Look, I'm not here to condone or to condemn them, merely to present things accurately. (Reading) the challenge for me is to explain to people today why this all didn't seem as insane then as it does now.ĭo you feel like you have a better understanding now for the reasons behind the actions of the radical armed groups?īURROUGH: I do. If you exploded a bomb and then taped a communique beneath a telephone booth or called it into a radio station, that was the way that these underground radicals got their message out.

Bombs, I write, basically functioned as exploding press releases at a time when there was no Internet or much way of, let's say, a radical getting his views out to the public. Less than 1 percent of them led to any type of serious injury, much less a fatality. These bombings were far more widespread and far less lethal. And that, of course, is the challenge for an author - is trying to explain to people today the incredible differences in the way the American public regarded all these bombings during the 1970s. So was that intentional?īRYAN BURROUGH: Yes, by and large, it was. But you also say that those bombings, although more widespread, were less lethal than attacks today.

So as part of doing that, you said that the number of bombings by radical groups in an 18-month period between 1971 and '72 - 2,500 bombings on U.S. So you're trying to take several of the radical groups from the '70s and late '60s and put them into context. He also wrote the best-seller 'Barbarians At The Gate: The Fall Of RJR Nabisco.'īryan Burrough, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Burrough was a special correspondent for Vanity Fair.

Burrough also spoke with retired FBI agents. Burrough spoke to several members of these groups who had never spoken on the record before and offered new insights into how these groups operated. In addition to the Weather Underground, Burrough writes about the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, which is an offshoot of the Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, which kidnapped Patty Hearst, the Family, which was co-founded by Tupac Shakur's stepfather and FALN, a Puerto Rican independence group. Some of the groups were fully committed to their political ideals.Others had vague and incoherent ideologies. The American radical underground of the 1970s is the subject of my guest Bryan Burrough's new book, 'Days Of Rage.' He writes about the Weather Underground and other groups whose members he says, quote, 'mistakenly believed the country was on the brink of a genuine, political revolution and thought that violence would speed the change,' unquote.

Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough