Recent Changes
- DaysOfRage . . . October 30, 2019, at 05:42 PM by phaedrus: [[Category: Florilegium]]
- Epilogue . . . August 30, 2019, at 02:16 PM by phaedrus: Eighteen members of the FALN served lengthy prison sentences for their roles in the group’s two campaigns. In the mid-1990s a clemency campaign drew the support of former president Jimmy Carter and ten Nobel Laureates. In 1999, with his wife, Hillary, seeking the support of Hispanic voters for a senatorial campaign in New York, President Bill Clinton offered clemency to sixteen of those imprisoned; all but two accepted. Both the House and the Senate passed measures condemning Clinton’s action, which remains controversial in conservative circles to this day. Marie Haydee Torres, who (along with her husband) was not offered clemency, was released after serving almost thirty years, in 2009; today a friend says she lives in Miami. Carlos Torres was released from an Illinois prison in 2010. A crowd of five hundred supporters held a celebration in Chicago; an even larger crowd welcomed him on his return to Puerto Rico. Oscar López remains in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. He comes up for parole every few years. His supporters—and there are many in the Puerto Rican and radical communities—campaign for his release. In 2014 the Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York honored him as a “Puerto Rican patriot” who “was not convicted of a violent crime.” Of all those who went underground during the 1970s, few have gone on to more productive lives than alumni of the Weather Underground. Other than those who became involved with Mutulu Shakur, only Cathy Wilkerson served prison time, all of eleven months, on explosives charges related to the Townhouse. Most resumed more or less normal lives. Wilkerson remains a math instructor in the New York schools; she lives in Brooklyn with her longtime partner, the radical attorney Susan Tipograph. Ron Fliegelman worked as a special-education teacher in the New York schools for twenty-five years, retiring in 2007; today he and his wife live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and are raising a son. Mark Rudd is a retired community college teacher in Albuquerque and gives talks about the sixties. Howard Machtinger lives in Durham, North Carolina, where he has worked as a high school teacher and at the University of North Carolina; he remains active in education reform efforts. Jonathan Lerner is a writer in New York. Russell Neufeld practices law in Manhattan. Robbie Roth taught social studies at Mission High School in San Francisco. Clayton Van Lydegraf died in 1992. Annie Stein died in 1981. Mona Mellis died in 1993. Several Weather alumni have risen to respected positions in their professions with very few knowing what they did in the 1970s. After attending law school, Paul Bradley, the pseudonym for one of Dohrn’s right-hand men, went on to a twenty-five-year career at one of the nation’s most prominent law firms. Today he lives in the Bay Area, where he advises a small start-up company or two; no one outside his family and other alumni has any clue that he spent years placing bombs in San Francisco–area buildings. Leonard Handelsman, a Weatherman in the Cleveland collective, went on to a distinguished career in psychiatry, becoming a full professor at Duke University, where he was medical director of the Duke Addictions Program. According to his longtime friend Howard Machtinger, who gave a eulogy when Handelsman died in 2005, no one outside his family knew of his life in the underground. Obituaries celebrated him only as a noted psychiatrist. Another Weatherman mentioned in this book became an accountant at a Big Four accounting firm in Vancouver. Today he is retired and active in local charities; he is not named here because of legal concerns. Another alumnus heads a children’s charity in Ohio, where an Internet biography indicates he has been appointed by three governors to sit on state task forces. Bernardine Dohrn has been a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University for more than twenty years. She has been active in efforts to reform the Chicago public schools and in international human rights activities. She has never disavowed her years as a Weatherman. Jeff Jones and Eleanor Stein were finally arrested in Yonkers, New York, in 1981 after the FBI received a tip on their whereabouts during the Brink’s investigations. Jones received probation on old explosives charges and became an environmental writer and activist in upstate New York, where he and Stein live today. Stein received a law degree from Queens College in 1986 and is today an administrative law judge with the New York State Public Service Commission. Michael Kennedy, who represented certain of Weather’s leaders, is today one of the most prominent attorneys in New York. Kennedy, who has served as a special adviser to the president of the United Nations General Assembly, lives with his wife, Eleanore, in a sumptuous apartment overlooking Central Park. Thanks to one of his old marijuana clients, he also happens to own High Times magazine.
