50th Anniversary of Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold's Death On W. 11th Street: Part 6

1967-68 Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold

Was Ted under FBI, CIA or NYPD Surveillance during His Last Three Weeks Alive?

In the month before 1967-68 Columbia SDS vice-chairperson Ted Gold's death, two underground collectives of the Weatherman faction of SDS were apparently operating in Manhattan. According to Bryan Burrough’s 2015 Days of Rage book, “one…was headquartered in a Chinatown apartment under [former Columbia SDS member and Weatherman] J.J.’s supervision” where Mark purportedly also “took a bed there;” and “the second underground Weatherman faction collective active in Manhattan in February 1970 apparently included a “dozen or so members” who “were initially spread across several” other “Manhattan and Brooklyn apartments,” according to the same book.

Ted apparently only first visited the 18 W.11th St. townhouse, on the street where he was killed, on Tuesday, Feb. 24, 1970 (just 10 days before his death), according to the 2015 Days of Rage book; and by “the following day,” Ted and four other members of the Weatherman collective he was in “had moved” into the townhouse, according to the same book. But the Days of Rage book also claims that 9 days before Ted’s death “at least a half-dozen members of the collective” still “lived elsewhere.”

On Feb. 21, 1970, three days before Ted first visited the 18 W. 11th St. townhouse, the Weatherman collective “cell” he was in apparently had “set off three fire bombs at the home of Judge John Murtagh, then presiding over the case of the New York `Panther Twenty-0ne’” (that a jury later found innocent of then-Manhattan D.A. and Columbia University Trustee Frank Hogan’s trumped-up Apr. 2, 1969 charge that these arrested members of the Black Panther Party’s New York City chapter were about to “bomb” department stores and public places in New York City), according to J. Kirkpatrick Sale’s SDS book. And in its Feb. 24, 1970 issue, the Columbia Daily Spectator student newspaper also reported that “detectives at the 26th Precinct” had “found shreds of glass on the floor of the burned room” of the Columbia Law School Building’s International Law Library and believed “the fire was set off by Molotov cocktails.” In addition, Spectator noted that “the same night as the fire at the Law School, three bombs were detonated at the home of State Supreme Court Justice…Murtagh” but “police officials declined to speculate a possible connection between the two incidents.”

According to Professor Eckstein’s 2016 Bad Moon Rising book, on Monday, March 2, 1970 (4 days before Ted was killed) then-U.S. President Richard Nixon next “ordered” his White House Chief of Staff H.R. “Haldeman to begin a nationwide campaign to politically isolate the antiwar radicals;” and “Richard Nixon in early March [1970]—before the townhouse explosion—was urging the FBI to use investigatory and surveillance techniques against the New Left which the FBI itself thought were dangerous,” “Nixon was impatient with any hesitation on grounds of legality regarding methods for going after the radicals” and he “offered to give political cover to the FBI.” And on Monday evening on March 2, 1970, Nixon “spoke at 9:47 p.m. at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, at a dinner given in honor of” then-French “President Pompidou,” in which then-Columbia University and Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] trustee and CBS board member “William A.M. Burden…presided at the dinner,” according to the Public Papers of Richard Nixon 1970 book.

In addition, Professor Eckstein’s 2016 Bad Moon Rising book observed, for example, that a March 2, 1970 memo from Nixon stated that “from now on we are going to take a very `militant’ position against these people,” “I consider this new direction being of the highest priority” and “I want absolutely no deviation from it.”  Jeremy Varon’s 2004 Bringing the War Home book also noted that “a month before the explosion” in which Ted was killed “FBI Director Hoover had” apparently “characterized Weatherman as the `most violent, persistent and pernicious of revolutionary groups.’”

On Tuesday, March 3, 1970 (the day after Nixon wrote his March 2, 1970 memo), “neighbors” of the 18 W. 11th St. townhouse that Weatherman faction member Cathy Wilkerson’s father owned “on 11th Street” apparently “watched” as Ted “supervised the unloading of crates from a van” (3 days before he was killed), according to Bryan Burrough’s 2015 Days of Rage book. And a member of an FBI surveillance team on W. 11th St. may have also been possibly watching Ted both supervising the unloading of crates from a van on March 3, 1970 and at the moment when Ted was killed at the front of the 18 W. 11th St. townhouse, at around noon on Friday, March 6, 1970. For, as Susan Braudy noted in her 2003 Family Circle book:

“In front of the burning house, an FBI agent who had been part of the surveillance team keeping watch on the young radicals quickly snapped pictures of the house’s crumpling brick Greek-revival façade. Since the buildings on the block were of significant design interest, he had been posing as an architectural historian.”

