Robbins himself led a group into the Inwood neighborhood, at Manhattan’s northern tip, to the redbrick home of John Murtagh, the judge overseeing the Panther 21 conspiracy trial. Murtagh was asleep inside with his wife and three children. Before placing the bombs, the group scrawled FREE THE PANTHER 21 and THE VIETCONG HAVE WON on the sidewalk. A neighbor called the police, who sent a patrol car. Before it arrived, the Weathermen placed three shopping bags containing Molotov cocktails beside the front door, on a window ledge, and beneath a car in the garage. All three went off at 4:30 a.m., blowing out two of the home’s windows and scorching the car.*3
As a “political action,” it was amateurish. On Sunday morning the bombings drew headlines in the New York papers, but Weatherman’s role went unreported; as in Berkeley, it had not sent a communiqué. Without it, “no one knew what they were about,” Wilkerson recalled. “It didn’t feel like we had accomplished anything. Firebombing had become routine. We could do them until we were blue in the face, and the government wouldn’t really care.”4
Robbins was disgusted with himself and the group for launching such an inconsequential attack. He began laying plans for something far more ambitious. First, though, they needed to get organized. The collective’s members were scattered across the city, and when Wilkerson mentioned that her father was taking a Caribbean vacation, Robbins startled her by asking whether she could get a key to the family townhouse, on Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village. The suggestion hit Wilkerson “like a ton of bricks,” she recalled, because it meant involving her family in her new underground life. She and her father, James, a radio executive, were estranged. Still, she went along, telephoning her father and telling him she had come down with the flu and needed a place to recuperate. He questioned her closely, then relented.
On Tuesday, February 24, Wilkerson visited the townhouse, on a quiet, tree-lined block just off Fifth Avenue, to see her father and stepmother off. She said nothing about anyone joining her there. Two hours later Teddy Gold and Terry Robbins arrived. Wilkerson, worried that a cousin might visit, pinned a note on the door saying she had the measles and would be watering the plants in her father’s absence; she was confident the cousin wouldn’t enter without at least a phone call. Robbins, meanwhile, toured the townhouse. It had four floors, plenty of bedrooms, and a subbasement with a workbench where James Wilkerson sometimes worked refinishing antique furniture. It would be a good spot for the technical work Robbins envisioned.
The following day, after five of them had moved in, Robbins chaired a meeting around the kitchen table.* Everyone agreed that the weekend actions had been a failure. Firebombings would no longer cut it; every ROTC building in America, it seemed, had been the target of Molotov cocktails. The answer, Robbins announced, was dynamite. Dynamite was actually safer, he insisted. It exploded only with the help of a triggering device, typically a blasting cap. They could buy it almost anywhere in New England. He had learned how to safely make a dynamite bomb, Robbins said. It was the only way to create an action large enough to get the government’s attention. By that point, Robbins’s authority was unquestioned. No one raised any objections.
That night in bed Robbins and Wilkerson had a long talk. In private, both admitted their fears. Robbins was secretly intimidated by the technical difficulties of building a bomb. As Wilkerson recalled it:
[Terry] had been an English major during his brief stint in college, and a poet. Science was a foreign language, and he hated it for being undecipherable. Because this left him powerless, he felt terrified. He understood no more about what electricity or dynamite were made of than I did, and he was considerably less interested. . . . Terry’s fear and dislike of anything technical could be overcome, I insisted. I tried to get him to see that it would be interesting to learn how all this worked. . . . [But] his fear, his courage, and his rage against injustice were feeding each other into a white heat. He was in a hurry, and didn’t want to mull it over too much. . . .
[His fear] could be overcome, he believed, by will. No one else seemed to be stepping up to the plate. Most people, even those in the movement, seemed willing to stand by while the United States rode roughshod over its victims. This infuriated Terry. We owed it to the Vietnamese to take some of the heat away from them. We owed the black movement to do the same.5
• • •
What worried Wilkerson most about their talk was Robbins’s continuing fixation on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and its vision of young heroes going out “in a blaze of glory.” If they failed, he swore, if they couldn’t ignite a revolution, at least they would be symbols. Robbins was prepared to die for the cause. Wilkerson wasn’t. Neither, she realized, were many of the others she knew in Weatherman. Not for the first time, she felt herself being carried along in a rushing river, powerless to stop.
