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violence against blacks and other minorities. In July, the Justice Department issued a new round of federal indictments, based on the Flint “War Council,” of twelve Weatherleaders for weapons possession and a conspiracy to commit bombings and murders.164 The Weathermen responded by warning Attorney General Mitchell: “Don’t look for us, Dog; we’ll find you first.”165 Subsequent communiqués in the first nine months of Weatherman’s underground existence accompanied the bombing of the National Guard headquarters following the shootings at Kent State; bombings of the Marin County and Long Island City courthouses; the bombing of the rebuilt Haymarket statue in Chicago; and the Leary escape.166 In the communiqués, the Weathermen were as brash as ever.

That accompanying the Haymarket bombing, which a Chicago Police Superintendent denounced as “an insane act perpetrated by psychopaths,” ran: “students and hippies who now hear peace talk from the white man must remember how talk of peace was used against the Indians and preached to the Blacks. Don’t be tricked by talk. Arm yourself and shoot to live. . . . We are not ‘attacking targets’—we are bringing a pitiful giant to his knees. . . . [G]uard your planes. Guard your colleges. Guard your children.”167

.

.

.

Crimson flames tied through my ears

Rollin’ high and mighty traps

Pounced with fire on flaming roads

Using ideas as my maps

“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I

Proud ‘neath heated brow.

Ah, but I was so much older then,

I’m younger than that now.

Bob Dylan, “My Back Pages”

Behind their bravado and audacious bombings, the Weathermen were deeply affected by the townhouse explosion. In late April, many Weathermen, including Boudin and Wilkerson, made their way to a secluded location in northern California for a meeting to discuss what had happened in New York and what the future of the organization should be.

This would be Weatherman’s first, crucial reckoning with its initial vision of armed struggle. Jeff Jones had gone home after the explosion to assure his parents that he had not been killed and to say his good-byes 182

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before completely vanishing underground. He came to the Weatherman summit intent on defeating the more extreme politics in the group or leaving and taking others with him. For Jones, the Weathermen had strayed

“far away from the essential humanity and commitment to democracy that had fueled us in the first place.” He, with Dohrn and several others, successfully argued that radical politics “wasn’t about big bombs”

and “terrorist acts.”168 Dohrn recalls that the meeting was different also in
how
the Weathermen argued—“not by staying up for 72 straight hours and seeing who was still on their feet, but actually trying to bring everybody back to . . . how you change hearts and minds.”169

J. J., in charge of New York operations, was held responsible with the late Robbins for the townhouse catastrophe and sent on indefinite leave, never to rejoin the group. He wandered for a couple years in northern California and Mexico, eventually settling under an assumed name in Vancouver, Canada, where he died a natural death in 1997. Once a great champion of the revolutionary motto “Audacity, audacity, and more audacity,” he confessed to Rudd in an unsent letter that he had “lost, killed, alienated, or driven away” all his friends, and that life was “sad and lonely,” whether he was a fugitive or not.170 Other Weathermen voluntarily made what Ayers described as an “honorable retreat from the craziness” and left the organization, paring it down to well below one hundred.171

On December 6, 1970, Weatherman made public the results of its self-evaluation in a lengthy communiqué, signed by Dohrn, titled “New Morning—Changing Weather.” It began:

We want to express ourselves to the mass movement, not as military leaders, but as tribes at council. It has been nine months since the townhouse explosion. In that time, the future of our revolution has changed decisively. A growing illegal organization of young men and women can live and fight and love inside of Babylon. The FBI can’t catch us; we’ve pierced their bullet proof shield. But the townhouse forever destroyed our belief that armed struggle is the only real revolutionary struggle.172

Admitting that “something had been wrong with our direction besides technical inexperience,” the Weathermen then tried to account for their misdirection.

