Weather Underground
Based on Wikipedia: Weather Underground
When Bob Dylan Named a Revolution
In 1965, Bob Dylan released a song with the line "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows." Four years later, a group of radical college students took that lyric as both their name and their mission statement. They believed they could read the political winds better than anyone—and that those winds demanded nothing less than violent revolution against the United States government.
They were wrong about almost everything. But understanding how they got there, and what they did along the way, reveals something important about what happens when idealism curdles into fanaticism.
From Campus Activism to Underground Cells
The Weather Underground—originally just "Weatherman" or "the Weathermen"—emerged from the rubble of the 1960s student movement. To understand them, you first need to understand Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, which was the largest and most influential student activist organization of its era.
SDS started in 1960 with idealistic goals: participatory democracy, civil rights, economic justice. By 1968, it had grown to roughly 100,000 members spread across college campuses nationwide. These weren't wild-eyed radicals at first. They organized voter registration drives. They ran community programs in poor urban neighborhoods. They held teach-ins about the Vietnam War.
But something changed in the late 1960s.
The Vietnam War kept escalating despite massive protests. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Police brutally attacked protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. For many young activists, peaceful protest began to feel not just ineffective but naive—like bringing flowers to a gunfight.
The 1968 Democratic Convention proved especially radicalizing. Protesters had gathered peacefully, but Chicago police responded with what an official investigation later called a "police riot"—beating demonstrators, journalists, and bystanders indiscriminately while the whole world watched on television. If this was how the system responded to peaceful dissent, some concluded, then peaceful dissent was pointless.
The Fracturing of SDS
By 1969, SDS was tearing itself apart over a fundamental question: what should we actually do?
One faction, aligned with the Progressive Labor Party, wanted to focus on organizing industrial workers in the traditional Marxist model. They saw students as merely a recruiting pool, not a revolutionary force in themselves.
The other faction, which would become the Weathermen, had a different theory. They argued that American imperialism—particularly the war in Vietnam—was the central evil of the age, and that young Americans had a moral obligation to fight it by any means necessary. Not just protest it. Fight it.
On June 18, 1969, at an SDS convention in Chicago, this second faction distributed a position paper with that Dylan lyric as its title. The document was dense with Marxist-Leninist jargon, but its core message was startlingly clear: they wanted to create a "White fighting force" allied with Black liberation movements to achieve "the destruction of U.S. imperialism and form a classless communist world."
The paper was signed by eleven people, including several who would become the most notorious figures of the radical left: Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, and Terry Robbins. Within months, they would transform from student activists into underground bombers.
Days of Rage
The Weathermen announced themselves to the world with spectacular ineptitude.
In October 1969, they organized what they called the "Days of Rage" in Chicago—four days of planned street fighting timed to coincide with the trial of the Chicago Seven, activists charged with inciting the 1968 convention riots. The Weathermen expected thousands of young radicals to pour into Chicago, ready to "bring the war home."
About 300 showed up.
What followed was less a revolution than a tantrum. The small group rampaged through wealthy Chicago neighborhoods, smashing car windows and storefronts, battling police. Dozens were injured. Nearly 300 were arrested. The Weathermen accomplished nothing except to alienate virtually everyone—including most of the left, who saw the violence as both morally wrong and tactically idiotic.
But the Weathermen drew a different lesson. The problem, they decided, wasn't the violence itself. The problem was that they weren't violent enough, weren't committed enough, weren't willing to fully break with "bourgeois" society.
The War Council
Two months after the Days of Rage fiasco, about 300 Weathermen gathered in Flint, Michigan, for what they called a "War Council." The meeting ran from December 26 to December 31, 1969—a fitting way to end both the year and the decade.
What happened in Flint was part revolutionary congress, part religious revival, part collective psychotic break.
Bernardine Dohrn opened the conference by telling the assembled radicals to stop being afraid and embrace "armed struggle." Over the following days, participants discussed how to go underground, how to organize clandestine cells, and how to justify violence. In the evenings, they practiced karate, sang revolutionary songs, and worked themselves into collective frenzies they called "wargasms."
The rhetoric reached genuinely disturbing heights. John Jacobs, one of the most militant leaders, gave a speech condemning the "pacifism" of white middle-class youth. "We're against everything that's 'good and decent' in honky America," he declared. "We will burn and loot and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's nightmare."
Two decisions emerged from Flint. First, the Weathermen would go underground and begin a bombing campaign against symbols of American power. Second, they would dissolve SDS entirely—ending, with a stroke, the largest student organization of the 1960s. Whatever came next would bear no resemblance to peaceful protest.
The Townhouse Explosion
On March 6, 1970, a massive explosion destroyed a townhouse at 18 West 11th Street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. The building had been serving as a bomb factory for a Weather Underground cell.