- HowThePuertoRicanRadicalsGotTheirInstitutions . . . August 28, 2019, at 08:44 AM by phaedrus: The key to the FALN’s early success was help provided by the National Commission on Hispanic Affairs and its director, Maria Cueto. Described as a quiet, determined single woman, Cueto refused to talk to investigators and to the end of her life refused to discuss the FALN. Years of investigation created suspicion, but found little concrete evidence, of her involvement. But her attorney was Elizabeth Fink, and after Cueto’s death, in 2012, Fink confirmed her onetime client’s key role in the FALN. According to Fink, it was Cueto who arranged to name a half-dozen FALN members, including Oscar López and Carlos Torres, to positions on the NCHA’s board, which allowed her to quietly pay them thousands of dollars in Episcopal Church monies that, in essence, funded the FALN’s birth. “Maria was the quartermaster of the FALN, the person who arranged the money, the travel, the person who arranged everything, who made everything happen,” Fink recalls. “The church had this special house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and I know the FALN had meetings there. Remember, Maria was doing all this with the FALN at the same time she was running this amazing social-action ministry, helping Hispanics.” Cueto and the NCHA, however, were only half the equation. Without dynamite and the expertise to use it, the FALN would never have sprung to life. For that it turned to its allies in the Weather Underground. Law enforcement for years speculated that Weather had played a role in the FALN’s formation. According to Charles Wells, a longtime member of the NYPD bomb squad, bombs built by the Weather Underground and FALN were of identical design. All of them, he explains, featured a single screw set into a clock at the “9”; the bomb detonated when the minute hand struck the screw. But the concrete evidence of Weather’s involvement came from its own bomb guru, Ron Fliegelman. “We gave them the training,” he acknowledged during a September 2012 interview. “We did that, sure. Was it me? I shouldn’t say. I don’t want to go there.” By Thanksgiving 1976, with the startling disclosure that nearly a dozen suspects had some kind of affiliation with its NCHA charity, the headquarters of the Episcopal Church became the unlikely epicenter of the FALN investigation. Church officials initially gave the FBI free rein. In a search of the NCHA’s basement office agents found a receipt taped to the bottom of Maria Cueto’s desk. It was for a Smith Corona typewriter. Agents knew that the FALN’s communiqués had been typed on a Smith Corona. They hustled to the Brooklyn store that sold the machine but found nothing of use; the name on the receipt was an alias. The FBI lab had determined that the communiqués had been photocopied on a Gestetner copy machine; a search of Gestetner’s records indicated that such a machine had been sold to the NCHA in 1974, on the eve of the first bombings. It was now being used by another office, and it would take a round of subpoenas to get it. Lou Vizi, meanwhile, met with the church’s top bishops and found them happy to furnish the NCHA’s financial records. He sensed they were intimidated by Cueto and her people, whose political leanings were far to the left of their own. “They were appalled,” Vizi remembers. “These were very nice people who had been stampeded into this charity stuff by their own guilt. The church treasurer got all the records for me, but they were a mess. He said, ‘We tried a thousand times to use proper accounting methods with these people, and every time higher-ups would say, “Don’t come down too hard, we don’t want any problems.”’ So no one was paying too much attention to where the church’s money was going, there were no receipts for a lot of this.”
- TheNeedsOfTheDelegates . . . August 28, 2019, at 08:31 AM by phaedrus: Jennifer Dohrn delivered an opening address ''[for the Hard Times Conference, a Weather Underground front group]'' calling on the delegates to devise a new agenda for the Left that would empower and protect the working class. “We have to develop a program for the working class as a whole in this period to fight the [economic] depression,” she said. It was soon clear, however, that the conference’s organizers, who were all white, did not fully comprehend the needs of the delegates, who weren’t. “I was almost lynched by a group of vegetarians because I hadn’t provided enough nonmeat meals in the cafeteria,” Neufeld recalls with a shudder. “There were a lot of little things like that, stuff I just didn’t understand. Every time something went wrong, I was constantly being accused of being a racist. That was just devastating to me. I felt I was fucking up, like my head was just going to explode.” Much of the conference work was done in breakout groups, and by Saturday it was clear that many of them had little interest in the conference’s agenda. A Black Caucus formed, and word soon spread that it was none too pleased with the emphasis on “working class” issues over black issues. A feminist caucus arose as well and was just as incensed at the lack of attention being paid to women’s issues. “Jeff Jones wanted these people ordered and controlled, and there was just no way,” Neufeld says. “My pushback [to him] was to respect the process, that people had opinions, that they couldn’t be ordered around.” The ominous rumblings finally broke into the open during the closing session, when black delegates spent nearly an hour excoriating the organizers as racists and demanding that any new radical coalition be run by blacks. By nightfall confusion reigned. “I don’t think [Jeff] initially appreciated how bad it was,” Neufeld says. “In fact, I know he didn’t. And it was bad. Very bad.” By that evening it was clear there would be no radical coalition for Weather or anyone else to control. Recriminations began the next morning, when thirty PFOCers gathered in a member’s Chicago apartment. “That’s when I first heard some of the non-Weather people start saying things like ‘Where did this whole conference idea come from?’” recalls Lerner. “They were finally starting to smell the rat.”
- TheOnlyCureForSymbioneseDysfunction . . . August 28, 2019, at 08:20 AM by phaedrus: Back in San Francisco violent arguments broke out, all exacerbated by ongoing sexual tensions within the group. Everything came to a head one long night at the Geneva Avenue apartment when, amid clouds of cigarette smoke, half-eaten pizza crusts, and beer and wine bottles, Harris announced that the only cure for the SLA’s dysfunction was black leadership. He proposed approaching a paroled San Quentin inmate they knew and asking him to take over. The newcomers hated the idea, afraid to bring in outsiders. As Harris and Kilgore screamed at each other, Emily Harris lamented the loss of the clarity DeFreeze had brought to the “old” SLA. Kilgore’s response provided an unwitting epitaph for the group: “That’s all a bunch of crap! What did the old SLA ever accomplish? You killed a black man, kidnapped a little teenaged girl and robbed a bank. What the hell did that amount to?” Finally, with half the group screaming and red-faced and the other half in tears, Harris shouted, “That’s it! It’s all over!” He and Emily were going in search of black leadership. The others could do as they pleased. The next day the Harrises rented an apartment on Precita Avenue in Bernal Heights, not far from San Francisco General Hospital. And just like that, with no good-byes, they were gone.