Yet if "an FBI agent who had been part of the surveillance team keeping watch on the young radicals" was present on the W.11th Street block on the day Ted was killed, why did the FBI's surveillance team apparently allow, according to Kirkpatrick Sale's 1973 SDS book, "a white station wagon" to double-park" in front of the Town House "while several heavy boxes were unloaded" and "carried into the cellar" by the young radicals on the morning of March 6, 1970, where there were "perhaps a hundred other sticks of dynamite" and "a number of already constructed pipe bombs," without at least questioning the young radicals who were under surveillance on that morning?

According to an article by James A. Naughton, titled “U.S. To Tighten Surveillance of Radicals”, that appeared in the Apr. 12, 1970 issue of the New York Times, “a Nixon aide who is aware of the Justice Departments intelligence operations” also “said that `We knew of the New York bomb factory in a Greenwich Village townhouse, but only just before it exploded on March 6 [1970].’”

On Wednesday, March 4, 1970, Columbia SDS’s former chairperson, Mark Rudd, was apparently first told by the leader of the Weatherman collective holding meetings inside the 18 W. 11th St. townhouse, Terry Robbins, “what his group was planning;” and that same day (while the townhouse was apparently under FBI surveillance) Mark “dropped Terry off at 18 W.11th St.” without going inside, according to Mark’s 2009 Underground book.

In his 2015 Days of Rage book, Bryan Burrough wrote that one of his unidentified sources purportedly claimed that the following incident occurred inside the 18 W. 11th St. townhouse the night before Ted was killed:

“There was…at least one naysayer. He will be called James. He was one of the Columbia alumni; he had been J.J.’s roommate at one point. James was a member of the collective who did not live in the townhouse. According to a longtime friend, `the target had been bothering him for days. Finally, right at the end, he went nuts. This was the night before. He just went crazy, crying and screaming. “What are we doing? What are we doing?” And you know what Teddy Gold told him? [He said] `James, you have been my best friend for 10 years. But you gotta calm down. I wouldn’t want to kill you.’ And he was serious.”

Yet at least one of the Columbia alumni who was one of Ted’s best friends for many years denies that he “had ever been J.J.’s roommate,” denies that he “was ever a member of the” Weatherman “collective who did not live in in the townhouse” and denies that Ted allegedly “told him” that “I wouldn’t want to kill you” on “the night before” Ted, himself, was killed. (end of part 6)

50th Anniversary of Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold's Death On W. 11th Street: Part 5

1967-1968 Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold

Ted’s January 1970 Political Activity and Arrest in Pennsylvania 

In January 1970, 1967-1968 Columbia SDS Vice-Chairperson Ted Gold apparently “was among those who argued shortly after Flint against putting a picture of” Charlie “Manson on the cover of” an early 1970 issue of the Weatherman group’s FIRE! newspaper because “he felt, and most concurred, that there was ultimately nothing progressive or even political about Manson’s violence,” according to the New School University Professor Jeremy Varon's 2004 Bringing the War Home book.  That same month Ted “was arrested along with seven other Weathermen” for protesting at “a Philadelphia television station” on Jan. 10, 1970, “after it broadcast what they called a `slanderous’ TV documentary on the Black Panthers,” according to an article that appeared in the Apr.13, 1970 issue of The Nation magazine. Ted and the other arrested Weathermen explained the reason for their protest action at CBS’s WCAU-TV station, according to an article that appeared in the Jan. 12, 1970 issue of the Philadelphia Free Press newspaper, in a leaflet which stated the following:

“On Tuesday, January 6, Pig AmeriKKKa escalated its brutal attack on the black liberation struggle by means of a slanderous TV documentary about the Black Panther Party. Behind the façade of liberalism, CBS henchman Mike Wallace accused the party of wanton violence, the desire to be martyrs, and even of corrupting little children’s minds about the good things in AmeriKKKa…We want Channel 10 in Philadelphia to publicly refute these lies, since they spread them in Philly…”

During January 1970, Ted had (according to March 1968 to September 1968 Columbia SDS chairperson Mark Rudd’s 2009 book Underground) apparently also “argued for keeping the” SDS National Office in Chicago “open and maintaining some presence on campus” in the 1970’s, “even as part of” the Weatherman “organization went underground.” 

Former Columbia SDS Member and Weatherwoman Dionne Donghi’s February 1970 Arrest

According to an article, titled “Unsettled Accounts” that appeared in the Berkeley Tribe antiwar underground newspaper on Aug. 21, 1970 (and was republished in the late 1970-published Weatherman book that Harold Jacobs edited), a former Columbia SDS member and New York SDS regional office organizer (with whom Ted had both searched in late June 1969 for a house to rent in Queens for a Weatherman collective to move into and been, along with Ted, a member of the Weatherman group that returned from visiting Cuba in mid-August 1969), Dionne Donghi, “was busted by the FBI for interstate transportation of stolen weapons” in Chicago in February 1970. But, according to the same Aug. 21, 1970 Berkeley Tribe article, “the U.S. Attorney threw the case out, and told Dionne and her lawyer that the bust had been set up by an informer inside Weatherman.”

In his testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives sub-committee on Oct. 18, 1974, the now-deceased FBI informant Larry Grathwohl claimed Dionne (whose father, a former CBS-TV News foreign assignment desk head in the 1950’s and early 1960’s named Frank Donghi, had also been NBC News’ Saigon Bureau Chief in Vietnam during the last six months of 1968, prior to later dying in California of an apparent overdose of sleeping tablets in March 1969) had been the “primary leadership person” of the Weatherman collective in Cincinnati in February 1970.  In addition, Grathwohl also testified that “when the collective was disbanded” that month, he sent a revolver to Dionne in Chicago “which the FBI turned over to the IRS, and she was arrested on that charge, but charges were dropped because the FBI would not let me testify.”

Yet during the same month that Dionne and her lawyer “were told in Chicago by the U.S. Attorney that Dionne’s arrest had been set up by an informer inside Weatherman,” Ted and Mark Rudd (according to Mark’s Underground book) apparently loaded together “a VW van full of New York” SDS “regional office files and mailing lists” and dumped “them onto a garbage barge at the sanitation department’s pier on West Fourteenth Street” in Manhattan. (end of part 5)

50th Anniversary of Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold's Death On W. 11th Street: Part 4

1967-68 Columbi SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold

Spying On Columbia SDS Members and Weathermen by NYPD, FBI or CIA Prior to Ted’s Death 

Professor Eckstein’s Bad Moon Rising book noted that less than 2 months before Fred Hampton’s early December 1969 assassination, “the FBI…in mid-October 1969…received word that” a Weatherman group member named “Brian Flanagan was” purportedly “threatening to lead his collective in an attempt to kill Richard Nixon;” and “the information had originated from Flanagan’s friend the journalist Dotson Rader (who unknowingly told an FBI informant).” According to Professor Eckstein’s book, “the threat was immediately sent to Nixon himself” since “Rader’s predictions of Weatherman actions had proven correct in the past.” A fourth former Weatherman faction member, however, characterizes Dotson Rader’s relationship to National SDS movement activists during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s as friendly, personally supportive, and principled; and feels that Dotson never asked for anything nor engaged in any manipulative behavior in relationship to National SDS organizers during this same historical period.

In late October 1969, according to Professor Varon’s 2004 Bringing the War Home book, the FBI had “alerted its field offices that New York City’s Weathermen were `going underground and forming commando-type units which will engage in terroristic acts, including bombings, arson, and assassinations;’” and “within days, it ordered all offices to `follow the activities of any Weatherman group in their respective areas.’” The same book also observed that in mid-November 1969, “twenty-three Boston Weathermen were arrested on spurious attempted murder charges after someone fired shots at a Cambridge police station” but “the charges were dropped when the only witness, a teenager, confessed that the police had coerced his false testimony.”  As a Dec. 1, 1969 article in the Harvard Crimson reported, “a 16-year-old ninth-grade dropout testified that the Cambridge police had forced him to sign a false statement that he had witnessed the Weathermen planning and executing the shooting;” and after he had signed the false statement, the twenty-three Weathermen were then arrested “in three separate raids on houses in Cambridge.”

And in a de-classified FBI document [on the subject “Theodore Gold, SM-SDS (Key Activist)”], dated Nov. 24, 1969 (contained in Ted’s de-classified FBI file) for example, the FBI labeled Ted a “Key Activist” and falsely accused him of participating in “terroristic acts” during the Nov. 14-15, 1969 antiwar protests in Washington, D.C. (which included a march on the Department of Justice in support of Bobby Seale, Dave Dellinger and the other Chicago 8 Trial defendants). In this same document it indicated why (according to a later Dec. 15, 1969 de-classified FBI document) the FBI secretly conducted a special investigation of Ted and his political activity between Nov. 19, 1969 and Dec. 11, 1969--three months before Ted was killed:

“At the recently held New Mobilization Committee demonstration in Washington D.C., 11/14-15/69, Gold was one of the principal tactical leaders for the Weatherman faction of SDS and participated in some of the terroristic acts this group was involved in.

