Days of Rage (16 page)

The new Weatherman underground made its unannounced debut six weeks after Flint, late on the evening of Thursday, February 12, when five or six Weathermen edged into position around the Berkeley police complex. There had been no warning call; this was intended to be an ambush, pure and simple. Just before midnight, when shifts would change, sending dozens of off-duty policemen out to their cars, two Weathermen crept into the parking lot. One bomb was placed beside a detective’s car; a second was tossed on the ground between cars. A few minutes after midnight, as officers began wandering outside, the first bomb detonated, its deep boom echoing through the downtown streets. Nearly thirty plate-glass windows in the adjoining municipal building shattered. More than two dozen officers were in the parking lot, and one, a reserve patrolman named Paul Morgan, was struck by shrapnel that mangled his left arm; he would later undergo six hours of surgery to save it. Thirty seconds later, as groups of stunned policemen slowly rose from the pavement, the second bomb went off, shattering more windows. Afterward, a half-dozen cops would be treated for bruises and broken eardrums.

“We wanted to do it at a shift change, frankly, to maximize deaths,” says a Weatherman cadre who took part in the action that night. “They were cops, so anyone was fair game. Basically it was seen as a successful action. But
others, yeah, were angry that a policeman didn’t die. There was no one that was anti that. That was what we were trying to do.”

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Because Weatherman took no credit for the Berkeley bombing, it received none. Until now, no history or memoir of the group has mentioned it, much less its intent, which has allowed apologists like Bill Ayers to claim that Weatherman never intended to hurt people. Even at the time, the attack received little notice, in large part because there were so many bombings that winter. In just the two-week period before and afterward, from February 6 to February 21, 1970, there were seventeen incidents of significant radical violence in the United States, including two bombings by a Puerto Rican independence group in New York on February 9; a firebombing in Ypsilanti, Michigan, on February 11; the bombing of a police station in Danbury, Connecticut, that injured twenty-three people on February 13; another set of bombings in Berkeley, believed to be the work of black militants, on February 16; and sundry other bombings in Hartford, Boston, and Maryland.

One of the enduring mysteries of the Weatherman story centers on one of these seemingly unrelated incidents. It happened just four nights after the Berkeley bombing, on the evening of Monday, February 16. A steady rain was falling as a forty-four-year-old San Francisco police sergeant named Brian McDonnell sorted through bulletins at a Teletype machine inside the Park Police Station in the upper Haight neighborhood. At 10:45 p.m., with no warning, a bomb exploded on an outside window ledge, just feet from where McDonnell was standing. The device was packed with inch-long industrial fence staples, many of which erupted through the window and shredded McDonnell’s face, severing his jugular vein and lodging in his brain; he was dead within two days. Detectives later surmised that the bomb had been timed to go off at the 11 p.m. shift change, much as the first Weatherman bomb had gone off at the Berkeley station.

The case has never been solved, but from the beginning San Francisco police suspected Weatherman. In 1972 detectives debriefed a Bay Area radical named Matthew Landy Steen, who claimed to have joined planning sessions for the action with Dohrn and Machtinger, among others. Two years later, in sworn testimony before a Senate committee, the FBI informant Larry Grathwohl claimed that Bill Ayers told a Weatherman meeting in Buffalo, New York, that Dohrn had supervised the attack; investigators, however, discounted this. They put more weight on stories told by a Weather associate named Karen Latimer, who emerged in the mid-1970s to tell of another meeting at which Dohrn presided and Machtinger oversaw the bomb building. According to a 2009 article in
San Francisco Weekly
, prosecutors came close to indicting Dohrn, Machtinger, and Jeff Jones in the late 1970s on Latimer’s word alone.

The case lay fallow until 1999, when a task force of retired prosecutors and FBI agents reopened it as part of a drive to prosecute several unsolved ’60s-era killings. Latimer’s death, however, as well as a lack of any physical evidence, has to date precluded any indictment. Still, as late as 2010, authorities asked several Weathermen, including Machtinger, to give voice and handwriting samples. Few believe the case will ever be solved. Needless to say, the Weathermen who were in San Francisco at the time all deny any involvement. “That Berkeley action took weeks of planning,” says one. “Given that, it’s not like we could turn around and do another one four days later.”

