Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  Rudd could see his stock falling. With every passing day, power and influence were passing to the more aggressive leaders, Jeff Jones, Terry Robbins, and especially Bernardine Dohrn, who, as the leadership’s sole female, seemed to hold every other Weatherman leader in thrall. “Power doesn’t flow out of the barrel of a gun,” Rudd snarled at Dohrn during one Weather Bureau meeting. “Power flows out of Bernardine’s cunt.”4

  The heart of Weatherman’s work remained in Chicago, where the leadership and their friends lived together in groups of five and six. The brutality they experienced there—especially from the Chicago police but also from others—would have a powerful impact on their eventual decision to go underground. One of Jeff Jones’s friends, Jonathan Lerner, was given control of the national office, a set of second-story rooms at 1608 West Madison, on the edge of a ghetto. Lerner’s tiny staff paid the bills, answered mail, and put out the SDS newspaper, New Left Notes. “The office was a terrifying place,” Lerner recalls. “The presence of the cops was constant, sitting outside, following us to the bank. We were under siege by this group of black boys, ten, eleven years old. They would come up the fire escapes, race through, and steal people’s purses. It was absurd. Eventually we boarded up all the windows to keep the kids out, put deadbolts on all the doors, and built a metal cage like an airlock to get in. None of it helped.”

  Another danger, though the leadership never publicized it, was the Panthers, whose offices were several blocks away. If SDS was a focus of police harassment, the Chicago Panthers were approaching open war with the police. Their derelict offices were regularly raided, their members stopped and frisked on an hourly basis. The Weathermen idolized the Panthers, but the relationship fast deteriorated. “The Panthers were in a stage of total madness,” recalls Lerner. “As those months went on, as they became more paranoid and more crazy, they kind of took it out on us. To them our offices were much bigger, much nicer than theirs, we had lots of equipment, and cars, and the printing press. It rapidly developed into this rip-off relationship. That was emotionally horrible. You couldn’t dare question it politically. It was completely insane.” Tensions climaxed when a group of Panthers stormed the SDS office, jammed a gun into a girl’s face, beat up the SDS printer, Ron Fliegelman, and ransacked the office, making off with typewriters and other equipment. Afterward, Bernardine Dohrn and others went to the Panther offices to complain, Lerner recalls, “and were basically kicked down the stairs.”

  For all the threats of political violence, however, the emotional violence Weathermen unleashed among themselves proved even more destructive. Throughout this period, the Weather Bureau issued a series of directives designed to mold every individual Weatherman—or “cadre”—into a revolutionary combatant. The most grueling of these practices, borrowed from the Maoist Chinese, was known as criticism/self-criticism, essentially a marathon all-night interrogation in which members were accused of every conceivable human weakness, from cowardice to insubordination. For many, these sessions were too much; dozens of Weathermen left the group as a result. This was the point: to weed out the weak and the unready, to break down all traces of individualism and transform the deponent into a tough, obedient, unquestioning soldier. Another initiative, which actually originated with a group of Detroit Weatherwomen, was the Smash Monogamy program, which ordained that every member of Weatherman break up with his or her romantic partner. The idea, again, was to sever individual Weathermen from every meaningful relationship except that with the group itself. Scores of Weather couples were forced to break up, though it was noted that Dohrn always seemed exempt; while she and JJ did break up during this period, Dohrn began an extended monogamous relationship with Jeff Jones.

  The Smash Monogamy program led to Weatherman’s most notorious initiative: orgies. The idea was to break down the last remaining personal barriers. As Terry Robbins put it, “People who fuck together fight together.” One of the first, called the “national orgy,” occurred in Columbus, Ohio, during a visit by the leadership. “We were doing booze, dope, and dancing,” a Weatherman named Gerry Long recalled:

  And suddenly you could see the wheels turning in people’s minds. Will it happen? When? How to get started? We knew it wouldn’t happen of its own accord; somebody had to do something about it. We were constantly talking about asserting leadership in ambiguous situations, and here was a case in point. After a while, Jeff Jones went upstairs to the attic, where the mattresses were, with an old girlfriend. JJ sees them go up and follows, taking off his clothes, too, and lying down beside them. Finally, Billy [Ayers] yells, “It’s time to do it!” and takes the hand of the woman he’s been dancing with and goes up, too. Within minutes, there was a whole group of naked people looking down from the head of the stairs, saying, “Come on up!” I took the hand of this girl and exchanged a few pleasantries to give it a slightly personal quality, and then we fucked. And there were people fucking and thrashing around all over. They’d sort of roll over on you, and sometimes you found yourself spread over more than one person. The room was like some modern sculpture. There’d be all these humps in a row. You’d see a knee and then buttocks and then three knees and four buttocks. They were all moving up and down, rolling around.

