Follow the leaders
Watching the mercury rise with 'The Weather Underground.'

By J.H. Tompkins

'SITTING STILL DURING the summer of 1969 made you feel like a sitting duck, a thought that would keep you moving. It was a bad, paranoid year; life ran on a short loop between terror and exhilaration. You'd run out of coffee and realize you'd been inside for a week, a sign of something. You'd watch war news and stare at death – fear management – until you could handle anything. Except waking at night with an ill wind howling through your skull, loosening image fragments that were then delivered to memory in a staccato rush of dead friends, blood, bone, needles, limbs, and other human defects. They'd hit so hard and fast you would hurt for a week."

I wrote those thoughts down a long time ago, on Feb. 14, 1970. It was a journal entry that had this headline: "Happy Fucking (Valentine)." In those days I was young, smart, stoned, and ready to get my outlaw on, ready for anything, really, because I'd been around and could see the big picture. I thought about that a lot – about the big picture, that is. What I really wanted, I suppose, was to be able to see myself in it. Recently, when I watched The Weather Underground, Sam Green and Bill Siegel's new documentary about the Weathermen (the '60s revolutionaries; they weren't meteorologists), the once notorious group seemed to be that way, too. To admit that I was self-involved and delusional in a romantic revolutionary way is, frankly, embarrassing.

But, as I said, 1969 was tough. It wasn't the war that was driving me around the bend – I was used to the war. What bothered me were the lies about the war, the bewildering rationalizations and circular logic, narrative non sequiturs that made you feel crazy, as if there was simply no point in talking at all. People poured into a rapidly growing antiwar movement, while once-earnest young adults fingered newfound cynicism like rosaries and dreamed of martyrdom. The stage was set in 1968, when Chicago cops clubbed the illusions from protesters at the Democratic convention. Unburdened, activists got radical in a hurry, finding the same hand behind a world of trouble and debating the need for militant tactics and entertaining the idea that maybe the Black Panthers were right about revolution being the only solution. The same kids who in January '68 were shopping for slide rules and textbooks were a year later busy pondering the advantages of the revolver and trying to find fake ID. Revolution was coming to a town near you.

The Weathermen were one of the warring factions in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that emerged from campus cocoons advocating urban guerrilla warfare. After a June '69 convention, the Weathermen – lost in dreams of urban uprisings and armed struggle – headed for Chicago to prepare for a fall face-off with Chicago police billed as the Days of Rage. Throughout the summer, they spread a confused gospel that had their mouths working nonstop, chattering like machine guns and drowning out doubts and evidence that didn't enhance the summer's romance: come October, a thousands-strong army of youth would put revolution in the United States on the map.

That the Weathermen seemed to be operating in a parallel universe that summer is a matter of historical record. But if those they harangued and challenged were largely indifferent, reporters and news editors – even those jaded by seen-one-seen-'em-all demonstrations – paid attention. The typical Weatherman was white, 25, had done three years at Ann Arbor or Columbia, and had a passion for getting down that existed in a direct relationship to his or her parents' financial assets. It was a great story – rich kids, anguished parents, terrorism, and life on the run – and the media covered it like a rug. Both parties suffered from attention deficit disorder – which gave them some common ground. If it seemed that the Weathermen changed tactics and strategy on a daily basis, they never ditched the notion that an armed uprising was drawing nigh. The media, with deadlines to meet, were equally impatient, and in exchange for a Weather Underground communiqué, they were happy to add another page to the group's surreal history.

Lost and found

San Francisco filmmaker Green, whose movie is currently showing around the country, looks to be about 30. Add a few years to be safe, and it's still likely that his concerns between 1969 and 1976, when the Weathermen were in business, lay elsewhere. Making the film was one way to satisfy his curiosity.

"I knew a little about this group," he told me recently, "and I thought other people should know, too – about a lot of things, really. One day a few years ago, I was in the Library of Congress leafing through government papers, when I came across a folder on the Weathermen, which included photographs of some members. As I was looking, I came across a shot of someone I knew. So I called him, we talked, and I thought the story was so interesting. This was a few years ago, when the city was bursting with dot-coms and money, and it just seemed to me there was a chance that all this history would be lost. That's where the movie started, with an attempt to dig up a story and keep it alive."

The Weather Underground gives those who wrote the original story a chance to look back and try it again, confined only by various versions of the original. Green and Siegel, who was the researcher behind Hoop Dreams, approached a number of ex-members and scored one-on-one conversations with most of the group's former leaders. Their observations – the Weathermen trying to make sense of the past – drive the film and are spliced into often riveting footage of the war, demonstrations, Black Panthers, police raids, and politicians and photo montages of the group in action. Archivists of the '60s will love the clip of Chicago Panther leader Fred Hampton addressing a crowd a few months before he was murdered in his sleep by Chicago police. The grainy footage of Weathermen fighting a pitched battle with Chicago police during the Days of Rage is a great find, as are numerous shots of cocky, young SDS members – once marginalized, now vindicated by public outrage at the war – basking in newly acquired outlaw status.

