In Ron Chepesiuk’s Sixties Radicals, Then and Now Bernardine Dohrn explained her theory on the Weather Underground’s Vietnam protests, and the violence that came with it:
R.C.: Did you come to the conclusion that violence was the way to go?
B.D: I don’t think I ever came to that conclusion. I never thought violence was a good thing in a strategic sense. What happened was that I found the combination of militancy and the notion of direct action to be a very compelling militant. I thought that people who were armchair radicals said they followed Mao, Castro, and Ho Chi Minh but weren’t ready to act on their beliefs were irrelevant and even destructive. We saw the government escalate the war... and our attempt to respond to that in an appropriate way was called by everybody “violent”;…ours was a very decentralized and anarchistic movement…the militancy remained symbolic. We called it “propaganda of the deed”
(Chepesiuk 235).
My impression of the Weathermen and other anti-war radicals was that they were more wrapped up in themselves and the power of their actions than they were in the socialist agenda that they were supporting.