Days of Rage (23 page)

According to Jeff Jones’s son Thai’s book
A Radical Line
, Jones made the pickup on the Santa Monica Pier. A woman sat on a bench, placing a brown paper bag at her feet. A moment later Jones wandered up and sat beside her, placing an identical bag filled with clothes next to hers. After a minute Jones took the woman’s bag, rose, and walked off. Inside he found bundles of hundred-dollar bills and several doses of acid, to be used as a celebration once Leary had been freed.

Michael Kennedy has always denied any role in Leary’s escape; an FBI investigation of his involvement ended in 1977 with no indictments returned. But Leary, in multiple interviews before his death in 1996, repeatedly characterized Kennedy as the driving force behind everything that happened. “Kennedy masterminded my escape from prison in such a way that there was no way he could possibly be imprisoned,” Leary told an interviewer in 1991. “He did nothing illegal, but he was my spiritual counselor. He directed and announced it.”
¹

Weatherman’s involvement was controversial within the group. Leary was not a political but a cultural figure; some cadres felt helping him escape was a risky sideshow. “We were opportunistically glomming on to the counterculture,” Mark Rudd has written. “The Leary jailbreak appeared to me to be a transparent attempt to insinuate ourselves with our potential base, the flower children.”
²
Others suggested that if anyone was to be broken out of prison, it should be a heavyweight black revolutionary, such as Huey Newton. “Huey Newton was in a maximum-security prison and it would have required guns and bloodshed and we were not capable of doing that,” Jeff Jones recalled. “This was doable and had a lot going for it. It was a real poke in the eye to California and the drug laws. It was a big ‘fuck you.’”
³

Weatherman’s entire Bay Area apparatus was employed in the brewing escape, which was planned in minute detail. A date was set: the night of Saturday, September 12, three days before Leary was scheduled to return to New York for trial on yet another set of drug charges. That Friday, Leary later told the FBI, Michael Kennedy’s law partner, Joe Rhine, visited him and laid out the details. Leary would always insist he never knew that his rescuers were to be Weathermen; Kennedy, he said, had mentioned only that they would be “political people.” The escape itself turned out to be child’s play. San Luis Obispo was a minimum-security prison—which made it easy the next night for Leary to simply walk out of his cell and climb atop a building near the wall. From there he began shimmying along a hundred-foot horizontal cable, fighting exhaustion and at one point freezing when a prison patrol car passed beneath him. Crossing the outer wall, he reached a telephone pole, then climbed down and leaped into a ravine along Highway 1. By and by a car coasted to a stop alongside him.

In later years Leary maintained that two young women using code names were in the car. In a 1974 interview with the FBI, however, he indicated that the driver was in fact “the brother of a well-known political radical,” a description that best fits one of Weatherman’s ablest cadres, John Willard Davis, Rennie Davis’s brother. As Leary stripped off his prison denims, the car headed through the town of Morro Bay and soon stopped on a beachfront road. Led across the dunes, Leary spotted a gray-haired man and an unidentified woman alongside a battered camper. The man was Clayton Van Lydegraf, a fifty-five-year-old Communist Party veteran from Seattle who had emerged as one of Weatherman’s most reliable aboveground supporters. The handy Van Lydegraf, who would leave a lasting mark on the organization, had fixed up the camper with Mark Rudd’s help. He and the woman guided Leary inside, dyed his hair, and for the first time told him he was in the hands of Weatherman. Outside, another reliable cadre, Paul Bradley, collected Leary’s prison clothes and drove south, eventually dumping them in a gas station restroom near Los Angeles in hopes of misleading police.

Van Lydegraf, meanwhile, drove Leary north in the camper as a second car trailed behind, monitoring a police scanner. Like Rudd, the old communist wasn’t thrilled by his duties. “I was against this whole thing from the start,” he told Leary, “and if it was up to me you’d still be rotting in jail.”
⁴
Leary sat in the back, sipping chilled wine, all the way to their destination, a duplex in a North Oakland slum. There was no sign of pursuit. The next day Van Lydegraf drove Leary north again, heading up Interstate 5 into far northern California, where they pulled into a remote campsite deep in the woods between the towns of Lakehead and Weed. The next night Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones arrived to welcome him.

