“I used a blank birth certificate; somebody stole it for me,” recalls Paul Bradley. “In time I had a pretty darn good set of ID. The only thing we couldn’t figure out was credit cards, so we used cash for everything. For airplane flights, for rent, for everything.”
• • •
As the last of the old collectives were purged that February, the survivors were herded into three sets of new underground collectives, sometimes called tribes, to be based in New York City, San Francisco, and the Midwest. Two tribes were based in Manhattan. One, tasked with gathering money and false identification, was headquartered in a Chinatown apartment under JJ’s supervision; Mark Rudd took a bed there, along with Paul Bradley, Ron Fliegelman, the SDS printer, and others. The second tribe, led by Terry Robbins, was to plan and carry out East Coast bombings; its dozen or so members were initially spread across several Manhattan and Brooklyn apartments. In the Midwest, the collectives in Pittsburgh, Columbus, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati were shut down; the survivors gathered in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo under the loose supervision of Bill Ayers.
The rest of the leadership, including Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Howie Machtinger, along with fifteen or so others, made their way to San Francisco, where two apartments were rented, on Geary Street and in Haight-Ashbury. Later Dohrn and Jones decided to distance themselves from the others, establishing a West Coast headquarters of sorts on a pink houseboat they rented at the Sausalito piers for $200 a month. The decision to relocate to the Bay Area, where SDS had little presence, was later a cause for some head-scratching. Some would cite San Francisco’s importance as a center of the burgeoning youth culture, which was part of it. Another reason for the decision was Jeff Jones’s familiarity with the area’s New Left community. Yet another was the crucial presence of one of Dohrn’s closest friends, the radical attorney Michael Kennedy, who would soon emerge as perhaps Weather’s most useful aboveground supporter.
In those first days Dohrn and Jones found California liberating. All the hassle of Chicago—the police raids, the street fighting, the constant surveillance—seemed swept away in the cool seaside breezes. The houseboat had a fireplace and a metal ladder to the roof, where Dohrn sunbathed, sometimes topless. Overhead, seagulls swooped to and fro. As in New York, they established two collectives in San Francisco, one to gather money and false documentation, and a second, supervised by Machtinger, which prepared to stage bombings on the West Coast.
Outside the leadership, there was widespread confusion as to what kinds of actions were authorized (as there was for decades afterward). There would be bombings, everyone assumed, but what kind? “There was so much macho talk, you know, like the Panthers, ‘Off the pigs,’ ‘Bomb the military back into the Stone Age,’” recalls Cathy Wilkerson. “But did that mean we were actually going to kill people? I never really knew.” Bill Ayers and others would later insist there were never any plans to harm people, only symbols of power: courthouses, police stations, government buildings. The handful of Weathermen who crossed that line, Ayers claims, were rogues and outliers. This is a myth, pure and simple, designed to obscure what Weatherman actually planned. In the middle ranks, in fact, it was widely expected that Weathermen would become revolutionary murderers. “My image of what we were gonna be was undiluted terrorist action,” recalls Jon Lerner. “I remember talking with Teddy Gold about putting a bomb on the [Chicago railroad] tracks at rush hour, to blow up people coming home from work. That’s what I was looking forward to.”
In fact, what constituted a legitimate target for a Weatherman bombing was the topic of sensitive discussions among the leadership at Flint. It was during these talks, according to Howard Machtinger and one other person who were present, that the leadership agreed that they would, in fact, kill people. But not just any people. The people Weatherman intended to kill were policemen. “If your definition of terrorism is, you don’t care who gets hurt, we agreed we wouldn’t do that,” recalls Machtinger. “But as to causing damage, or literally killing people, we were prepared to do that.” According to one side of the argument, says Machtinger, “if all Americans were compliant in the war, then everyone is a target. There are no innocents. That was always Terry and JJ’s argument. But we did have a series of discussions about what you could do, and it was agreed that cops were legitimate targets. We didn’t want to do things just around the war. We wanted to be seen targeting racism as well, so police were important.” Military personnel were ruled to be legitimate targets as well.