 • • • 

As Weatherman initiated its first attacks on police in February 1970, the most complex management task fell to twenty-five-year-old Bill Ayers, who found himself shuttling between collectives in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo. By the time of the Berkeley bombing on February 13, he had plans for similar actions under way in the Midwest. A vivid glimpse of Ayers in action during this period was later provided by Larry Grathwohl, the Cincinnati student who had joined Weatherman the previous fall.
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According to Grathwohl’s account, Ayers chaired his first strategy
meeting in a vacant classroom at Wayne State University in Detroit. He led six Weathermen in a discussion of possible targets for a kidnapping or a bombing, including Vice President Spiro Agnew and Detroit’s mayor. Grathwohl sensed that Ayers already had a target in mind, and watched as he guided the group toward it. At the time, three Detroit police officers were on trial in the deaths of three black youths during a 1967 riot. “Where did [those] pigs get the money to hire decent lawyers?” Ayers asked. “The Police Officers Association put up the money.” When someone mentioned that the association had a headquarters downtown, Ayers pounced. “We blast that fucking building to hell,” he said. “And we do it when the place is crowded. We wait for them to have a meeting, or a social event. Then we strike.”
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The attack, Ayers indicated, would come at the same time that a second Weatherman group bombed the Detroit police’s 13th Precinct house. Ayers unfolded a piece of paper on which he had drawn the neighborhood around the association headquarters. As the group studied it, he assigned each member a task, constructing disguises, securing a getaway car, and, for Grathwohl, scouting the target. Grathwohl, who was in regular contact with his FBI handlers, later told Ayers that he objected to his plan to place the bomb on a window ledge, which faced a restaurant called the Red Barn. “We’ll blow out the Red Barn restaurant,” he argued. “Maybe even kill a few innocent customers—and most of them are black.”

According to Grathwohl’s account, Ayers was unconcerned with killing innocent passersby, as was his best friend, Terry Robbins, in New York; both were regularly overheard to make comments to the effect that “collateral damage” was to be expected in any war. “We can’t protect all the innocent people in the world,” Ayers said, according to Grathwohl. “Some will get killed. Some of us will get killed. We have to accept that fact.”

In the end, the two bombs, composed of forty-four sticks of dynamite, were placed exactly as Ayers planned, on the night of March 6, by which time Grathwohl had been transferred to another city. Detroit police found them before they exploded, however, either because they were built improperly or because Grathwohl alerted the FBI in time to remove them.

Another of Ayers’s collectives, Cleveland, led by a Columbia SDS veteran named John Fuerst, was almost as ambitious. It was a group of six or seven that included two high school girls, one a sixteen-year-old dropout named Joanna Zilsel, who had made a life attending Weatherman and other demonstrations. Zilsel’s parents were prominent progressives in the Cleveland area, but when her mother prevented her from attending the Days of Rage and Flint, she left home to join Weatherman. “We didn’t have money, we didn’t have anything, we were figuring things out on the fly; the only stuff we had we shoplifted,” Zilsel recalls. “I think people were quite confused about what we were supposed to be doing. I know I was.”

At one point, John Fuerst met with Bill Ayers. According to an informant—apparently one of the high schoolers—who spoke to the FBI in 1972, Ayers told Fuerst to focus on targets linked to the case of a militant convicted of murdering three Cleveland policemen, Ahmed Evans. How and what they did, however, was left to the Cleveland collective. “When [Fuerst] came back, he said, ‘You know, we’re on our own. That’s just the way it is. All over the country there are cells, and everyone is doing their own thing,’” Zilsel says. “I don’t remember hearing even a flavor of marching orders. It was more: Here we are, a group of individuals with a very strong commitment to making urgently needed change. The war had to be ended, racism had to be stopped, the system had to be changed. So we did the best we could.”

