Sara S
10-31-2012, 09:01 AM
from delancy place.com:
In today's selection -- by 1970, despair and anger about the Vietnam War was resulting
in protest bombings throughout the U.S., twenty a week in California alone. The
targets were often major corporate headquarters. In the middle of it all, the famed
Weathermen accidentally detonated a bomb in their own quarters killing three of
their own:
"[In 1970], the country felt like it was exploding, often liter*ally. Despite a
rash of nonviolent protests that included the October Mora*torium in Washington,
the pro-peace movement's growing frustration over Vietnam was turning into a depression.
That depression was turning into anger and desperation, and the desperation was
turning to destruction.
"The exact number of bombs set off by a variety of radical offshoots depended on
the source. CBS News placed the nationwide tally between January 1969 and the spring
of 1970 at 4,330, about twenty a week in California alone. The U.S. Treasury estimated
forty a week. In Manhat*tan, between August and October 1969, explosive devices
had gone off in three buildings on Wall Street and in Macy's, followed by bombs
at the Chase Manhattan Bank, the RCA Building, and General Motors in No*vember.
A letter sent by the bombers to UPI stated their motives: The enemy was the 'giant
corporations ... Spiro Agnew may be a household word, but [the public] has rarely
seen men like David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan, James Roche of General Motors
and Michael Haider of Standard Oil, who run the system behind the scenes.' Eventually
im*plicated were employees of the Rat, an underground newspaper, and a man Time
described as a 'health faddist.' In February 1970, the detona*tions in the New York
area continued -- at a GE center in Queens and outside the home of State Supreme
Court justice John Murtagh, who presided at a pretrial hearing involving Black
Panthers accused of trying to blow up public spaces.
"Obtaining the materials to make a bomb was, one network news re*port said, 'ridiculously
simple.' Dynamite came from anywhere, swiped from construction sites or military
bases or, in some cases, purchased over the counter. (Where did those seven thousand
dynamite blasting caps swiped from a Maryland plant in March go, exactly?) The laws
for selling dynamite varied from state to state. In Oregon, all anyone needed was
a name, address, and license-plate number. Other states required a blasting permit,
making the process more difficult. 'The underground promises more bombings,' said
one CBS reporter, 'and it is clear that ex*isting controls are totally inadequate
to stop them.' Working on the script for his second film, Bananas, that spring --
it would begin filming in May -- Woody Allen acknowledged the prosaic ordinariness
of the ex*plosions. When his character asks out a New York leftie played by Allen's
ex-wife Louise Lasser, she replies, 'Call me Saturday... I may be bomb*ing an office
building, but I'll know later.'
"In New York City, the relative ease with which explosives could be obtained and
detonated by anyone determined or crazy enough to do it was slammed home at noon
on Friday, March 6. One moment, 18 West 11th Street was a ten-room brownstone that
dated back to the 1840s. The next moment it was a roof and a stairwell, a massive,
gaping, flame-spewing hole in between. After neighbors and nearby drivers heard
a massive explosion, the roof collapsed, along with all four floors; the two-foot-thick
walls were scarred with holes that ascended twenty feet. The first to scurry from
the building were rats, along with a few cats, fol*lowed by two girls -- one nude,
another just wearing a T-shirt -- who were discovered by rescue workers and led
to a building across the street. Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door, at 16 West
11th, joined the gawkers on the street. Clutching a Tiffany lamp and several paintings
he'd taken with him, he noticed that his desk, which shared a wall with num*ber
18, had fallen through the wall and into the burning rubble.
"When police and firemen began sifting through the wreckage of the explosion, they
found the body of one man beneath the debris, followed by an even grislier discovery.
A large power shovel cleaning debris out of the basement scooped up a body with
two missing hands, one leg, and a mangled head, nails jutting out of the torso's
flesh. At first, the fire de*partment assumed a gas leak caused the blast, but
when an intact gas fur*nace was unearthed in the basement rubble on Monday morning,
suspicions that bombs were involved were confirmed. The dead turned out to be three
members of the radical group the Weathermen. One of them, Terry Robbins, had accidentally
set off the bombs as he was assem*bling them. (The other dead were Theodore Gold
and Diana Oughton, while Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson, whose father owned the
build*ing, escaped, at least for a while; they were the two young women seen fleeing.)
Along with body parts, police discovered sixty sticks of unexploded dynamite, caps
to set them off, primitive nail bombs, and a map of the tunnels beneath Columbia
University, one of the Weathermen's in*tended targets.
