Tale of two terrorists
...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....