Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol: The Explosive Story of M19, America's First Female Terrorist Group - Softcover

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William Rosenau, PhD, is a senior research scientist at CNA, a nonprofit research and analysis organization, and a fellow in the International Security program at New America. His articles have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. He has appeared on CNN, BBC World News, and elsewhere. He lives in Washington, DC.

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Tonight We Bombed the U.S. Capitol

1

KEEPERS OF THE FLAME

. . . our dreams

will be the shell casings

that pierce the enemy

as our love, and resistance

continue.

—Susan Rosenberg, “Compañera” (Fall 1986)1

NEW YORK, 1979

There is no record of the founding of May 19th. The closest thing to a formal beginning was a fiery manifesto the nascent group issued in 1979: “The Principles of Unity of the May 19th Communist Organization.” Their creed was “revolutionary anti-imperialism,” and like other millenarians, they wrapped their faith in reason. “Our science is Marxism-Leninism,” they wrote.2

The United States, according to May 19th, was the ultimate “white oppressor nation,” a “parasite on the Third World,” a poisonous spider at the center of a noxious global web.

May 19th believed that national liberation wasn’t just an international challenge: the United States had its own internal colonies filled with blacks, American Indians, and Puerto Ricans, who were just as ruthlessly exploited as the denizens of any sweltering tropical dictatorship. And it wasn’t just racial minorities who were subjugated. The oppression of women in general, and lesbians in particular, was another symptom of a national sickness. Imperialism, capitalism, and racism were strong, but still, May 19th saw some hopeful signs. They heard revolutionary rumblings inside the guts of the American monster and detected systemic weaknesses that were ready to be exploited.

May 19th insisted that the “oppressed nations within the U.S. are preparing themselves to wage a full-scale people’s war against the enemy that has entered its final decline.”3 The women offered apocalyptic visions and end-time prophesies: a “much more brutal fascist regime,” the liberation of captive peoples, and the destruction of the United States.4

How could their tiny band of middle-class intellectuals contribute to the global struggle, and bend the arc of history to speed up the destruction of the “parasite” nation? One of their lawyers later described the women as “Revolutionaries. Dreamers. Lovers of Freedom. . . . Some are lesbians. All love women, people fighting everywhere for self-determination and dignity.”5

But ushering in the new world required more than just good intentions and beautiful dreams. Mao Zedong had made that point back in 1927 when the Chinese Communist Party had been fighting for power. The revolution, Mao said, “is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”6

According to May 19th’s analysis, the ruling class would never give up peacefully, and May 19th, one member said later, wanted to “ensure that all the shooting didn’t come from one side.”7

May 19th said that the First World mass movements of the 1960s had taken a wrong turn. Instead of doing all they could to support national liberation struggles in places such as Vietnam, South Africa, and Palestine, sixties radicals thought they were leading a global revolution. May 19th pledged to avoid that mistake. They vowed to shed their “white-skin privilege” and work as “North American anti-imperialists” under the leadership of black and brown people. “We, white women, say NO to amerika where white is a badge of acceptance of daily murder,” they declared.8

May 19th didn’t immediately reach for bombs and guns. They started off with nonviolent agitation and propaganda: demonstrations, picketing, speeches, film screenings, and politically informed graphic art. May 19th had a number of affiliated groups that promoted its agenda and served as recruitment pools.I The all-women Madame Binh Graphics Collective pumped out propaganda posters. Other affiliated groups raised funds for Robert Mugabe’s wing of the Zimbabwe African National Union, a guerrilla movement fighting to end white minority rule in Rhodesia. They raised hell about imprisoned Puerto Ricans they called “freedom fighters.” There was an “everlasting spiral of activity, urgency, and exhaustion,” former May 19th member Mary Patten recalled.9

Two women were the heart and soul of the new formation. Although a decade apart in age, they had much in common: a solidly middle-class New York upbringing, early ideological commitment, education at elite institutions—and an unwavering dedication to revolution, new values, and sexual self-actualization. Judy and Susan: sisters in arms.

• • •

Judith Alice Clark was born to Joseph and Ruth Clark in New York on November 23, 1949. She described her childhood as happy, but it was an unusual upbringing, at least in her early years.

As a young man in Brooklyn, Joe had been a member of a Marxist-Leninist microsect that had followed the Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky into anti-Stalinism.

Later, Joe concluded that Trotsky and his worshippers had been all wrong. Comrade Joseph Stalin, not Trotsky, was the true communist godhead. Joe switched sides and joined the Moscow-dominated Communist Party USA. He rose quickly through the Party’s ranks, and before long he was a full-time high-level Party functionary, and an editor of the Party’s newspaper, the Daily Worker.

Unsurprisingly, FBI Red hunters kept tabs on the Clarks. They had a sense they were being watched, but it didn’t rattle them—they were on the right side of history, after all. Stalin’s Soviet Union was their alpha and omega. They were utopians, like Tillie Olsen, a true-believing American poet who wrote in 1934 that the Soviet Union was “a heaven . . . brought down to earth in Russia.”10

In 1950, Joe got to see his revolution’s control center firsthand. He moved Ruth, their son, Andrew, and baby Judy to Moscow, where he took up a position as a Daily Worker correspondent. The relocation represented a remarkable devotion to the communist cause, given the harsh conditions that prevailed in the Soviet capital and the anticommunist sentiment that saturated postwar America.

After a three-year stint, the Clarks returned to New York, and Joe and Ruth continued their Party work. The family lived in Brooklyn: first in Bensonhurst and then in solidly lower-middle-class Flatbush. In the summer they would often go out to Mohegan Lake in Westchester County, where there was a colony of fellow communists. The folk singer Pete Seeger, a supporter of the Communist Party, made occasional appearances at lakeside hootenannies. Those annual excursions to the cozy summer community reinforced social bonds among Party members—being a communist meant total commitment.

But by the mid-1950s, Ruth and Joe had growing...