David Gilbert is not as well known as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, his old comrades in the Weather Underground, but he does deserve notoriety: He is a convicted murderer and a revolutionary terrorist, who is now serving a life term for his role in the 1981 Brink’s robbery near Nyack, N.Y. He and his common-law wife, Kathy Boudin, both members of a group called the Revolutionary Armed Task Force, were in a van meant to be a getaway car for members of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) who were robbing a bank. The robbers fled in the van, after killing a bank guard. When the police stopped the van, Boudin and Gilbert surrendered. Seeing that they were unarmed, the police put down their guns. When they went to open the van’s back door, however, other BLA members came out shooting, murdering police officers Waverly Brown and Edward J. O’Grady. (Brown was the first black officer hired by the Nyack force.)
In his self-serving and disingenuous memoir, Gilbert offers a manual for today’s advocates of armed struggle. Beginning with his participation in the famous 1968 Columbia University sit-in, in which he was a leader of the so-called praxis/axis, made up of students who sought to infuse their movement with Marxist revolutionary theory, Gilbert takes his readers on an exhausting trip through all of the revolutionary factional groups he later joined. Like Ayers, Gilbert became part of the Weathermen, a group whose members believed that the path to socialist revolution in America lay through an alliance of white students with Third World revolutionaries and black militants within the U.S.
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