The Weather Underground | Starting the Fire | 1

It's a little before noon on March 6th, 1970, in Greenwich Village, New York.

On West 11th Street, the pale rust-colored brick and white-framed windows of a four-story townhouse blend perfectly with the rest of the homes on the block.

Squeezed between two nearly identical buildings, Number 18 is the kind of place you'd expect to find an ordinary nuclear family.

But the inside of Number 18 is far from ordinary.

On the upper floors, bare mattresses lie on the ground next to ratty sleeping bags.

Brightly colored posters of Che Guevara adorn the walls, and piles of obscure Communist and Anarchist text are stacked in a corner.

The top three floors of the townhouse are quiet.

27-year-old Cathy Boudin is showering, while her friend Cathy Wilkerson lounges on the couch.

Downstairs in the basement, it's a different vibe.

Work benches crowd the exposed brick walls, each stacked with coils of wire, bins full of what looks like junk, and bundles of homemade dynamite.

The mood is tense, as two people work on a special task.

Terry Robbins bends over one of the benches, fiddling with an electronic switch.

Terry's a good-looking man with a steely gaze that makes him seem much older than 22.

Right now, he's gaunt, and his eyes are red at the rims, strained from too much work and not enough sleep.

Next to him is Diana Auten.

Like Terry, she's a dedicated revolutionary.

They're comrades in arms.

Terry swings from his spot at the bench to flip through one of his many notebooks on another table, consulting a hand-drawn diagram.

Scrawled chemical equations crowd the margins and run off the page.

Looking up from his work for a moment, Terry cracks a joke, making Diana laugh.

At 28, she's older than Terry, more mature.

But there's no question that he's the leader of the group.

That's what their collective, The Weather Underground, decided.

In this house, Terry calls the shots.

And Diana is fully committed to the group's decisions, to their mission.

Right now, that mission requires her focus.

She pushes aside her straw-colored hair and rifles through a toolbox.

Diana and Terry are getting ready for their most extreme act to protest yet against the war in Vietnam.

They're building a bomb.

It's not their first time constructing an explosive, but this one's different.

In the past, The Weather Underground is only targeted property, never people.

This time, though, they're going to bomb the non-commissioned officers' ball at Fort Dix in New Jersey.

It's a significant escalation, but one that The Weather Underground feels is totally justified.

Like millions of other Americans, they've been protesting the Vietnam War for years, and they barely moved the needle.

So now, Terry and his friends have decided that bringing the war home to America is the only way to stop it.

In Terry and Diana's minds, if the US military can drop bombs on innocent Vietnamese civilians every single day, then US servicemen and their families are fair game too.

At the sound of the front door opening upstairs, Terry and Diana glance over their shoulders.

Their comrade, Ted Gold, shouts down to them.

He's been tasked with buying cotton for one of the components in the bombs, and he's come back to ask what kind he needs to pick up.

Terry shouts up with an answer.

Then before Ted can make it back out the front door and onto the street, it happens.

Tired hands cross two wires on that busy, messy workbench.

It's a simple split-second mistake that causes electricity to surge through the newly closed circuit, igniting a detonated cat.

The bomb meant for the Officer's Ball in New Jersey goes off instead in a claustrophobic basement in Greenwich Village.

Three bundles of dynamite wrapped in nails explode in an instant.

Before Terry and Diana even realize their slip up, the brick facade of the townhouse erupts and the building, all four stories come tumbling down.

The neighbors hear a sound like thunder and rush outside.

At number 18 West 11th Street, where a building stood just moments ago, there's only a cloud of ash and dust.

From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal.

In the late 1960s and 70s, a group of far left militants grew in strength through the USA.

Born from the student movement protesting the Vietnam War, The Weather Underground was a patchwork of young activists who at first just wanted to put the brakes on US military aggression.

To their credit, they were some of the earliest Americans to recognize and name the horrors of the Vietnam War.

But their intentions eventually stretched beyond simply ending the conflict.

Admirers of figures like Che Guevara and Malcolm X, the men and women of The Weather Underground were passionate and rebellious.

They were also more than a little naive.

Many of them came from lives of privilege, but they were disillusioned with the society they'd grown up in and lived with unearned chips on their shoulders.

