Days of Rage
FBI's war on America's rebels
Description
On a January night in 1975, a bomb tore through the ground floor of the State Department in Washington. Nobody died, but the blast gutted twenty offices and rattled a city that liked to think of itself as untouchable. The group that claimed it, the Weather Underground, mailed a communiqué explaining why. This was not an isolated event. In the years around it, the United States was living through a slow drumbeat of domestic explosions — police stations, corporate headquarters, courthouses, a bathroom in the Capitol. At the peak, the country was absorbing something like five bombings a day, most of them the work of Americans who believed they were starting a revolution.
That sentence tends to stop people, because almost nobody remembers it. The seventies survive in memory as disco, wide collars, Watergate, and long gas lines — not as a decade when small bands of young radicals declared war on their own government and, for a while, got away with it. In Days of Rage, the journalist Bryan Burrough reconstructs that lost war: the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, the FALN, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the federal agents who chased them, often clumsily, sometimes lawlessly, and for years without much success.
What emerges is a strange double story. On one side, a generation of middle-class kids and street militants convinced that bombs could crack open history. On the other, an FBI that was powerful, feared, and quietly out of its depth against enemies who hid in plain sight. Burrough refuses to romanticize either. He wants to know how it happened, why it burned out, and why a country that lived through it chose so thoroughly to look away.
The question we’re asking : How did the United States spend a decade under homegrown bombs, and why did almost everyone agree to forget it?What we’ll see : The forgotten scale of the violence, the young radicals who chose it, the Bureau that struggled to stop them, and the silence that followed.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — A country that forgot its own bombs
Burrough opens with a fact that reads like a misprint. Between roughly 1971 and 1972, according to the figures he cites, the United States experienced more than nineteen hundred domestic bombings in a single year. Not overseas, not hypothetical — set off in American cities, by Americans, against American targets. Banks, draft boards, ROTC buildings, police precincts, the offices of Gulf Oil and Mobil. For long stretches of the decade, an explosion somewhere in the country was ordinary news, barely worth the front page.
The point of the book is not the body count, which was mercifully low, but the amnesia. The bombers were mostly careful to hit property rather than people; the Weather Underground in particular built its whole ethic around warning calls and empty buildings. That restraint is part of why the era faded. When almost no one dies, the trauma doesn't lodge the way it does after a massacre. The violence became background noise, and background noise is easy to forget once it stops.
02Chapter 2 — The kids who wanted a revolution
The Weather Underground is where Burrough spends much of his attention, partly because its members left the fullest record and partly because they embody the era's central paradox. These were not desperate people. Many came from comfortable homes, elite campuses, families with money and standing. Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Kathy Boudin, Mark Rudd — bright, articulate, formed by the antiwar movement and radicalized by the sense that marching had changed nothing while the war ground on.
In 1969 they broke from the larger Students for a Democratic Society, convinced that peaceful protest was a dead end. The following year, three of their own were killed when a bomb they were building in a Greenwich Village townhouse detonated prematurely. Burrough treats that explosion as a hinge: it should have ended the group, and instead it hardened the survivors into a disciplined underground that spent the next decade evading the largest manhunt the FBI had ever mounted.
03Chapter 3 — The Bureau that had no idea what to do
The other half of Days of Rage is the FBI, and Burrough's portrait is deflating for anyone who imagines the Bureau as an all-seeing machine. Against radicals who moved constantly, used false names, and lived among sympathetic strangers, J. Edgar Hoover's agency was often lost. Its informant networks, so effective against the Communist Party, barely penetrated cells bound by personal loyalty and paranoia. Agents spent years chasing people who were sometimes living a few neighborhoods away.
The frustration bred lawlessness. Unable to catch the Weather Underground by legitimate means, the Bureau resorted to warrantless break-ins — the so-called black bag jobs — mail opening, and illegal surveillance, much of it targeting the fugitives' families rather than the fugitives themselves. Burrough details how these tactics eventually blew up in the FBI's face. When the abuses surfaced in the mid-seventies, it was agents, not radicals, who ended up indicted, and prosecutions of the Weathermen collapsed because the evidence had been gathered illegally.
04Chapter 4 — What the seventies buried
Step back from the individual cells and manhunts, and Days of Rage becomes a book about national memory — specifically, about the things a country decides not to keep. The revolutionary underground of the seventies did not fail because it was defeated in some decisive battle. It faded. The war in Vietnam ended, the draft ended, the movement lost its oxygen, members drifted into ordinary lives, and the whole episode was quietly folded away as an embarrassment nobody on any side wanted to reopen.
That collective forgetting, Burrough suggests, was almost a shared project. The former radicals had reasons to downplay how serious their intentions had been; some became professors, lawyers, respectable citizens for whom the bombs were a youthful excess best left vague. The FBI had every reason to bury a decade of failure and illegality. And the wider public, having survived the violence without much personal cost, was happy to remember the seventies as a costume party rather than a low-grade civil conflict.
05Conclusion
The bomb that opened this story, the one in the State Department in 1975, is a good measure of how far the memory has drained away. A revolutionary group blew a hole in a federal building in the capital, mailed an explanation to the newspapers, and the country moved on so completely that most people today would swear it never happened. Burrough's achievement is to make that strangeness visible again — to recover a decade when the FBI and a scattering of homegrown revolutionaries fought each other across American cities, and to insist that we look at it without the comforting haze.
