Transcription
O. >> This story begins in Greenwich Village on a block of Greek Revival town houses owned by the rich and powerful. One of those town houses belonged to the actor Dustin Hoffman, freshly nominated for his role as Ratzo Rizzo in the film Midnight Cowboy.
>> Hey, I'm walking here. I'm walking here.
>> But this isn't Dustin Hoffman's story. It's a story about the group of rich kids who are building bombs in the townhouse next door. That townhouse was owned by an advertising executive named James Wilkerson. Mr. Wilkerson had a problem. His daughter Kathy Wilkerson was part of a radical group called the Weather Underground, which aimed to violently overthrow the United States government. Throughout the early 1970s, they bombed buildings like the US Capital, the Pentagon, and the State Department. Mr. Wilkerson thought that he was lending his daughter the keys to his townhouse while he was away on vacation. Instead, she and her friends turned it into a bomb factory, planning to blow up a military officer's dance at Fort Dicks.
On March 6th, 1970, Cathy's boyfriend, Terry Robbins, nervously assembled nail bombs in the townhouse's basement. Terry didn't know what he was doing. He was an English literature major who couldn't even explain how electricity worked. But what he did know was that he wanted to be a revolutionary icon like Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh. Terry Robbins was ready to die. In fact, he looked forward to it. Night after night, he watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, captivated by the final scene when the two main characters die in a shootout. Hours before the dance, he filled the basement with far more explosives than they needed. Upstairs, Cathy was ironing sheets when she heard an explosion and felt her body begin to sink. The floors caved in. Splintered wood and brick rose up all around her. Then came a second explosion and a third.
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Terry made a wiring mistake that instantly killed him and two other members of the Weather Underground that day, Diana Outton and Ted Gold. The explosions destroyed the townhouse and blew a large hole in Dustin Hoffman's wall next door. Law enforcement discovered the remains of Diana Outton, a 28-year-old who was under FBI investigation for belonging to the terrorist group. The story of Diana's transformation stunned the public. In just two years, she went from debutant to bomb maker. Her parents watched her change, but mostly kept their worries private. In a moment of vulnerability, her mother confided to a friend, "We've lost her." People wanted to understand how a kind-hearted young woman like Diana became a self-proclaimed enemy of the United States.
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Diana Outton belonged to one of the wealthiest families in the state of Illinois. Her father, James Outton, was a businessman who encouraged his daughters to think about the world critically. He often spoke about politics at the dinner table. As a result, Diana adopted his conservative politics as her own. In college, she surprised her friends by voting for Richard Nixon over JFK during the 1960 presidential election.
When she was 21 years old, Diana spent 2 years volunteering in Guatemala, which had a profound impact on her worldview. She stayed in Chichi Kasanango, a poverty-stricken market town where most of the coffins for sale were built to fit the bodies of children. During her time there, she became friends with an American socialist who convinced her that Guatemala needed a revolution. He explained to her that charity alone couldn't fix the problem of inequality in the country. Guatemala was controlled by a handful of ultra-wealthy families, he said, who prospered while everyone else suffered. Diana became deeply ashamed of her privilege and took a vow of poverty. She moved into a room with a dirt floor and a single hole in the ground.
When her father visited Guatemala, her new beliefs worried him. He said that she should try to help Guatemalan farmers to increase their production instead of advocating for a revolution. For the first time in her life, Diana didn't agree with her father's opinions. It was the beginning of a pattern where they argued about politics every time they saw each other. However, their relationship never soured. In 1964, she voted for him when he ran as a Republican for a seat in the Illinois State Legislature. When he mailed her a check to make her life in Guatemala easier, she told him to donate it to a convent school that she was volunteering for instead. He took her advice and did just that.