The decision to attack policemen was an unspoken act of solidarity with the group whose approval mattered most to Weatherman leadership: Movement blacks, especially the Black Panthers, who reserved a special hatred for urban police. The death of Fred Hampton and the brutality of the Chicago police in general made almost everyone in the leadership eager to seek revenge against policemen. “In our hearts, I think what all of us wanted to be were Black Panthers,” Cathy Wilkerson recalls. “And it was no secret what the Panthers wanted to do, which is what the Black Liberation Army did later, and that’s kill policemen. It’s all they wanted to do.”
By the first week of February 1970, all three Weatherman groups—San Francisco, the Midwest, and New York—were more or less in place. Everyone, at least in the leadership, understood what would come next: bombings. Perhaps surprisingly, there appears to have been no coordination among the three groups, no overarching plan of attack. Instead, the field marshals in each group—Howie Machtinger in San Francisco, Bill Ayers in the Midwest, and Terry Robbins in New York—mapped out their initial actions independently. Given Weatherman’s leadership culture, it is hardly surprising that a keen competition arose among the three men and their acolytes to see who could launch the first, and splashiest, attacks.
“The problem with Weather wasn’t that people disagreed with our ideology,” Machtinger says. “It was that they thought we were wimpy. The sense was, if we could do something dramatic, people would follow us. But we had to act fast. We had no idea what Terry and Billy were doing, they had no idea what we were doing, but everyone wanted to be first.” Adds Wilkerson, “That was the real problem: all these macho guys with their macho posturing, seeing who could be the big man and strike first.”
Working from the Geary Street apartment, Machtinger and the leadership were determined to strike quickly. They decided to mount an attack on the police, sending male-and-female teams—posing as lovebirds—to scout police stations throughout the Bay Area. They selected the sprawling Hall of Justice complex in Berkeley as their first target. No one involved would remember where they obtained the dynamite—“I don’t remember that being a problem,” Machtinger recalls—but they managed to assemble two pipe bombs at Geary Street. Each device carried two sticks of dynamite linked to an alarm clock. The devices were wiped with alcohol to remove any fingerprints.
The new Weatherman underground made its unannounced debut six weeks after Flint, late on the evening of Thursday, February 12, when five or six Weathermen edged into position around the Berkeley police complex. There had been no warning call; this was intended to be an ambush, pure and simple. Just before midnight, when shifts would change, sending dozens of off-duty policemen out to their cars, two Weathermen crept into the parking lot. One bomb was placed beside a detective’s car; a second was tossed on the ground between cars. A few minutes after midnight, as officers began wandering outside, the first bomb detonated, its deep boom echoing through the downtown streets. Nearly thirty plate-glass windows in the adjoining municipal building shattered. More than two dozen officers were in the parking lot, and one, a reserve patrolman named Paul Morgan, was struck by shrapnel that mangled his left arm; he would later undergo six hours of surgery to save it. Thirty seconds later, as groups of stunned policemen slowly rose from the pavement, the second bomb went off, shattering more windows. Afterward, a half-dozen cops would be treated for bruises and broken eardrums.
“We wanted to do it at a shift change, fr
ankly, to maximize deaths,” says a Weatherman cadre who took part in the action that night. “They were cops, so anyone was fair game. Basically it was seen as a successful action. But others, yeah, were angry that a policeman didn’t die. There was no one that was anti that. That was what we were trying to do.”
• • •
Because Weatherman took no credit for the Berkeley bombing, it received none. Until now, no history or memoir of the group has mentioned it, much less its intent, which has allowed apologists like Bill Ayers to claim that Weatherman never intended to hurt people. Even at the time, the attack received little notice, in large part because there were so many bombings that winter. In just the two-week period before and afterward, from February 6 to February 21, 1970, there were seventeen incidents of significant radical violence in the United States, including two bombings by a Puerto Rican independence group in New York on February 9; a firebombing in Ypsilanti, Michigan, on February 11; the bombing of a police station in Danbury, Connecticut, that injured twenty-three people on February 13; another set of bombings in Berkeley, believed to be the work of black militants, on February 16; and sundry other bombings in Hartford, Boston, and Maryland.
