Days of Rage (22 page)

A unique glimpse of a Weatherman bombing is offered in an unpublished manuscript written by a young radical named Marvin Doyle, who worked closely with the leadership beginning in 1971.
*
In it, he gives a detailed portrait of the intense days leading to a bombing, including interaction between the national leadership and local cadres and coordination between West and East Coast bomb makers. The action Doyle describes was actually a double bombing, in August 1971, at two offices of the California Department of Corrections. Dohrn, he writes, placed great emphasis on the need for local cadres to physically build the bomb and write the communiqué. For technical guidance, though, Ron Fliegelman was flown in from New York. Doyle describes Fliegelman as “roly-poly, with a big black beard, wire-rimmed glasses, and a Santa Claus twinkle in his eye that inspired confidence.”

They did their initial work at an apartment they rented in San Francisco’s Sunset district:

We sat down together in the [apartment], with [Paul Bradley] in attendance, going over [Fliegelman’s] sketches of the model circuit, with its safety light and a second safety circuit, or shunt, that connected the odd poles of the switch. The next day, we brought out the hardware and constructed a trial timing device together, soldering together a circuit connecting batteries, safety light, shunt, switch, blasting cap, and a pocket watch with the minute hand removed. One wire was soldered to a screw driven into the face of the watch and at the other end of the circuit was a wire soldered to the hour hand. When the hand reached the screw, the circuit was closed.

At twilight, we drove down to the south end of Ocean Beach, planted a cap in the sand and armed the device. Once the circuit was activated and the safety light stayed off, we flipped the switch that opened the circuit connecting the battery, clock and cap and stood back a few feet. The surf was pounding at our backs and the sky was getting darker as we waited out the short interval we had set on the pocket watch. At the expected moment, more or less, there was a dull thud and a burst of sand exploded into the air. The test was right.

Afterward, Jeff Jones took Doyle to inspect the dynamite they would use, kept in a rented garage in an industrial area. They closely inspected the paper wrapping, looking for beads of “sweat” that might indicate that the explosives had begun deteriorating. There were none. Two days before the action, the bombing team began moving into a hotel room, this one on Lombard Street, to finish its preparations. They assembled their disguises, mostly wigs and fake mustaches, along with the wiring, two alarm clocks, and ten sticks of dynamite.

Arrivals and departures from the motel were tightly rationed—we didn’t want it to look like a dope dealer had set up shop. The electrical equipment was brought in first. [Fliegelman] and I started working on the wiring that first night. Remove the minute hand from the pocket watch and drive a small screw into the face of the dial, soldering it fast. That way you can set the detonation eleven hours or so ahead, with a timing circuit that closes when the hour hand touches the screw. One wire is attached to the screw, another connected to the hour hand, and these wires lead back around to each other in a loop that also includes a nine-volt battery, the blasting cap, the safety switch, and the safety light—the all-important warning that goes on if by accident the timing circuit . . . shorts out. . . .

As much as possible, [Fliegelman] had me solder the connections, after several extensive practice sessions, and under his close supervision. We had the thing pretty well built and were testing the connections by midmorning Friday, when one of the boys from LA delivered the shoebox full of TNT. [Dohrn] was in and out, keeping the East Coast informed and nailing down arrangements for afterwards, when quite a few people would want to be out of town.

On the day of the action, parts of the bomb itself were slid into a shoe box. Fliegelman cut a small hole in one end, through which the safety switch and the light would be visible. Doyle had been chosen to carry the bomb to the target in a Pan Am flight bag. The final task was packing the detonating circuit into the sticks of dynamite:

[Fliegelman] and I did this together, four hands carefully moulding and fitting the package together, looking up into each other’s eyes every so often to share the immediate experience of our consciousness and resolve. Everyone else in the room—three or four others—seemed to finish what they were doing in time to watch the lid go on the box and be taped down. [Bradley] slid the box into the airline bag, switch and light facing up, then zippered the bag shut and hung it on my shoulder. Hugs and kisses all around and out the door into the bright California sunshine.

Bradley drove Doyle to the Corrections building on the downtown waterfront. There was no security. They simply walked into the lobby and stepped to the elevator. Doyle had scouted the location, moving a ceiling panel on an upper floor where they would plant the bomb.

[Bradley] was unusually quiet, unusually sparing with his customary bonhomie. “This is it, eh? Not much you can say,” was all he offered as we slid into one of the old cars. . . . [At the Corrections building] we would be looking for vending machines if anyone asked, but were confused about which floor they were on. [Arriving at the floor, Bradley] went ahead to the alcove. The hallway was empty as I followed him. Step around the corner, crisply now. The drop-ceiling panel is still out of place. I step into the corner and squat under the hole, bracing myself against the wall. [Bradley] steps up on my shoulders, as we practiced, and I stand. He sticks his head in the hole and takes a quick look around, spots the place he wants to put the package, then beckons me to hand it up. Unzip the bag, flip the switch that arms the bomb. Oh my God! I didn’t even look at the light! A subliminal flash—we could all be dead!—buried instantaneously by some bluff feral nerve. Alive! Let’s do this and stay alive. Up the parcel goes, my hands to his, into the hole. Squat again, step down, turn. One last moment of serious vulnerability, stepping back out into the main hall—all clear, nobody there, nobody looking. Split up. Leave in opposite directions. Don’t walk too fast. It’s two-thirty. Nine and a half hours to go.

We did it!

In keeping with the leadership’s insistence that local cadres do as much work as possible, Doyle himself called in the warning to police from a pay phone that night. He didn’t see or hear the explosion, which demolished a pair of empty offices. Afterward, when police began investigating, everyone left the city for several days.

“[Actions] were terrifying, just terrifying,” Paul Bradley recalls forty years later. “You just do it.”

 • • • 

They were doing it. After all that had happened—Chicago, Flint, the Townhouse—they were finally launching a true armed struggle in America. It all sounded so dramatic. Yet the day-to-day reality of the Weathermen’s lives was anything but. Many, especially those in San Francisco, lived on the edge of poverty. “I lived on Bisquick,” Cathy Wilkerson recalls. “Lots and lots of biscuits.”

For those outside the leadership, the emotional tumult that followed in the wake of the Townhouse gave way that summer to stretches of grinding boredom. Much of their time was spent waiting for orders, reading, taking long walks, smoking pot, building IDs, and perfecting disguises. Bill Ayers joked that you could always tell a Weatherman by their bad hair-dye jobs. Until the leadership issued a new set of marching orders, many cadres wondered what to do.

Between actions, for instance, the New Yorkers struggled to define their roles as “revolutionaries.” Should their work be limited to bombings? When money ran low—and it was always low—would true revolutionaries meekly wait for another donation from a radical lawyer or a family member? Or simply take what they needed? In the apartment in Cobble Hill, they debated whether to rob a bank, as other radical groups would do in the years to come. “The thinking was, we were revolutionaries, this is what revolutionaries do,” Fliegelman says. “In Uruguay the Tupamaros robbed banks. I mean, we were declaring war on the country. So whatever you have to do, you do.”

In the end, after considerable debate, Fliegelman says, they decided to stage a robbery. But not a bank. The logistics seemed far too daunting. Instead, once they finally mustered the courage to rob something, Fliegelman says with a sigh, “it was a steakhouse. In Westchester County. Two of us walked into the restaurant. And there was a driver outside. There was a cashier. They were scared to death. They pulled guns on the cashier and asked for all the money and they were given all the money. It wasn’t very much, a thousand or two.”

Afterward everyone felt awful. What if someone—a proletariat worker—had been shot? Would revolutionary ends have justified it? The entire exercise was humiliating, at once far too ambitious and yet, as Ivy League students just months before, somehow beneath them. Weatherman’s goal was the overthrow of the legitimate government of the United States of America. Yet they could barely summon the nerve to rob a steakhouse. Would the vaunted Tupamaros have robbed a steakhouse?

“I think we felt, this is just too hard for us,” says Fliegelman. “This is not what we are. You’re walking into a restaurant with a loaded gun. Are we willing to actually shoot someone? I guess we weren’t. We’re not thugs. We don’t rob people. [Our feelings] had to do with the middle-class white people we really were.”

