Top Highlights

• The crane operator was just finishing his shift at five o’clock when Detective Perotta urged him to lift out one final load. The big bucket splashed into a hole in the middle of the rubble, now filled with seven feet of black rainwater. When the bucket rose, Perotta lifted his hand again. Between the bucket’s teeth was a gray, basketball-sized glob...
• The Times, for one, remained skeptical that anything could be done. “Nothing and no one can be made safe from a man determined to explode an infernal machine in a public building,” it editorialized. “When the full implications of that truth sink in . . . New Yorkers are going to realize that they are living with a new urban anxiety.”10
• Still, such tactics made many agents uncomfortable, few more so than William Dyson. “We were going to end up with FBI agents arrested,” he remembers thinking at the time. “Not because what they did was wrong, but because nobody knew what was right and wrong.” J. Edgar Hoover sensed this as well. After Nixon approved the Huston Plan, Hoover demanded...
• Midnight bombings that until that point seemed brave or romantic or even heroic suddenly appeared callous and uncaring at least, murderous at worst. For the first time a generation of militants comfortable with revolutionary rhetoric were forced to confront its consequences. “It isn’t just the radicals who set the bomb in a lighted, occupied buildi...
• The idea of a Black Liberation Army emerged from conditions in Black communities; conditions of poverty, indecent housing, massive unemployment, poor medical care, and inferior education. The idea came about because Black people are not free or equal in this country. Because ninety percent of the men and women in this country’s prisons are Black an...