On Saturday, February 28, the collective gathered to discuss targets: universities, police stations, ROTC buildings. Someone had seen a newspaper item about a dance at Fort Dix, an army base east of Philadelphia in New Jersey. Robbins seized on the idea of “taking the war” to the military but allowed other targets to be considered as well. Over the next few days they scouted half a dozen targets and got preparations under way. The dynamite proved easy to secure. On Monday, March 2—the day the Cleveland collective staged its attack—a member of JJ’s tribe, Ron Fliegelman, did what Sam Melville hadn’t realized he could do: He walked into the offices of New England Explosives in Keene, New Hampshire, presented the stolen driver’s license of a New York rabbi, and laid out less than $60; he walked out with two fifty-pound cases of American Cyanamid dynamite, each case containing one hundred sticks.* The next day, neighbors on Eleventh Street watched as Teddy Gold supervised the unloading of crates from a van.
By Tuesday Robbins had decided on their target: the dance at Fort Dix. Dozens of army officers would be there with their sweethearts. They would strike, he announced, that Friday, March 6; this would be the same evening Bill Ayers carried out the failed bombings in Detroit, suggesting that Robbins and Ayers, who visited the townhouse that week, were trying to coordinate their strikes. Later, there would be speculation as to what the rest of the leadership had known of Robbins’s plan. Ayers almost certainly knew. In the Chinatown collective, JJ and Mark Rudd knew. Blood, Robbins assured Rudd that week, would run in the streets. When Rudd asked where, Robbins said, “We’re gonna kill the pigs at a dance at Fort Dix.”6 In the years since, Bernardine Dohrn and Jeff Jones have downplayed their knowledge of the attack. A Weatherman confidant of both, however, asserts that privately the two have admitted they knew but were reluctant to confront Robbins.
On Thursday, March 5, Robbins chaired a final meeting in the townhouse kitchen, going over details and assignments for the attack. A new face was present; Diana Oughton, Ayers’s girlfriend, who had been transferred to join the group. If Oughton was uncomfortable with the plan—an attack that, if successful, amounted to mass murder—she showed no sign. Neither did anyone else at the table. In fact, according to Cathy Wilkerson, there was no talk whatsoever about the decision to actually kill people. Years later she admitted that she had viewed those they planned to kill only as an “abstraction.”7
There was, however, at least one naysayer. He will be called James. He was one of the Columbia alumni; he had been JJ’s roommate at one point. James was a member of the collective who did not live in the townhouse. According to a longtime friend, “the target had been bothering him for days. Finally, right at the end, he went nuts. This was the night before. He just went crazy, crying and screaming, ‘What are we doing? What are we doing?’ And you know what Teddy Gold told him? [He said,] ‘James, you have been my best friend for ten years. But you gotta calm down. I wouldn’t want to have to kill you.’ And he was serious.”
That Thursday in the kitchen, they focused on practical details. There was some talk of how much dynamite to use. No one, least of all Robbins, knew how much damage a single stick would do or whether it wo
uld take one or ten sticks to blow up a building. Someone said dynamite did more damage if inserted into a pipe. Not much dynamite could go inside a pipe, however, so Robbins said he planned to pack roofing nails into the bomb as well, in order to do as much damage as possible. Wrapping up, he described the electrical circuit to trigger the explosion, as he had been taught. Someone asked if it would contain a safety switch, a way to test the bomb short of detonation. Robbins hadn’t a clue. “Terry had been told to do it a certain way, and he was too insecure in his knowledge to debate it,” Wilkerson remembered. “He cut off the discussion. He was the leader and he would take responsibility for how it was to be done. . . . No one else spoke up.”8
By that evening Robbins had begun preparing his bombs at the workbench deep in the subbasement. He had far more dynamite than they needed, along with wire and a bomb-making text. No one knew what would happen when the bombs exploded at Fort Dix. They might be regarded as mass murderers; they might be heroes; they might be revolutionaries. In their minds Robbins and his acolytes were certain of only one thing: They would be striking back. It was Russia in 1905, and this was the road to a true revolution.
