For more see: Students for a Democratic Society, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn The Weather Underground (also known as Weatherman or the Weathermen) was a radical-left violent extremist group that was active from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s. What became known as the Weather Underground beg…
Weather Underground (Weatherman/The Weathermen) - InfluenceWatch - InfluenceWatch Close Menu About Us Report an Error Suggest a New Entry Want to Write for IW? Listen to the weekly IW Podcast Subscribe to Our Newsletter Hubs People Non-profits For-profits Labor Unions Other Groups Political Parties/527 Government Agencies Movements Legislation Search InfluenceWatch About Us Report an Error Suggest a New Entry Want to Write for IW? Listen to the weekly IW Podcast Subscribe to Our Newsletter Hubs People Non-profits For-profits Labor Unions Other Groups Political Parties/527 Government Agencies Movements Legislation Menu Donate Other Group Weather Underground (Weatherman/The Weathermen) Parent Organization: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) For more see: Students for a Democratic Society, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn Type: Radical-left violent extremist group Active: Late 1960s – Mid 1970s Contact InfluenceWatch with suggested edits or tips for additional profiles. Fields marked with an * are required Name Email * Reason for Contacting * Tip or profile suggestion Reporting an error I would like to write for InfluenceWatch Other reason Message * If you are a human seeing this field, please leave it empty. The Weather Underground (also known as Weatherman or the Weathermen) was a radical-left violent extremist group that was active from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s. What became known as the Weather Underground began in 1969 as “Weatherman,” a dominant faction within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a left-wing-turned-revolutionary Communist organization that split apart shortly after founding of Weatherman. In separate books detailing the history of the Weathermen, professional historian Arthur Eckstein and Vanity Fair journalist Bryan Burrough used law enforcement documents and personal recollections of numerous former Weathermen leaders to demonstrate that through at least May 1970 the organization aggressively promoted efforts to kill police officers and military personnel as part of its goal of sparking the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. While no murders have been conclusively tied to the Weathermen, police officers were injured in at least two Weatherman attacks. As late as 2003, several former Weathermen leaders were the subject of a federal probe into the February 1970 bombing-murder of a San Francisco, California, police officer that occurred two days after a known-Weatherman bombing that injured police in nearby Berkeley. 1 2 3 Eckstein and Burrough both provided strong evidence that two coordinated Weathermen bombing plots set for March 6, 1970, were intended to produce massive fatalities among police in Detroit, Michigan, and among military personnel who would be attending a dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Operating on the advice of an FBI informant, local law enforcement in Detroit discovered and disabled two large explosives on the morning of March 6. On the same day, the New York City Weathermen faction, working on bombs intended for Fort Dix, accidentally detonated a device, collapsing the townhouse in which they were working, killing three of them. 4 5 In May 1970, on the run from the FBI following the townhouse explosion and discovery of the Detroit bombs, the Weathermen leadership declared the organization would pivot to a strategy of non-lethal bombings. This meeting and a subsequent public declaration in December 1970 promoted a false mythology that the townhouse bombers had been a violent and misguided faction within a larger Weatherman movement that had supposedly always pursued only property damage, and not personal injury. The Weathermen conducted at least 25 bombings between 1969 and 1975, and after May 1970 began phoning ahead warnings that prevented injuries after June 1970. Noteworthy actions included bombings of the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and aiding in the prison escape of LSD guru Timothy Leary. Burrough has written that members of the left-wing National Lawyers Guild provided crucial financial and other assistance to the Weathermen. 6 7 Despite a significant investigation, costing an estimated $86.6 million in 2020 dollars, the FBI was never able to catch and secure prosecution of any major Weatherman participants, two of whom appeared on the Bureau’s list of ten “Most Wanted” fugitives. In its desperation, the FBI resorted to unconstitutional methods to pursue the Weathermen, including warrantless break-ins and electronic surveillance of family members of Weathermen leaders. This behavior compromised the ability of federal law enforcement to prosecute the Weathermen, leading the U.S. Department of Justice to drop the most serious charges in 1973 and allowing nearly all the Weathermen leaders to come out from hiding and avoid serious felony prosecutions. 