The Way The Wind Blew A History Of The Weather Underground Author: Ron Jacobs Publisher: Verso Date: 1997 ISBN: 1-85984-167-8 Table of Contents Preface....................................................................................................................1 1. 1968: SDS Turns Left...........................................................................................3 2. Weather Dawns: The Break and the Statement .................................................13 3. Into the Streets: Days of Rage ..........................................................................21 4. Down the Tunnel: Going Underground ..............................................................35 5. Women, The Counterculture, And The Weather People .....................................45 6. Changing Weather.............................................................................................61 7. A Second Wind? The Prairie Fire Statement ......................................................75 8. The End of the Tunnel: Weather and Its Successors..........................................83 Bibliography.............................................................................................................i A Weather Chronology ............................................................................................v The Cast ...............................................................................................................xiii List of Acronyms ................................................................................................. xvii Illustrations ............................................................................................................a Preface I first became aware of Weatherman in the fall of 1970, after opening a copy of Quicksilver Times and reading about the group's assistance in Timothy Leary's escape from a prison in California. Although I personally preferred the antics of that other psychedelic prankster Ken Kesey, the fact that a political organization had aided the unreservedly apolitical Leary to escape fascinated me. Then, at high school on a US military base in West Germany, where I was involved in organizing against the Vietnam war, I began reading as much as I could about Weatherman and its history. I found its politics difficult to understand but always admired its style and its ability to hit targets which in my view deserved to be hit. When I returned to the US after high school I floated in and out of organizations on the Left, where the presence of Weather was always felt, as an example both of commitment and of the necessity to organize deep popular support. My own political path has led me to shun military actions in favor of mass- based organizing, but I believe Weather's insistence on an anti-racist and anti-imperialist (and, belatedly, anti-sexist) analysis was fundamental to my political development. The New Left was constantly changing, reacting to events in the world and in the movement itself. Many of today's critics view the Students for a Democratic Society of late 1968 and early 1969 (and afterwards) in relation to its original intentions as expressed in the Port Huron Statement. When they write about its history after the June 1969 convention, they often do so in terms of a betrayal of the ideals of the organization before it split. It is my contention that what happened at that convention and afterwards was not so much the end of the New Left as yet another sharp turn in the history of the Left itself. Another tendency in many writers is to relate this part of its history with an emphasis on the personalities involved and not the politics. While they are arguably intertwined, it is my hope that this text is primarily a political history of Weatherman, and not merely an account of personalities. Every attempt has been made to ensure that all citations are complete. However, given the nature of the North American underground press, it has not always been possible to provide complete information, especially in the case of specific page numbers. Also, in the early chapters of the text, I refer to the New Left as such. However, as the lines between the New Left and Old Left become blurred, I use the more general term, the Left. 1 1. 1968: SDS Turns Left I send you, my friends, my best wishes for the New Year 1968. As you all know, no Vietnamese has ever come to make trouble in the United States. Yet, half a million troops have been sent to South Vietnam who, together with over 700,000 puppet and satellite troops, are daily massacring Vietnamese people and burning and demolishing Vietnamese towns and villages. In North Vietnam, thousands of US planes have dropped over 800,000 pounds of bombs, destroying schools, churches, hospitals, dikes and densely populated areas. The US government has caused hundreds of thousands of US youths to die or be wounded in vain on Vietnam battlefields. Each year, the US government spends tens of billions of dollars, the fruit of American people's sweat and toils, to wage war on Vietnam. In a word, the US aggressors have not only committed crimes against Vietnam, they have also wasted US lives and riches, and stained the honor of the United States. Friends, in struggling hard to make the US government stop its aggression in Vietnam, you are defending justice and, at the same time, you are giving us support. To ensure our Fatherland's independence, freedom, and unity, with the desire to live in peace and friendship with all people the world over, including the American people, the entire Vietnamese people, united and of one mind, are determined to fight against the US imperialist aggressors. We enjoy the support of brothers and friends in the five continents. We shall win and so will you. Thank you for your support for the Vietnamese people. Ho Chi Minh 1 The story of the Weather organization begins in 1968. From the Tet offensive of the national liberation forces in Vietnam to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., to the uprisings in France and at Columbia University, to the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Chicago Democratic convention -the events of that year created the political space for the emergence of this New Left organization—one arguably without precedent in United States history. Within the United States the anti-racist and anti-war movements constituting the New Left, which had been growing in leaps and bounds since the late 1950s, took on thousands of new members in 1968, and began to develop a more radical approach in their analysis and activities. These approaches were partly reactions to the intensification of the war in Vietnam and a belief that a new "fascism" was on the rise in the United States. This fascism was manifested politically in a new concern over law and order and experienced socially in the increasing use of brutal police methods during protests and insurrections. For example, during the black rebellion following King's murder, Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago ordered the police to "shoot to kill" any looters. 3 The response of the New Left was to develop a more coherent stance toward the liberal— conservative establishment. No longer were particular racist policies or murderous acts protested; instead the New Left sought to acknowledge the totality of social and political injustice in the US, a system that it came to label as imperialist. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—the national organization which, partly by design and partly by default, carried the mantle for the New Left in the United States—was at the forefront of this new perspective. The organization's paper, New Left Notes, became the forum for a discussion of how to combat US imperialism, in theory and practice—a discussion that sometimes became acrimonious and divisive. Within SDS itself an older, sectarian Marxist-Leninist group -then called the Progressive Labor Party but soon to shorten its name to Progressive Labor (PL)—formed its own power base2. Anti-nationalist and anti-Soviet, PL recruited mostly among students from the elite universities on the west and east coasts. It received its broadest support in 1965-7, when it formed the May 2nd Movement (M2M) against US involvement in Vietnam—the only national organization of its kind at the time. Its members' ability to manipulate discussion and votes at SDS national conventions and locally, and their knowledge of Left rhetoric and theory, enabled them to hold more power than their numbers warranted. Although a marginal faction at the beginning of 1968, by year's end PL had, if nothing else, created a division within SDS so deep that the rift between those who supported PL and those who didn't was irreparable. In the January 15, 1968 issue of New Left Notes an article appeared entitled "Resistance and Repression." The article was an attempt to move SDS and its actions beyond "the point [where] it became necessary to define and confront the institutions of American aggression in Vietnam—[to] the point when it became necessary to start building a movement which could take over those institutions. Earlier demonstrations had "enabled [the movement] to show our strength, but did not give us forms to use that strength."3 The events of 1968 and beyond were to change this, as SDS began to see itself as a revolutionary movement. No longer would the New Left merely react to America's exploitative and racist system, but, instead, it would provide an alternative vision. On the evening of January 11, 1968, outside the Fairmount Hotel on San Francisco's Nob Hill, a picket