b a d m o o n r i s i n g This page intentionally left blank BAD MOON RISING How the Weather Underground Beat the FBI and Lost the Revolution A RT H U R M . E C K S T E I N New Haven and London Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund. Copyright © 2016 by Arthur M. Eckstein. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Janson type by IDS Infotech, Ltd. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2016933043 ISBN 978-0-300-22118-3 (hardcover: alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Jeffrey This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction 1 1. “Angels of Destruction and Disorder” 11 2. “We Sentence the Government to Death” 46 3. “A Menace of National Proportions” 97 4. “Our Own Doors Are Being Threatened” 127 5. “The Hoover Cutoff” 150 6. “Hunt Them to Exhaustion” 182 7. “One Lawbreaker Has Been Pursued by Another” 210 Conclusion 236 Notes 259 Acknowledgments 329 Index 332 vii This page intentionally left blank Introduction W riting this book was a journey back into my own younger days, and into old feelings. I am part of the Sixties Generation; born in 1946, I was at UCLA between 1964 and 1968: years of transfor- mation in politics, society, and culture. Then I went off to graduate school at Berkeley, arriving in the autumn of 1968. While I am now a professional historian, and in Bad Moon Rising I have sought to write objectively about the facts as I see them in a professional way, no one who was politically involved as a young person in the sixties can write about those years without emotion. I was politically involved. I deeply supported the civil rights movement, generally supported the Black Panthers, was involved in antiwar demonstra- tions, witnessed some street violence (and even participated in it). This puts me in the 15 percent of my generation who were active politically on the Left—only 15 percent, but people who would come to have a large influence in culture and society (and especially in the university world).1 I was, however, ultimately more a hippie than a campus radical, and in the summer of 1969—right when the Weatherman faction was taking over Students for a Democratic Society—I gave up on politics altogether. By contrast, my dear friend Susan Reverby, who has been a constant source of advice and support as I worked my way through the historical problems asso- ciated with Weather, was a real campus radical, an active member of SDS at Cornell in the sixties who remained highly political far 1