Three Weathermen died in the blast: Terry Robbins, Ted Gold, and Diana Oughton. They had been building nail bombs—antipersonnel weapons designed to kill as many people as possible. The intended target was a dance at Fort Dix, a U.S. Army base in New Jersey. Had the attack succeeded, the death toll could have been enormous.
Two other Weathermen in the building, Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson, survived and fled naked from the wreckage. They would remain underground fugitives for years.
The townhouse explosion was a turning point—though not in the way you might expect. Rather than abandoning their campaign, the surviving Weather Underground leaders concluded that the real mistake had been planning to kill people. Future bombings would target property, not lives. They would provide warnings before attacks. The goal would be symbolic destruction, not mass murder.
This was, in a twisted way, a moral improvement. But it was still terrorism.
The Bombing Campaign
After the townhouse disaster, the Weather Underground—now officially calling themselves the Weather Underground Organization, or WUO—declared war on the United States government. Literally. On May 21, 1970, they issued a formal "Declaration of a State of War."
Over the next several years, they conducted dozens of bombings, targeting what they considered symbols of American imperialism and oppression. The targets read like a checklist of establishment power:
- The United States Capitol building (March 1, 1971, to protest the U.S. invasion of Laos)
- The Pentagon (May 19, 1972, in retaliation for the U.S. bombing of Hanoi)
- The State Department (January 29, 1975, in response to escalation in Vietnam)
- An International Telephone and Telegraph building in New York (September 28, 1973, protesting ITT's role in the Chilean coup that overthrew Salvador Allende)
Each bombing was accompanied by a communiqué explaining its political rationale. Each was preceded by a warning designed to allow evacuation. And remarkably—aside from the three Weathermen killed in the townhouse—no one died in any of these attacks.
This was partly luck and partly design. But it also reflected something important about the Weather Underground's contradictions. They wanted to wage war against the American state, but they weren't actually willing to become mass murderers. They wanted to be revolutionaries, but they couldn't quite shake their middle-class scruples.
Life Underground
For most of the 1970s, the core Weather Underground members lived as fugitives. They assumed false identities, moved between safe houses, and communicated through elaborate security protocols. The FBI hunted them relentlessly—though, as later revelations showed, the Bureau's methods were often illegal themselves.
Underground life was strange and claustrophobic. The Weathermen lived in small collectives, sharing everything from resources to romantic partners. They subjected themselves to constant self-criticism sessions, rooting out "bourgeois" tendencies. They read Marxist theory obsessively. They issued periodic communiqués and published an underground magazine called Osawatomie, named after the Kansas town where the abolitionist John Brown had fought pro-slavery forces in 1856.
One of their more audacious actions was helping Timothy Leary escape from prison in 1970. Leary, the former Harvard psychologist who had become a counterculture icon for promoting LSD use, had been imprisoned on marijuana charges. The Weather Underground broke him out, smuggled him to Algeria, and produced a statement in which Leary declared himself a revolutionary. The alliance was absurd—Leary was about as far from a disciplined Marxist-Leninist as you could get—but it captured something about the era's strange convergences.
The Ideology Behind the Madness
What did the Weather Underground actually believe? Their theoretical framework drew heavily on Lenin's analysis of imperialism, which argued that advanced capitalist countries maintained their wealth by exploiting colonies and developing nations. In this view, the relative prosperity of American workers was essentially stolen goods—wealth extracted from the global poor.
This had radical implications. If American prosperity depended on imperialism, then the American working class had become, in a sense, complicit. You couldn't organize them around their economic interests, because their economic interests were tied to the imperial system. Instead, you had to ally with the colonized peoples fighting against that system—the Vietnamese, the Cubans, the African liberation movements.
The Weather Underground saw themselves as a kind of internal resistance movement within the imperial core. They weren't trying to lead a revolution of American workers. They were trying to support revolutions elsewhere by disrupting the American war machine from within.
There was something almost noble in this logic—a willingness to sacrifice their own privilege for global justice. But it led to disastrous conclusions. If you've written off most of the American population as hopeless beneficiaries of empire, then you've also written off any possibility of building a mass movement. All that's left is small-group violence—terrorism by another name.
The Cuban Connection
The Weather Underground's ideology didn't emerge in isolation. In July 1969, about thirty Weathermen traveled to Cuba, where they met with representatives of North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had a specific request: they wanted armed political action inside the United States to pressure the government to end the war.
This was heady stuff for young American radicals. Here were actual revolutionaries—people who were fighting and winning against the world's most powerful military—asking for their help. The Weather Underground accepted Cuban funding, training, and tactical advice. Some evidence suggests they may have received explosives as well.