Leary was transfixed by Dohrn. His description of her would eventually
appear in countless articles. She dressed, he said, “like no one else in the out crowd,” with “cashmere sweaters and black Capezio flats,” possessed of “unforgettable sex appeal” and “the most amazing legs,” like “the rah-rah leader of the crazy motherfuckers from the Girls Athletic Association running down the aisles of American Airlines borrowing food from people’s plates.” Leary volunteered to join Weatherman underground. Dohrn demurred, saying he was far too hot. She thought he should leave the country, perhaps join the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who had fled to Algeria. They wrote a pair of communiqués around the campfire. Dohrn’s was a transparent attempt to curry favor with the counterculture:

Dr. Leary was being held against his will and against the will of millions of kids in this country. He was a political prisoner, captured for the work he did in helping all of us begin the task of creating a new culture on the barren wasteland that has been imposed on this country by Democrats, Republicans, capitalists and creeps. LSD, and grass, like the herbs and cactus and mushrooms of the American Indians and countless civilizations that have existed on this planet, will help us make a future world where it will be possible to live in peace. Now we are at war. . . . We are outlaws, we are free!

Leary’s was predictably florid. He wrote, in part:

There is the day of laughing Krishna and the day of Grim Shiva. Brothers and sisters, this is a war for survival. Ask Huey and Angela. They dig it. Ask the wild free animals. . . . To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act. . . . Listen, the hour is late. Total war is upon us. Fight to live or you’ll die. Freedom is life. Freedom will live.

The escape was news around the world and probably did more to elevate Weatherman’s visibility than any single bombing. At a press conference in San Francisco, Michael Kennedy characterized it as “a merger of dope and dynamite. . . . There is now a merger of Timothy and the Weathermen. This portends more destruction to the American government than anything in history.” In Washington a simmering J. Edgar Hoover, asked about Leary, sniped, “We’ll have him in ten days.”

The next morning the group split up, Dohrn and the others promising to see Leary again in three days. Once again Van Lydegraf drove Leary north in the camper, eventually coming to a stop on a country lane outside the town of Monroe, northeast of Seattle. A mile down the lane stood a farmhouse occupied until a few days earlier by Bill Ayers’s brother, Rick, and his pregnant girlfriend. Rick had deserted from the army to join Weatherman and would soon emerge as its West Coast logistics expert. “I didn’t even know about Leary until afterward,” he recalls forty years later. “I just knew someone was coming. So we all cleared out.”

Leary’s wife, Rosemary, was waiting at the house. When Dohrn and the others finally arrived, Leary insisted they all go see the Woodstock concert movie; at the theater, a totally stoned Leary, his head now shaved, ate popcorn and hollered comments at the screen while Dohrn and Jones sat behind him, wishing he would shut up.

Both Learys had been given fake driver’s licenses. The next morning Dohrn told Leary it would be necessary to fly to Chicago to get the passports needed to travel to Algeria. “Tim was quite shocked when he found out we weren’t handing him a preprinted, ready-to-go passport,” Jones recalled. “That was a capability we did not have.”
⁵
Rick Ayers recalls: “Leary was, like, ‘Fuck, I’m out, let’s hijack a plane and get outta here,’ and the leadership was, like, ‘Man, cool out.’”

On September 23, having used the fake licenses to secure passports at a Chicago passport office, the Learys boarded a flight to Paris, eventually making their way to Algiers. There they held court with a host of Movement figures, including Eldridge Cleaver and Dohrn’s sister, Jennifer. It was the beginning of a multiyear international odyssey that would end in embarrassment for everyone involved.

