Karl Armstrong
Although the AMRC bombing was his largest effort, it was not the first bomb built by the 23-year-old former University of Wisconsin student. Nor was it the only bombing Karl Armstrong had bungled.
In a stolen plane on New Year’s Day, 1970, he had attempted an aerial bombing of the Badger Ordnance owned by the Olin Corporation near Madison at Baraboo, but the mission was a dud. Twice he had thrown firebombs into what he thought were the offices of the army ROTC, but the first time he hit a classroom and the second time he burned out the armory basketball court. The next night, after his second ROTC error, he made another bomb, walked to the corner of Orchard and Regent, and threw the container into what he thought was the Selective Service Office. Over the radio, after he returned to his apartment, he learned that he had the right corner but the wrong address and that he had firebombed the Primate Research Center. A second assault on Badger Ordnance was made on Washington’s Birthday, 1970; this time by land and after considerable preparation. Around midnight Karl and a friend took thirteen sticks of dynamite to the Prairie du Sac electrical substation which provides electricity for the Badger Ordnance plant. But after they had the dynamite in place and were stringing out the wire, they were spotted by an employee and forced to make a getaway. Police found Karl’s fingerprints on the abandoned materials and the dynamite.11After his arrest in Toronto in March 1972, Karl Armstrong resisted a return to Wisconsin for a year because the United States treaty with Canada does not allow extradition for political crimes. But after the Canadian courts decided that bombing was not a political act, he was returned to Madison in March 1973. In a letter to the judge, signed “Karlton Lewis Armstrong, P.O.W.” and “Power to the People!” he protested that he “was kidnapped and held for ransom by the State of Wisconsin.”12 When arraigned he stood mute, and a first-degree murder trial date was set.
After visits in jail from, among others, Philip Berrigan, and after plea bargaining, Karl Armstrong pled guilty on September 28 to second-degree murder, to four counts of arson, and to transporting explosives with intent to commit a crime. The trial of Karl Armstrong was in actuality a sentencing hearing covering not only the bombing of the Math Research Center and the death of Robert Fassnacht but also the burning of the Primate Lab, the ROTC classroom and basketball court, and the attempt to blow up the electrical substation. Although he referred to the event in his own testimony, the attempted aerial strike against Badger Ordnance was not included in the state case because it was on army property and was part of the federal case.In the two-week sentencing hearing, which began on his twenty-seventh birthday, Karl Armstrong emphasized that his bombings were acts of protest against the Vietnam War, that other nonviolent protests were not affecting the conduct of the war, and that he had not intended to injure or kill anyone, only destroy property. He had been born, he pointed out, on the day the convicted Nazi leaders were executed, October 15, 1946. He and his father later discussed Nuremberg and attempted to understand how Hitler had come to power without German resistance. “I resolved that nothing like that, as long as I was alive, would happen in America. That’s probably the only real resolution I ever made about my whole life—that I would be prepared to give up my life so that wouldn’t happen here in America.”13
The Armstrong family lived in a housing project next to Truax Field, an Air Force base near Madison. Karl, his older sister, and younger brother grew up seeing military people daily but fearing that if they went near the barracks they would be shot on the spot. Karl was a member of the Madison’s Boy’s Choir, a Boy Scout who enjoyed camping, and a good athlete. From the stand he observed, “I felt very wholesome when I was a child.”14
The Vietnam War and the 1968 Democratic Convention disillusioned Karl Armstrong as they did many Americans.
In 1964, when he was eighteen, he worked for Lyndon Johnson’s election because Johnson had said that he would not commit more troops to Vietnam. When the war escalated during the next year, Karl said, “I felt betrayed by the president of the United States. I felt like a fool.”15 This made Karl question everything about America. While Karl was a student at the University of Wisconsin, his father warned him not to join civil rights or peace demonstrations: “Don’t get involved in anything political because you’re going to get destroyed. Either you won’t get a job or you’ll be put on black lists; they’ll find some way of destroying you.”16Karl participated in dozens of demonstrations at the university, the first in 1965 at Peterson Hall to protest the university’s complicity with Selective Service, and the largest in 1967 against Dow Chemical, a demonstration which turned into a riot. In 1968 he quit his job with Graber’s Drapery Fixtures to hitchhike to Chicago for the Democratic Convention protests. He had just arrived at 5 P.M. when someone, probably seeing his long hair, asked him if he was a Yippie. “I wasn’t and didn’t know what a Yippie was. But I said, ?Well, this is a free country; if I want to be a Yippie, I can be a Yippie.’ I said, ?Yeh, I’m a Yippie.’”17 He was then thrown into the Chicago River. Cold and soaking wet, Karl went to Lincoln Park where he listened to Allen Ginsberg and other speakers. He had no place to sleep, but at a campfire on the side of a hill he found “a real sense of solidarity” with the other demonstrators, including members of the Blackstone Rangers. Later he was chased through the streets—all the time carrying his wet sleeping bag—and was involved in the Grant Park battle and the march on the Conrad Hilton Hotel. These were his first contacts with police provocation. “I said to myself, ?Karl Armstrong, you are such a stupid person. Stupid and naive to think that these people care about civil disobedience or anything of that sort.’”18
After his radicalizing experience in Chicago, Karl began to wrestle with the ethics of political violence.
Although a marginal student at the University, having been dropped for poor grades three times, he did receive a grade of A, ironically, in Social Disorganization. His interest was American history, especially the American Revolution. He concluded that “any sort of social progress in class society takes place because there are people who are willing finally to use violence to change the conditions of their life.”19In 1969 the focus of attention on campus turned toward the connections the university had with the military, especially the Army Math Research Center. At the end of the year Karl began to plan his firebombing campaign, feeling a “horror and complete revulsion for war” yet sensing that because most of the American people were against the war, the democratic institutions had failed. “I am a very nonviolent person, basically. Even when I was firebombing ROTC facilities and conducting the aerial bombing of Badger Ordnance I felt alienated by the violence I was using. And all the time I was wishing that there was some other way to stop the war.”20Following the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State killings, when the University of Wisconsin continued to ignore the demands by protestors that the AMRC be closed down, Karl began preparations for the big AMRC bombing. He stockpiled explosives, primacord, ammonium nitrate fertilizer, and fuel oil in his uncle’s basement in Minneapolis. