![]() ![]() ![]() He traces the bombing campaign back to the man he deems a “kind of Patient Zero for the underground groups of the 1970s,” who began seeding Manhattan with bombs in the year of Woodstock and provided a blueprint for radicals right and left ever since. The author takes a deep look into this history on both sides, interviewing veterans of the underground on one hand and of the FBI on the other. ![]() As Burrough records, it embarked on a campaign of infiltration and interdiction that soon overstepped its bounds, legally speaking. In contrast to the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, which killed 168 people, the “single deadliest radical-underground attack of the decade killed four people.” The FBI, of course, took this very seriously. ![]() The statistics are daunting and astonishing: In 19, the FBI recorded more than 2,500 bombings, only 1 percent of which led to a fatality. The 1970s, writes Vanity Fair special correspondent Burrough ( The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes, 2009, etc.), saw something unknown since the American Revolution: a group of radical leftists forming “an underground resistance movement” that, as his subtitle notes, is all but forgotten today. A stirring history of that bad time, 45-odd years ago, when we didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing, though we knew it was loud. ![]()
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