Demonic (26 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.”
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He also offered to give them final approval over content, location, cinematographer, and film editor.
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(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.”
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But De Antonio asked them if he should bring a gun to the filming.
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After five more years of playing underground, in 1981, Kathy conspired with addled, drug-addicted members of the Black Liberation Army to rob a Brinks armored truck in Rockland County, New York. They wanted drug money and she wanted something exciting to do. Her six BLA co-conspirators murdered Brinks guard Peter Paige and wounded two others at the Nanuet Mall, then hopped in the back of the getaway truck, with Kathy and her partner, David Gilbert, in the truck’s cab.

When the truck was stopped by the police minutes later, thirty-eight-year-old Kathy played the innocent housewife, frightened by firearms. She emerged from the cab, begging the police to put down their guns. The perplexed cops, who had been told to look for a U-Haul truck full of black gunmen, did so. No sooner were their weapons holstered than six black men leapt out of the back of the vehicle, guns blazing. Firing wildly at the cops, they instantly killed the force’s only black officer, Waverly Brown. Sergeant Edward O’Grady died a few hours later on the operating table.
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Decades later, Kathy continued to deny she intentionally disarmed the cops by pretending to be a middle-class suburbanite afraid of guns. And yet her partner, David Gilbert, tried the exact same ruse about an hour later. Stopped by a policeman, Gilbert calmly walked toward the cop, innocently asking for help, as his co-conspirators in the car loaded their weapons. It didn’t work a second time. The cop yelled for Gilbert to get down and soon another cop arrived with a shotgun. Gilbert and his posse were taken into custody.
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A mob’s behavior, Le Bon says, is an “atavistic residuum of the instincts of the primitive man.” It is the fear of punishment, he says, that “obliges the isolated and responsible individual to curb” his barbarism.
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But the Weathermen never faced punishment. To the contrary, they were showered with praise and admiration.

Even in 2000, the
New York Times
was still describing Kathy Boudin as “deeply committed to civil protest against what [she] saw as injustices.” Leonard—Castro’s lawyer—was said to have been “on the front line fighting for civil liberties and human rights.” And Kathy’s uncle,
I. F. Stone—a paid Soviet agent, as established in the Venona papers in 1995—is simply identified as a “liberal journalist.” After reeling off these insane encomiums,
Times
critic Mel Gussow concluded, “Kathy grew up surrounded by activists and artists. Her social consciousness came naturally.”
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If the Weathermen had succeeded in transporting their bombs to the Fort Dix dance, instead of blowing themselves up, they would have murdered lots of U.S. servicemen and their dates. For liberals, that’s “social consciousness.”

Dustin Hoffman, who lived next door to the Greenwich Village townhouse destroyed by the inept revolutionaries, reminisced in 2000 about the explosion that blew out his living room wall. He told the
Times
, “Since then, we’ve seen killings of abortion doctors, killings by Christian fundamentalists.”
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(In the four decades since
Roe v. Wade
took away Americans’ right to vote on abortion, eight people working at abortion clinics have been killed—versus 53 million babies.)

Even when a liberal’s own house is blown up by left-wingers, he still somehow manages to blame right-wingers.

At her trial, Kathy was represented by a string of dazzling attorneys, many of them working free, and received celebrities in her jail cell as if she were a visiting dignitary. Meanwhile, one of her pro bono attorneys, Dan Pochoda, grandly announced to reporters, “The test of a civilization is how it treats the people it dislikes.”
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Dislikes? Boudin was bigger than Sean Penn, with slightly less moustache.

Her father Leonard, a great advocate of the communist redistribution of wealth, felt differently when it came to his own money. After ponying up $1.5 million in legal costs for Kathy’s defense, he heatedly argued to his tax accountant that he should be able to deduct it as a “business expense.”
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In prison, Kathy wrote poems about her incarceration and her crime, mostly focusing on herself as the victim and what it was like to be stopped at gunpoint by the police. Luckily for Kathy, her boundless self-love was shared by the elites. She won first prize for her prison poetry at the PEN awards in 1997.
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Actor Danny Glover read one of Kathy’s poems at a PEN ceremony, dedicated to political prisoners. Her poetry was also read at a Lincoln
Center benefit in the late nineties. (Perhaps they can rustle up a poem from Jared Loughner for next year’s benefit!) In 2001, the
New Yorker
ran an admiring feature story about Kathy—a “model prisoner”—endorsing her utterly tendentious version of the Brinks robbery. Alas, the piece laments, “friends and families of the victims are not interested in what Boudin is really like.”
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After decades of recounting her sufferings since the robbery that left Waverly Brown dead, Kathy was told that Brown’s son still attended the memorial service held for his father and Sergeant O’Grady every year. Hundreds of uniformed policemen from all over the state attend the ceremony, replete with bagpipes and a color guard, held at 4 p.m. every October 20.

