Days of Rage (20 page)

That night Rudd and JJ retired to a bar in nearby Fort Bragg, where they drank and played pool. JJ was surprisingly sanguine. Rudd wrote that JJ told him:

“Someone has to take the blame. Bernardine, Billy, and Jeff are right about the military error.”

“But everyone knew what was being planned,” I said. . . .

“It doesn’t matter. We have to create the fiction that they were always right so that they can lead the organization.”

Inevitably, the subject turned to one of JJ’s favorite novels,
Darkness at Noon
, about the Stalin-era purges. “I always respected the fact that the old Bolshevik confessed for the sake of the revolution,” JJ said. “There had to be a single unified revolutionary party, even under Stalin’s leadership. The individual doesn’t count; it’s only the party and its place in history that’s important.”

He laughed. “At least they’re not going to liquidate me,” he said. “I’ll be back.”
⁸

But JJ never came back. In fact, he never really recovered. Wanted by the FBI, he would wander the United States and Mexico for years, eventually settling in Vancouver. There, calling himself Wayne Curry, he worked odd jobs, ultimately making a living as a low-level marijuana dealer. He died of cancer in 1997, forgotten.

As sad as it was to his friends, Rudd wrote years later, “JJ’s expulsion was a brilliant maneuver that successfully rewrote history. Suddenly no one remembered how universally accepted the old ‘Fight the people, all white people are guilty’ line was.” No one would remember that they had tried to kill policemen. “Weather’s history,” Rudd wrote, “had been conveniently cleaned.” A myth was born. “The myth, and this is always Bill Ayers’s line, is that Weather never set out to kill people, and it’s not true—we did,” says Howie Machtinger. “You know, policemen were fair game. What Terry was gonna do, while it was over our line, it wasn’t that far over our line, not like everyone said later. I mean, he wasn’t on a different planet from where we were.”

 • • • 

When the meetings ended, Dohrn sat down with a tape recorder and, in a single take, dictated Weatherman’s first communiqué. Her voice was calm, her tone the thoughtful grad student. “Hello, this is Bernardine Dohrn,” she began. “I’m going to read a declaration of war.”

This initial declaration, soon to be quoted in newspapers around the country, gave no hint of the group’s proposed retreat from murderous violence; if anything, it celebrated violence. The statement is notable in that it makes only a single reference to the war; as Dohrn makes clear, Weatherman’s true
motivation was fighting alongside the blacks they imagined were in revolt against the U.S. government:

Black people have been fighting almost alone for years. We’ve known that our job is to lead white kids to armed revolution. . . . Kids know that the lines are drawn; revolution is touching all of our lives. Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way. Now we are adapting the classic guerrilla strategy of [Uruguay’s] Tupamaros to our own situation here in the most technically advanced country in the world. . . .

Within the next fourteen days we will attack a symbol or institution of Amerikan injustice. This is the way we celebrate the example of Eldridge Cleaver and H. Rap Brown and all black revolutionaries who first inspired us by their fight behind enemy lines for the liberation of their people.

Never again will they fight alone.

It was a bold and, especially given the humiliation of the Townhouse, astonishingly arrogant statement. Weatherman was a shell of its former self; it had lost hundreds of supporters and dozens of members. Many believed it could never survive the emotional wreckage of the Townhouse. Yet Weatherman’s challenge now was as much technical as logistical. If it was to actually carry out a “war” against the U.S. government, it needed to find a way to do so without getting any more of its members killed. The bomb Terry Robbins had been building had no “safety switch,” that is, no way to test it short of detonation. Their first task, Dohrn and Jones were uncomfortably aware, was finding a way to build a safe bomb. “There was a flaw in our design,” Cathy Wilkerson recalls. “Howie and the San Francisco people, they had been lucky, because the design wasn’t safe, it was primitive. I was eager to fix it, for any number of reasons. I was eager to learn. There was a sense I was responsible for the Townhouse. And yes, a part of me wanted to finish what Terry had started.”