When Diana returned to America, she enrolled in a master's degree program in education at the University of Michigan. In 1966, she started teaching at the Children's Community School, an alternative school in Ann Arbor. There, Diana met Bill Ayers, a leftist who was the son of an energy executive. The two began dating and moved in together. Soon, Diana and Bill were put in charge of the school and began experimenting with radical education methods. For example, they refused to stop fights between black and white students, believing that they were teaching the kids how to navigate racial tension. Instead, they outraged a father whose son was beaten by a black student. He pulled him out of the school, complaining that they were turning his son into a racist. In 1968, the school was forced to close due to a lack of funding. Devastated, Diana tried to save the school by selling buttons, which said, "Children are only newer people." But her fundraising effort failed.
In 1968, Diana and Bill moved into a commune in Ann Arbor and dedicated themselves to political activism. The late 60s were a time when it seemed like the world was starting to spin out of control. Decolonization movements, Vietnam, assassinations, riots, mass student demonstrations around the globe. It was a time when American youth were primed for the most radical of politics. They cheered for anything that was anti-authoritarian. They believed that America was an ex-Nazi Germany, and they didn't want to sit back and be good Germans.
Diana and Bill joined the Students for a Democratic Society, the largest group in the American Student Movement at the time. They joined the SDS when it was both at the height of its power with over 100,000 members nationwide and also on the brink of internal collapse. At the time, the SDS was split into two warring camps: the Progressive Labor Party, a working-class focused group of old school communists, and the Revolutionary Youth Movement, a militant group that eventually became Weatherman, and was the faction that Diana and Bill belonged to. The Revolutionary Youth Movement was full of famous faces in the protest movement, such as Bernardine Dohrn, a law student with a fondness for miniskirts, who Jed Ghoover called the "Lashianaria of the Lunatic Left." Other key members included Mark Rudd and John Jacobs, known as JJ, who led the student occupations of Columbia University in 1968. The Revolutionary Youth Movement was united by their belief that America was committing a genocide in South Vietnam and that any action, even violence, was justified to combat racism and imperialism. They were intoxicated by the idea that they would become the catalysts of a major turning point in world history. JJ wrote the group's founding document during a speed binge. He named the manifesto after a Bob Dylan lyric, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." 11 people signed the manifesto and agreed to call the group Weathermen.
In August 1969, Weatherman raided the SDS National Office in Chicago and declared themselves its rightful leader. And their manifesto told the world what they were all about. JJ envisioned Weatherman joining a worldwide resistance against American imperialism being fought in countries like Vietnam and Angola. He wanted to "bring the war home," a slogan that advocated attacking the US imperialist machine from within. He intended to inspire blacks and working-class whites to take up arms against the US government. If Fidel Castro could launch the Cuban Revolution with only 13 men, he reasoned that Weathermen could do the same. They didn't need numbers. They needed to be like Marian Delgado. Marian Delgado was a 5-year-old who derailed a passenger train by placing a concrete slab on the tracks, destroying the train's engine. Life magazine called it a prank, but Marian Delgado was no prankster. He was a problem solver. Marian was a curious boy who couldn't break the concrete slab himself, so he let the train do it for him. "Be like Marian Delgado." It became Weatherman's unofficial motto. Be like the powerless boy who used a tiny slab of concrete to sabotage a powerful system.
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By summer of 1969, small groups of Weatherman collectives lived in communes across New York, San Francisco, and the Midwest, answerable to a central committee of Weatherman leaders which operated out of Chicago. Weathermen distributed flyers at schools promoting what they declared the first battle in their war. It was called the Days of Rage. It was 4 days of riots in Chicago.
When a 22-year-old Vietnam vet named Larry Grathwall was handed a flyer for the Days of Rage, he took it straight to the authorities. He was a sergeant of the 101st Airborne and watched a quarter of his platoon die after only seven months of fighting in Vietnam. Larry hated hippies, especially anti-war activists like Weatherman, who were planning to tear a city apart. Larry approached the FBI and volunteered to join Weatherman as an informant for them. He claimed that he did it solely for patriotic reasons and didn't ask the FBI for a dime.