“Really?” Kathy said. “I never knew the guy had a son.”
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There’s the mob’s idealist.

But according to the
New Yorker
article, it was “one of the crime’s crueller ironies” that the “revolutionaries” had killed the first and only black member of the Nyack police force.
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Ironic, one surmises, because the Weathermen had done so much to enrich the lives of black people in America. Kathy would surely agree—if only she could remember who Waverly Brown was. The $1.6 million stolen from the Brinks armored car wasn’t going to build charter schools in the South Bronx. It was to buy cocaine.

And yet Kathy portrayed her participation in a robbery that left nine children fatherless as a charitable act, saying, “Had I been Roman Catholic, perhaps I would have been a nun.”
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When the police searched Kathy’s Morningside Drive apartment after the Brinks robbery, amid the food stamps and welfare forms they found Kathy’s application to New York University Law School.
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That’s what it was always about.

Not anyone could go to a good law school, but anyone could become part of a violent America-hating rabble—and be a superstar. Kathy couldn’t get into a good law school, so she had to declare war on the country. If only this pathetic creature had been accepted by a decent school, she would never have had to become a radical. But the academic establishment spurned her. So she did the only thing she could to make the fashionable set revere her, make movies about her, and publish
admiring profiles in the
New Yorker
about her. Had student radicals received a fraction of the contempt heaped on Sarah Palin daily, it might not have been so much fun.

They were showered with fawning press coverage and numerous admiring documentaries and sought out by Hollywood celebrities. They have won tributes in endless magazine profiles, awards ceremonies, Hollywood documentaries, and sympathetic portrayals on television shows like
Law & Order
. Before fleeing from the townhouse explosion, Kathy had to cancel an appointment with a Random House editor.
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Weatherman Bernardine Dohrn was photographed in a leather miniskirt by celebrity photographer Richard Avedon.

Compare the bien-pensants’ treatment of women who participated in bombings and cop-killings to their treatment of Carrie Prejean. Dohrn and Boudin enthusiastically endorsed the Manson murders; pageant contestant Prejean only endorsed marriage. Guess which one was relentlessly mocked? Christianity is never trendy, which is one reason Christians can never be a mob.

Where are Prejean’s celebrity photographs hanging in chichi New York museums? To the contrary, Prejean—the actually attractive one—has been called ugly, stupid, hateful, and bigoted and has had her plastic surgery broadcast around the globe, while the genetic misfit Weathermen are hailed for their glamour and style. To applause and laughter, Obama adviser David Axelrod went on NPR and said the president was naming the White House dog Miss California after Prejean.
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If only Prejean had praised Manson instead of marriage, liberals would finally have a female “idealist” who doesn’t look like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Dohrn and her husband Ayers have dined out for half a century on the glory of their days as Weathermen. They’re the domestic terrorist version of
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
They give dramatic renderings of their days “underground” as if it took wily stratagems to hide in a country where 12 million illegal aliens stroll about Los Angeles undetected.

The aging lothario, five-foot-four Ayers particularly enjoys recounting his sexual exploits. Here’s a selection from his 2001 book on—guess what?—his days as a Weatherman: “She felt warm and moist” … “Her
mouth opening slightly, our tongues touching secretly” … “Another night Diana and Rachel and Terry and I bedded down together” … “You were supposed to f—k no matter what.” …
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In 2002, there was yet another movie made about these narcissistic sociopaths,
The Weather Underground
. Naturally, it was nominated for an Oscar.

The moment Yale-reject mediocrities became “radicals,” throwing rocks at cops and setting bombs, they entered a lifetime of praise—and insta-rehabilitation. When it was time for them to make money, they were hired for cushy teaching jobs at the nation’s universities.

To name just a few:

• Ron Karenga, aka Dr. Maulana Karenga, was a founder of United Slaves, a violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers and a dupe of the FBI. In 1971, Karenga was convicted of torturing two members of United Slaves. The
Los Angeles Times
reported on the trial testimony of one of Karenga’s victims:

Deborah Jones, who once was given the Swahili title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis’ mouth and placed against Miss Davis’ face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said.
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Karenga is a professor of black studies at California State University, Long Beach.
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• William Ayers put a bomb in the Pentagon and now teaches childhood education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.