"Both the city and the country barely had time to digest what had hap*pened when,
five days later, explosions detonated in three office build*ings in midtown Manhattan,
in roughly the same area -- 42nd Street between Lexington and Third; Park Avenue
and 55th; and Third Avenue at 46th. The targets were Mobil, IBM, and General Telephone
and Elec*tronics, respectively. In each case, no one was hurt; police had been tipped
to the pending explosions and their precise times by an anony*mous caller a half
hour before. Streets were strewn with glass, elevators were deluged with water,
and the buildings sustained structural damage. Over the next two days, six hundred
bomb threats were called in to the city. On March 15, the Times reported, with no
sense of sarcasm, that 'the number of bomb threats in the city declined sharply
for the first time since Thursday.' An anonymous caller to the New York Police De*partment
credited the Mobil, IBM, and General Telephone bombings to a previously unknown
group called the Revolutionary Force 9."
Author: David Browne
Title: Fire and Rain
Publisher: Da Capo
Date: Copyright 2011 by David Browne
Pages: 118-121
Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost
Story of 1970
by David Browne by Da Capo Press
Paperback
If you wish to read further: Buy Now [https://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001laJa-Q13mnkdBME45qUBQa4wySNFRahb2f8KeC4qt3mIRR2RbKfqVLpOoLvq9lGMDB7ZB3FU-OkL7toyG7WgaQN6chew6MR3BzTXu07rHSfioOsMo3YPmUE1ldIwMyNfgBhVs6oGeKJb6OZaCKeI_vnHFfwxGgiXd6I0HTw_W5-xv_eHI1djFoai14zTa28Winaar2v5JaiBTardCRdxpdNdIIF8vw1JuWM8LDgp_O93hfhFhrgqgXac56uzl1lZrmKUzjU6mzeaUvBv4YMNocEU6EbcFvTedL5IOtURWNQed5DQ4T5CDGZqX9-xy9tay_CAfC9CnUSTVQFrjzoZnAnnA6di4u_0Aq0xmTEuIKRM1g10vzJIa0a0z1ydYTAEekxHCx_5xcM=]
If you use the above link to purchase a book, delanceyplace proceeds from your purchase
will benefit a children's literacy project. All delanceyplace profits are donated
to charity.
In today's selection -- by 1970, despair and anger about the Vietnam War was resulting
in protest bombings throughout the U.S., twenty a week in California alone. The
targets were often major corporate headquarters. In the middle of it all, the famed
Weathermen accidentally detonated a bomb in their own quarters killing three of
their own:
"[In 1970], the country felt like it was exploding, often liter*ally. Despite a
rash of nonviolent protests that included the October Mora*torium in Washington,
the pro-peace movement's growing frustration over Vietnam was turning into a depression.
That depression was turning into anger and desperation, and the desperation was
turning to destruction.
"The exact number of bombs set off by a variety of radical offshoots depended on
the source. CBS News placed the nationwide tally between January 1969 and the spring
of 1970 at 4,330, about twenty a week in California alone. The U.S. Treasury estimated
forty a week. In Manhat*tan, between August and October 1969, explosive devices
had gone off in three buildings on Wall Street and in Macy's, followed by bombs
at the Chase Manhattan Bank, the RCA Building, and General Motors in No*vember.
A letter sent by the bombers to UPI stated their motives: The enemy was the 'giant
corporations ... Spiro Agnew may be a household word, but [the public] has rarely
seen men like David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan, James Roche of General Motors
and Michael Haider of Standard Oil, who run the system behind the scenes.' Eventually
im*plicated were employees of the Rat, an underground newspaper, and a man Time
described as a 'health faddist.' In February 1970, the detona*tions in the New York
area continued -- at a GE center in Queens and outside the home of State Supreme
Court justice John Murtagh, who presided at a pretrial hearing involving Black
Panthers accused of trying to blow up public spaces.
"Obtaining the materials to make a bomb was, one network news re*port said, 'ridiculously
simple.' Dynamite came from anywhere, swiped from construction sites or military
bases or, in some cases, purchased over the counter. (Where did those seven thousand
dynamite blasting caps swiped from a Maryland plant in March go, exactly?) The laws
for selling dynamite varied from state to state. In Oregon, all anyone needed was
a name, address, and license-plate number. Other states required a blasting permit,
making the process more difficult. 'The underground promises more bombings,' said
one CBS reporter, 'and it is clear that ex*isting controls are totally inadequate
to stop them.' Working on the script for his second film, Bananas, that spring --
it would begin filming in May -- Woody Allen acknowledged the prosaic ordinariness
of the ex*plosions. When his character asks out a New York leftie played by Allen's
ex-wife Louise Lasser, she replies, 'Call me Saturday... I may be bomb*ing an office
building, but I'll know later.'