One of the enduring mysteries of the Weatherman story centers on one of these seemingly unrelated incidents. It happened just four nights after the Berkeley bombing, on the evening of Monday, February 16. A steady rain was falling as a forty-four-year-old San Francisco police sergeant named Brian McDonnell sorted through bulletins at a Teletype machine inside the Park Police Station in the upper Haight neighborhood. At 10:45 p.m., with no warning, a bomb exploded on an outside window ledge, just feet from where McDonnell was standing. The device was packed with inch-long industrial fence staples, many of which erupted through the window and shredded McDonnell’s face, severing his jugular vein and lodging in his brain; he was dead within two days. Detectives later surmised that the bomb had been timed to go off at the 11 p.m. shift change, much as the first Weatherman bomb had gone off at the Berkeley station.
The case has never been solved, but from the beginning San Francisco police suspected Weatherman. In 1972 detectives debriefed a Bay Area radical named Matthew Landy Steen, who claimed to have joined planning sessions for the action with Dohrn and Machtinger, among others. Two years later, in sworn testimony before a Senate committee, the FBI informant Larry Grathwohl claimed that Bill Ayers told a Weatherman meeting in Buffalo, New York, that Dohrn had supervised the attack; investigators, however, discounted this. They put more weight on stories told by a Weather associate named Karen Latimer, who emerged in the mid-1970s to tell of another meeting at which Dohrn presided and Machtinger oversaw the bomb building. According to a 2009 article in San Francisco Weekly, prosecutors came close to indicting Dohrn, Machtinger, and Jeff Jones in the late 1970s on Latimer’s word alone.
The case lay fallow until 1999, when a task force of retired prosecutors and FBI agents reopened it as part of a drive to prosecute several unsolved ’60s-era killings. Latimer’s death, however, as well as a lack of any physical evidence, has to date precluded any indictment. Still, as late as 2010, authorities asked several Weathermen, including Machtinger, to give voice and handwriting samples. Few believe the case will ever be solved. Needless to say, the Weathermen who were in San Francisco at the time all deny any involvement. “That Berkeley action took weeks of planning,” says one. “Given that, it’s not like we could turn around and do another one four days later.”
• • •
As Weatherman initiated its first attacks on police in February 1970, the most complex management task fell to twenty-five-year-old Bill Ayers, who found himself shuttling between collectives in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo. By the time of the Berkeley bombing on February 13, he had plans for similar actions under way in the Midwest. A vivid glimpse of Ayers in action during this period was later provided by Larry Grathwohl, the Cincinnati student who had joined Weatherman the previous fall.*
According to Grathwohl’s account, Ayers chaired his first strategy meeting in a vacant classroom at Wayne State University in Detroit. He led six Weathermen in a discussion of possible targets for a kidnapping or a bombing, including Vice President Spiro Agnew and Detroit’s mayor. Grathwohl sensed that Ayers already had a target in mind, and watched as he guided the group toward it. At the time, three Detroit police officers were on trial in the deaths of three black youths during a 1967 riot. “Where did [those] pigs get the money to hire decent lawyers?” Ayers asked. “The Police Officers Association put up the money.” When someone mentioned that the association had a headquarters downtown, Ayers pounced. “We blast that fucking building to hell,” he said. “And we do it when the place is crowded. We wait for them to have a meeting, or a social event. Then we strike.”2
The attack, Ayers indicated, would come at the same time that a second Weatherman group bombed the Detroit police’s 13th Precinct house. Ayers unfolded a piece of paper on which he had drawn the neighborhood around the association headquarters. As the group studied it, he assigned each member a task, constructing disguises, securing a getaway car, and, for Grathwohl, scouting the target. Grathwohl, who was in regular contact with his FBI handlers, later told Ayers that he objected to his plan to place the bomb on a window ledge, which faced a restaurant called the Red Barn. “We’ll blow out the Red Barn restaurant,” he argued. “Maybe even kill a few innocent customers—and most of them are black.”
