Jeremy Varon (32 page)

For the left, however, to attribute everything troubling or repellent within it to the “dominant culture” was to shift the blame for its own failings onto its enemies. The New Left can therefore be accused of participating in at least the
logic
of scapegoating. Conventionally, scape-170

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goating entails the denigration of the corrupting influence of the “outsider,” figured as an absolute other, a source of impurity and contagion.

But in fact it is the dominant group that projects
its own undesirable qualities
onto that other, whose attack or destruction it sees, in sacrificial terms, as enhancing its vitality or even ensuring its survival.106 In contrast to this model, the New Left remained a minority sub- or counterculture, closer in position to the denigrated “outsider.” New Leftists felt less anxious about contagion than about wholesale ruin at the hands of the American mainstream. Their condemnation of America, following the Panthers’ lead, as a “pig” order sought rhetorically to reverse their own outsider status and to cast their enemy, in a typical gesture of scapegoating, as subhuman. For all its fury, the New Left never had the strength to reproduce the power dynamic that makes scapegoating so destructive.

Yet even in its “weak” position, the New Left subtly disavowed responsibility for its own destructiveness and used the awareness of its own limitations to vilify its adversary further.

There are problems, however, with Kenniston’s analysis. Sympathetic to young leftists, Kenniston is careful to point out that their violence was dwarfed by that of the state. Nonetheless, he contends that the state’s war makers and the militants drew from the same well of violence and rage. Here Kenniston fails to acknowledge that violence varies greatly in its origins and function. Most important, he suggests that the New Left’s violence was only, or essentially, an unfortunate mirroring of the violence of the larger society. From this premise, it is a small step to a blanket denunciation of protest violence—one that may obscure its complexities and confound judgment of it.

New Left violence can be seen as a form of mirroring that resists Kenniston’s criticisms. Robin Palmer invoked Newton’s basic laws of physics to insist that the force of the state, relatively unimpeded by peaceful dissent, met an opposite (though unequal) reaction in the counterforce of its opponents. Protest violence, in this blunt account, was an attempt to answer and ultimately stop the violence of the state. When not entirely rejecting their national roots, New Leftists could also present their violence as a positive expression of their American heritage. Palmer saw armed support for the Viet Cong as an assertion of America’s own revolutionary past— captured in the self-description of some radicals as the

“Americong”—and an
affirmation
of the American values of freedom and self-determination.107 New Left violence, in these formulations, is not reducible to “unconscious complicity” with the destructiveness of the adversary. Rather, New Leftists explored in violence the utility or even Excesses and Limits

171

integrity of force as a means of defending themselves and their allies, expressing outrage, and, most broadly, asserting their political principles and interests.

Kenniston, finally, pays little attention to the efforts of groups like Weatherman to reflect critically on violence. It was they who learned most immediately both its power and its dangers. They struggled to develop a militant practice that was politically coherent, ethically defensible, and existentially self-aware. The Weathermen’s reckoning with their excesses was prompted by a tragedy of their own making. It is that event to which we now turn.

.

.

.

This wheel’s on fire,

Rolling down the road,

Please notify my next of kin,

This wheel shall explode!

Bob Dylan,

“This Wheel’s on Fire”

Going underground initially meant different things for different Weathermen. In January 1970, Weatherman finally closed the SDS National Office in Chicago. Under a plan the Weatherbureau called “consolidation,” the collectives then engineered emotionally painful “purges” of those they suspected of being police agents or whose commitment they deemed less than total.108 Only one informant, the Vietnam veteran Larry Grathwohl, survived the purges. Most dramatically, he passed a Weatherman “acid test” by, he claims, cleverly feigning taking an LSD tab; although berated for hours as a homicidal “pig,” he failed to crack.

Though most of the movement wanted nothing to do with Weatherman, some individuals desperately sought to be part of the group and were crushed by the prospect of being told they did not measure up. This intense desire to belong had reasons both bad and good. Dohrn conceded that Weatherman “did have a cultish quality that made it hard to leave.”