Green launched the project during the dot-com gold rush, when the most complicated social problems were addressed with Darwinian simplicity and the winner-take-all ethos that transformed popular culture was in many ways the antithesis of what characterized the '60s. The masses were not demanding a reevaluation of the '60s, and the interviews, which were largely done before 9/11, lack the urgency they'd have packed had they been done later (although truth be told, they probably wouldn't have been done at all were that the case). We are conditioned to receive volatile images – wartime carnage, street riots, assassinations, terrorism – with an opinion already attached, and The Weather Underground doesn't offer you the option. It takes a little getting used to, but the film forces you to enter the conversation brain-first.

Out of the closet

Weathermen began to drift into the Bay Area late in 1969. In February 1970, shortly after verdicts were handed down in the trial of the Chicago Seven, hundreds of angry youths, watched from nearby rooftops by police with rifles, stormed out of Provo Park and headed toward Sproul Plaza. Crossing Shattuck Avenue, a handful of young men dug rocks from their pockets and hurled them through the windows of banks and car dealerships. Arguments erupted in the crowd, and rocks in hand, the Weathermen lectured the assembled about banks. The idea caught on, and as the crowd surged up Bancroft Avenue, no windows were spared, prompting another lecture explaining why the dry cleaner whose windows had been shattered was not the enemy. Within minutes, a hat filled with cash was delivered to the bewildered couple who owned the store. The police suddenly appeared, and as the air filled with the high-pitched trills heard in The Battle of Algiers, the crowd charged. The Weathermen had come to Berkeley.

I'm not sure how many were in the demonstration that day. But the presence of small affinity groups like the rock throwers, and the politicization of their actions by off-the-cuff debate, had the group's fingerprints on them. More and more, their rhetoric was not only aimed at the media's Woodstock Nation, but also was written in such a way as to place Weather activists in it. In the beginning it was tough going for an overly earnest bunch whose two-pronged approach to almost everything – shout it down or blow it up – had little in common with a counterculture whose denizens were generally too easygoing or stoned to figure out if there were any entrance requirements at all. Had tickets to the August '69 Woodstock festival granted freak status to the earnest, overwound leftists, they could have forged them. If it were as simple as long hair, Weather's men would have grown theirs, or failing that, bought wigs. As it was, they wrote leaflets, made posters, and issued communiqués whose very existence tended to undercut their aims.

You can see it in The Weather Underground, for example, when the camera pauses briefly on a Days of Rage poster bearing the phrase "Light My Fire," a reference to the Doors' hit from the group's 1967 self-titled debut. It was a bad choice for hip sloganeering; the song was two years old, and by 1969, the Doors were widely regarded as pop sellouts, and singer Jim Morrison, once a dark poet, was now a hippie Rod McKuen. It's a small detail, but it indicated a larger problem: the group's tendency to speak for a constituency it didn't have in a voice that didn't sound right. Consider their name, taken from "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," a line from Bob Dylan's 1965 song "Subterranean Homesick Blues." In retrospect you could call it a lack of respect for popular culture, although at the time it just seemed like the Weathermen were out of touch.

The group's self-styled rhetoric always walked a thin line between serviceable movement shorthand and annoying entitlement. The endless variations on the theme of weather (Weather Bureau, Weather Reports, etc., ad nauseam) were tiresome and self-referential. Nothing, however, topped "town house politics," a phrase that put a happy face on the March 1970 explosion in a Greenwich Village town house in which three Weather activists who were attempting to make a bomb died.

You heard endless reconstructions of the tragic misadventure when summer rolled around and Weather activists landed on the couches and floors of youth ghettos around the country – although they were disguised as discussions of martyrs and revolutionary strategy. I walked into my Berkeley apartment one June day and was greeted by Edward Siegel, who introduced himself as a friend of my cousin. His once dark hair had been recently bleached orange, and he wore a tie-dyed T-shirt and purple bell-bottoms that barely reached his ankles. He was friendly and eager, and I liked him immediately. By evening the house was full of stoned strangers, friends of Edward ("I knew you'd be cool," he told me). The party was fun, once I hid the by-then tiresome Country Joe album that provoked group sing-alongs – "Well it's one-two-three what are we fightin' for ..." When I left to catch Tower of Power in Oakland, Edward followed.

"I know I can trust you," he said as we headed up Parker Street toward Shattuck Avenue, "and I need to tell you something. My real name isn't Edward. It's Jeff. I'm underground."

