Spies, lies, and the underground: a new book shines some light on the violent radicals of the 1970s but misses their biggest impact on American politics.

• Author: Theoharis, Athan
• Position: 'Days of Rage' by Bryan Burrough - Book review

Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence, by Bryan Burrough, Penguin Press, 608 pages, $29.95

BEGINNING IN 1969, a small but noisy segment of the radical left turned to bombings, bank robberies, kidnappings, jailbreaks, targeted assassinations of police officers, and other acts of violence. At the outset of Days of Rage, Bryan Burrough claims that the "most startling thing about the 1970s-era underground is how thoroughly it has been forgotten." His reconstruction of that period's activities profits from the journalist's extensive and revealing interviews with activists, their attorneys, and former FBI agents. The result is a comprehensive account of the lifestyles, motivations, and actions of the militants who went underground during the 1970s and '80s: the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional, the United Freedom Front, the Mutulu Shakur Group.

Burrough characterizes these groups' headline-making behavior as "revolutionary violence," but they bore more real-world resemblance to crude terrorists and petty criminals. Their operations were uncoordinated, they lacked (and did not seek) broad support even within the radical political community, and, accordingly, they failed to seriously challenge established political and economic institutions. Yet despite their illegal actions, these activists for the most part escaped apprehension, whether by local police or the FBI. This is a striking failure, given the costs of their misdeeds: 23 people killed, 169 people wounded, more than a million dollars in property damage, more than a million dollars stolen.

Burrough's book is a riveting read, recapturing the senseless violence and perversity of the era. But it is of limited value to an understanding of the politics of the 1970s. Days of Rage has plenty of details about the activists' drug use, their sexual promiscuity, their extensive use of bombings (1,900 in 1972 alone), and their indifference to the consequences of violence for the broader radical movement. But the author is not well-informed on FBI operations, and his account says nothing about the paradoxical impact these radical activists had on the nation's political institutions.

So let's put this story in a broader context. In the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, the Cold War produced a militantly anti-Communist politics that equated dissent with disloyalty. That in turn led to an expansion of presidential power and the FBI's surveillance authority. By contrast, the terrorism of the '70s did not give rise to a more repressive politics, to the expansion of the FBI's surveillance powers, or to an increase in presidential power, despite the bureau's failure to apprehend the people responsible for the violence. To the contrary, the 1970s witnessed an unprecedented reassessment of the role and authority of both the presidency and the FBI. One catalyst to these developments was the Nixon administration's reaction to the radicals'...