Days of Rage

by Bryan Burrough

  Seedman set up a command post in a basement across the street, which soon filled with the city’s fire chiefs and a milling squadron of clean-cut FBI men. All that afternoon they watched as the fire consumed what remained of the townhouse. By dusk flames still raged at the rear, while the front had crumbled into a massive heap of smoking, red-hot rubble two stories high. Seedman, suspicious at the disappearance of the only known survivors, contacted James Wilkerson’s office and learned that his daughter had been staying at the house. He got his first lead when a detective hustled up around 6 p.m. A records check, the detective said, indicated that Cathy Wilkerson belonged to Weatherman—“the wildest of the wildest,” as he put it.

  Seedman pondered the news all that evening as the rubble cooled and firefighters began to take shovels to the top layers. This was no gas leak, he felt sure. But why would Cathy Wilkerson bomb her father’s home? Did she hate her father that much? Or was it something else? He was still chewing over matters around seven when there were shouts from the debris. They had found a body, a young man with red hair, lying crushed in the rubble with his mouth wide open. He was loaded into an ambulance and taken to the coroner’s office for identification.

  Cranes were wheeled in; all weekend they lifted the rubble and dumped it into waiting trucks to be taken to the Gansevoort Street pier, where police raked through it for clues. Sunday evening Seedman was at his command post when he got the news: The dead man was another Weatherman, Teddy Gold.* For Seedman, this changed everything. One Weatherman could be dismissed. Two meant this was no accident. This was a bomb factory.

  The news broke in the Monday morning papers. At Columbia students tried in vain to lower the flag in memory of the popular Ted Gold; when security stopped them, they scrawled on the flagpole’s base, IN MEMORY OF TEDDY GOLD. FIGHT LIKE HIM. In the window of a store on West Eighth Street, a sign appeared: TED GOLD DIED FOR YOUR SINS.

  • • •

  Chaos broke out in the Weatherman ranks. In those first crazed hours, no one understood what had happened, much less what to do. Ron Fliegelman had been in Vermont buying more dynamite. After hiding it, he returned to New York to find JJ’s collective in an uproar. “The collective was in a tizzy,” Fliegelman recalls. “No one knew what to do. I gave a thought to giving up, and I had a gun pulled on me and was told I was not leaving.” Mark Rudd didn’t learn the news till that evening, when he returned to the Chinatown apartment to find everyone hunched over an early edition of the Times. TOWNHOUSE RAZED BY BLAST AND FIRE; MAN’S BODY FOUND, read the headline. They had no idea who was alive and who was dead. Rudd ran outside to a pay phone and with a single call managed to find Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin, who had most likely taken shelter at the Boudin family’s house. He hurried over and heard everything from the two shaken women. Robbins and Diana Oughton were almost certainly dead. Ted Gold was missing.

  All night Rudd worked the phones, rounding up the other members of the townhouse collective. Everyone gathered the next morning at a coffee shop on Fourteenth Street. They were in shock. For the moment Rudd concentrated on logistics, making sure people had safe places to stay. A few days later he managed to herd them to upstate New York for a day of shooting practice, just to get them out of the city. Outside New York, most Weathermen heard the news on their car radios. Most knew only that there had been an explosion; out in Denver, David Gilbert heard it had been a police attack. “We were just like, ‘Oh, my God, Diana Oughton, Teddy Gold,’” remembers Joanna Zilsel, then a teenager in the Cleveland collective. “I had met them. It was like, Holy shit. This is the real thing. We’re in a war. This is what the Vietnamese people are being subjected to every day. This is the ugliness of violence.”

  • • •

  A crane was still gouging out loads of debris Tuesday morning when one of Seedman’s detectives, Pete Perotta, thought he saw something. He held up his hand for the crane operator to stop. The man jumped to the ground alongside him. “Is that . . . ?” he asked.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” Perotta breathed.5

  He summoned Seedman and a group of FBI men from their command post. There, hanging from the teeth of the bucket, were bits and pieces of a human body: an arm with no hand, a shredded torso, a set of buttocks, a leg without a foot, all of it studded with roofing nails. They looked for a head but never found one. The coroner would later identify the remains as Diana Oughton’s.*

  The crane operator was just finishing his shift at five o’clock when Detective Perotta urged him to lift out one final load. The big bucket splashed into a hole in the middle of the rubble, now filled with seven feet of black rainwater. When the bucket rose, Perotta lifted his hand again. Between the bucket’s teeth was a gray, basketball-sized globe. Perotta stepped closer and peered at the muddy orb. It was studded with roofing nails and encrusted with dripping protuberances. It took a moment for Perotta to realize what they were: blasting caps. Slowly it dawned on him: The entire blob was made of dynamite—enough explosive to blow up the entire block. Albert Seedman would say it was the single largest explosive device ever seen in Manhattan.