“In view of Gold’s leadership in the Weatherman faction of SDS he is being designated as a Key Activist. Promptly submit FD-122 placing him in Priority 1 of the Security Index. The last report submitted concerning Gold was dated 8/14/68. It is desired by 12/15/69 eight copies of a current report concerning Gold be furnished to the Bureau…”

In addition, in another de-classified FBI document, dated Dec. 19, 1969 (contained in Ted’s de-classified FBI file), “the Bureau noted that…positive steps must be taken to develop informant coverage…to insure that the Bureau is in a position to have advance knowledge of all plans and future activities…” So, not surprisingly, Professor Varon’s Bringing the War Home book also observed that the Weatherman organization’s late December 1969 “War Council” meeting in Flint, Michigan “also attracted the interest of the FBI, which just days before the meeting compiled its initial field reports on the Weathermen, identifying approximately 270 members, 85 of whom were already on its special `Security Index’;” and agents there apparently “diligently recorded the identities of most of the 300 or so people in attendance.” 
According to Professor Eckstein’s 2016 Bad Moon Rising book:

“The Bureau had a keen interest in the `War Council’ held in Flint, Michigan, at the end of December [1969]. The Flint police photographed every person who entered the dingy ballroom where the meeting took place, and the photos were sent directly to FBI headquarters in Washington; the informant Larry Grathwohl reported in detail on the meeting…”

In his testimony before an Oct. 18, 1974 U.S. House of Representatives sub-committee, the now-deceased Grathwohl (who was with the U.S. military’s 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam for a year, prior to working as a drill instructor at Fort Knox when he returned from Vietnam) stated that after he returned to his Weatherman collective in Cincinnati, Ohio following the Flint, Michigan meeting, the FBI then paid him “approximately $200 [equal to $1,322 in 2019] in the middle of January” 1970. At this same October 18, 1974 hearing, Grathwohl also testified:

“In February [1970], when the Weathermen went underground, the FBI said OK you are going to have to leave Cincinnati and go to various other cities wherever they want you to go, we will pay you and it will be either $100 [equal to  $661 in 2019] or $150 [equal to $991 in 2019] a week while you are gone. So that held up until the middle of March [1970]…I also was getting somewhere in the vicinity of $300 [equal to $1,983 in 2019] or $500 [equal to $3,306 in 2019] a month in expenses.”  (end of part 4)

50th Anniversary of Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold's Death on W. 11th Street: Part 3

1967-1968 Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold

Surveillance of Columbia SDS Members and Weathermen by NYPD, FBI or CIA Prior to Ted’s Death

In his 2016 book, Bad Moon Rising, University of Maryland Professor Arthur Eckstein wrote that the assassination of the leader of Chicago’s Black Panther Party [BPP], Fred Hampton, and BPP member Mark Clark (that was both arranged and carried out by local, state and federal law enforcement agencies) on Dec. 4, 1969 “was shocking and prompted the relatively sober and cautious Ted Gold to opt for total armed struggle (and, eventually, death in the townhouse).” And in footnote 106 on page 281 of his book, Eckstein cited “Toni Hart (Wellman) interview 8/15/14” as his source for what the “Impact on Ted Gold” and Ted’s politics was, of Fred Hampton’s assassination.

The day after Professor Eckstein interviewed her, Toni, who was apparently also once a close woman friend of John “J.J.” Jacobs, (the now-deceased former Columbia SDS member and one of the Weatherman group’s pre-May 1970 leaders), posted on her blog the following text on Aug. 16, 2014:

“The man in the photograph above is James Jesus Angleton, the head of Counterintelligence in the CIA from 1954 until 1974. In 1967, he set up a secret organization inside the CIA called `Operation Chaos.’  Its purpose was to shut down left-wing groups such as the anti-war movement and Students for a Democratic Society (“SDS”). I was in the anti-war movement and SDS at Columbia University.  Jim Angleton was my uncle.

“I knew Jim was involved in the operations against us but I did not know the specifics. I do now. Very few people on the left understand Operation Chaos and how brilliant that operation and fellow operations by the FBI and the local police were in the 1960s. We on the left always believed that the intelligence groups were dumb, that they had no idea what we were doing, that they did not influence our activities at all. We were dead wrong. I believe that the CIA, the FBI and the Red Squad (NYPD) were so skilled at their intelligence-gathering they were able to infiltrate key left-wing groups, exacerbate conflicts and shut the student left down, in particular, SDS.

“In this piece, I tell that story.  I also tell the story of my uncle, Jim Angleton, because his story is the story of the CIA.  And I will add that I was in SDS and the anti-war movement until they became violent.  Then, I was gone…

“Jim Angleton was the handsomest man I have ever seen. I met him when I was a kid in Duluth…. Angleton went to work for the CIA when it was founded and, when Allen Dulles became the director in 1953, he appointed Jim head of Counterintelligence…Angleton set up Operation Chaos but he did not run it….OpChaos was set up to spy on, infiltrate and shut down the left…. It was difficult to infiltrate student groups. The operative had to be registered in the school, they had to be part of the radical movement on campus and they had to be believable. However, every group on the left that was not a student group was filled with informants…”

Yet according to a former New York City SDS regional office organizer who met up with Toni sometime before the late March 1968 SDS National Council meeting in Lexington, Kentucky, and worked together  with her on writing a position paper related to draft resistance organizing that he presented at that meeting, at that time Toni never mentioned anything about CIA kinships; despite the fact that the SDS chapter at Columbia University had been continually protesting against the Columbia University administration’s policy of allowing the CIA to recruit inside Columbia’s campus buildings since November 1966.