To win Weathermen members over, Larry introduced himself as a veteran who was deeply ashamed of participating in the genocide against the Vietnamese people. They believed him, and it wasn't long before he was accepted into Weatherman's Cincinnati Collective House. Later, an FBI memo revealed that the bureau had trouble finding informants who were willing to live as Weatherman members did due to the group's "degenerate living habits, their immoral conduct, and their use of drugs." Somehow, Larry Grathwall had no trouble fitting in.
In late 1969, Weathermen began hardening themselves. The leadership believed that to inspire recruitment, they had to create an image of strength. They did daily target practice, calisthenics, and karate in the park. They watched The Battle of Algiers, studying the guerrilla warfare tactics shown in the film. They performed jailbreaks, which were raids of schools where they ran through the halls to recruit students by breaking windows, interrupting lessons, and beating and tying up professors. They wanted to recruit greasers, teenagers and motorcycle gangs who knew how to fight. Unfortunately for them, the greasers didn't care for them very much. When Mark Rudd, a Weatherman leader, tried to recruit greasers out of McDonald's, they beat him so badly that they sent him to the hospital.
From the summer of 1969 to New Year's Day 1970, Weathermen entered the most notorious period in the group's history. It was a time when they became a cult in order to turn themselves into battle-ready revolutionaries. Most historians stop short of calling Weatherman a cult, but the parallels are hard to ignore. In Weatherman, members were told to give up jobs and to cut off relationships. All personal assets were handed over to the group. Diana gave her collective the shareholder checks and credit card she received from her father's company. Her father canceled the card, saying that he didn't want to fund a movement that wanted him, a capitalist, dead. After severing ties with the outside world and draining their bank accounts, Weatherman members became dependent on the collectives, which isolated them away from interactions where clear thinking about the group might arise.
Members were told to break taboos to teach them to become hyper-obedient soldiers. Diana's collective smashed tombstones in a graveyard. They killed a cat, cooked it, and ate it. Committing unthinkable acts put their inner values at odds with their actions. Internal contradiction made them experience cognitive dissonance. To ease the mental discomfort caused by committing acts that they were opposed to, such as killing and eating a cat, they had to learn to suppress and change their previously held principles. Taboos continued to be broken. The Weatherman leadership challenged societal norms about sex through a practice they called "smash monogamy." They said that monogamy needed to be destroyed because it was possessive and patriarchal. Couples in the group were forced to break up, even married ones. They held orgies believing that sexual inhibition would make them a more harmonious fighting force. Eventually, the orgies led to an outbreak of STDs. Mark Rudd wrote that he knew things had gone too far when he was in bed with a woman who had a crab louse crawling on her eyebrow. Women were expected to sleep with any man who wanted them or risk being labeled as uncommitted to the movement. It wasn't uncommon for men with power in the group to tell women to break up with their partners as a ploy to sleep with them. They transgressed anything that they saw as status quo. Bill Ayers wrote that he had sex with Terry Robbins even though they were both straight men.
By then, Diana Outton and Bill Ayers' relationship had long been an open arrangement. Although he told her that monogamy was a counterrevolutionary trait, he became very attached to Bernardine Dohrn. While they were both with the Weatherman leadership in Chicago, Diana found it difficult to divorce sex from love. She confessed to Bill, "If this is liberation, why don't I feel free?" Diana was learning to accept cruelty, violence, and the expectation that her body be made available to any man who desired her instead of pushing her away from the group. It psychologically trapped her. She was nearing a stage of total commitment to the group. But there was one essential ingredient of cult indoctrination left: forced confession.
