Dupes

by Paul Kengor

  Violence was not the only reason to go underground: many of the comrades were inspired by, and even interacting with, foreign adversaries of the United States.

  Ayers, for example, had been inspired by the Cuban revolution, by Fidel and Che. That is no small thing. At the time that Ayers dedicated himself to la revolucion, insurgent Marxist guerrillas had penetrated countries throughout the Western hemisphere, and always with guns blazing—from Cuba to Peru, from Brazil to Colombia, from El Salvador to Nicaragua. Ayers and his youthful revolutionaries would not let the Communist groundswell miss the most important country: America.

  The young American revolutionaries were embraced by Castro's Cuba, which sponsored Marxist subversion throughout the Western hemisphere. When the Weathermen went underground, Castro and his forces offered training and asylum in Cuba—including training by the KGB. Here the Weathermen continued the long and dishonorable tradition of American radicals traveling abroad to meet with representatives all over the Communist world, from Havana to Hanoi to Prague to Bratislava. To this day, the old comrades have not dared divulge details of such highly disturbing trips. Even Mark Rudd, in his otherwise tell-all memoir, did not address claims that he visited Castro's Cuba and that the uprisings he initiated at Columbia were in some way planned in Cuba.

  Nevertheless, it seems clear—based on congressional reports, the recollections of ex-Communists, testimony by FBI informants, FBI investigations, and other sources63—that at least some of the Weathermen interacted with the Cubans. Weathermen looking to join the Cubans could be fed through the Cuban embassy in Canada. They could operate in clandestine cells, fronts, and “collectives,” so careful about secrecy that they would not carry cards or register in formal membership rolls. Such secrecy would be necessary because the group's activities were dangerous and illegal.

  Consider, for example, the pipe-bomb attack on a San Francisco police station on February 16, 1970. The bomb, which detonated at Park Police Station at roughly 10:30 p.m., took the life of a young police sergeant named Brian V. McConnell, severely injured another officer, and hurt seven more.

  The young Red storm troopers who organized this assassination never did a day in jail for it. Law-enforcement officials have long suspected that Ayers and Dohrn not only were involved in but actually orchestrated the attack, with Dohrn herself allegedly placing the bomb in the window.

  FBI informant Larry Grathwohl pointed to Dohrn's hand in the operation. A Vietnam vet who penetrated SDS and the Weather Underground, Grathwohl implicated both Dohrn and Ayers in sworn testimony in the 1970s and in his 1976 book, plus numerous times since.64 He testified before the Democrat-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee on October 18, 1974, where he spoke at length, and under oath, about his relationship with Ayers and Dohrn, including how Dohrn personally (in Grathwohl's words) “had to plan, develop, and carry out the bombing of the police station in San Francisco.”65

  Even as this book was being written, the San Francisco Police Officers Association was still implicating Dohrn and Ayers, and demanding justice. In March 2009, for example, the police association issued public statements maintaining that “irrefutable and compelling reasons” established Dohrn and Ayers as responsible for the bombing.66

  Of course, the San Francisco bombing was just the start of the violence for the Weather Underground.

  On the other side of the country, Weather Underground troops began producing nail bombs to detonate at a military dance in Fort Dix, New Jersey, where the revolutionaries hoped to murder young Vietnam vets reunited for an evening of happiness with their wives.67 The plan backfired.

  On March 6, 1970, in a borrowed apartment in the wealthy Greenwich Village section of New York City, three members of the Weather Underground were killed when a bomb they were manufacturing accidentally exploded. The dead revolutionaries were Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Ted Gold, all dear friends of Rudd, Ayers, Dohrn, Boudin, Gilbert, Jones, Jacobs, and crew. Robbins and Gold had been Columbia comrades, with Gold having served as vice chairman of the school's SDS chapter. Oughton, meanwhile, had attended Bryn Mawr along with Kathy Boudin.

  Oughton was another tragic case. Her upbringing stood apart from that of her red-diaper-baby friends. Her father was a Republican, a bank and restaurant owner, and her great grandfather reportedly founded the Boy Scouts of America. The happy debutante was radicalized in college, particularly after an all-night browbeating by Boudin, in which the SDS activist overwhelmed the innocent Illinois native with feelings of white guilt and indifference to injustice. With her new “social justice” conscience and sudden spurning of “bourgeois” values, Oughton rejected a marriage offer from a handsome quarterback at Princeton, trading in the life that would have spared her from violent death.68 The radicalization process continued once Oughton got to the University of Michigan, where she pursued a master's degree in education. She met Bill Ayers and Tom Hayden at the UM chapter of SDS.