 • • • 

One of the great mysteries of the Weatherman story involves the sources of its funding. Of the half-dozen largest underground groups active during the 1970s, it was one of only two that did not resort to armed robbery to raise money. Many have assumed that because a number of prominent Weathermen were the children of wealthy families—Bill Ayers and Cathy Wilkerson are often cited—they lived off donations from family and friends. While some families did help, money remained a chronic problem for many
Weathermen. In San Francisco, Jeff Jones and the cadres he was responsible for lived on $1,200 a month and kept to strict budgets. At various times the FBI launched probes into traveler’s-check and credit-card scams it suspected the organization was using for money, but nothing ever came of them.

In fact, the single largest source of funding appears to have been donations from Movement sympathizers. Most gave willingly; others, it appeared, had to be persuaded. “I remember this one guy they targeted in Brooklyn, a rich guy, Fred something, his father founded [a toy company],” recalls Elizabeth Fink. “They find out he has like twenty-five grand. So they have this party, eight or nine people, all of them Weatherman or connected to the underground. Fred is the only one not in the underground. He just thinks they’re fun. I don’t know what happened, but the next morning I heard they got every cent of that money, all twenty-five grand.”

Among Weatherman’s financiers, by far the most important single source of money was a group of radical attorneys in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Almost all belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, a network of left-wing lawyers founded in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association. “Money? It was the lawyers, all of it,” says Ron Fliegelman, a sentiment echoed by several other Weather alumni. Of the dozen or so attorneys mentioned as key supporters, only a handful will admit helping out. One is Dennis Cunningham, then a Chicago attorney who represented Black Panthers. “I gave them money, sure, and I raised even more,” he says. “Without the lawyers, I’m telling you, they couldn’t have survived.”

“You gotta understand, honey, we were lawyers, but we were revolutionaries in our hearts,” says Elizabeth Fink. “We didn’t have the balls to go underground, you see, but those who did, they were our heroes. You can’t believe the excitement of helping the underground, the romance of it, the intrigue. It was enthralling, and addictive. Any of us—Dennis, me, a bunch of us—we would’ve done anything for these people. Money, strategy, passports, whatever it was we could do, you just did it. This was the revolution, baby, and they were the fighters. But a lot of what they did, you know, was because they had attorneys like Dennis and me and a lot of others aboveground helping out.”

By far the most important attorney in Weatherman’s support network was Michael Kennedy, who in 1970 was emerging as one of the Bay Area’s most prominent radical lawyers. Born in 1937 and raised in California’s San Joaquin Valley, Kennedy had gone to Berkeley, then Hastings law school, before heading to New York in 1968 to work with a leftist lawyers’ group, the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee. There he forged a close friendship with several high-profile liberal attorneys, including Kathy Boudin’s father, Leonard, and William Kunstler. In 1969 Kennedy relocated to San Francisco, where he caused a splash representing infamous pornographers, the Mitchell brothers.

Michael and his wife, Eleanore, were among Bernardine Dohrn’s closest friends in the Bay Area; the two women even went to the gynecologist together. Michael served as a useful conduit to the Movement and beyond. “Michael Kennedy was the key,” recalls Dennis Cunningham, a close friend of Dohrn’s, who visited her in San Francisco. “I went out there and got in touch with him, and he got me in touch with them. Bernardine had a lot of confidence in Michael. He was the most important friend they had.”
*

 • • • 

Although he denies any significant role, Michael Kennedy was nevertheless drawn into what would become the strangest political action in Weatherman’s history: the prison escape of LSD guru Timothy Leary. A onetime Harvard lecturer who had transformed himself into the nation’s preeminent exponent of psychedelic drugs, Leary had drawn a ten-year sentence after an arrest for possession of two marijuana cigarettes in Laguna Beach, California; sent to the California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, he hired Kennedy to handle his appeal. Leary’s wife, Rosemary, meanwhile, reached out to the country’s largest illegal distributor of LSD—a ragtag bunch of Orange County– and Maui-based hippies who called themselves the Brotherhood of Eternal Love—in hopes they might bankroll an effort to rescue him. The amount involved is in dispute; most sources say $25,000, others $50,000. In fact, one of the Brotherhood’s leaders, Travis Ashbrook, told Leary’s biographer years later that he and another dealer gave an intermediary $17,000 to cover the costs.