Bad Moon Rising: How the Weather Underground Beat the FBI and Lost the Revolution

By Arthur M. Eckstein

A startling history of the forlorn war between the Weather Underground and the FBI, based on interviews and 30,000 pages of previously unreleased FBI documents

In the summer of 1970 and for years after, photos of Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and other members of the Weather Underground were emblazoned on FBI wanted posters. In Bad Moon Rising, Arthur Eckstein details how Weather began to engage in serious, ideologically driven, nationally coordinated political violence and how the FBI attempted to monitor, block, and capture its members--and failed. Eckstein further shows that the FBI ordered its informants inside Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to support the faction that became Weather during the tumultuous June 1969 SDS convention, helping to destroy the organization; and that the FBI first underestimated Weather's seriousness, then overestimated its effectiveness, and how Weather outwitted them. Eckstein reveals how an obsessed and panicked President Nixon and his inner circle sought to bypass a cautious J. Edgar Hoover, contributing to the creation of the rogue Plumbers Unit that eventually led to Watergate.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300221185
• ISBN13: 9780300221183
• Release Date: October 2016
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 360 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Don't waste your money

This book is silly. The author begins with an introduction about how he participated in anti-war rallies and engaged in acts of vandalism to establish his credentials as being radical and proceeds to tell the history of this group based on FBI files when he admits the FBI had no information from the group. It ends up being a biased diatribe to attack a group he lacks information and understanding of Ciontelpro, and the type of misinformation the FBI used to discredit Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers and other left wing groups.