But there was also this feeling that the women’s movement was very strong and that the men in Weathermen would lose legitimacy unless they dealt with that. So their response was to create this very militant women’s action. And certainly the women didn’t want to be left out, which we generally were. So we were easy targets for the argument that the way to liberate women was to show women being militant.
BILL DYSON (FBI agent)
Sometime in May of 1969 I get a call, and it’s the special agent in charge’s secretary. And she says, “The special agent in charge would like to see you immediately.” I had never met the man. When you came into a major office, you didn’t even get a chance to meet the special agent in charge. He was sort of like God. I mean, Hoover was God, this is God’s right-hand man. So I met the assistant special agent in charge in Chicago.
There were a half a dozen of us, all similar seniority, all of us worried what the heck have we done wrong? His name was Marlin Johnson, and he says, “You gentlemen know what’s going on on college campuses?” I didn’t know what to say. Learning? And he says, “Well, you’ve got all of this picketing, and demonstrating, and protesting, all this disruptive thing going on on college campuses against the war in Vietnam.” Well, everybody knew that. He said, “We’re not interested in that. We’re interested in the bombings. The arsons. The physical attacks on corporate people, governmental agents, and so forth.” I didn’t know anything about it. Well, I soon found out that between the middle of 1968 and the middle of 1969, there was something like one hundred and twenty bombings on or around college campuses in connection with the war in Vietnam. I had no idea. And that’s what he was asking me to work on.
MARK RUDD
In the late fall of ’69, our little clique of eight or ten people made a decision to close the national offices of SDS, and the regional offices, under the belief that we needed to start armed struggle, so that the revolution could happen. And that would be our contribution. We assumed somehow that the mass movement would just carry on, and that SDS would continue, but we would be out front. There was no more SDS regional office; there was no more organizing on college campuses that was coordinated or advanced in any way by SDS. SDS ceased to exist, and it was during the height of the war. We didn’t put our ideas up to a vote. We just did it. It was like a coup.
BILL DYSON
Our squad supervisor, Hugh Mallet, who was a wonderful mentor, said, “We’re going to be putting in a wiretap.” I said, “A wiretap? I don’t even know what a wiretap is. I’ve never really experienced that.” And I’m led through the bowels of the Chicago office, to a place I never knew existed. It’s a windowless room with machines all over the place. I never saw anything like this before. And they said, “Here’s your machine.” And they sit me down and there’s three recording machines. That’s what my first assignment was, and it was on the SDS national office. As far as I knew, everything was perfectly legal. I mean, it’s not as though this was clandestine. There were no microphones at the old SDS National Headquarters at 1608 West Madison Street.
I knew nothing about these people at first. I’m being assigned to this squad and I worked the night shift. I would come in at four o’clock, and it was like I never went home. I would just be so fascinated with these people. I would stay there until the relief came in the next morning. And sometimes I wouldn’t even leave then. It was fascinating.
Now, I’m only hitting the recorder when they’re saying something that’s pertinent to violence. So I’m hearing about their whole personal life. And I’m hearing all sorts of things—I’m getting to know these people very, very well, better than anybody else would know them. You can go out and interview and learn about a person to a certain degree, but that’s not the same as when you’re monitoring them constantly. They may be militants, they may be terrorists, whatever word you want to use, but they’re still human beings. They’ve still got gossip, they’ve still got their personal life, and their personal problems, and everything else. And I’m just listening, and listening, and I’m really getting to know these people very, very well. I lived with these people sometimes twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
I mean this was exciting! We were monitoring the Students for a Democratic Society and I watched them become the Weathermen. I was with them when they became clandestine. If you work a wiretap, a good wiretap, you will become that way. And to me, it was exciting. I was watching history.*2
MICHAEL KAZIN
I was scared to death. I was a nice upper-middle-class Jewish kid from the New Jersey suburbs. I did judo as a kid but I didn’t like fighting. That’s why I left the Weathermen in the end, because I wasn’t ready to die, which we were talking about doing. We were talking about confronting PL [Progressive Labor] people, maybe with guns. Mark Rudd came to town as a member of the Weather Bureau, and this shows what a sect we were. The gospel was that you couldn’t leave Weathermen; you had to be expelled. So at an all-night meeting I convinced Mark to expel me. But even so, I was still sympathetic with the politics. I felt guilty for leaving, but I was already beginning to question it.
BILL DYSON
What fascinated me? You got to understand, my background is different. Most of these people came from affluent backgrounds. And it’s almost like they’re just throwing away their education. They’re throwing away their lives. And here I am, I’ve spent so much time trying to get this education at the University of Miami, I’ve fought and battled to get this education, but with these people, it was just given to them on a silver platter. I came from a very working-class family. My parents always wanted to go to college, and they couldn’t; it was the Depression era.
It caused me confusion in that sense, but it also showed their [the Weathermen’s] dedication. I mean somebody just throws away their life for this movement. I couldn’t understand—a lot of the philosophy didn’t make any sense to me. The war in Vietnam wasn’t the only issue. It took me a while to learn that. And when I figured that out, then I could understand these people.
