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AN INTIMATE RECKONING WITH THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND  
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Frida Berrigan
July 30, 2026
Waging Non-violence
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_ Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s new book about his Weatherman parents,
“Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young,” contends honestly with the
political violence of the 1970s. _

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Looking for a quintessentially American book to read this 4th of
July? 

As we celebrate and/or mourn the 250th birthday of the most
militarized, most violent, (almost) most corrupt, most polluting, most
inequitable and most sad nation on the face of the Earth, I am reading
“Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young: A Fugitive Family in the
Revolutionary Underground.” Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s new book about his
Weatherman parents is more than just a great beach read (which it also
is, literally). It is the most appropriate book to read instead of
subjecting yourself to a PTSD-triggering fireworks display.

It chronicles a small group of revolutionaries who used dynamite,
bombs and guns to blow up buildings, statutes and police cars, break
people out of prison and generally make mayhem half a century ago. But
it is not just history to view on the page. It says so much to our
MAGA moment.

 

It is a story of history, conscience and memory at a time of AI slop,
official lies and active amnesia. It is a story of youthful rebellion
against the Vietnam War that matures into revolutionary sabotage,
political violence and life “underground” that eventually settles
into careers in education and law outside of the mainstream. It is the
story of surviving some of the most harrowing political moments of the
last half century. It is a story of a family.

I grew up in a very different corner of the left than Ayers Dohrn.
There were no drug-fueled orgies, shootouts with the cops or days of
rage in the Catholic left. But there was a similar stridency, urgency
and seriousness about my family life
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There was jail and prison and fear of FBI infiltration and dirty
tricks. There were people with no last names who showed up for a meal
or a night and headed back into the underground. We also survived
separation and secrecy, and I am also not raising my children on the
knife’s edge of the revolution. So, Ayers Dohrn’s effort to tell
his family’s story with truthfulness, curiosity and distance landed
so very true for me. 

DON’T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO KNOW

Who were the Weathermen? They’ve been memorialized countless times
on screens small and large, most recently (sort of) in “One Battle
After Another.” But in real life, they were mostly white, mostly
college educated, mostly middle-class young people who had been part
of Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, before splintering off
from that group in the summer of 1969 to join forces with the Black
Panthers and incite revolution, laying waste
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to what they left behind. They felt like they had tried everything
else!

In recounting this episode, Ayers Dohrn was able to use FBI notes and
communiques to highlight their role in fomenting the clash between the
more progressive and radical factions, manipulating members into
all-out conflict with one another and essentially destroying SDS.
Ayers Dohrn quotes Weatherman faction leader Mark Rudd reflecting that
it was “the single greatest mistake I’ve made in my life …
scuttl[ing] America’s largest radical organization — with chapters
on hundreds of campus[es], a powerful national identity and enormous
growth potential — for a fantasy of revolutionary urban guerrilla
warfare.” What could have been is not explored.

At this point, we’d need speculative fiction to spin out the
possibilities of true solidarity between the largely white,
campus-based antiwar movement and the Black Panther Party and its
affiliates. It sure scared the FBI! In fact, in a memo to agents in
the field, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote that SDS and the Black
Panther Party working together would “pose a formidable threat. …
It would be a definite advantage if these two groups were
alienated.”

This story is told with cinematic depth, gleaned from Ayers Dohrn’s
interviews with participants and from declassified FBI files. The new
organization was small, secretive and “fiercely committed to
following the leadership of the Black vanguard, to fighting the police
and to going out, if necessary, in a blaze of revolutionary glory.”

A DECLARATION OF A STATE OF WAR

The mostly middle-class, young, white activists had been working on
many fronts for years, but their “organizing and peaceful protest
had failed to stop the war.” They were going to try something new
— but actually it wasn’t new. It was old. It was violence. And,
for a time, it was street riots against the police and property damage
during protests. But then their friend and Black Panther leader Fred
Hampton was assassinated by Chicago police and the FBI in a barrage of
90 bullets. And then the horrors of the My Lai massacre were revealed,
and as 1969 became 1970, the Weathermen declared war on the United
States.

An FBI wanted poster for Bill Ayers. (FBI)

Ayers Dohrn describes a series of bombings at the homes of judges,
banks and police stations, and a complicated plan in New York City’s
West Village that would have brought the carnage of Vietnam to a
military Officer’s Ball at Fort Dix in New Jersey. The Fort Dix plan
was thwarted not by the FBI or a rival faction of revolutionaries, but
by chemistry. The bombs went off in the 11th Street townhouse the
revolutionaries were using as a temporary safe house (while the
parents of one of the Weathermen were on a St. Kitts vacation). Three
Weathermen were killed in the blast and the house was obliterated.
Bill Ayers’ girlfriend at the time was among the dead and he carried
that grief and memory into Ayers Dohrn’s life. As a little kid, Zayd
remembers going with his father to lay flowers at the site every
year. 