8 9 Eckstein and Burrough each wrote that federal law enforcement and the administration of President Richard Nixon severely overestimated the size and threat posed by the Weather Underground, affording the group more attention and lasting historical reputation that it otherwise deserved. Burrough concluded, “In every conceivable way, the young intellectuals who had come together in 1969 to form Weatherman had utterly failed: failed to lead the radical left over the barricades into armed underground struggle; failed to fight or support the black militants they championed; failed to force agencies of the American “ruling class” into a single change more significant than the spread of metal detectors and guard dogs.” 10 11 Contents Origins Weatherman Manifesto Days of Rage Going Underground Self-Criticism Sessions The Flint War Council The Consolidation Bombing Campaign Intention to Kill Bay Area Police Bombs New York City Firebombs Cleveland Firebombing March 1970 Failed Bombings Detroit Police Bombs Fort Dix Plot Pivot from Lethal Attacks Fallout from Townhouse Explosion “Responsible Terrorism” Scapegoating of Townhouse Bombers Motives for the Pivot Non-Lethal Terrorist Actions Timothy Leary Prison Break U.S. Capitol Bombing Pentagon Bombing Other Terrorist Actions Financing and Supporters Logistical Assistance High Living of Leadership FBI Investigations Missed Opportunities FBI Misconduct End of the Weather Underground Prairie Fire Movement Resurfacing Aboveground Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn Eleanor (Raskin) Stein and Jeff Jones Cathy Wilkerson and Ron Fliegelman Mark Rudd John Jacobs Howard Machtinger Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert References ReferencesRelated ProfilesDirectors, Employees & SupportersOrigins What became known as the Weather Underground began as one of two feuding factions emerging from the June 1969 national convention held by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). As it turned out, the June 1969 convention would be the last national meeting before SDS ceased to exist. One SDS faction was aligned with the Progressive Labor Party (PL), a Maoist organization created in 1962 by disgruntled former members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). By 1969, PL was pushing SDS toward de-emphasizing campus-based student activism in favor of student activists organizing the blue collar, mostly white working class. PL was either skeptical of or sometimes explicitly opposed to student activism that might be perceived as alienating culturally conservative and militarily hawkish, blue collar workers. PL eventually opposed SDS’s call to end the military draft, and opposed SDS participation in the violent demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. In place of these policies, PL promoted a student-worker alliance as the path to growing a Communist revolutionary movement, and advocated placing students in working-class communities and in jobs as factory workers. 12 13 Aligned against PL were two loosely affiliated caucuses calling themselves Revolutionary Youth Movements I and II (RYM I and RYM II). The RYM I faction arrived at the convention united behind the so-called “Weatherman Manifesto,” a 16,000-word paper spelling out their objectives for the future of SDS. RYM II included those not in complete ideological or tactical alignment with RYM I, but also opposed to the PL Maoists. 14 15 RYM I included the primary leadership of what would become the Weatherman faction that emerged from the SDS convention: Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, John Jacobs, Jeff Jones, Jim Mellen, Mark Rudd, Howie Machtinger, Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins. According to Days of Rage, a history of leftist revolutionary violence in the 1970s written by Vanity Fair correspondent Bryan Burrough, Dohrn and her then-boyfriend Jacobs became a “force of nature” within SDS after Dohrn’s election as a top officer at the June 1968 national convention and her declaration that she was a “revolutionary communist.” From that point forward, according to Burrough, the pair “had their eyes on seizing overall control of SDS,” and their Chicago apartment became the “epicenter of SDS politics” for “several who would achieve prominence in Weatherman.” 16 The 1969 convention, and effectively SDS itself, ended shortly after the Weatherman-RYM II faction tried to expel the Progressive Labor members for being “objectively anticommunist” and “counterrevolutionary.” Historian Guenter Lewy states that the Weatherman-RYM II group and PL each commanded roughly one-third of the 1,500 delegates, with the remaining third either first-time delegates or otherwise unaffiliated with either warring side. This might have compromised the prospects for a successful expulsion vote, but no such vote occurred. Having deemed the PL faction to be “counterrevolutionaries,” the Weathermen-RYM II partisans further reasoned it was logically absurd to allow the supposed counterrevolutionaries a vote on their “counterrevolutionary nature.” 