“It’s all so fantastic to me now,” she says as we rise to leave. “It’s just so absurd I participated in all this.”
“The challenge for me,” I say on the sidewalk outside, “is to explain to people today why this all didn’t seem as insane then as it does now.”
“Yes,” she says, stepping into a morning rain. “That’s it exactly.”
• • •
Imagine if this happened today: Hundreds of young Americans—white, black, and Hispanic—disappear from their everyday lives and secretly form urban guerrilla groups. Dedicated to confronting the government and righting society’s wrongs, they smuggle bombs into skyscrapers and federal buildings and detonate them from coast to coast. They strike inside the Pentagon, inside the U.S. Capitol, at a courthouse in Boston, at dozens of multinational corporations, at a Wall Street restaurant packed with lunchtime diners. People die. They rob banks, dozens of them, launch raids on National Guard arsenals, and assassinate policemen, in New York, in San Francisco, in Atlanta. There are deadly shoot-outs and daring jailbreaks, illegal government break-ins and a scandal in Washington.
This was a slice of America during the tumultuous 1970s, a decade when self-styled radical “revolutionaries” formed something unique in postcolonial U.S. history: an underground resistance movement. Given little credibility by the press, all but ignored by historians, their bombings and robberies and shoot-outs stretched from Seattle to Miami, from Los Angeles to Maine. And even if the movement’s goals were patently unachievable and its members little more than onetime student leftists who clung to utopian dreams of the 1960s, this in no way diminished the intensity of the shadowy conflict that few in America understood at the time and even fewer remember clearly today.
In fact, the most startling thing about the 1970s-era underground is how thoroughly it has been forgotten. “People always ask why I did what I did, and I tell them I was a soldier in a war,” recalls a heralded black militant named Sekou Odinga, who remained underground from 1969 until his capture in 1981. “And they always say, ‘What war?’”
Call it war or something else, but it was real, and it was deadly. Arrayed against the government were a half-dozen significant underground groups—and many more that yearned to be—which, while notionally independent of one another, often shared members, tactics, and attorneys. Of these, only the Weather Underground, the first and by far the largest, has earned any real analysis. The Symbionese Liberation Army, a ragtag collection of California ex-cons and radicals who pulled off the underground’s most infamous action, the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst in 1974, was widely dismissed as a pack of loonies. Many doubted that the Black Liberation Army, a murderous offspring of the Black Panthers, even existed. A Puerto Rican independence group known as the FALN, the most determined bombers in U.S. history, remains cloaked in secrecy to this day; not one of its members has ever spoken a meaningful word about its operations. The United Freedom Front, a revolutionary cell consisting of three blue-collar couples and their nine children, robbed banks and bombed buildings well into the 1980s. An interracial group of radicals called the Family did much the same, yet remained so obscure that no one even knew it existed until a fateful afternoon in 1981 when an armored-car robbery went badly awry, three people died, and America was reintroduced to a movement it had assumed dead years before.*
This was strange, even at the time. Because radical violence was so deeply woven into the fabric of 1970s America that many citizens, especially in New York and other hard-hit cities, accepted it as part of daily life. As one New Yorker sniffed to the New York Post after an FALN attack in 1977, “Oh, another bombing? Who is it this time?” It’s a difficult attitude to comprehend in a post-9/11 world, when even the smallest pipe bomb draws the attention of hundreds of federal agents and journalists.
“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States,” notes a retired FBI agent, Max Noel. “People don’t want to listen to that. They can’t believe it. One bombing now and everyone gets excited. In 1972? It was every day. Buildings getting bombed, policemen getting killed. It was commonplace.”