Their bag was they wanted to overthrow the U.S. government and set up a communist state here. To them the war in Vietnam was the outward manifestation of all the evils of capitalism. We were over there because we needed new markets for our products. We were over there because we needed resources to build our products. That’s what their belief was. Whereas for the people who were picketing and demonstrating, and doing all the things that are legal or maybe cross the line to a misdemeanor, the average person who’s opposed to the war, that’s what he was opposed to: the war, and the principle of it—like me. As far as the war in Vietnam was concerned, I really didn’t know why we were there. I’m not picketing and demonstrating, but I don’t understand why we were fighting a war in Vietnam. I don’t think my brother understood, either, and he was in the air force stationed in Thailand. He was two years younger than me.
MARK RUDD
We formed these goofy collectives, where everything was owned together, because the future was going to be a collective, not private property. And everything was owned—all clothes were owned together, you know? Therefore, nobody had any clean clothes.
I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but if you take a bunch of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds and put them in an apartment together, there is a tendency for them to engage in sexual intercourse. It’s not unique to the Weatherman phenomenon, but we did have a kind of an ethic that we were all revolutionaries, and that the way to build intimacy in the collective is through sex. But that was heterosexual sex. Except for sex among women, which was okay, but not sex among men. Not okay. The poor gay guys who were not open, I heard from them later, they were pretty miserable.
It was totally sexist from the start. Monogamies were smashed. There was a line that monogamies were like a deal where women especially were protected from criticism by being in a couple. And so that’s a form of liberalism, because a radical communist thing to do is to open yourself up to total criticism. So all monogamies were smashed. E
xcept those that Bernardine was involved in.
For one thing, sexually transmitted diseases were very common—crabs, pelvic inflammatory disease, gonorrhea. There were always some doctors in the periphery who we could get some help from. It was terribly unhygienic. In fact, there was also a low-level infection, a cold-type thing which we called the Weather crud.
There was an apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn; it was before Park Slope had become gentrified. There were maybe twenty kids living there, and maybe half of them were women, and I opened up a closet once, and there were all these hair dryers piled up inside. It was hilarious. I mean clearly they weren’t going to use them anymore. There was no housekeeping—there might have been some spaghetti, but there was no housekeeping. There was no cleaning; there was none. There was no laundry; there was nothing. People would stage phony weddings, and get money from their parents, and give it to the collective.
BILL AYERS
We had no sleep and did lots of speed. It was all about the next meeting, and the next meeting, and living on drugs and hot dogs. It was really not a good way to live—sleeping in the national office under the printing press. To the extent that anyone had a sex life, it was kind of an animalistic sex life of necessity. It wasn’t joyful. That’s not 100 percent true, but it’s true enough. It lacked a certain amount of intimacy; when there was intimacy you were often ratted out for it. So you would have an intimate moment with somebody—a friend, a lover—and then you’d be in some group-criticism session and you’d be told what a backward-sliding person you were. And you’d always agree.
CATHY WILKERSON
Marriage was inherently unequal in the social structure of the time. And also many women—myself included—felt like to really participate in the movement, the movement had to come first. And so it would make it hard to have a traditional marriage. People had relationships, but they came and went.
I don’t know who cooked up smash monogamy, but the effect of it was that there was open season on women by the men all under the guise of women’s liberation. What it really did was disempower women—another decision we’re taking away from you. It didn’t impact me because I wasn’t in a relationship that I particularly wanted to stay in so it was an easy out, and I think that was true for a number of women. The smash-monogamy policy only existed for a few months, but while it lasted it caused a big commotion.
All the talk of guns and violence and being strong, and nothing about families and children and social life, was very disorienting; no day-to-day substance to ground us. It contributed to an eroding of intellectual self-confidence. Increasingly, I think women were devastated and wiped out and disempowered by being humiliated in these criticism sessions. That was how I experienced it. The criticism sessions were like rehab therapy: Someone humiliates you and strips you down and tells you you’re a worthless piece of shit, and then builds you back up again in their own image.
BERNARDINE DOHRN
Self-criticism sessions were terrible. It was kind of on the Chinese Maoist model, or what we thought it was. The great side of it was we were trying to break out of the traditional nuclear, patriarchal family and insist that in order to be a revolutionary you had to not have children; you had to not be in a monogamous relationship; and that you had to sleep with lots of people, which was obviously terrible, self-righteous, and hurtful. But again, how do you change these big systems without confrontation?
BILL DYSON
Of course, there were other problems with the Weather Underground, some of which I knew, some of which I learned later. There was male chauvinism. The females felt that they were not being treated as equal to the men. But I’m not so sure about that. I think it may have been the opposite extreme that the women seemed, in some cases, to be more dominating than the men were. They had Bernardine Dohrn, Cathy Wilkerson; they had Kathy Boudin, and many others—they had women in prominent positions. And yet there seemed to be this thought within people in the Weather Underground that the women were being regarded as secondary. I don’t think it was true. I’m looking from the outside and saying, “Wait a minute, it’s the exact opposite!”
