In Circular Pursuit

While “it might seem strange to compare them,” says Arthur M. Eckstein, professor of history at the University of Maryland, “they were two organized groups of confused, frightened, and very angry Americans who broke the law. .  .  . No one on either side really knew what they were doing.”

Eckstein was a graduate student at Berkeley at the time—a good perch for watching this drama unfold—and it is clear that he has been saving string on the story ever since. The release, a few years ago, of some 30,000 pages of FBI documents from the era led him to take up virtual residence at the National Archives, and after poring through them and many other sources, and conducting a large number of interviews, he has produced a volume that has the distinct aura of a life work, complete with 69 single-spaced pages of meticulously detailed end notes. It can, in places, be a slog.

The group portrait that emerges of the Weathermen, essentially an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society, is less of a fearsome cadre than of a gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight—and, in fact, couldn’t decide whether and when it wanted to shoot at all. It had geographic factions and secret cells and Communist-style groupthink and self-criticism sessions where the works of Frantz Fanon and Régis Debray were analyzed. Bernardine Dohrn, one of its best-known leaders, is heard praising Charles Manson and his gang during the “Flint War Council,” and there was even a “smash monogamy” campaign, in which couples were forced to separate, the better to assure that they would give their primary loyalty to “the collective.”

Eventually, notes Eckstein, revolution in the United States “proved to be a forlorn and doomed enterprise.” Although the Weathermen probably numbered only about a hundred people at their peak—not the thousand or more that the FBI estimated and warned against—and set off a grand total of 25 dynamite bombs in a six-year period, it is important to remember that they did do some serious (and unimpeded) damage. Well-remembered are the explosions they set off at the New York City Police Headquarters, the U. S. Capitol, and the State Department—usually by walking in casually and planting bombs in bathrooms. At the Pentagon, in May 1972, the bomb they planted allegedly damaged a computer that was coordinating bombing runs in Vietnam.

But after debating the point and deciding that they did not want to kill people randomly, they would call in warnings before each attack, so that potential victims could escape. In fact, Eckstein says, no one was ever killed or injured by the Weathermen’s bombs—with the notable exception of three of their own, who perished in March 1970 during an explosion at their bomb factory in a Greenwich Village townhouse. (There is also the matter of a holdup of a Brink’s armored car by the Black Liberation Army in Nyack, New York, in 1981, in which at least three “Weather bitter-enders,” as Eckstein calls them, participated. A Brink’s guard and two policemen were killed, and two of the ex-Weatherman perpetrators, who drove getaway cars, remain in prison.)

The FBI emerges from the saga with an even lower degree of success in achieving its objectives. Having put the photos of several Weather Underground personalities on its Ten Most Wanted list of fugitives—giving them outlaw status and years of celebrity in every post office in the land—the bureau pulled out all stops to find them, to no avail. On at least one occasion documented by Eckstein, agents missed an opportunity to arrest a group of Weathermen sitting together in a movie theater simply because they did not recognize them.

President Richard Nixon, for reasons that are still unclear after absorbing this volume, was convinced that the Weathermen had funding and other influence from overseas, and that somehow this was all related to other New Left activities, such as the massive antiwar demonstrations convulsing Washington in 1969 and 1970, not to mention Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The news that Bernardine Dohrn and some of her fellow revolutionaries had met with the Vietnamese Communists in Fidel Castro’s Cuba did not exactly help to calm the White House.

So Nixon ordered the bureau to find evidence supporting his suspicions. Eckstein has plumbed a trove of FBI documents, all now legally available, to demonstrate how twisted and hapless the investigation became.

Here is J. Edgar Hoover, by then in his fifth decade as director, cutting off longstanding permission (dating back to the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt) to engage in extralegal tactics against subversive elements—and then somehow suddenly reinstating it, at the urging of lieutenants who competed for influence with him by escalating their own warnings of the grave dangers the nation faced. The result was break-ins, wiretaps, and various other invasions of the privacy of the aboveground parents, siblings, friends, and sympathizers of the Weather Underground. All these measures were internally acknowledged to be illegal, often in writing, and virtually all were pointless.

In a development that epitomized what Hoover (who died in 1972) feared most, two former top bureau officials—including Mark Felt, “Deep Throat” of Watergate fame—went on trial in 1980 and were convicted of federal crimes. Ex-President Nixon insisted on testifying in their defense, and they were pardoned the following year by President Ronald Reagan.

Along the way, Eckstein clears up a few matters. One is the reputation of Bill Ayers, one of the original Weathermen, who has taken to describing their actions as “vandalism” and reinvented himself as a professor of education and community leader in Chicago. Eckstein finds evidence that Ayers, as leader of the group’s Detroit branch, was actually a leading advocate of violence.

And then there is L. Patrick Gray III, whom Nixon named as acting director of the F B I upon Hoover’s death. Gray lost any chance of his appointment becoming permanent when it’s was revealed that he had destroyed evidence related to the Watergate investigations. But he has been remembered primarily for gestures such as hiring the first female FBI agents and relaxing J. Edgar Hoover’s outdated dress code. In his autobiography, published posthumously in 2008, Gray disavowed the bureau’s illegal tactics against the Weathermen, but Eckstein finds evidence of the “startling ferocity” of his efforts to find the fugitives, including an order that agents hunt them “to exhaustion.”

Virtually everyone in this story was exhausted by the time it ended, and it is hard to say that anyone on either side was better off for the effort.

Sanford J. Ungar, the author of FBI: An Uncensored Look Behind the Walls (1976), is distinguished scholar in residence at Georgetown University and a Lumina Foundation fellow and teaches seminars on free speech at Harvard and Georgetown.