There are crucial distinctions, however, between public attitudes toward bombings during the 1970s and those today. In the past twenty-five years terrorist bombs have claimed thousands of American lives, over three thousand on 9/11 alone. Bombings today often mean someone dies. The underground bombings of the 1970s were far more widespread and far less lethal. During an eighteen-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day. Yet less than 1 percent of the 1970s-era bombings led to a fatality; the single deadliest radical-underground attack of the decade killed four people. Most bombings were followed by communiqués denouncing some aspect of the American condition; bombs basically functioned as exploding press releases. The sheer number of attacks led to a grudging public resignation. Unless someone was killed, press accounts rarely carried any expression of outrage. In fact, as hard as it may be to comprehend today, there was a moment during the early 1970s when bombings were viewed by many Americans as a semilegitimate means of protest. In the minds of others, they amounted to little more than a public nuisance.
Consider what happened when an obscure Puerto Rican group, MIRA, detonated bombs in two Bronx theaters in New York on May 1, 1970. Eleven people suffered minor injuries when one device went off at the Dale Theater during a showing of Cactus Flower. The second exploded beneath a seat at the cavernous Loew’s Paradise while a rapt audience watched The Liberation of L.B. Jones; when police ordered everyone to leave, the audience angrily refused, demanding to see the rest of the movie. When the theater was forcibly cleared, an NYPD official said later, the audience “about tore the place apart.”1 Neither the bombings nor the Paradise audience’s reaction was deemed especially newsworthy; the incident drew barely six paragraphs in the New York Times.
The public, by and large, dismissed the radical underground as a lunatic fringe, and in time that’s what it became. But before that day, before so many fell victim to despair or drugs or the FBI, there was a moment when the radical underground seemed to pose a legitimate threat to national security, when its political “actions” merited the front page of the New York Times and the cover of Time magazine and drew constant attention from the White House, the FBI, and the CIA. To the extreme reaches of the radical left, to those who dared to believe that some sort of second American Revolution was actually imminent, these years constituted a brief shining moment, perhaps its last. To others, the bombings were nothing more than homegrown terrorism; the excesses of the radical left during the 1970s helped nudge America toward the right end of the political spectrum and into the arms of Ronald Reagan and the conservatives. But in the eyes of much of mainstream America, to ordinary working people in Iowa and Nevada and Arkansas who hadn’t the time or the inclination to study the communiqués of bomb-throwing Marxists, who wanted only to return to normalcy after long years of disorienting change, it was insanity.
In the end, the untold story of the underground era, stretching from 1970 until the last diehards were captured in 1985, is one of misplaced idealism, naïveté, and stunning arrogance. Depending on one’s point of view, its protagonists can be seen as either deluded dreamers or heartless terrorists, though a third possibility might be closer to the truth: young people who fatally misjudged America’s political winds and found themselves trapped in an unwinnable struggle they were too proud or stubborn to give up. This book is intended to be a straightforward narrative history of the period and its people. Any writer makes judgments, but I have tried to keep mine to a minimum, especially where politics is concerned.
It is ultimately a tragic tale, defined by one unavoidable irony: that so many idealistic young Americans, passionately committed to creating a better world for themselves and those less fortunate, believed they had to kill people to do it. The story is long and laby
rinthine, alternately exciting and sad, and it all begins, in a way, with a tortured couple living in New York’s East Village in the summer of 1969. They were like so many in the faltering protest movement at that restive decade’s end: long-haired, free-spirited, and mired in gloom. The one thing that set them apart from friends who raised their fists and chanted antiwar slogans in demonstrations of the day was that late one night, after removing a carton of cottage cheese, a quart of yogurt, and some leftover salad from their refrigerator, they replaced it all with a hundred bright red sticks of dynamite.
01
“THE REVOLUTION AIN’T TOMORROW. IT’S NOW. YOU DIG?”
Sam Melville and the Birth of the American Underground
NEW YORK CITY | AUGUST 1969
On a drizzly Friday afternoon they drove north out of the city in a battered station wagon, six more shaggy radicals, a baby, and two dogs, heading toward a moment unlike any they had seen. Jimi. Janis. The Who. The Dead. They were like hundreds of thousands of young Americans that season, one part aimless, druggy, and hedonistic, two parts angry, idealistic, and determined to right all the wrongs they saw in 1969 America: racism, repression, police brutality, the war.