- TheSoledadBrothersDefenseCommittee . . . August 28, 2019, at 07:42 AM by phaedrus: On January 16, after a television report that the grand jury had ruled the deaths “justifiable homicide,” the Soledad inmates took their revenge. A young, inexperienced guard named John Mills was alone on the floor of Soledad’s Y Wing, where Jackson was housed. A group of inmates grabbed him by the throat, beat him up, and threw him over a third-floor railing. Mills struck the concrete floor below with a thud, tried to rise, then fell dead. The cell block exploded in cheers. Jackson and two other inmates were detained, placed in solitary, and charged with Mills’s murder; as a serial offender, Jackson faced the gas chamber. The case of the “Soledad Brothers,” as the three were soon dubbed, would have a profound impact on the California prison system, the Left, and ultimately the underground. The key figure was a radical attorney named Fay Stender, who agreed to represent Jackson after she made a name for herself as Huey Newton’s co-counsel in his murder trial. A plain woman with a smoldering sexuality, Stender was utterly entranced by the black inmates she represented. Although married with two children, she would enter into a sexual relationship with Jackson, as she had with Newton. She was a genius at public relations. As she’d done with Newton, she intended to put the entire white “system” on trial by portraying Jackson as an innocent victim being persecuted for his revolutionary beliefs. Enlisting white activists from across California, Stender formed the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee, which soon blossomed into a full-blown bureaucracy with seven subcommittees and a Who’s Who of radical-chic supporters, including Jane Fonda, Pete Seeger, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Hayden, and a striking UCLA professor named Angela Davis. The committee turned Jackson into a cause célèbre for the radical Left, pumping out a stream of posters, pamphlets, buttons, bumper stickers, and fund-raising letters while staging bake sales, poetry readings, and art auctions. The Grateful Dead even played a benefit concert. Under Stender’s guidance, George Jackson emerged as the living symbol of everything the Bay Area Left yearned for: strong, black, prideful, masculine, and undeniably sexual. John Irwin, who was called to testify for Jackson’s defense, noticed how naïve and starstruck Stender and her supporters were. “It was mostly women who were doing the organizing,” he told the writer David Horowitz years later. “They had each picked their favorite Soledad Brother and were kind of ooh-ing and ah-ing over them, like teenagers with movie stars. I couldn’t believe it.”
- ConvictCultism . . . August 28, 2019, at 07:39 AM by phaedrus: That jailed criminals would link up with the underground movement had long been foreseen. The rhetoric of violent revolution had found hundreds, perhaps thousands, of eager adherents inside U.S. prisons from its first utterances in the mid-1960s. Nowhere did prisoners pore over Debray and Che and Marighella more avidly than in California, where their interest attracted the notice of those who wanted a revolution just as badly: white radicals in San Francisco, Oakland, and especially the college city of Berkeley. This unlikely alliance, between charismatic black inmates and adoring white radicals, provided the underground with the long-sought messiah it ardently sought, thereby prolonging the life of a movement that had been on its last legs. Ironically, the figure who paved the way for all this was a white man, Caryl Chessman, a convicted rapist who, during the 1950s, launched a tireless legal and literary assault on the California prison system from his cell at San Quentin. What began as a stream of writs and lawsuits evolved into a series of best-selling memoirs in which Chessman put the prison system’s brutality on trial. By the time he was finally executed, in 1960, he had drawn clemency appeals from such liberal icons as Eleanor Roosevelt and Norman Mailer. During the 1960s hundreds of California inmates mimicked Chessman’s tactics, churning out thousands of clemency petitions and memoirs of their own—so many that as late as 1967 inmates on San Quentin’s Death Row were punished if discovered attempting to write their life stories. ... For apocalyptic revolutionaries, who had long sought a constituency to rise up and fight alongside them, black inmates seemed to represent the Holy Grail. Weatherman, after all, had invested thousands of hours attempting to rally working-class youth, high school students, and black liberals and had earned little in return but snickers and shrugs. Finally, in California’s toughest prisons, radicals found what appeared to be a loyal following. By 1968 black inmates were reported to be forming clandestine chapters of the Black Panthers and a hard-core Marxist group called the Black Guerrilla Family, both of which operated extensive, secret Marxist political-education groups, including courses on revolutionary theory and bomb making. In 1971 a House subcommittee identified the most popular books requested by black inmates as The Autobiography of Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown’s Die Nigger Die, and Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. It was Cleaver, starting in 1968, who loudly and repeatedly began predicting that black inmates would soon rise up and form the leading edge of the revolution. This kind of talk produced something approaching rapture in a certain brand of white revolutionary, to the point that, in a phenomenon the author Eric Cummins terms “convict cultism,” by the early 1970s “convicts who were released from California prisons frequently enjoyed instant hero status in radical organizations.” As a Movement radical named Betsy Carr put it, “I was completely fascinated with [black inmates]—the glamour, the bizarreness. It was my Hollywood. I’d never discussed anything with any of them, just watched in total awe.” By 1971 scores of Bay Area radicals were volunteering and protesting at California prisons. More than a few of the black inmates they befriended, however, turned out to be opportunists who parroted Marxist philosophy in hopes of luring their new white friends into helping them make parole or, in extreme cases, escape. The classic case came in October 1972, when several members of Venceremos, a leading Bay Area activist group, ambushed a car transporting a black prisoner named Ronald Beaty outside Chino’s California Institute for Men. A guard was killed in the ensuing gunfight. Their plan, authorities learned later, was to form guerrilla training camps in the California mountains, from which they would launch the long-awaited revolution in American cities. These hopes were dashed, however, when Beaty was recaptured. He not only implicated much of the Venceremos leadership; he also said he had only pretended to be a revolutionary to gain his freedom.