BERNARDINE DOHRN
We were planning the Days of Rage, which we called the National Action, in Chicago for October. The Vietnamese, the Cubans, and the Black Panthers all told us not to do it, and we said, “No, you don’t understand. We know better, and we have to do this. And the ‘this’ that we have to do is we have to bring young, white kids to Chicago to fight cops.” Totally suicidal. We thought we would bring thousands to the streets. In fact, we brought fewer people than we started out with in June of ’69. We probably had five hundred Weather supporters in June, and by October we probably had maybe two hundred and fifty people, despite four months of effort.
MARK RUDD (Weathermen leader)
I remember sitting in Central Park with a guy I knew from Columbia named Marty Kenner. Marty had been in touch with the Cubans, and he said, “So-and-so, of the Cuban consulate, says that you shouldn’t be doing the Days of Rage.” And I thought, Really? Wow, why did they say that? He says, “You’re way too far ahead of where the base is, and not only that, but the Vietnamese want a united antiwar movement. And you’re already calling for revolution.” I’d say, “Oh, that’s interesting,” and then I’d go back to my comrades at the Weather Bureau and I’d report this, and they’d say, “Well, that’s ridiculous, we understand that the time is right now for a revolution, and we’ve got to go all the way. The Cubans and the Vietnamese don’t understand our situation.” So I’d say, “Really? I guess so.” But I was conflicted, because I’m not totally crazy. Even at that time I wasn’t. I mean I was crazy enough to be in it, and not to get myself out of it. But I wasn’t crazy enough to really believe my own shit.
I felt it was my own failing. A lot of what we were presenting to the rest of the New Left was what we called a gut check. “Are you strong enough?” “Do you believe in revolution enough?” “Are you really willing to lay your life on the line?” And “Do you carry a gun?” I’ve got a gun, you know?
BILL AYERS (Weathermen leader)
We were convinced that militancy was essential. That is, putting our bodies on the line, showing what we’re willing to do, taking the consequences. That’s why we organized the Days of Rage. We organized the Days of Rage under the theory that the problem with the mass mobilizations at that time was that the militants—us—were always contained. We were pushed aside by peace marshals and demonstration marshals. But actually we were the real energy of the thing, so why don’t we organize our own action with the militants in the open and in the lead? Well, that was a miscalculation, to say the least, because it’s one thing to be the militant in a one-hundred-thousand-person demonstration. It’s another thing to be the militant with two hundred other militants. It was isolating, and we did it to ourselves.
BRIAN FLANAGAN (Weathermen member)
I was a soldier rather than a leader. I wasn’t part of the Weather Bureau, which were the people who had written the Weathermen’s statement, you know, J.J. [John Jacobs], Bernardine, Billy, Mark, all the people with the big names, and a few that just faded away.
They’re carpet bombing Vietnam, and Cambodia and Laos. So there has to be something done to try to make this country unlivable as long as they’re slaughtering Vietnamese; we’re going to make big trouble here, and so a big march on Washington is not enough. Getting more and more people to a big demonstration isn’t going to do any good. So the Days of Rage was sort of our coming-out party.
MARK RUDD
We went into it thinking we were going to have ten thousand people, and about two hundred and fifty to three hundred showed up the first night. I was in hiding. They were keeping me for the next day. What we did was, we rotated responsibility. I was going to handle the bail money and then on the third day I was going to lead the demonstration.
So I was handling bail, and getting people safe away from the police, and all kinds of crazy things. A cop got beat up in one of o
ur movement centers, and all kinds of things were happening. I was in charge of leading the last march, which was Saturday morning, October 11. I had this crazy little mustache disguise, the kind you buy in a magic shop, and I got to the location of the rally about forty-five minutes early and immediately the Red Squad came and beat me up and busted me. Just immediately, before the rally ever formed. There was this group that was part of the Chicago Police Department called the Red Squad. They always followed us around.
I stopped fighting at one point, and the cop who arrested me said that he was surprised I had stopped fighting. It stuck in my mind. I must have had some sense of self-preservation, a concept that if you don’t fight, they won’t—they’ll lay off. I’m not much of a fighter; I never was. So the whole thing was macho posing. They charged me with assaulting an officer and I went to jail.
DAVID FENTON
The Days of Rage was one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen in my life. The Weathermen all took nightsticks and police truncheons out from under their jackets and went running in a mad frenzy down the streets of Chicago’s Gold Coast breaking every window in sight. This was their big revolutionary action. And the police freaked out, and opened fire on them, which is well documented, but forgotten. Nobody was killed. So I watched the police shooting at these people—I think six people were shot. And I’m like, Oh, my goodness! Maybe I should get out of here. But my job as a photographer was to go where the action was. And that’s when this guy Richard Elrod got knocked over.
Witness to the Revolution Page 15