  The next day there was a lingering awkwardness, Long recalls, until one woman piped up, “I’m sure they have to do it this way in Vietnam.”5

  “I was one of the people who instigated [the orgies], one in Chicago, one I remember, after a demonstration in Washington in November,” recalls Jon Lerner, who was in the process of coming out. “Billy Ayers and I were the leaders in D.C. After the demonstration, about thirty of us came back to this house. Somebody had a bunch of acid. We sort of said, ‘Let’s all drop acid and have an orgy,’ so we did. For me, it was sort of liberating, because I got a chance to have sex with some of the men I was after. The creepy thing was, I have a memory of several women who came out as lesbians having their first sex with women, and it was weird because everyone was sitting around watching. There were people who clearly didn’t want to be there, standing on the sidelines, legs crossed. It was basically creepy.”

  Weatherman’s taste for orgies proved short-lived, petering out within months. Mark Rudd thought all the sexual experimentation—from Smash Monogamy to orgies to homosexuality—was “disastrous,” fostering petty jealousies, driving people out of the collectives, and introducing a level of sexual confusion that did little to focus cadres on the revolution. Worst of all, he recalls, was a resulting epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, from gonorrhea and pelvic inflammatory disease to crab lice and genital infections they called Weather crud. For Rudd, the final straw came when he was having sex with a woman and noticed a crab in her eyebrow.

  All of it—the organizing and recruiting, the orgies, the escalating violence—climaxed at the Days of Rage in October. Weatherman leaders crisscrossed the country, giving interviews in which they predicted it would be the largest, most violent mass protest the Movement had seen, something on par with an urban Armageddon. As Mark Rudd told an Ohio television station, “thousands and thousands” of protesters were coming to Chicago “to fight back, to fight the government, to fight their agents, the police.” Exactly what that meant, no one was entirely sure. “We’re not urging anybody to bring guns to Chicago,” Bill Ayers said at the time. “We’re not urging anybody to shoot from a crowd. But we’re also going to make it clear that when a pig gets iced, that’s a good thing, and that everyone who considers himself a revolutionary should be armed, should own a gun.”6 Two nights before the protest, leadership sent a team to detonate Weatherman’s first bomb, a small one that destroyed the ten-foot bronze statue of a policeman in Haymarket Square, site of the violent 1886 labor rally in which eleven people (seven of them policemen) were killed. After the Weather bomb went off, a union official vowed that police were ready to meet violence head on. “We now feel,” he said, “that it’s kill or be killed.”

  After months of speechmaking
and posturing, the long-awaited Days of Rage began on a cool Wednesday night, October 8, 1969, on a rise at the southern end of Lincoln Park. At dusk the Weathermen began gathering around a bonfire—most of the leadership, Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Jeff Jones, all ready for battle. Then they waited, and waited, and waited. By nightfall it was clear something was wrong. Thousands had been expected. At best two hundred people had shown up, almost all of them veteran Weathermen. Everyone stood around blinking, vaguely embarrassed, until one young man, glancing about nervously, muttered, “This is an awful small group to start a revolution.”7

  Small, but ready for havoc. Most were wearing some kind of helmet, goggles, or gas mask; beneath their clothes they hid lead pipes, chains, blackjacks, and their emergency contact information. At 10:25 p.m., after several desultory speeches, Jeff Jones stepped into the firelight and shouted the code words, “I am Marion Delgado!”—evoking the name of a five-year-old California boy who in 1947 had placed a concrete block on railroad tracks to derail an oncoming locomotive. With that, amid a volley of war whoops and echoing ululations—a bit of street theater taken directly from The Battle of Algiers—the attack began, some two hundred Weathermen running from the park into the wealthy neighborhood known as the Gold Coast. Chanting “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!” they tossed bricks through the bay windows of chandeliered apartment houses and bashed the windshields of dozens of cars. Racing toward downtown, they smashed more windows, at the Astor Tower Hotel, the Park Dearborn Hotel, and the Lake Shore Apartments. High above, a few irked residents threw ashtrays and flowerpots.