- AMovementWithNoInstitutions . . . August 28, 2019, at 07:13 AM by phaedrus: What most interested Cleaver, and the subject he returned to again and again in his transatlantic phone calls, was the need to establish an aboveground network to support the BLA. Guerrilla units could not survive long, he knew, without donations, without volunteers to serve as couriers and press agents, without community support. A Panther named Bernice Jones was keeping the old Seventh Avenue headquarters open in Harlem, but as police pressure skyrocketed after the May attacks, many volunteers simply melted away. Those who remained came under relentless surveillance and harassment from the FBI and NYPD. By the summer there would be fewer than a dozen people working with Jones. “Everyone is just too scared,” Lumumba Shakur complained in one call to Algeria. “They all running and hiding in fear.” ... The BLA’s most pressing problem, however, was a lack of aboveground support, something Cleaver and Sekou Odinga in far-off Algiers constantly harped on. Other than Right On!, whose next issue wouldn’t appear until August, there was none. Barely a dozen people now manned the Panthers’ Seventh Avenue storefront as their every move was tracked by the NYPD and the FBI. Both searched for links to the underground, but other than the intermittent calls to Algeria, all monitored by the FBI, there were none to be found. The calls, in fact, only revealed the tensions among those few volunteers still supporting Cleaver. At one point, Lumumba Shakur and the Right On! editor, Denise Oliver, got into a bitter argument. “I hit her in the titty!” Shakur crowed to Odinga in Algiers. Cleaver was forced to intervene. With no donations, the BLA cadres turned to armed robbery. Their targets, as Dhoruba Moore’s experience demonstrated, were black social clubs and drug dealers; almost all these robberies are lost to history. “There were actions all over the five boroughs,” recalls Blood McCreary. “There were people in the drug business who were setting up others for us to move on. We raised a lot of money that way, and we were letting them know that drugs would not be tolerated anymore.”
- LeaderlessCells . . . August 28, 2019, at 07:11 AM by phaedrus: With the Panther split in February 1971, Cleaver’s dreams seemed to be coming true. After years of calling for guerrilla warfare in the United States, militant Panthers began flocking to New York to take arms. Policemen were murdered. Communiqués were issued. Given his role as a beacon of revolutionary violence, one might have expected Cleaver to anoint himself chairman of the BLA. He didn’t. In fact, Cleaver ordained that the BLA would have no leader. Not him. Not anyone. Under guidelines set by Cleaver and Don Cox, the BLA’s structure would be the exact opposite of the Weather Underground’s. Where Weather cadres did nothing without direction from leadership, Cleaver and Cox wanted BLA units to operate independently, with no central coordination whatsoever. A system of autonomous cells, Cox reasoned, would be much harder for the government to subdue; a single leader could be defeated with a single arrest. This sounded fine in theory; in practice it led to anarchy. “I never understood the concept of an organization without leadership,” recalls Brooklyn BLA member Blood McCreary. “I always thought that was going to be difficult, and it was. When we got into the field, we were supposed to be autonomous, and you’d be two or three cells trying to do their own thing. I remember once two cells showed up to rob the same bank. It happened outside the Bronx Zoo, at a Manufacturers Hanover. So not having leadership, that was a problem.” A decentralized structure, however, had the added virtue of distancing Cleaver from BLA violence. The Algerian government, while happy to host revolutionary groups, made clear to all of them it would not condone acts of violence initiated on its own soil; worse, from Cleaver’s point of view, were hints that the government might be warming to a U.S. government more than a little interested in Algerian energy reserves. In practice this meant that while Cleaver spent day and night proselytizing bloody revolution, he seldom if ever mentioned the Black Liberation Army by name, much less publicly condoned its acts. His position in Algiers was too insecure. Rather than speak over an international phone line he suspected—correctly—that the FBI had tapped, Cleaver laid out his initial plans for the BLA in a set of “voodoo” tapes, which his favorite courier—a striking young Puerto Rican radical named Denise Oliver—brought to New York.
- ConcentrationCamps . . . August 28, 2019, at 07:06 AM by phaedrus: Algiers in the summer of 1969 was perhaps the perfect place, and the perfect moment, for Eldridge Cleaver. Since winning its bloody war for independence from France in 1962, the government had forged close relations with the Soviet Union and allowed scores of revolutionary groups, from Angola to Palestine, to maintain offices in its diplomatic community. A London paper termed Algiers in 1969 the “headquarters of world revolution.” Cleaver, figuring he could demand an embassy too, invited any number of other Panther fugitives to join him. A half dozen followed suit, including a trio of California skyjackers; Donald Cox of “radical chic” fame, a Panther field marshal fleeing a murder indictment in Baltimore, who arrived in May 1970; and Sekou Odinga, who with two other Panthers reached Algiers via Havana three months later. Cox became Cleaver’s aide-de-camp, Odinga his unofficial No. 3 man. It took a full year of on-and-off negotiations, however, for the Algerian government to approve official recognition of the “international section” of the Black Panther Party. While waiting, Cleaver embarked on a series of trips, leading Panther delegations to the Soviet Union, China, North Vietnam, and his personal favorite, North Korea, where he spent two months. In Algiers, Cleaver rented a spacious apartment in the Pointe Pescade section, where he gave frequent interviews. Finally, in June 1970, Cleaver received the Algerian government’s formal recognition, which came with a monthly stipend, identification cards, the right to obtain visas, and, best of all, the Panthers’ own embassy, a white two-story villa in the suburb of El Biar previously used by the North Vietnamese. Cleaver held a press conference to announce it all, telling reporters the “Nixon clique had begun to group the black people in concentration camps, escalating repression to the level of overt fascist terror against those who dare resist the oppression of the diabolical system under which the blacks of the United States are suffering. We reject the temple of slavery, which is the United States of America, and we intend to transform it into a social system of liberty and peace.”