 • • • 

The Leary escape created a surge of momentum for Weatherman, one the leadership could not afford to waste. Everyone sensed they were nearing some
kind of turning point. After Kent State and the campus riots in May, there were worrisome signs that the mass movement was flagging. The Nixon White House, it was clear, could not be influenced by demonstrations, no matter how large; that era was passing. By that fall, one author notes, “activists faced three options: go underground and fight the establishment by any means necessary, drop out and do their own thing, or turn their energies toward other causes.”
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Events beyond Weatherman’s control, meanwhile, had dealt the underground’s allure a severe blow. Early on the morning of August 24, three weeks before the Leary escape, four militants in Madison, Wisconsin, packed nearly a ton of explosives into a stolen Ford Econoline van and parked it beside the University of Wisconsin’s Sterling Hall, which housed the Army Mathematics Research Center; it was the same building Jeff Jones, during a campus appearance, had urged “trashing” a year before. The resulting explosion, exponentially larger than anything Weatherman ever attempted, could be heard thirty miles away. It gutted the six-story building. Damage was put at $6 million; at the time, it was the single most destructive act of sabotage in U.S. history. Worse, a postdoctoral researcher named Robert Fassnacht, working inside the building, was killed. He left a wife and three children.

Literally overnight, the Madison bombing transformed the national conversation from a focus on Nixon’s misdeeds—Cambodia, Kent State—to those of self-styled revolutionaries. Midnight bombings that until that point seemed brave or romantic or even heroic suddenly appeared callous and uncaring at least, murderous at worst. For the first time a generation of militants comfortable with revolutionary rhetoric were forced to confront its consequences. “It isn’t just the radicals who set the bomb in a lighted, occupied building who are guilty,” editorialized the
Wisconsin State Journal
. “The blood is on the hands of anyone who has encouraged them, anyone who has talked recklessly of ‘revolution,’ anyone who has chided with mild disparagement the violence of extremists while hinting that the cause is right all the same.” Reporters who sought reactions from young radicals found many not only chagrined but prepared to denounce the use of violence altogether. “Blowing up the CIA building will not bring home the troops,” a Detroit radical observed. “Bombings are suicidal and are not bringing any change except more repression.” In a widely quoted speech at Kansas State University three weeks later, President Nixon cited the Madison bombing in a virulent denunciation of student revolutionaries, “the violent and radical few, the rock throwers and the obscenity shouters” who would “tear America down.”

Weatherman’s leadership was determined to keep the underground option alive. Even before the Leary escape, plans had been laid for an ambitious “fall offensive” to demonstrate the group’s resurgence and reach. In late September Ron Fliegelman and others traveled from New York to Chicago for the first bombing. “That was us, New York, and some aboveground friends,” he recalls. Their action was to be a symbol of Weatherman’s Phoenix-like rise from the ashes of the Townhouse: the very same Haymarket police statue they had destroyed a year earlier. The statue had been rebuilt, but on the morning of October 5, Fliegelman detonated a dynamite bomb that destroyed it once again.
*

At a New York press conference the next day, Jennifer Dohrn, taking a step toward becoming Weatherman’s aboveground spokesperson, along with the Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman, played a recording of her sister Bernardine reading Weatherman’s communiqué aloud. It promised a series of bombings “from Santa Barbara to Boston” in the days ahead and, using the group’s groovy new “youth culture” patois, struck an almost plaintive tone, all but begging Movement activists to stay the course:

Today many student leaders have cut their hair and called for peace. They say young people shouldn’t provoke the government. And they receive in return promises of peaceful change. . . . Don’t be tricked by talk. Arm yourselves and shoot to live! We are building a culture and a society that can resist genocide. It is a culture of total resistance to mind-controlling maniacs; a culture of high-energy sisters getting it on, of hippie acid-smiles and communes and freedom to be the farthest-out people we can be.

This time all the bombs went off.

At 1:27 a.m. on October 8, two days after the press conference, the first
demolished an empty courtroom in the Marin County Courthouse, north of San Francisco. Two months earlier police there had killed a seventeen-year-old black teenager named Jonathan Jackson who was attempting to free three San Quentin prisoners at a hearing. The bombing was carried out by Weathermen working from the Pine Street apartment in San Francisco; Mark Rudd had scouted the site. Ninety minutes later the Seattle underground group Quarter Moon Tribe, which the exiled Howard Machtinger had joined, detonated a bomb in a set of lockers in an ROTC building at the University of Washington. The explosion destroyed a vacant office. Ninety minutes later a group calling itself the Perfect Park Home Garden Society detonated a bomb against a wall of a National Guard Armory in Santa Barbara, California. Damage was minimal. (The Seattle group was directly affiliated with Weatherman; the Santa Barbara group was believed to be.)