Dear Leo: Give Up, the War Is Over

Twenty years ago, on the night of Aug. 24, 1970, four young men known as the New Year’s Gang bombed the Army Mathematics Research Center (AMRC) at the University of Wisconsin . By far the most violent protest of the era, the blast damaged 26 campus buildings, wiped out the work of dozens of scientists, injured a night watchman and three graduate students and killed a physicist, Robert Fassnacht, who left a wife, three children and an unfinished experiment in superconductivity. Fassnacht opposed the war in Vietnam.

Three of the conspirators were eventually caught and served prison sentences. The fourth, Leo Frederick Burt, a UW graduate from the Philadelphia suburb of Havertown, remains at large, the last active FBI case from that period.

Burt is believed to be living in California, where two of his co-conspirators hid out. This is a letter to Leo from Tom Bates, a former Times senior editor, author and one of Burt’s UW contemporaries.

Dear Leo,

I thought I saw you the other night at a blues concert by a river. You were alone in the middle of the crowd, kneeling on the grass, listening to the songs of Charlie Musselwhite, a blues man you would recognize (he used to perform at the Nitty Gritty Bar & Restaurant in Madison when you and your buddies were planning the revolution there in 1970). You had the same dark, curly hair, the Sgt. Rock jaw and swarthy coloring, but you had lost weight-- about 20 pounds, I’d say, all of it muscle. A neat trick, Leo (if it was indeed you)--giving up that Charles Atlas body to throw your pursuers off your trail.

The last news we had of you was the night you jumped out the back window of that youth hostel in Petersborough, Ontario, a posse of Canadian Mounties after you. That was 20 years ago. Richard Nixon was still President; napalm bombs were still incinerating Asian peasants; Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (your favorite rock band) were still at the top of the charts.

You know, the FBI agents who have hunted you all these years say you are dead, but none of your old friends believe that. How’ve you been, Leo? And how does the Vietnam Era look to you now that we, as a nation, are leaving the Cold War behind. Isn’t it time that you too made peace with the past?

When you were named as a suspect in the Army Math bombing, a lot of militants figured you for a provocateur, especially when they heard that you had been in ROTC and summered with the Marines at Quantico. On the other side were federal authorities who pegged you as a front man for Havana or Hanoi. You were a dupe, either of the Communists or the CIA, it was thought.

But I see you simply as a straight kid who got bent by the forces of civil war. Yours was a big Irish-Catholic clan that had given Philadelphia generations of engineers, philosophers, artists. You had a sister in a convent, an uncle in the priesthood and you served in the Altar Society at your Catholic high school. The Burts were Kennedy Democrats, of course.

You wanted to be a journalist, but rowing was your passion. During your first three years in Madison, practically all you did was row and study. Your enthusiasm was an inspiration to your crewmates, but rowing is a tall man’s sport and, at 5-foot-11, you were too short to make varsity. You tried to compensate by lifting weights, but it only made you muscle-bound. The music went out of your stroke, and, at the end of your junior year, you were cut from the traveling team.

All along, you’d been changing inside. Training for a shot at the Olympics in the summer of ‘68, you got in trouble for wearing a peace symbol in a competition. You argued with the athletic director, former football great Elroy (Crazylegs) Hirsch, over his order to all UW athletes to get haircuts. You started wearing sandals and smoking pot. Your dream of Olympic gold faded out, replaced by the ambition to be a new Lincoln Steffens, a crusading journalist.

You had been covering sports for the Daily Cardinal, UW’s student newspaper. You switched to politics. You were a moderate voice on what was by then a radical paper, condemning hooliganism (you called it “trashing”) on the Op-Ed page. Then, in May, 1970, came the invasion of Cambodia and the slaying of four students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University. You were beaten bloody covering the ensuing riots in Madison. That was your turning point.

Meanwhile, a new factor had emerged in the local movement, the so-called “New Year’s Gang.” On the evening of Dec. 31, 1969, the gang had stolen a plane and, in the middle of a howling blizzard, had dropped mayonnaise jars full of gooey ANFO (the ammonium nitrate fuel-oil mix later used on Army Math) on a big munitions plant north of Madison.

The bombs didn’t go off; nonetheless, the Gang’s antics made international news. The Daily Cardinal hailed the saboteurs as heroes, and, after Kent State, signs appeared around campus: “Where is the New Year’s Gang, now that we need them?”

You were astonished to learn that Madison’s top guerrilla was Karl Armstrong, an easygoing Madison kid and one of your drinking buddies. He had carried off the New Year’s caper with the help of his kid brother Dwight and his girlfriend, a secretary at Ray-O-Vac. Now he wanted your help for something really big, something that even Richard Nixon couldn’t ignore.

For more than a year, a Cardinal reporter named Jim Rowen had been investigating the Army Mathematics Research Center. Rowen was the son of a Washington Post columnist and son-in-law of Sen. George McGovern. With the help of information leaked to him by Sen. William Proxmire, he had documented Army Math’s connection to the “electronic battlefield” in Vietnam. University officials continued to deny the link, but you believed Rowen.

And so you went along. The center was housed in Sterling Hall, sandwiched between Physics and Astronomy. You were going to have to use a lot of explosive to get at it. You picked a time of day (3:30 a.m.) and year (semester break) when you thought no one would be around. You recruited David Fine, a freshman on the Cardinal staff, to make a warning call.

But violence wasn’t really your style. You grew morose, sluggish. On the day that you were to assemble the bomb, you ran a fever. “I can’t do it,” you told Karl at the staging area. “I’m too sick.”

But there were the 500-pound barrels of ANFO sitting in the grass. The others couldn’t get them into the stolen van without you. And so you played the little trick on yourself that you had learned from the Marines, the trick of not feeling The Pain. And with the strength you had built up in your legs by means of boathouse squats with 250-pound sandbags, you lifted those barrels into the van.

I imagine you now living in California--the land where time begins today--where so many defeated revolutionaries ended up. I imagine you free in the way that only fugitives, cut off from the demands of family, can be. I suspect that you are still playing that old mind game, refusing to feel The Pain. How else could you live with the knowledge of the trauma that you brought upon the Burt clan, not to mention the Fassnachts?

You know, I’ve interviewed scores of people about you, and I’ve yet to find anyone who didn’t like you. Generous, considerate, funny, sincere--beneath the muscles you were still an altar boy at heart. Robert Fassnacht is mourned to this day, but so are you.

Come home, Leo. The ‘60s are over. Life is too short to spend it apart from those we hold dear.