Traffic on the New York State Thruway was slow, but a pipeful of hashish and a few beers left everyone feeling fine. Ten miles from their destination, the car sagged into a traffic jam. One couple got out to walk. The girl, who was twenty-two that day, was Jane Alpert, a petite, bookish honors graduate of Swarthmore College with brunette bangs. She wrote for the Rat Subterranean News, the kind of East Village radical newspaper that published recipes for Molotov cocktails. Later, friends would describe her as “sweet” and “gentle.” As she stepped from the car Alpert lifted a copy of Rat to ward off the raindrops.
Beside her trudged her thirty-five-year-old lover, Sam Melville, a rangy, broad-chested activist who wore his thinning hair dangling around his shoulders. Melville was a troubled soul, a brooder with a dash of charisma, a man determined to make his mark. Only Jane and a handful of their friends knew how he intended to do it. Only they knew about the dynamite in the refrigerator.
Slogging through the rain, they didn’t reach the Woodstock festival until almost midnight. Ducking into a large tent, Jane curled up beside a stranger’s air mattress and managed an hour of sleep. She found Melville the next morning wandering through the movement booths, manned by Yippies and Crazies and Black Panthers and many more. After a long day listening to music, she glimpsed him deep in conversation with one of the Crazies, a thirty-something character named George Demmerle, who could usually be found at New York demonstrations in a crash helmet and purple cape. “That George,” Melville said as they left. “He really is crazy. I offered to spell him at the booth, but he said only bona fide Crazies ought to work the official booth.”
“That’s because he’s old,” Jane said. “He wants to be a twenty-year-old freak.” When Melville dropped his head, Jane realized she had offended him. He and Demmerle were almost the same age.
The echoes of Jimi Hendrix’s last solo could still be heard at Woodstock on Monday morning when Jane left the East Village apartment she shared with Melville and walked to work. They had been squabbling all summer and had decided to see other people. That night, though, she canceled a date and returned to the apartment to find him glumly sitting on the bed. “I thought you had a date,” he said.
“I changed my mind.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d rather be with you.”
He said nothing, which was unusual. She lay beside him.
“What’s wrong, Sam?” she asked.
It took a moment before he said, “I planted a bomb this afternoon.”
• • •
The first bombs had already exploded in America, scores of them, and self-styled “revolutionaries” were already as thick as the air that sweltering August night, but the man who really started it all—who became a kind of Patient Zero for the underground groups of the 1970s—was Sam Melville. Until he and his friends began planting bombs around Manhattan in the summer of 1969, protest bombings had been mostly limited to college campuses, typically Molotov cocktails heaved toward ROTC buildings late at night. All but forgotten today, Melville was the first to take antigovernment violence to a new level, building large bombs and using them to attack symbols of American power. While later groups would augment his tactics with bank robbery, kidnapping, and murder, Melville’s remained the essential blueprint for almost every radical organization of the next decade.
He was born Samuel Grossman in the Bronx in 1934, making him a decade older than many of his revolutionary peers. In his teens he adopted the surname Melville, after the author of his favorite book, Moby-Dick. He had a difficult upbringing; his parents separated before he was five, and he grew up poor in Buffalo. He drifted through his twenties, working as a draftsman. By the time he turned thirty-one, he had married and separated and was teaching plumbing at a trade school, aimless and unsatisfied, searching for a purpose to his life.
He found it during the Columbia University unrest in 1968, when angry students were occupying campus buildings in protest of discriminatory policies and the Vietnam War. Their cause enthralled Melville, who quit his job on an impulse and took one delivering copies of a radical newspaper, the Guardian. He began dating Jane after selling her a subscription. Jane had grown up in Forest Hills, Queens, and knew next to nothing about Melville’s two specialties, radical politics and sex, both of which she found she liked quite a bit. Under his guidance she became intoxicated by life in “the Movement”: the demonstrations, the sit-ins, the meetings, the sense that the world was changing and she was helping make it happen. “This country’s about to go through a revolution,” Melville told her. “I expect it to happen before the decade is over. And I intend to be a part of it.”
