Public Enemy Read online

  Those front-door encounters were the most difficult and exhilarating thing I’d ever done. The more I tried to teach others, the more I learned—about the real circumstances of people’s lives, and mostly about myself. Step by step, I became more and more radical, conscious of the connections between foreign war and domestic racism to start, between capitalist economic hierarchies and the hollowing-out of democracy, between the sexual exploitation of women in war zones to service the military and violence against women at home. Eventually I thought of myself as a revolutionary, committed to overturning the whole system of empire, and that was a decidedly two-edged sword: as an organizer I was learning to listen as well as to shout, but as a newly committed activist I was fired up and brimming with urgency.

  The peace movement geared up to end the American invasion and occupation of Viet Nam, but as more and more people joined the effort, it seemed possible that we might not only end that single, despicable war but that we could prevent other such adventures—the invasion of Santo Domingo, for example, which was happening right before our eyes. At a certain point, it seemed to me that African Americans and the working class and, indeed, the majority of the American people stood in direct and deep conflict with the US government—a contradiction that could only be resolved in a second American revolution, a massive popular upheaval. It was a grandiose dream, to be sure, and a wildly passionate vision. The war enraged me—its brutality and horror—but the resistance to it inspired me—the sacrifices and steady victories of the Vietnamese; the courage of the anticolonial forces in South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau; the audacity of the guerrillas from Cuba and all over Latin America. Live like Che!

  Was it naïve? Of course it was naïve; the Tupamaros in Uruguay were naïve as well, and Che, too.

  Did I misinterpret the conditions and the possibilities? Indeed, but who can gauge what’s really possible in the moment?

  Utopia beckoned, and we heeded her call—it was a Time of the Impossible, and the horizons of my imagination were expanding like crazy. I thought the violence of the world could be dramatically diminished, even if it took a fiery outburst from below to begin, and I held tight to the romance that ordinary people through their own self-activity have the capacity to eliminate the agony of exploitation and the intolerable suffering of the poor and despised—to achieve justice in the public square and establish a beloved community. It seemed it was all there within our reach—the revolution demanded everything of me and it offered everything to me. Much later, I cracked up at Mike Tyson’s sharp observation: “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face.”

  By 1968 people had turned massively against the war, and at the end of March, President Johnson abruptly stepped aside. I was both surprised and overjoyed. The war is over! A million deaths, true and terrible, but at last it would end. I didn’t stay hopeful for long. Five days later the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, and two months further along Senator Robert Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles. Soon enough, a new Nixon/Kissinger administration doubled down, expanding and extending the war indefinitely.

  And so it did not end, and it was back to the front, back to work, and back to the streets, but now with a determination edged with despair. Every week that the war dragged on, six thousand people were murdered in Southeast Asia. Every week—six thousand lives extinguished—with no end in sight. Six thousand human beings—massive, unthinkable numbers—were thrown into the furnaces of war and death—napalm and carpet bombing, strategic hamlets and tiger cages, My Lai and mass murder. We had tried everything, and everything had proved to be inadequate; the war was lost, but the terror continued. Everything added to the crazy sense that we were falling into the abyss.

  None of us knew precisely how to proceed, for we’d done what we’d set out to do—we’d persuaded the American people to oppose the war, built a massive movement and a majority peace sentiment—and still we couldn’t find any surefire way to stop the killing. Millions mobilized for peace, and still the war slogged along into its murky and unacceptable future, trailing devastation and death in its wake. The political class had no answers to the wide expression of popular will, and the ensuing crisis of democracy became a profound turning point for the peace movement as well—the antiwar forces splintered.

  Some activists (including one of my brothers) joined the Democratic Party in order to build a peace wing within it. Some fled to Europe or Africa, while others migrated “back to the land” and built rural communes and intentional utopian communities to escape the madness. Some created tiny but humane and hopeful organizing projects, from women’s health clinics to alternative newspapers, from gay pride marches to environmental action, from street theatre to underground comics—all of which would, surprisingly, change the culture. A few went into the factories in the industrial heartland to radicalize the unions, create a workers’ party, and build toward a general strike to transform the country. And I took a different path altogether.

