The Weathermen and 9/11

In the half-century since the Vietnam War, the Weathermen have acquired the reputation as the violent and unhinged offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the tamer, collegiate anti-war organization that was founded in the early 1960s. Recently, while contemplating the upcoming 25th anniversary of 9/11, I got a sudden urge to watch the definitive documentary about the Weathermen, The Weather Underground, directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel, which was made back in 2002, just a year after the tumbling of the Twin Towers. After I finished watching the film I was overcome with sadness, not about 9/11, which had been sending jolts of sadness through me since that day, but about the awareness that this country has become completely incapable of producing any organization with the chutzpah and passion of a bunch of young firebrands who were willing to take radical measures to challenge the murderous actions of a United States government run amok. 

I was an exuberant anti-war protester during my college years and I watched with glee while these brazen rebels brought the war back home to the warmongers. While we marched around with signs, yelling “Hell no, we won’t go!” the wild and crazy Weathermen were bombing buildings where crimes against humanity were planned and carried out. They bombed the US Capitol, the Pentagon, and various courthouses and regional draft boards throughout the country. We knew that the bombs were timed to go off while the buildings were not occupied, either in the middle of the night or after warnings had been issued to evacuate. So, in spite of their reputation as a violent extremist group, which they were to an extent, the Weathermen never killed anyone in their bombing campaigns. They only destroyed property.

Critics will remind us that the Weathermen’s activities did result in some accidental deaths. In 1970, several Weathermen were making bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse when one of the bombs accidentally exploded, killing three of them and destroying the townhouse and adjacent buildings. More than a decade later, in 1981, members of the Weather Underground (consisting of members who went into hiding after the Greenwich Village explosion) teamed up with the Black Liberation Army members to rob a Brink’s armored car, which resulted in the unplanned killing of a Brinks guard and two Nyack, NY police officers. BLA members did the shootings, but as drivers of getaway cars Weather Underground members were implicated in the killings. 

The Weathermen neither planned nor made excuses for these deaths. But in the years since, these events are more associated with the Weathermen than their impassioned war against a militaristic government that sent thousands of 19-year-old kids to a steamy jungle to be killed, dumped tons of napalm on Vietnamese children, encouraged young soldiers to refer an entire population as “gooks” that needed to be extinguished, and finally, maintained a death grip on a war that had long been considered brutal, senseless, and unwinnable by the majority of American people. In total, ten members of the Weathermen were responsible for six accidental deaths during all the years of its existence. No violent death can be excused or celebrated. But when you compare the ten tragic deaths with the millions of violent deaths perpetrated by the US government during the war in Vietnam, well, the numbers tell a story worth contemplating. 

And now, a half century later, watching the documentary about the Weathermen, which included thoughtful and introspective interviews with former key members, not only reinforced my respect for this much-maligned group, but it made me feel frustrated and disillusioned by our post-9/11 helplessness before a monstrous surveillance and military establishment that has turned us into a nation of wimps incapable of any organized revolutionary action. We scream impotently at ICE agents while they drag people out of their homes and workplaces and murder innocent protesters. We watch helplessly while our government pours billions of dollars into an insane “forever war.” We try to avoid the victims of a collapsed mental health system who rant and rave through our streets, stab passersby, and shove strangers onto subway tracks. We wring our hands while millions of people die every year from preventable conditions because they can’t afford doctor’s visits or life-saving medications. And we chirp with indignation knowing that generations of our children are emerging from our school systems not even able to read or write because money that should be funding education programs is being usurped by our monstrous Military Industrial Complex.

The 9/11 attacks took all the teeth out of protesting in the United States. I look around at our flailing society and think, why isn’t anyone doing anything? You might tell me they are. Millions of people have taken to the streets, to join “No Kings” rallies and other so-called protests against government malfeasance. They are sincere and well-intended and passionate. But 9/11 was a terrible shock and robbed us of much of our bravado. The attacks gave us a gut punch we couldn’t recover from, because the evildoers in our own government took advantage of our fear to gain all this power over us. They have dictated that war reporters be “embedded” with strictly supervised military units instead of roaming freely through battle grounds, like the intrepid journalists in the Vietnam era. They restrict the activities of protesters, designate their meeting spaces and impose rules on them, and the protesters obediently comply, waving their signs and yelling their slogans until they run out of steam and go home. If you ever participated in the anti-war protests of the sixties and seventies, you will remember the powerful feeling of being part of a movement that was busting through the deaf walls of the warmongering establishment. Richard Nixon himself, freaking out over one of the protests at the US Capitol, actually walked right into a crowd of protesters and struck up a conversation with them, hoping to get them to stop breaking his balls. In the spring of 1970, after the killing of the four Kent State students, public officials were so terrified of escalating protests that they shut down scores of riotous campuses all over the country. We didn’t stop the war in Vietnam; it wound down on its own. But we sure put the fear of God into those fuckers. 

Today, in the post-9/11 world, if you go on a protest you feel more like a bleating sheep than a roaring lion. You can have millions of people in the streets, screaming at presidents to refrain from invading Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria and Libya and Iran, and many other countries led by critics of US style, unfettered capitalism. But our leaders just keep the war machine rolling while the people march around and holler until their lungs give out. You can holler and wave signs today to your heart’s content. But you know the people you are protesting against are not afraid of you. And that makes all the difference. 

The former Weathermen who appeared in the documentary were accomplished professionals at the time of the interviews. Bernadine Dohrn was a law professor, and her husband, Bill Ayers, was a professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois. Mark Rudd, the famous leader of Columbia University’s SDS chapter before joining the Weathermen, was a mathematics instructor at Central New Mexico Community College, and Naomi Jaffee was the executive director of Holding Our Own, an anti-racist women’s funding organization. Kathy Boudin was still in prison for her role in the Brink’s armored car robbery, but after her release in 2003 she became an adjunct professor at the Columbia School of Social Work. (She died of cancer in 2022.) David Gilbert, who also was imprisoned for participating in the Brink’s robbery, was a leftist political writer throughout his adult life and was active in various prisoner’s organizations during his imprisonment, and his memoir, Love And Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground and Beyond, was published in 2012. He was released in 2021. 

The Weathermen were not a gang of mindless revolutionaries. They were serious people who were so outraged by the Vietnam War that kept going on and on in spite of national protests that they felt they had to up the ante in order to shake the foundations of the establishment. 

We need to follow their example and shake the foundations of our own establishment, which is draining our national spirit while we distract ourselves with our phones. We need to take a good hard look at ourselves during this grim reminder of that horrible day, which began with that clear blue sky and ended with smoke and rubble and falling bodies. We have allowed the evildoers in our own government to strip away our swashbuckling optimism and turn us into a nation of despairing hand-wringers. 

My socialist mom, a Bernie Sanders-admirer who had seen more war than she could stomach in her 92 years, used to say, “We need a good revolution in this country.” 

Wherever she is, she’s still waiting. 

Addendum: The Weathermen raised successful children. Among them is Zayd Ayers Dohrn, one of two biological sons of Dohrn and Ayers, who is an acclaimed playwright and screenwriter. His new memoir, Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground, describes his life with his parents during their years spent hiding from the FBI. (Dohrn was on the FBI’s “most wanted” list until she gave herself up in 1980 and served a year in prison; charges against Ayers were dropped due to the illegal tactics of FBI agents.) Chesa Boudin, the biological son of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, who was raised by Dohrn and Ayers during their imprisonment, is a lawyer who served as the 29th district attorney of San Francisco.