“New Morning” chiefly criticized the “the military error,” which Weatherman defined as “the tendency to consider only bombings or picking up the gun as revolutionary, with the glorification of the heavier the better.” Under the influence of “the military error,” and racked by sleep-Excesses and Limits

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lessness and fear, the New York collective “acted as if only those who die are proven revolutionaries.” Weatherman frankly admitted confusing martyrdom with commitment and reducing radical politics to a fatalistic end game, consummated in death. In a striking revision of its ideology, Weatherman then urged the Movement to engage in aboveground activities such as demonstrations. Echoing earlier communiqués, the statement also proclaimed the fundamental progressiveness of the youth movement and described “grass and organic consciousness expanding drugs”

as “weapons of the revolution.”

In praising the youth culture, the Weathermen both expressed a more expansive concept of radical politics and reasserted their roots. In conversations after the explosion, members reflected on their first demonstrations, their early efforts to persuade friends, and their “talents, interests, differences.” Abandoning notions of being America’s Zero Children striking out at a society that had misshaped them, they now saw themselves as part of a robust, if still naïve, counterculture. In this spirit, Weatherman memorialized Oughton and Gold as teachers (they had taught in Guatemala and New York City respectively) and Robbins as a community organizer (he had worked with SDS in a Cleveland ghetto). The Weathermen also revised their appreciation of other revolutionaries, lauding the Vietnamese “not as abstract guerrilla fighters, slugging it out with U.S. imperialism,” but as people with “parents and children and hopes for the future.” Finally, “New Morning” reflected the growing feminist consciousness in the organization. It concluded with a list of “exemplary” women revolutionaries throughout the world. And, after Weatherwomen protested the sexism of the name Weather
man,
the group renamed itself in the communiqué the “Weather Underground.”173

“New Morning” conveyed both the tragic-comic aspects of Weatherman and how much the group had matured since going underground.

Weatherman conceded virtually all of the major charges of its critics since its founding—its glorification of violence, its dismissal of conventional protest, and its dangerous belief that a revolutionary group can succeed or even survive without any kind of genuine popular base.

Yet even in confession, the Weathermen spoke with a conspicuous arrogance, as though the revolution were somehow theirs to lead and as though they alone could assert the widely held “truths” that
they
had recently discovered. Particularly awkward was their declaration in the name of the movement of a faith in the value of public, nonviolent protest—a faith that most activists had never fully lost. By the same token, the Weathermen could lay claim to an authority that comes with 184

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having learned certain things themselves, from beyond a boundary others could only imagine. The group was, in a sense, the New Left’s ca-nary in a coal mine, alerting others to the dangers of at least a certain approach to armed struggle.

The Weathermen now sought to lead largely by example. “New Morning” intended only to correct for the “military error” and not, as one might infer, to signal the group’s withdrawal from violence altogether.

Crucially, Weatherman had decided, following the townhouse explosion, not to engage in actions aimed at killing police—actions, Jaffe has recently indicated, that the group “could have and would have done” had it not been forced into sober self-reflection.174 In addition, teams of Weathermen toured the country to persuade independent radical collectives not to engage in the kinds of all-out assaults Weathermen had once favored. Dohrn, who took part in this effort, explained that the basic goal was to turn “people away from thinking ‘the more damage the better,’ from thinking that it was ok to hurt or kill civilians,” and to argue that “kidnapping and assassinations were off the table.” The Weathermen gave political, practical, and ethical reasons in urging restraint.175

Attacks on property were another story. Shortly after “New Morning,” the Weather Underground planted several small bombs in the Capitol to protest the recently announced U.S. invasion of Laos. Ayers explained that the attitude among the group was, “‘We’ve corrected for the townhouse, now take this, BOOM!’”176 Weatherman’s change of approach was already evident in its bombings since the townhouse. In each, the Weathermen issued a warning to prevent injury—a practice they continued throughout their existence. Capturing the universal sentiment among former members, Jaffe said: “We were and continue to be very proud of the fact that we didn’t injure anybody in any of those actions.”177

