Stormy Weather Underground

West Eleventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is one of the “nicest” blocks in Greenwich Village, a leafy street lined with handsome Greek Revival townhouses and stately apartment buildings. One house stands out, literally: 18 West Eleventh, which became an unlikely nexus of privileged status and radical politics during the Vietnam War era.

Born in 1945, Cathy Wilkerson grew up in haute bourgeois comfort in Connecticut. When her parents divorced she stayed with her mother; her father, an executive at the ad agency Young & Rubicam, remarried and in 1963 bought 18 West Eleventh. That year Cathy, a sophomore at Swarthmore, was arrested while picketing outside a dangerously decrepit and overcrowded black school in Chester, Connecticut. A few years later she was at SDS headquarters in Chicago editing New Left Notes, SDS’s newsletter. When the Students for a Democratic Society began in 1962 it was mainly involved in civil rights issues, but from the mid-1960s on it grew increasingly active in the antiwar movement. In 1969, SDS claimed a hundred thousand members on college campuses nationwide. Wilkerson attended the national convention in Chicago that June, when SDS burst apart at the seams. Fed up with the organization’s policy of nonviolent protest, which seemed to be having little effect, a faction calling themselves Weatherman from the line in Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” essentially hijacked and later dismantled SDS. Among its leaders were Mark Rudd, who as chairman of the SDS chapter at Columbia had led a 1968 student uprising there, and Bernadine Dohrn. Wilkerson went along with them. Weatherman styled themselves as a cadre of the world armed revolt against U.S. imperialism and as a corollary to the Black Panther Party. They adopted Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, two Panthers killed in a police raid, as role models and patron saints. Never more than a thousand committed members nationwide, Weatherman set themselves the goals of radicalizing the nation’s working class, disrupting government and corporate operations, and bringing about the revolution in America by any means necessary. Attempts to organize the working class and to align with the Panthers would fail miserably: Workers beat them up and the Panthers rejected them as “scatterbrains.” Meanwhile their violence alienated the rest of the antiwar movement.

Weatherman’s first public action was a demonstration in Chicago that fall that came to be known as Days of Rage. They’d expected tens of thousands of protesters, but only a few hundred showed up. From its starting point in a park the march flowed out into the streets and soon got out of hand, with protesters breaking car and shop windows. Cops chased them through the streets, shooting a few, bludgeoning and arresting others, including Wilkerson. She was out on bail two weeks later. Having proven to themselves the futility of public demonstrations, Weatherman now turned to direct action. “We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmare,” one of them orated. Looking back on this moment forty years later in her memoir Flying Close to the Sun, Wilkerson writes, “Now it seems fantastic that I responded to the clear signs of political idiocy” by going along. Breaking up into small cells in secret locations around the country, they went into an intense period of self-indoctrination, hoping to transform themselves from middle-class college kids into “more effective tools for humanity’s benefit,” Wilkerson writes. Through grueling, humiliating group interrogations they attempted to purge themselves of personality and individualism to create a faultlessly doctrinaire and obedient collective that was as much cult as Communist, the Borg of the revolution. Because traditional relationships might weaken members’ bonds with the collective, they were supposed to have sex only with randomly assigned partners or in cheerless-sounding group orgies.

In the winter of 1970 Wilkerson was attached to the cell in New York City. Because the cell needed a safe place to hide and work, she went to visit her father at 18 West Eleventh Street. She hadn’t seen much of her Nixon-voting father in recent years, but was able to convince him to let her stay in the townhouse while he and her stepmother were on a Caribbean vacation – she told him she had the flu and had nowhere else in the city to stay. She and a handful of other revolutionaries moved in as soon as her father left. It was plush digs for a gang of Marxist terrorists, one of four spacious townhouses Henry Brevoort Jr. built in the 1840s for his children. Later, Charles Merrill, founding partner of Merrill Lynch, lived there; his son James, the poet, was born into wealth there in 1926. The Merrills moved when he was five. Cathy’s father had handsomely furnished the house, and the pantry was well stocked.

One member of the New York cell, Kathy Boudin, was a Village native with family roots in the Village’s left-intellectual history. Her father Leonard Boudin was a well-known civil liberties lawyer. He represented Daniel Ellsberg when he was tried under the Espionage Act for leaking the Pentagon Papers. Leonard’s uncle Louis Boudin, a Russian Jewish émigré, was a labor lawyer and Marxist writer. An aunt of Kathy’s was married to the liberal investigative journalist I. F. Stone. Kathy went to Bryn Mawr with another member of the cell, Diana Oughton, daughter of a wealthy Illinois Republican.

Weatherman collectives around the country had set off a number of firebombs by this time, targeting military recruitment centers, campus ROTC centers, courthouses and the offices of corporations doing business with the military. The devices they used were basically Molotov cocktails and had not done much damage, when they went off at all. Wilkerson’s group decided, despite a nearly perfect lack of demolitions knowledge, to step up to pipe bombs filled with dynamite and nails, detonated with blasting caps on electronic timer fuses. They set to work constructing them in the townhouse’s unfinished sub-basement. They chose Fort Dix in New Jersey for their target. They didn’t want to harm regular soldiers, who might well be draftees from lower-income communities, so they decided to detonate the bombs during a dance in the officers club.