17 Dohrn led the expulsion proceedings against PL. A very acrimonious convention that had included fistfights between the factions concluded with two rival SDS organizations voting themselves to be the genuine SDS. But, according to Burrough, “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.” The Weathermen-SDS elected Dohrn, Rudd, Ayers and Jones as its national leadership. 18 Using recently declassified FBI files for Bad Moon Rising, his 2016 history of the FBI’s pursuit of the Weather Underground, historian Arthur Eckstein revealed that FBI informants had infiltrated the Weatherman faction of SDS and likely comprised “dozens” of those who aligned with the Dohrn-led effort to expel the Progressive Labor caucus. Eckstein provides documents proving the FBI ordered these secret allies to side with Weatherman and “to the extent that it could, attempted to steer SDS toward Weatherman—which the FBI saw, initially, as less dangerous than PL.” 19 Eckstein gives this analysis of the incident: “This was the first FBI misjudgment of Weatherman; it would not be the last.” 20 Weatherman Manifesto The Weatherman Manifesto was drafted for the 1969 SDS convention by John Jacobs and co-signed by Dohrn, Rudd, Jeff Jones, Machtinger, Robbins and Ayers. The document and thus the initial ideology of the Weathermen was heavily influenced by French political theorist Regis Debray, an ally and admirer of Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro. Jacobs also, according to the account in Days of Rage, idolized the murderous “Civil War-era anti-slavery zealot” John Brown, and was fond of the rallying cry “John Brown! Live like him!”21 22 Debray proposed that successful communist revolutions did not initially require a mass of support to succeed, but could instead be jump-started by a small group of what historian Arthur Eckstein characterized as “committed revolutionaries” willing to commit “exemplary violence” that would inspire the masses to join the revolt. Debray believed Castro and his small cadre of followers had won because they launched successful assaults on the Cuban state’s police and military, thus showing the Cuban people that an oppressive government’s authority was not invincible. 23 Summarizing Debray’s thinking as it was internalized by the early Weathermen, Eckstein wrote: “The population’s assumption that the police and the army were unassailable could be undermined only by killing soldiers and policemen.” In this way a “small guerilla band, if committed enough, could—through violence against the state … eventually become the nucleus of a large people’s army.” 24 But Eckstein noted that Debray (and thus the Weathermen) were embracing a mythology of successful revolutionary violence that ignored crucial facts regarding Cuba:25 “What Debray failed to mention were the years of resistance and political organizing that had taken place in Cuba’s cities. He ignored the significant role played by the urban resistance, composed mostly of middle-class moderates. Instead, he swallowed hook, line, and sinker Castro’s view of his own path to success, which tended not to recognize the diversity and contribution of other actors in the effort to overthrow [former U.S.-backed Cuban military dictator Fulgencio] Batista.” 26 Eckstein wrote that the Weather faction was committed to a communist overthrow of the United States, and “tired of protest”—the non-violent path to revolution taken by SDS up until that point. “They wanted to prepare for war,” observed Eckstein. 27 The Weatherman Manifesto, according to Eckstein’s analysis, proposed that SDS lead America’s radical youth movement to become a communist “Red Army” that was “clandestine, centrally controlled, and trained in military tactics.” Proposing to ignite a communist revolution in the United States, it called for working-class white youth to open a domestic battlefront in the supposed world-wide war against capitalism and imperialism. This battle included allies such as the Vietnamese communists fighting U.S. forces in Southeast Asia like the Viet Cong and black militants such as the Black Panthers fighting what the Weathermen asserted was an identical war of liberation against the U.S. government at home. Eckstein also noted the Manifesto judged that the “white working class in general” (apart from the youth) were “bought off by a combination of materialism and racism,” and thus not a useful ally in the communist liberation struggle. 28 Future Weathermen bomber Cathy Wilkerson said of this perspective among the overwhelmingly white Weather leaders: “I think in our hearts what all of us wanted to be was a Black Panther.” 29 All of this was a direct challenge to the revolutionary strategies advocated by the Progressive Labor faction of SDS, which held that an alliance with the American working-class (the large majority of which was white) was the essential pre-requisite to a successful communist revolution. Eckstein wrote: “PL pushed a traditional Marxism, focused on industrial workers as the engine of revolution, and they viewed blacks as merely an intensely exploited part of the working class.” 