  Malcolm X had called for liberation by any means necessary, and the Black Freedom Movement rose up and was met with escalating repression and police violence. Black Panthers were exhorting people to “pick up the gun”; Lorraine Hansberry, beloved and stunning author of A Raisin in the Sun, and Nina Simone, the dazzling jazz diva, urged Black people to arm up. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the idea spread like wildfire. The editorial board of the New Republic was at that moment debating the value and the efficacy of armed struggle, while the high-minded New York Review of Books featured an oversized depiction of a Molotov cocktail on its cover. A small group of us from the radical student movement—lacking experience and skill but compensating, we hoped, with determination and will—actually did it: we created a clandestine political force outside the reach of the FBI and the national security forces that would (we believed, but couldn’t be sure) survive the approaching (we were sure) American totalitarianism and that could fight the war-makers by other means. In a great river of excess our words were surely excessive, but we were determined to meet certified state violence with a fierce eruption of our own, and for a moment a few of us—myself included—flirted with matching their official and systematic terror blow for blow. But we never did it; we drew back and reconsidered just what we were in fact willing to do, what our own reverence for life and moral outlook required of us for real, as well as what would be effective in the long run. Dramatic sabotage and precisely targeted vandalism as agitprop, yes; propaganda of the deed, always; but violence against people, no. I wondered: When is an act of sabotage also an act of love?

  My brother Rick’s activist odyssey included nonstop organizing, demonstrations, arrests, and the disruption of his induction physical. When they came for him to press him into the military, he ran to Canada, and this time I had the difficult task of explaining it all to our parents. There, he set up a station on the modern underground railroad, a halfway house for deserters escaping the war. After a couple of years, he convinced himself that his efforts were inadequate, and he returned to the United States and joined the army—now as an organizer for the banned and harassed American Servicemen’s Union. When he was busted, he deserted, and we spent a decade together on the run.

  A front page headline in the New York Times on March 7, 1970, declared: “Townhouse Razed by Blast and Fire; Man’s Body Found.” The story described an elegant four-story brick building in Greenwich Village destroyed by three large explosions and a raging fire “probably caused by leaking gas.”

  The body was later identified as belonging to twenty-three-year-old Ted Gold, a leader of the 1968 student strike at Columbia University, a teacher, and a member of what the Times would call a “militant faction of Students for a Democratic Society.” Over the next few days two more bodies were discovered: both Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins had been student leaders, civil rights and antiwar activists. By March 15 the Times reported that police had found “57 sticks of dynamite, four homemade pipe bombs and about
30 blasting caps in the rubble” and referred to the townhouse for the first time as a “bomb factory.” These three were our comrades, and Diana, my partner, lover, companion, and much more—all suddenly gone. Their deaths became our irreplaceable loss and our shared sorrow—my hands never entirely cleansed, the grieving never done. And this was where and when the Weather Underground was born.

  But that awful event also announced the existence of something weirdly original and brand new: a group of young, largely white, homegrown, “mother-country” Americans taking up arms in opposition to the war. Bernardine and I and a wider circle of partisans and fellow travelers were indicted by the Justice Department on two single-count conspiracies—we had crossed state lines, they charged, in order to foment civil disturbances and destroy government property. Bernardine was prominently placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, an inventory of J. Edgar Hoover’s evolving obsessions that was quickly changing right then from a rogues’ gallery of plug-uglies and terrifying gangsters to a catalog of appealing revolutionaries: Angela Davis, H. Rap Brown, and Bernardine. We were frightened, confused, and uncertain, to be sure, making it up as we went along, but we were also resolute and had no intention of reporting in federal or state court—too many other radicals, we thought at the time, got caught in a government trap that deflected their best efforts and reduced their political work to barricaded defense committees and occasional fund-raisers for legal fees. And so we took off and we lived on for more than a decade—on borrowed time, surely, and on the run from the law.