In criticism-self-criticism sessions, collectives analyze each other's slightest errors and deviations in thinking from the group's ideology. Criticism-self-criticism sessions were popularized by Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, who compared the practice to sweeping a dirty room. Usually, an individual member of a collective was put on the hot seat and criticized by the entire group. Secrets were weaponized by their friends and lovers, leading to hurt feelings and mistrust. The sessions continued until the person being criticized admitted to real or imagined faults and promised to change. Criticism, self-criticism, transformation. The collectives usually dropped tabs of LSD before sessions to heighten the experience. Sometimes the sessions went on for days. By the end of the sessions, members of collectives were put into a state of fear, disorientation, and exhaustion. The sessions reminded them to never show weakness or to get caught saying the wrong thing. This created an environment ripe for indoctrination. This meant that they were truly isolated without anyone to turn to for support, since they couldn't trust outsiders, insiders, or even themselves. Constant stress kept their minds too occupied to consider anything rationally, such as their ability to leave the group. Weathermen followed the classic process of breaking down the individual to rebuild them in the image of the group, or as psychiatrist and cult researcher Robert J. Lifton called it, thought reform. The criticism-self-criticism sessions were used for shame and control; stress and endless activities gave them no time to think. They were turned into an army of unthinking devotees to the movement. Anyone who resisted becoming a tool for the revolution was purged from the group.
On October 8th, 1969, a crowd of Weatherman members gathered in Chicago for a national action that they called the Days of Rage. Bill Ayers predicted that a mob of thousands of young people would assemble. But only 400 people, mostly Weathermen members, showed up. It was a cold night. Morale was low and the leadership was disorganized. It was clear that the recruitment efforts had failed. Nearly 2,000 officers in the Chicago Police Department were eagerly waiting for the riot to start. Weatherman provoked the Chicago PD by blowing up a statue commemorating dead cops killed in the 1886 Haymarket affair. When the statue was rebuilt a year later, Weathermen blew it up again. Wearing motorcycle helmets and armed with saps, Weatherman members began marching at 10:45 p.m. towards the Drake Hotel, destroying property and fighting cops along the way. The riot was over in less than 90 minutes and caused over $1 million in property damage. 250 Weatherman members were arrested. Six were shot and survived. A city official was paralyzed. 57 policemen were hospitalized.
The Weatherman leadership called the Days of Rage a success. They said that clashing with police proved that they were a force to be reckoned with. However, they were devastated when Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party partially condemned their actions.
>> We think it is anarchistic, opportunistic, individualistic. It's chauvinistic. It's a Custeristic and that's the bad part about it. It's Custeristic in that its leaders take people into situations where the people can be massacred and they call that revolution. It's nothing but child's play, it's folly and it's criminal because people can be hurt. We say that they're doing exactly what the pigs want them to do when they take people down and and just do nothing, play around and the pigs are prepared for this and they'll wipe all of those young people out. We think these people may be sincere, but they're misguided. They're muddleheads and they're scatterbrains.
Receiving condemnation from Fred Hampton was a major blow. The Black Panther Party was the group that they wanted to align themselves with the most. As Kathy Wilkerson said, "In our hearts, all of us wanted to be Black Panthers."
The next day, 70 Weatherman members in the women's militia attempted to raid a draft board office. Diana Outton was among those who were arrested. Her father paid $5,000 to bail her out of jail. At dinner, he asked her if she'd return home for a few days, but she declined because she had a Weatherman meeting in Evanston. Her father reluctantly drove her to the meeting, dropping her off at 1:00 a.m.
On the rare occasion that Diana visited her family home, she was accompanied by Weathermen members who her father described as rude and arrogant. He tried to engage them in political discussions, but he said that they responded with sarcasm and a lot of giggling. He remembered being annoyed when one of them beat him in a chess game with only four moves. Diana loved her family, but kept them at a distance. They represented every bourgeois inclination that she was told to rid herself of. Her family was worried about her. She missed her sister's wedding. They heard that she had traveled to Cuba to meet with representatives of the Viet Cong. After that, her grandmother removed her from her will. Her father said that he always tried to reason with her and never dismissed her point of view because he felt that regardless of her actions, she was still a rational person. Diana returned home one last time on Christmas Day in 1969. During her stay, she refused to talk about politics and was thankful that her sister gave her a fisherman sweater.
