Days of Rage : America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence

The Weathermen. The Symbionese Liberation Army. The FALN. The Black Liberation Army. The names seem quaint now, when not forgotten altogether. But there was a stretch of time in America, roughly between 1968 and 1975, when there was on average more than one significant terrorist act in this country every week, and the FBI combated these groups and others as nodes in a single revolutionary underground, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government. The FBI's response to the leftist revolutionary counterculture has not been treated kindly by history, and it is true that in hindsight many of its efforts seem almost comically ineffectual, if not criminal in themselves. But one aim of Bryan Burrough's book is to temper those easy judgments with an understanding of just how deranged these times were, how charged with menace. Burrough re-creates an atmosphere that seems almost unbelievable just forty years later, conjuring a time of native-born radicals, most of them "nice middle-class kids," smuggling bombs into skyscrapers and detonating them inside the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, at a courthouse in Boston, at a Wall Street restaurant packed with lunchtime diners. Radicals who robbed dozens of banks and assassinated policemen in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta. The FBI's fevered response included the formation of a secret task force called Squad 47, dedicated to hunting the groups down and rolling them up. But Squad 47 itself was not overly squeamish about legal niceties, and its efforts ultimately ended in fiasco. Benefiting from the extraordinary number of people from the underground and the FBI who speak about their experiences for the first time, Days of Rage is filled with important revelations and fresh details about the major revolutionaries and their connections and about the FBI and its desperate efforts to make the bombings stop. From the bestselling author of "Public Enemies" and "The Big Rich," an explosive account of the decade-long battle between the FBI and the homegrown revolutionary terrorists of the 1970s. The Weathermen. The Symbionese Liberation Army. The FALN. The Black Liberation Army. The names seem quaint now, when not forgotten altogether. But there was a stretch of time in America, roughly between 1968 and 1975, when there was on average more than one significant terrorist act in this country every week, and the FBI combated these groups and others as nodes in a single revolutionary underground, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government. The FBI's response to the leftist revolutionary counterculture has not been treated kindly by history, and it is true that in hindsight many of its efforts seem almost comically ineffectual, if not criminal in themselves. But part of the extraordinary accomplishment of Bryan Burrough's groundbreaking book is to temper those easy judgments with an understanding of just how deranged these times were, how charged with menace. Burrough re-creates an atmosphere that seems almost unbelievable just forty years later, conjuring a time of native-born radicals, most of them "nice middle-class kids," smuggling bombs into skyscrapers and detonating them inside the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, at a courthouse in Boston, at a Wall Street restaurant packed with lunchtime diners. Radicals who robbed dozens of banks and assassinated policemen, in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta. The FBI's fevered response included the formation of a secret task force called Squad 47, dedicated to hunting the groups down and rolling them up. But Squad 47 itself was not overly squeamish about legal niceties, and its efforts ultimately ended in fiasco. Benefiting from the extraordinary number of people from the underground and the FBI who speak about their experiences for the first time, "Days of Rage" is filled with important revelations and fresh details about the major revolutionaries and their connections and about the FBI and its desperate efforts to make the bombings stop. The result is mesmerizing and completely new--a book that takes us into the hearts and minds of homegrown terrorists and federal agents alike and weaves their stories into a spellbinding secret history of the 1970s. -- Publisher description From the bestselling author of Public Enemies and The Big Rich , an explosive account of the decade-long battle between the FBI and the homegrown revolutionary movements of the 1970s The Weathermen. The Symbionese Liberation Army. The FALN. The Black Liberation Army. The names seem quaint now, when not forgotten altogether. But there was a stretch of time in America, during the 1970s, when bombings by domestic underground groups were a daily occurrence. The FBI combated these groups and others as nodes in a single revolutionary underground, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government. The FBI’s response to the leftist revolutionary counterculture has not been treated kindly by history, and in hindsight many of its efforts seem almost comically ineffectual, if not criminal in themselves. But part of the extraordinary accomplishment of Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage is to temper those easy judgments with an understanding of just how deranged these times were, how charged with menace. Burrough re-creates an atmosphere that seems almost unbelievable just forty years later, conjuring a time of native-born radicals, most of them “nice middle-class kids,” smuggling bombs into skyscrapers and detonating them inside the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, at a Boston courthouse and a Wall Street restaurant packed with lunchtime diners—radicals robbing dozens of banks and assassinating policemen in New York, San Francisco, Atlanta. The FBI, encouraged to do everything possible to undermine the radical underground, itself broke many laws in its attempts to bring the revolutionaries to justice—often with disastrous consequences. Benefiting from the extraordinary number of people from the underground and the FBI who speak about their experiences for the first time, Days of Rage is filled with revelations and fresh details about the major revolutionaries and their connections and about the FBI and its desperate efforts to make the bombings stop. The result is a mesmerizing book that takes us into the hearts and minds of homegrown terrorists and federal agents alike and weaves their stories into a spellbinding secret history of the 1970s. Prologue -- "The revolution ain't tomorrow. It's now. You dig?": Sam Melville and the birth of the American underground -- "Negroes with guns": Black rage and the road to revolution -- Weatherman. -- "You say you want a revolution": The Movement and the emergence of Weatherman -- "As to killing people, we were prepared to do that": Weatherman, January to March 1970 -- The Townhouse: Weatherman, March to June 1970 -- "Responsible terrorism": Weatherman, June 1970 to October 1970 -- The wrong side of history: Weatherman and the FBI, October 1970 to April 1971 -- The Black Liberation Army. -- "An army of angry niggas": The birth of the Black Liberation Army, Spring 1971 -- The rise of the BLA: The Black Liberation Army, June 1971 to February 1972 -- "We got pretty small": The Weather Underground and the FBI, 1971-72 -- Blood in the streets of Babylon: The Black Liberation Army, 1973 -- The second wave. -- The dragon unleashed: The rise of the Symbionese Liberation Army : November 1973 to February 1974 -- "Patty has been kidnapped": The Symbionese Liberation Army, February to May 1974 -- What Patty Hearst wrought: The rise of the post-SLA underground -- "The Belfast of North America": Patty Hearst, the SLA, and the Mad Bombers of San Francisco -- Hard times: The death of the Weather Underground -- "Welcome to Fear City": The FALN, 1976 to 1978 -- "Armed revolutionary love": The odyssey of Ray Levasseur -- Bombs and diapers: Ray Levasseur's odyssey, part II -- Out with a bang. -- The Family: The Pan-Radical Alliance, 1977 to 1979 -- Jailbreaks and captures: The Family and the FALN, 1979-80 -- The scales of justice: Trials, surrenders, and the Family, 1980-81 -- The last revolutionaries: The United Freedom Front, 1981 to 1984.