Recalling that loss, Ayers Dohrn asks his father how he contemplated
killing people with those bombs. Bill Ayers responded that “We often
said things like, ‘I need to be a tool of the revolution.’ … Or
‘I need to be an instrument of the rebellion.’ And that
instrumentalizing of our lives was more than a weakness. It was a
horror.”

That realization and the other reflections Ayers Dohrn is able to
elicit from his parents as they think back on their roles as
revolutionaries are the backbone of this book. Bill and Bernardine
Dohrn are able to reflect, see mistakes and missteps, explain their
priorities, and accept responsibility for the harms they inflicted
because they survived and so many other people who were part of this
splinter movement did not.

IT WAS A HORROR

It is difficult and brave that Zayd Ayers Dohrn contends with violence
and memory without letting anyone — even his mother and father —
off the hook. Against the backdrop of an administration and a
president that can’t remember, or won’t admit to, crimes of three
sentences ago, he holds his father and mother to a high standard. And
they can take it. They survived the days of rage and purity tests and
self-criticism sessions and the run-ins with the law and stretches of
prison and dirty tricks that so many others did not.

His mother, Bernardine Dohrn, is now living with dementia, as is my
own mother, and I found his present-day conversations with her the
most poignant and difficult of the book. Memory threads all the way
through this book. What do we remember? Why do some memories stick? 

Ayers Dohrn began his reckoning with family history in an
extraordinary 10-part podcast called “Mother Country Radicals,”
which was Fred Hampton’s term of endearment for the Weathermen. But
as he researches his own past and excavates his own memory, there are
things that don’t add up, don’t stitch together, memories that
don’t bear up to scrutiny. There are contradictions that he can’t
square.

Once the podcast was released, he received letters, diaries and phone
calls from old fellow travelers. These new resources, along with 7,833
pages of FBI files, convinced him that there was more to the story and
he sat down to write. The book is more in-depth, intimate and
searching than the podcast. Ayers Dohrn is less star struck by his
parents’ bravado too. Now, he is a parent, too, noting decisions
that Bill and Bernadine made that put the family in jeopardy, that
were hard for him, that caused him pain. He sees and feels the impact
of his parents’ choice of the revolution over parenthood. “Over
and over, you can see the same pattern, repeated: Asked to choose
between solidarity and family, revolution and love, my parents and
their comrades chose the cause almost every time.”

A 1969 mugshot of Bernadine Dohrn from an arrest at a Chicago protest,
later circulated by the FBI. (FBI)

Family lore had it that Bill and Bernardine hung up their
revolutionary bonafides when they became parents. But the documents
Ayers Dohrn received after the podcast aired show that was not true.
They continued to take risks even after they became parents of Zayd
and his younger brother Malik. One memorable camping trip in West
Virginia as a family turns out to be a trip to case Alderson Prison
for Women where Black Panther leader Assata Shakur was serving out her
sentence. She was eventually liberated from prison in another
operation and Bill Ayers played a small — but very risky — role in
that while Bernardine was home with Zayd.

Ayers Dohrn confronted his dad by asking: “What would have happened,
not only to him but to me, my mother and my unborn brother?” Ayers
responded: “It was a difficult decision. It felt monumental, it felt
important. We were pretty clear that Bernardine would be with you. …
But yeah, it was, in retrospect, really risky. And really on the
edge.” But in the end, Bill Ayers played his part, “Because it
mattered. Because the world needed it to happen.”

They continued to do leg work for the Black Liberation Army and other
radical groups like Action Five even after they informally adopted
14-month-old Chesa Boudin. That should have been a clear warning to
stop. Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, Chesa’s parents, had acted as
getaway drivers for an Action Five robbery on a Brinks armored truck
in October 1981. The job quickly went off the rails and three people
injured, and three others were killed — Nyack police officers Edward
O’Grady and Waverly Brown, and Peter Paige, one of the team from the
Brinks truck. Boudin and Gilbert spent decades in prison for their
crimes while the Ayers Dohrn family raised their son. 

LIFE UNDERGROUND

I described this book to a friend, and she got stuck on the word
underground. “Wait,” she demanded, “you mean they lived
underground, like moles or Hobbits?” No, they lived under assumed
names, worked cash jobs, had fake IDs. They were on the run from the
FBI, facing jail time and family separation. They had disappeared from
“normal society” and were dependent on friends and fellow
travelers for support.

A striking moment in the book comes when Ayers Dohrn recounts that at
one of his father’s off-the-books jobs, as a longshoreman in San
Francisco, he gets the sense that something is about to go down. Bill
Ayers saw men on the rooftops and by the union hall, standing out in
their cheap suits and cop-loafers. But he was already at the docks and
there was nowhere to run. The docks are all of a sudden swarmed with
police and his co-workers started yelling “La Migra! La Migra!”