  Oughton's parents had already agonized over their “lost” little girl; now, on March 6, 1970, they would receive a phone call from hell.69

  Two female Weathermen escaped the blast in the Greenwich Village apartment. One, who had been reclining in a cedar-lined sauna at the time of the explosion, fled naked from the scene. As the likes of actor Dustin Hoffman (who lived next door) looked on, the two survivors were helped by a neighbor, who happened to be the ex-wife of Henry Fonda, before they disappeared. The naked woman was Kathy Boudin, who had led Diana Oughton down her tragic path.70

  One might think that this tragedy would have quelled the desire for destruction by America's Red revolutionaries. Not at all. There was little time or desire for remorse. Boudin was undeterred, living to play a part in another crime, with more dead victims, another day. When David Gilbert got the news (he was heading to target practice at the time), he immediately blamed the “pigs” for killing Gold, a friend from Columbia days. As Mark Rudd put it, the young Reds had three “brand-new martyrs, Diana, Ted, and Terry”—in addition to their beloved Che.71

  The young revolutionaries could also count on adults to defend them. The “liberal” I. F. Stone—Corliss Lamont's “civil liberties” pal and Kathy Boudin's uncle—published a defense of the bombers, titled “Where the Fuse on That Dynamite Leads.”72

  Prairie Fire

  Although the former SDSers stayed underground, they continued to draw attention to their cause, and not just with bombings. The Weather Underground crafted a manifesto to address the masses. In 1974 the devoted radicals released Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, published as the “political statement of the Weather Underground.” It was signed by four members of the Weather Underground: Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Celia Sojourn.

  “We are a guerrilla organization,” the authors explained. “We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years.” They went on: “We need a revolutionary communist party in order to lead the struggle, give coherence and direction to the fight, seize power and build the new society.”

  “We have only begun,” continued the fanatical four. They vowed that “the only possibilities are victory or death.” This “revolutionary program” was one of “an urgent and pressing strategic necessity.” “Our intention,” they wrote, was “to disrupt the empire” of “U.S. imperialism,” “to incapacitate it.” “The only path to the final defeat of imperialism and the building of socialism is revolutionary war.” That “war,” the authors promised, “will be complicated and protracted. It includes mass struggle and clandestine struggle, peaceful and violent.… Without armed struggle there can be no victory.”

  Che Guevara was the poster boy for Prairie Fire. Full pages inside the book featured loving illustrations of the godlike Communist revolutionary. “In our own hemisphere,” the authors wrote, “Che Guevara urged that we ‘create two, three, many Vietnams,’ to destroy U.S. imperialism … and opening another front within the US itself.” The Weather Underground had opened that
front. The “war” to defeat imperialism was being conducted under “THE BANNER OF CHE,” the authors said.

  And if Democrats still, by now, could not discern that these Communists were not their friends, the four authors dedicated their manifesto to, among others, Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert F. Kennedy.

  What's Twenty-five Million Dead Americans?

  The same year that the Weather Underground announced its violent intentions in Prairie Fire, Larry Grathwohl gave even more alarming testimony about the terrorists. Grathwohl, the FBI informant, testified against SDS and the Weathermen before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 18, 1974. In doing so he infuriated his erstwhile comrades, especially as he implicated Dohrn and Ayers in the San Francisco Park Police bombing. When they learned that Grathwohl was an informant, the Ivy League apparatchiks turned on him with a vengeance, posting his face on “WANTED” posters and labeling him a “pig infiltrator” who had committed “crimes against the people.” (See page 344.)

  Before the Senate and in his book, Grathwohl bravely testified to the comrades’ willingness to kill innocents. He explained how Bill Ayers, discussing a planned bombing of the Detroit Police Officers Association building, told him and other plotters: “We blast that f—ing building to hell. And we do it when the place is crowded. We wait for them to have a meeting, or a social event. Then we strike.” Grathwohl noted to Ayers that a Red Barn restaurant nearby would get blown up in the process. Ayers, he said, was unconcerned, responding: “We can't protect all the innocent people in the world. Some will get killed.”73

  Grathwohl offered an utterly chilling account in a videotaped interview he gave for the 1982 documentary No Place to Hide: The Strategy and Tactics of Terrorism.74 In it he spoke of a meeting he attended with twenty-five leaders of the Weather Underground.75 He pressed his comrades for some specifics as to how they planned to manage the massive social-political American reengineering project they all desired. Grathwohl recalled:

  I brought up the subject of what's going to happen after we take over the government. You know, [once] we become responsible for administering, you know, 250 million people. And there was no answer. No one had given any thought to economics. How are you going to clothe and feed these people? “Pig infiltrator”: The Weather Underground distributed this “WANTED” poster when the radical organization discovered that Larry Grathwohl was an FBI informant.

  The only thing that I could get was that they expected that the Cubans, the North Vietnamese, the Chinese, and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States.

  They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the “counterrevolution.” And they felt that this counterrevolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing reeducation in the [American] Southwest, where we would take all of the people who needed to be reeducated into the new way of thinking and teach them how things were going to be.

  I asked, “Well, what is going to happen to those people that we can't reeducate, that are diehard capitalists?” And the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated. And when I pursued this further, they estimated that they'd have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers. And when I say “eliminate,” I mean kill 25 million people.

  I want you to imagine sitting in a room with 25 people, most of whom have graduate degrees from Columbia and other well-known educational centers, and hear them figuring out the logistics for the elimination of 25 million people.

