TIMETHE WEEKLY NEWSMAGALINE March 23, 1970 Vol. 95, No. 12 THE NATION • not have to fill in a lucky coupon, AMERICAN NOTES much less tell why he liked a deter- Stand at Isla Vista gent. Technicolor, Inc., his old employer, "At some time and in some place, was content merely that he serve as its Americans must decide as to whether public relations consultant after he went they intend to have their decisions, in- to the Senate five years ago. deed their lives, ruled by a violent mi- Unethical? Apparently not. Senator nority. We are but one bank, but we John Stennis, chairman of the Senate's have decided to take our stand in Isla Select Committee on Standards and Vista." Conduct, gave Murphy's arrangement That determined declaration by one his approval without even referring the of the nation's usually faceless financiers, matter to the members. Many men in Chairman Louis B. Congress, after all, have outside sourc- Lundborg, may not rank historically with es of income, particularly from the prac- Martin Luther's challenge at the Diet tice of law. Still, few have such a of Worms: "Here I stand—I cannot do direct connection, and probably no oth- otherwise, God help me." It does in- er legislator is the employee of a com- dicate, however, that society is growing pany whose chairman, like Technicolor's grimmer as it confronts youthful rad- Patrick Frawley Jr., is a militant ad- icals and rioting students. The bank's vocate of right-wing causes. $275,000 Isla Vista branch was burned Question: What would Stennis, a con- to the ground last month during a ram- servative from Mississippi, have said if IBM OFFICES IN Murphy's boss were the 01, page that began on the Santa Barbara N.A.A.C.P.? Or campus of the University of California. the Black Panthers? Second question: Bank officials fear that they may smell What exactly does the Senator do as a Bombing: A Way of smoke again. Nonetheless, they decided public relations consultant? not to be intimidated, and workmen NLY nine months ago, the Na- erected a $55,000 prefabricated building Potato Bake in Idaho O tional Commission on the Causes next to the rubble. Last week the branch U.S. agriculture is still one of the and Prevention of Violence was able to was back in business, which is, iron- world's wonders—and its economics is report that the U.S. "has experienced al- ically, mainly that of serving students still a mess. Amid spectacular farm pro- most none of the chronic revolutionary at the university. So that they can stay duction and surpluses, some 15 million conspiracy and terrorism that plagues in school, some 1,600 students have Americans go underfed. Last week, in dozens of other nations." To he sure, taken $1,500,000 in loans from the bank. an attempt to drive the price of prize plots and skirmishes have footnoted Idaho potatoes up from about $2.50 a American history, and bomb blasts Questions in Technicolor hundredweight to $3.50, farmers burned sometimes provided the punctuation. But It sounded like a supermarket sweep- 5,000,000 lbs. of them in eastern Idaho they were usually isolated cases tied to stakes, the jackpot being $20,000 a year, in giant bonfires fueled by straw and ker- a specific labor dispute, racial confron- $260 a month toward the rent and use osene. If the price does not rise prompt- tation or criminal feud. For many dec- of a credit card. But California's Re- ly, say the farmers, they will destroy ades, the specter of the political bomb- publican Senator George Murphy did another 5,000,000 lbs. er has been as alien and anachronistic as the caricature of the bearded an- archist heaving a bomb the size and shape of a bowling ball. Last week that specter took on ominous substance as the nation was shaken by a series of bombings that highlighted a fearsome new brand of terrorism. Corrupt and Doomed. Taking their cue from right-wing racists who used to keep blacks down with TNT, whites and blacks of the lunatic left have be- gun using explosives to produce sound effects and shock waves in their cam- paign to unnerve a society that they re- gard as corrupt and doomed. Schools, department stores, office buildings, po- lice stations, military facilities, private homes—all have become targets. So far, miraculously, fatalities have been relatively few. One small slip, however —or one bloodthirsty bomber—could run up a death toll that could easily rival a week's total in Viet Nam. If NEW BANK BESIDE RUINS OF THE OLD the bomb threat continues. that is al- Growing grimmer in the confrontation. most certain to occur. LEONAllb 1:111-1LY PtIVMS hit the Michigan State University's years ago, when there were no more School of Police Administration, and than 20 bombings a year. au- someone threw a Molotov cocktail in thorities have accused 21 Black Pan- an Appleton, Wis., high school. thers of a conspiracy to blow up stores Like Tarzan. Two black militants were and railroad tracks and, during a hear- killed when their car was blasted to ing on those charges, five bombs were hits while they were riding on a high- set off around the city in one night, way south of Bel Air. Md. The dead three at the home of the judge. Last were Ralph Featherstone, 30, and Wil- July through November, a series of liam ("Che") Payne, 26. Featherstone, bombs exploded in government and cor- a former speech therapist, was well porate offices in the city; three left- known as a civil rights field organizer