Perhaps more than anything, they wanted something to believe in and were desperate to outdo each other in their commitment to a cause.

Over time, their noble intentions mingled with their optimism and dangerous impatience.

In their quest to spark a revolution, to overthrow what they saw as a murderous empire, they became, in many ways, what they'd always hated.

Impulsive, closed-minded and violent.

This led the Underground to make mistakes.

Ones that cost them the lives of their friends, and that sent once-fearless rebels into hiding.

This is episode one in our four-part series on The Weather Underground, Starting the Fire.

It's March 24, 1965 at the University of Michigan.

It's a freezing night, but the campus's central green space, known as the diak, is packed.

A bonfire pours silver smoke into the sky, and the smell of cannabis hangs in the air.

Some 3,000 people encircle the flames, a motley crew of students, faculties and visitors.

All evening, there have been a mix of passionate political speeches and folks he protests on.

Among the crowd is 20-year-old Bill Ayers, a bright-eyed anti-war activist.

He takes a hit off a joint and passes it to the student on his left.

He's feeling exhilarated, but it's got nothing to do with the drugs.

He's just excited to be participating in the world's first teach-in, a protest against the Vietnam War inspired by the sit-ins of the civil rights movement.

Lectures from famous activists, university professors, and even representatives from the US State Department are scheduled to go all night and into the morning.

Truth be told, Bill didn't know much about Vietnam until recently, when President Lyndon B.

Johnson announced the United States would be escalating its military involvement in the country.

But what Bill lacks in knowledge and protest experience, he more than makes up for in enthusiasm.

Sitting there on the grass, he listens to his friends arguing with two of the State Department representatives.

It's a debate that's playing out in conversations all over the country.

The government reps recite talking points about the rising danger of communism, and the protesters counter with their concerns about US imperialism.

From Bill's point of view, his friends are annihilating the State Department guys in this discussion, and he can't resist joining the fray.

He spouts off about the U.S.'s efforts to police the world, and draws parallels to the injustices exposed by the civil rights movement.

To his delight, his buddies give his speech approving nods.

For the first time in his life, Bill really feels like he's a part of something, like he's fighting against the conformity of his middle class upbringing.

The canned, suburban life and prescribed path to happiness never sat right with him.

But tonight, he's finally finding his purpose.

A little later, he catches a passionate talk from the president of the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS for short.

The president forcefully addresses the crowd of young people, asking them, How do you stop a war?

How will you live your life so that it doesn't make a mockery of your values?

It's that last question that really lights a fire under Bill Ayers.

From that moment on, he doesn't see the war in Vietnam as a vague, distant conflict taking place in a country he's barely heard of.

Suddenly, to him, it's a matter of life and death, not just for tens of thousands of American soldiers, but for millions overseas, civilians, innocent people he's never met.

Then and there, he asks himself what he's willing to do to stop it.

Bill Ayers joins the SDS that same night.

Over the next few months, he educates himself more about the conflict he's protesting and learns the basics of what's been happening overseas.

Just over a decade ago, in 1954, Vietnam gained independence after defeating the French Empire in the First Indochina War.

As part of the peace treaty, the country was divided in two.

North Vietnam was under the control of the communist leader Ho Chi Minh, who had the support of the Soviet Union.

And the US pledged financial and military assistance to the government in the South.

Over the next decade, North Vietnam attempted to unify the two halves under communist control by throwing its weight behind a group of revolutionaries called the Viet Cong.

Sporadic conflicts between the two nations intensified over the years, basically becoming a proxy war between the US and Soviet Union.

The two strongest capitalist and communist spheres of influence.

Then, in 1964, Congress authorized an escalation of US involvement in the conflict, and directed the military to intervene in Vietnam.

It was this resolution that led to the teach-in at the University of Michigan in the spring of 1965.

The more he learns, the more Bill Ayers struggles within himself, thinking about what lengths he'll go to for the sake of protest.

That fall, following the bonfire, he attends a sit-in at a local military draft board.

He and about a hundred other protesters link arms inside the office, blocking the entrances.

When the police threaten to arrest anyone who refuses to disperse, Bill is one of 39 who stay put.

That night, he's hauled off to jail, for the first time.

Bill's thrown into a cell with other protesters, but he finds the experience more invigorating than frightening.