This foreign connection transformed the Weather Underground from a domestic radical group into something more complicated—a small piece of the global Cold War chessboard. It also made them a much higher priority for U.S. intelligence agencies, which viewed them not just as criminals but as potential agents of foreign powers.
The Unraveling
The Weather Underground's reason for existence was opposition to the Vietnam War. When the United States signed a peace accord with North Vietnam in January 1973, that reason evaporated.
Some members had already grown disillusioned. Living underground was exhausting and isolating. The revolution they had predicted seemed no closer. The American left had largely rejected them. And their bombings, however symbolically satisfying, had accomplished nothing concrete.
By 1977, the Weather Underground was effectively defunct. Several members surfaced and turned themselves in. Most received surprisingly light sentences—partly because FBI misconduct in pursuing them had tainted much of the evidence against them. The Bureau's illegal surveillance, break-ins, and dirty tricks made prosecution difficult.
Bernardine Dohrn surrendered in 1980 and served less than a year in prison. Bill Ayers emerged from underground in 1980 and, due to prosecutorial problems, never faced significant charges. He went on to become a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago—a career path that would later become politically explosive when Barack Obama, who had served on a charity board with Ayers, ran for president in 2008.
Other former Weathermen took different paths. Some, like Kathy Boudin, couldn't let go. In 1981, Boudin participated in a Brink's armored truck robbery with members of the Black Liberation Army. The robbery went horribly wrong: two police officers and a security guard were killed. Boudin was captured and sentenced to twenty years in prison.
What They Got Wrong
The Weather Underground misread almost everything about American politics.
They believed revolution was imminent. It wasn't. They believed young Americans were ready to embrace armed struggle. They weren't. They believed their bombings would inspire a mass uprising. Instead, their violence repelled potential allies and gave the government justification for repression.
Most fundamentally, they misunderstood how social change actually happens. Lasting change in democratic societies comes from building broad coalitions, changing minds, winning elections, and pushing institutions to reform. It's slow and frustrating and often fails. But small-group violence is even less effective—it alienates the public, empowers the state's repressive apparatus, and almost never achieves its stated goals.
The Weather Underground's campaign of bombings did not shorten the Vietnam War by a single day. It did not spark revolution. It did not even significantly disrupt the American government. What it did do was discredit the broader anti-war movement by association, provide ammunition to conservatives, and destroy the lives of the participants themselves.
The Uncomfortable Legacy
The Weather Underground presents a genuine moral puzzle. On one hand, they were responding to real horrors. The Vietnam War killed millions of people. The United States government was engaged in what many considered mass murder halfway around the world. If your government is committing atrocities, at what point does violent resistance become justified?
On the other hand, the Weather Underground's violence was both morally wrong and practically useless. Their bombs damaged property but changed nothing. Their rhetoric was grandiose and self-deceiving. Their revolutionary pretensions masked what was, at bottom, a kind of political tantrum by privileged young people who couldn't accept the limits of peaceful protest.
Perhaps the most telling detail is what happened afterward. Most Weather Underground members went on to comfortable professional lives. Bernardine Dohrn became a law professor. Bill Ayers became an education professor. Mark Rudd became a community college math teacher. Their brief careers as underground revolutionaries became, in retrospect, a kind of extended gap year—a dramatic interlude before settling into the professional class they had once rejected.
This doesn't invalidate their original concerns. The Vietnam War was a crime. Racism and economic injustice were—and remain—genuine evils. But the Weather Underground's response to those evils was itself evil, and it accomplished nothing except to damage the causes they claimed to serve.
The Lessons
What can we learn from the Weather Underground?
First, that righteous anger is not the same as effective action. Being morally certain about an injustice does not automatically make your response to that injustice wise or good. The Weather Underground were right that the Vietnam War was wrong. They were catastrophically wrong about what to do about it.
Second, that small-group political violence almost never works in modern democracies. It tends to be counterproductive—strengthening the state, alienating potential allies, and providing justification for repression. This is not a universal rule, but it holds true often enough that anyone considering such a path should think very, very carefully.
Third, that movements need patience. The Weather Underground turned to violence partly because peaceful protest seemed to be failing. But the anti-war movement, despite all its frustrations, eventually did help end American involvement in Vietnam. It just took longer than the Weathermen wanted to wait. Social change is slow. Those who demand immediate transformation often end up destroying what they hoped to build.
Finally, that ideology can become a trap. The Weather Underground's Marxist-Leninist framework gave them a complete explanation for everything that was wrong with the world and exactly what needed to be done about it. That certainty was seductive—and dangerous. It allowed them to dismiss anyone who disagreed as ideologically benighted. It freed them from having to engage with the actual complexities of American society. And it led them, step by step, from campus activism to underground bombings.
The wind blows in complicated directions. Anyone who tells you they know exactly which way it's going—and exactly what you should do about it—deserves your skepticism.