Everything was happening so fast. To members of the collective, what mattered most was striking back, and striking back now. No one took much time to ponder repercussions. At one point that week, Diana Oughton spoke with an old friend, Alan Howard. She admitted that the Days of Rage and Flint had achieved little and that the revolution would be possible only with mass support.
“We have a lot to learn,” she said. “We’ll make mistakes.”9
They would have time for only one.
05
THE TOWNHOUSE
Weatherman, March to June 1970
That Friday, March 6, the day they planned to bomb the Fort Dix dance, everyone rose early at the townhouse. Terry Robbins and Diana Oughton disappeared into the subbasement to finish building the bombs. Teddy Gold walked to the Strand bookstore, where he ran into Kathy Boudin’s mother, Jean. “Ted, Ted,” Jean said, kissing Gold on his bearded cheek. She knew Gold stayed in touch with her daughter.
“Do you think Kathy will pick herself up and go to NYU Law School in the fall?” she asked.
“No,” Gold said, his voice cracking from a cold.
“Is she living in Manhattan?”
“Sort of,” Gold said. Jean Boudin rolled her eyes and smiled. She had been around leftists enough to know not to ask more.1
Back at the townhouse, Cathy Wilkerson busied herself stripping the beds and straightening the rooms. Her father and stepmother were due back from St. Kitts that afternoon, and everyone had to be gone, the house thoroughly cleaned, for their arrival. After Gold returned from the Strand, Wilkerson tossed the sheets in a washer and started vacuuming. While others finished up the disguises they would wear that night, she unfolded an ironing board in the kitchen. Barefoot, her toes wriggling on the carpet, she had just begun pressing the wrinkles from a sheet when Gold came up the basement stairs. Robbins needed cotton balls, and Gold said he was running to the drugstore to buy some. Wilkerson nodded. Overhead, water coursed through the pipes. Kathy Boudin had just stepped into a second-floor shower.
A moment later, a few minutes before noon, as Wilkerson ironed sheets by the dull gray light of a kitchen window, everything—the townhouse collective, the Weatherman organization, every thought of armed revolution every student militant across the nation dared harbor—changed forever. Suddenly Wilkerson felt a shock wave ripple through the house, along with a deep rumbling from below. The ironing board began to vibrate. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Still standing, the hot iron in her hand, Wilkerson felt herself begin to fall as fissures appeared in the carpet at her feet. Geysers of splintered wood and plaster filled the air. A second, louder explosion came then, the floor gave way, and Wilkerson felt herself sinking. She had the presence of mind to toss the iron to one side. She was dimly aware of a dull red glow somewhere beneath her. When she stopped falling, everything went black. She could barely see.
The two explosions eviscerated the townhouse, destroying the first floor and blowing a great hole in its brick façade; above, the top floors hung like a set of trembling balconies, ready to fall at any moment. Up and down Eleventh Street windows blew out. Shattered glass sparkled like diamonds on the sidewalks. All across Greenwich Village, heads turned at the sudden booms. A block away, walking on Fifth Avenue, Jean Boudin felt the explosion, stepped toward it, and saw the townhouse in flames. She had no idea her daughter was inside.
The first officers on the scene, a patrolman named Ronald Waite, who had been guarding a school crossing around the corner, and a Housing Authority cop named Vincent Calderone, who had just left a doctor’s office nearby, arrived within moments of the explosions. Running up to the house, Waite tried to enter but was driven back by billowing white smoke; he dashed away, looking for help. Seeing no entry through the front of the townhouse, Calderone sprinted through an adjoining house and circled to the rear of the Wilkerson home, where he encountered a padlocked door and barred windows.