Yet, she felt, most people were “in it for authentic and genuine reasons and wanted to be found worthy of participating.”109 Others close to Weatherman, doubting their own courage, or the wisdom of “armed struggle,” or both, never resolved their relationship to the group and remained at its edges. One such activist confessed: “Part of me that thought that maybe I wasn’t a good revolutionary, maybe I just wasn’t committed enough. . . . I was willing to give up a lot of my life and my time but I 172

Excesses and Limits

wasn’t willing to make bombs. . . . Did I not believe in it or was it too scary for me? Part of me believed that it was OK to do physical violence where you didn’t kill people [but] quite a few people believed . . . that killing was part of the program, and I certainly couldn’t . . . jump that

[line].”110

Jim Mellen, author of the original Revolutionary Youth Movement statement giving rise to Weatherman, had grown more and more vocal after the Days of Rage in criticizing the group’s direction. He recalls pleading with his friends and comrades:

The important thing to understand about people like Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse Tung is that they survived: they didn’t go out in a blaze of glory. I was always told that I was from the Two-Months-in-the-Library School of Revolution, . . . and I kept trying to tell them that going out in a blaze of glory is just another way of going out. They argued that my approach was too staid, too stodgy. . . . I was constantly trying to figure out where I failed [in convincing others to] continue with above-ground political action and long range planning, and not become personal existential heroes.111

When talk of consolidation began he concluded, “This is the limit. This is ridiculous.” Unsure of how to exit the group, he simply left a Weatherman house one afternoon and did not come back. Still puzzled years later by the process of his disengagement, he admitted, “I think I probably decided to leave after I left. I mean, it’s very hard to leave anything like this . . . I was very close to [the Weathermen]. They were my whole world.”112

By the end of Weatherman’s consolidation, the group had 150 or so members—fewer than half as many as during the Days of Rage. (The group had no official membership, making it difficult to fix its numbers at any given point.) Members of the Weatherbureau, weary of one another after nearly a year of intense collaboration, split the organization into three parts. Collectives based in San Francisco, New York City, and Chicago and Detroit were to experiment more or less autonomously in devising underground strategies. Members of the West Coast collective, headed by Dohrn and Jones, spent time in Berkeley and San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, but avoided public political activities and quietly plotted bombings. The Midwest collective, headed by Ayers, built an arms cache and fabricated crude bombs with Grathwohl’s help. The most dangerous of the bombs, dynamite with a burning cigarette as its trigger, was placed outside a Detroit police station, putting at risk both police and passersby, but failed to detonate.113 The New York collective Excesses and Limits

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was the most militant. Its leaders, J. J. and Terry Robbins, thought that whites would move in a revolutionary direction only through the prompting of dramatic acts of violence, and they were dead set on providing the drama.114 The collective was headquartered in the fashionable Greenwich Village townhouse of Cathy Wilkerson’s father, a broadcast executive, while he was on vacation in the Caribbean. Though not technically underground, members of the collective virtually disappeared from public life and built a large stockpile of dynamite, purchased by Weathermen using false names from demolition supply companies in New England.115

Former Weathermen, though generally refraining from talking about personalities in the group, identify Terry Robbins as a main source of the group’s most aggressive tendencies. Robbins had been an important organizer in the Ohio-Michigan SDS region and was a contributor to Weatherman’s founding manifesto. He had excelled in the organization by virtue of his militant line and fascination with explosives. In his memoir, Ayers describes Robbins as at once a best friend, a partner in mis-chief, and a dangerously driven figure—“smart, obsessive,” inhabiting an “anarchic solitude,” and wedded to a strategy of “the bigger the mess, the better.”116 In a private interview, Ayers elaborated: “I don’t want to demonize Terry . . . but Terry did have a very apocalyptic view of himself. . . . I used to say to Terry that if there hadn’t been a movement [he’d]

be the guy up in the Texas Tower” (a deranged sniper who opened fire on university students, killing over a dozen people). Ayers added, “But it wasn’t just Terry. Terry’s extremism was an impulse in all of us.”117

Palmer recalls that Robbins “scared the shit out of him” when they first met in early March 1970 in a recruiting session for Weatherman. Listening to Robbins talk wildly, with an embarrassed J. J. present, of plans to bomb an Army dance, Palmer responded, “I don’t agree with what you’re saying. You’re going to get yourself killed.” To Palmer, Robbins appeared a victim of “gut check” and what he proposed was “crazy.”118

Days later, Palmer’s prediction would come true.