- HowTheWeathermenGotTheirMoney . . . August 28, 2019, at 06:49 AM by phaedrus: One of the great mysteries of the Weatherman story involves the sources of its funding. Of the half-dozen largest underground groups active during the 1970s, it was one of only two that did not resort to armed robbery to raise money. Many have assumed that because a number of prominent Weathermen were the children of wealthy families—Bill Ayers and Cathy Wilkerson are often cited—they lived off donations from family and friends. While some families did help, money remained a chronic problem for many Weathermen. In San Francisco, Jeff Jones and the cadres he was responsible for lived on $1,200 a month and kept to strict budgets. At various times the FBI launched probes into traveler’s-check and credit-card scams it suspected the organization was using for money, but nothing ever came of them. In fact, the single largest source of funding appears to have been donations from Movement sympathizers. Most gave willingly; others, it appeared, had to be persuaded. “I remember this one guy they targeted in Brooklyn, a rich guy, Fred something, his father founded [a toy company],” recalls Elizabeth Fink. “They find out he has like twenty-five grand. So they have this party, eight or nine people, all of them Weatherman or connected to the underground. Fred is the only one not in the underground. He just thinks they’re fun. I don’t know what happened, but the next morning I heard they got every cent of that money, all twenty-five grand.” Among Weatherman’s financiers, by far the most important single source of money was a group of radical attorneys in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Almost all belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, a network of left-wing lawyers founded in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association. “Money? It was the lawyers, all of it,” says Ron Fliegelman, a sentiment echoed by several other Weather alumni. Of the dozen or so attorneys mentioned as key supporters, only a handful will admit helping out. One is Dennis Cunningham, then a Chicago attorney who represented Black Panthers. “I gave them money, sure, and I raised even more,” he says. “Without the lawyers, I’m telling you, they couldn’t have survived.” “You gotta understand, honey, we were lawyers, but we were revolutionaries in our hearts,” says Elizabeth Fink. “We didn’t have the balls to go underground, you see, but those who did, they were our heroes. You can’t believe the excitement of helping the underground, the romance of it, the intrigue. It was enthralling, and addictive. Any of us—Dennis, me, a bunch of us—we would’ve done anything for these people. Money, strategy, passports, whatever it was we could do, you just did it. This was the revolution, baby, and they were the fighters. But a lot of what they did, you know, was because they had attorneys like Dennis and me and a lot of others aboveground helping out.”
- TheHustonPlan . . . August 28, 2019, at 06:45 AM by phaedrus: On Friday, June 5, 1970, four days before the attack on NYPD headquarters, President Nixon summoned J. Edgar Hoover and CIA director Richard Helms to the Oval Office, along with the chiefs of the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Nixon was furious. Everywhere he looked, the antiwar movement seemed to be turning increasingly violent. The deaths at Kent State were still fresh in the air. Weatherman had now declared war; its first attacks were promised any day. This had gone far beyond the Townhouse and random bombings. The president lectured Hoover and the others that “revolutionary terrorism” now represented the single greatest threat against American society. He demanded that the four agencies assemble a concerted, overarching intelligence plan to defeat its spread. At the FBI, Hoover’s No. 2 man, Bill Sullivan, already had such a plan well in hand. The following Monday, June 8, he convened the first of five meetings intended to tear down the walls between the FBI, the CIA, and their brethren, lift all restrictions on domestic intelligence gathering, and clear the way for all four agencies to institute every dirty trick in the FBI’s old playbook: illegal break-ins, unilateral wiretapping, the opening of mail, even inserting informants into undergraduate classrooms. They called it the Huston Plan, after Tom Charles Huston, the twenty-nine-year-old Nixon aide who championed it alongside Sullivan. When Huston relayed the plan to Nixon on July 14, the president said he approved. There was just one problem: J. Edgar Hoover was dead set against the Huston Plan. The old man had grown exceedingly cautious in his last years, fearful his legacy would be tarnished if the rampant illegalities he had ordered over the years burst into view. He had never liked working with the CIA and had rarely done so; he didn’t want anyone, especially the FBI’s institutional rivals, knowing the Bureau’s secrets. But his main objection was the question of blame if this ever became public. Nixon had given only verbal approval. Hoover, who had no idea that Sullivan had already cleared FBI offices to engage in almost all these illegal tactics, had no doubt he and the FBI would take the fall. Hoover had something else to hide: the Bureau’s near-total inability to learn much of anything about Weatherman and other violence-prone radicals. With the loss of Larry Grathwohl, the FBI didn’t have a single informant anywhere near Weatherman—not one. Nor did it any longer have any useful wiretaps. As a result, the Nixon administration was badly misreading Weatherman’s status. No one at the FBI had any idea that the Townhouse had left the group in shambles. In fact, the startling explosion in the heart of New York City left senior officials believing exactly the opposite: that Weatherman constituted as dire a threat to national security as any the United States now faced. In the FBI’s nightmare scenario, Weatherman would lead thousands of long-haired demonstrators into a campaign of sabotage and assassination. Without informants, FBI agents across the country had first tried traditional investigative methods, interviewing Weatherman family and friends. This got them nowhere. A few agents were allowed to grow their hair long and linger at demonstrations, but it would take months if not years before they could be expected to infiltrate Weatherman or its allies. The fact was, the FBI had never attempted to root out an underground group like Weatherman. The legality of the tactics under consideration—or already under way—was unclear; no court, for instance, had yet ruled whether wiretaps could be installed without a court order. “Can I put an informant in a college classroom?” William Dyson, the agent put in charge of Weatherman cases, recalls wondering. “Can I penetrate any college organization? What can I do? And nobody had any rules or regulations. There was nothing.”