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From December 27th to New Year's Day 1970, Weathermen held a war council in Flint, Michigan. It consisted of several days of fiery speeches, orgies, and group karate sessions. During the war council, Bernardine Dohrn infamously praised Charles Manson's cult for murdering the actress Sharon Tate and her unborn baby. To a crowd, she said, "Dig it. First, they killed those pigs. Then, they ate dinner in a room with them. Then they even shoved a fork into Pig Tate's stomach. Wild."
By the time Diana returned to her Weatherman Collective in Michigan, the Summer of Love was officially over and a dark new decade had begun. In the early months of 1970, Weatherman began purging its members. In a two-month period they called the consolidation, Weatherman cut their ranks down from 400 to 150 members. After that, they destroyed records at the SDS headquarters and officially terminated the organization. Then they started to live under aliases to disappear from society. In time, they changed the group's name from Weatherman to the Weather Underground.
In the 1970s, it was easy to live under a false identity. Sometimes the Weather Underground collectives purchased phony government documents from ID brokers, but usually they just committed identity theft. They stole checkbooks, driver's licenses, and credit cards from college dorms. To trick the government into issuing them fake identities, they filed for birth certificates using the names of dead babies who, like them, were born around 1946. Larry Grathwall wrote in his memoir that he spent hours combing through cemeteries and obituaries to find names of dead children, which they then used to stockpile IDs.
In the early 1970s, there was an underground network of safe houses, couriers, and smugglers serving a clientele of draft dodgers and criminal fugitives nationwide. The Weather Underground leadership was well taken care of. Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn lived in a cozy bungalow in Hermosa Beach. They received funding from a group of left-wing lawyers in the National Lawyers Guild who pampered them with fancy dinners. However, Weather's lower-ranking members were so poor that some of them, like Bill Ayers' brother, lived in tents. The difference between the leadership and the lower-ranking members' lifestyles bred resentment.
The collectives in New York, San Francisco, and the Midwest communicated via payphones and anonymous post office boxes. When members traveled between collectives, they used the surname Delgado as a code word, a nod to their 5-year-old icon, Marian Delgado, who was featured in Life magazine. Larry Grathwall identified himself as Larry Delgado when he was sent to live with the Detroit Collective. In Detroit, he met Diana Outton, who he described as a "very sweet girl." In his memoir, he claimed that Diana told him privately that she had doubts about the movement. However, Larry said that she still held on to the conviction that revolution was the only way to fight imperialism. By then, she was 28 years old, in and out of jail, estranged from her loved ones, and was reportedly seen selling hard drugs to fund the group. The last time her family heard from her was when she called her sister and asked if their family would stand by her no matter what. Later, she sent her sister a large envelope labeled "Do Not Open." Inside were old letters, documents, and photos.
In February 1970, Diana drove Larry Grathwell to a meeting held by Bill Ayers in Detroit. During the meeting, Bill spoke about bombing the Detroit Police Officers Association building in retaliation for the police killings of three black men in 1967. Larry claimed that when he warned Bill that by bombing that location, they might kill the mostly black patrons of a nearby restaurant, Bill replied, "We can't protect all the innocent people in the world." But before the Detroit Collective went through with the bombing, Larry was thrown out of the group after he was reassigned to Wisconsin for urban guerrilla survival training.
Around the same time, Diana was moved to Terry Robbins' Collective in New York City. Other than JJ, the most radical member of the Weather Underground was Terry Robbins. Described as twitchy and intense, he spent his time obsessively studying the Anarchist Handbook and the Mini Manual of the Urban Gorilla. Terry was eager to lead the New York Collective in what he hoped would be the most destructive Weather Underground bombing. Two months earlier, in January 1970, he led a firebombing campaign in the city, but felt disappointed that it wasn't noteworthy enough to receive extensive news coverage. And he was right. The 1970s saw more domestic bombings than any other decade in US history. Between 1971 and 1972, the FBI recorded over 2,500 bombings across the United States, an average of nearly five per day.
