Bryan Burrough - Days of Rage: Americas Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence

Without a doubt, this book is the single most difficult project I have ever attempted. During more than five years of research, I thought of quitting any number of times. When I began work in 2009, I had no idea of the challenges involved, or the complexities of dealing with veterans of the radical left. If you said I was nave, well, I couldnt argue with you.

Eleven years ago I wrote a book called Public Enemies, in which I employed a million or so pages of newly released FBI files to tell the story of the Bureaus pursuit of John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and a half dozen other Depression-era criminals. In approaching this book, I assumed I would be able to draw on similar resources to document the rise and fall of the 1970s-era underground groups. Big mistake. FBI files, those the Bureau has made publicly available, are almost useless to a historian. Only a fraction of the paperwork these investigations generated has been issued, and almost all of it is dreck, either highly redacted headquarters summaries or page after page of highly redacted, and highly repetitive, airtels and telegrams. One could learn far more about the underground from newspapers.

The existing literature was helpful, but contained gaping holes. Of the ten or so books and films dealing with the Weather Underground, few contain much detailed information on what interested me most: how the group actually operated underground. There are two good books about the Symbionese Liberation Army from the 1970s, but none on the Black Liberation Army, the FALN, or the United Freedom Front. John Castelluccis 1986 book about the Family, The Big Dance, is packed with good information but so loosely structured it is often hard to follow.

In the absence of fresh documentation, I was obliged to fall back on the basic skills I learned as a young newspaper reporter many years ago: pounding the pavement, hitting the phones. Veterans of the underground were easy enough to track down. The problem was getting them to talk candidly about decades-old crimes they had rarely if ever spoken of publicly, and which in some cases might still be the subject of law enforcement interest.

During my first year of research, I cold-called any number of aging underground figures. The conversation usually went something like this:

Hello, my name is Bryan Burrough. You dont know me from Adam, and I dont share your politics. Would you be willing to tell me about that building you bombed in 1972?

Click.

This became somewhat frustrating. A turning point came when, during the course of peoples deflecting my questions, I was directed to their attorneys. The group of radical lawyers who handled underground cases turned out to be surprisingly small; maybe fifteen attorneys, almost all in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, handled just about every major case. A handful worked on dozens of cases spanning multiple underground groups. With the help of several of these attorneyspeople motivated simply by a wish to accurately recapture a piece of little-remembered American historyI was able to begin building bridges to their clients, many of whom remain distrustful of anyone associated with the mainstream media. Some interviews took months to negotiate. Even once a veteran of the underground agreed to speak with me, it sometimes took four or five meetings to begin earning something like the trust that is necessary for someone to share secrets with a complete stranger. I am deeply grateful to all those who did.