In San Francisco, Wilkerson, Paul Bradley, and several others obtained chemistry and explosives manuals and began studying bomb design. “We just went to the store and bought books,” Wilkerson recalls. “
Popular Mechanics
magazines. I needed all that stuff. I needed to figure out how electricity
works. Protons, neutrons, I didn’t know any of that stuff.” The most serious work, however, was done back east. Even before Mendocino, Jeff Jones had returned to New York and sat down on a Central Park bench with Ron Fliegelman. “We were talking about the Townhouse, and I said, ‘I don’t want this to happen again,’” Fliegelman recalls. “He was talking politics, you know, ‘This wouldn’t have happened without bad politics,’ and I said, basically, that’s crap. You either know how to build something or you don’t. He said, ‘Well, what do we do?’ And I said, ‘This can never happen again. I’ll take care of it.’ And I did.”

In all the thousands of words written about Weatherman in the past forty years, including six memoirs, three other books, two films, and countless news articles, not one devotes a single sentence to Ron Fliegelman. Yet it was Fliegelman who emerged as the group’s unsung hero. Beginning that day in Central Park, he devoted hundreds of hours to the study of explosives and, in the process, became what Weatherman desperately needed: its bomb guru. “Without him,” says Brian Flanagan, “there would be no Weather Underground.”

In a group that at that point had shrunk to barely thirty or so members, many of whom were effete intellectuals, Fliegelman was the one person who knew how to strip down and reassemble guns, motorcycles, and radios, who knew how to weld, who could fix almost anything. He had always been this way. The son of a suburban Philadelphia doctor, Fliegelman had from an early age been fascinated by how things work. His grandfather, a steelworker, never objected when he returned home to find that little Ron had taken apart the alarm clock. By his teens he could disassemble and rebuild any kind of engine. He was never much in the classroom, dropping out of two colleges before washing up at Goddard College in Vermont, where Russell Neufeld, who became his lifelong friend, invited him to join Weatherman in Chicago. When SDS ran out of money to pay its printer, Fliegelman took over himself, cranking out hundreds of leaflets before crushing his hand in the machinery. Aimless up to that point in life, he discovered in Weatherman a new purpose, a new meaning. “I knew none of these people, and they didn’t know me,” he recalls. “But I was opposed to the war and racism, and I thought, ‘This is pretty cool.’”

Squat and stout, with a bushy black beard, Fliegelman plunged headlong
into the study of dynamite. “Everyone was afraid of the stuff, for good reason,” he says. “What we were dealing with was a group of intellectuals who didn’t know how to do anything with their hands. I did. I wasn’t afraid of it, I knew it could be handled. When you’re young and you’re confident, you can do anything. So, yeah, you play with it, and try to build something. The timer is the whole thing, right? It’s just electricity going into the blasting cap. Eventually I came up with a thing where I inserted a lightbulb, and when the bulb lit, the circuit was complete, and we were able to test things that way. If the light came on, it worked. The rest of it is simple.”

It is perhaps appropriate that Weatherman’s two principal bomb makers, Ron Fliegelman and Cathy Wilkerson, would in time come together and have a child. Forty years later Wilkerson, while acknowledging Fliegelman’s primacy in explosives, isn’t so certain her onetime boyfriend should take sole credit for Weatherman’s bomb design. Fliegelman, however, has no doubt. “New York fixed the problem,” he says with emphasis. “And we taught it to San Francisco. Cathy was the only technical one out there. She knew how to build the thing, but she was the only one out there who could do it.” In the years to come, Fliegelman reckons he personally built the vast majority of the group’s bombs, flying to the Bay Area on a number of occasions. “Maybe they did two or three things without me,” he says, “but I doubt it.”

 • • • 

In Weatherman’s May 21 declaration of war, Dohrn had promised to attack a major symbol of American power within fourteen days. In Weather lore, and in previous histories, that is what they did. But the reality, according to several alumni, was not only far more complicated but far more embarrassing, not to mention harmful to the myth that Weather had now dedicated itself to solely nonviolent actions.

The actual “battle plan,” such as it was, consisted of at least three actions. The first suggests that, its own propaganda aside, Weatherman was still actively considering high crimes. It went beyond anything ever attempted in radical circles to that point, and had it been successful, it might have altered the history of the underground. The action involved a small coterie of
Weathermen led by Howie Machtinger, who related his version of events to the author in 2011.