In 1970, 23 states had little to no laws regulating the purchase of dynamite. Because of that, JJ, the writer of the Weather Underground Manifesto, was able to easily purchase 100 lb of dynamite for $60 in New England using an ID stolen from a New York City rabbi. By the time that states began restricting the sale of dynamite in reaction to terrorist bombings, the Weather Underground had already bought or stolen enough explosives to last them for decades to come.
In late February 1970, Terry Robbins' New York Collective received a fresh shipment of dynamite. Then he asked his girlfriend Kathy Wilkerson to find a place for them to build bombs. She called her father and asked if she could stay at his Greenwich Village townhouse while he was away on vacation. Despite tensions over her radicalism, her father gave her the keys before leaving for St. Kitts the next day. By the first week of March, the New York Collective had a target: a military officer's dance at Fort Dix.
In a townhouse basement, Terry Robbins and Diana Outton assembled nail bombs. At the time, they didn't really consider the reality of what they were planning to do. No one spoke about the possibility of people being hurt or killed. In her memoir, Kathy Wilkerson said that it took quite a bit of denial, but she didn't think that the nails they were adding to bombs could actually kill people. Terry admitted to Kathy that he was terrified because he didn't know what he was doing. When she encouraged him to take some time to learn how to build bombs safely, he shut off discussion. He said that as their leader, he would take responsibility for how things were done. Years later, Kathy learned enough about bomb making to realize that the bombs Terry was building didn't even have a safety switch to prevent accidental detonation. With a lack of experience, something was bound to go wrong.
Then, on March 6th, 1970, at 11:55 a.m., something did indeed go very wrong. Terry Robbins made a fatal error which completely destroyed the townhouse and ended the lives of himself, Diana Outton, and Ted Gold. It took 10 days to find Diana Outton's remains. All that was left of her was an arm without a hand and a leg without a foot. Both of her limbs were covered in roofing nails. On March 24th, she was buried in her family plot next to her grandparents' graves.
Diana's father, James Outton, was in London when he was told about his daughter's death. He spent months quietly brooding over what happened to her. He told a reporter that "I can't sit here and say that she was wrong and I am right. I won't say she lived her life in vain. That's such a trite statement, but I still can't help but feel that it was such a waste."
>> I've been asked how I would advise other parents and uh I've answered that I have no advice at all. I don't I wouldn't know how to advise myself. I'm looking for guidelines myself from somebody else.
Later, he said that he believed that she was a victim of a kind of intellectual hysteria that made her lose contact with reality.
Kathy Wilkerson and another Weather Underground member named Kathy Boudin managed to escape the townhouse without being arrested. Later, they met Mark Rudd in a coffee house. He took them upstate to a hideout and do firearms practice. Both women were charged in absentia with criminally negligent homicide and illegal possession of dynamite. 11 days after the townhouse explosion, 12 Weather Underground members were indicted in Chicago for charges related to the Days of Rage. 13 were indicted in Detroit for violations of explosives and firearms laws.
Larry Grathwall heard about the accidental townhouse explosion while he was in Wisconsin. After the explosion, his FBI handlers finally began taking the Weather Underground seriously. Thanks to him, they were able to stop the bombing of the Detroit Police Officers Association building. The FBI said that they wanted him to help find and arrest everyone named on the indictments. However, only a few weeks later, Larry's cover was blown after the FBI pressured him to set up their arrests of two Weather Underground members. In June 1970, he testified before a federal grand jury in Detroit about his time as an underground informant in the group. Wanted posters with Larry's face started to appear on college campuses. The posters were made by the Weather Underground.