Not everyone on the left was pleased with “New Morning,” including some Weathermen. Braely confessed, “I did think it was backpedaling on armed struggle, but I wasn’t all that clear on what we should do.” Though he counted himself as “one of the organization’s hippies,” he was less than enthusiastic about Weatherman’s effort to bust Leary out of jail and the group’s newfound love of the counterculture. Equally important, some of Weatherman’s apparent allies sharply criticized the statement.178 Two months after the publication of “New Morning,” members of the Panther 21 issued an open letter to the Weathermen.179 By February 1971, the situation of the Panther 21 was doubly desperate. Arrested in April 1969, the members had been given extremely high bail, such that most of the group had been in prison for eighteen months as their trial for at-Excesses and Limits

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tempted murder and other serious charges slowly unfolded. (The trial, ending in the acquittal of the defendants, lasted until May 1971, making it the longest trial in New York State up to that point.)180 In addition, the New York Panthers were in the process of being expelled from the national Black Panther Party by its increasingly paranoid West Coast leadership for alleged breaches of solidarity.181 In their statement, the Panther 21 singled the Weather Underground out for praise among white groups because it had gone beyond lip service and “related to action—the unequivocal truth by which revolutionaries gauge one another.” Yet they also expressed strong misgivings about the direction outlined in “New Morning”—in particular the Weather Underground’s praise of the counterculture and apparent retreat from violence. Their criticisms echoed Weatherman’s own earlier grievances about the counterculture: that it was escapist, indulgent, and racist, because it was more concerned with the individual freedom of whites than with the “group freedom” of African Americans. Though acknowledging the need for political education, the Panthers rejected as naïve the belief that transforming the consciousness of young whites would have any impact on the conduct of the Panthers’

oppressors. And, reminding the Weathermen that blacks were suffering daily, the Panthers insisted that violence remained the only viable strategy for black liberation. In ways principled, desperate, and heavy-handed, they implored the Weathermen not to abandon the armed struggle.

The Panthers’ letter was one of the few direct public communications between black and white revolutionary groups. It is hard to overstate the significance of the dilemma it posed for the Weathermen, given the status of race in Weatherman ideology. The Weathermen had justified their violence largely by asserting the need for whites to join blacks and other people of color at the front lines of combat; disidentifying with much of the New Left, the Weathermen had declared themselves accountable, in effect, to the most militant of militant blacks. With the Panther 21 statement, the Weathermen finally received the kind of endorsement that most radical blacks had previously withheld. But the statement, by insisting that violence was
the
essential ingredient of revolutionary politics, potentially tempted the Weathermen back to the narrow conception of radicalism behind the “military error”—an error to which black militants were hardly immune. For the Weathermen to curtail their violence was, however, to risk losing their identity as “exceptional whites” and undermine their ethic of solidarity. Striking a balance between the two impulses proved difficult. On December 4, 1970, two days before the publication of “New Morning” and exactly one year after the murder of Fred 186

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Hampton, Robin Palmer led five others in an ill-fated attempt to avenge Hampton’s murder by firebombing a First National City Bank office in New York City after business hours. (The group had also planned to attack two police stations, the Bolivian Consulate, a research building at New York University, and a New York law firm with which President Nixon was affiliated.) The Weatherbureau, doubting the security of the action, urged Palmer not to go through with it. Its sense of caution proved well founded, as Palmer had unwittingly recruited a police agent, who had the cell arrested.182

The Weather Underground did not respond publicly to the letter from the Panther 21—a decision many Weathermen later regarded as a horrible mistake.183 Gilbert recalls that the Weathermen privately concluded that the Panthers had misinterpreted “New Morning” by failing to see that they retained an armed struggle strategy.184 The group’s continued bombings would make that plain, and the Panthers were not owed further clarification. But the Weather Underground’s new modus operandi
did
represent a step back from the kind of violence favored initially by the Weathermen and still by the Panther 21, designed to instigate a civil war. In effect and likely intent, the group’s “armed actions” in the 1970s were transparently “symbolic.” Most notably, the Weather Underground bombed the California Department of Corrections in August 1971 in response to the killing of George Jackson during a prison escape; the New York State Department of Corrections following the massacre at Attica prison a month later; and the Pentagon in May 1972, after the U.S. bombing of Hanoi. In each case, the Weather Underground reacted to instances of state violence against people of color—violence it felt compelled to censure with more than just words, but that it was powerless to prevent.