  The police, dozens of whom had been lining Lincoln Park, were caught off guard; they had assumed that the demonstration would take place inside the park. Scrambling to stop the surging protesters, police managed to erect a roadblock in front of the Drake Hotel. Seeing it, the charging Weathermen veered a block east, then ran south into another roadblock, this one manned by thirty helmeted police officers. A melee ensued. Thirty protesters were beaten to the pavement. Others broke through and split into groups, which the police ran down, truncheons swinging, gunshots fired. Six Weathermen were shot, none seriously; dozens were hauled off to jail. By midnight it was over.

  It took three days to bail many out of jail. The Weatherman contingent, once again two hundred strong, reassembled on Saturday, at first marching peacefully through downtown streets past double lines of Mayor Daley’s finest. At a signal the war whoops again rose, and they broke into a run, swinging pipes at car windshields and chucking rocks. They never had a chance. This time uniformed officers, augmented by plainclothes detectives, appeared at every corner, mercilessly beating everyone with long hair until they fell, bloodied, into the gutters. More than 120 people were arrested. This time someone was seriously hurt: a city attorney named Richard Elrod, who charged at a Weatherman named Brian Flanagan, lost his balance, and hit his head, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. Flanagan was indicted and later turned himself in; a jury eventually found him not guilty.

  It was, all in all, a humiliating debut for Weatherman. Bail bonds alone cost SDS $2.3 million. All the group’s top leaders were arrested and now faced criminal charges, typically assault and incitement to riot. But the Days of Rage event did achieve something important: It marked Weatherman as the leading player on the “heavy edge” of the New Left, the furthest left, the wildest, the craziest, the most committed. The leadership chose to declare victory. The next issue of New Left Notes argued:

  We came to Chicago to join the other side . . . to do material damage to pig Amerika and all that it’s about . . . to do it in the road—in the open—so that white Amerika could dig on the opening of a new front . . . to attack . . . to vamp on those privileges and destroy the motherfucker from the inside. We did what we set out to do, and in the process turned a corner. FROM HERE ON IT’S ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER—WITH WHITE YOUTH JOINING IN THE FIGHT AND TAKING THE NECESSARY RISKS. PIG AMERIKA BEWARE. THERE’S AN ARMY GROWING IN YOUR GUTS AND IT’S GOING TO BRING YOU DOWN.

  “The Days of Rage was really a shock to us, that nobody came but us,” recalls Jon Lerner. “You know, we didn’t step back and take a sober view of it. We took a reactive view, which was ‘Well, if we’re the only people who will do this, it’s us against the world.’ And after that, it was.”

  • • •

  “The decision to go underground,” says Russell Neufeld, “was largely a function of what happened to us in Chicago, the violence, the brutality. Things like getting a gun put in your mouth, it convinced a lot of us we really were living in a police state. [Going underground] seemed the logical next step.”

  It appears that the Weather Bureau decided to abolish SDS and go underground in the days immediately after the Days of Rage. The decision had certainly been made by the time the leadership gathered ten days later for a postmortem in a pair of cabins they rented in White Pines Forest State Park, in northern Illinois. Of those present, only Mark Rudd and Jim Mellen have given partial accounts, and both recall that the decision to go underground—to, in effect, attempt a Cuban-style revolution in the United States—was presented to them as a fait accompli. Both voiced doubts, suggesting that the Days of Rage had been a failure and that it might be time to reconnect with a Movement they were turning their backs on. Both were dismissed out of hand.

