An American Radical:. Susan Rosenberg
(Counter Intelligence Program) program6 was in full force. I decided that rather than go to what I presumed would be a rigged trial, I would follow my revolutionary heart and risk all.
The underground, becoming a fugitive, being on the run, however one describes it, is both a physical and mental state of being. The underground, not unlike the French resistance movement during World War II, consisted of a network of people who thought enough like you to risk opening their lives and homes to fugitives in order to protect them from capture by the authorities. In the language of criminal law, their help is defined as “harboring.” In wartime, it would be called “aiding the enemy.”
By the time I fled, however, whatever underground had existed as a result of the anti-war movement, the anti-draft movement, and the movement to give illegal immigrants sanctuary had all but disappeared. There was nothing romantic or fun about it. The lack of a vital and thriving network of committed radicals willing to sacrifice their careers and possessions should have been enough of a warning to me that I was incorrectly reading the mood of the country. The election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980 by an overwhelming majority should have been further proof that our view of American society was deeply skewed. But I saw only what I wanted to see. I was blinded by my own dedication and extremism. Life underground was lonely and isolating, and this should have been another signal to me that something was wrong with the path I was treading. But, because I had lived through the rise of a mass movement and had felt the power of collective action once before, I still believed it could happen again. And so all the signs that I was moving in the wrong direction didn’t stop me.
As the country moved to the right, some of us in the radical left went further afield and were increasingly polarized and far from the mainstream. I had been in various projects and organizations over the course of my life, including student groups at Barnard College and later at the City University of New York, as well as solidarity organizations that supported Puerto Rican independence and African liberation both in South Africa and in the United States. The overlapping core of people who built these organizations and many others grew increasingly frustrated with the inability to organize and grow or effect change in U.S. policies.
It was this core of radical activists that I joined to build the ranks of the underground. We hoped that our actions would help galvanize a militant mass protest against repressive U.S. policies in Central America, in Africa, and at home. We thought that by taking armed actions against government property (including bombing unoccupied government buildings), we would show that despite the power of the state, it was possible to oppose it.
In order to build an underground, we had to retreat further and further away from our public lives and psychologically further into our own political thinking and commitment than any of us had before. Although living in obscurity was difficult and tedious, there was a feeling of power that came from invisibility. Anonymity was often invigorating and chilling at the same time. For so many years in the left we had been trying to be different, to present an alternative to the norms of regular society. We were in the broadest sense part of the counterculture. This meant that we looked different, acted different, and were different from the accepted models of behavior. So, by our own definition we attracted attention. Going underground demanded a completely different discipline and relationship to our public appearance. Here the goal was to look exactly like everyone else around you so that nothing stood out, so that nothing would be a visual cue to anyone to remember anything about you. Leave no trace, we said to ourselves, blend in and glide along. We dyed our hair and straightened the curls, bought dresses and skirts and suits and ties and applied makeup and playacted that we were straight, in all senses of the word. For some of us this was easier to do than for others. But all of us found it was a difficult life and dramatically different from how we had formed our identities. We had been organizers, we had been in the public movement, and we had been speechmakers and workers. We had been living our lives for the purpose of helping people and ending society’s inequities. Once underground, we could no longer talk to people or engage in any social work. Suddenly our lives had become the very antithesis of our beliefs, the embodiment of the social alienation that we had been trying to redress. And so, we made jokes to cope with the loneliness and pain. We laughed when the first time we dyed our hair it turned orange, a long-honored tradition of underground participants around the world. The color was called “underground orange” because it would take several attempts to get the color right. While we laughed, nothing about our lives was funny. We were trying to create lives and structures that were in no way connected to the world. We were trying to build identities that could coexist while there was a manhunt in progress for all of us. We were trying to create a look that would never be remembered and with it a capacity to appear anywhere. We were erasing our own identities in an attempt to be invisible.
When the mother of one of our members died, we had a big debate about whether or not she should attend the funeral. We all had seen the movies where the FBI was crouching behind tombstones waiting for a fugitive to show up. Several years earlier when I had been aboveground, I had attended the funeral of a member of the Black Panthers who had been in a terrible gun battle with the NYPD. FBI agents in helicopters surveilling the people followed the funeral procession to the cemetery in attendance. We had worked so hard to create a clandestine space with a network of apartments, cars, and contacts that we were loath to take the risk. But in the end, she went. It was the right decision, it was the humane decision. Her father was very glad that she came. And she was not put in jeopardy. There were no police or FBI at the funeral, no overt or covert surveillance of any kind.
It was hard to let down the wall that we had constructed between our past and present lives. I missed my parents and wanted to see them. Through an elaborate maze of procedures that included lipstick scrawled on a hotel mirror, indicating that it was safe to go, we contacted my parents and invited them into the underground. They came for a weekend. My mother said that all the precautions were right out of a John Le Carré novel. We shared our world over two days, talking inside an upscale motel. My parents were worried for my safety. They were afraid that someone would get hurt. They vehemently disagreed with the choices that I had made, and they urged me to leave the country. They had been visited by the FBI and threatened with jail themselves if they failed to turn me in. And yet, they risked themselves for their love of me.
I did not leave the country. Instead, I kept going. On that awful and cold day in November when I was on the New Jersey Turnpike with Tim, there was no immediate, specific plan to use the explosives. We were moving them into storage for an unspecified future time and purpose. We were stockpiling arms for the distant revolution that we all had convinced ourselves would come soon.
I ended up on that highway because I had been a part of something that had taken hold of my imagination and heart, a world of infinite possibility that would free us all. I believed that there was no other more appealing avenue in life than to be an activist, a revolutionary who worked for justice. I knew from my reading of history that it was only through people actively trying to change the balance of forces, or a war, that made power concede to a demand. Intermixed with what I saw as lofty goals were other psychological factors. I wanted to be loved, to be rewarded, to be an outlaw, and to reject conformity. Was it rebellion or a rejection of authority, or had I fallen in love with the romantic idea that justice was pure and that goodness would not be affected by the means? Was all this intense activism a way to fill the spiritual hole that I felt from being born in America, which I considered to be a morally empty landscape? No matter what, I could not see the long distance I had traveled from my commitment to justice and equality to stockpiling guns and dynamite. Seeing that would take years.
That night on the New Jersey Turnpike, I still believed with all my heart that what Che Guevara7 had said about revolutionaries being motivated by love was true, and that by being willing to die for the cause we were simply embodying the ideals that we were striving for. I also believed that our government ruled the world by force and that it was necessary to oppose it with force. I felt that we lived in a country that loved violence and that we had to meet it on its own terms. This is why I was moving explosives on the New Jersey Turnpike with Tim Blunk.
AS IT GOT