 “It only took a few minutes; the feds rounded them all up, chasing
them to the edge of the water or just tackling them down to the
concrete of the parking lot. And they let all the white people go”
Ayers Dohrn recounts.

Previous Coverage

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Daniel Berrigan and his fearless nonviolence, at 100
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The officials were not looking for Bill Ayers, of the Weathermen. They
were rounding up undocumented immigrants. Ayers Dohrn writes that his
father had “always assumed, with the self-centered paranoia of a
federal fugitive, that he was the only outlaw hiding out on the docks.
… But it turned out that half of the men on his crew were invisible,
even to him. They were all living on a different plane, off the grid.
Undocumented. Underground.”

In his autobiography “To Dwell in Peace,” my uncle, Father Daniel
Berrigan
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writes that while he was underground, avoiding a prison sentence for
the Catonsville 9 action
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and speaking constantly to young people, he heard that the Weather
Underground wanted to dialogue. On Aug. 8, 1970, just a few days
before he was captured on Block Island, he made an audio recording and
sent it off through intermediaries. It had been just six months since
the three Weathermen were killed in the bomb blast on 11th Street.

A NEW KIND OF ANGER

In the message
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to his “Brothers and Sisters,” Dan Berrigan invites them to “a
new kind of anger which is both useful in communicating and
imaginative and slow-burning to fuel the long haul which is the
definition of our whole lives.” He calls them away from violence for
the sake of violence, noting that there is a great risk that violence
“will change people for the worse and harden them against
enlightenment.” He continues by sharing that “I hope your lives
are about something more than sabotage.”

I looked around for evidence that Dan Berrigan ever sat down with the
Weather Underground, or that his message received a reply. I did not
find any, but the group did shift tactics after the 11th Street
explosion. Ayers Dohrn writes of a meeting that his mother called a
few weeks later where the group became the Weather Underground and
“disavow[ed] deadly violence going forward.” They did not become
paragons of pacifism after this, but they stopped a posture of open
warfare against the American people. 

In “Absurd Convictions, Modest Hopes: Conversations After Prison
with Lee Lockwood,” Dan shares that the Weather Underground did
respond to his communications, saying, “In fact the response was
almost beyond my hope, because it indicated that they really were
serious and were growing more thoughtful about such things.”
That’s where that thread ends, as far as I can tell, but it is
beautiful to consider the “calling in” and constructive dialogue
that could have followed, as both sides — motivated by a fervent
commitment to racial equality and an end to war — kept talking.

In his message to the Weather Underground, my uncle has a beautiful
formulation of the concept of underground, writing: “Instead of
thinking about the underground as temporary or exotic or abnormal,
perhaps we are being called upon to start thinking of its implication
as an entirely self-sufficient, mobile, internal revival community, so
that the underground may be the definition of our future.”

Ayers Dohrn dedicates his book to his wife Rachel and their children
Dalin and Light. Late in the book, he writes that “every generation
is born into a world desperately in need of transformation, and young
people in every era have inherited a struggle — a fight to make
things better — that stretches back long before any of them were
born."

I read “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young” with horror and hope
— in equal measure. There is plenty to rage about in the Mother
Country these days. You do not have to look far to find a replay of
the horrors that radicalized Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and their
friends. The war lust, impunity and corruption of the Trump
administration and the craven weaponization of the justice system
under FBI Director Kash Patel makes President Richard Nixon and FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover look like Boy Scouts, and that is saying
something!

Our society is full of the dirty, dangerous, violent and young, but so
much of the violence is turned inward into self-harm and online into
self-referential time frittering. It does spill out into the streets
and it is political, but it is not, for the most part, organized or
coordinated. The political violence of the Weatherman and the
Underground that felt so justified and satisfied, that urge to “do
something” and to “take a stand,” did do something. But most of
that something was sowing chaos, alienating potential allies and
narrowing the political space available to others. That violence was
used — over and over — to rationalize indiscriminate
state-sponsored repression and violence. In the process, almost
incidentally, they did build something of value, the idea of an
underground, and that persists and continues.

There is a lot of hope here for me in this idea of a permanent
underground that sustains and revives, a subculture of connection and
support that is not on the same map (literally not plottable) as the
systems that exploit and oppress.

Those who survived those harrowing years as fugitives, undergrounders
and radicals, built community, raised families, showed up for one
another. And they were able to do all that because they survived. Or,
perhaps, they survived because they could do all that.

 

_Frida Berrigan is a columnist for Waging Nonviolence and the author
of "__It Runs in the Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing
into Rebellious Motherhood_
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in New London, Conn. with her husband Patrick and their three
children._

 

_Waging Nonviolence is a nonprofit media organization dedicated to
providing original reporting and expert analysis of social movements
around the world. With a commitment to accuracy, transparency and
editorial independence, we examine today’s most crucial issues by
shining a light on those who are organizing for just and peaceful
solutions._

* Weather Underground
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* Violence
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* Father Daniel Berrigan
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* Nonviolence
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