Bill Ayres today
Throughout the 1970’s, the Weather Underground was responsible for the bombings of the National Guard offices in Washington, D.C.; the U.S. Capitol Building; the New York City Police Headquarters; and the Pentagon and other things.
Weather Underground logo
38 years ago on March 6th, 1970, the same day as the morning’s bombing of a military recruitment center in New York’s Times Square, domestic terrorists got a dose of what they deserved.
According to Weather Underground member William Ayers, the bomb they were working on in a New York City townhouse was destined for a military dance at Fort Dix.
The Crime Library
Brownstones stand like soldiers in a row on tree-lined West Eleventh Street in lower Manhattan. Many were built at the turn of the century when pride in workmanship still prevailed in the building trades. Eleventh Street is just three blocks north of famed Washington Square Park, once a public execution ground in the 19th century, and extends west through Greenwich Village, past historic Hudson and Bleecker Streets, ending finally at West Street on the shore of the Hudson River. A long line of artists, writers, actors, musicians and celebrities of every manner and fashion has called this area home. Herman Melville and Walt Whitman once lived here. And Edgar Allen Poe wrote The Raven when he lived in a boarding house on Greenwich Street in 1844. The great “Satchmo” played the blues here from time to time and Sara Vaughn often performed in Village jazz clubs, along with Tony Bennett, Ella Fitzgerald, “Cannonball” Adderly, Monk and Miles Davis.
On March 6, 1970 at 11:55 a.m., Susan Wager, former wife of film actor Henry Fonda, was in her basement at 50 West Eleventh Street with her housekeeper sorting her laundry. A few minutes before noon, she heard a tremendous explosion outside her building. “We both looked at each otheryou could feel it, a real quaver ran through the ground,” she later told reporters.
Immediately, she heard two more rapid-fire explosions. Mrs. Wager hurried up the steps and out into the street. She saw that the explosions came from building number eighteen. As she ran down the block, Mrs. Wager saw the flames blowing out the front windows of the townhouse. There was concrete debris lying on the sidewalk and large pieces of the townhouse on the tops of parked cars. In the doorway, she saw a “red, incandescent glow, more scary than flames” emanate from inside the 1st floor hallway.
fire consumed the townhouse as gas lines exploded and windows shattered into the street. But firefighters were able to get hoses on the inferno quickly and soon, it was brought under control. In the early evening, a man’s body was found in the basement and a short time later, a woman’s torso was discovered on the first floor. Police also found several handbags with personal identifications that were stolen from college students over the previous few months. Late that same night, cops located at least 60 sticks of dynamite, a live military antitank shell, blasting caps and several large metal pipes packed solid with explosives. Neighbors, including actor Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door, began leaving in droves.
The dead man was later identified as 23-year-old Theodore Gold, a leader of a student strike at Columbia University in 1968. He was a member of the Weathermen, a radical group of college students who believed that the only way to change America was through confrontation and violence. The dead girl, whose body was horribly mangled by the powerful blast, was eventually identified as Diana Oughton, another former college student. Seven days later, police managed to locate another dismembered body of a male. His identity remained a mystery until the Weathermen later claimed it was Terry Robbins, one of their own members.
James P. Wilkerson, a radio station owner from the Midwest, owned the townhouse. His daughter, Catherine Wilkerson, 25, was also a known member of the Weathermen. She was currently out on $40,000 bail on assault charges in Chicago where she struck a police officer with a club during a political demonstration. A close friend of Catherine’s, a girl named Kathy Boudin, was staying with her at the time of the blast. Boudin, too, was out on $20,000 bail on similar charges in Chicago. Neither of the girls could be located. Police soon speculated that the town home was being used as a bomb factory and the occupants were probably assembling bombs when something went very wrong.
Columbia University in New York City and Berkeley University in California were two institutions where radicals assumed center stage. Various political groups and peace organizations sprung up everywhere but especially on college campuses where anti-war factions found fertile ground for recruitment.
One such political organization was the Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.). The S.D.S. wanted action, not words. But as time passed, several groups broke away from the organization to form their own ideological cells. Such a camp was the Weathermen, named after a line in a Bob Dylan song, “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” The line went like this: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
The Weathermen were radicals. They wanted their people to get involved, demonstrate, get arrested and force change down the throat of the “establishment.” They fought at the Democratic Presidential Convention in 1968 and converged in Chicago in 1969 for an event that came to be known as “Days of Rage.” The more violent extremists during that era were responsible for a score of bombings in places like Harvard University, various corporate headquarters and a number of government institutions. They praised Charles Manson and freed Dr. Timothy Leary from prison. Wherever there was violence and chaos in the name of dissent, the Weathermen were there. But after the townhouse explosion in New York City in 1970, the group was forced to go “underground” and remove itself from the prying eyes of law enforcement and public scrutiny.
Due to the extreme length of the artible…….Skip to ………The Agony of Parole
This is a slap in the face of every officer in our state and our nation who put their lives on the line every day to protect the citizens of our country. It is the worst travesty of justice that I have seen in a long time!” Such were the words of Fraternal Order of Police President Frank Ferreyra when he learned of the New York State parole board decision to free 60-year-old Kathy Boudin.