Coincidentally, one reason U.S. government attorneys in October 1973 asked that the 1970 indictments against Weatherman group members be lifted, according to Professor Jeremy Varon’s 2004 Bringing the War Home book, was that “an FBI memo explained that prohibited forms of surveillance by `another government agency’ had been used in preparing the indictments, and that it was therefore `in the best interests of the national security’ not to pursue prosecutions.” The same book also noted that “it appeared that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or the National Security Agency (responsible for the electronic intercept of foreign communications), or both, had conducted illegal investigations;” and “both agencies, barred from nearly all forms of domestic spying, did not want their operations exposed.” (end of part 3)

50th Anniversary of Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold's Death On W. 11th Street: Part 2

1967-1968 Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold

Revisiting Feb. 14, 1970 Attack on U.S. Antiwar Movement’s Fort Dix Antiwar GI Coffeehouse

The planned attack on “a non-commissioned officers’ dance” at Fort Dix, which Weatherman Terry Robbins apparently pushed for prior to his own death on March 6, 1970, did not happen. But less than 3 weeks before 1967-1968 Columbia SDS Vice-Chairman Ted Gold’s death on that same day 50 years ago, there was an actual violent attack on the U.S. antiwar movement’s Fort Dix GI Coffeehouse in Wrightstown, New Jersey on Saturday, Feb. 14, 1970. As an article distributed by the then-Upper West Side-based Liberation News Service in February 1970, titled “Fort Dix Coffeehouse Fire-Bombed,” noted: 

“An incendiary bomb was thrown through the door of the Fort Dix GI-movement Coffee House at 8:45 Saturday evening, Feb. 14 [1970]. Some of the 30 GIs and civilians inside rushed toward the device and tried to kick it out the door. The bomb ignited and three GIs and one woman staff member were injured---sustaining burns and cuts. The most serious injury was to a GI who was cut around the eyes. He is presently in the Fort Dix hospital: his condition is described as satisfactory. Some of the GIs who ran out after the bomb throwers were shot at.

“When N.J. State Police Detectives Bureau agents came to investigate the bombing, they kicked all GIs and staff out of the building and proceeded to rip down posters, tear up GI papers, pull down boards that had been nailed up to fill cracks in the wall, and tamper with the heater (causing it to malfunction)…

“According to GI staff members, the bomb is of a military type. They suspect either members of the military or local right-wingers of carrying out the bombing.

“GI organizers explain that the bombing is only one in a long series of harassments by the military, local and state police, and right-wing groups in the area. The coffee house is already facing eviction this month as a result of pressure put on their landlord by the military and local businessmen. The bombing may have been intended, in part, as a warning to other Wrightstown property-owners not to rent to the anti-war GIs.

“Just a week before the bombing, an army captain and three sergeants came into the coffee house and started to push people around. They shoved one GI away from the telephone, where he was trying to make a call. Radical GIs eventually threw them out, but they threatened to come back with friends and equipment.

“The Fort Dix Coffee House has been the headquarters for dissident GI organizing against the war and against racism. The Fort Dix Soldiers Liberation Front and the Black Liberation Party both make their headquarters at the coffee house. The coffee house played a central role in the organizing of the Oct. 12 [1969] `invasion’ by 10,000 civilians who were demonstrating their support for the Fort Dix 38—participants in the Fort Dix stockade rebellion of June 1969.

“`We will defend ourselves against repression and use all our power to increase our struggle. Power to the people,’ said a spokesman for Fort Dix’s radical GIs.”

According to a Feb. 15, 1970 telephone call (the text of which can be found in a document from the G.I. Press Collection of the Wisconsin Historical Society that’s posted on the internet), a member of the Ford Dix Coffeehouse Collective also stated:

“The police came in and kicked everybody out and investigated the place. The next morning we came back and we found the place more ripped up and torn down than it was the previous night before we left. The police damaged the coffeehouse beyond what the bombing did. They tore Panther posters off the wall and ripped them up…We think it was a pretty well planned thing…This was a professional type bomb, it was not a homemade pipe type bomb…We feel that this is part of a plan to come down on all the [antiwar G.I.] coffeehouses of the country.”