According to Grathwohl’s account, Ayers was unconcerned with killing innocent passersby, as was his best friend, Terry Robbins, in New York; both were regularly overheard to make comments to the effect that “collateral damage” was to be expected in any war. “We can’t protect all the innocent people in the world,” Ayers said, according to Grathwohl. “Some will get killed. Some of us will get killed. We have to accept that fact.”
In the end, the two bombs, composed of forty-four sticks of dynamite, were placed exactly as Ayers planned, on the night of March 6, by which time Grathwohl had been transferred to another city. Detroit police found them before they exploded, however, either because they were built improperly or because Grathwohl alerted the FBI in time to remove them.
Another of Ayers’s collectives, Cleveland, led by a Columbia SDS veteran named John Fuerst, was almost as ambitious. It was a group of six or seven that included two high school girls, one a sixteen-year-old dropout named Joanna Zilsel, who had made a life attending Weatherman and other demonstrations. Zilsel’s parents were prominent progressives in the Cleveland area, but when her mother prevented her from attending the Days of Rage and Flint, she left home to join Weatherman. “We didn’t have money, we didn’t have anything, we were figuring things out on the fly; the only stuff we had we shoplifted,” Zilsel recalls. “I think people were quite confused about what we were supposed to be doing. I know I was.”
At one point, John Fuerst met with Bill Ayers. According to an informant—apparently one of the high schoolers—who spoke to the FBI in 1972, Ayers told Fuerst to focus on targets linked to the case of a militant convicted of murdering three Cleveland policemen, Ahmed Evans. How and what they did, however, was left to the Cleveland collective. “When [Fuerst] came back, he said, ‘You know, we’re on our own. That’s just the way it is. All over the country there are cells, and everyone is doing their own thing,’” Zilsel says. “I don’t remember hearing even a flavor of marching orders. It was more: Here we are, a group of individuals with a very strong commitment to making urgently needed change. The war had to be ended, racism had to be stopped, the system had to be changed. So we did the best we could.”
The Cleveland collective launched its first action early on the morning of Monday, March 2. Their target was the home of a detective named Frank Schaeffer, president of the Fraternal Order of Police. At about 1:15 a.m., members of the collective crept into Schaeffer’s front yard, Molotov cocktails ready to be lit. “We had a very clear plan, with designated responsibilities, signals and
a driver,” recalls Zilsel. “We went over this many, many times. And we were there and this young man, he was standing right beside me, he just lights the thing and throws it. With no coordination, just forgetting the plan. He just lost it. And we’re like, ‘Oh, my God, this is happening.’ So I instantly said, ‘There is no choice here, you have to follow through.’ And so I [threw mine]. And we got away. It was just sheer panic and confusion.” The firebombs ignited on the front porch. Wakened, Schaeffer and his son rushed out and extinguished the flames.
• • •
Oddly, it was the most aggressive of the Weatherman leaders, Terry Robbins, whose New York collective was the last to mobilize. Obliged to serve a six-week jail sentence following a demonstration, Robbins didn’t arrive in Manhattan until late January, when actions proposed by the California and Midwestern groupings were well into the planning stages. Robbins, however, was determined that if his debut came last, it would be the splashiest.
A glimpse of Robbins’s preparations comes from his girlfriend at the time, Cathy Wilkerson. Unlike Ayers, who granted subordinates wide latitude, Robbins took full control from the outset. At an initial meeting, the mood was grim—no jokes, no laughter. After months of airy talk, they were finally going to war. Robbins announced that he intended to launch three simultaneous firebombings. They discussed an array of targets, including buildings at Columbia and various police precincts. They made their move on the frigid night of Saturday, February 21, 1970. Robbins had gathered the makings of at least nine Molotov cocktails—each a glass bottle filled with gasoline, with a cloth inserted into its mouth, ignited by, of all things, a firecracker. That night everyone gathered around a gasoline can behind a supermarket, filled their bottles, and scattered to their targets. The first bomb was tossed at a patrol car outside the NYPD’s Charles Street precinct at 1:30 a.m.; a second blew up in the street nearby. Neither caused any damage. Two hours later two more were thrown at navy and army recruitment booths near Brooklyn College; the booths were scorched. A fifth ignited on the steps of the Columbia University law library.
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