- TheSpiral . . . August 28, 2019, at 06:31 AM by phaedrus: ''(Then the bombs went off early -- in Wilkerson's father's house, which she'd 'borrowed' for the Weathermen.)''
- WhatKindsOfActionsWereAuthorized . . . August 28, 2019, at 06:19 AM by phaedrus: 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.
- TheUnderground . . . August 28, 2019, at 06:16 AM by phaedrus: By 1970, thanks to the influx of deserters and draft dodgers, the underground had taken on a decidedly left-wing flavor. An armed robber who escaped from a Midwestern prison that year was startled to find how Movement sympathizers had transformed life on the run. Sitting in New York’s Washington Square, he sang their praises to a New York Times reporter: The Movement people are fabulous. They have a real underground that takes care of you. No matter where I went they made sure I had something to eat, they introduced me to others, they made me feel safe. . . . I’ve only been here three weeks now, but I feel completely different from all the other times I’ve been on the run. It’s not a hassle like it was alone. I’m part of a community. The underground is much bigger than you’d think. It’s all around. I could go from place to place for weeks and there’d always be a place I could stay and people to take care of me. . . . Whether you call us criminals or radicals, we’ve all been [screwed] by society, we’re all on the lam together.
- SexAsAFormOfIdeologicalActivity . . . August 28, 2019, at 06:06 AM by phaedrus: Many of the brightest SDSers, including several who would achieve prominence in Weatherman, swung by that autumn to crash, drop acid, and ogle Dohrn as they listened to JJ’s rambling, amphetamine-fueled soliloquies on Che and Debray and every other revolutionary topic imaginable. ... “Power doesn’t flow out of the barrel of a gun,” Rudd snarled at Dohrn during one Weather Bureau meeting. “Power flows out of Bernardine’s cunt.”
- TheWeathermenGetMacho . . . August 28, 2019, at 06:05 AM by phaedrus: Few outside Weatherman itself thought that any of this, especially the Days of Rage, made much sense. When Mark Rudd met with leaders of the group that organized the largest mass protests of the era, the National Mobilization Committee—the “Mobe”—they adamantly refused to join forces, arguing that street fighting and battling police were counterproductive. The Panthers too thought the Days of Rage a bad idea. The Chicago Panthers’ charismatic young leader, Fred Hampton, held shouting matches with Dohrn and other leaders; the Panthers refused to help, and Hampton actually went public with his opposition, calling the Days of Rage “Custeristic.” Inside Weatherman, especially in its male-dominated upper reaches, the surest way to lose face was to share these doubts. JJ set a macho tone, and a number of those who trailed in his wake, including Bill Ayers, Terry Robbins, and Howie Machtinger, were short young men who seemed to compensate by adopting façades of arrogant swagger, scoffing at anyone who dared question Weather dogma; several of them had begun carrying guns. When Rudd made the mistake of questioning the Days of Rage, Ayers and Robbins snorted. “How could you succumb to that liberal bullshit?” Robbins demanded. “We’ve got to do it. It’s the only strategy to build the revolution.” As Rudd wrote later, “The scene plays in my memory like a grade-B gangster flick. Billy looks on in smirking contempt as Terry dismisses me with a flick of his ever-present cigarette. ‘How could you be so weak?’ That settled it.”
- TheNewLeftCoalition . . . August 28, 2019, at 06:02 AM by phaedrus: A crystallization of all JJ’s pet ideas, the paper didn’t just draw parallels between American student protests and the Third World guerrilla campaigns sprouting up around the world: It judged them all part and parcel of a single titanic global struggle between oppressed minorities and the agencies of U.S. imperialism. In other words, Mark Rudd hadn’t just acted like Che at Columbia; he was, in fact, Che’s comrade in arms. But the genius of JJ’s argument was that it allowed white radicals to portray themselves as allies of these oppressed minorities by rallying behind the one group whose leaders—from Martin Luther King to Huey Newton—the JJs of the world adored even more than Che Guevara: American blacks. “I think in our hearts what all of us wanted to be,” former SDS leader Cathy Wilkerson recalls, “was a Black Panther.” Wars like Vietnam came and went, but it was only the brewing revolution of American blacks, JJ prophesied, that had the potential to destroy the country. Every white revolutionary, he argued, was duty-bound to become 1969’s version of John Brown, the Civil War−era antislavery zealot. “John Brown! Live like him!” became JJ’s rallying cry. What this meant in reality was, like most protest-era rhetoric, open to interpretation. In the minds of apocalyptic radicals like JJ, white American protesters were destined to become Che-style guerrillas in the streets of America, rallying blacks and the white working class to a bloody revolution. ... The SDS convention took place at the Chicago Coliseum on Wednesday, June 18, 1969; nearly two thousand people attended. The Weathermen arrived as part of the larger RYM—Revolutionary Youth Movement—caucus, but both were consumed with the battle against their archrivals, PL. (The basic difference between the two groups was that PL adopted a Maoist philosophy of focusing on “workers,” while Weatherman put its emphasis on the “oppressed,” especially blacks.) The convention’s first two days were consumed with the trappings of student-leftist gatherings, angry speeches, PL chants against RYM, RYM chants against PL, even fistfights. The turning point came on Friday night, when a delegate from the Black Panthers took the microphone and read a statement that condemned PL as “counterrevolutionary traitors” who, if their ideological positions did not change, “would be dealt with as such.” It amounted to an ultimatum from the Panthers, whose approval every SDS leader sought like lost gold: Dump PL or else. PLers tried to drown out the Panthers, chanting “Read Mao” and “Bullshit!” When RYM supporters chanted the Panther slogan, “Power to the People!” PLers shouted back, “Power to the Workers!” Fistfights broke out. On stage, Mark Rudd called for a recess. As he finished, Dohrn rushed to the rostrum, eyes ablaze, and shouted that it was time to decide whether they could remain in the same organization as those who denied human rights to the oppressed. Anyone who agreed, she announced, should follow her. And with that, Dohrn and the leadership marched into an adjacent arena to decide what to do next. The RYM caucus and its allies, maybe six hundred