wing white radicals were arrested and and, more recently, as manager of the one is still sought. The San Francisco Afro-American bookstore, the Drum & Bay Area had an estimated 62 bomb- Spear. in Washington. Both were friends ings in the past year, Seattle 33. The of H. Rap Brown, whose trial on charg- es of arson and incitement to riot was scheduled to begin last week in Bel Air. Reconstruction of the car's speed- ometer indicates it was traveling about 55 miles an hour when it blew up. Police believed that Payne had been carrying a dynamite bomb on the floor between his legs and that it accidentally exploded. A preliminary FBI investiga- tion supported that theory. Friends of the dead men contended that white ex- tremists had either ambushed the pair or booby-trapped their car, perhaps try- ing to kill Brown. But police pointed out that Featherstone and Payne had AFTER BLAST driven in from Washington without no- i Lice, cruised around Bel Air briefly and If seemed to be headed back. That us- f- Protest and Death „,, sassins could plot and move so quickly FEATHERSTONE defies belief. slight is the margin of error has How Although Featherstone had not been been demonstrated by the most recent known as an extremist, friends said that bomb episodes. Two weeks ago, three ex- he had grown markedly more bitter in plosions destroyed an elegant town house the past year. Police cited a crud on 's West 1 lth spelled typewritten statement found on Street. The basement had apparently *McTody: "To Amerika:* I'm playing been used as a factory for jerry-built heads-up murder. When the deal goes bombs, one of which seemed to have ac- down I'm gon be standing on your chest cidentally exploded. Last week police screaming like Tarzan. Dynamite is my found in the ruins the body of a young response to your justice." Brown, mean- radical leader, a headless female torso, while, was nowhere to be found. so mangled the remains of a third person The night after the Bel Air incident. that gender was still uncertain at week's a blast ripped a 30-ft. hole in the side end, and an arsenal of dynamite and of the Dorchester County courthouse homemade bombs (see box, page 10). in Cambridge, where Brown allegedly in- As demolition experts continued to cited the 1967 riot and where his trial probe the 11th Street wreckage for was originally scheduled. No one was more explosives—and perhaps more hurt in the blast, which occurred just GOLD bodies—bombs exploded at the Man- 100 miles from Bel Air. Police were seek- hattan headquarters of Mobil Oil, IBM ing a young white woman seen at the and General Telephone and Electronics. courthouse before the blast. An organization that styled itself "Rev- Haymarket Again. Last week's vi- olutionary Force 9” claimed respon- olence was only the latest in a fright- sibility. No one was hurt in the early- ening trend. Though the upswing in morning blasts, which were strikingly bombing is far from nationwide, it has similar to three blasts in several New occurred in widely separated parts of York office buildings last Nov. 11, but the country. New York and San Fran- during the following two days news of cisco, both areas of left-wing extremist the explosions triggered an outbreak of activity, have been particularly hard hit, more than 600 phony bomb scares in a but so have less electric cities, includ- jittery New York. Three Molotov cock- ing Seattle, Denver and Madison, Wis. tails exploded in a Manhattan high In New York, there were 93 bomb ex- school. There were scattered bomb plosions in 1969, police say, and an- threats elsewhere in the country, even other 19 bombs did not explode. Half at the Justice Department in Wash- the 93 are classed as political, a cat- ington. One of them obliged Secretary egory that was virtually nonexistent ten of State William Rogers to leave his of- fice. Mysterious nighttime explosions n The Germanic spelling, which is used by rocked a Pittsburgh shopping mall and some radicals to indicate America's control WILKERSON a Washington nightclub. Another blast by "fascists." How slight the margin for error. F131 says that there were 61 bombing Psychotic fads have a way of be- an apocalyptic and conspiratorial view and arson cases on U.S. college cam- coming contagious, and the political left of society and an arrogant, elitist con- puses in 1969. has had no monopoly on bombings. viction that only they know how to re- Police are a prime target of black Bank robbers in Danbury, Conn., re- form the world. They have only a vague, and white revolutionaries. There were cently set off three blasts to divert cops. romantic idea of overthrowing the "Es- two attempted bombings of police sta- In Detroit. rival motorcycle gangs with tablishment" and ending the Viet Nam tions in Detroit earlier this month; both nary a trace of political ideology be- War. Thus, their goals cannot be failed. A blast during last October's tween them dynamited each other's club- achieved through traditional means of Weatherman rampage in top- houses. In Denver, where a battle over reform within the system. As Berkeley pled a statue commemorating policemen busing for integration rages, 38 school Police Chief Bruce Baker points out, killed in the 1886 Haymarket Square buses were bombed last month. Three they are "playing a very tragic form of riot and ensuing disturbances—all of cars were recently destroyed there in sep- cops and robbers, seeing