IN THE MIDDLE of one late-August night in 1970, radicals bombed the Army Mathematics Research Center on the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus. The blast killed a scientist who was in his laboratory to catch up on work before a vacation.
In a letter published by the Milwaukee underground newspaper Kaleidoscope, a group calling itself the “New Year’s Gang” took credit for the bombing and demanded the abolition of ROTC, as well as the release of three Vietnam veterans who’d bombed the power substation of a nearby army training base.
“If these demands are not met by October 30th,” the letter read, “open warfare, kidnapping of important officials, and even assassination will not be ruled out.” In an extraordinary action, a federal prosecutor jailed Kaleidoscope editor Mark Knops for six months for refusing to answer questions before a grand jury. Although the authorities thought they knew the identities of the four bombers within hours, they could not locate them; the suspects’ names joined fellow radicals H. Rap Brown and Angela Davis on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. When Davis was captured, another militant, Bernardine Dohrn, moved onto the list within hours.
Bombs were exploding at least weekly in 1970—in Chicago, in Marin County, in Seattle, in Santa Barbara, in Long Island City, in Orlando. And American radicals were moving into other areas of adventurism. Members of Weatherman (a violent offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society) helped Timothy Leary escape from prison in San Luis Obispo in September. Two women who’d worked for the National Strike Information Center at Brandeis University—coordinating campus protests immediately following the May murder of four unarmed protestors by the National Guard at Kent State University—took part in a Boston bank robbery that left a police officer dead. They too went underground and joined the most wanted list.
The FBI stepped up its wiretapping and black-bag jobs in its dragnet for radicals. To get access to on-campus intelligence, the agency even lowered the minimum acceptable age for recruiting informants. But it was mostly coming up empty-handed.
“Face it,” a Justice Department veteran told Newsweek, “we’re in what amounts to a guerrilla war with the kids. And so far, the kids are winning.”
Still, a 33-page FBI report shared information from a confidential source that the activities of the Yippies—a streettheater-oriented radical group of the wildest antiwar activists, which had been very active in
