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In a way, what the Weathermen did was even more serious than Sarah Palin’s putting crosshairs on congressional districts.

After a Chicago Democratic official, Richard Elrod, became paralyzed for life while fighting with a privileged looter during the Weathermen’s Days of Rage, Obama adviser Bernardine Dohrn led the Weathermen in a song sung to the tune of Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady, Lay”:

Lay, Elrod, Lay,

Lay in the street for a while

Stay, Elrod, stay

Stay in your bed for a while

You thought you could stop the Weatherman

But up-front people put you on your can,

Stay, Elrod, stay

Stay in your iron lung,

Play, Elrod, play

Play with your toes for a while

The author of that ditty, Ted Gold, was later blown up in an elegant Greenwich Village townhouse while assembling the bomb intended for a new-recruits dance at Fort Dix.

Kathy was part of the brain trust that blew up the townhouse, but fled before the police could talk to her. Kathy’s parents were delighted with the townhouse bombing. Her mother had always envied the home’s owners for their wealth anyway,20 and her father thought seeing his daughter on FBI “Wanted” posters was “good for his legend.”21

Usually the aging radicals cite their ineptitude at setting bombs to brag about how few humans they murdered. But these bombs were made with nails, and nails don’t destroy property, they maim and kill people. The three Weathermen who accidentally dynamited themselves were completely dismembered, their body parts splattered all over the walls and ceiling.22

Fortuitously, going underground after the townhouse explosion finally gave Kathy an excuse to get a nose job. She also dyed her hair bright red—the better to hide—mimicking Bernardine Dohrn, born Bernardine Ohrnstein.23 These revolutionaries would engage in sex orgies to “smash monogamy,” but one convention the gritty radicals adhered to was the WASP ideal of beauty and gentrified names.

Being “underground” gave them all celebrity status. The only thing that terrified Kathy, Braudy says, was that “if stripped of her glamorous and dramatic revolutionary attachments and subterfuges, she would be the dullest person in Leonard’s circle of admirers.… She would be a woman, no longer young, whose work was waiting tables and cleaning houses.”24

In 1974, Kathy, Dohrn, and Bill Ayers were thrilled when a documentary filmmaker, Emile De Antonio, offered to make a movie about the Weather Underground. De Antonio was solidly in the liberal firmament, having made the movie Point of Order, attacking Senator Joseph McCarthy. In a letter to the Weathermen, he gushed over them, praising their “masterstroke of political theater” and the “tender loving care” they took making bombs. He signed his letter “Bang. Bang. Bang.”25 He also offered to give them final approval over content, location, cinematographer, and film editor.26 (I wonder if McCarthy got that for Point of Order.)

Some would argue that setting bombs, rioting in the streets, and trying to blow up American servicemen was even worse than identifying a communist as a communist. But that wasn’t the view of American liberals.

After the Weathermen led De Antonio on a two-hour game of hide-and-seek before their first meeting, the steeplechase ended at a restaurant, open to the public. But they couldn’t have said, “Let’s meet at Appleby’s” because, you see, they were “underground.” Their subsequent meetings with the filmmaker were in restaurants, on street corners, and in public parks, including Central Park.

They apparently relished playing cops-and-robbers—but it turns out the FBI wasn’t even looking for them anymore. Kent State had put an end to the student riots, and in any event, the Vietnam War was over. No one cared about the Weather Underground. Around the time of the filming, a newspaper in Wisconsin printed David Gilbert’s whereabouts and—nothing happened. “No one arrested him,” Braudy writes, the “authorities weren’t interested in him.”27 But