Larry Grathwohl: Undercover Weather Underground Member

In 1969 Weather Underground founders Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn (who were to become President Obama's personal friends and associates for many years) put Charles Manson on the cover of their occasional newspaper, "Fire". At what was billed as a "War Council" in Flint Michigan that same year, Ayers and his comrades took to greeting each other with "the fork" - three fingers pointed upwards, in honor of Manson. In 1972 Ayers dedicated the Weather Underground's manifesto, "Prairie Fire", to his cultural and political heroes: a list which included Senator Robert Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan.

Throughout their career as terrorist bombers, Ayers and Dorhn were constantly trying to break the Left free of its "bourgeois" commitment to non-violence. In fact, they frequently used that word, bourgeois, to mock any Weather Underground member who hesitated to accept Ayer's increasingly deadly commitment to violence. By adopting Charles Manson as their own, by praising Manson as a hero of the counterculture, they hoped to smash the Left's "bourgeois" ties to civilization and thus spark similar acts of horrific "revolutionary" violence.

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