30 Days of Rage In July 1969, in the weeks after they seized control of the fractured SDS at its final convention, the Weatherman leadership traveled to Cuba to meet with Cuban communists and representatives of the Viet Cong. According historian Arthur Eckstein in his book Bad Moon Rising, notes taken at the meetings by Bernardine Dohrn (and later captured by the FBI) prove that both the Vietnamese and Cubans “advised the Weather leaders not to engage in violent actions” and to instead to concentrate on creating more of the “aboveground antiwar demonstrations that had shaken the American administration [of President Lyndon Johnson] in 1967.” 31 Eckstein reports this advice—which ran contrary to Weather’s impatience with peaceful protests—was both ignored and quickly misrepresented when Dohrn’s group returned home. Eckstein wrote that John Jacobs and Bill Ayers engineered the change in the story to account in which “the Vietnamese and the Cubans urged Weatherman to violence against the American state.” In his memoir of the era, Ayers confirmed this distortion had taken place, but tried to place the blame for the switch exclusively on Jacobs—a claim Eckstein refuted using Ayers’ own published essays from the era and the account of fellow Weather Underground leader Eleanor (Raskin) Stein. 32 The public statements of Weather leaders promoting this distortion led the New York Times to credit Cuban and Viet Cong advice as instrumental in the turn to violence by the Weathermen. As a result, reported Eckstein, high officials in the administration of President Richard Nixon began to suspect foreign communists were controlling the Weathermen. 33 The first major manifestation of the turn to violence was planning for the so-called Days of Rage, scheduled to begin in Chicago on October 8, 1969. In his book, Days of Rage, Bryan Burrough writes the Weathermen leaders “crisscrossed the country” telling media the event would be “the largest, most violent mass protest the Movement had seen” and an “urban Armageddon.” Weatherman Mark Rudd predicted “thousands and thousands” would show up to fight against the government and police. Bill Ayers advised “we’re also going to make it clear that when a pig gets iced, that’s a good thing, and that everyone who considers himself a revolutionary should be armed, should own a gun.” 34 The Days of Rage was intended as the practical execution of Regis Debray’s strategy. Eckstein wrote that in showing “toughness and violence against the authorities,” Weathermen leadership believed they could politicize the “anger, alienation, and hostility to cops” supposedly felt by the “working-class street youth” being targeted for recruitment as soldiers for the revolution. 35 Recruitment efforts to draw in the “thousands and thousands” expected for the Chicago violence included public demonstrations such as the displaying of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese flags at high schools, community colleges, public beaches and other venues where the youth from blue collar homes were expected to be found. However, both Burrough and Eckstein noted that this behavior led to few converts and instead often violent confrontations with the intended recruits; in one instance, Mark Rudd was hospitalized after a beating inflicted by Milwaukee teenagers. 36 37 Weather also failed to recruit noteworthy “New Left” allies for the Days of Rage. Black Panther leader Fred Hampton publicly denounced the plan as “Custeristic”—presumably a reference to the 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn, in which U.S. Army Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry Regiment was destroyed by Lakota Sioux warriors. Leaders of the National Mobilization Committee (the “Mobe”—responsible for many of the largest anti-war demonstrations of the era) disagreed with the inclination to provoke battles with police and refused to participate. 38 The response from Weather leaders, according to Eckstein, was to “condemn the Panthers” as “revisionists,” a “term of Marxist abuse.” Similarly, in September a Cuban diplomat informed Bernardine Dohrn that his government opposed the anticipated confrontations with police. Dohrn responded by declaring the representative from the communist government to be a counterrevolutionary. 39 Inside Weather leadership, according to Burrough, “the surest way to lose face” was to express doubts about the Days of Rage. Mark Rudd committed this ideological error, later writing that he received “smirking contempt” from Ayers and denunciation for being “weak” from Terry Robbins. Eckstein identified Ayers and Robbins as the leaders of a “Michigan group” within SDS that was “notorious for its extreme conduct.” 40 41 The first known detonation of a Weathermen bomb occurred two days before the Days of Rage, destroying a bronze statue of a policeman at a Chicago park, but causing no injuries. The Days of Rage began on schedule the evening of October 8, 1969, but with an estimated 200 participants—far short … truncated (144,065 more characters in archive)