{"id":1466,"date":"2015-05-03T09:59:57","date_gmt":"2015-05-03T09:59:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hamiltonbookreviews.com\/reviews\/?p=1466"},"modified":"2015-05-04T10:04:12","modified_gmt":"2015-05-04T10:04:12","slug":"days-of-rage-the-long-ago-war-between-the-left-and-the-fbi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hamiltonbookreviews.com\/reviews\/days-of-rage-the-long-ago-war-between-the-left-and-the-fbi\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Days of Rage:\u2019 the long-ago war between the left and the FBI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bryan Burrough\u2019s \u201cDays of Rage\u201d chronicles an era when leftist American students used bombs and other forms of violence in an attempt to convert the working class to their cause.


\n\u2018Days of Rage: America\u2019s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence\u2019

by Bryan Burrough

Penguin Press, 585 pp., $29.95


\nTerrorism today conjures images of Islamic militants horrifically crashing planes into buildings, detonating bombs on crowded subway trains or exploding devices specifically designed to kill or maim large numbers of people. But not so long ago, as the 1960s wound to a close, the idea of \u201crevolutionary violence\u201d was embraced not by religious zealots, but by left-wing radicals, certain they were on the vanguard of the coming revolution.

In \u201cDays of Rage,\u201d Bryan Burrough, author of \u201cPublic Enemies,\u201d provides a fascinating look at an almost forgotten era of homegrown terrorism. Groups like the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army and the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) routinely bombed post offices, military installations, and corporate facilities in a wildly naive and self-indulgent effort to lead the \u201coppressed\u201d American working class to revolt. \u201cDays of Rage\u201d relies not only on historical research, but on interviews with some of the principal activists, living in obscurity but still defiant about their underground activity. The book is utterly captivating, coupling careful historical research with breathless accounts of the bombings and the perpetrators\u2019 narrow escapes.

The sheer numbers are astounding. During one 18-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings, nearly five a day. Yet, as Burrough\u2019s notes, \u201cless than 1 percent of the 1970s-era bombings lead to a fatality; the single deadliest radical-underground attack of the decade killed four people.\u201d Most of the bombs were placed in restrooms and were followed by ornate \u201ccommuniqu\u00e9s,\u201d filled with Marxist jargon.

This was not an anti-war protest movement. The underground radicals were, instead, committed to righting what they perceived as wrongs in American society and fighting back against racism and police brutality.

Bernadine Dohrn, the stunningly beautiful and promiscuous leader of the Weather Underground, who J. Edgar Hoover called \u201cLa Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left,\u201d famously celebrated Charles Manson\u2019s horrific murder of Sharon Tate in 1969. The SLA grabbed attention by kidnapping 19-year old Patty Hearst in 1974. Neither action led to a tide of sympathy or support. Indeed, by the mid-1970s, the country had moved on, embracing much of the hippie culture, music and style \u2014 but emphatically rejecting its violent rhetoric.

The FBI, pushed hard by the Nixon administration, formed \u201cSquad 47\u201d to investigate. The squad conducted widespread \u201cblack bag jobs,\u201d opening mail, breaking into homes, and installing thousands of wiretaps \u2014 with full knowledge that what they were doing was patently illegal.

When the FBI\u2019s abuses came to light, only three individuals were indicted: Acting Director L. Patrick Gray, Acting Associate Director Mark Felt and Assistant Director Ed Miller. Felt and Miller were both convicted. Felt was fined $5,000, Miller was fined $2,500 and both were quickly pardoned by incoming President Reagan. (Felt, it was revealed years later, was the \u201cDeep Throat\u201d source for The Washington Post reporters breaking the Watergate scandal).

Within weeks, Dohrn turned herself in. At one time the most wanted fugitive in the underground, she was fined a mere $1,500. The Weather Underground had conducted hundreds of bombings but the only individuals convicted were the FBI agents \u2014 not the leadership of the organization.

When Ray Levasseur, one of the last violent bombers, was finally arrested in 1984, the world had so completely changed that, as Burrough\u2019s notes, he was the \u201cradical equivalent of the aging Japanese infantrymen found in Pacific caves well into the 1970s, men still fighting a war everyone else knew only from history books.\u201d

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