Boudin, a former Weather Underground member, has been in prison for the past 22 years for her role in the notorious Brinks armored car robbery in Nyack in 1981, during which two police officers and a security guard were murdered. On August 20, 2003, the two-member parole board voted to release the 1960s radical as early as it may be feasible.
Boudin said of her early years, “I had an ideology…that said essentially, white people, beause of having privilege, are essentially bad.” But the parole commissioners took notice of the good work performed by Boudin during her incarceration, including her assistance to inmates who have AIDS.
Her attorney, Leonard Weinglass, told reporters. “It’s only just and fair she be released in accordance with the agreement.”
Her son, Chesa Boudin, 23, told the press that her mother wants to apologize personally to the victims’ families. “It’s very important to her that the families of those three men – know how terribly she feels about what happened,” he said.
Chesa’s father, David Gilbert, who drove one of the getaway vehicles in the bloody hold-up, is serving a 75-year-to-life sentence in Attica prison and will be eligible for parole himself in 2056. Gilbert has never cooperated with authorities in the investigation of the crime, which netted Boudin and friends $1.6 million in cash.
Chesa was later raised by
comrades Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn and recently graduated from college. “If there is anything any of us could do to go back and change history, we would,” he said recently to reporters.
The decision to parole Boudin enraged the law enforcement community in New York, especially in Rockland County where the robbery took place. Local groups have consistently opposed the release of Boudin and have worked tirelessly to make their feelings known to the parole board and the governor’s office.
The Village of Nyack has erected monuments to the slain officers and holds an annual ceremony in their memory. Officer Waverly Brown, 45, and Sgt. Edward O’Grady Jr., 33, were killed on October 20, 1981 when they stopped a U Haul truck occupied by gang members who had murdered Brinks’ guard Peter Paige just minutes before. When the officers tried to open the rear doors of the U Haul, the suspects, who were never all identified, came out shooting. Brown and O’Grady were instantly killed by a barrage of bullets from automatic weapons. Kathy Boudin, a passenger in the front seat of the truck, was apprehended as she ran from the scene of the carnage. She was already on the lam for over ten years as a result of an explosion in a Greenwich village townhouse-bomb factory that unintentionally killed three fellow terrorists.
In a letter published by the New York Post, Diane O’Grady, widow of Sgt. Ed O’Grady and mother to their three children raised without a father, addressed the parole of Boudin. “I do not believe that there is a shred of guilt, shame or remorse felt by inmate Boudin,” she wrote. “To see and hear of the celebrating by Boudin and her supporters was hurtful and indecent.” Mrs. O’Grady also responded to Boudin’s request for a face to face apology. “I want to set the record straight and leave no room for doubt,” she wrote, “I will never meet with inmate Boudin or her son. I would never dishonor my husband’s memory with such a meeting. Nor do I have any desire to help Boudin ease her conscience or to give her a better public image for her next book.”
But one thing is sure: Kathy Boudin, now 60 years old, will walk out of Bedford Prison a free woman. Her debt to society for her actions on August 20, 1981 will have been paid. She will start a new life, much to the dismay of some people. There have been published reports that Manhattan’s St. Luke’s Hospital has already offered her a job to work with AIDS patients. Undoubtedly, her image will appear on television talk shows, media events and the inevitable book deal may soon follow. New York’s “Son of Sam” law, which prevents those convicted of crimes to profit from them in movie or book contracts will apply to Kathy Boudin, but other criminals have gotten around the law. It remains to be seen if Boudin has such ambitions.
In the meantime, her family and supporters are ecstatic. “Right now, she’s hysterically happy,” attorney Weinglass said to reporters recently. “It’s a pretty overwhelmingly joyous moment,” Chesa Boudin told the Associated Press from his home in Chicago. But in Nyack, where the blood of murdered cops once flowed through village streets, there was a different reaction.
It’s nothing to celebrate,” Diane O’Grady wrote to the Daily News recently, “Nine children are still without fathers.”
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Wild Thing’s comment……..
This is a very long post, I hope it is ok. I try not to do this often. I needed to do this to put a history of all of this at Theodore’s World for reference. It will be kept at the link in the sidebar listed as Traitors To America.
So much was happening in the late 60’s and early 70’s in my life, moving to Calif. in 68′ from Dallas Texas, the Vietman War, trips with Bob Hope to Vietnam (68′,69′,70′ and 71′) and life back in California when I was at home.
I knew Sharon Tate, we were not friends just two girls that ran into each other since we both worked in showbiz (acting and modeling) but she seemed sweet and was always a kind person. Years later when I met Nick he shared a story with me how he had lived in the same apt. building she did and they would run into each other as well usually out by the pool. He gave her an old radio he had when he was moving out of his apt. into a house he bought in the Hollywood hills. Just a canyon over from where Sharon Tate was killed that horrible night along with the others. Small world but that is why this is extremely interesting to me since I knew so little about all of this about the Weather Underground.
….”Wherever there was violence and chaos in the name of dissent, the Weathermen were there. But after the townhouse explosion in New York City in 1970, the group was forced to go “underground” and remove itself from the prying eyes of law enforcement and public scrutiny.”….