  It was a revelation to me that pain can fade and that living goes on, moving ever more rapidly away from the dead. Survival was mystifying, but I had survived, and I thought if I was to live at all, it would from now on be for those who did not.

  A few days after the townhouse explosion, Ralph Featherstone and William “Che” Payne, two “black militants” associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, according to Time magazine, “were killed when their car was blasted to bits” by a bomb police said was being transported to Washington, DC, to protest the prosecution of SNCC leader H. Rap Brown. Violent resistance to violence was as “American as cherry pie,” Rap said at the time.

  Time noted that in 1969 there had been sixty-one bombings on college campuses, most targeting ROTC and other war-related targets, and ninety-three bomb explosions in New York, half of them classified as “political,” a category that was “virtually non-existent ten years ago.” Suddenly, according to the FBI, from the start of 1969 to mid-April 1970, there had been 40,934 bombings, attempted bombings, and bomb threats, leading to forty-three deaths and almost $22 million in damage. Out of this total, 975 had been explosive, as opposed to incendiary attacks, and within that chaos and whirlwind, the Weather Underground took credit for some twenty actions over five years, causing maybe $2 million in damage, less than it had cost the United States to conduct its nasty war machine for an hour. No one was killed or harmed in any of them.

  Our notoriety, then and now, outstripped our activity on every count, and who knows why? Perhaps because we couldn’t shut up and issued long involved political statements with every action, or perhaps because of our familiarity as public student leaders, our white skin privilege, and our fortunate backgrounds. Perhaps it was the surprising American romance with outlaws on the run, or simply the power of metaphor. Whatever the reason, we made it clear that we intended to blast out our full-throated message to the heavens: I intended to fight and fight and fight on until I dropped dead.

  Some felt that the actions of the Weather Underground were not only illegal and off the rails, but indefensible at best and even “detestable,” and that case was not impossible to make. It was easy enough—and perfectly safe—to condemn us noisily for what we did, but just a bit harder to prove the efficacy of any other road taken—and impossible to stack against doing nothing. A prominent Nation columnist quantified her critique this way: “The Weather Underground didn’t shorten the war by five minutes.” That may well be true, but when I ran into her later and asked by how many minutes she figured the Nation had shortened the war, she said I was being ridiculous. I guess I was. Another old radical told me that if every person for peace had joined the Democratic Party at the same moment in 1968, we might have elected the principled George McGovern and ended the war. “Perhaps,” I replied, “but if everyone had joined the Weather Underground in 1969, we might have made a revolution.” “You’re being ridiculous,” he said, and we both laughed.

  TWO

  Up and Running

  Eleven years after we’d plunged underground, Bernardine and I traveled to Chicago to surface—to turn ourselves in to the legal authorities who’d been pursuing us throughout those fervent renegade days. It would mark the loss of a special treasure for us—the good fortune of knowing precisely where we stood and finding a kind of paradoxical, fleeting fugitive freedom in a place of constraint and quarantine—our decade of living dangerously.

  We’d thought she would return in relative obscurity—the war was long over and the Weather Underground quiet—but we learned later that someone in the state’s attorney’s office had told a friend that Bernardine had sent out feelers, and from friend to friend to contact to reporter, the story spread and grew. When we arrived at the Cook County Criminal Courthouse on Twenty-sixth Street and California, we were met by the rolling maul of a media scrum, something we’d never experienced before, and the pushing and rucking around caught us off-balance at first. Bernardine had resisted this moment mightily—“I’m not going to give up, and I don’t want them to feel they’ve won even the smallest symbolic victory”—but now she held her head high, smiled slightly, and walked quietly and purposefully into criminal court.

  We’d driven from New York to Chicago a few days earlier with Zayd, three years old, and Malik, not quite a year. We kissed and hugged them, and dropped them off that morning at our last “safe house,” with friends who could be trusted—“You guys have fun . . . we’re going to change our names,” we told them. We met up with our legal team, Michael and Eleanora Kennedy, and jumped into a cab headed down to the gritty Cook County Criminal Court building, a place we once knew well.