Together, the men sing songs all night, and through the thick walls, they can hear the women doing the same.

He gets a familiar rush sitting there in jail, one he loves, the feeling that he's a part of something bigger than himself.

Admittedly, some of that passion flags when a judge gives Bill and the other protesters 10 days in prison.

The thrill of belonging fades completely as he wiles away his short sentence.

The tedium and the cold gray walls start to close in.

It's a reality check, but one that ultimately strengthens his resolve.

He won't be broken.

So after Bill walks free, he decides that he wants more.

He feels like a real activist now.

Someone was street cred.

Over the next couple of years, Bill's life changes entirely.

He graduates from college with a degree in American Studies.

But instead of getting a job, he becomes a full-time activist for the students of a democratic society.

He wants to help people in any way he can.

So, at the suggestion of some friends at the SDS, he starts volunteering at the Children's Community Preschool.

The Preschool is a tiny institution run out of a church basement.

And, like everything Bill does, it's unconventional, experimental, part of a nationwide free school movement.

As a teacher, Bill doesn't follow a standard curriculum and encourages the children to follow their own interests.

He strives to promote cooperation rather than competition.

Mostly, he just supervises the kids as they play and pursue their burgeoning interests.

After only a few months volunteering there, he becomes the director of the institution at just 21 years old.

On the strength of that experience, the SDS sends Bill to Cleveland in the summer of 1966.

His mission is to set up an alternative school in an impoverished, predominantly black part of town.

It's Bill's first real experience with an underserved community, and it's another wake up call for him.

In Cleveland, he witnesses the country's roiling racial tension up close, feeling the strain between the community and the police.

He spends the summer teaching, volunteering, and trying to help the neighborhood any way he can.

It takes him a while to earn the trust of the locals, but just when he feels like he's making progress on that front, the SDS suddenly calls him back to Ann Arbor to continue teaching preschool.

Bill's disappointed at first, but then he meets a new volunteer at the school, Dianna Auten, a graduate student at the University of Michigan.

Dianna's older and more experienced than Bill.

She's brilliant and sensitive, and has just gotten back from a two-year teaching stint in Guatemala.

Bill's head over heels almost immediately, though he doesn't make quite the same impression on her.

Soon after their first meeting, Dianna writes to her sister, saying Bill is a sweet guy, naïve but gifted.

He's got a Peter Pan complex and no Wendy girl in sight.

Over time, Dianna becomes a regular teacher at the preschool, and the two of them grow closer.

Like Bill, Dianna comes from privilege.

Her father is a wealthy farmer in Illinois, but she tells Bill that her experience in Central America made her a socialist.

So she spends part of her meager salary from Bill's school on supplies that she sends to a left-wing guerrilla group back in Guatemala.

Dianna's quiet confidence and knack for teaching inspire Bill as much as they intimidate him.

One night, the two of them see a movie with a group of other activists from the university.

Afterward, Bill walks Dianna home, desperate to hold her hand but too shy to make a move.

Even after she invites him up to her room, he's paralyzed by his fear.

He sits next to her on the couch, clutching a mug of tea with both hands and trying to work up his courage.

After a moment, Dianna leans in and whispers that she wants to kiss him, and they fall into each other's arms.

Eventually, Bill and Dianna move into a small apartment together.

They talk about having kids together someday.

Dianna wants a houseful.

But for now, they focus most of their energy on protesting the continuing escalation in Vietnam.

They devote themselves to the cause entirely, subsisting on little money and trying to live up to high revolutionary ideals.

As time goes on, the two of them witness the anti-war movement grow and change.

Bill burns his draft card in front of the Pentagon.

Dianna stares down the guns of the National Guard.

But as public support for the protesters grows, so does the backlash.

In 1968, some activists are arrested for conspiracy to help men resist the draft.

By this point, the conflict in Vietnam has reached an uneasy stalemate that's proving difficult to break.

Then at the end of January 1968, North Vietnam begins the Tet Offensive in an attempt to swing the war in their favor.

The unprecedented operation launches assaults on five major South Vietnamese cities and dozens of military targets.

Viet Cong forces overrun the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon and the US.

Embassy there.

They hold their position in various cities for almost a month before they're eventually pushed out.

In the end, the offensive proves extremely costly to the North, but it has effects that reach far beyond the Vietnamese borders.

