Sure, Violence Is All-American, but Terrorism? : Bombing: In the 1960s and ‘70s, young, middle-class terrorists organized all over the world, but in the United States they proved ephemeral.

SOUTH ROYALTON, VT. — Americans worried that terrorism is about to join the catalog of national ills ought to reflect on March 6, 1970, a date that means nothing to most of them. In New York City on that day, in the basement of a townhouse on a pleasant, tree-lined street in the neighborhood known as Greenwich Village, two men and a woman in their 20s took the first step in what they hoped would be a campaign of relentless and merciless urban terrorism.

Repeated attacks, they hoped, would spark a law-and-order backlash leading, in turn, to revolution, violent overthrow of the government in Washington and imposition of a communist dictatorship that would end capitalism and root out all trace of liberal bourgeois faith in private property, the Bill of Rights and democracy by majority rule.

That was the plan, anyhow.

What the aspirant terrorists actually did that morning was to assemble a bundle of dynamite sticks, wrap them in duct tape studded with galvanized roofing nails and attach a detonator wired to a cheap alarm clock. At the appointed hour the bomb would announce that terrorism had arrived in the United States. First to know would be the ruling elite of corporate America in their three-piece suits as they hurried through Grand Central Station to catch the 5:10 p.m. to Connecticut.

One can easily imagine what a bomb would do in such a crowd. If all had gone according to plan, the date would be fixed in the national memory. But fate, luck, divine Providence, plain ignorance of things technical--in short, the wrong wire--intervened. The bomb killed the young woman assembling it with such violence she had to be identified by the tip of a little finger. Her two companions died as well. The rest of the group, known as the Weatherman faction of the Students for a Democratic Society, disappeared into hiding and their plan for terrorism leading to revolution ended on its first day.

But elsewhere in the world at the same time, events unfolded far differently: In Northern Ireland, the Irish Republican Army had already begun a campaign to drive the British out of the six counties; Germany lived in fear of a left-wing group of young kidnappers and assassins known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang; Italian radicals were organizing the Red Brigades; the Red Army Faction in Japan would soon be killing members who failed tests of ideological purity, and in the Middle East, Palestinian extremists, in a host of small underground groups, had begun a program of aircraft hijackings and attacks on innocent civilians.

Terrorist groups tend to be self-absorbed, making it all the more difficult to explain the global phenomenon of like-minded, mostly young, mostly middle-class, mostly Marxist-Leninist killers that emerged in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Also common to the first groups was a quixotic impracticality--their means were hopelessly unequal to their goals--and a tendency, encouraged by failure, to turn their ferocity upon themselves.

The Weathermen endured a miserable few years of underground fear and recrimination before they resurfaced, one by one, to pay a modest debt to society for old crimes and then take up professional roles. The exception was Kathy Boudin, who escaped the townhouse bombing but was arrested in 1981, following a failed raid on an armored car in Nyack, N.Y., and is now serving a long prison sentence.

But elsewhere, the fate of spiritual brothers and sisters reached a level of gothic horror. In Germany, Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and other leaders all committed suicide in jail, several with smuggled guns on the same day in an attempt to make it appear as if they had been murdered by police. In Japan, a Red Army group spent a long winter in a cabin on the slopes of Mt. Fuji, arguing politics. From time to time, one of the members, failing to follow the political line argued by the others closely enough, would be stripped naked, bound with wire and thrown out into the snow to freeze to death. The ethos of violence in all terrorist groups is a threat first to themselves, but among the Irish and the Palestinians, factional murders, though frequent, have never taken precedence over the war against their enemies--the British and the Israelis, respectively.

Some observers have speculated that the worldwide pandemic of terrorism is only a kind of substitute for war. A combination of nuclear weapons and the global net of Soviet and U.S. alliances in the Cold War, the argument goes, made war too dangerous, and conflicts were routinely nipped in the bud.

In Western Europe, especially, a kind of unnatural peace reigned long beyond the customary generation that separates big wars. Looked at in this way, terrorism was a symptom of long-fermenting furies--a kind of three-day drunk by Western nations, addicted to war and violence, following too long a stretch of unnaturally good behavior. In the Middle East, unmistakably, terrorism was a continuation of war by other means.

But no country has been less often invaded or longer at peace than the United States, where most citizens have never shouldered arms or even seen an army in the field. The national and ethnic tensions of Europe and the Middle East are fully matched by American racial animosities but the latter have never generated the same level of clandestine violence with a political purpose.

But of violence itself there is plenty. Few countries, and none called modern, can match the sheer level of violence in the United States, where 24,000 homicides are recorded annually, and the street battles of drug gangs make Dodge City in its heyday sound like Arcadia.

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago during bootlegging days, when the execution of seven men shocked the world, is now repeated almost weekly in America’s inner cities, and the victims, as often as not, include women or children who happen to be present. Some of this violence has been imported from Latin countries, where men of power routinely travel in armored cars and employ body guards with submachine guns. But gun violence is as American as cherry pie.

It is clandestine political violence which has never taken root in the United States. Puerto Rican nationalists perhaps came closest in the 1940s and ‘50s, with an unsuccessful attack on President Harry S. Truman and a brief burst of machine-gun fire in the U.S. Congress. Much more typical were the efforts of the Weathermen, and yet more isolated acts of terror--a bomb detonated in a crowd of police in Chicago in 1886, a devastating blast on Wall Street in 1929, which killed innocent passersby when a bomb went off without warning or later explanation.

These outrages, lethal as they were, probably made less of an impression on the nation’s consciousness than the series of mostly harmless bombs set throughout New York in the 1950s by George Metesky, known as the Mad Bomber. His purpose, confessed after he was caught, was to protest callous treatment by Consolidated Edison 20 years earlier.

The World Trade Center bombing in New York, on Feb. 26, killing six, has prompted the latest round of fears that terrorism was about to plunge the United States into a violent nightmare. Similar fears swept the country twice before--during the Gulf War in early 1991, when authorities worried that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein would blow up nuclear reactors and poison city water supplies; and in 1983, when Americans simply crossed Europe off their vacation lists for fear of Islamic terrorists seeking vengeance for the accidental downing of an Iranian passenger plane by an U.S. warship.

Now, as then, prudent caution requires the authorities to treat all threats seriously. But Americans ought to remember March 6, 1970, when a misplaced wire ended three young lives and a campaign of terrorism before it began. Terror never wins wars, but only keeps causes alive by what anarchists used to call “the propaganda of the deed.”

The prosaic truth is that the United States offers an alternative to the hardships of life underground in political war against the system: polls, press agents and political-action committees get results where bombs only get attention. It was anger, not conviction they knew how to change the world, that brought the Weathermen to their basement bomb factory in Greenwich Village, and though survivors have been too proud to confess the fact, it was anger that died there.