Prior to the Fort Dix Coffehouse being firebombed in February 1970, according to a former New York City SDS regional office organizer involved in initiating the antiwar coffeehouse GI organizing project near Fort Dix, there were many instances of police and army harassment, as he and other antiwar organizers set up the coffeehouse and farm house where they lived outside of Wrightstown, New Jersey. For example, when he and another Movement organizer were pulled over by a New Jersey trooper and asked for an ID, the state trooper demanded that he show him his ID a second time; and when he said to the trooper, “I just gave it to you,” he was then handcuffed, busted for “not having ID,” and forced to spend a couple of nights in BCI-Burlington County Jail on charges that were thrown out subsequently. In addition, according to the same coffeehouse project organizer, in the months prior to the Feb. 14, 1970 attack that finally shut down the Fort Dix GI Coffeehouse, the army also tried to use some troubled GI’s “and lackeys” to plant heroin at the coffeehouse so they could have a pretext to close the antiwar coffeehouse down; but that never worked because they were all recognizable to the antiwar GI’s and Airmen there, and were tossed out before they could cause any problems.

Recalling the Feb. 16, 1970 NYPD Attack on Chicago 8 and Panther 21 Defendants’ Supporters 
  
Two days after the antiwar movement’s Fort Dix GI Coffeehouse was firebombed, however (on Monday afternoon, Feb. 16, 1970), “more than 3,500 supporters” of the  Chicago 8 Conspiracy Trial defendants and Panther 21 Trial defendants still “marched on the Criminal Courts Building at 100 Centre St” in Downtown Manhattan “to protest the contempt citations handed down” the previous week by “Judge Julius Hoffman at the Chicago conspiracy trial” (of Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale, Dave Dellinger and other U.S. antiwar movement organizers), according to a Feb. 17, 1970 Columbia Daily Spectator article by Cyndi Reinhart. But when the demonstrators reached the court house, “about twenty policemen, waving clubs, pushed back the chanting protesters” and “protesters remaining at the court house were herded off the street;” and the police “then charged into the radicals when they refused to leave the area” and “clubbed several protesters.” (end of part 2)

50th Anniversary of Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold's Death On W. 11th Street: Part 1

1967-1968 Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold

A few minutes before noon on Friday, March 6, 1970, a blast was heard on W. 11th St. in the West Village that, according to Douglas Robinson’s March 7, 1970 New York Times article was “powerful enough to tear a hole in the front wall” of a townhouse at 18 W. 11th St.; and, according to the same article, “as firemen arrived at the scene, two” more “lighter blasts shook the building as gas lines burst.” Then, “flames quickly engulfed the townhouse and, a few minutes later, the entire front wall collapsed;” and a former vice-chair of Columbia University’s Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] chapter, Ted Gold, and two other members of the Weatherman faction of National SDS, Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins, were killed.

Dave Dellinger’s 1975 Account

As the now-deceased longtime U.S. antiwar Movement organizer/activist and 1969-1970 Chicago 8 “Conspiracy” Trial defendant Dave Dellinger recalled in his 1975-published book, More Power Than We Know, “shortly after the event, a private message from one of my underground Weathermen friends told me that Ted Gold…was killed only because he had been traumatized by a sudden realization of the horror they were preparing for their enemies and had come back to the house to try to persuade his associates to abandon the project.”

In addition, in his 1993-published autobiography, From Yale to Jail, Dellinger also wrote that “the message explained that they were making an anti-personnel bomb in the townhouse” and “that was what had upset Gold.”

One former Weatherman’s view, however, is that Dellinger’s 1975 account was after-the-fact wishful thinking; and, although Ted was critical and one of the main doubters in the pre- March 6, 1970 meeting debates within the townhouse, that got transformed, for what might be called ideological reasons, into Dellinger’s story. According to this former Weatherman, the story he heard on March 7, 1970 was that Ted had gone out to a drug store to buy cotton to muffle the sound of the watch for the bomb they were making, but came back to ask Terry Robbins--the leader of the Weathermen inside the townhouse--if he should get balls or batts.

Although another former Weatherman also thinks it’s possible that whoever Dellinger’s contact was romanticized Ted as more fully opposed than he was, this second former Weatherman notes that there is good evidence that Ted felt conflicted about what Dellinger characterized in his 1975 book as “the horror they were preparing for their enemies.” But a third different veteran of the 1960’s New Left antiwar movement in Manhattan adamantly feels that Dellinger’s 1975 account was not historically accurate; and he greatly doubts that Ted was against whatever they were planning to do.

Did Columbia University Administration Receive False “Bomb Plot” Warnings Prior to Ted’s Death?
  
In an article titled “The House on 11th Street” that appeared in its March 23, 1970 issue, the then-Washington Post Company-owned Newsweek magazine initially claimed that “underground sources” had “told Newsweek’s Thomas Dotten” that the target of the Weatherman group’s project, was allegedly “buildings at Columbia University (and elsewhere);” and that “Columbia officials were relieved that the bomb plot against the university—about which they had received warnings—had failed.”

The same Newsweek article also initially claimed that “underground sources” told Dotten that, prior to Ted’s death 50 years ago, the Weatherman collective in the 18 W. 11th St. townhouse was allegedly planning “to blast” the buildings at Columbia “in conjunction with a planned protest on campus;” since “the new focus of their attention at Columbia was a demand by far leftists that the university admit its guilt as part of a `racist society’ by arranging the bail for the Black Panthers on trial in an alleged bombing conspiracy.”

