inmates began to see themselves as a by-product of an inherently biased system. Their crimes, in their eyes, were a form of revolt, with the resulting incarceration making them political prisoners. As for me, I straddled the political fence. On the one hand I saw many of their crimes as the inevitable result of the failure of the War on Poverty. On the other I was afraid of violent crime, and wanted those who would attack me on the streets sent to prison.
As for prison reform, prisoner activists had a good ear for pandering and propaganda, but as Bob Dylan put it, you didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blew. Playing the Oswald tape and then doing nothing was a bad idea. Worse, Oswald had been the commissioner while the Auburn Six were being tortured at one of his supposedly reform-minded prisons. The inmates at Attica took it for what it was—lip service. Even more insulting, it must have seemed as if prison officials weren’t even trying particularly hard. The Times editorial board called the transcript of Commissioner Oswald’s speech “New Directions,” and with the majority of Attica’s dead still unburied when the transcript was published, the irony was clear. Commissioner Oswald, relatively new to the post he occupied, was definitely premature in touting progress in state correctional facilities when he said: “The main impact of the new direction of the department is the recognition of the individual as a human being and the need for basic fairness throughout our day-to-day relationships with each other.” The sad thing was that compared to his predecessor, Commissioner Oswald actually was a reformer.
But Rockefeller had turned Oswald into a bagman. It was his job to shut down the uprising: The governor had to remain untouchable.
* * *
At around seven thirty in the evening, four days after the uprising was crushed, a bomb ripped through the offices of the New York Department of Corrections in the usually quiet state capital of Albany. The offices were on the outskirts of town; it was a Friday night; they were deserted. The Weather Underground immediately claimed responsibility for the bomb, placed a couple of hundred feet from Commissioner Oswald’s office.
It seemed like a lot more than four days had passed. Time had slowed to a crawl. Prison officials kept reporters and lawyers seeking to represent the prisoners outside the walls. News was tough to come by, and I could find out nothing about Tony. The feverish activity of the observers’ committee trying to broker a deal among Governor Nelson Rockefeller, prison officials, and the inmates had been talked to death. I could not get the smell of tear gas and gunpowder as we had been escorted through the heavy steel doors to the outside world out of my mind. During the intervening days I’d thought incessantly about the bloodbath hidden behind Attica’s thirty-foot walls, and the more than eighty men who were wounded and the thirty-three prisoners and nine hostages who were inside, dead or dying. Repeating in my head, over and over, the final death toll, which was forty-three, I felt as if the forward motion of my life had come to a stop. I was paralyzed. Then the Weather Underground bomb shook me out of it.
Before they set off the bomb, the Weather Underground contacted two newspapers and Pacifica Radio’s WBAI in New York City. That was their thing: They made a very public point of being careful not to hurt anyone. Meanwhile the idiocy of setting off bombs remained, and the timbre of the messages attached to these attacks was so overpowered by the Weather Underground’s unique blend of overeager, ill-considered radicalism that they might have done better sending no message at all. At least that’s how I saw it, but then I suppose from a more radical perch that simply meant I favored the tepid sort of advocacy lampooned in Phil Ochs’s 1966 song “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.” Ironically, I loved that song. The communiqué that accompanied this particular bombing cited the “white supremacy” of the corrections system, explaining that it was “how a society run by white racists maintains its control.” The dispatch went on: “We only wish we could do more to show the courageous prisoners at Attica, San Quentin and the other 20th-century slave ships that they are not alone in their fight for the right to live.” It wasn’t news-friendly language, like my outburst on The David Frost Show. That said, there was an