By John M. Murtagh
Somewhere
near Boston early Monday morning, he packed a bomb in a bag. It was by
all accounts relatively crude — a pressure cooker, explosives, some
wires, ball bearings and nails . . . nails which, hours later, doctors
would struggle to remove from the flesh of bleeding victims.
His motive is unclear. His intent is not: It was to maximize injury, suffering, pain, trauma and, yes, death.
Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be caught, perhaps not.
Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be offered a teaching job at Columbia University.
Forty-three
years ago last month, Kathy Boudin, now a professor at Columbia but
then a member of the Weather Underground, escaped an explosion at a bomb
factory operated in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. The story is
familiar to people of a certain age.
Three weeks earlier,
Boudin’s Weathermen had firebombed a private home in Upper Manhattan
with Molotov cocktails. Their target was my father, a New York state
Supreme Court justice. The rest of the family, was presumably, an
afterthought. I was 9 at the time, only a year older than the youngest
victim in Boston.
One of Boudin’s colleagues, Cathy Wilkerson,
related in her memoir that the Weathermen were disappointed with the
minimal effects of the bombs at my home. They decided to use dynamite
the next time and bought a large quantity along with fuses, metal pipes
and, yes, nails. The group designated as its next target a dance at an
Officer’s Club at Fort Dix, NJ.
Despite the misgivings of some, it
is reported that Kathy Boudin urged the use of “anti-personnel bombs.”
In other words, she wanted to kill people not just damage property.
Before they could act, her fellows were killed in the townhouse
explosion. The townhouse itself collapsed; Boudin fled.
She
reappeared over a decade later driving the getaway car for the rag tag
mix of Weathermen and Black Panthers who held up a Rockland County bank
in 1981, murdering three in the process. Survivors of the ambush along
the New York State Thruway recount how Boudin emerged from the driver’s
door, arms raised in surrender, asking the police to lower their guns.
When they did, her accomplices burst from the back of the van guns
blazing.
As I said, people of a certain age remember this history.
For those that don’t, Robert Redford is kindly about to release a movie
recounting the Rockland robbery (albeit relocated to Michigan). By all
accounts, the film lionizes the Weather Underground terrorists, Boudin
and her accomplices.
Perhaps to bring it full circle, Professor
Boudin can soon guest-lecture at a film class at Columbia when the
Redford movie is screened.
Other than the passage of time, one can
find no real distinction between the cowardly actions of last Monday’s
Boston murderer and the terror carried out by Boudin and her
accomplices. Yet today we live in a country where our leading
educational institutions see fit to trust our children’s education to
murderers and Hollywood sees fit to celebrate terrorists.
The Web
site of Columbia’s School of Social Work sums up Boudin’s past thus:
“Dr. Kathy Boudin has been an educator and counselor with experience in
program development since 1964, working within communities with limited
resources to solve social problems.”
“Since 1964” — that would
include the bombing of my house, it would include the anti-personnel
devices intended for Fort Dix and it would include the dead policeman on
the side of the Thruway in 1981.
Maybe, if he is caught,
Monday’s bomber can explain that, like Boudin, he was merely working
within the community to solve social problems.
Perhaps Monday’s
bomber will be caught, perhaps not. Perhaps, some day, Monday’s bomber
will be offered tenure at Columbia University.
John M. Murtagh
is Of Counsel to the White Plains law firm of Gaines, Gruner, Ponzini
& Novick, LLP. He lives in Westchester. Twitter: @johnmurtagh
http://tinyurl.com/co3sqzx
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