An intimate reckoning with the Weather Underground

This article An intimate reckoning with the Weather Underground was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Looking for a quintessentially American book to read this 4th of July? 

As we celebrate and/or mourn the 250th birthday of the most militarized, most violent, (almost) most corrupt, most polluting, most inequitable and most sad nation on the face of the Earth, I am reading “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground.” Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s new book about his Weatherman parents is more than just a great beach read (which it also is, literally). It is the most appropriate book to read instead of subjecting yourself to a PTSD-triggering fireworks display.

It chronicles a small group of revolutionaries who used dynamite, bombs and guns to blow up buildings, statutes and police cars, break people out of prison and generally make mayhem half a century ago. But it is not just history to view on the page. It says so much to our MAGA moment.

It is a story of history, conscience and memory at a time of AI slop, official lies and active amnesia. It is a story of youthful rebellion against the Vietnam War that matures into revolutionary sabotage, political violence and life “underground” that eventually settles into careers in education and law outside of the mainstream. It is the story of surviving some of the most harrowing political moments of the last half century. It is a story of a family.

I grew up in a very different corner of the left than Ayers Dohrn. There were no drug-fueled orgies, shootouts with the cops or days of rage in the Catholic left. But there was a similar stridency, urgency and seriousness about my family life. There was jail and prison and fear of FBI infiltration and dirty tricks. There were people with no last names who showed up for a meal or a night and headed back into the underground. We also survived separation and secrecy, and I am also not raising my children on the knife’s edge of the revolution. So, Ayers Dohrn’s effort to tell his family’s story with truthfulness, curiosity and distance landed so very true for me. 

Don’t need a weatherman to know

Who were the Weathermen? They’ve been memorialized countless times on screens small and large, most recently (sort of) in “One Battle After Another.” But in real life, they were mostly white, mostly college educated, mostly middle-class young people who had been part of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, before splintering off from that group in the summer of 1969 to join forces with the Black Panthers and incite revolution, laying waste to what they left behind. They felt like they had tried everything else!

In recounting this episode, Ayers Dohrn was able to use FBI notes and communiques to highlight their role in fomenting the clash between the more progressive and radical factions, manipulating members into all-out conflict with one another and essentially destroying SDS. Ayers Dohrn quotes Weatherman faction leader Mark Rudd reflecting that it was “the single greatest mistake I’ve made in my life … scuttl[ing] America’s largest radical organization — with chapters on hundreds of campus[es], a powerful national identity and enormous growth potential — for a fantasy of revolutionary urban guerrilla warfare.” What could have been is not explored.

At this point, we’d need speculative fiction to spin out the possibilities of true solidarity between the largely white, campus-based antiwar movement and the Black Panther Party and its affiliates. It sure scared the FBI! In fact, in a memo to agents in the field, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote that SDS and the Black Panther Party working together would “pose a formidable threat. … It would be a definite advantage if these two groups were alienated.”

This story is told with cinematic depth, gleaned from Ayers Dohrn’s interviews with participants and from declassified FBI files. The new organization was small, secretive and “fiercely committed to following the leadership of the Black vanguard, to fighting the police and to going out, if necessary, in a blaze of revolutionary glory.”

A declaration of a state of war

The mostly middle-class, young, white activists had been working on many fronts for years, but their “organizing and peaceful protest had failed to stop the war.” They were going to try something new — but actually it wasn’t new. It was old. It was violence. And, for a time, it was street riots against the police and property damage during protests. But then their friend and Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was assassinated by Chicago police and the FBI in a barrage of 90 bullets. And then the horrors of the My Lai massacre were revealed, and as 1969 became 1970, the Weathermen declared war on the United States.

Ayers Dohrn describes a series of bombings at the homes of judges, banks and police stations, and a complicated plan in New York City’s West Village that would have brought the carnage of Vietnam to a military Officer’s Ball at Fort Dix in New Jersey. The Fort Dix plan was thwarted not by the FBI or a rival faction of revolutionaries, but by chemistry. The bombs went off in the 11th Street townhouse the revolutionaries were using as a temporary safe house (while the parents of one of the Weathermen were on a St. Kitts vacation). Three Weathermen were killed in the blast and the house was obliterated. Bill Ayers’ girlfriend at the time was among the dead and he carried that grief and memory into Ayers Dohrn’s life. As a little kid, Zayd remembers going with his father to lay flowers at the site every year. 