"In New York City, the relative ease with which explosives could be obtained and
detonated by anyone determined or crazy enough to do it was slammed home at noon
on Friday, March 6. One moment, 18 West 11th Street was a ten-room brownstone that
dated back to the 1840s. The next moment it was a roof and a stairwell, a massive,
gaping, flame-spewing hole in between. After neighbors and nearby drivers heard
a massive explosion, the roof collapsed, along with all four floors; the two-foot-thick
walls were scarred with holes that ascended twenty feet. The first to scurry from
the building were rats, along with a few cats, fol*lowed by two girls -- one nude,
another just wearing a T-shirt -- who were discovered by rescue workers and led
to a building across the street. Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door, at 16 West
11th, joined the gawkers on the street. Clutching a Tiffany lamp and several paintings
he'd taken with him, he noticed that his desk, which shared a wall with num*ber
18, had fallen through the wall and into the burning rubble.
"When police and firemen began sifting through the wreckage of the explosion, they
found the body of one man beneath the debris, followed by an even grislier discovery.
A large power shovel cleaning debris out of the basement scooped up a body with
two missing hands, one leg, and a mangled head, nails jutting out of the torso's
flesh. At first, the fire de*partment assumed a gas leak caused the blast, but
when an intact gas fur*nace was unearthed in the basement rubble on Monday morning,
suspicions that bombs were involved were confirmed. The dead turned out to be three
members of the radical group the Weathermen. One of them, Terry Robbins, had accidentally
set off the bombs as he was assem*bling them. (The other dead were Theodore Gold
and Diana Oughton, while Kathy Boudin and Cathy Wilkerson, whose father owned the
build*ing, escaped, at least for a while; they were the two young women seen fleeing.)
Along with body parts, police discovered sixty sticks of unexploded dynamite, caps
to set them off, primitive nail bombs, and a map of the tunnels beneath Columbia
University, one of the Weathermen's in*tended targets.
"Both the city and the country barely had time to digest what had hap*pened when,
five days later, explosions detonated in three office build*ings in midtown Manhattan,
in roughly the same area -- 42nd Street between Lexington and Third; Park Avenue
and 55th; and Third Avenue at 46th. The targets were Mobil, IBM, and General Telephone
and Elec*tronics, respectively. In each case, no one was hurt; police had been tipped
to the pending explosions and their precise times by an anony*mous caller a half
hour before. Streets were strewn with glass, elevators were deluged with water,
and the buildings sustained structural damage. Over the next two days, six hundred
bomb threats were called in to the city. On March 15, the Times reported, with no
sense of sarcasm, that 'the number of bomb threats in the city declined sharply
for the first time since Thursday.' An anonymous caller to the New York Police De*partment
credited the Mobil, IBM, and General Telephone bombings to a previously unknown
group called the Revolutionary Force 9."
Author: David Browne
Title: Fire and Rain
Publisher: Da Capo
Date: Copyright 2011 by David Browne
Pages: 118-121
Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost
Story of 1970
by David Browne by Da Capo Press
Paperback
If you wish to read further: Buy Now [https://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001laJa-Q13mnkdBME45qUBQa4wySNFRahb2f8KeC4qt3mIRR2RbKfqVLpOoLvq9lGMDB7ZB3FU-OkL7toyG7WgaQN6chew6MR3BzTXu07rHSfioOsMo3YPmUE1ldIwMyNfgBhVs6oGeKJb6OZaCKeI_vnHFfwxGgiXd6I0HTw_W5-xv_eHI1djFoai14zTa28Winaar2v5JaiBTardCRdxpdNdIIF8vw1JuWM8LDgp_O93hfhFhrgqgXac56uzl1lZrmKUzjU6mzeaUvBv4YMNocEU6EbcFvTedL5IOtURWNQed5DQ4T5CDGZqX9-xy9tay_CAfC9CnUSTVQFrjzoZnAnnA6di4u_0Aq0xmTEuIKRM1g10vzJIa0a0z1ydYTAEekxHCx_5xcM=]
If you use the above link to purchase a book, delanceyplace proceeds from your purchase
will benefit a children's literacy project. All delanceyplace profits are donated
to charity.