Blows Against Empire: A Sixties Obituary

Here's a reminder that not everybody emerged from the "idealistic" Sixties with his ideals and dignity intact. Dwight Armstrong was a college kid in Wisconsin who bombed a campus building, killed some poor researcher (who was anti-war, naturally), and spent 7 years on the run. Armstrong has now died. Are we having fun, yet? Dwight Armstrong Dies At 58

Dwight Armstrong, one of four young men who in 1970 bombed a building on the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison, killing one person and injuring several others — a political protest that, gone violently wrong, endures in the national memory as an act of domestic terrorism — died on June 20 in Madison. He was 58.

The cause was lung cancer, said Susan Lampert Smith, a spokeswoman for the University of Wisconsin Hospital, where he died.

The bombing took place on Aug. 24, 1970, during a time of intense agitation against the Vietnam War. At 3:42 a.m., an explosion tore through Sterling Hall, a building that housed both the university physics department and the ArmyMathematics Research Center. The center, which operated under a contract with the United States Army, had been the target of many nonviolent protests since it opened in the 1950s.

Though the bombers said afterward that they had not intended to hurt anyone, the explosion killed Robert Fassnacht, a physics researcher who was working late. Mr. Fassnacht, 33, a father of three, was, his family said afterward, against the war.

On Sept. 2, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began a nationwide hunt for four men charged with the bombing: Dwight Armstrong, who had turned 19 five days after the explosion; his brother, Karleton, 22; David S. Fine, 18; and Leo F. Burt, 22.

Placed on the bureau’s most-wanted list, the four lived separate, fugitive lives, in some cases for years. Of the three who were eventually apprehended, Dwight Armstrong remained underground the longest, for nearly seven years. Mr. Armstrong, who had driven the getaway car after the bombing, was arrested in Toronto in April 1977.

That May, he pleaded no contest to a state charge of second-degree murder and guilty to federal charges including conspiracy. In June, in a plea agreement, he was sentenced to seven years on the state charges and seven on the federal, to be served concurrently. He was paroled in 1980.

Unlike a lot of Sixties left-overs, Armstrong was under no illusions about his misspent youth or the long-term effects it had on the rest of his life:

In 1987, he was arrested in Indiana on charges of helping operate a methamphetamine lab there. Sentenced to 10 years, he was released in 1991. Afterward, he returned to Madison, where he drove a cab and helped take care of his mother.

“My life,” Dwight Armstrong told The Capital Times, a Madison newspaper, in 1992, “has not been something to write home about.”

For every Tom Hayden or Bill Ayers who came out of The Sixties with tenure and backstage passes to the CSN&Y reunion concert, there were dozens of Dwight Armstrongs; people who blew their minds on drugs, bad music, and revolutionary ideology. Armstrong was a troubled soul who probably wouldn't have amounted to much anyway, but the Baby Boomer culture of his day gave him a Cause to fight and kill for. This is the same culture that is endlessly celebrated in PBS documentaries and Woodstock at 40 retrospectives which the rest of us have to suffer through, all so the New Left can tell us why they were right and the rest of us were/are wrong.

The funny thing - and I love little historic ironies like this - is that the New Left was and is a rigidly hierarchical movement despite its noisy professions to be fighting for equal rights. Look at a guy like Bill Ayers, a rich kid who was a movement leader with all of the traditional trappings of power, including sex with all of the hot babes in the room, and the power to tell his followers to start building bombs and blow people up. He was able to emerge legally and physically unscathed while many of his "comrades" were killed or sent to prison. Then look at Armstrong, a foot soldier who did what people like Ayers told him to do - and ruined his life. Somehow, I doubt Armstrong was the sort of guy that all of those hippie girls would have gotten tingly over; but he was goaded to perform acts of violence in order to prove himself worthy of the Cause, whatever that was. A sad story all around, and one that you are not likely to hear.