Bad Moon Rising: How the Weather Underground Beat the FBI and Lost the Revolution by Arthur M. Eckstein

Author:Arthur M. Eckstein [Eckstein, Arthur M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, History, Terrorism, Politics, United States
ISBN: 9780300224603
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-10-24T13:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

“One Lawbreaker Has Been Pursued by Another”

THIS HAS BEEN A story about a small group of violent radicals, and opposed to them, a large and cumbersome bureaucracy.1 It might seem strange to compare them, but they were two organized groups of confused, frightened, and very angry Americans who broke the law.2 Their misjudgments are clear. Weatherman failed to see that mass demonstrations had worked to curb the escalation of the Vietnam War, first under Johnson, then under Nixon. Instead, carried forward by a cracked Marxist-Leninist momentum, it launched a violent and clandestine revolt encumbered by strict hierarchy and ideological zealotry. For its part, the FBI panicked, seeing Weatherman as a real threat to political stability in the country and a threat to the Bureau itself. Such was the dark mood of 1969–1970. It created an FBI institutional imperative (even obsession) to capture the young would-be guerrillas—even if that meant illegal government operations, including warrantless burglaries and buggings. A late 1972 FBI memo stated that Weatherman bombings appeared to be abating, but the finding had no impact on FBI policy.3

Both sides willingly engaged in illegal acts. But in this clash of the nearsighted, the angry, and the frightened, the FBI bears the heavier weight: in a polity where civil liberties are central, the government itself must obey the law. The FBI’s exaggeration of the scale of the Weatherman threat cannot be an excuse here; it only makes their illegal actions more disturbing. Indeed, the FBI paid the higher cost. First, all federal prosecutions of Weatherman were aborted for fear of the revelation of government misconduct. Second, when the illegal operations were in the end exposed, not only was the reputation of the Bureau gravely damaged, but a federal jury in 1980 found high FBI officials guilty in court of serious violation of the rights of American citizens under the Constitution they had sworn to defend.

No one on either side really knew what they were doing. Weatherman, it turned out, was not very good at revolutionary war. Despite the intense preparations in winter 1969–1970, when the bombings planned for March 6, 1970, in Detroit and at Fort Dix did not work out, Weatherman eventually backed away from actions that were intended to kill. After June 1970 it engaged in what amounted to protest dynamite bombings against property, not serious blows against the state. The one exception is Weather’s successful Pentagon bombing in May 1972, which disrupted air operations over Vietnam. As for the FBI, it had no experience dealing with self-declared revolutionary guerrillas. The steps the Bureau took were both repressive and stumbling. Faced with a new phenomenon, it used the secret and illegal tactics that had been employed in the past against other groups deemed subversive. And such tactics continued even though they turned out to be useless for capturing the Weathermen or stopping their bombings.

Of course, the Weathermen knew they had to be careful. And they were. But Weather veterans say that they rarely felt that the FBI was hot on their heels.

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