Fifty years after the final Weatherman bombing

Tomorrow (September 6) will mark the 50^th anniversary of the bombing of the Salt Lake City headquarters of the Kennecott Copper Corporation. A New York Times report that day explained it this way:

Two persons, identifying themselves as members of the Weather Underground, said the blast was to protest the Kennecott Copper Corporation’s ties to the present Government of Chile. [. . .] The explosion came six days before the second anniversary of the death of President Salvador Allende Gossens Sept. 11, 1973, during a military‐led coup in Chile.

The Weather Underground was a revolutionary communist domestic terrorist group that emerged in the late-1960s from the dissolution of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The attack on Kennecott Copper is the last known bombing carried out by the group before it disbanded.

The InfluenceWatch profile of the Weather Underground begins with this overview:

The Weather Underground (also known as Weatherman or the Weathermen) was a radical-left violent extremist group that was active from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s. What became known as the Weather Underground began in 1969 as “Weatherman,” a dominant faction within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a left-wing-turned-revolutionary Communist organization that split apart shortly after founding of Weatherman.

In separate books detailing the history of the Weathermen, professional historian Arthur Eckstein and Vanity Fair journalist Bryan Burrough used law enforcement documents and personal recollections of numerous former Weathermen leaders to demonstrate that through at least May 1970 the organization aggressively promoted efforts to kill police officers and military personnel as part of its goal of sparking the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. While no murders have been conclusively tied to the Weathermen, police officers were injured in at least two Weatherman attacks. As late as 2003, several former Weathermen leaders were the subject of a federal probe into the February 1970 bombing-murder of a San Francisco, California, police officer that occurred two days after a known-Weatherman bombing that injured police in nearby Berkeley.

Eckstein and Burrough both provided strong evidence that two coordinated Weathermen bombing plots set for March 6, 1970, were intended to produce massive fatalities among police in Detroit, Michigan, and among military personnel who would be attending a dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Operating on the advice of an FBI informant, local law enforcement in Detroit discovered and disabled two large explosives on the morning of March 6. On the same day, the New York City Weathermen faction, working on bombs intended for Fort Dix, accidentally detonated a device, collapsing the townhouse in which they were working, killing three of them.

In May 1970, on the run from the FBI following the townhouse explosion and discovery of the Detroit bombs, the Weathermen leadership declared the organization would pivot to a strategy of non-lethal bombings. This meeting and a subsequent public declaration in December 1970 promoted a false mythology that the townhouse bombers had been a violent and misguided faction within a larger Weatherman movement that had supposedly always pursued only property damage, and not personal injury. The Weathermen conducted at least 25 bombings between 1969 and 1975, and after May 1970 began phoning ahead warnings that prevented injuries after June 1970. Noteworthy actions included bombings of the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and aiding in the prison escape of LSD guru Timothy Leary. Burrough has written that members of the left-wing National Lawyers Guild provided crucial financial and other assistance to the Weathermen.

Despite a significant investigation, costing an estimated $86.6 million in 2020 dollars, the FBI was never able to catch and secure prosecution of any major Weatherman participants, two of whom appeared on the Bureau’s list of ten “Most Wanted” fugitives. In its desperation, the FBI resorted to unconstitutional methods to pursue the Weathermen, including warrantless break-ins and electronic surveillance of family members of Weathermen leaders. This behavior compromised the ability of federal law enforcement to prosecute the Weathermen, leading the U.S. Department of Justice to drop the most serious charges in 1973 and allowing nearly all the Weathermen leaders to come out from hiding and avoid serious felony prosecutions.

Eckstein and Burrough each wrote that federal law enforcement and the administration of President Richard Nixon severely overestimated the size and threat posed by the Weather Underground, affording the group more attention and lasting historical reputation that it otherwise deserved. Burrough concluded, “In every conceivable way, the young intellectuals who had come together in 1969 to form Weatherman had utterly failed: failed to lead the radical left over the barricades into armed underground struggle; failed to fight or support the black militants they championed; failed to force agencies of the American “ruling class” into a single change more significant than the spread of metal detectors and guard dogs.”

While the Weather Underground disbanded, the influence of its membership continues to today in many NGOs and political movements.

In addition to the Weather Underground profile, examples of other InfluenceWatch entries covering the terrorist group, its members and its extended relations include Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Susan Rosenberg, Bob Avakian, Chesa Boudin, SDS, Ramparts, the Black Panther Party, the Venceremos Brigade, the National Lawyers Guild, and the FBI.

Capital Research Center reports on the Weather Underground and its enduring influence include the following:

A History of Radicalism at the National Lawyers Guild

Antifa: We Have Been Here Before with the Weathermen

The Weather Underground: Lucky Terrorists Who Tried to Live Like John Brown

Several Weather Underground Bombers Became Professors

The Venceremos Brigade: Fifty Years of Cuban Solidarity

The “New” Left: Socialist Origins

“Pathological Altruism” May Kill a City Near You