Just before noon on March 6, 1970, Wilkerson was ironing sheets in the kitchen when a series of explosions burst up from the sub-basement and shattered the kitchen floor. Smoke, splinters of wooden beams and shards of brick roared up from the crater where the floor had been, followed by a rush of flames. The explosions blew out a two-story section of the front wall of the house, shooting glass, bricks and tongues of flame across the street. The shock wave rocked the entire block and broke windows up to the sixth floor in the apartment house across the way. Down in the sub-basement, Terry Robbins, Ted Gold and Oughton had made some fatal error in hooking up the blasting caps and timers to their pipe bombs, and were literally blown to pieces when the exploding bombs set off three cases of extra dynamite. Wilkerson and Boudin, who’d been taking a shower upstairs, stumbled outside, blinded by smoke, through the gaping hole in the front wall. Boudin was miraculously unharmed, Wilkerson was bleeding from numerous small cuts, her clothes in shreds. Behind them, the entire interior of the house collapsed into the crater, where a huge fire roared and belched black smoke through the blown-out windows.

Neighbors gathered instantly, thinking it had been a gas main explosion. Television news footage shows Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door at 16 with his wife and kids, in the crowd. He was a movie star by then – The Graduate had come out in 1967, Midnight Cowboy in 1969 – but New Yorkers were famously blasé about celebrities living among them. Theater critic Mel Gussow also lived at 16; he and his wife were in the crowd as well. None of them ever slept another night in the structurally compromised 16. A neighbor let Wilkerson and Boudin use her shower and gave them some of her clothes to wear. As cops and fire trucks arrived, Wilkerson and Boudin slipped out of the neighbor’s house, walked away from the crowd, and went down into the nearest subway station. They and other Weatherman members went into hiding, becoming the Weather Underground. The FBI placed them on its most wanted list.

On April 30, President Nixon went on national tv to announce that he had sent troops into Cambodia, Vietnam’s neighbor. The purpose was to cut off North Vietnamese supply routes through the country. Nixon had been saying since his election in 1968 that he would wind down U.S. participation in the war; the Paris peace talks had begun in 1969, followed by the very gradual withdrawal of some U.S. troops. On April 20 Nixon had announced that one hundred and fifty thousand American troops would be pulled out in the coming year. Now, just ten days later, he suddenly seemed to be expanding the war again. In the following days, protests erupted at hundreds of colleges around the country, while Nixon groused about “bums blowing up campuses.” Protest rallies were practically everyday occurrences by the spring of 1970 – the giant march on Washington in 1969 had drawn an estimated quarter of a million protesters – but this time things turned deadly. On May 4, national guardsmen opened fire at Kent State in Ohio, killing four students and wounding nine others. Reacting to this “massacre,” students went on strike around the country, and there was another huge march on Washington. A few thousand college and high school students gathered outside Federal Hall on Wall Street for a rally on May 8. Cops and a few hundred construction workers, organized by local union bosses, attacked the kids, chasing them through the streets of the financial district in what came to be known as the Hard Hat Riot. For the Old Left it was a terrible vision, the workers rising up to attack kids. Audre Lorde wrote a poem about it, with the lines:

Look here Karl Marx
the apocalyptic vision of amerika!
Workers rise and win
and have not lost their chains
but swing them
side by side with the billyclubs in blue
securing Wall Street
against the striking students.

The turmoil continued. One hundred thousand protesters marched on Washington on May 9. A student in San Diego ritually burned himself to death, as Buddhist monks had done in Vietnam. At a protest at the all-black Jackson State College in Mississippi, police shot and killed two more students. From in hiding, Bernadine Dohrn issued a tape-recorded “declaration of war.” Three weeks later, a bomb went off at NYPD headquarters. The organization followed it with a number of actions over the next few years, bombing military buildings, corporate headquarters, courthouses, even the US Capitol building and the Pentagon. They also helped Timothy Leary break out of a California prison where he was serving time on a pot bust, and smuggled him and his wife out of the country to Algeria, where they met up with self-exiled Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver.

Wilkerson remained in hiding through it all, changing her locations and using assumed identities, lying low, working as a waitress, a secretary, a nurse’s aide. When Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974 and the last American troops left Vietnam in 1975, the revolutionary moment passed. The Weather Underground dissolved amid doctrinal squabbles in 1976, and members began turning themselves in to the authorities. After serving his time in jail, one of them, Brian Flanagan, went on to become a Jeopardy champion and open a bar on the Upper West Side, Night Cafe, now closed. Dohrn and Wilkerson stayed in hiding until 1980. After giving herself up, Wilkerson served a year for illegal possession of explosives. On her release she moved to Brooklyn and became a public school math teacher.  

Boudin was arrested in 1981. After the break-up of the Weather Underground she’d become involved with a radical black organization, The Family, who included Doc Shakur, Tupac’s stepfather. She participated with them in a botched hold-up of a Brinks truck in Rockland County, New York, in which they shot and killed a Brinks guard and two policemen before being apprehended. The Family’s motive wasn’t political; they wanted the money to score drugs. Boudin became a poet in prison and won a PEN prize. She was paroled in 2003.

The 1970 explosions and fire had completely gutted the Wilkersons’ home. It stood an abandoned and boarded-up husk for eight years. Someone scrawled the graffito Weatherman Park on the plywood. Some neighbors thought the house should be reconstructed to match the original design, but when it was finally rebuilt in 1978 an architect gave it a new facade, which stands at a sharp, punched-out angle to the flat fronts of its stately neighbors, a silent but striking visual reference to the explosion.

James Merrill wrote a poem about it all, “18 West 11th Street,” which includes the lines, “…The point/ Was anger, brother? Love? Dear premises/ Vainly exploded, vainly dwelt upon.”

by John Strausbaugh