What Was Actual Planned Target of Weatherman Collective in 18 W. 11th St. Prior to Ted’s Death?

Although, according to Newsweek, “Columbia officials” had “received warnings” prior to Ted’s death (presumably from either federal or local law enforcement agencies or informants) about a purported “bomb plot against the university,” in early March 1970 Columbia University’s buildings were apparently not actually being then targeted by the Weatherman collective in the 18 W.11th St. townhouse. As Dan Berger later observed in his 2006 book, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity, “the specific target” of the planned bombing project on March 6, 1970, “was a non-commissioned officers’ dance at” the Fort Dix “Army base” in New Jersey.

According to Bryan Burrough’s 2015 Days of Rage book, the decision. to target “the dance at Fort Dix” on Friday, March 6, 1970, was decided by and announced to the 18 W. 11th St. townhouse Weatherman collective members by its leader, Terry Robbins, on Tuesday, March 3, 1970—just 3 days before Ted was killed by the entrance to the townhouse; after “the collective” had “gathered to discuss” possible “targets” during the previous weekend. The same book also noted that “on Thursday, March 5”, 1970, the day before the former Columbia SDS vice-chair’s death at the age of 22, “Robbins chaired a final meeting in the townhouse kitchen going over details and assignments for the attack.”

In his 1975-published book, More Power Than We Know, Dave Dellinger, however, wrote that “a bitter argument had been raging for some days over the legitimacy of the enterprise” and “two days before the blast” that destroyed the townhouse and killed Ted, Terry Robbins and Diana Oughton, “Kathy Boudin…had told me her fears that they were losing contact with the revolutionary love that had motivated them to embark on their new course.” 

In his 2004-published book, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies, New School University Professor Jeremy Varon noted that, when he interviewed the now-deceased former 1960’s Lower East Side antiwar Movement activist and Weatherman faction member Robin Palmer many years later, Palmer recalled that Terry “Robbins `scared the shit out of him’ when they first met in early March 1970;” and “listening to Robbins talk wildly, with an embarrassed” now-deceased former Columbia SDS member and pre-May 1970 Weatherman faction of National SDS leader “J. J. [John Jacobs] present, of plans to bomb an Army dance, Palmer responded, `I don’t agree with what you’re saying.’” In addition, according to Varon’s book, Palmer felt that Robbins’ proposed planned action “was `crazy.’” (end of part 1)

Ted Gold's Summer 1968 `Education and Teaching' Paper Revisited

1967-68 Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold

In late April 1968, anti-racist and anti-war students of Barnard College and Columbia University non-violently occupied Hamilton Hall, Low Library, Avery Hall, Fayerweather Hall and Mathematics Hall on the Upper West Side campus of Columbia University for nearly a week, in support of six demands.

Yet instead of peacefully agreeing to implement the demands of the over 700 students participating in this late April 1968 non-violent campus protest, the politically "liberal' Columbia University administration requested that the then-politically "liberal" mayor of New York City, John Lindsay, order his New York City Police Department [NYPD] to invade Columbia's campus; and to remove and arrest on "criminal trespassing" charges all the protesting anti-racist and anti-war Barnard and Columbia students who refused to end their non-violent occupation of Columbia's campus buildings.

As a result, in the early morning hours of April 30, 1968 around 1,000 helmeted NYPD cops invaded Columbia's Upper West Side campus and brutalized many Columbia or Barnard students of all political persuasions, clubbed some Columbia faculty members and arrested over 700 anti-racist and anti-war Barnard and Columbia students. And then, after the Columbia-Barnard chapter of Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] initiated a second non-violent student occupation of Hamilton Hall, to demand that 1967-68 Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold and five other anti-racist and anti-war Columbia students not be suspended, the politically "liberal" Columbia University administration again requested that NYPD cops come onto its Upper West Side campus, in the early morning of May 22, 1968.

And, not surprisingly, for a second time many Columbia or Barnard students of all political persuasions were either brutalized or arrested when the NYPD cops again invaded Columbia's campus.

Following his suspension by the Columbia administration in late May 1968, however, 1967-68 Columbia SDS Vice-Chair Ted Gold wrote a position paper in the Summer of 1968, titled "The Columbia Liberation School Class on Public Education and Teaching," which contained the following text:

"The largest class at the Columbia Liberation School this summer has been the Public Education and Teaching course. The class has been meeting for about 10 weeks. At the beginning we knew next to nothing about teacher organizing; now perhaps we know a little. Despite the admittedly low level of development of our strategic insights and ideas, which only reflects the fact that the radical teachers movement is still feeling its birth pangs, it might be useful to briefly go over the major points we have developed in the course.

