Days of Rage (56 page)

For weeks there was chaos. No one knew who to trust. People scattered. The last Weather collectives in Boston imploded, the printing press abandoned, everyone running for the safety of family and friends. In time, Van Lydegraf’s crusade took shape. He took Russell Neufeld to Chicago and forced him to apologize to everyone he had lied to. It was a wrenching experience for everyone involved. “There was a week or two that spring, when the whole thing was collapsing, that I just remember walking the streets, crying,” recalls Jon Lerner.

But as the months wore on, it became clear that purging the PFOC was only the first step in Van Lydegraf’s plan. Slowly word spread that he intended to purge the Weather Underground itself. Once again, one by one, a number of the original Weathermen, including Bernardine Dohrn herself, were summoned to San Francisco, where they submitted to criticism/self-criticism sessions said to have been more grueling than any others in the group’s history. None of those involved have ever spoken in detail of what took place. “It was rough, yeah,” recalls Cathy Wilkerson, who submitted to a rigorous examination. “They felt we had betrayed the black cause, and I guess they were right. But the fact is, by then, like a lot of people, I was so burned out I didn’t really care.” What she recalled about her final meeting with Van Lydegraf was walking out afterward to the startling realization that she was being followed. It was the first hint that law enforcement, after years of trying, had finally managed to infiltrate what remained of the group.

The culmination of Van Lydegraf’s crusade came over Thanksgiving weekend 1976, when he unveiled his findings at a PFOC summit in San Francisco, essentially a series of white papers that indicted the Central Committee for a host of “counterrevolutionary” crimes, from betraying the PFOC to abandoning the black cause to attempting to “destroy” feminists, gays, and lesbians in Weather’s ranks. Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and all the others were summarily expelled; Van Lydegraf ordered that no one could have any contact with them. The centerpiece of his findings was an extraordinary tape recording of Dohrn in which she admitted, among a kaleidoscope of offenses, engaging in “naked white supremacy, white superiority, and chauvinist arrogance.” The tone was set in the first line: “I am making this tape,” Dohrn intoned,
in the voice so many remembered from Weatherman’s declaration of war in May 1970, “to acknowledge, repudiate, and denounce the counterrevolutionary politics and direction of the Weather Underground Organization.” She spread the blame, naming Bill Ayers and Jeff Jones as her co-conspirators. “Why did we do this?” she asked. “I don’t really know. We followed the classic path of white so-called revolutionaries who sold out the revolution.”

It all had the air of sad anticlimax. Dohrn’s statement reeked as much of fatigue and self-loathing as of surrender. But if her words arrived draped in melodrama and Marxist dogma, there was no denying their essential truth: The Weathermen had, in fact, sold out their dreams in return for their own personal safety. One could argue that those dreams had actually died six years earlier, in the accidental explosion on Eleventh Street, after which no one in the leadership had any stomach for the violence they had so casually embraced and urged on others. In every conceivable way, the young intellectuals who had come together in 1969 to form Weatherman had utterly failed: failed to lead the radical left over the barricades into armed underground struggle; failed to fight or support the black militants they championed; failed to force agencies of the American “ruling class” into a single change more significant than the spread of metal detectors and guard dogs.

The Weather Underground was dead. Its survivors scattered, many of them unsure what to do next. For those still wanted on old criminal charges, most arising from the Days of Rage, the first order of business was confronting what had once been the unthinkable: surrender. Feelers from various lawyers began going out in early 1977. It was a measure of how thoroughly America had turned its back on the tumultuous 1960s that, for the most part, law enforcement yawned. When the first Weathermen, Robbie Roth and Phoebe Hirsch, appeared unannounced at a Chicago courthouse that April, the officer on duty told them to come back the next day. They eventually received probation and were fined a grand total of $1,000 each.

Next went Paul Bradley, who abandoned his beloved cottage house in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood and, with Michael Kennedy at his side, turned himself in to Chicago prosecutors. He too got probation. “I remember in 1977 Bernardine apologized to me,” Bradley recalls. “She said, ‘You know,
I’m really sorry, who’d have thought it’d end up like this.’ I said, ‘Forget it, it’s been great. How else could I have lived in San Francisco for seven years?’”

