The Recantations of a Reformed Berkeley Bomber

For more than a decade, young radicals have seized brief, Warholesque fame with bullhorns and sometimes with their bodies. Many of them have now disappeared into a reclusive existence at home or exile abroad. Consider: Mark Rudd underground with the Weatherman. Stokely Carmichael in self-imposed exile in Guinea. Fiery Berkeley Communist Bettina Aptheker in a house in San Jose to rear her child and write a book. Former S.D.S. President Carl Oglesby writing songs on a Vermont farm and lecturing at M.I.T. John Lewis, S.N.C.C. co-founder who once promised to sweep the civil rights movement "through the South the way Sherman did," is directing voter education in the South. Mario Savio is established in Berkeley, the city he shook in 1964 and now wants to lead as mayor.

Among the radicals who once fleetingly held center stage is Anthony Tankersley, a former Berkeley graduate student convicted of the Sept. 1, 1968, terrorist bombing of a Pacific Gas & Electric Co. high-tension tower. Tankersley, the son of a Navy officer, then fled to join the U.S. expatriate community in Canada. For 18 months, Tankersley and his wife Susan re-examined their political philosophy. As a result, last February he turned himself in to federal authorities as his own "statement against violence" and is now serving a one-to five-year sentence in a California prison. From his cell, Tankersley talked to TIME'S Chris Anderson about the making and unmaking of a violent revolutionary:

In 1966 Tony Tankersley was just beginning his graduate studies when he discovered political activism: "At first I mixed with a loose-knit group of Old Lefties and Black Panthers, but it did not take long for me to make the transition to the hip radical world--a world I could identify with." His first encounter with the New Left came during the Oakland Induction Center riots of 1967, when he "saw the brutality perpetrated against the demonstrators and thought it unjust. It was then that I began seeing myself as a violent revolutionary." From a follower to a leader was a short step: he helped organize an antidraft demonstration in April 1968. It was "a pathetic flop. I felt impotent and very militant. I joined a commune; I cut off ties with moderates, liberals, anyone who didn't agree with me totally. It's so easy to resign yourself to violence as the only effective way to combat a system you conceive to be fascist. Once you're committed to violence, you reinforce your own militance by shutting off all other viewpoints. You won't hear other people; you can't hear other people. The ties you establish with fellow revolutionaries bind your mind to the ethic of violence. By the time fall rolled around, I was ready to take violent action."

Tankersley dynamited the 60-ft. tower, then abandoned a cache of explosives just ahead of the police and made his way to Montreal. There, as a fugitive, he began to rethink his political role: "I was far enough away from the movement to reflect on my own actions without interruption. Nobody was there to remind me whom I could talk to and whom I couldn't. I drew on liberal ideas and conservative ideas and found that I didn't know everything. I had been wasting all of my energy figuring out how to destroy, when I could have been getting something good and tangible accomplished."

After months came an abrupt turn away from violence: "I began seeing the hypocrisy throughout the entire radical scene. I saw the same people who said they were fighting for a humane society accept violence without question. Radicals have accomplished the impossible: they have successfully separated the concept of violence from the idea of hurting people. I'm sure if Bonnie and Clyde were alive today, they'd have a poster of Che on their wall. Death and blood are no longer words that convey human suffering; they are potent political battle cries. Had I kept going, I am sure I would have killed somebody."

What about the future of violent protest? "Bernardine Dohrn and the others on the top of the terrorist heap can only be moved to reconsider the role of violence if they are convinced it is tactically counterproductive. Violence is just a tool for them, and they use it when they think it is necessary. They might think the use of that tool is alienating people now, but I assure you that restraint is a very temporary thing. I'm sure it's going to get worse. The gap is still too big. There is no communication between the stable, experienced people and the younger people who have no experience to lean on. There is so little passage of knowledge and awareness."

Although he could have stayed in Canada, reasonably secure from imprisonment, he chose to return. For Tankersley, return has been a "rebirth. I feel freer now in prison than I did when I was a radical."

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