  As Mellen remembered it: “The argument, as usual, was in personal terms. I didn’t have the character to be a revolutionary. I lacked audacity. I couldn’t do it. When I tried to point out that military action required exactly the kind of discipline that we’d rejected and a technical capacity [i.e., bomb making] we’d never bothered to master, JJ looked at me and said, ‘Jim here is from the Six-Months-in-the-Library School of Sabotage.’ Everybody laughed, and that was that.”8

  In a 2011 interview for this book, Rudd remembered being stunned by the sudden shift in strategy. They had mused about going underground for months—every self-styled revolutionary had—but Rudd had never truly believed they would go through with it. Just as startling, he says, was how the message was delivered: by Bernardine Dohrn, with preternatural cool, “as if she were suggesting we go for supper.” As Rudd recalled it, Dohrn said, “We’ve learned from Che that the only way to make revolution is to actually begin armed struggle. . . . This is what we’ve been waiting for. The next step after the National Action is to move to a higher level of struggle, to build the underground. Street violence is an unsustainable tactic—it makes us too vulnerable and costs too much. We’ve got to be able to work clandestinely.”9

  Rudd couldn’t believe it: They were planning to initiate actual violence, actual bombings, actual sabotage. It was surreal. Almost as shocking was Dohrn’s final message: Weatherman’s underground would be organized not by the Weather Bureau but by a new subset of leadership they were calling the Front Four: Dohrn herself, JJ, Jeff Jones, and the pugnacious Terry Robbins. All the others—Rudd, Mellen, Howie Machtinger, even Bill Ayers—would be relegated to secondary status. Only later would many of them realize that the crucial component in this equation was the little-known Robbins, that in the words of the writers Peter Collier and David Horowitz, who published a history of Weatherman in Rolling Stone in 1982, there was a “subtle passing of the torch from JJ, Weatherman’s thinker, to Terry, who had proposed himself as Weatherman’s doer.” One Weatherman told them, “JJ had these fantasies, but it was Terry who was prepared to act them out.”10

  It was a fateful choice. To that point, Robbins had been a marginal member of leadership, an SDS stalwart best known as Ayers’s best friend. A chain smoker, small, dark, and intense, Robbins came across to friends as warm and funny, as the sensitive poet he was; others, noting his caustic humor and macho posturing, found him, in the words of a Weatherman ally, Jonah Raskin, “menacing.” Robbins was younger than the rest, having just turned twenty-two, but he talked tougher than almost anyone. He was the perfect fist at the end of JJ’s arm, endlessly preoccupied—obsessed, some would say—with underground warfa
re. He would scribble bomb designs and ideas for sabotage in a notebook, remembered by Bill Ayers in his 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days:

  Terry studied The Blaster’s Handbook, a publication of the Explosives Department of E.I. du Pont Corporation, his cranky notebook lying open on the ratty sofa, each inflamed sketch coiled tight, busy with detail, poised to detonate on the page—pressure-trigger device, nipple time bomb, magnifying glass bomb, cigarette fuse, alarm clock time bomb, homemade grenade, walking booby trap, Bangalore torpedo, book trap, pressure-release gate trap, loose floorboard traps, whistle and pipe traps. . . .

  There were detailed drawings of bridges—slab bridge, T-beam bridge, concrete cantilever bridge, truss bridge, suspension bridge—with wild X’s indicating the pattern of placements that would drop every goddamned thing into the water or the ravine below, and architectural sketches of the skeletons of numerous buildings, with the requisite accompanying fury of X’s designed to doom the thing, reduce it to chaos. There were maps of highways with notes on sabotage and destruction.

  Page after page was piled with calculated steps for making high explosives with all-but-indecipherable formulae; the formula for nitroglycerin, the formula for mercury fulminate, for dynamite, for chloride of azode, for ammonium nitrate, for black powder. . . . The pigs need a strong dose of their own medicine, Terry said grimly, shoved down their throats. . . . And up their asses, too. A napalm enema for Nixon.

  In retrospect, others would remember an inescapable air of violence that hung over Robbins. He came from a broken family and hinted that there had been violence; one of his many girlfriends later came forward to say he beat her. But what troubled some, including his principal lover that winter, Cathy Wilkerson, wasn’t so much his comfort with violence as his preoccupation with death. He was constantly talking about the need for Weathermen to give their lives for the revolution, how he was willing to die for the struggle. His favorite movie that season was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and his favorite scene was the last, when the two outlaws meet their fates charging headlong into a volley of bullets. More than one Weatherman alumnus, discussing Robbins, uses the term “death wish.”