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Bad Moon Rising: How the Weather Underground Beat the FBI and Lost the Revolution
. By
Arthur M.
Eckstein
. (
New Haven
:
Yale University Press
,
2016
.
viii
,
352
pp. $35.00.)
Daniel S. Chard 1University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic
Journal of American History, Volume 104, Issue 3, December 2017, Pages 817–818, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jax407
Published:
01 December 2017
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Daniel S. Chard, Bad Moon Rising: How the Weather Underground Beat the FBI and Lost the Revolution, Journal of American History, Volume 104, Issue 3, December 2017, Pages 817–818, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jax407
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The Weather Underground, originally known as Weatherman, was a small group of white radicals that splintered from Students for a Democratic Society in 1969. The group carried out approximately twenty-five politically motivated bombings inside the United States before dissolving in 1976 amid internal conflict, all while evading a massive Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) dragnet. A historian of classical antiquity at the University of Maryland, Arthur M. Eckstein decided to add to the literature on the Weather Underground after being introduced to thousands of declassified FBI documents on the group that the National Archives made available in June 2011 and September 2013. Eckstein also conducted oral histories with former Weather Underground members.
With copious detail, Bad Moon Rising documents Weatherman's unfruitful efforts to ignite a revolutionary uprising in the United States and the FBI's unsuccessful attempt to defeat the group. Eckstein offers few new insights on Weatherman, though he emphasizes that in early 1970, before its leadership committed to a strategy of attacking property but avoiding bloodshed, the group's “bombing plans were more lethal than previously understood” (p. 246). In particular, Eckstein highlights Weatherman's botched efforts to bomb a pair of Detroit police buildings on March 6, 1970, the same day that three members of the group accidentally blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse while preparing bombs intended for a dance for noncommissioned army officers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Eckstein's most original revelations concern the FBI. He demonstrates that President Richard M. Nixon and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover viewed Weatherman violence as an urgent national security threat and that under pressure from Nixon, the FBI launched a massive investigation that included illegal burglaries into the residences of suspected Weather Underground supporters. The FBI's efforts failed, Eckstein asserts, due to the bureau's “shaky competence” and the Weather Underground's high security and engagement in sporadic, relatively low-risk, nonlethal bombings (p. 253). Most Weather Underground members reintegrated into American society in the late 1970s, while FBI officials W. Mark Felt and Edward Miller received felony convictions in 1980 for authorizing the burglaries (President Ronald Reagan pardoned them in 1981). Eckstein argues that the Weather Underground “foiled the FBI and destroyed itself” (p. 243).
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