and using driver’s licenses they found inside. Eventually, petty theft came to be frowned upon as an unacceptable risk; worse, once a license was reported stolen, its use could get the thief arrested. Bill Ayers recalled once using a stolen license and
credit card to rent a fancy car and buy new clothes, until Jeff Jones showed him how foolish he was being. (Shoplifting, however, was a common pastime; when Cathy Wilkerson needed a winter coat on her arrival in New York, she walked out of a boutique with one.) In time even dealing with ID brokers was deemed too risky. By the spring, most Weathermen had begun building false identities employing an old Communist Party trick: using the birth certificates of long-dead infants to file for Social Security cards and other government identification papers. Dead babies could be identified by searching old newspapers or, as Ayers did more than once, walking the grounds of remote cemeteries in search of infant graves dated between 1940 and 1950. Collecting their birth certificates became a “small industry,” Ayers recalled; soon the group would amass hundreds of them.

“I used a blank birth certificate; somebody stole it for me,” recalls Paul Bradley. “In time I had a pretty darn good set of ID. The only thing we couldn’t figure out was credit cards, so we used cash for everything. For airplane flights, for rent, for everything.”

 • • • 

As the last of the old collectives were purged that February, the survivors were herded into three sets of new underground collectives, sometimes called tribes, to be based in New York City, San Francisco, and the Midwest. Two tribes were based in Manhattan. One, tasked with gathering money and false identification, was headquartered in a Chinatown apartment under JJ’s supervision; Mark Rudd took a bed there, along with Paul Bradley, Ron Fliegelman, the SDS printer, and others. The second tribe, led by Terry Robbins, was to plan and carry out East Coast bombings; its dozen or so members were initially spread across several Manhattan and Brooklyn apartments. In the Midwest, the collectives in Pittsburgh, Columbus, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati were shut down; the survivors gathered in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo under the loose supervision of Bill Ayers.

The rest of the leadership, including Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Howie Machtinger, along with fifteen or so others, made their way to San Francisco, where two apartments were rented, on Geary Street and in Haight-Ashbury. Later Dohrn and Jones decided to distance themselves from the others, establishing a West Coast headquarters of sorts on a pink houseboat they rented at the Sausalito piers for $200 a month. The decision to relocate to the Bay Area, where SDS had little presence, was later a cause for some head-scratching. Some would cite San Francisco’s importance as a center of the burgeoning youth culture, which was part of it. Another reason for the decision was Jeff Jones’s familiarity with the area’s New Left community. Yet another was the crucial presence of one of Dohrn’s closest friends, the radical attorney Michael Kennedy, who would soon emerge as perhaps Weather’s most useful aboveground supporter.

In those first days Dohrn and Jones found California liberating. All the hassle of Chicago—the police raids, the street fighting, the constant surveillance—seemed swept away in the cool seaside breezes. The houseboat had a fireplace and a metal ladder to the roof, where Dohrn sunbathed, sometimes topless. Overhead, seagulls swooped to and fro. As in New York, they established two collectives in San Francisco, one to gather money and false documentation, and a second, supervised by Machtinger, which prepared to stage bombings on the West Coast.

Outside the leadership, there was widespread confusion as to what kinds of actions were authorized (as there was for decades afterward). There would be bombings, everyone assumed, but what kind? “There was so much macho talk, you know, like the Panthers, ‘Off the pigs,’ ‘Bomb the military back into the Stone Age,’” recalls Cathy Wilkerson. “But did that mean we were actually going to kill people? I never really knew.” Bill Ayers and others would later insist there were never any plans to harm people, only symbols of power: courthouses, police stations, government buildings. The handful of Weathermen who crossed that line, Ayers claims, were rogues and outliers. This is a myth, pure and simple, designed to obscure what Weatherman actually planned. In the middle ranks, in fact, it was widely expected that Weathermen would become revolutionary murderers. “My image of what we were gonna be was undiluted terrorist action,” recalls Jon Lerner. “I remember talking with Teddy Gold about putting a bomb on the [Chicago railroad] tracks at rush hour, to blow up people coming home from work. That’s what I was looking forward to.”

In fact, what constituted a legitimate target for a Weatherman bombing was the topic of sensitive discussions among the leadership at Flint. It was during these talks, according to Howard Machtinger and one other person who were present, that the leadership agreed that they would, in fact, kill people. But not just any people. The people Weatherman intended to kill were policemen. “If your definition of terrorism is, you don’t care who gets hurt, we agreed we wouldn’t do that,” recalls Machtinger. “But as to causing damage, or literally killing people, we were prepared to do that.” According to one side of the argument, says Machtinger, “if all Americans were compliant in the war, then everyone is a target. There are no innocents. That was always Terry and JJ’s argument. But we did have a series of discussions about what you could do, and it was agreed that cops were legitimate targets. We didn’t want to do things just around the war. We wanted to be seen targeting racism as well, so police were important.” Military personnel were ruled to be legitimate targets as well.

The decision to attack policemen was an unspoken act of solidarity with the group whose approval mattered most to Weatherman leadership: Movement blacks, especially the Black Panthers, who reserved a special hatred for urban police. The death of Fred Hampton and the brutality of the Chicago police in general made almost everyone in the leadership eager to seek revenge against policemen. “In our hearts, I think what all of us wanted to be were Black Panthers,” Cathy Wilkerson recalls. “And it was no secret what the Panthers wanted to do, which is what the Black Liberation Army did later, and that’s kill policemen. It’s all they wanted to do.”

By the first week of February 1970, all three Weatherman groups—San Francisco, the Midwest, and New York—were more or less in place. Everyone, at least in the leadership, understood what would come next: bombings. Perhaps surprisingly, there appears to have been no coordination among the three groups, no overarching plan of attack. Instead, the field marshals in each group—Howie Machtinger in San Francisco, Bill Ayers in the Midwest, and Terry Robbins in New York—mapped out their initial actions independently. Given Weatherman’s leadership culture, it is hardly surprising that a keen competition arose among the three men and their acolytes to see who could launch the first, and splashiest, attacks.

“The problem with Weather wasn’t that people disagreed with our ideology,” Machtinger says. “It was that they thought we were wimpy. The sense was, if we could do something dramatic, people would follow us. But we had to act fast. We had no idea what Terry and Billy were doing, they had no idea what we were doing, but everyone wanted to be first.” Adds Wilkerson, “That was the real problem: all these macho guys with their macho posturing, seeing who could be the big man and strike first.”

Working from the Geary Street apartment, Machtinger and the leadership were determined to strike quickly. They decided to mount an attack on the police, sending male-and-female teams—posing as lovebirds—to scout police stations throughout the Bay Area. They selected the sprawling Hall of Justice complex in Berkeley as their first target. No one involved would remember where they obtained the dynamite—“I don’t remember that being a problem,” Machtinger recalls—but they managed to assemble two pipe bombs at Geary Street. Each device carried two sticks of dynamite linked to an alarm clock. The devices were wiped with alcohol to remove any fingerprints.