Their avowed goal to bring about a violent Communist revolution in the United States, perhaps the Weathermen's greatest significance lay in their exploitation by the Nixon administration, which characterized them as typical protestors. These few hundred extremists were used to represent the thousands comprising the antiwar movement, a strategy that allowed President Nixon to offer the "silent majority" a clear choice: either his plan of gradual disengagement from the war (called "Vietnamization") or the violent revolution supposedly espoused by all of the war's opponents.

The Weathermen arose from the ashes of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which self-destructed at its 1969 convention in a power struggle between the Progressive Labor Coalition, whose adherents were older, socialist, and principally interested in organizing workers to bring about social change, and the Radical Youth Movement, younger, Communist-oriented revolutionaries who saw armed struggle as the only viable political option...