On March 6, 1970, a massive explosion leveled the Wilkerson townhouse.119 Kathy Boudin, entirely naked, and Cathy Wilkerson, clad only in jeans, emerged in a daze from the wreckage. On the street they met Anita Hoffman, Dustin Hoffman’s wife (whose house was next door) and Susan Wagner, Henry Fonda’s former wife, who took the women to the Fonda house. Clothed by their hosts, Wilkerson and Boudin then vanished. Three dead bodies lay among the wreckage. The police soon identified two as Diana Oughton, aged twenty-eight, and Ted Gold, aged 174

Excesses and Limits

twenty-three, from New York City. Pieces of another body could not be identified, but the Weathermen later announced that Robbins had also died in the blast. Among the rubble, police found more than eighty sticks of dynamite; experts estimated that had it detonated, it would have “leveled everything” on the entire block.120

The Weathermen have refrained from disclosing in detail what the internal life of the collective had been and for years concealed the intended target of the bombs, leading to rampant speculation among the authorities and the left alike. Yet an outline of events can be gleaned from official communications of the group and the recent comments of former members. In late February, four New York Weathermen had bombed the New Jersey home of the judge presiding over the trial of the Panther 21—a group of New York City Black Panthers spuriously accused of a conspiracy to blow up department stores, city landmarks, and police and subway stations. With Robbins likely in the lead, the four insisted that the action had not been extreme enough: injuring no one, it did only

“symbolic” damage. Planning what Weatherman would confess was a

“large-scale, almost random bombing offensive,” they built antiperson-nel devices (explosives wrapped in nails) and persuaded the collective to bomb a dance at an Army base at Fort Dix, New Jersey.121 Robbins apparently crossed live wires while preparing the bombs in the townhouse basement, causing the blast.

The townhouse explosion was one of the crucial junctures in an era full of dramatic turning points. It certainly frustrates any attempt to give a narrowly structural account of New Left violence in the United States and would likely fascinate anyone trying to determine the role in history of chance events. One can begin to assess its importance by speculating on what might have unfolded had it not occurred. If the collective had succeeded in its plan to kill Army officers and their dates, the “war at home” would have instantly become more volatile. The bombing might have inspired some small number of Weathermen and others to commit similar acts. The government, which often disregarded civil liberties in pursuing dissidents, and two months later at Kent State would again break the taboo against killing white demonstrators, might have abandoned all restraint in its efforts to destroy Weatherman.122 Mass arrests or even murders of suspects might have been followed, in turn, by movement reprisals, conceivably kidnappings or assassinations. In short, had Fort Dix been attacked, it is possible that Americans would now speak of the 1970s as a “decade of terrorism,” as do people in countries like Germany and Italy, where “Red Armies” clashed with their governments Excesses and Limits

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in grim cycles of lethal violence. By the same token, those responsible for the murderous plan might have been denounced and marginalized by other Weathermen, effectively stopping the escalation of the group’s violence.

The consequences of the explosion that can be determined in less speculative ways are also immense, but tangled in a complex chronology made more complicated by the differences between the Weathermen’s public acts and their private deliberations. The media and the public reacted with shock and outrage. The
New York Times
scrambled to provide background stories on the Weathermen, printed timelines of recent bombings, reported extensively on the March 12 explosions perpetrated at three Manhattan buildings by “Revolutionary Force 9” (a collective that apparently took its name from the Beatles’ song “Revolution 9”), noted the
hundreds
of idle bomb threats made that week, and tracked the efforts of officials to tighten restrictions on the sale of dynamite. Echoing indignant politicians, the
Times
pronounced the Weathermen to be “criminals, not idealists.”123 Thomas Powers elaborated that view in a series of Pulit-zer Prize-winning articles that chronicled what he saw as Oughton’s transformation from a sensitive, midwestern child of privilege to a zealous assassin.124 For much of the country, the blast turned the Weathermen into an instantaneous symbol of the antisocial violence into which the New Left had apparently descended. For historians, it has provided the seemingly perfect bookend for narratives of the New Left beginning with the earnest optimism of SDS’s founders and ending with the movement’s fiery self-annihilation.125