Public Enemy Read Online Free PDF Page B

pie,” Rap said at the time.
    Time
noted that in 1969 there had been sixty-one bombings on college campuses, most targeting ROTC and other war-related targets, and ninety-three bomb explosions in New York, half of them classified as “political,” a category that was “virtually non-existent ten years ago.” Suddenly, according to the FBI, from the start of 1969 to mid-April 1970, there had been 40,934 bombings, attempted bombings, and bomb threats, leading to forty-three deaths and almost $22 million in damage. Out of this total, 975 had been explosive, as opposed to incendiary attacks, and within that chaos and whirlwind, the Weather Underground took credit for some twenty actions over five years, causing maybe $2 million in damage, less than it had cost the United States to conduct its nasty war machine for an hour. No one was killed or harmed in any of them.
    Our notoriety, then and now, outstripped our activity on every count, and who knows why? Perhaps because we couldn’t shut up and issued long involved political statements with every action, or perhaps because of our familiarity as public student leaders, our white skin privilege, and our fortunate backgrounds. Perhaps it was the surprising American romance with outlaws on the run, or simply the power of metaphor. Whatever the reason, we made it clear that we intended to blast out our full-throated message to the heavens: I intended to fight and fight and fight on until I dropped dead.
    Some felt that the actions of the Weather Underground were not only illegal and off the rails, but indefensible at best and even “detestable,” and that case was not impossible to make. It was easy enough—and perfectly safe—to condemn us noisily for what we did, but just a bit harder to prove the efficacy of any other road taken—and impossible to stack against doing nothing. A prominent
Nation
columnist quantified her critique this way: “The Weather Underground didn’t shorten the war by five minutes.” That may well be true, but when I ran into her later and asked by how many minutes she figured the
Nation
had shortened the war, she said I was being ridiculous. I guess I was. Another old radical told me that if every person for peace had joined the Democratic Party at the same moment in 1968, we might have elected the principled George McGovern and ended the war. “Perhaps,” I replied, “but if everyone had joined the Weather Underground in 1969, we might have made a revolution.” “You’re being ridiculous,” he said, and we both laughed.

TWO
Up and Running
    Eleven years after we’d plunged underground, Bernardine and I traveled to Chicago to surface—to turn ourselves in to the legal authorities who’d been pursuing us throughout those fervent renegade days. It would mark the loss of a special treasure for us—the good fortune of knowing precisely where we stood and finding a kind of paradoxical, fleeting fugitive freedom in a place of constraint and quarantine—our decade of living dangerously.
    We’d thought she would return in relative obscurity—the war was long over and the Weather Underground quiet—but we learned later that someone in the state’s attorney’s office had told a friend that Bernardine had sent out feelers, and from friend to friend to contact to reporter, the story spread and grew. When we arrived at the Cook County Criminal Courthouse on Twenty-sixth Street and California, we were met by the rolling maul of a media scrum, something we’d never experienced before, and the pushing and rucking around caught us off-balance at first. Bernardine had resisted this moment mightily—“I’m not going to give up, and I don’t want them to feel they’ve won even the smallest symbolic victory”—but now she held her head high, smiled slightly, and walked quietly and purposefully into criminal court.
    We’d driven from New York to Chicago a few days earlier with Zayd, three years old, and Malik, not quite a year. We kissed and