>> I brought up the subject of what's going to happen after we take over the government. Uh you know we we become responsible then for administering you know 250 million people and there was no answers. No one had given any thought to economics. How are you going to clothe and feed these people? The only thing that I could get was that they expected that the Cubans and the North Vietnamese and the Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States. They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counterrevolution. And um they felt that this counterrevolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing re-education centers in the Southwest. uh where we would take all the people who needed to be re-educated into the new way of thinking and teach them how things were going to be. I asked, well, what is going to happen to those people that we can't re-educate that are die-hard capitalists? And the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated that they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these re-education centers. And when I say eliminate, I mean kill. 25 million people. I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of which have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people. And they were dead serious.
Larry was the FBI's last remaining embedded informant in the Weather Underground. After the townhouse explosion, Richard Nixon ordered the intelligence agencies to use any means necessary to end the revolutionary terrorism problem. Nixon's command led to the Houston Plan, a proposal that would give multiple intelligence agencies carte blanche to break civil liberty laws in the name of counterterrorism. Fearing scandal, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover vehemently objected to the Houston Plan, and Nixon rescinded his approval of it within days. However, elements of the Houston Plan were implemented informally by the FBI in their investigations. In pursuit of the Weather Underground, the FBI created Squad 47. They ran "black bag jobs," which were warrantless break-ins into the homes of family members and friends of the group. They bugged homes, read mail, made copies of documents, took photos, and dug through trash. The FBI knew what they were doing was illegal, but decided to deal with the consequences of breaking the Fourth Amendment if and when they came.
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After the accidental townhouse explosion, membership in the Weather Underground shrunk to roughly 40 people. The leadership was scattered and didn't know what their next move would be. In the midst of the chaos, Bernardine Dohrn stepped up to take the organization in a new direction. She gathered the Weather leadership in San Francisco and announced that from then on, they'd only target empty buildings, which stood as symbols of imperialism. In other words, they were no longer an organization that was in favor of killing people. To communicate their shift in strategy, Bernardine kicked JJ out of the group. He was the main advocate of revolutionary violence in the leadership, so she decided that he had to go.
Then, on May 21st, 1970, Bernardine Dohrn recorded a formal declaration of war against the United States government.
>> Hello, this is Bernardine Dohrn. I'm going to read a declaration of a state of war. This is the first communication from the Weatherman Underground.
In the communiqué, she promised that they would bomb a building within the next 14 days. When 14 days passed without anything happening, people wondered if the Weather Underground was all talk. Then, 33 days later, the group snuck a bomb into the New York City police headquarters. The bomb was concealed in a hollowed-out law book, and it was planted in the ceiling of a men's bathroom on the second floor. Before the bomb exploded, they called in a warning from a payphone, which was ignored. The blast destroyed the bathroom and the deputy commissioner's office. It injured eight people, but no one was seriously hurt.
The bomb, like many of the Weather Underground's subsequent bombings, exposed the absurd lack of security precautions government, corporate, and financial buildings had in the 1970s. The New York Police Department headquarters lacked metal detectors, ID checkpoints, cameras, or any other measures that could foil a terrorist attack. The Weather Underground showed that anybody could simply walk into a government or corporate building and plant a bomb.
From 1970 to 1975, The Weather Underground was responsible for 25 bombings. Most of the bombings were in reaction to news of US military operations in Southeast Asia, police brutality, and the deaths of prison inmates. The majority of their bombings followed the same strategy. First, their bombs were built by a former welder named Ron Flaggelman, who was the group's bomb expert. He was flown from coast to coast to safely assemble bombs for their attacks. If the bombs weren't built by Ron, they were built by Kathy Wilkerson, who, haunted by the accidental explosion of her father's townhouse, committed herself to studying the intricacies of bomb making. Second, the group typically planted bombs in isolated bathrooms. Because of that, the FBI jokingly called them the "terrible toilet bombers." Third, they always called in an advanced warning before a bomb was set to explode. Usually, their bombs went off around 1 to 2:00 a.m. when no one in the building was likely to be caught in a blast, not even overnight janitors or security guards.