Jane threw herself into the brave new world of radical politics with a convert’s zeal, taking the job at Rat Subterranean News. She and Melville moved in together, renting an apartment on East Eleventh Street. It was there, amid a hazy tableau of marijuana and Movement politics, that she realized Melville’s talk of revolution wasn’t abstract. He wasn’t satisfied with placards and slogans; he wanted to do something, something to bring on the revolution.
It was in the fall of 1968 that Melville began to talk about bombs. New York City, he knew, had a long history of bombings. There was the anarchist bombing on Wall Street in 1920, which killed thirty-eight people, and another that killed two policemen at the World’s Fair in 1940. But the bomber who obsessed Melville was one he knew from boyhood: George Metesky, the original Mad Bomber. A disgruntled employee of Consolidated Edison, Metesky planted thirty-three bombs around Manhattan between 1940 and his arrest in 1957. Twenty-two of them exploded—at Grand Central Terminal, at Pennsylvania Station, at Radio City Music Hall—and a dozen or more people were injured. After Columbia Melville began spray-painting buildings with the graffito GEORGE METESKY WAS HERE.
For the moment, bombing was still just an idea. But that winter, as 1968 gave way to 1969, Melville began planning some kind of bombing campaign with his friends. They were all angry. Times were changing, and not for the better. The Movement—the great swelling of young Americans that had thronged the streets in protest over the past three years—was crumbling. Everyone sensed it. A new president, Richard Nixon, was entering the White House, pledging to crack down on student radicals. What that meant had become clear at the Democratic National Convention in August, when Chicago police used truncheons to beat down demonstrators, leaving them bloodied, bowed, and defeated.
Repression: It was all anyone in the Movement was talking about that winter. Many were giving up hope. But others, Melville included, began talking about fighting back, about a genuine revolution, about guns, about bombs, about guerrilla warfare. Jane privately thought it all ridiculous, brave speechifying fueled by too much free time and too many drugs. And in time Melville app
eared to drop the subject. It was clear, however, that he wanted to do something, and to Jane’s amazement, “something” arrived unannounced that February. In fact, there were two of them, “Jean” and “Jacques.” Melville took Jane aside and told her they were genuine revolutionaries—Canadian revolutionaries, dedicated to the freedom of their native Quebec. Their real names were Alain Allard and Jean-Pierre Charette, and their terrorist group, Front de libération du Québec, known as the FLQ, was responsible for more than 160 acts of violence in Canada—killing at least eight people—since 1963, including the bombing of the Montreal Stock Exchange just days before. They were on the run.
Melville had not only met the two Canadian terrorists through mutual acquaintances but had agreed to hide them in a friend’s apartment. They wanted to get to Cuba. Melville had promised to take care of everything, and for the next few weeks he did. He arranged for a post office box, retrieved their mail, brought them newspapers, even bought their food. In turn he spent hours closeted with the two, quizzing them on the minutiae of revolutionary work: the ins and outs of safe houses, false papers, and, most of all, bombs. Jean and Jacques drew Melville diagrams and showed him how to insert bombs into briefcases. They even tutored him on how to cover his mouth when telephoning in bomb threats.
One night Jane returned to the apartment and found Melville pacing nervously. “They’ve come up with a plan,” he said.
Jane stared.
“They want to hijack a plane to Cuba.”
“You’re not serious.”
They were. He was. Even though every nerve in her body told Jane not to, she agreed to help. She did it, she told herself, out of love. The real reason, though she couldn’t admit it for years, was the excitement. She was involved in something bigger than herself. They were changing the world. This was justified. This was important.
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