B. Hussein Obama has served on boards with Ayers – and been a guest in his home.
Re: William ‘Bill’ Ayers, one of the most troubling feature of Barack Obama is his association with the dreadful Ayers Dohrn pair.
“I don’t regret setting bombs,” Ayers was quoted in the opening line of the Times profile; “I feel we didn’t do enough.” In 1969, Ayers and his wife convened a “War Council” in Flint Michigan, whose purpose was to launch a military front inside the United States with the purpose of helping Third World [Maoist-communist] revolutionaries conquer and destroy it.
Today William Ayers is not merely an author favored by the New York Times, but a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His Lady Macbeth is not merely a lawyer, but a member of the American Bar Association’s governing elite, as well as the director of Northwestern University’s Children and Family Justice Center. These facts reflect a reality about the culture of facile defamation of America and ready appeasement of her mortal enemies, that confronts us as we struggle to deal with the terrorist attack….911 attacks.
There is more at FrontPageMag.com
Allies in War,
By David Horowitz:
“Obama served on the Wood’s Fund board alongside William C. Ayers, a member of the Weathermen terrorist group which sought to overthrow the U.S. government and took responsibility for bombing the U.S. Capitol in 1971.” “Obama was a director of the Woods Fund board from 1999 to Dec. 11, 2002, according to the Fund’s website.”
Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: ”Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at,” is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And he says he doesn’t actually remember suggesting that rich people be killed or that people kill their parents, but ”it’s been quoted so many times I’m beginning to think I did,” he said. ”It was a joke about the distribution of wealth.”
Something Ayres shares with his wife mentioned below as Ms.Dohrn:
In 1967 Ayres met Ms. Dohrn in Ann Arbor, Mich. She had a law degree from the University of Chicago and was a magnetic speaker who often wore thigh-high boots and miniskirts. In 1969, after the Manson family murders in Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: ”Dig it! Manson killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach.”
At a 1969 “War Council” in Flint, Michigan, Dohrn gave her most memorable and notorious speech to her followers. Holding her fingers in what became the Weatherman “fork salute,” she said of the bloody murders recently committed by the Manson Family in which the pregnant actress Sharon Tate and a Folgers Coffee heiress and several other inhabitants of a Benedict Canyon mansion were brutally stabbed to death: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!” The “War Council” ended with a formal declaration of war against “AmeriKKKa,” always spelled with three K’s to signify the United States’ allegedly ineradicable white racism.
In Chicago recently, Ms. Dohrn said of her remarks: ”It was a joke. We were mocking violence in America. Even in my most inflamed moment I never supported a racist mass murderer.”
Michelle Obama obviously hates America, is a rascist, hates the establishment and corporate America – their church preaches loyalty to the Mother Land, Africa – not America.
Barack Obama has a problem in saluting the Flag when given a chance to, at least on a regular basis.
Michelle Obama’s own hatred of everything ‘white’ in link below. Black Power movement has never gone away – and is now a whisper from the Oval Office.
some notes from this next excellent article:
Sing, o muse, the wrath of Michelle
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JC04Aa01.html
The wrath of swift-footed Achilles, of which Homer called his muse to sing, nearly lost the Trojan War for the Greeks. The wrath of swift-tongued Michelle Obama well might lose the White House for her husband. We had a peek into her diary last week when the Obama campaign finally made public her undergraduate thesis, titled “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community”. The contents of this remarkable document sharpen the profile of Obama’s women.
Barack Obama, I argued, evinces a preternatural sangfroid, for he is in America but not of it, a Third World anthropologist profiling Americans. But his wife’s anger at America will out, for it is a profound rage amplified by guilt.
Michelle felt she was betraying “lower class Blacks” by assimilating:
… the path I have chosen to follow by attending Princeton will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society, never becoming a full participant. This realization has presently made my goals to actively utilize my resources to benefit the Black community more desirable.
And still more at WND
“Mr. Ayers, who has been described by one supporter as ‘friends’ with Mr. Obama, openly speaks and writes of his role in the 1974 bombing of the U.S. Capitol Building where Mr. Obama now serves. Mr. Ayers is widely quoted from his reminiscence, which appeared in the New York Times on the infamous Tuesday, September 11, 2001: ‘I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.’
When asked in that same interview if he would set more bombs today, his response was, ‘I don’t want to discount the possibility.'”
And from Human Events….The Obama Files :
“They’re certainly friendly” –quote from “Obama’s chief strategist (and reigning expert on Chicago’s political tribes), David Axelrod”
Obama’s Bill Ayres Problem
Jump ahead to 2000…In addition to his professoship, Ayers is The Woods Fund board chairman, and a young state senator, who like Ayers is living in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, is a fellow board member–that person of course is Barack Obama. Why any organization would have Ayers serving on their board (he’s not chairman any more, but Ayers is still on The Woods Fund board), is astonishing to me and any other person with common sense. And who’d want to serve with him? That year, Ayers and Obama (who should’ve abstained) voted to invest $1 million in Woods Fund money into a firm run by a former boss of the then-state senator, Allison Davis.
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