  The block was evacuated, the bomb squad called in. Working through the night, they whisked the dynamite away, then found fifty-seven more bright-red sticks deep in the rubble, along with all the wristwatches, coils of orange fuse, and blasting caps Robbins had secreted in the subbasement. Seedman was terrified that one of his men might be killed if they stumbled on more dynamite. At his request, both James Wilkerson and his wife stepped in front of television cameras and beseeched their daughter to tell them how much more dynamite might be inside and how many bodies. They received no answer.

  By the following Saturday the rubble had almost been cleared, the deep pool of rainwater drained, and detectives were able to begin inspecting what remained of the walls and foundation. That morning a detective glimpsed what appeared to be a piece of pinkish-brown rug wrapped around a sewer pipe in the subbasement. Only when he unrolled it did he realize he was holding human flesh. It was all that remained of a man’s torso—and it was all they would ever find of Terry Robbins. It would be two months before he was tentatively identified.

  Seedman and the NYPD had done all they could. This new mode of terrorism—massive bombs being placed by educated and highly mobile young radicals—was not their job to prevent. If the Weathermen were to be stopped before others died, it would be up to the FBI.

  • • •

  On Sunday, March 8, two days after the explosion, President Richard Nixon met with the FBI’s aging director, J. Edgar Hoover, and White House staffers in the Oval Office. Nixon was alarmed at the spread of radical bombings, and not simply those attributed to Weatherman. Every day that winter seemed to bring a new incident of radical violence, random bombings from Rockefeller Center to San Francisco, shoot-outs with Black Panthers in Chicago and elsewhere. The Townhouse appeared to confirm the FBI’s worst fears. Further, Nixon lectured Hoover, it was only a matter of time until Weatherman or some other radical group tried to assassinate him. Nixon said he wanted “everything possible” done to end the Weatherman threat.

  Hoover promised he would see to it. The problem was, he had few arrows in his quiver. When Weathermen had begun disappearing underground that January, the FBI had been caught off guard. Agents had relied so completely on tapped telephones in Chicago that when the taps went silent, they had no sense where anyone had gone. The day of the townhouse explosion—an event so momentous in leftist circles that it came to be referred to simply as the Townhouse—the Bureau had precisely one significant informant inside Weatherman: the Cincinnati student Larry Grathwohl. Not long after, he was in Buffalo, studying a plan to bomb a power station in Niagara Falls, when Bill Ayers arrived and ordered him to New York. There Grathwohl managed to slip away and meet with FBI agents at a hotel. Overnight Weatherman had become the FBI’s highest priority, and Hoover ordered the immediate arrest of any Weatherman Grathwohl could provide. Grathwohl groused that the lead
ership had fled. The only fugitive he knew in the city, he said, was a girl named Linda Evans, who had been indicted in Chicago. Worse, Grathwohl argued, an arrest would blow his cover, leaving the FBI with no informants inside the group whatsoever.

  It didn’t matter. Hoover wanted an arrest, pronto, and he got it. Grathwohl arranged to have breakfast with Evans on April 15, at a diner on East Twenty-third Street. FBI men were waiting. As it happened, so was Mark Rudd, who arrived early, sensed something was wrong, and calmly left, unnoticed, before Grathwohl arrived. When Grathwohl got there, he and Evans were arrested, along with another Weatherman, Dianne Donghi, whom they found at Grathwohl’s hotel. Both women served brief jail terms. Grathwohl testified before a grand jury, then was whisked to San Francisco, where the FBI put him to work on surveillance duties, hoping he could spot Bill Ayers or anyone else in the leadership. He never did.

