I recently finished re-reading Diana: The Making of a Terrorist, a 1971 book by Thomas Powers. I found it fascinating and disturbing when I first read it more than 20 years ago. Recent headlines — Luigi Mangione‘s shooting of healthcare executive Brian Thompson, the murder of Charlie Kirk — prompted me to pick it up again. It is the story of Diana Oughton, a young woman who died in March 1970 along with two other members of the Weatherman organization when they accidentally detonated a bomb that they were building intended for a dance attended by soldiers and their dates at an army base in New Jersey.
Although Oughton died while attempting to commit a horrific crime, Powers gives a surprisingly sympathetic overview of her life and makes it clear that she was once an intelligent, idealistic and compassionate young woman. She was born into a wealthy family, played the piano and the flute as a child, attended Bryn Mawr College, and got drawn into leftist politics first by tutoring African-American children in an impoverished section of Philadelphia and then by spending two years working with poor people through an American Friends Service Committee project in Guatemala. The poverty that she witnessed radicalized her, and she came to feel sadness and shame at her privileged upbringing. These feelings fed into her participation in the anti-war and anti-racism movements that flourished during the Vietnam War. The Weathermen, who were composed primarily of upper-class white people like herself, turned to violence because they convinced themselves that it was the only way to “make the revolution” and overcome their class privilege and prejudices. It was a tragic error, compounded because they were so blinded by ideology that they didn’t even bother learning how to assemble a bomb safely and blew themselves up in the process of making it.
The MAGA movement has attempted to use the murder of Charlie Kirk to demonize Democrats, liberals and leftists. Of course there are examples of violence from the left, including Diana Oughton and others who came before them. Historically, however, there has been even more violence from the right. The Oklahoma City bombing, carried out in 1995 by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, remains the deadliest terrorist act committed by U.S. citizens in American history, killing 169 people and injuring another 684. The ability to rationalize violence exists across the political spectrum.
I think it is noteworthy that Charlie Kirk’s killer, like Luigi Mangione, came from affluent or at least comfortable families, and almost all of the mass shootings and other terrorist actions that occur in the United States are the work of white males. Perhaps this is because they come from a sector of society that is given more latitude in our culture to lash out with anger and violence when they don’t get their way. In this regard they have something in common with Diana Oughton and the Weathermen, whose best-known protest was something they called the “Days of Rage.” People from other backgrounds are not immune from violence, but maybe they are less likely to feel entitled to engage in performative rage and pretend that it is some sort of righteous and even cleansing activity.
Perhaps the saddest thing about Diana Oughton is her slow but inexorable progression into a form of madness. After her stint in Guatemala, she and Bill Ayers (who became her lover) taught at a well-intentioned, if somewhat misguided “community school” in Ann Arbor that attempted to teach children to be “free” and “self-governing.” The school failed in large part because parents were dissatisfied with the quality of the education their children were receiving. Oughton and Ayers then became involved with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and gravitated to a radical splinter group which became the Weathermen. Frustrated by their inability to end the Vietnam War and achieve broader social reforms, they turned to increasingly coarse language and tactics — calling police “pigs” and “fascists,” chanting allegiance to Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong and Huey Newton, shouting down and bullying high school principals, and instigating street fights with police. They grew increasingly convinced that their militant intransigence would lead the revolution, even as their numbers shrank when their rhetoric and behavior alienated former allies.
Unlike today’s violent militants, however, the Weathermen started as a community. The SDS in its heyday had more than 100,000 members who showed up at rallies, printed leaflets, socialized at conferences and teach-ins, and egged each other on in person. It took years of selective groupthink before they got to the point of doing anything violent. By contrast, nowadays people like Luigi Mangione or Tyler Robinson seem to come out of nowhere — lone wolves who sometimes don’t even leave a trail on social media to show what pushed them over the edge.
Ayers and the other Weathermen who did not die in the bomb blast that killed Diana Oughton went on to commit other bombings (most of them non-lethal). They went underground to avoid arrest, but after a few years as fugitives, most of them surrendered and served short terms in prison before pursuing careers as teachers, attorneys, nurses. Some became respected figures in their fields. Ron Fliegelman took over as the group’s bomb maker after Oughton’s death and perfected the technique of assembling them safely. He built explosive devices that blew up in NYPD headquarters, a Department of Corrections toilet, the US Capitol building and the Pentagon. His bombs never killed anyone, so the statute of limitations expired and he never faced prosecution. He went on to become a special education teacher at a public school in Brooklyn, where he worked for 25 years before retiring in 2006.
Several Weathermen have written memoirs of their time underground, most of which downplay their violent behavior or argue that they were justified by the evils they sought to change. If Diana Oughton had not died in that bomb blast, perhaps today she would be living a similar life. Or, perhaps the bomb she was building would have claimed other victims, in which case she might be serving a long prison term for her crime. That was the fate of Kathy Boudin, another Weatherman who was at the townhouse in New York where Oughton blew herself up. Boudin survived the blast with only minor injuries and went underground for more than a decade before she was arrested and convicted of murder for her part in a 1981 robbery of a Brinks armored car. A Brinks guard and two police officers died in the robbery, which was intended to finance the revolution that Boudin and her accomplices thought they were making. She spent 23 years in prison for her crimes.
Kathy Boudin did express remorse that she “supported and was part of a robbery that risked and then destroyed human life.” She at least showed more reflection than Timothy McVeigh, who defiantly defended the Oklahoma City bombing to the end, even as he sat on death row for his crimes. The day before his execution, McVeigh shrugged off the deaths he had caused, saying, “that’s the nature of the beast. It’s understood going in what the human toll will be.”
Ideologically, McVeigh was worlds apart from Diana Oughton, Kathy Boudin and the Weathermen. McVeigh was a white nationalist, survivalist and gun fanatic who took his inspiration from The Turner Diaries, a racist novel written by a neo-Nazi, while the Weathermen saw themselves as militant anti-racists. What they shared in common was hatred of the government and a belief that their cause justified violence against people who were only tangentially connected with the institutions they sought to overthrow. I can only feel thankful that their revolutions never succeeded.