The audacity of the move and its initial success further galvanizes public opinion in the United States.

Over 2,500 US troops died during the Tet Offensive, and many more were injured.

Looking at the numbers, reading the news reports, more people begin to see the Vietnam War as an unending, expensive conflict, and support for it declines.

This all just happens to dovetail with increasing racial tension across the US.

On April 4th, just a couple of months after the Tet Offensive began, Martin Luther King Jr.

is assassinated, sparking riots in 125 cities across the country.

The federal government calls in 55,000 troops to quell the unrest, leading to a staggering 20,000 arrests.

Americans all over the nation are seeing their communities go up in smoke.

There are fires, injuries and even deaths in Chicago, DC and Baltimore.

To Bill Ayers and Diana Oughton, it looks like the embers of revolution are finally being stoked.

And they aren't the only ones who think so.

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It's March 20th, 1968 in New York City, two weeks before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Members of the Columbia University Chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society file into Earl Hall.

The stately red brick building, complete with fluted ivory columns, looks right at home on the illustrious Ivy League campus.

But to the eyes of the SDS members, the neoclassical architecture looks frivolous and bourgeois.

The only reason they've come to the hall is to attend a talk by Colonel Paul Axe, the head of the draft board for New York City.

He's in charge of registering and selecting young men that are sent to Vietnam.

The SDS members intend to let the colonel say his piece, then respond with a series of probing questions about the US's role in Vietnam.

But not every member thinks the group's passive approach is the way to go.

20-year-old Mark Rudd is a leading campus activist and chairman of the Columbia SDS.

He believes more dramatic action is called for.

In his eyes, Colonel Axe is a war criminal, not someone to politely listen to.

So when Mark takes his seat in the front row of the hall, he's holding a bright white bakery box on his lap.

He's tense, antsy.

Next to him is his partner in crime, a long-haired hippie named Lincoln.

Mark and Lincoln watch as Colonel Axe approaches the podium in his pristine dress uniform.

As the Colonel begins his speech, Mark sticks his finger under the top of the bakery box and waits for his moment.

All of a sudden, a cacophony erupts at the door.

Everyone turns and looks as a gaggle of students dressed in faux revolutionary war regalia marches into the hall, blaring horns and pounding drums with toy guns at their hips.

This is the signal Mark and Lincoln are waiting for.

With the crowd distracted, Mark flips open the lid, revealing a lemon meringue pie.

Lincoln reaches in, palms the dessert like a basketball, and before anyone can react, he hurls it directly into the Colonel's face.

It hits its mark, smearing the stung Colonel with meringue, dripping yellow and white from his cheeks down to his collar.

As Axe blinks the filling from his eyes, Mark and Lincoln rush to the fire exit.

Determined to stay ahead of the security guards or police, they're certain are on their tail.

They breathlessly make their way to West 115th Street, where Mark's girlfriend waves them inside her apartment.

Lincoln dives into a closet to hide while Mark takes a seat on the couch, feigns a look of nonchalance and catches his breath.

Every now and then, he glances nervously at the door, but eventually, Lincoln slinks out of the closet and Mark relaxes.

No one was chasing them after all.

In the following days, the Pi incident becomes notorious on campus.

The press covers the event heavily, which helps turn Mark Rudd from a small-time campus activist into a pseudo-celebrity.

Without meaning to, he's become an unofficial face of the student anti-war movement, and a figurehead for a massive national organization.

But while the Students for a Democratic Society boasts a huge membership, there isn't a centralized or truly unified directive for the group.

It's just a loose collective of chapters from universities all over the country.

Now sure, everyone in the SDS opposes the Vietnam War, but when it comes to what to actually do about it, no one really agrees.

Because of that, factions are forming.

There are anarchists, marxists, maus, moderates and every opinion in between.

Members like Bill Ayers and Diana Otten in Michigan are laser focused on organizing within their own communities, working at their preschool and attending protests when they can.

Mark on the other hand, in his new capacity as a leader, is looking at the bigger picture.

And from where he's sitting, it's a mess.

The lack of a central plan is frustrating to Mark because he favors a more radical approach than the moderates who dominate the organization.

Nonviolent protest, campus organizing, intellectual discussions, they're not bringing change fast enough for him.