people, talked there for three hours, then resumed discussions Saturday morning. The debates lasted all that day. Finally Dohrn, pacing between a set of bleachers, delivered a slow, deliberate speech that detailed the case for expelling PL from SDS. “We are not a caucus,” she concluded. “We are SDS.” And with that, a vote was taken: By a five-to-one margin, PL was expelled. The leadership, led by Dohrn and Bill Ayers, then drafted a statement listing the reasons why. Around eleven everyone filed back into the main hall, and Dohrn strode to the rostrum. For twenty minutes she laid out every PL sin, real and imagined, terming the group reactionary, anticommunist, and “objectively” racist. When she announced PL’s expulsion, chaos ensued. PLers chanted “Shame! Shame!” Dohrn led the RYM caucus out of the auditorium, leading their own chants: “Power to the People!” and “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!” By Sunday confusion reigned. The PLers, refusing to acknowledge their expulsion, elected their own SDS leadership. At a church across town, the RYM caucus elected theirs, all prominent Weathermen: Mark Rudd as national secretary, Bill Ayers as education secretary, Jeff Jones as the interorganizational secretary. By Monday morning there were, in effect, two functioning SDSes, but everyone understood that Weatherman had carried the day, in large part because its members had taken control of the national office in the days before the convention. Possession is nine-tenths of the law; Weatherman possessed the national office, and so it possessed SDS.
- BringingDownTheIndustrializedWest . . . August 28, 2019, at 05:56 AM by phaedrus: “We actually believed there was going to be a revolution,” remembers a Weatherman named Paul Bradley.* “We believed the world was undergoing a massive transformation. We believed Third World countries would rise up and cause crises that would bring down the industrialized West, and we believed it was going to happen tomorrow, or maybe the day after tomorrow, like 1976. We really thought that would happen. I know I did.”
- TheBeginningOfTheRevolution . . . August 28, 2019, at 05:54 AM by phaedrus: Calvert’s call [for a "truly revolutionary movement"] struck a chord, as did the slogan he coined that swept the Movement that winter of 1966−67: “From protest to resistance.” At least initially, no one was entirely sure what “resistance” meant. But out on college campuses, students quickly provided the answers. All through the first half of 1967, protesters who once silently carried signs began confronting authority. When a district attorney tried to confiscate copies of a student literary magazine at Cornell, a crowd of angry students sold it in brazen defiance; when six were arrested, others surrounded the police car and freed them. At Penn State student protesters occupied the president’s office until he provided information about the university’s practice of releasing student-organization lists to Congress. But it was SDS itself that propelled by far the largest resistance movement: to the military draft. The first draft-resistance groups began springing up in early 1967 and were soon widespread, many students openly burning their draft cards or wearing a popular SDS button: NOT WITH MY LIFE YOU DON’T. This kind of open defiance to government authority, along with disclosures of U.S. bombing of North Vietnamese civilians, drew tens of thousands of young people into the Movement even as its intellectual leaders, especially in SDS, began musing about ever more militant ways to confront the government. Protests alone, they could see, were no longer enough. ... One of the most striking characteristics of radical thought during the late 1960s was the flash-fire speed with which it evolved: An idea could be introduced, accepted, popularized, and taken to the “next level” in a matter of months, sometimes weeks. And so it was with the path of “resistance.” No sooner had the broader Movement plunged into the realities of draft and other resistance than the keenest thinkers began pondering what came next. Defying the government was giving way to confronting the government. And there was only one place to go, intellectually, once the government was confronted. It was Greg Calvert once more who first put it into words, at least publicly, in a front-page article in the New York Times in May 1967. The article, which attempted to take stock of student-resistance activities, suggested that violence was the Movement’s logical next step, a contention it supported with a quote that Calvert quickly recanted: “We are working to build a guerrilla force in an urban environment.” No other student leader seconded it, and because it suggested a tactic few in SDS had even considered, much less approved, it was broadly renounced. But not by everyone. The intellectual cat was now out of the bag...
- TelevisionRadicalization . . . August 28, 2019, at 05:49 AM by phaedrus: To begin to understand all this, one needs to understand the protest movements of the ’60s, and to understand that turmoil, one must at least glance at the decade that produced all those angry young activists: the 1950s. For much of white America, the ’50s was a time of suffocating conformity, when parents born during the Depression and empowered by winning a “good war” taught their children that America represented everything that was right and true in the world. These were the “happy days,” when a booming economy sent wealth soaring and children, born by the millions, grew up in homes where every family seemed to have two cars in the driveway, a stereo cabinet, and, in fifty million homes by 1960, a television. How happy were Americans? When a 1957 Gallup poll asked people whether they were “very happy, fairly happy, or not too happy,” an astounding 96 percent answered very or fairly happy. “The employers will love this generation,” University of California president Clark Kerr said in 1959. “They are not going to press many grievances . . . they are going to be easy to handle. There aren’t going to be riots.” And then, as if overnight, things changed. More than anything else, it was the pictures young Americans began seeing on those new televisions in 1960—of stoic Southern blacks dragged away from all-white lunch counters, of black protesters being beaten bloody by red-faced Southern deputies—that laid the groundwork for the white protest movement. The violence and injustice itself was shameful enough, but it was what those pictures said about America, about what an entire generation of young people had been taught, that felt like a betrayal. America wasn’t a land of equality. It wasn’t a land of the good and the just and the righteous. It was all a lie.