The Cleveland collective launched its first action early on the morning of Monday, March 2. Their target was the home of a detective named Frank Schaeffer, president of the Fraternal Order of Police. At about 1:15 a.m., members of the collective crept into Schaeffer’s front yard, Molotov cocktails ready to be lit. “We had a very clear plan, with designated responsibilities, signals and a driver,” recalls Zilsel. “We went over this many, many times. And we were there and this young man, he was standing right beside me, he just lights the thing and throws it. With no coordination, just forgetting the plan. He just lost it. And we’re like, ‘Oh, my God, this is happening.’ So I instantly said, ‘There is no choice here, you have to follow through.’ And so I [threw mine]. And we got away. It was just sheer panic and confusion.” The firebombs ignited on the front porch. Wakened, Schaeffer and his son rushed out and extinguished the flames.

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Oddly, it was the most aggressive of the Weatherman leaders, Terry Robbins, whose New York collective was the last to mobilize. Obliged to serve a six-week jail sentence following a demonstration, Robbins didn’t arrive in Manhattan until late January, when actions proposed by the California and Midwestern groupings were well into the planning stages. Robbins, however, was determined that if his debut came last, it would be the splashiest.

A glimpse of Robbins’s preparations comes from his girlfriend at the time, Cathy Wilkerson. Unlike Ayers, who granted subordinates wide latitude, Robbins took full control from the outset. At an initial meeting, the mood was grim—no jokes, no laughter. After months of airy talk, they were finally going to war. Robbins announced that he intended to launch three simultaneous firebombings. They discussed an array of targets, including buildings at Columbia and various police precincts. They made their move on the frigid night of Saturday, February 21, 1970. Robbins had gathered the makings of at least nine Molotov cocktails—each a glass bottle filled with gasoline, with a cloth inserted into its mouth, ignited by, of all things, a firecracker. That night everyone gathered around a gasoline can behind a supermarket, filled their bottles, and scattered to their targets. The first bomb was tossed at a patrol car outside the NYPD’s Charles Street precinct at 1:30 a.m.; a second blew up in the street nearby. Neither caused any damage. Two hours later two more were thrown at navy and army recruitment booths near Brooklyn College; the booths were scorched. A fifth ignited on the steps of the Columbia University law library.

Robbins himself led a group into the Inwood neighborhood, at Manhattan’s northern tip, to the redbrick home of John Murtagh, the judge overseeing the Panther 21 conspiracy trial. Murtagh was asleep inside with his wife and three children. Before placing the bombs, the group scrawled
FREE THE PANTHER 21
and
THE VIETCONG HAVE WON
on the sidewalk. A neighbor called the police, who sent a patrol car. Before it arrived, the Weathermen placed three shopping bags containing Molotov cocktails beside the front door, on a window ledge, and beneath a car in the garage. All three went off at 4:30 a.m., blowing out two of the home’s windows and scorching the car.
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As a “political action,” it was amateurish. On Sunday morning the bombings drew headlines in the New York papers, but Weatherman’s role went unreported; as in Berkeley, it had not sent a communiqué. Without it, “no one knew what they were about,” Wilkerson recalled. “It didn’t feel like we had accomplished anything. Firebombing had become routine. We could do them until we were blue in the face, and the government wouldn’t really care.”
⁴

Robbins was disgusted with himself and the group for launching such an inconsequential attack. He began laying plans for something far more ambitious. First, though, they needed to get organized. The collective’s members were scattered across the city, and when Wilkerson mentioned that her father was taking a Caribbean vacation, Robbins startled her by asking whether she could get a key to the family townhouse, on Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village. The suggestion hit Wilkerson “like a ton of bricks,” she recalled, because it meant involving her family in her new underground life. She and her father, James, a radio executive, were estranged. Still, she went along, telephoning her father and telling him she had come down with the flu and needed a place to recuperate. He questioned her closely, then relented.

On Tuesday, February 24, Wilkerson visited the townhouse, on a quiet, tree-lined block just off Fifth Avenue, to see her father and stepmother off. She said nothing about anyone joining her there. Two hours later Teddy Gold and Terry Robbins arrived. Wilkerson, worried that a cousin might visit, pinned a note on the door saying she had the measles and would be watering the plants in her father’s absence; she was confident the cousin wouldn’t enter without at least a phone call. Robbins, meanwhile, toured the townhouse. It had four floors, plenty of bedrooms, and a subbasement with a workbench
where James Wilkerson sometimes worked refinishing antique furniture. It would be a good spot for the technical work Robbins envisioned.