Bombing: A Way of Protest and Death

ONLY nine months ago, the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence was able to report that the U.S. "has experienced almost none of the chronic revolutionary conspiracy and terrorism that plagues dozens of other nations." To be sure, plots and skirmishes have footnoted American history, and bomb blasts sometimes provided the punctuation. But they were usually isolated cases tied to a specific labor dispute, racial confrontation or criminal feud. For many decades, the specter of the political bomber has been as alien and anachronistic as the caricature of the bearded anarchist heaving a bomb the size and shape of a bowling ball. Last week that specter took on ominous substance as the nation was shaken by a series of bombings that highlighted a fearsome new brand of terrorism.

Corrupt and Doomed. Taking their cue from right-wing racists who used to keep blacks down with TNT, whites and blacks of the lunatic left have begun using explosives to produce sound effects and shock waves in their campaign to unnerve a society that they regard as corrupt and doomed. Schools, department stores, office buildings, police stations, military facilities, private homes--all have become targets. So far, miraculously, fatalities have been relatively few. One small slip, however --or one bloodthirsty bomber--could run up a death toll that could easily rival a week's total in Viet Nam. If the bomb threat continues, that is almost certain to occur.

How slight is the margin of error has been demonstrated by the most recent bomb episodes. Two weeks ago, three explosions destroyed an elegant town house on Greenwich Village's West 11th Street. The basement had apparently been used as a factory for jerry-built bombs, one of which seemed to have accidentally exploded. Last week police found in the ruins the body of a young radical leader, a headless female torso, the remains of a third person so mangled that gender was still uncertain at week's end, and an arsenal of dynamite and homemade bombs (see box, page 10).

As demolition experts continued to probe the 11th Street wreckage for more explosives--and perhaps more bodies--bombs exploded at the Manhattan headquarters of Mobil Oil, IBM and General Telephone and Electronics. An organization that styled itself "Revolutionary Force 9" claimed responsibility. No one was hurt in the early-morning blasts, which were strikingly similar to three blasts in several New York office buildings last Nov. 11, but during the following two days news of the explosions triggered an outbreak of more than 600 phony bomb scares in a jittery New York. Three Molotov cocktails exploded in a Manhattan high school. There were scattered bomb threats elsewhere in the country, even at the Justice Department in Washington. One of them obliged Secretary of State William Rogers to leave his office. Mysterious nighttime explosions rocked a Pittsburgh shopping mall and a Washington nightclub. Another blast hit the Michigan State University's School of Police Administration, and someone threw a Molotov cocktail in an Appleton, Wis., high school.

Like Tarzan. Two black militants were killed when their car was blasted to bits while they were riding on a highway south of Bel Air, Md. The dead were Ralph Featherstone, 30, and William ("Che") Payne, 26. Featherstone, a former speech therapist, was well known as a civil rights field organizer and, more recently, as manager of the Afro-American bookstore, the Drum & Spear, in Washington. Both were friends of H. Rap Brown, whose trial on charges of arson and incitement to riot was scheduled to begin last week in Bel Air. Reconstruction of the car's speedometer indicates it was traveling about 55 miles an hour when it blew up.

Police believed that Payne had been carrying a dynamite bomb on the floor between his legs and that it accidentally exploded. A preliminary FBI investigation supported that theory. Friends of the dead men contended that white extremists had either ambushed the pair or booby-trapped their car, perhaps trying to kill Brown. But police pointed out that Featherstone and Payne had driven in from Washington without notice, cruised around Bel Air briefly and seemed to be headed back. That assassins could plot and move so quickly defies belief.

Although Featherstone had not been known as an extremist, friends said that he had grown markedly more bitter in the past year. Police cited a crudely spelled typewritten statement found on his body: "To Amerika:* I'm playing heads-up murder. When the deal goes down I'm gon be standing on your chest screaming like Tarzan. Dynamite is my response to your justice." Brown, meanwhile, was nowhere to be found.

The night after the Bel Air incident, a blast ripped a 30-ft. hole in the side of the Dorchester County courthouse in Cambridge, where Brown allegedly incited the 1967 riot and where his trial was originally scheduled. No one was hurt in the blast, which occurred just 100 miles from Bel Air. Police were seeking a young white woman seen at the courthouse before the blast.

Haymarket Again. Last week's violence was only the latest in a frightening trend. Though the upswing in bombing is far from nationwide, it has occurred in widely separated parts of the country. New York and San Francisco, both areas of left-wing extremist activity, have been particularly hard hit, but so have less electric cities, including Seattle, Denver and Madison, Wis.