The next few weeks were as interesting as any I'd spent that year. My vacant couch, long hair, and drug-dealing friends granted me entry to a Weather-inspired affinity group. We spray-painted pro-NLF slogans everywhere, handed out antipolice leaflets, pasted up Free Huey posters, and laid waste to capitalism in conversations with runaways on Telegraph Avenue. A Weatherman from Seattle arrived with a box of purloined draft cards; someone else had hot credit cards. We put the two together and went on retail benders. We executed "military actions," including two that cost taxpayers the price of a fully equipped police cruiser. We shoplifted by day and partied by night; my comrades were fearless in a mall and driven when it came to drugs and sex – as if they'd memorized a how-to-be-a-hippie manual.

Three weeks in those days seemed like three years, and when the affinity group drifted apart, it seemed like an organic dissolution and not the result of political disagreements. Although we debated where American workers fit into the revolutionary scheme of things, the working-class question that mattered to me was that I had to get up each morning and go to work – someone had to pay the rent – and they didn't. After a while it got on my nerves, and the Berkeley apartment fell apart. In late September the house I'd moved to in Richmond was raided by FBI agents looking for a fugitive Weather activist. A few weeks later, Jeff's house in Oakland got the same treatment. It was good to know someone had been paying attention.

Second thoughts

The upbeat energy of the '60s dissipated at the turn of the decade. If the sense that anything could happen was generated by the chaos and surprise of huge, unruly demonstrations, it peaked in May 1970 after the invasion of Cambodia. There were many contributing factors – frustration with military escalation, political confusion, and the end of the draft among them. The fact remains that it was never the same again.

Weatherman became the Weather Underground and over the next several years proved they could make bombs without blowing themselves up. They used their newly acquired skills – many times – to provide symbolic response to events like the murder of revolutionary inmate George Jackson at San Quentin in August 1971, the massacre of prisoners at Attica State Penitentiary a few weeks later, and the ITT-sponsored overthrow of the Allende government in Chile, in 1973. Their strategy depended on the media to have an impact, and for the most part the media cooperated.

As the '70s wore on, movement infighting was fierce, and even today it's easy to pick a fight with old rivals about old issues. Perhaps the most delightful moment in The Weather Underground is watching spittle ooze from the corner of reactionary former activist Todd Gitlin's mouth as three decades later he attempted to discuss the role Weathermen played in the final days of SDS. It can't be denied that the faction nailed the coffin shut on the once venerable organization; still, the fact is that as the struggle against the war deepened, the questions raised about what to do outstripped the ability of SDS to deal with them.

For that reason, Green's film is a welcome addition to the ongoing discussion of the decade America can't forget. The Weathermen, like the rest of their generation, took a fast ride down a long road and, lacking adult leadership, had to improvise. To some people, the symbolic bombings of the 1970s were as effective as putting cherry bombs in a high school toilet. And when Weather activists supported the SLA – who, if not police agents, were buffoons of the highest order – most activists weren't surprised.

But I spent years in a different organization, so of course I'd disagree with the Weathermen: I remember my group – more than 1,000-strong and deeply committed at a time when the Weather Underground had dwindled to 50. I'll never forget when I heard a friend speaking on national radio in the early '70s as a leader of the wildcat strike movement in West Virginia's mines, or when a pair of Asian American activists I knew tossed blood on the Soviet and U.S. speakers during a United Nations debate on war in Afghanistan. No doubt hundreds of other activists from those days have their own story to tell – and no doubt they'd dispute my version.

Ironically, Green had nothing to do with what's most important about The Weather Underground: the timing of its release. "When I started it," he told me, "no one was thinking about this stuff. Now, well, I wish it wasn't so, but the world has changed a lot. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have raised many issues, and a lot of the questions that people talked about back then are relevant today."

Who knows, maybe Green and Siegel will explore the era again someday ("One of the hardest things was to do," Green told me, "was to leave so much stuff out of the film.) They realized that Weather Underground was a world inside a world inside a world – letting its ex-leaders answer for and explain their actions was a good idea. There's plenty for tomorrow's outlaws to chew on, including more wisdom from Bob Dylan, who cautioned in that same song, "Don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters."

'The Weather Underground' opens Fri/25 at Bay Area theaters. See Rep Clock and Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times. Filmmaker Sam Green and Weather Underground spokesperson Bernardine Dohrn appear in person Fri/25-Sat/26 at the 7 p.m. screenings, Castro Theatre, S.F.; Green appears at the Sat/26, 2 p.m., screening at Shattuck Cinemas, Berk. The Wed/30, 7 p.m., show at Shattuck Cinema is a benefit for the Jericho Movement and the Friends of Marilyn Buck; representatives of the groups will be on hand to discuss their efforts.