  Hoover pressed ahead anyway. Two dozen Weathermen were named the targets of “intensive investigations,” which meant that field offices had to report on their efforts to apprehend them on a weekly basis. The White House’s paranoia grew after the discovery of an old Weatherman bomb cache in Chicago in late March, followed by a specious tip that the group planned to begin bombing commercial airline flights. On April 2, Attorney General John Mitchell announced a second set of major indictments against the group, charging a dozen top Weathermen with conspiracy and inciting riots in connection with the Days of Rage.

  The combination of so enormous a perceived threat with so little intelligence persuaded Hoover’s right-hand man, William Sullivan, that extraordinary measures were called for. For decades one of the FBI’s most effective investigative methods had been the illegal break-in, “the black bag job.” But an aging and increasingly cautious Hoover, concerned about potential lawsuits, had forbidden further black bag jobs in 1966. That winter, as Weathermen began disappearing, Sullivan—without Hoover’s knowledge—quietly sent word down the chain of command that break-ins were again acceptable. This directive was left intentionally vague, leading some FBI offices to initiate an entire range of illegal activities, from break-ins to opening mail.

  Nowhere were these tactics embraced more enthusiastically than in the FBI’s New York office, where agents worked out of an office building on East Sixty-ninth Street. After the Townhouse, thirty were quickly formed into a new Weatherman squad, dubbed Squad 47. Their exploits would, in time, bring the FBI to the brink of ruin.

  • • •

  Bernardine Dohrn learned of the Townhouse explosion just as she and Jeff Jones were about to sit down to a lasagna dinner at Michael and Eleanore Kennedy’s Victorian mansion in San Francisco. Putting down the phone, Dohrn motioned to Michael to join her and Jones in another room. After a moment they emerged, Dohrn kissed Eleanore good-bye, and she and Jones disappeared into the night.

  It took days to grasp it all. Terry, Diana, Teddy: all dead. Dozens of members had scattered and were nowhere to be found. The damage was incalculable. More than a few inside the organization felt that Weatherman would never recover. Others believed it would simply cease to exist. “After the Townhouse, it was just complete chaos,” Cathy Wilkerson recalls. “There was no plan, no reality, zero. When reality hit, you know, the leadership was completely unresponsive for three or four weeks. Hundreds of people just disappeared. They were gone. Weather evaporated. It basically ceased to exist. Only later were some people contacted and brought back. Others, they were never found.” In California Jeff Jones took a break, driving alone to his father’s home outside Los Angeles, where he spent long days lounging on the couch, hiking the San Gabriel Hills, grieving, thinking. In the end, he decided he knew two things: He remained dedicated to the struggle, and he didn’t want to die in some dank basement as the others had. When he returned to Sausalito, he sat atop the houseboat with Dohrn and talked. If Weather was to live on, Jones and Dohrn agreed, changes were needed. They made three decisions. One was on a strategy going forward; this they kept to themselves for the moment. The second was to gather what remained of the original eleven Weatherman signers and present their new vision. If things went as planned, they wouldn’t need to announce their third decision; it would be clear. Because there, atop a houseboat in Sausalito, Dohrn and Jones had decided to take control of Weatherman.

  The call went out. In ones and twos, many of the remaining cadres began to trickle into the Bay Area over the next few weeks. Most were now officially fugitives, having failed to show up for court appearances on the Chicago indictments. Bill Ayers used a stolen credit card to rent a car and drove it cross-country with JJ, who spent the trip arguing the need for more and larger actions. After a month lying low in Philadelphia, Mark Rudd borrowed money from his parents and flew west, as did Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin. “There was Weather debris—that’s what we called ourselves—coming into Berkeley at the rate of three a day,” recalls Brian Flanagan, among the first arrivals. “Others we never found. They were just gone.”

  Many of the newcomers crowded into a first-floor apartment they had rented in April on Pine Street, on the Tenderloin side of Nob Hill. When that filled up, a second flat was rented nearby. Dohrn and Jones greeted each new arrival in person; hugs and tears were the order of the day. Gradually the post-Townhouse gloom began to lift. In its place a wave of relief swept the group. They had survived. They were among friends. They were free. “There was a certain amount of exhilaration that we’d gotten away with what we’d gotten away with,” recalls Paul Bradley. “We weren’t in jail like we were supposed to be. We were living in this beautiful city and going to the beach. So, yeah, it was good.”