Recalling that loss, Ayers Dohrn asks his father how he contemplated killing people with those bombs. Bill Ayers responded that “We often said things like, ‘I need to be a tool of the revolution.’ … Or ‘I need to be an instrument of the rebellion.’ And that instrumentalizing of our lives was more than a weakness. It was a horror.”

That realization and the other reflections Ayers Dohrn is able to elicit from his parents as they think back on their roles as revolutionaries are the backbone of this book. Bill and Bernardine Dohrn are able to reflect, see mistakes and missteps, explain their priorities, and accept responsibility for the harms they inflicted because they survived and so many other people who were part of this splinter movement did not.

It was a horror

It is difficult and brave that Zayd Ayers Dohrn contends with violence and memory without letting anyone — even his mother and father — off the hook. Against the backdrop of an administration and a president that can’t remember, or won’t admit to, crimes of three sentences ago, he holds his father and mother to a high standard. And they can take it. They survived the days of rage and purity tests and self-criticism sessions and the run-ins with the law and stretches of prison and dirty tricks that so many others did not.

His mother, Bernardine Dohrn, is now living with dementia, as is my own mother, and I found his present-day conversations with her the most poignant and difficult of the book. Memory threads all the way through this book. What do we remember? Why do some memories stick? 

Ayers Dohrn began his reckoning with family history in an extraordinary 10-part podcast called “Mother Country Radicals,” which was Fred Hampton’s term of endearment for the Weathermen. But as he researches his own past and excavates his own memory, there are things that don’t add up, don’t stitch together, memories that don’t bear up to scrutiny. There are contradictions that he can’t square.

Once the podcast was released, he received letters, diaries and phone calls from old fellow travelers. These new resources, along with 7,833 pages of FBI files, convinced him that there was more to the story and he sat down to write. The book is more in-depth, intimate and searching than the podcast. Ayers Dohrn is less star struck by his parents’ bravado too. Now, he is a parent, too, noting decisions that Bill and Bernadine made that put the family in jeopardy, that were hard for him, that caused him pain. He sees and feels the impact of his parents’ choice of the revolution over parenthood. “Over and over, you can see the same pattern, repeated: Asked to choose between solidarity and family, revolution and love, my parents and their comrades chose the cause almost every time.”

Family lore had it that Bill and Bernardine hung up their revolutionary bonafides when they became parents. But the documents Ayers Dohrn received after the podcast aired show that was not true. They continued to take risks even after they became parents of Zayd and his younger brother Malik. One memorable camping trip in West Virginia as a family turns out to be a trip to case Alderson Prison for Women where Black Panther leader Assata Shakur was serving out her sentence. She was eventually liberated from prison in another operation and Bill Ayers played a small — but very risky — role in that while Bernardine was home with Zayd.

Ayers Dohrn confronted his dad by asking: “What would have happened, not only to him but to me, my mother and my unborn brother?” Ayers responded: “It was a difficult decision. It felt monumental, it felt important. We were pretty clear that Bernardine would be with you. … But yeah, it was, in retrospect, really risky. And really on the edge.” But in the end, Bill Ayers played his part, “Because it mattered. Because the world needed it to happen.”

They continued to do leg work for the Black Liberation Army and other radical groups like Action Five even after they informally adopted 14-month-old Chesa Boudin. That should have been a clear warning to stop. Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, Chesa’s parents, had acted as getaway drivers for an Action Five robbery on a Brinks armored truck in October 1981. The job quickly went off the rails and three people injured, and three others were killed — Nyack police officers Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown, and Peter Paige, one of the team from the Brinks truck. Boudin and Gilbert spent decades in prison for their crimes while the Ayers Dohrn family raised their son. 

Life underground

I described this book to a friend, and she got stuck on the word underground. “Wait,” she demanded, “you mean they lived underground, like moles or Hobbits?” No, they lived under assumed names, worked cash jobs, had fake IDs. They were on the run from the FBI, facing jail time and family separation. They had disappeared from “normal society” and were dependent on friends and fellow travelers for support.

A striking moment in the book comes when Ayers Dohrn recounts that at one of his father’s off-the-books jobs, as a longshoreman in San Francisco, he gets the sense that something is about to go down. Bill Ayers saw men on the rooftops and by the union hall, standing out in their cheap suits and cop-loafers. But he was already at the docks and there was nowhere to run. The docks are all of a sudden swarmed with police and his co-workers started yelling “La Migra! La Migra!”

