NEW YORK's West 11th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues is a
gracious, tree-shaded reminder of the Greenwich Village of Henry James.
A community of successful artists, writers and businessmen, it is lined
with stately town houses like the four-story dwelling at No. 18, which
until last week looked much the same as when it was built in 1845.
There was a formal garden in back where few sounds louder than the
tinkling of teacups were ever heard. The owner of the Federal-style
$250,000 house, Businessman James Platt Wilkerson, had furnished the
interior Georgian style. The rooms were filled with art and rare
antiques, including a 1790 square piano. Wilkerson was especially proud
of his paneled library, called the Bird Room because it housed a
collection of wood, metal and china birds. It was a site for refined,
elegant living. Now No. 18 is a tangle of ground-level debris. Behind its faade of
gentility, the house had become a laboratory of violence, its products
designed to destroy the stable society that its elegance symbolized.
When three explosions shattered the dwelling, Wilkerson's daughter
Cathlyn, 25, and an unidentified young woman emerged dazed and
trembling from the crumbling, burning ruins. Having donned a neighbor's
old clothes, the pair disappeared before police came. At the end of
last week, they were still missing.
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In the ruins, police found 60 sticks of dynamite, 30 blasting caps and
four dynamite-packed pipes wrapped with heavy nails that could act as
flesh-shredding shrapnel. They also found the body of Theodore Gold,
23, and the unidentified remains of two other persons. A credit card
belonging to Kathy Boudin, 26, who may have been the person with
Cathlyn, also turned up in the debris. Gold and the girls were all members
of the violent Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic
Society. Police speculated that, while Wilkerson and his wife were
vacationing in the Caribbean, the amateurs had turned the basement into
a bomb factory. The bright, attractive children of moderately wealthy families, the
youngsters were unlikely by normal standards to have ended up as
bombers. But in college they had turned away from traditional values
and become increasingly radicalized. Though the pretty, brown-haired
Miss Wilkerson attended the best of private schools and Swarthmore
College, she seemed also lonely and unsure of herself. “Every time I
think of something to explain Cathy,” said her mother, who is divorced
from Cathy's father , “I think of something that
contradicts it. She didn't think much of herself. And she could develop
a deep and fierce loyalty to things.” Bearded Ted Gold was the son of two physicians; his father, Hyman, is
known as “the Movement Doctor” for his free treatment of penniless
radicals. Gold was a bright, committed student in New York's Stuyvesant
High, where a former teacher, Bernard Flicker, recalls: “He had
everything—wit, charm. He could have been anything.” At Columbia
University, Gold began as a moderate leftist, working for civil rights
and antiwar causes. But he moved further toward the fringe, Flicker
says, and “began to feel that protests did no good, that nothing could
change. In the end, he took the view that any means to an end was
legitimate.”
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