  Eleanora, elegant and refined, was not an actual lawyer—she had never gone to law school or formally studied the law, passed the bar, or earned a license—but she possessed more raw courage than anyone in any courtroom she ever graced with her presence and her laser-like insights. Her fierce loyalty to Michael’s clients—Los Siete de la Raza, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Black Panthers, the Irish Republican Army—was the stuff of legend and fiction. She could raise money, write a press release, create an outfit, post bail, straighten a tie, clean a wound, remove a splinter, do reconnaissance, find a weapon, light a candle, say the Rosary, infiltrate the enemy, gather intelligence, run interference, coordinate colors, move a family into her home, or plan a great escape—all without mussing her make-up. “You can’t wear that,” she said critically, eyeing my bottom-shelf sport coat and khakis in their hotel room the night before the big move, and she pulled out one of Michael’s suits and held it up in front of me for a serious appraisal. Michael shrugged his shoulders and smiled knowingly—she dressed him as well. “Wear this,” she commanded. She was larger than life, revered and feared, and in combination with Michael, her ferocious pit-bull partner—who was possessed of the finest legal mind God ever bestowed upon an Irish anarchist——she was an unparalleled advocate. We were so happy they were on our side.

  Michael had tried for weeks to negotiate a deal with the brand new state’s attorney, Richard M. Daley, son of the Old Man, but Daley had refused, and so we were flying into the jaws of the beast a bit blind. I worried even though we knew that the heaviest charges against us—the federal conspiracies—had all been dropped because of gross governmental misconduct and illegality linked to the FBI’s COINTELPRO violations, the fed’s murderous counterintelligence program. I had no legal charges outstanding whatsoever; Bernardine, though
never captured, had been quietly removed from the Ten Most Wanted list, and while still notorious, her legal entanglements as far as we knew amounted to eight aggravated batteries, a few mob actions, resisting arrests from street demonstrations, and bail jumping. It was enough to make me sweat, but Michael and Eleanora assured us that she would be back on the street by the end of the day.

  Bernardine was taken into custody to be processed, and I waited outside the courtroom. One reporter came over to ask me if I thought this moment was “the end of the sixties at last.” She sounded hopeful. I thought about how the so-called sixties had become completely commodified by then and sold back to us as myth and symbol. When had the so-called sixties actually begun? I wondered. Brown v. Board of Education in 1954? Montgomery in 1956? And had it ended in 1968, as Newsweek predicted at the time, or, as this eager intrepid reporter wanted to know, in 1980? In any case, I didn’t remember anyone saying on December 31, 1969, “Oh, shit, it’s almost over! I’d better get high.” And I didn’t know a soul who lived by decades—all of that was merely marketing. The sixties were neither as brilliant nor ecstatic as some wanted to imagine, nor the devil’s own workshop, as others insisted, and whatever they were, they remained mostly prelude. We were still here, still living, up and running now. Scott Simon, a young reporter from local public radio, passed me a note on which he had simply written, “Welcome back.” Later he told us that the media frenzy that morning matched the earlier coverage of public enemy and serial killer John Wayne Gacy—a dubious distinction to be sure.

  I worried about Bernardine being shuffled around somewhere in the entrails of criminal justice, where I imagined two-way mirrors and good cop-bad cop routines in dingy interrogation rooms with the ghosts of torture victims wailing from the walls. I tried to picture what was really going on with her. I knew that if anyone could handle herself in bizarre and coercive conditions it was she, but I found it difficult to be separated at this precise moment when she was suddenly in the rough hands of the state she’d opposed so thoroughly. When Eleanora emerged to tell me that it was as routine and bureaucratic as it could possibly be, and that everyone was on best behavior, a couple of heavies watching from afar but several court workers excited to meet her and even asking for autographs, my troubled mind relaxed, and I breathed deeply.