"One thing we have to remember, however, is that at this time practically anything we say is likely to be quite abstract, because we don't even know yet what a radical teacher is. We don't know what the best demands in a radical educational struggle will be. Teachers who consider themselves radical cannot confine themselves to supporting the demands and struggles that already exist. We must become part of the process of initiating the struggles and formulating the demands that will define our Movement, a Movement that only barely exists at this time.

"The Liberation School class has explored three major areas related to teacher organizing. First we went into the role of the teacher in the classroom. We reached a general consensus that it is extremely inadequate and superficial to confine ourselves to criticisms of the content of the curriculum--the factual material that is and is not taught--in the New York City public schools. The feeling among most of the class was that though it is very important that (for example) lies about American history are being taught--and that in most schools Black history is not being taught at all--what is much more important is the teachers' role, the teachers' stance in the classroom.

"The teacher functions as an authority figure, a dispenser and enforcer of rules to be followed for their own sake, a symbol of society's oppressive relation to the individual. If instead of saying `The United States is the land of freedom and opportunity' the teacher were to say `The United States is conducting a war of annihilation against the Vietnamese and maintains its own Blacks as colonial subjects,' it would make little difference if the atmosphere in the classroom remained the same. That atmosphere is defined by the stifling of creativity, by the teacher as master and the students as subjects, with the master dispensing truth to the subjects and exercising total control over the subjects, right down to the carrying out of their life functions (`May I take the pass?').

"In that atmosphere, it doesn't make a tremendous difference whether the truth the teacher shoves down the kids' throats is in fact true or not; in either case, the kids will (and do) react by keeping it outside themselves, becoming `discipline problems,' not wanting to listen because listening in such a situation becomes the antithesis of learning.

"The Liberation School class concluded that the content of education must be changed, but more importantly, the classroom must be turned into a place where the teachers and students, together as human beings, explore their interests, develop their potential, and initiate the process of learning. Once again, the abstract quality of this conclusion is not evidence that it is incorrect, but that it must be given more concrete form by the experience of all of us.

"Secondly, the Liberation School class went into the nature of education in America. One of the members gave a presentation on the class nature of education. The tracking system was seen as the tactic used by the Board of Education to earmark, from the beginning of their schooling, some students for college and well-paying jobs, others for jobs providing enough to live on, and still others for menial labor or unemployment. An important point in the discussion of the tracking system and the class nature of education was that the reason a large number of people have menial or no work is not that they have poor educations, but the reason they are given poor educations is that the society doesn't have `good' (well-paying, anyway) jobs to give them. With an economy that requires 4 percent unemployed and a much large number in seasonal and menial labor, it would be extremely disadvantageous for smooth-running oppression for these people to be trained to do more.

"Another important point relating to the nature of education in America that came out in the Liberation School class was that the `good' jobs are good only in the sense that they are well-paying. They are often as meaningless and alienating as lower-status employment, and the education received by individuals filling these jobs was seen by the class to be not education at all, but training. One difference between whites and Blacks in this society is not that whites are educated and Blacks are not, but that most whites receive training for some `respectable' station in life, and most Blacks and Puerto Ricans do not. Programs such as Head Start, Upward Bound, MES, Demonstration Districts, etc. were seen as efforts to buy off the revolt growing within Black and Puerto Rican communities against the education their children are (not) receiving.

"Thirdly, the class got into the question of teachers as a constituency, what issues they can be organized around, and how they can be united with the community struggles (and student struggles) already going on. The problem of overcoming the fragmentation between teachers and community was seen as crucial, because the tactic of dividing one oppressed group from another is the surest weapon for preventing either group from attacking their real enemy, their common enemy.

"The class felt, in the process of trying to build a united Movement in the public schools, it was extremely important not to put teachers in an auxiliary role vis a vis the community, a role that many of us played in SNCC, CORE, etc., before the Student Movement took on a life of its own.

"Teachers must be shown that they have common interests with the students and community, that what seems to be conflicting interests are not, but they must be organized around their own interests as well. For example, it is important to show teachers why community control will help the community achieve better education, but we will not be successful in winning teachers over to our side unless we show them how the struggle for community control will help make their jobs more human, how it will help them become better teachers, in short, how it is in their interest as well.

"That is where the Liberation School class is at now. We are trying to develop organizational forms that will help bring teachers and community together politically, and that will specifically help teachers to a better job in the classroom. Most of the ideas just described are hardly original, and many were held by some members of the class before it began. These ideas and others have been explored at the Liberation School class in some greater depth than it's been possible to go into here. But the important thing is that in getting together regularly we've become part of a process not only of discussing ideas, but of forming a collective of teachers who will be part of the struggle too for change in the public schools and society."  (this article was initially posted on the Upper West Side Patch website)