Terry Robbins - The Explosion

The Explosion

The morning of March 6, 1970, while finishing up preparations to bomb the Non-Commissioned Officers Dance at Fort Dix, Robbins and two other New York Collective members, Diana Oughton, and Ted Gold blew themselves up in the explosion of a New York City townhouse. The explosion originated from the basement floor of the townhouse at 18 West 11th in which Robbins and Oughton had been working. Other members deduced that the inexperience in the art of bomb making and of its maker (Robbins) mistakenly crossed wires and set off a premature detonation. The remains of the bodies found in the basement floor were almost unidentifiable; the police were able to identify the remains of Diana Oughton by a fragment of her thumb. Ted Gold’s body was found outside, crushed under the townhouse’s framework. It was only with the issuance of the first official Weather Underground Organization (WUO) communiqué, weeks after the explosion, that Terry Robbins was identified as the last victim.

Shortly after the explosion, Weathermen leaders placed John Jacobs on indefinite leave from the WUO because he was the main advocate of Robbins’ aggressive actions. Terry Robbins was convinced that extreme acts of destruction was the way for the organization to move into a revolution. He was seen as the main source of the Weathermen's aggressive tendencies, as friend Bill Ayers once said, “his extremism was an impulse in all of us.”

Because of the explosion, the Weathermen claimed to try not to hurt people:

We were very careful from the moment of the townhouse on to be sure we weren't going to hurt anybody, and we never did hurt anybody. Whenever we put a bomb in a public space, we had figured out all kinds of ways to put checks and balances on the thing and also to get people away from it, and we were remarkably successful. —Bill Ayers