He doesn't want to just end the war in Vietnam.

He wants to end the entire system.

In his eyes, the US and its capitalist imperialism can only make the world worse.

He wants to over throw the government, and he's willing to fight fire with fire.

But he knows he can't do it alone.

Mark seeks out others in the SDS who share his perspective.

He hears about several chapters where differing ideologies have led to schisms, and he figures he can capitalize on that.

So he gets on the phone and starts talking to a dozen or so wannabe revolutionaries across the country, mostly in the northeast.

Slowly, a splinter group coalesces.

Among the people Mark connects with are Bill and Diana.

In late 1968, the newly formed group starts meeting once a month to discuss strategy.

They hop in their cars and drive across state lines to meet in person, or else spend long hours chatting on the phone.

Together, they study all kinds of left-wing movements, trying to form a comprehensive plan for radical resistance.

Yes, this might all sound a bit over the top, but Mark and his fledgling group are hardly unique.

In the late 1960s, it seems like far-left revolution is in the air all over the world.

The Soviet Union is a superpower on par with the United States.

Fidel Castro emerged victorious in Cuba a decade earlier.

Communist movements have power in China and much of Southeast Asia.

Parts of South America are also in the midst of left-wing revolts.

And in the US, the Black Panthers have buried Marxist-Leninist ideas with the Black Power movement.

Looking at everything going on around them, students like Mark, Bell and Diana believe that they're at a critical historical juncture.

Are they young, naïve and idealistic?

Sure.

But to them, overthrowing the US government doesn't seem like some quixotic fantasy.

In fact, it seems like an inevitability, and they want to get to it sooner rather than later.

Mark's group meet regularly through 1969, refining their strategy for revolution.

They translate their theories into a 12,000-word paper they plan to present at the SDS National Conference in Chicago that June.

They hope it will become a unifying document for the disparate chapters of the organization.

A new guiding light.

For a title, they pull from a Bob Dylan lyric, don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

So their essay becomes known as the Weatherman paper, and their faction, the Weathermen.

The document they bring to the conference is long, dramatic and dense with detail.

But, essentially, the Weathermen argued that the youth anti-war movement, which is comprised mostly of white workers and students, should form a violent, underground political party.

This party should ally itself with black revolutionaries to organize against US imperialism in high schools, workplaces and universities.

But the Weathermen never get the chance to really make their case at the SDS National Convention.

The event falls apart almost immediately due to in-fighting, and the whole thing ends with the organization splitting in two.

The Weathermen go along with the larger contingent, and a vote is held to elect national representatives.

Due to his prominence in the press, Mark is elected National Secretary, while Bill is elected Educational Secretary.

It's an unexpected development and not quite one they were hoping for, but Mark and Bill both believe that their new positions of power could help them enact their radical revolutionary plan.

And they want to debut with a bang.

So, fresh off the convention, Mark and the rest of the Weathermen get busy organizing.

Their first major goal is to show off their new violent face during a three-day protest in Chicago that October.

The plan is to recruit a massive group for a series of demonstrations that will redefine activism.

They want a rag-tag fighting force, thousands of young white students and workers.

They'll spend their days surging through the streets from Lincoln Park all the way to the Federal Building, where they'll smash windows and knock down doors.

They'll call it the Days of Rage.

The Weathermen are aware that they'll face pushback from the police.

In fact, that's part of the plan.

They'll go to jail en masse to send a message to everyone watching from the sidelines.

They want people to know that revolution isn't just coming to America.

It's already here.

But with only four months to prepare, they've got a lot to do.

See, they aren't just getting ready for the protest.

They're trying to create a new collective political party from the ground up.

That means that ideas about traditional gender roles, race relations, class divisions, personal property, civility, and even hygiene have to be annihilated.

Burn it all down and start it all over.

It's a lot to be thinking about while the Weathermen are planning their big protest.

But there's internal politics to be dealt with too.

One of the biggest issues the group grapples with is sexism.

The women in the organization are outnumbered and want to be taken seriously by the men.

And despite the supposedly liberated minds of the Weathermen, a lot of the guys can't resist smirking and cracking jokes about a woman's rightful role in revolution.

When the women speak up about the power imbalances in the group, the messages just don't get through.