According to him, he was asked by the leadership to take the group on a super-secret mission to the state of Maine. Their task, Machtinger says, was the kidnapping of a member of the Rockefeller family, said to be at a summer home whose exact location has been lost to time. “I don’t even remember which Rockefeller it was,” he says. “I just remember we went up there, got a hotel, and drove around a lot, not even sure what we were supposed to do. We were there like a week, and eventually, you know, we didn’t have any plan, we just kind of gave up.” What Machtinger does remember, however, is the leadership’s wrath when he returned in defeat to San Francisco. Though he had been one of the group’s eleven founders and had been among those considered the early leadership, he was now abruptly dismissed from Weatherman and exiled to Seattle. “You know, there’s this myth that Bernardine ruled out any violent actions after Mendocino, but it’s just not true,” Machtinger says. “The line is much blurrier than that. The fact is, we were prepared to do a political kidnapping, and in fact we tried to, but we weren’t able to carry it out.”

The second stage of the war plans involved something almost as dramatic: the bombings of major centers of power on both coasts. The targets were the San Francisco Hall of Justice, the massive concrete monolith that housed the courts and the police department, and the headquarters of the New York Police Department. The San Francisco bomb was placed in a men’s room drain; a warning was phoned in, but the device failed to detonate, presumably because the Bay Area Weathermen had yet to master a working bomb design. Though rumors of the incident floated among FBI agents for years, details were only confirmed in David Gilbert’s 2012 book,
Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond
. Afterward, Gilbert writes, “we had the awkward but necessary responsibility of telling the authorities [by telephone] exactly where the device was hidden so that the bomb squad could find and defuse it, thus giving police forensics an intact example of our circuit and components.”
*
9
By the June 4 deadline, in fact, neither the San
Francisco nor New York actions had taken place. This was a significant setback for the organization; war had been declared, actions had been promised, and nothing had happened. “Raising people’s hopes that high isn’t a good way to build trust in the underground,” griped a letter writer to the
Berkeley Tribe
.

Weather’s reputation was salvaged in the near term by its fledgling New York cell, which would come to play an outsized role in future actions. The cell’s importance has never been publicly explored, largely because until now its members have declined to discuss its operations. But it was surprisingly small: Before the Townhouse, Weather could count as many as thirty-five active members in New York; afterward, while outsiders and aboveground supporters drifted in and out, the core of the “new” New York cell was rarely more than six people, including Ron Fliegelman. Its leader was Robbie Roth, the twenty-year-old student who had replaced Mark Rudd as head of Columbia’s SDS chapter. Roth was a popular Weatherman, smart, generous, and easygoing, traits Dohrn and the others recognized. Weather’s post-Mendocino leadership has usually been understood as comprising three people—Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Bill Ayers—but in fact, Roth was named leadership’s fourth member after the Townhouse.

Months later the New York cell’s third prominent member, Eleanor Stein, would be named the fifth member of Weather’s Central Committee. Stein was a classic “red diaper” baby, intense and committed. That June she, Roth, and Fliegelman were living with several others in an apartment they rented in a house on Amity Street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. (“That place took all the romance out of the underground for me,” recalls Stein’s ex-husband, Jonah Raskin, a Weatherman supporter who visited often. “A single apartment, upper floor, remaindered furniture, with a half-dozen people crammed inside.”) Fliegelman had purchased dynamite in Vermont under an assumed name; he kept it in a garage they rented nearby. Forty years later, he shudders at the memory of that first bombing, at NYPD headquarters. “That first one was the scariest,” he recalls. “Going into a public building, there was security, and you had to get past it. We had people who did the casings. We needed people who wouldn’t be noticed, so they went in dressed like lawyers. Still, I was scared. Very scared. We knew if we did this, they would come after us.”

The “casers” identified a second-floor men’s room as an ideal spot to hide a bomb: It was just 125 feet from Police Commissioner Howard Leary’s office. In the years to come, public bathrooms would become Weatherman’s favorite target. Stall doors allowed a measure of privacy, and many bathrooms could be locked from within. At the Amity Street apartment, Fliegelman built the bomb, a large one, using his new design: about fifteen sticks of dynamite and a Westclox alarm clock purchased at a Radio Shack. The challenge was smuggling it into the building; they couldn’t risk having a backpack or briefcase searched. In the end, Fliegelman says, they hollowed out a thick law book and placed the bomb inside. Exactly who walked it through security and placed it above a ceiling tile in the bathroom has never been disclosed, but by the afternoon of Tuesday, June 9, the bomb was in place. “It wasn’t like they had metal detectors back then,” Fliegelman says. “There was just a guy at a desk, and we walked right past him.”