Inside, Cathy Wilkerson was regaining her senses. Miraculously, she was unhurt. Her face was coated in soot and dust; she could barely see. She was seized by the need to find Robbins and Oughton. “Adam?” she called, using Robbins’s code name. “Adam, are you there?”
Standing at the back door, Officer Calderone heard her words. As yet he had no sense that a crime had been committed; his only thoughts were of rescuing survivors. Fearing that the building would collapse at any moment, he drew his service revolver and fired several shots into the heavy padlock. It did nothing. Just then the house began to quiver, as if about to fall. Calderone backed away from the door.
“Adam?” Wilkerson asked once more. A voice answered, asking for help. It was Kathy Boudin, somewhere close by in the rubble.
“Are you okay?” Wilkerson asked.
“I can’t see,” Boudin said. It was the dust.
Wilkerson was dimly aware of flames. She sensed that they had barely ten or fifteen seconds before the fire reached them. Groping blindly, she inched left along the edge of what appeared to be a crater, reaching for Boudin. They touched hands, then grasped them. Wilkerson, still barefoot, took a step or two across the rubble, trying to reach what appeared to be a shaft of daylight in front of her. She could hear the flames building behind them. A few steps more, and she managed to pull herself and Boudin up a rise and out of the crater.
Just then a third explosion erupted from beneath the rubble at the back of the house. The force of it blew a massive hole in the wall of an adjoining building, which happened to house an apartment occupied by the actor Dustin Hoffman and his wife; Hoffman’s desk fell into the hole. Behind the house, the blast knocked Officer Calderone from the door. As flames erupted from the rear windows, he stumbled and ran.
As he did, Wilkerson and Boudin clawed over the last of the rubble and emerged onto the sidewalk, dazed. Wilkerson wore nothing but blue jeans; her blouse had been blown off. Boudin was nude. Other than cuts and bruises, the two women had not been seriously hurt.
A man in a white coat, a doctor passing the scene, helped them to their feet. A neighbor, Susan Wager, the ex-wife of the actor Henry Fonda, appeared and threw her coat around Boudin’s shoulders.
“Is there anyone else in there?” she asked.
“Yes,” Wilkerson mumbled as chunks of the townhouse’s façade fell onto the sidewalk. “Maybe two.”2
“Come on to my house and I’ll give you something to wear,” Wager said, leading the two shaken women down the sidewalk. Inside, she guided the pair to an upstairs bathroom, tossed towels on the floor outside, then jogged to a closet, where she pulled out two pairs of jeans, a pink sweater and a blue turtleneck, a pair of pink patent leather go-go boots, and a set of olive-green slippers. She left them outside the bathroom. A hand reached out and took them.
Regaining her se
nses, Wilkerson knew they had only minutes before the police arrived. She and Boudin showered quickly. When Wager left, Wilkerson crept from the bathroom and rifled through a set of closets in search of money or a subway token, anything they could use to flee. She found a token, then grabbed Boudin and trundled downstairs to the front door, where Wager’s housekeeper said they shouldn’t leave. The sound of sirens was already filling the air as Wilkerson insisted they needed to go to the drugstore and buy burn ointment. Before the woman could answer, they were out the door. They fast-walked down the sidewalk, hoping to avoid notice, and as the first fire trucks arrived behind them, made their way to the subway. And vanished.3
• • •
By twelve thirty, a half hour after the explosions, the hollowed-out skeleton of the townhouse was engulfed in angry flames, spewing thick clouds of smoke into the gray sky. A phalanx of fire trucks lined Eleventh Street, directing jets of water into the fire. In that first hour most of the firefighters assumed it was an accidental gas explosion, but the senior detective on the scene, Captain Bob McDermott of the First District, sensed that something was amiss. He put in a call to his boss, the chief of detectives whose men had arrested Sam Melville five months earlier: the crusty Albert Seedman.
“Captain McDermott just says it’s like no gas explosion he ever saw,” an aide told Seedman. “Like—it’s unnatural.”4
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