30 years ago, bomb shattered UW campus
Anger over Vietnam reached tragic climax in Sterling Hall explosion
By Sharif Durhams and Peter Maller
of the Journal Sentinel staff
Last Updated: Aug. 19, 2000
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Sterling Hall Bombers |
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 Photo/File
KARL ARMSTRONG: Apprehended in 1972 in Toronto by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He served seven years. After a stint as a cab driver, he now runs the Loose Juice stand on UW-Madison's Library Mall. DWIGHT ARMSTRONG: Apprehended in 1976. He served four years in prison, moved back to Madison and now works for Union Cab. DAVID FINE: Apprehended in 1976 in California. He served a three-year sentence. He received a law degree in 1984 and was last known to be working in Vancouver, Wash. LEO BURT: Never apprehended. He was 22 at the time of the bombing, and was later dropped from the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list. Federal officials still are seeking him. Michele Kenner/Journal Sentinel • Graphic: Bombing site  Photo/Erwin Gebhard Karl Armstrong (left) and Phil Ball talk last week in Madison. The two were classmates at UW during the Vietnam War era. "Twenty students would say to each other, 'Let's go break some windows at State Street and Layton Avenue.' The police typically resisted with emotion, energy and violence." -- John Elder, a UW-Madison sociology professor and Quaker who was a vocal opponent of the war "I feel real badly that Bob Fassnacht died in the bombing. It wasn't something that was intended. I look at it more like a tragedy that I was involved in." -- Karl Armstrong, who served seven years for the bombing. I've never seen anything change so quickly. Before the bombing, there used to be 10,000 to 15,000 kids rioting in this city every week. Everything stopped. I remember there being just one event after that, with a couple of hundred people … and half of them were FBI agents and undercover cops." -- Michael Zaleski, the prosecutor who eventually brought criminal charges against Karl Armstrong. "There certainly are scars remaining, both physical and psychological," said Don D. Reeder, department chairman, who was a young professor at the time of the bombing. "There were several people who lost their entire research projects," he said. "They were so demoralized that they never came back to the level of productivity they were at before." |
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Madison - Karl Armstrong remembers vividly his hatred for the government.
There was the My Lai massacre. The beatings by police at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. And the killings of four anti-war protesters by National Guardsmen at Kent State University.
Armstrong, an occasional student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a participant in several hit-and-run building attacks, learned of Kent State while visiting an uncle in Minneapolis.
As he watched the evening news with his younger brother, Dwight, his resolve firmed.
"I turned to my brother, and I said: 'They're killing us now. We're in the endgame. Army Math is next.' "
Thursday is the 30th anniversary of the morning Armstrong lighted the fuse to a bomb that carved a crater into the Army Math Research Center in UW-Madison's Sterling Hall - and, by extension, into the whole anti-war movement at one of the country's most volatile campuses.
University officials will make no public statements about the event. Bells will not toll for Robert Fassnacht, the 33-year-old graduate student who died in the explosion. No ceremony is scheduled.
But any visitor to the building can still see the faint signs of what was then the most destructive act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history, since eclipsed only by the Oklahoma City bombing.
The crevice where newer bricks join old serves as a kind of plaque marking the spot where the fertilizer and jet-fuel bomb exploded. There is no memorial.
"The event has become a legend of the university and is almost surreal," says a guide to the university written by students two years ago. "But for those on campus in the late summer of 1970, the event was very real."
Target for Anger
"Army Math" - as the one-of-a-kind research center was known on campus - had been the target of activists' ire since soon after it opened in the late 1950s. Over the years, that ire turned to anger.
As protests against the Vietnam War intensified, the Daily Cardinal published stories alleging that university professors and graduate students were conducting secret weapons research that would eventually be used to kill civilians in Southeast Asia. Army Math - located on the top three floors of the six-floor building - had become Public Enemy No. 1 among the anti-war protesters.
The protest speeches and vandalism that spread through the university area in the 1960s had, by the end of the decade, grown to riots and firebombings countered by police with pepper spray and by National Guardsmen with brute force. Students abandoned classes to protest what they saw as discriminatory policies that prevented black students from entering the university, and they railed against their lack of voice in how administrators ran the school.
By 1970, simply holding classes had become difficult.
"Twenty students would say to each other, 'Let's go break some windows at State Street and Layton Avenue,' " said John Elder, a UW-Madison sociology professor and Quaker who was a vocal opponent of the war. "The police typically resisted with emotion, energy and violence. The crowds would swell to 200 or 400 students. By evening, there would be complete disruption."
One of the worst student disruptions came in the spring, in what came to be known as the Miffland riots, an on-again, off-again fight between students and police. Roger Howard, now dean of students, was the resident director at Witte Hall, the dorm closest to Mifflin St. - the heart of the "Miffland" area. Howard would see young men in dorm hallways carrying piles of rocks. They would quickly dart out, pelt police officers and run back inside.
Howard kicked the attack squads out when he could. When that didn't work, officers would enter the building, pepper-spraying antagonists and bystanders alike.
In May, with the news of Kent State burning across campus, Chancellor Edwin Young declared a state of emergency, and 1,800 National Guardsmen and 400 police officers clamped down the campus. Young then canceled final exams to get students out of town for the summer as soon as possible.
Young's move ended the riots, but not the destruction.
Powerful Blast
The 3:40 a.m. attack on Sterling Hall was so powerful, it damaged 26 other buildings. Pieces of the stolen van that contained the ammonium nitrate bomb were found atop an eight-story building three blocks from the blast site.
Howard and his wife were knocked out of bed. Nearby churches lost their windows. Residents 30 miles away were awakened by the sound.
Fassnacht was working through the night to finish a project before leaving on vacation. He planned to go to San Diego the next day with his wife, Stephanie, their 3-year-old son, Chris, and their 1-year-old twin daughters, Heidi and Karin.