Still, many women do manage to rise to leadership positions in the local Weathermen collectives, which is pretty rare for political groups at that time.

Of course, the women also feel like they have to go above and beyond to prove themselves.

To be taken seriously, they're pushed to become as extreme, provocative and violent as the most radical men in the group.

That leads some of them to take showy action in a bid to prove their commitment.

At the end of summer 1969, the days are counting down until their planned violent demonstration in Chicago.

Everyone's anxious to convince plenty of people to show up so the group can make a big enough splash.

They've been trying to recruit on college campuses all summer, but in Pennsylvania, a band of women decide it's time for a different approach.

On September 3rd, 75 weather women break into a Pittsburgh high school, burst into the classrooms and scream, jailbreak.

They pound on desks, rattle doors and shout about the coming revolution.

They cheerfully urge the kids to join them in Chicago, telling them it's a chance for them to get in on the ground floor of a new world order.

Students and teachers alike are bewildered by the intrusion.

But despite the fact that none of the high schoolers seem interested in joining the impromptu demonstration, the weather women don't stop, hooping and hollering until the front office calls the police.

When the cops show up, the women run into them head first, practicing for Chicago.

When all is said and done, 26 members of the group are arrested for trying to incite a riot.

Whether or not they actually recruit any of the kids is doubtful, but these kinds of stunts do attract the press, who write about the new radical organization which slowly increases their name recognition.

More importantly to the Weather women, they've made their point to the Weathermen.

They're just as committed, just as willing to break the law and go to jail for their cause.

Now they all need to come together to follow through because the clock is ticking.

Their big demonstration is only a month away, and it's going to be explosive.

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It's the night of October 4th, 1969, just three days before the Weathermen's Big Chicago Extravaganza.

And they plan to announce their arrival in the city with a bang.

Bitter wind blows down Randolph Street, past the Kennedy Expressway.

Bill Ayers shelters one of his comrades from the gusts as he lights a cigarette.

Terry Robbins takes a deep inhale and lets the smoke out slowly.

Then he points a stubby finger down the block.

There, near the intersection, a huge statue towers over the asphalt.

A memorial to a group of fallen cops.

A nine-foot policeman in an old-fashioned, over-coated uniform, cast in bronze, raises his metal arm in a gesture of defiance.

He stands atop a bell-shaped marble pedestal.

An inscription reads, in the name of the people of Illinois, I command peace.

The statue is a monument to the Haymarket Massacre of May 1886.

Back then, a group of protesters gathered in Haymarket Square to peacefully protest for an eight-hour work day.

The police got violent with the demonstrators several times, and as the day's activities wound down, an agitator threw a bomb at the cops.

Seven officers and at least four civilians were killed in the blast, while dozens more were injured.

Now, almost a century later, the Weathermen sympathize with the labor protesters, and even the bomber.

So they resent the statue that commemorates only the fallen officers.

Perhaps no one more than 22-year-old Terry Robbins.

Since the Weathermen were established, Terry has stood out among his cohorts as the most militant member.

While all of them embrace the rhetoric of violent revolution to one degree or another, it's still something of a taboo subject, especially to the level that Terry's at.

So far, the Weathermen have talked a big game.

They've gotten into plenty of scuffles with police and anti-war demonstrations, but they've never really strayed beyond petty vandalism.

Terry is frustrated by that.

He thinks of himself as a realist, someone willing to get his hands dirty, maybe even somebody who's eager to.

As the others leaf through communist text and debate the finer points of gender relations, Terry fills notebooks with sketches of weapons, chemical formulae and detailed blueprints.

He marks the vulnerable parts of his diagrams with Xs, highlighting the specific points where one might place an explosive to, let's say, bring down a bridge.

He matches his research with exaggerated threats against the establishment, often passing his rhetoric off as humor.

The other members, particularly Diana Auten, call him out sometimes.

They try to remind him it's easy to become the very thing you hate.

But every time, Terry diffuses any arguments with an easy joke before the others can really press the issue.

Now though, he's excited to finally take action here in Chicago.

He wants to kick off the upcoming demonstration early by taking down the Haymarket Memorial.

Not only will it send a message that the Weathermen are ready to escalate their actions, he'll finally be able to put his chemical knowledge to the test.

