BOOK REVIEW: ‘Days of Rage’

OPINION:

DAYS OF RAGE: AMERICA’S RADICAL UNDERGROUND, THE FBI, AND THE FORGOTTEN AGE OF REVOLUTIONARY VIOLENCE

By Bryan Burrough

Penguin Press, $29.95, 608 pages

Beyond the explosions of homemade bombs, and the gunning down of police patrols, the lingering question is whether the underground movement of the 1970s actually achieved anything. Even worse, how many people noticed that those proclaiming themselves the revolutionaries of middle America were in fact little more than gangsters.

After more than 600 meticulously researched pages about organizations that almost nobody can remember, Bryan Burrough draws upon memories of the past to conclude that the so-called days of rage didn’t amount to very much, especially in light of a post 9/11 world where a mislaid suitcase will draw large numbers of police.

Perhaps some of the answers emerged at a meeting in 2010 in Harlem when those who became notorious as members of the underground surfaced to assess whether their actions were worth the cost of dozens of lives of people who didn’t realize they were dying to feed adolescent egos more than to improve social justice.

“No one that evening was in the mood to provide an honest assessment of what, if anything, the underground movement of the 1970s era solved,” Mr. Burrough reported.

“In terms of tangible successes, of hard won moral or political victories, the short answer has to be not much. They had launched a kind of war on America and they had lost. Talk to the underground veterans today — many in their 60s, some mellowed, some not — and almost all are hard pressed to point to any lasting impact they had on American society short of metal detectors and bomb sniffing dogs. While it drew the attention of law enforcement for more than a decade, the underground did little to force changes in the way America acted or was governed.”

Elizabeth Fink, a woman lawyer who represented Cathy Wilkerson, one of the leading bomb makers, was scathing in her comments. “You have to understand the underground, it became a cult,” she said, “the Weather group, the SLA, the Sixties drove them all crazy. All they did was listen to their own people, their own opinions.”

Cathy Wilkerson, now a 68-year-old grandmother, one of those who stirred up bombs in the belief that it was for the public good, still insisted to Mr. Burrough in an e-mail that for those who joined in some form of armed resistance, “It mattered that we chose to step out of the existing protective cover of race and class privilege and take equal risk with those who had no choice but to fight for a better future.”

Mr. Burrough suggested that perhaps the kindest way to view the underground struggle was as a well-meaning if misguided attempt to right America’s wrongs. Those who vehemently disagree with that viewpoint include Joseph Connor, a New Jersey writer and banker who is the son of one of the victims of the underground who died in a 1975 shooting.

“Those people, the Weathermen, the underground, were deluded, self motivated, egotistical. You think of them as kids. But they were murderers first, revolutionaries second,” he told the author. “They appointed themselves my father’s judge, jury and executioner because he represented something they didn’t like.We are left with a soft view of these people when they were just terrorists. Flat out terrorists.”

Mr. Burrough has written what amounts to an encyclopaedia of the undergrouond movement of the 1970s from the Weathermen, which was a dominant group, to the Symbionese Liberation Army, which commanded attention by kidnapping Patty Hearst whose offense was being the daughter of a newspaper tycoon. The author has painstakingly assembled a motley cast of characters, commenting, “This was a slice of America during the tumultuous 1970s, a decade when self-styled radical “revolutionaries” formed something unique in post-colonial U.S. history — an underground movement. Their bombings and robberies and shootouts stretched from Seattle to Miami, from Los Angeles to Maine.

“The fact that their goals were patently unachievable and its members little more than onetime student leftists in no way diminished the intensity of the shadowy conflict that few in America understood at the time and even fewer remember clearly today,” asserts the author.

He adds, “In fact, the most startling thing about the underground movement is how thoroughly it has been forgotten.”

Which is the epitaph that the alleged rebels would have hated most.

Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.