  This “new” incarnation of Weatherman began to develop a style sharply different from its Midwest and East Coast origins. As wonky student leftists, SDS members had dressed conservatively, by ’60s standards; the men had short hair. In San Francisco many Weathermen finally came face-to-face with what they insisted on calling “youth culture,” that is, hippies, adorned with long hair, beards, beads, and bell-bottoms. In barely a year, while the Weather leadership had been consumed with purges, riots, and bombs, these shaggy kids seemed to have taken over a series of ever-larger antiwar demonstrations.

  Sensing the change, and needing to blend into the Bay Area’s laid-back Left, the Weathermen embraced the new look. Jeff Jones took the lead, growing a bushy beard and donning a leather cowboy hat; he acquired a pickup truck adorned with a large red rose and named it Suzie Q. Bill Ayers sported a leather vest and beads with no shirt, while Dohrn wore Grace Slick−style fishnet tops with no bra, a look that—if nothing else—kept men from staring at her face. The new hippie vibe tended to unsettle their militant friends back east. “It did seem like the California people had a different style,” recalls Jonah Raskin, who visited Dohrn and Jones later that year. “I mean, no one in New York was driving around in a pickup truck with a red rose.”

  Others, however, sensed that the change was needed. “People had been overheated, you know, in Chicago,” remembers Rick Ayers, Bill Ayers’s brother, who had left the army to join Weatherman, “and before long, they realized we had to calm down, be cool, think, plan for the long term. The weird thing was, being underground, suddenly everyone was a lot calmer, a lot more zen. It was like, ‘Eh, let’s have another cup of tea.’ Chill out. Relax. You know, we took our time.”

  While the leadership regrouped in San Francisco, what remained of Weather’s underground structure collapsed as quickly as the townhouse itself. “It was crazy how many people we lost,” recalls Brian Flanagan. “I remember asking Jeff Jones at one point, you know, what happened to Denver? And he kind of sighed and said, ‘Those people are so far underground they don’t even know they’re still members.’” The Midwestern tribes—Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo—simply disappeared. Scores of Weathermen found themselves cast adrift, still committed to armed struggle but unable to regain contact. The teenaged Joanna Zilsel and a girlfriend left Cleveland headed for California, with vague plan
s of finding other Weathermen. They never did. Zilsel ended up in British Columbia, where she lives to this day.

  Many settled back into “normal” lives within the Movement, where they would form a bulwark of Weather’s aboveground support. But others refused to give up. One or two, such as Seattle’s “Quarter Moon Tribe,” later forged ties with Weather, functioning as minor-league affiliates. Still others struck out on their own.

  A group of veterans of the Weather collective in Milwaukee formed around a young activist named Judith Cohen and two others; they had all been purged but kept the collective alive in hopes of regaining leadership’s favor. “We decided to form a ‘purgee’ group,” Cohen recalls. “This was my chance to get back in. We did some great little actions, on campuses, against ROTC, almost riots, busting into classrooms, a lot of civil disobedience. We weren’t Weathermen. We were trying to be Weathermen, hoping they would invite us back in.”

  After the Townhouse, Cohen’s group managed to recruit a half-dozen other local radicals, including a nineteen-year-old named Kirk Augustin, who had been at Flint and whose factory job paid the rent at the group’s two apartments, near Marquette University. “The problem was, we didn’t have a clue what to do,” Augustin recalls. “The [national] leadership might issue these communiqués, but below that, it was just people trying to survive. These people, they were students, they didn’t know how to make money, or fix a car, much less make a bomb. They had lived off their parents before that. To think of it as cadres and safe houses, that’s too romantic. At our level, it was all about survival. The people in Milwaukee, they had been abandoned. We were supposed to try and do [actions]. That’s a difficult thing to do. And essentially nothing got done. So everyone was constantly blaming each other, with all these constant power struggles and factions.”

  That summer the Milwaukee collective did its best to scout targets, mainly military installations. Several in the group went so far as to steal dynamite from a site in Lexington, Kentucky, that August. Augustin, now a software engineer in Oregon, demurs when asked whether this is true. “Uh . . . , let’s just say it wouldn’t be that hard to do,” he says. “Getting explosives was easy.”