March 6: The Weathermen

Ted Gold and Terry Robbins were two of three members of the Weathermen who were killed in an explosion in a Greenwich Village townhouse on West 11th Street when one of the bombs they were constructing went off on this date in 1970. Gold had been a leader of the Columbia University strike two years earlier; Robbins had been a leader of the Kent State University student movement. The bombs were reportedly intended for use at a Fort Dix, New Jersey army base dance, “to bring the war home,” according to Mark Rudd. Diane Oughton was also killed, and two surviving members of the Weathermen who were caught in the explosion, Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson, immediately went underground and evaded arrest for a decade. The Weathermen had emerged as a faction within Students for a Democratic Society and proceeded, after the townhouse explosion, to bomb the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the Department of State, and several banks, always with advance warning to avoid killing people. Other well-known Jewish members of the Weathermen, which soon became known as the Weather Underground, were Naomi Jaffe, Eleanor Raskin, David Gilbert, Susan Stern, Bob Tomashevsky, Sam Karp, Bernadette Dohrn (nee Ohrnstein), and Russel Neufeld.

“The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long. The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.” —Bill Ayers