Outside the leadership, there was widespread confusion as to what kinds of actions were authorized.

They split into three groups, one each in San Francisco and New York, the third a loose collection of cells spread across Midwestern cities such as Detroit and Pittsburgh. In fact, Dohrn and Ayers lived in a beach bungalow in the seaside village of Hermosa Beach, California.Īfter closing S.D.S.’s national headquarters, 100 or so Weathermen began going underground in January 1970. Nor, contrary to myth, did Weather’s leaders operate from grinding poverty or ghetto anonymity. To cite just one canard, Weather’s attacks, for much of its life, were the work not of 100 or more underground radicals, as was widely assumed, but of a core group of barely a dozen people almost all its bombs, in fact, were built by the same capable young man-its bomb guru. Partly as a result, Weather’s seven-year bombing campaign has been misunderstood in fundamental ways.

Yet despite all the attention, very little has ever been revealed about the group’s internal dynamics, even less about its bombing tactics and strategies, a topic that few Weather alumni, mostly now in their 60s, have ever been eager to discuss publicly. A splinter faction of the 60s-era protest group Students for a Democratic Society, Weather has been the subject of a dozen books, memoirs, and documentary films its best-known leaders, Bernardine Dohrn and her husband, Bill Ayers, remain icons on the radical left to this day. counted more than 1,800 domestic bombings, almost five a day.īy far the best known of the radical underground groups was Weatherman, later known as the Weather Underground, which detonated dozens of bombs across the country from 1970 until it dissolved in late 1976. Amazingly, during an 18-month period in 19, the F.B.I. What few Americans remember clearly today is that barely 40 years ago, during the tumultuous 70s, such bombings were more or less routine, carried out by a half-dozen significant groups of underground radicals, from the Symbionese Liberation Army (best known for kidnapping the heiress Patricia Hearst in 1974) to lesser-known outfits like the F.A.L.N., a Puerto Rican independence group that bombed a Wall Street–area restaurant, Fraunces Tavern, killing four people in January 1975. soil has become a major concern, drawing the attention of hordes of federal investigators and journalists. Ever since 9/11, the threat of terrorist bombs on U.S.

Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough