Bryan Burrough is a special correspondent at Vanity Fair and the author of five previous books, including The Big Rich and Public Enemies. His new book is Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence.
There was a stretch of time in America, during the 1970s, when bombings by domestic underground groups like The Weathermen, The Symbionese Liberation Army, The FALN, and The Black Liberation Army were a daily occurrence. The FBI combated those groups and others as nodes in a single revolutionary underground, dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government.
The FBI’s response to the leftist revolutionary counterculture has not been treated kindly by history, Burrough’s book tempers those judgments with an understanding of just how deranged those times were.
