ABSTRACT
Almost 40 years ago, I was called an American terrorist-that’s what Time magazine called me in 1970, and the New York Times, too, and that was the word hurled in my direction from the halls of Congress. Terrorist. I was indicted by the Justice Department in 1970 on two single-count conspiracies-broad charges (in my case, crossing state lines to create disorder and destroy government property) the government brings against groups it considers “criminal enterprises,” people who have committed no actionable off enses and yet the state hopes to intimidate or disrupt or silence. But I had no intention of answering in federal court-so many others had seen their best eff orts reduced to legal fees and support committees-and so I took off and lived on the run for the next decade. I was part of the Weather Underground and thought of myself as a radical, and immodestly I suppose, as a revolutionary, but I knew that “terrorist” was tattooed over every inch of me-it was an electrifying label, even then. I imagined a pale fi gure dressed in an oily overcoat, feverish eyes blazing, beard and hair wild and unkempt, sitting in the back of a theater with a black bomb sparking and sizzling in his pocket. Nothing at all like me, I said to myself at the time. I’m no terrorist.