In New York, there were 93 bomb explosions in 1969, police say, and another 19 bombs did not explode. Half the 93 are classed as political, a category that was virtually nonexistent ten years ago, when there were no more than 20 bombings a year. New York authorities have accused 21 Black Panthers of a conspiracy to blow up stores and railroad tracks and, during a hearing on those charges, five bombs were set off around the city in one night, three at the home of the judge. Last July through November, a series of bombs exploded in government and corporate offices in the city; three left-wing white radicals were arrested and one is still sought. The San Francisco Bay Area had an estimated 62 bombings in the past year, Seattle 33. The FBI says that there were 61 bombing and arson cases on U.S. college campuses in 1969.

Police are a prime target of black and white revolutionaries. There were two attempted bombings of police stations in Detroit earlier this month; both failed. A blast during last October's Weatherman rampage in Chicago toppled a statue commemorating policemen killed in the 1886 Haymarket Square riot and ensuing disturbances--all of which was triggered by an anarchist's bomb. While many of the attacks are clearly aimed at property and publicity rather than people, some seek to maim and murder. A bomb that ripped through the Park Precinct house near Haight-Ashbury on Feb. 16 killed a policeman when an industrial staple taped to the weapon shot through his left eye and brain.

Psychotic fads have a way of becoming contagious, and the political left has had no monopoly on bombings. Bank robbers in Danbury, Conn., recently set off three blasts to divert cops. In Detroit, rival motorcycle gangs with nary a trace of political ideology between them dynamited each other's clubhouses. In Denver, where a battle over busing for integration rages, 38 school buses were bombed last month. Three cars were recently destroyed there in separate explosions; the only link is that all were red and foreign-made.

Cops and Robbers. The most frightening aspect of the political bomb-throwing is the cool acceptance of terror as a tactic by educated people. Mainly young, often college-educated, many are guilt-ridden offspring of middle-class affluence. Others are black militants devoured by despair. What they share is an apocalyptic and conspiratorial view of society and an arrogant, elitist conviction that only they know how to reform the world. They have only a vague, romantic idea of overthrowing the "Establishment" and ending the Viet Nam War. Thus, their goals cannot be achieved through traditional means of reform within the system. As Berkeley Police Chief Bruce Baker points out, they are "playing a very tragic form of cops and robbers, seeing themselves as modern-day revolutionaries."

Some inkling of the bombers' psychology appeared in a letter mailed last week just before the New York office bombings by Revolutionary Force 9: "All three [companies bombed] profit not only from death in Viet Nam but also from American imperialism in all of the Third World. To numb Amerika to the horrors they inflict on humanity, these corporations seek to enslave us to a way of 'life' which values conspicuous consumption more than the relief of poverty, disease and starvation. In death-directed Amerika, there is only one way to a life of love and freedom: to attack and destroy the forces of death and exploitation and to build a just society --revolution."

Experts discount notions of a coherent conspiracy in the spread of left-wing bombing. They attribute it, rather, to the power of suggestion among individuals who think alike. Certainly, as the FBI maintains, some of the suggestion has been fostered by radical groups. But the blame goes deeper into the very marrow of society. Violence has become increasingly accepted in recent years. Traditional restraints are breaking down. It has become easy, in this era of mass murders and daily battle reports, to intellectualize violence and the value of revolution. This is encouraged by the seemingly slow progress of nonviolent protest and the many instances of unfair and inconsistent application of the law.

Moral Dilemma. Young people have plenty of examples of glamorous, if not always successful revolutionaries: the Stern Gang, the Irish Republican Army, Algeria's National Liberation Front, Che Guevara. Cops in San Francisco and New York City both say that the movie The Battle of Algiers has influenced much of the bombing surge. It centers on the moral dilemma of killing innocent people in the cause of revolution. Thirteen Panthers are on trial in New York for conspiring to plant bombs around a congested city. One member of the Committee to Free the Panther 21 argues: "Peaceful demonstrations just don't work. Whatever violence the left may do is not as violent as that of the Establishment."

In the name of their own vision of utopia, the bombers blithely risk the lives of the people to whom, they say, they would give power. There is no doubt that determined terrorists can blow up property, people and a community's equilibrium. But in a nation where the overwhelming majority favor either the status quo or orderly reform in the liberal tradition, mindless acts of violence by a self-appointed revolutionary elite only harden resistance to legitimate, necessary change. Says New York Mayor John Lindsay: "The use of explosives to tear down the system is self-defeating. It's cowardly. No democratic system can live that way. Society cannot permit it."

Saddest of all, playing at revolution is not really necessary. Many effective resources for reform are available--the courts, public opinion, peaceful demonstrations, the ballot. These vehicles are far less spectacular than TNT, but more effective in the long run. By changing the nation's mind rather than blowing it, those who seek to remake the world would at least have some chance of success.

* The Germanic spelling, which is used by some radicals to indicate America's control by "fascists."

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