No one was killed in any of the Weather Underground's bombings except for the three who died in the accidental townhouse explosion. Because of that, they were overshadowed by more militant and deadly terrorist groups of the time. Even after the Weather Underground bombed the Pentagon, the US Capitol building, and the State Department, the group remained an obscure footnote of a violent and bizarre time.
In the early 1970s, Bernardine Dohrn signed two communiqués admitting to the group's failings. She acknowledged that their lack of technical experience led to the accidental townhouse bombing. She also acknowledged that they had failed in their main objective, which was to spark a violent revolution. Their bombing campaign, she said, had been "as effective as a beast." Arguably, their lasting legacy was that their bombings led to a heightened level of security in government, financial, and corporate buildings. By the time they bombed the State Department in 1975, the building had clearance passes, security checkpoints, and inspections, which were much tighter security measures than the buildings they bombed at the beginning of the decade had.
The Weather Underground is also remembered for aiding the jailbreak of the legendary LSD advocate Timothy Leary. It's a little convoluted, but here's the gist of it. After escaping from a minimum-security prison, Leary was picked up and shuttled between Weather Underground safe houses. Then he was flown to Algeria where he briefly stayed at a Black Panther Party compound for refuge until Eldridge Cleaver, an early leader of the Black Panthers, took him and his wife hostage. The Weather Underground spiked in popularity among the Flower Power youth after helping Timothy Leary escape prison. But they were also criticized for turning their backs on the Black Liberation Movement by not breaking out the co-founder of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton, out of prison instead of Leary. They never directly responded to accusations that they turned their back on the black movement. But years later, Bernardine Dohrn was forced to record a tape apologizing for being "white so-called revolutionaries who sold out the revolution." The simple fact was that after being spooked by the townhouse bombing, the Weather leadership became more interested in their own self-preservation than they were in fighting a bloody revolution.
On January 27th, 1973, the United States pulled out of Vietnam, which marked the beginning of the end for the group. With only 15 or so members left, and with no clear purpose, the Weather Underground leadership was unsure of what to do next. Then, in October 1973, prosecutors at the United States Department of Justice did something unexpected when they dropped their most serious charges against the Weather Underground leadership. That year, the Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to perform wiretapping without a warrant. So, the government decided that instead of exposing the FBI's illegal surveillance tactics in court, it would dismiss charges against the group.
By 1979, almost everyone in the Weather Underground leadership had come out of hiding and surrendered. Most of them received minor punishments such as probation and a small fine. Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were the last of the leadership to turn themselves in. When they came out of hiding in 1980, they were living in New York and had started a family. Bill didn't receive any punishment, and Bernardine Dohrn was given 3 years probation and ordered to pay a $1,500 fine. It was a profoundly light sentence for someone who had spent several years on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list.
The only Weather Underground member who saw significant prison time for their bombing campaign was Kathy Wilkerson. She received 3 years and 11 months for unlawful possession of dynamite tied to the townhouse explosion. Kathy was released 11 months later and began a process of restarting her life at 35 years old. She went back to school to study mathematics and became a math teacher. Many of the prominent members of the Weather Underground returned to college in their 30s for undergraduate and graduate degrees. In the end, they were permitted to rejoin the system that they sought to destroy unscathed by serious consequences. The Weather Underground could not possibly exist after Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War. The group faded and their revolution never materialized. The fact that they were privileged enough to just be able to step back into society was not lost on them. There was a sense that compared to black activists, members of the Weather Underground were permitted to exist with one foot placed in the radical movement and another foot safely entrenched in the system. After all, they were the children of the men who ran society. Therefore, the consequences of their actions in the courts would never be so severe that it prevented them from re-entering the establishment after they were finished being communist revolutionaries.
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