Investigators think Armstrong, along with his brother Dwight and accomplices David Fine and Leo Burt, filled a Ford van with fertilizer and jet fuel, drove it to Sterling Hall's loading dock, lighted the fuse and called the police to warn them.
In an interview last week, Armstrong said the attackers had bombed Sterling Hall in the wee hours because they did not want to harm anyone and had assumed the building would be vacant. But Fassnacht was killed and four others injured.
"There was this red glow from the fire and there was debris flying up in a mushroom-shaped cloud," Armstrong said. The group stopped at a truck stop to celebrate because the initial radio report said there were no injuries.
"We were just jubilant. We were high as a kite," he said.
But the next news broadcast told of the killing. The bombers were horrified. And they knew they were in serious trouble.
The next morning, after driving around southern Wisconsin for hours, Karl Armstrong and David Fine returned to Madison in their getaway car, a yellow Corvair.
"It was my mom's, and I had promised her I'd get it back to her the next day," Armstrong said. "I didn't want to worry her."
Then he and Fine stole another car and left the city.
"I thought then that I would never come back," he said. "I felt that I was leaving everything, my family and friends, behind forever."
Within two weeks, the Armstrong brothers, Fine and Burt were on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list.
Karl Armstrong was found in Canada two years later, and his brother was found there four years after that. Police tracked down Fine in California in 1976.
Fine was paroled in 1979; the Armstrongs were paroled separately in 1980. Burt has never been found.
All four were accused in the bombing and a series of other attacks that had either failed or had not caused serious damage.
"I feel real badly that Bob Fassnacht died in the bombing," Armstrong said last week. "It wasn't something that was intended. I look at it more like a tragedy that I was involved in."
Fears on Campus
No one knew what to expect when students returned to campus in the fall. Some suspected the bomb had relieved tensions; others - including the student body president and the state attorney general - feared it was just a beginning.
It turned out to be more of an ending.
The statement made by the Sterling Hall bombing was one that many anti-war activists opposed. They feared the attack discredited the peace movement and gave credence to people who viewed war protesters as dangerous.
They struggled to reclaim their message - that the government was still killing soldiers and civilians in Vietnam. But now protesters - some of their own - had killed an innocent here.
The bombing "definitely had a negative impact on what we were trying to accomplish," said former Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, who was a radical student leader at the time. "It was a shocking episode."
Activists posted fliers and held meetings, but could no longer rally support.
"People were tired of it," Howard said.
Across the country, anti-war demonstrations declined dramatically.
"I've never seen anything change so quickly," said Michael Zaleski, the prosecutor who eventually brought criminal charges against Karl Armstrong. "Before the bombing, there used to be 10,000 to 15,000 kids rioting in this city every week. Everything stopped. I remember there being just one event after that, with a couple of hundred people - and half of them were FBI agents and undercover cops."
Activist professors at UW-Madison silenced themselves. Students who asked them to lecture were refused.
The pain was most evident among faculty at the physics department at Sterling Hall, which occupied the first floor and basement of the building. While research at Army Math was virtually uninterrupted, numerous academic projects in the physics department were destroyed.
"There certainly are scars remaining, both physical and psychological," said Don D. Reeder, department chairman, who was a young professor at the time of the bombing.
"There were several people who lost their entire research projects," he said. "They were so demoralized that they never came back to the level of productivity they were at before."
Joe Dillinger, Fassnacht's faculty supervisor, a scientist in his mid-50s at the time of the explosion, was perhaps the most deeply wounded. With his research in superconductivity destroyed and his chief researcher dead, Dillinger went into severe emotional decline.
"He died a few years after," Reeder said. "He was a broken man."
Targeted Again
Organized protest virtually disappeared for 13 years before students once again linked arms and blocked a building to oppose university policies. The issue that reignited student activism: secret military research at the Army Math Research Center, which had then moved to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation building. "Army Math" finally went out of business in the late 1980s.
Since then, activism slowly has returned to the Madison campus. But the degree is different, and the tactics have changed.
Adam Klaus, a student who helped organize several protests last year, said modern protests have borrowed some tactics from the 1960s playbook. But students, through seats on committees and audiences with administrators, have much more formal say now in how the university is run.
Karl and Dwight Armstrong returned to live in Madison after being released from prison.
"There was no hostile reaction in the community when I returned home," Armstrong said. "Quite to the contrary. The atmosphere was friendly."
Now 53, the elder Armstrong runs Loose Juice, a fruit juice stand just blocks from Sterling Hall. He rarely works at the stand; he prefers playing golf. He spends three nights a week with his mother. They play Scrabble.
Dwight Armstrong works for Union Cab in Madison. He keeps a low profile and has not spoken publicly about the bombing.
David Fine earned a law degree from the University of Oregon in 1984; he was last known to be living in the Pacific Northwest.
About 10 years ago, at a large gathering of former 1960s leftists, Karl Armstrong publicly apologized for his part in the bombing. The closest he comes to activism these days is naming a banana-flavored drink at his juice stand for Angela Davis, the 1960s black activist.
Not the Same
Howard's career at the university has allowed him to be touched in some way by virtually every student protest of the last four decades.
And although recent protests against tuition increases, the university's perceived lack of commitment to diversity and potential ties to sweatshop labor have gathered some momentum, they do not question the core values of the university the way protests did in the 1960s.
"There has been nothing that has cut across the institution like that," Howard said.
Howard argues that Vietnam War protesters raised a fundamental moral question - one shared by peaceful and violent activists alike through American history, from the abolitionist movement to the current crop of anti-globalization protests.
The question: If you believe that your country is engaged in a fundamentally immoral activity, how far can you go?