themselves as which was triggered by an anarchist's arate explosions; the only link is that modern-day revolutionaries." bomb. While many of the attacks are all were red and foreign-made. Some inkling of the bombers' psy- clearly aimed at property and publicity Cops and Robbers. The most fright- chology appeared in a letter mailed last rather than people, some seek to maim ening aspect of the political bomb-throw- week just before the New York office and murder. A bomb that ripped through ing is the cool acceptance of terror as bombings by Revolutionary Force 9: the Park Precinct house near Haight- a tactic by educated people. Mainly "All three [companies bombed] profit Ashbury on Feb. 16 killed a policeman young, often college-educated, many are not only from death in Viet Nam but when an industrial staple taped to the guilt-ridden offspring of middle-class af- also from Amerikan imperialism in all weapon shot through his left eye and fluence. Others are black militants de- of the Third World. To numb Amerika brain. voured by despair. What they share is to the horrors they inflict on humanity,

The House on llth Street

EW YORK'S West 1 1 th Street be- mother, who is divorced from Cathy's fa- N tween Fifth and Sixth Avenues is ther (both have remarried), "I think of a gracious, tree-shaded reminder of the something that contradicts it. She didn't Greenwich Village of Henry James. A think much of herself. And she could de- community of successful artists, writers velop a deep and fierce loyalty to things." and businessmen, it is lined with stately Bearded Ted Gold was the son of town houses like the four-story dwelling two physicians; his father, Hyman, is at No. 18, which until last week looked known as "the Movement Doctor" for much the same as when it was built in his free treatment of penniless radicals. 1845. There was a formal garden in Gold was a bright, committed student back where few sounds louder than the in New York's Stuyvesant High, where tinkling of teacups were ever heard. a former teacher, Bernard Flicker, re- The owner of the Federal-style $250,000 calls: "He had everything—wit, charm. house, Businessman James Platt Wil- He could have been anything." At Co- kerson, had furnished the interior Geor- lumbia University, Gold began as a mod- gian style. The rooms were filled with erate leftist, working for civil rights art and rare antiques, including a 1790 and antiwar causes. But he moved fur- square piano. Wilkerson was especially ther toward the fringe, Flicker says. proud of his paneled library, called the and "began to feel that protests did Bird Room because it housed a col- no good, that nothing could change. lection of wood, metal and china birds. In the end, he took the view that any It was a site for refined, elegant living. means to an end was legitimate." Now No. 18 is a tangle of ground- • level debris. Behind its façade of gen- was destined to be a tility, the house had become a labo- crusader. Her father Leonard is a prom- ratory of violence, its products designed inent lawyer for leftist causes. She was to destroy the stable society that its ele- a magna cum laude graduate of Bryn gance symbolized. When three explo- Mawr. Her mother recalls: "Kathy did sions shattered the dwelling, Wilkerson's everything cum laude." Kathy's parents daughter Cathlyn, 25, and an uniden- have refused to cooperate with police tified young woman emerged dazed and hers of the violent Weatherman faction in their search for her, and her mother trembling from the crumbling, burning of Students for a Democratic Society. says only: "We know she is safe." ruins Having donned a neighbor's old Police speculated that, while Wilkerson The three moved to the Weatherman clothes, the pair disappeared before po- and his wife were vacationing in the Ca- organization after S.D.S. split up in a lice came. At the end of last week, ribbean, the amateurs had turned the factional dispute ;n 1969. All had sever- they were still missing. basement into a bomb factory. al scrapes with the law. Last year the • The bright, attractive children of mod- girls were among 26 women who "raid- In the ruins, police found 60 sticks erately wealthy families, the youngsters ed" a Pittsburgh high school. By then, of dynamite, 30 blasting caps and four were unlikely by normal standards to their upper-class breeding was wearing dynamite-packed pipes wrapped with have ended up as bombers. But in col- thin; some of the girls ran through the heavy nails that could act as flesh-shred- lege they had turned away from tra- corridors bare-breasted, yelling "Jail- ding shrapnel. They also found the body ditional values and become increasingly break!" The girls were also arrested dur- of Theodore Gold, 23, and the un- radicalized. Though the pretty, brown- ing the violent Weatherman clashes with identified remains of two other persons. haired Miss Wilkerson attended the best police in Chicago's Grant Park last Oc- A credit card belonging to Kathy Bou- of private schools and Swarthmore Col- tober. But their class privileges paid din, 26, who may have been the person lege, she seemed also lonely and un- off: the women were released in $40,000 with Cathlyn, also turned up in the de- sure of herself. "Every time I think of bail. They are supposed to go on trial bris. Gold and the girls were all mem- something to explain Cathy," said her this week.

10 TIME, MARCH 23, 1970