Larry Grathwohl: Requiem for an American Hero

My article from the July 24, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Larry Grathwohl: Requiem for an American Hero

By Matthew Vadum

A great patriot who suffered and risked everything he had to defend the United States of America by infiltrating the Weather Underground terrorist group in the late 1960s, died suddenly last week.

Larry Grathwohl passed away at the age of 65 in his Cincinnati apartment on July 18, apparently of natural causes. Although no cause of death has been made public, he had been in poor health for some time.

Born in Cincinnati on Oct. 13, 1947, Larry David Grathwohl was a highly decorated Vietnam War veteran.

After fighting Communists abroad, he decided to fight them at home. He returned to America after serving in the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division and took it upon himself to infiltrate the group, joining the Weatherman collective in Cincinnati. In his clandestine enterprise he rose quickly, aided by his perceived authenticity as a working class Vietnam vet, unlike the spoiled rich-kid draft resisters who ran the organization.

The story of Grathwohl is very much also the story of Bill Ayers.

For reasons that historians will argue about for decades to come, the revelation that socialist Barack Hussein Obama was close personal friends with unrepentant Weather Underground bombers Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn failed to torpedo Obama’s presidential bid. In fact, it caused little more than a ripple at the time in the mainstream media and only came up when alleged journalist George Stephanopoulos, a longtime Bill and Hillary Clinton loyalist, raised the disturbing connection during a primary-season presidential debate to hurt Obama’s campaign.

Grathwohl’s daring venture into the bowels of the anti-American Left showed that the subversives of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), which grew out of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) splinter group Weatherman, worked with Cuba and the governments of other hostile foreign nations.

WUO bombed the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, and various other sites of national importance throughout the 1970s. One of its key leaders, trust fund baby Ayers, now portrayed by the media as an innocuous school reformer, famously said he didn’t regret what he did and he’d do it again.

Ayers claims the WUO never killed anyone. If that’s true, it wasn’t for lack of trying. Sometimes bombs failed to detonate. In a Greenwich Village townhouse, one bomb that was supposed to be planted at a well-attended dance exploded prematurely, killing several terrorists including Ayers’s girlfriend at the time.

Ayers was obsessed with violence, Grathwohl explained. Ayers spearheaded the group’s effort “to make plans to select and destroy targets that were symbols of authority. If necessary, we would kidnap government officials for ransom and assassinate others when it was politically expedient,” according to Grathwohl.

Patriot Larry Grathwohl, RIP

I learned today that Larry Grathwohl was found dead in his Cincinnati apartment.

No cause of death has been announced but my guess is it was natural causes. In the above 2011 photo Larry is shown at the right.

The Vietnam vet put his life on the line by infiltrating the Weather Underground Organization. He was in the inner circle of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. He told his fascinating tale in the recently reissued book, Bringing Down America.

Here is a link to  a tribute by Tina Trent. I wrote an article about Larry in 2010.

Here’s what I wrote about Larry at pp. 35-6 of my 2011 book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers:

Although in retrospect Ayers has criticized some of his past statements as foolish, his core beliefs haven’t changed. His hatred of America burns just as bright today as when his terrorist cell plotted to use dynamite to murder military officers at a dance in Fort Dix, New Jersey in 1970. “This society is not a just and fair and decent place,” he said in 2001. “The pundits all pat themselves on the back: ‘God, what a great country.’ . . . It makes me want to puke.” In what must have been the worst case of bad timing in history, Ayers denounced the U.S. in a profile that ran in the New York Times on Sept. 11, 2001. “I don’t regret setting bombs,” he said. “I feel we didn’t do enough.”

What exactly did Ayers mean? According to Bringing Down America author Larry Grathwohl, the Weather Underground made plans to kill the one-tenth of the U.S. population they expected would turn out to be “diehard capitalists” incapable of reeducation. Grathwohl is a Vietnam War veteran who, after fighting Communists abroad, decided to fight them at home. After returning to America having served in the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, Grathwohl took it upon himself to infiltrate the group. Incredibly, very little has been written about what the Weather Underground planned to do to America if it seized power. (endnote 57) Even today Ayers refuses to disavow violent tactics. “I never denounced what we did and the reason is, because in the context of those times and what was going on I actually think that we were very restrained and I’ve always thought that and I still think it. I think the most violent force then and even more violent today is the U.S. government.

Endnote 57:

57. “Larry Grathwohl on Ayers’ Plan for American Re-education Camps and the Need to Kill Millions,” posted October 29, 2008, at (click here), accessed July 25, 2010. Grathwohl made the assertion in No Place to Hide: The Strategy and Tactics of Terrorism (Part V), a 1982 documentary film directed by Dick Quincer. Grathwohl is author of Bringing Down America, an out-of-print book published by Arlington House in 1976. He infiltrated the Weather Underground and participated in internal discussions in which its leaders laid out plans to systematically liquidate those who resisted the communist revolution they aspired to create.

‘Nonviolence’ Explodes in Chicago

My article from today's Front Page Magazine:

'Nonviolence' Explodes in Chicago

By Matthew Vadum

The NATO summit in Chicago has produced an impressive list of arrests for demonstrations officially billed by the Left and the compliant mainstream media as “nonviolent.” Some of the alleged pacifists conspired to maim and kill Americans.

The wave of violence unleashed by the Obama-endorsed Occupy Wall Street movement and other elements of the activist Left in recent weeks is part of what left-wingers are calling the “99% Spring.” The actions, which are being cheered on by small-c communist terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, are designed to foment civil unrest and prompt change.

Occupy Wall Street and the satellite protests it has spawned in cities across the U.S. and around the world have been spectacularly violent. Radical activists are responsible for hundreds of serious crimes, including murder, assault, gang rape, arson, rioting, and robbery.

Around the NATO summit at least four police officers were assaulted by radical activists and around 45 protesters were arrested by police on Sunday. The city of Chicago’s official website may have been targeted by computer hackers on Sunday when it went offline for part of the day. City and federal authorities are investigating.

Former anarchist activist Brandon Darby warned of the approaching violence weeks ago. In an exclusive interview Sunday, Darby said, “I told you so.”

“When an entire movement does nothing but convince young people that America is evil and must be stopped by any means necessary it makes it inevitable that some of them will take actions like the ones we’ve seen over and over again involving police officers, conservatives, and Molotov cocktails,” said Darby.

Darby has been targeted by the Left ever since it was publicly revealed that the former community organizer saved the lives of innocent Americans by thwarting the planned fire-bombing of the 2008 Republican Convention by two anarchists. (The plot was revealed in my book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.)