The romance of revolutionary violence: the Kathy Power case - Katherine Ann Power emerges from 23 years of hiding after being charged with participating in the robbery that killed police officer Walter Schroeder, September 23, 1970, in Brighton, Massachusetts

Sixties radicals talked about the pigs versus The People, about honky America eating its children. Mostly it was just talk, but a few believed it literally, and they were the ones who died or killed.

AFTER 14 months of secret negotiations with the authorities, former Brandeis University student Katherine Ann Power came out of hiding on September 15 to plead guilty to charges that, 23 years earlier, she was part of a group that fire-bombed and stole arms from a National Guard armory and then, a few days later, on September 23, 1970, robbed a bank in Brighton, Mass., during which robbery police officer Walter Schroeder was shot and killed. Miss Power admitted that she stood armed guard during the weapons heist and drove a getaway car for the bank robbery. Searching her apartment shortly after the murder, police found three rifles, a carbine, a pistol, a shotgun, and a considerable store of ammunition.

In statements made on the occasion of her surrender and later at her sentencing, Miss Power expressed shock and remorse at the death of Officer Schroeder, who left a wife and nine children, offering lifelong "endemic" depression as partial explanation for her delay in coming forth, but also for her crimes. She characterized her activities then as "naive and unthinking" and "outrageously illegal," but, contradicting herself, also insisted that she had thought very deeply about them at the time and, in context, would still defend them. It was a period of widespread lawlessness by protestors and by the government, she said, and she acted "not from any desire for personal gain but from a deep philosophical commitment that if a wrong exists, one must take active steps to stop it, regardless of the consequences to oneself in comfort or security." The reason she acted as she did, she concluded (now ignoring her body chemistry), "lies in the deep and violent crisis that the Vietnam War created in our land."

Following her lead, most media accounts and editorials have offered as explanation "the War" and the "radical climate of the times," commenting, typically, on the pathos of "idealism gone astray" and the paradox of "violence in the name of the peace." "It seems ludicrous now," said the avuncular New York Times editorial, "but in those cynical, angry, and weirdly romantic times . . . such acts seemed logical."

One wonders what logic the editorialist understands Miss Power and her comrades to have been following. To be sure, there were many violent acts of antiwar protest at the time: draft resistance, Daniel Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon papers, nuns and priests destroying draft records, the bombing of a University of Wisconsin laboratory suspected of weapons research. Typically, these acts were followed by long public statements explaining the antiwar point of the illegal action or defending the appropriateness of the target. As extreme as they were, these were, arguably, public acts of protest, which aimed to punish, pester, and disrupt but also to persuade, if only by calling obstreperous and lurid attention to the antiwar cause.

But what is the symbolic logic of a mere bank robbery which, if successful, would be reported only as: a bank robbery? Kathy Power's comrades were classmate Susan Saxe; another Brandeis student, Stanley Bond, who was an ex-con; and two other ex-cons. Following the heist and murder the three ex-convicts were quickly apprehended, and Bond spoke of the group's plan to use the money obtained to buy explosives capable of paralyzing railroad cars carrying weapons by fusing their wheels to the tracks, thus enabling Bond's merry band to leap aboard and steal the weapons in order to supply them to black revolutionaries. Newsweek repeated the story absolutely straight-faced, never asking, among other obvious questions, what does an armed revolution by blacks have to do with the peace movement?

Sex and Revolution

WHILE I DID NOT know Kathy Power or her friends Susan Saxe and Stanley Bond personally, I was teaching at Brandeis then and closely observed the activities of their radical circle. And for a number of years I have taught a course at Brandeis on "The Sixties." The conclusions I have reached about these events differ a good deal from the picture presented lately in the media.

One explanation for Miss Power's actions, suggested in several media accounts, is that she may have fallen under the spell of Bond, a "menacing, charismatic sexual adventurer," according to one account. In this view, Kathy Power--valedictorian of her Catholic high school in Denver, the conspicuously unrebellious daughter of an apparently loving and conservative family--was undone by Bond's licentious magnetism. But if there was seduction, it went both ways, the radical students also pressuring Bond into acts of revolutionary derring-do which he would not otherwise have committed.

I recall Bond telling his story to anyone who would listen. He said he had persuaded prison authorities to support his parole by telling them what they wanted to hear: that he knew he was a compulsive criminal in recovery and he was now determined to, as it were, take the pledge. When he arrived at Brandeis in the fall of 1969, his advisor, the dean of faculty, who had insisted Bond be in his direct charge, told him, Bond said, to keep his nose clean, get his degree--his "union card" the dean called it--and then "screw the system for all it was worth" like all "successful" Americans.