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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
After being pardoned by Bill Clinton, former Weatherman member Linda Evans is still an enemy of American democracy.
Sep 4, 2001 | In August, the Santa Monica, Calif., promenade is a mecca for pleasure seekers and the curious. Its bricked sidewalks are crowded with Angelenos and tourists gawking at the antics of mimes, jugglers, break-dancers and other entertainment wannabes who put on a good show that is also free. Last week, taking a Saturday evening stroll with my wife along this walkway, I was given the serendipity of seeing one of Bill Clinton's famous pardons in action -- outside of prison and back on the streets.
The last time I saw Linda Evans was 32 years ago in Berkeley, Calif., in a packed hall of student radicals at the university. In those heady times, Linda was one of the leaders of a vanguard organization known as Weatherman and had come to the university with fellow militant Ted Gold to recruit others to the cause. In the style of New Left revolutionaries, Weatherman had taken its name from a Bob Dylan line ("You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"), but its substance was very much that of older Leninist factions of the time. The Weather Bureau (which was the name adopted by its Central Committee) knew what was good for the rest of us. Its icons, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, had been elected to the leadership of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1968, and had promptly trashed its headquarters and announced the end of the organization. They explained that SDS -- until then the largest student radical organization, was in fact "the pig" itself, which in those times was the symbol of the political enemy. SDS was an organization hooked on its "white skin privilege," they said, and thus too cowardly to launch the necessary war against the imperial monster, Amerikkka.
Evans and Gold had come to Berkeley to recruit troops for the global race war they believed was already taking place. The "only" role for white radicals in this war, they told the student audience, was to serve as a Fifth Column of saboteurs and terrorists in the "belly of the beast." White radicals were needed to blow things up, sow social chaos, and hasten Amerikkka's destruction. "Vietnam is burning," Evans screamed at the audience. "It's only white skin privilege that prevents Amerikkkan cities from being burned too." Everyone present knew what this meant. Berkeley deserved to be put to the torch; only our racism stopped us from lighting the match.
To their credit, most of the New Left radicals present were appalled by these Weather ideas and agendas, but no one spoke out against them. It was fascinating to see how tongue-tied the denouncers of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were when individuals from their own ranks proposed criminal acts.
The year was 1969. A few months later, Evans and Gold disappeared from sight and into what their "war communiquis" identified as the "Weather Underground." Speaking for her comrades, Bernadine Dohrn issued a formal "Declaration of War Against Amerikkka." Shortly thereafter, three Weathermen terrorists were blown up in a Greenwich Village townhouse, while making a bomb filled with roofing nails which they intended to detonate at a dance at Fort Dix. Ted Gold was one of them. Months later, Linda Evans was arrested for transporting weapons and explosives in Detroit, and for crossing state lines to incite a riot. The charges were eventually thrown out on a technicality because the wiretaps that identified her had been unauthorized.
On her release, Evans resumed her anti-American activities as a self-styled fighter against "racism/white supremacy and Zionism" and as a supporter of communist movements in Central America. In a profile found on a "political prisoners" support Web site, her activities in these years are described as "working to develop clandestine resistance, capable of conducting armed struggle as part of a multi-level overall revolutionary strategy." On May 11, 1985, she was arrested again, charged and then convicted of acquiring weapons, fake IDs and safe houses, and of terrorist actions. Her targets included the U.S. Capitol Building, the National War College, the Navy Yard Computer Center, the Navy Yard Officers Club, Israeli Aircraft Industries, the FBI and the New York Patrolman's Benevolent Association. In her possession were 740 pounds of dynamite. Evans was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
But then her Clinton patrons intervened. The agent of her mercy was New York congressman Jerry Nadler, one of President Clinton's staunchest defenders during the impeachment process and one of Sen. Clinton's chief supporters during her election bid. Nadler appealed to Clinton and Clinton responded. As the last hours of the Clinton era expired, Linda Evans was freed. It was 24 years shy of her full sentence.