Howie Machtinger soon followed. After fleeing Boston, he had moved to Vancouver, where he found refuge with, of all people, John “JJ” Jacobs. But the young student who had inspired Weather’s creation had never adjusted to life outside the organization. He had become a heavy drug user. “I began to think JJ was totally crazy,” Machtinger recalls. “He was stoned all the time. Very erratic.” In time Machtinger moved to Seattle, where he took a job as a sports counselor at a recreation center. In his spare time he read Stalin. Finally, in May 1978, he returned to Chicago, where he faced assault charges from the Days of Rage. He too received probation.

One of the stranger partings involved the two bomb makers, Cathy Wilkerson and Ron Fliegelman. By 1977 the couple had been living together for several years—first in Yonkers, New York, later in San Francisco—in a tenuous relationship arranged by the leadership in an effort to keep both of them content. “When everything started falling apart, my first thought was ‘I can get out of this now,’” Wilkerson recalls. “Then I thought, ‘Wait, I should get pregnant first.’ So I did.” (As did Dohrn and Eleanor Stein; all three women gave birth during 1977 and 1978.) When their daughter was born, Wilkerson and Fliegelman went their separate ways. Wilkerson, who was wanted on charges related to the Townhouse, went back into hiding, taking her daughter to an apartment in a gritty neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side. Fliegelman, who wasn’t sought, simply returned to his parents’ home in Philadelphia. Within weeks he began working at the same school for troubled children he had left on joining SDS in 1969. “For me it was really seamless,” he recalls with a shrug. “No one—the FBI, no one—ever came looking for me.”

Of those who surrendered in 1977, the only one to attract serious media attention was Mark Rudd, the star of the Columbia unrest nine years earlier. A crowd of more than a hundred reporters and photographers jostled him as he and his attorney walked through New York’s Foley Square toward the Criminal Courts Building that September.

“Hey, Mark,” someone shouted. “Say something like the old days at Columbia.”

“I’ve got something to say,” Rudd replied as he fended off the crowd. “I hope no one is picking my pocket.”

The press seemed to be the only ones who cared. A reporter who visited Columbia couldn’t find anyone who knew Rudd’s name. When the campus newspaper asked a hundred freshmen who Mark Rudd was, eight knew. Rudd eventually pled guilty to misdemeanor assault charges in New York and in Chicago. Like the others, he received probation and a fine.

By year’s end barely a half-dozen significant Weathermen remained at large. Dohrn and Ayers appear to have left their Hermosa Beach bungalow in the mid-1970s and taken a place in San Francisco. In the wake of Weather’s collapse they moved to New York, where Dohrn waitressed and Ayers worked as a baker’s assistant. Of all the “Weather debris,” the one who suffered the toughest transition was Jeff Jones, who was roundly blamed for the disastrous “inversion” strategy. For a time he and Eleanor Stein threw a mattress into a van and lived out of it, shuttling between parking spaces in the farthest reaches of Brooklyn and the Bronx. They tried to set up meetings with old friends, but people either shunned them or failed to show. In time Stein bowed to pressure from her own friends; the couple separated. Broke, Jones washed up in an apartment in Jersey City, New Jersey, paying his rent with the only job he could find: as a bicycle messenger.

 • • • 

There was a bizarre coda—actually, two—to the Weather Underground’s demise. Clayton Van Lydegraf, it turned out, didn’t want to just purge Weather’s leadership. He wanted to assume it. At the Thanksgiving 1976 gathering of PFOC leaders in San Francisco, he argued in favor of launching a new underground bombing campaign. The New York delegation, spearheaded by Silvia Baraldini, thought he had lost his mind. “We kept asking, ‘Who the fuck is this Clayton Van Lydegraf?’” says Elizabeth Fink. “‘Who is he to tell you what to do?’”

“I remember Russell Neufeld saying, ‘We have to wake up and realize we are not going to be Ho Chi Minh,’” says Baraldini. “Really, though, things broke down over race. We went out there with black people. There was an
enormous fight over the role of black people in the PFOC. What I remember is that a group of us decided to leave [the PFOC. Clayton] took us in a van and talked to us for hours, [saying,] ‘You can’t just leave, we need you, you need to fight for [the blacks].’ They just begged us not to let everything go down the tubes.”

When Baraldini and the New Yorkers resigned anyway, Van Lydegraf and two couples decided to go it alone. For months they had convened regularly to read and discuss communist texts. Then, in the spring of 1977, they began weapons training, sort of, firing BB guns at tin cans at an impromptu firing range in the desert outside Barstow. To train for high-speed car chases, sort of, they took spins around a go-cart track. In all this they were helped immeasurably by Van Lydegraf’s roommate of two years, named Ralph, and Ralph’s close friend Dick, who turned out to be a pair of undercover FBI agents, Richard Giannotti and William Reagan—the same William Reagan who had grown close to Mona Mellis way back in 1971. Cathy Wilkerson had been right about being followed: In its death throes the Weather Underground had finally been penetrated by the FBI.

In November 1977, believing that Van Lydegraf’s little band was about to bomb a California state senator’s office, the FBI swooped in and arrested all five of them. All were thrown in jail for short stints, at which point any reasonable observer might have believed the days of the Weather Underground’s attacks on “Amerika” were over. But even then, in 1977, there remained a handful who would not give up.

 • • • 

It was one of the ironies of the underground era that, just as the Weather Underground began to disintegrate, so did its main pursuer, the FBI’s last true black-bag specialists, Squad 47. Members of the squad had precious little to show for the previous six years. Other than Leonard Handelsman, a Weatherman in the Cleveland collective who apparently fled after the Townhouse, the only figure of note to be arrested since 1971 had been Howie Machtinger, who promptly disappeared back into the underground. Sixty members of Squad 47 soldiered on, though, staking out relatives’ homes and,
when so inclined, breaking into them in a vain effort to find Bernardine Dohrn or anyone else on their list of known Weathermen. By 1976 a sense of defeat and resignation permeated the squad’s offices on East Sixty-ninth Street. At one point Lou Vizi, the FALN investigator, grew excited when a Squad 47 agent mentioned they had discovered a fingerprint on a Weather communiqué. It belonged to a member of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee. “Man, that’s great!” Vizi remembers blurting.

The Squad 47 man pulled a face. “Why?” he asked.

“Why?” Vizi repeated. “You can take it to a grand jury. You got a print! We’d kill to have a print.”

The Squad 47 man just sighed. “We’ve been down that road,” he said, shaking his head. “The guy’ll just say someone showed it to him, or it was an old piece of paper. Believe me, nothing will happen.”

And nothing ever did. In the end Squad 47’s downfall was pure happenstance. By 1976 disclosure of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program had prompted the Justice Department to open a number of investigations, including probes into work against Martin Luther King and a host of black-power groups. The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) had filed suit, charging that they had been subjected to COINTELPRO-like tactics as well. Reviewing those charges fell to Bill Gardner, a lawyer who ran the criminal section of the department’s Civil Rights Division.

Every few days during the spring of 1976, Gardner walked over from his office in the Todd Building to FBI headquarters, where a pile of the Bureau’s SWP files would be awaiting him in a conference room. He had received a top security clearance in order to perform the review, but the Bureau took no chances: As Gardner sorted through the files, a pleasant FBI agent—Gardner thought of him as his babysitter—always sat in one corner, watching. The Keith decision in June 1972 made any warrantless electronic surveillance or break-ins against domestic organizations strictly illegal; any violations Gardner found that occurred after that date he fully expected to prosecute.

But a funny thing happened as Gardner was thumbing through the files. There was no indication whatsoever that the FBI had performed illegal surveillance of the SWP. But for some reason, someone had inserted dozens of
the Bureau’s Weather Underground files into those he was reviewing. When he glanced at these, Gardner realized in an instant that Squad 47 had been carrying out buggings and break-ins well after June 1972. The files cited dozens of instances, maybe hundreds, all the way into 1975. It was all there in black and white, in the FBI’s own files. There was no way anyone in the Bureau could deny it.

Gardner, sensing he was onto something big, went straight to Stan Pottinger’s office. Pottinger, a suave government attorney who would go on to a successful career as a novelist, ran the Civil Rights division. Pottinger, in turn, took the matter to the U.S. attorney general, Edward Levi, a former president of the University of Chicago appointed by President Ford. Levi appeared personally offended. The FBI had repeatedly sworn that these kinds of black bag jobs were history. He immediately authorized a task force to investigate Squad 47.