Dale Van Atta: Ayers, Laird and the bombing of the Pentagon

Dale Van Atta  —  11/04/2008 8:47 pm

"Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them."

-- Bill Ayers, "Fugitive Days"

The injection of former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers into the presidential race by Republicans who were trying to smear Barack Obama has prompted renewed recollections from a Wisconsinite who was a chief target of Ayers and others of his ilk during the Vietnam era.

Melvin Laird of Marshfield, who had served 16 years as a congressman from Wisconsin's 7th District, was pressured by President-elect Richard Nixon to become his secretary of defense at the height of the Vietnam War. He knew he would be unpopular, and would even be in danger.

But once in office, he would not be distracted by others in an almost single-minded plan to end the draft and American involvement in the Vietnam War -- a goal that often put him at odds with Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger.

Anti-war dissenters in Wisconsin had little idea that the state's native son Laird was working toward that end and made a point of trying to hit him where they knew it would hurt -- including the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison. His mother, Helen Connor Laird, was on the university's Board of Regents, and Congressman Laird had arranged congressional appropriations to fund several research buildings on campus.

On Jan. 1, 1970, at 1:30 a.m., a group calling itself "the Vanguard of the Revolution" stole a twin-engine Cessna 150 used to train UW's ROTC flight cadets and flew 35 miles north to drop three bombs on the Badger Army Ammunition Plant. An anonymous telephone caller to the UW student newspaper, the Daily Cardinal, announced the action, adding: "Unfortunately, all the bombs were duds."

The same week, two UW buildings housing ROTC cadets were firebombed. The Cardinal, in an editorial titled "End of the Road," endorsed the terrorist acts. "If acts such as those committed in the last few days are needed to strike fear into the bodies of once fearless men ... then so be it." (Across the country during the 1969-70 academic year, there were 250 bombings and 247 cases of arson on and off campuses.)

In the wake of the Cambodia invasion and Kent State tragedy (four students were killed when members of the National Guard opened fire at a protest) in early summer, the UW campus was in turmoil and the university's president was forced to resign.

Then, on Aug. 24 at 3:42 a.m., the Army Mathematics Research Center at UW was bombed. "The New Year's Gang" -- as they dubbed themselves after the abortive ammunition plant action -- had given police warning that a bomb would go off in five minutes. The bomb, a mixture of nitrogen fertilizer and fuel oil parked next to the building, went off three minutes early, killing Robert Fassnacht, a 33-year-old post-doctorate student doing research in the early morning hours, and injuring four others.

Even though Laird was a target of both dangerous and not-so-dangerous but hostile protests, he refused to move his family from its suburban Maryland home to safer housing on a military base. Protesters acted out guerrilla theater on his lawn and anti-war poet Allen Ginsberg urinated on the front of his house. Laird believed the anti-war dissenters, especially America's young, deserved an attentive ear.

The Pentagon was well aware of the danger emanating from a new group formed in 1969 called the Weather Underground. Its founders dramatically walked out of the 1969 national convention of the Students for a Democratic Society, and went into the bomb-making business. They were full of anti-establishment fury and anti-war rage, and were further fueled by a dangerous sense of impotence.

They initially called themselves "Weatherman," after a line in Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues": "You don't need a weather man/To know which way the wind blows." Several hundred-strong at their peak, they went underground as they began to plot murder and mayhem. Living and moving about in "cells," they developed their own "slanguage." Dynamite was "ice cream" or "pickles." The Pentagon was "Maggie's Farm," after the Bob Dylan song with the refrain, "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more."

Ayers' favorite target was the Pentagon. In his memoir, "Fugitive Days," he wrote, "The Pentagon was ground zero for war and conquest, organizing headquarters of a gang of murdering thieves, a colossal stain on the planet, a hated symbol everywhere around the world."

Weeks before the first bombing of the Pentagon in 1972, a three-person Weather cell set up in a cheap apartment near the building. A still-unidentified Weather woman was tapped to case the place. She dressed in a suit and blouse, donned a dark wig and thick glasses, and carried a briefcase into the Pentagon each morning to walk its halls and map it. Just in case she touched anything, she painted her fingertips with clear nail polish so she would leave no fingerprints.

After repeatedly entering, unchallenged, with hundreds of workers every morning, she identified a fairly isolated woman's room in an Air Force section of the building as the best place to hide three pounds of dynamite under a floor drain. The bomb was placed to go off on Ho Chi Minh's birthday, May 19.

The 12:59 a.m. blast on the fourth floor of the Pentagon's E-ring shook that section of the building, including the offices of Air Force Secretary Robert Seamans and Air Force Chief of Staff John Ryan.

While security sweeps for other possible bombs began, a transatlantic call was placed to Defense Secretary Laird in Copenhagen, where it was past 7 a.m.

"Was anyone hurt?" he anxiously asked the Pentagon caller.

Custodians had been cleaning nearby, and about 300 feet from the blast, 10 Air Force officers and men were working at the all-night Air Force message center -- but no one was hurt. Grateful, Laird put in a call to his public affairs chief directing him to treat the incident as a minor one.

Approximately $80,000 damage had been done by the blast, mostly from the seeping water from broken pipes, but only 18 of the Pentagon's 26,000 employees had to move out of their offices temporarily. Though he did not know the downplaying had come at Laird's direction, a Washington Post reporter, Carl Bernstein, took due note of the "extraordinarily muted reaction to the attack on the symbol of America's military establishment."

No one was ever arrested for the incident. Two of those responsible, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, were on the run for more than a decade. Dohrn made the FBI's "10 Most Wanted List," with J. Edgar Hoover labeling her "the most dangerous woman in America." After the pair had their second child together, Ayers and Dohrn gave themselves up to the FBI in 1981. Eventually, all federal charges were dropped against them because the FBI had engaged in a variety of illegal actions while pursuing them. The two married. Dohrn became a professor at Northwestern University and a crusader for juvenile justice system reform, while Ayers became a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In 2001, Ayers published a self-confessing, unapologetic memoir, "Fugitive Days."

"I'd marched on the Pentagon more than once, scaled its walls, confronted armed troops there, and even peed on its side. If I could have, I'd have duct-taped it shut, or put it in a trash compactor, but the closest I could come was" a bomb in a bathroom, he wrote.

In a terrible irony, the New York Times printed a fairly sympathetic profile of Ayers and his new book on the front page of its arts section on Sept. 11 under the headline: "No regrets for a love of explosives." In the article, which may have been the last thing some victims of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks read that morning, Ayers was quoted: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."

Dale Van Atta is the author of "With Honor: Melvin Laird in War, Peace and Politics," which is available at bookstores throughout the Madison area.

Dale Van Atta  —  11/04/2008 8:47 pm