Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

698 • WEATHERMEN/WEATHER UNDERGROUNDin the United States, much in the same way the German Baader-Meinhof Red Army Faction (RAF) and several other terrorist groupsdrew their membership from middle-class university students.The Weathermen emerged out of the Students for a DemocraticSociety (SDS), a student leftist antiwar group, in 18–22 June 1969during an SDS conference. Their name is taken from the lyrics ofBob Dylan’s song Subterranean Homesick Blues, “You don’t needa weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” used as the titleof the position paper of the SDS leaders published on 31 December1969 advocating armed revolution. While the majority of SDSmembers rejected this proposal, the Weathermen core stuck to theproposal, imagining that they would form the vanguard that wouldkindle revolution at large.They proposed acts of armed propaganda aimed at pitting antiwaryouth against the police and planned to incite riots in the socalleddays of rage planned for 8 October 1969, that is, a reenactmentof the demonstrations and police riot that had occurred a year earlierat the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. On 7 October1969 they bombed the Chicago policeman’s statue in HaymarketSquare. During 8–11 October some 287 Weathermen assembled inChicago’s Grant Park and were arrested for disorderly conduct. During27–31 December 1969 the Weathermen “war council” decidedto go underground and accordingly failed to appear for their trialsrising from the Grant Park demonstrations, so becoming fugitives.On 6 March 1970, the Weathermen’s hideout in Greenwich Village,New York, blew up due to an error one of them made while trying toassemble a bomb, killing three leaders.Despite this mishap, the group undertook its program of armed propaganda.The first known bombing by the Weathermen was of severalparked police cars in Berkeley, California, on 13 February 1970. On 9June 1970 the Weathermen bombed the New York City police headquarters.On 1 August 1970 they blasted the exterior of the New Yorkbranch of the Bank of Brazil with a pipe bomb. On 13 September 1970they arranged the jail break of Timothy Leary, who was then smuggledto Algeria. On 8 October 1970 they bombed the Reserve Officers’Training Corps (ROTC) building on the University of Washingtoncampus, the Santa Barbara National Guard Armory, and a courthousein San Rafael, California. On 1 March 1971 they bombed the U.S. Senatewing of the Capitol building. On 19 May 1972, the birthday of Ho