- DeclineOfTheBlackPanthers . . . August 28, 2019, at 05:48 AM by phaedrus: It was King’s death and the image of brave Panthers seeking to avenge it that cemented the party’s national reputation. For the first time many blacks who had resisted the martial calls of Black Power began to believe that white violence must be met with black violence. Emissaries arrived in Oakland from New York and dozens of other cities, all clamoring to start their own Panther chapters. In a matter of months, party membership went from hundreds to thousands; by late 1968 there would be Panther chapters in almost every major urban area. From a managerial point of view, it was chaos. A Central Committee was supposed to impose some kind of structure, but for the moment, Panther headquarters exercised little sway over these new affiliates. It was, in some respects, the apex of the party’s influence; looking back, there is no denying that the Panthers’ “heroic” age was already passing. In September, after a two-month trial marked by rancorous demonstrations, Huey Newton was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to two to fifteen years. Bobby Seale was indicted for taking part in demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention that August, becoming one of the “Chicago Eight.” Eldridge Cleaver, released on bond after the April shootout, spent the rest of 1968 “campaigning” for president and promoting Soul on Ice. After refusing to appear for a court date on November 27, he vanished; some said he had fled to Canada, others to Cuba. The next month a weary Stokely Carmichael boarded a freighter for a self-imposed exile in Guinea. “The revolution is not about dying,” he observed. “It’s about living.”
- EldridgeCleaver . . . August 28, 2019, at 05:44 AM by phaedrus: Sentenced to prison for rape, first at San Quentin and later at Folsom, Cleaver (like Malcolm) read voraciously, joined the Nation of Islam, and became a leader in the state’s burgeoning prison movement, pushing for books and classes in African history. In 1965 he wrote a radical Bay Area attorney named Beverly Axelrod, who took up his case. She gave some of Cleaver’s letters to editors at Ramparts, who enjoyed them so much that they promised to hire him, as they did, when Axelrod managed to secure Cleaver’s release, in December 1966. Cleaver, who became Axelrod’s lover, said years later that he had been romantically “gaming” her in a cynical bid to gain his freedom. At Ramparts, Cleaver became an instant celebrity, by far the most prominent black radical in the Bay Area. Angry, sometimes funny, and frequently sexual, his letters and articles portrayed Cleaver as a kind of cross between Malcolm and Barry White, an angry, charismatic lover man with his own revolutionary spin on hoary black stereotypes. Cleaver viewed blacks as sexual supermen, envied by whites and too often rejected by uppity black women. And, like Huey Newton, he argued that the most genuine “revolutionaries” were those who were most oppressed: black prison inmates and gangbangers—an idea that appealed strongly to white radicals yearning for a taste of black authenticity. Unlike Stokely Carmichael, Cleaver embraced white radicals, who adored him. They flocked to Black House, a kind of Black Power salon Cleaver co-founded, where he held court with every Movement figure who visited San Francisco. Cleaver’s rise would be capped in 1968, when his letters and Ramparts articles were packaged into a memoir, Soul on Ice, an international bestseller that sold more than two million copies in just two years. Critics hailed Cleaver as a powerful new literary talent, a symbol of black political and sexual repression. The New York Times named Soul on Ice one of the ten best books of 1968.
- GroupHeader . . . August 28, 2019, at 05:43 AM by phaedrus: (:stylepage Site.StyleSheetApostaxe:)
- RiseOfTheBlackPanthers . . . August 28, 2019, at 05:42 AM by phaedrus: Few protest groups in U.S. history have risen to national prominence as quickly as the Panthers: They went from an idea in Huey Newton’s head to the front pages of major newspapers in a scant seven months. Part of this was luck, part the enormous appeal to beleaguered urban blacks of the Panthers’ message to police: Kill a black man, they warned, and retribution will follow. But the crucial factor in the Panthers’ meteoric rise was Newton’s genius for media and street theatrics, as demonstrated from their first confrontations with authority to the costumes they donned, black leather jackets, powder-blue shirts and turtlenecks, and especially the black berets they wore in honor of Che Guevara. Unlike other black-militant groups springing up that year, the Panthers not only sounded badass; they looked it. In its first hundred days, the party consisted only of Newton, Seale, and a dozen or so of their friends. With little fanfare, they secured their first guns, learned how to use and clean them, opened a storefront office at Fifty-sixth and Grove in Oakland, and began their patrols, cruising the streets until they found a black citizen being questioned by police, typically at a traffic stop. The Panthers would step from their car, guns drawn, and remind the citizen of his rights; when a shaken patrolman asked what the hell they were doing, Newton, who had taken law school classes, told him of their right to bear arms. The Panthers generated curiosity and then, after a tense confrontation outside their office in early February 1967, respect. An Oakland policeman stopped Newton’s car; Seale and others were with him. At first Newton politely showed his driver’s license and answered the officer’s questions; he had his M1 rifle in clear view, Seale his 9mm. In short order three more patrol cars arrived. A crowd began to form. Up and down the street, people poked their heads from apartment windows. When an officer asked to see the guns, Newton refused. “Get away from the car,” Newton said. “We don’t want you around the car, and that’s all there is to it.” “Who in the hell do you think you are?” the officer demanded. “Who in the hell do you think _you_ are,” Newton replied.