So, in the darkest hours just before October 5th, Terry and Bill plant a dynamite bomb under the legs of the Bronze Policeman.

Terry promises that it won't just bring down the statue, it'll break most of the windows on the block too.

Bill's excited hearing that.

The plan isn't for anyone to get hurt, so to him, it feels more like a joke than anything else.

And while Terry and Bill get the bomb in place, the other members plaster the city with flyers and graffiti, taking credit for the explosion and getting the word out about the days of rage.

As the morning dawns, the bomb detonates on Randolph Street, blasting molten slag from the statue's legs onto the freeway and shattering almost a hundred window panes.

The stun earns the Weathermen their most prominent press so far.

Chicago's mayor appears on TV, furiously vowing to rebuild the statue and find the people responsible.

And he's not the only one who's angry.

The police union considers the bombing an act of war.

Officers now see the conflict between themselves and the Weathermen, including the upcoming protest, as kill or be killed.

But that's exactly what the Weathermen want, or what they think they want anyway.

Terry's excited by all the attention his bomb gets, but it's still not enough for him.

He wants more destruction.

Bill tries to talk him down, but it doesn't do much good.

Over the next couple of days, Terry stays up late into the night scribbling in his notebooks.

He pops amphetamine pills to fuel 24-hour binges, reading books on bomb making and the manufacture of napalm.

One night, he wakes Bill up at 3 a.m., red-faced and frazzled.

As Bill rubs the sleep from his eyes, Terry shoves a sketch under his nose.

It's a blueprint for an explosive design to topple the 57-story first national bank building downtown.

This is a whole new level.

A statue is one thing, but a building.

Bill's both too disturbed and too grumpy to be diplomatic with his response.

He calls Terry an idiot and tries to go back to sleep.

But Terry's all gacked up on amphetamines and won't let it go.

The scene devolves into a shouting match that wakes up the entire house.

The other members shuffle out of their beds to find Terry screaming in Bill's face.

The pair hurl insults back and forth until Terry punches Bill and Bill shoves Terry to the ground.

And the two of them walk on eggshells around each other from that point forward.

But the conflict between Bill and Terry doesn't happen in a vacuum.

All of the Weathermen are feeling the stress and lead up to October 8th.

They staked a lot on their promised three-day protest.

They've worked hard to spread the word about their organization and recruit an army of cities all over the Northeast.

And they haven't shied away from big talk and dramatic language.

They mean this to be a game-changing demonstration.

One that will show the US government that they're serious, that they're a real threat.

When the big day arrives, Bill, Terry, Mark Rudd, Diana Otten and the others gear up, ready for what they think is going to be a dramatic clash with the man.

Most people have improvised weapons, gas masks, thick boots, the whole nine yards.

Others walk out raw, leaving their fate to chance.

Together, they make their way downtown to Lincoln Park with their heads held high, adrenaline already coursing through their blood.

They enter the park like confident generals ready to meet a loyal army, thousands of kids and young adults awaiting their command.

But that's not what happens.

Instead, there are a couple hundred people scattered around the park in disconnected clicks.

Bill's heart sinks.

Off in the distance, he can see squadrons of policemen assembling, waiting for the huge insurgency the Weathermen have been gleefully promising for months.

Of course, the protesters are outgunned, but Bill didn't expect them to be outnumbered, too.

Not for the first time, his heart flutters with doubts.

Even so, he clenches his fist and stifles them.

He reaches for a weapon and strides forward.

It's time to start the fire.

From Airship, this is Episode 1 in our series on The Weather Underground.

On the next episode, The Weathermen Go Underground.

Embracing cult-like customs in Guerrilla Revolution.

If you'd like to learn more about The Weather Underground, we recommend Fugitive Days, Memoirs of an Anti-War Activist by Bill Ayers, and Underground, My Life with SDS and the Weathermen by Mark Rudd.

This episode contains reenactments and dramatized details.

And while in most cases, we can't know exactly what was said, all our dramatizations are based on historical research.

American Criminal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz.

Audio editing by Mohammed Shazi.

Sound design by Matthew Filler.

Music by Thrum.

This episode is written and researched by Terrell Wells.

Managing producer, Emily Burke.

Executive producers are Joel Callan, William Simpson and Lindsey Graham.