  And they were dead serious.76

  Grathwohl's account may shock observers today, but no one should be surprised. Bear in mind that these young revolutionaries, educated at America's leading universities—and many of whom today teach at universities—were diehard Communists and moral relativists. They accepted that millions would need to die to usher in the “better world,” as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Che, and on and on and on, had always said.

  Even milder Marxist murderers like Leon Trotsky, exiled by Stalin and thus deprived of adequate killing power, preached the necessity of eliminating innocents. As Trotsky famously said, the Bolsheviks would not arrive at the kingdom of socialism on a polished floor with white gloves. Blood would need to be spilled. The blood of innocents would consecrate the Communist ground.

  Remember, too, that the Weather Underground gaggle was largely Maoist. Compared to Mao's death toll, twenty-five million was actually quite small—barely a third of the lives that the Chinese Communist tyrant took. Like Mao, and Stalin and Lenin and the others, the young revolutionaries professed no higher authority than their own, and were willing to do whatever suited their purposes.

  The Weatherman's talk of reeducation centers should not come as a surprise either. It was fully in keeping with the group's Maoist model. This was Mao's “Sinification” of Marxism, stripped bare. The American Maoists were planning to carry out precisely what they had long advocated. Such 1960s discussions among the SDSers at Columbia University had not been mere dorm-room “bull sessions.” They were serious—deadly serious.

  Mark Rudd Bolts

  The situation got so bad at the Weather Underground that some, like Mark Rudd, finally had enough.

  Rudd was taken aback at the behavior of his companions, especially Bernardine Dohrn. He was struck by their paranoia. He saw a Stalinist purge mentality beginning to consume Dohrn and crowding in on the whole group, almost as if it were possessed. “The effort had degenerated into mindless Stalinism,” said Rudd.77

  Rudd came to see that his and the others’ hopes and dreams had deteriorated into reckless madness. Now the demons haunted him. He plunged into despair, considering suicide. He later admitted that he had gone almost “crazy.”78

  By 1976 Rudd was ready to leave the Weather Underground. He continued a life on the run as a fugitive for a while, but he finally turned himself over to authorities in New York in October 1977. He would never do jail time.

  It was left to Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and the remaining true believers to carry on the unholy crusade.

  The Brinks Job

  The Weather Underground was never able to match its heroes’ murder of millions, lacking the absolute power that mentors like Mao Tse-tung and Vladimir Lenin had achieved. Nonetheless, the group's hellions ruined more than a few lives.

  In October 1981 the faithful pulled off an armed robbery of a Brinks security truck in Nanuet, New York, in which two more “pigs,” plus a Brinks guard, were murdered. One of the policemen was the only black officer on the force. This was ironic given that the perpetrators had done the job to finance a Communist war against racism in America, the apotheosis of which would be the establishment of a “New Afrika” in America's southern states.79

  The Brinks attackers included Weathermen Judy Clark, David Gilbert, and Kathy Boudin. The conspirators were arrested. Boudin would do long-term prison time, with her father, counsel to other Communists, from Paul Robeson to Fidel Castro, unable to save his client-daughter from jail. Clark and Gilbert received even longer sentences. Boudin and Clark would now teach their inmates about “social justice.”80 Gilbert is still in the penitentiary.81

  Mark Rudd, who had been classmates with Gilbert at Columbia—together they had orchestrated the Columbia student revolt—described Gilbert as sensitive and brilliant. If not for the path he chose that led to a life in prison, Gilbert probably would have had “a career as a respected professor” in sociology, according to Rudd.82 No doubt, that is a fair estimation. Gilbert's story is yet another cautionary tale from a group whose radicalism and destructiveness are often sugarcoated today.

  When he went to jail, Gilbert left behind a young son, Chesa, who was only fourteen months old at the time of the Brinks robbery. Chesa also lost his mother, who was none other than Kathy Boudin. With Chesa's parents both off to prison, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn offered to raise the orphaned child.

  Boudin happily agreed. She turned over the nurturing of her son to the author of th
e four-finger salute that glorified the fork that had gashed the baby in Sharon Tate's womb.

  From Terrorists to Tenured Radicals

  Much more could be said about the Weathermen's destructive ambitions and terrorist activities, but even this brief synopsis conveys the human carnage they left in their wake. Of course, even then, Bill Ayers feels that he and his cohorts “showed remarkable restraint” in their activities—in light, that is, of American bombings in Vietnam.83

  The radicals justified their own bombings as necessary to advance the revolution. They considered their depths of cruelty “appropriate” given what American “authorities” had done at home and were doing internationally. And generally, as Communists had always preached, they believed a measure of violence was necessary to create the better world.

  One good thing did come from the radicals’ open advocacy of violent revolution: it finally awakened the duped liberals who supported them and (inadvertently) their goals. The ringleaders of the Weather Underground—people like Dohrn, Ayers, Jones, and Rudd—had been way too aggressive for the non- Communist liberals who truly wanted peace and not an “American Vietnam.” Rudd later acknowledged that he and his fellow militants had “made such disastrous mistakes on such a big level” and “played into the hands of the FBI—our sworn enemies. We might as well have been on their payroll.”84