 “It only took a few minutes; the feds rounded them all up, chasing them to the edge of the water or just tackling them down to the concrete of the parking lot. And they let all the white people go” Ayers Dohrn recounts.

Previous Coverage

Daniel Berrigan and his fearless nonviolence, at 100

The officials were not looking for Bill Ayers, of the Weathermen. They were rounding up undocumented immigrants. Ayers Dohrn writes that his father had “always assumed, with the self-centered paranoia of a federal fugitive, that he was the only outlaw hiding out on the docks. … But it turned out that half of the men on his crew were invisible, even to him. They were all living on a different plane, off the grid. Undocumented. Underground.”

In his autobiography “To Dwell in Peace,” my uncle, Father Daniel Berrigan writes that while he was underground, avoiding a prison sentence for the Catonsville 9 action and speaking constantly to young people, he heard that the Weather Underground wanted to dialogue. On Aug. 8, 1970, just a few days before he was captured on Block Island, he made an audio recording and sent it off through intermediaries. It had been just six months since the three Weathermen were killed in the bomb blast on 11th Street.

A new kind of anger

In the message, addressed to his “Brothers and Sisters,” Dan Berrigan invites them to “a new kind of anger which is both useful in communicating and imaginative and slow-burning to fuel the long haul which is the definition of our whole lives.” He calls them away from violence for the sake of violence, noting that there is a great risk that violence “will change people for the worse and harden them against enlightenment.” He continues by sharing that “I hope your lives are about something more than sabotage.”

I looked around for evidence that Dan Berrigan ever sat down with the Weather Underground, or that his message received a reply. I did not find any, but the group did shift tactics after the 11th Street explosion. Ayers Dohrn writes of a meeting that his mother called a few weeks later where the group became the Weather Underground and “disavow[ed] deadly violence going forward.” They did not become paragons of pacifism after this, but they stopped a posture of open warfare against the American people. 

In “Absurd Convictions, Modest Hopes: Conversations After Prison with Lee Lockwood,” Dan shares that the Weather Underground did respond to his communications, saying, “In fact the response was almost beyond my hope, because it indicated that they really were serious and were growing more thoughtful about such things.” That’s where that thread ends, as far as I can tell, but it is beautiful to consider the “calling in” and constructive dialogue that could have followed, as both sides — motivated by a fervent commitment to racial equality and an end to war — kept talking.

In his message to the Weather Underground, my uncle has a beautiful formulation of the concept of underground, writing: “Instead of thinking about the underground as temporary or exotic or abnormal, perhaps we are being called upon to start thinking of its implication as an entirely self-sufficient, mobile, internal revival community, so that the underground may be the definition of our future.”

Ayers Dohrn dedicates his book to his wife Rachel and their children Dalin and Light. Late in the book, he writes that “every generation is born into a world desperately in need of transformation, and young people in every era have inherited a struggle — a fight to make things better — that stretches back long before any of them were born.” 

I read “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young” with horror and hope — in equal measure. There is plenty to rage about in the Mother Country these days. You do not have to look far to find a replay of the horrors that radicalized Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and their friends. The war lust, impunity and corruption of the Trump administration and the craven weaponization of the justice system under FBI Director Kash Patel makes President Richard Nixon and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover look like Boy Scouts, and that is saying something!

Our society is full of the dirty, dangerous, violent and young, but so much of the violence is turned inward into self-harm and online into self-referential time frittering. It does spill out into the streets and it is political, but it is not, for the most part, organized or coordinated. The political violence of the Weatherman and the Underground that felt so justified and satisfied, that urge to “do something” and to “take a stand,” did do something. But most of that something was sowing chaos, alienating potential allies and narrowing the political space available to others. That violence was used — over and over — to rationalize indiscriminate state-sponsored repression and violence. In the process, almost incidentally, they did build something of value, the idea of an underground, and that persists and continues.

There is a lot of hope here for me in this idea of a permanent underground that sustains and revives, a subculture of connection and support that is not on the same map (literally not plottable) as the systems that exploit and oppress.

Those who survived those harrowing years as fugitives, undergrounders and radicals, built community, raised families, showed up for one another. And they were able to do all that because they survived. Or, perhaps, they survived because they could do all that.

This article An intimate reckoning with the Weather Underground was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2026/06/ayers-dohrn-reckoning-weather-underground/