142 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographythe University of Michigan, but dropped out to join Students for a Democratic Society. “In 1967 he
met Ms. Dohrn in Ann Arbor, Mich. She had a law degree from the University of Chicago and was
a magnetic speaker who often wore thigh-high boots and miniskirts,” wrote the Times. In 1970,
after the explosion of the Greenwich Village townhouse, Dohrn jumped bail and failed to appear for
her trial in connection with the Weatherman Days of Rage caper, a piece of absurd political
tragicomedy in which a few hundred Weathermen wearing football helmets proposed to start the
revolution by doing battle with the Chicago cops in the middle of the Loop. The Weathermen had
expected a massive turnout that would have allowed them to rule the streets and sweep the forces of
order aside. The whole lunatic exercise was predictably a tactical failure, and an even bigger
strategic political failure, since it marks the end of the student movement and of the Students for a
Democratic Society. Despite all of its problems, SDS had been by some measures the largest left-
wing membership organizations in the history of this country, and with reasonable leadership it
could have acted as a pressure group to the left of the Democratic Party for many years to come.
But that meant nothing to the Weatherman provocateurs, police agents, and wreckers, who seemed
determined to destroy SDS with all the tools at their disposal.
Later in the spring of 1970, Ayers and Dohrn were both indicted along with other Weathermen
in Federal Court under the Rap Brown law for crossing state lines to incite a riot during the Days of
Rage, and then for “conspiracy to bomb police stations and government buildings.” Those charges
were dropped in 1974, allegedly because of prosecutorial misconduct, including illegal surveillance,
but, some said, because the individuals in question were evidently assets of interest to the US
intelligence community.
FOUNDATIONS ALLEGED TO HAVE FUNDED THE WEATHERMEN
The now obscure but highly detailed survey entitled Carter and the Party of International
Terrorism,^37 issued in the summer of 1976 by the long-defunct US Labor Party, alleged the
involvement of a number of foundations in the origins and development of the Weathermen. This
study expresses a heterodox view of the Weathermen which may nevertheless prove heuristic:
... The Weathermen were created as a joint project of the Ford Foundation, IPS, and the
Institute for Social Research (ISR) [at the University of Michigan].^38 The group was spawned in
May, 1968 at a “secret meeting” in the midst of the Columbia University student strike.
Weatherman founder Mark Rudd constituted the initial cell around a Ford Foundation grant
under which the group agreed to bust the strike through anarchist provocations. The Ford
Foundation “blank check” was conduited through Tom Neumann, the [step-son] of OSS
ideologue Herbert Marcuse and the head of a New York City IPS anarchist project, “Up Against
the Wall Motherf****r.” Weathermen were constituted as a national faction within the IPS-
dominated Students for a Democratic Society by means of the selection process conducted
during 1968-1969 through a series of position papers published in the Radical Education
Project, run by Marcus Raskin and Arthur Waskow. In fact, the position papers (including the
infamous “You Don’t Need a Weatherman...” were synthetic belief structures drafted by
psychological warfare experts at ISR and published under the bylines of SDS leaders like Bill
Ayers and Jim Mellen – both [Ann Arbor] ISR graduate students. SDSers attracted to the
anarcho-syndicalist Weatherman credo were put through a series of well-financed “military
maneuvers” during this period to refine the selection. The Democratic Convention riots in
Chicago: Led by IPS operatives Hayden and Waskow and heavily financed by the Carnegie
Fund ($85,000), the Office of Economic Opportunity ($194,000 conduited through IPS), plus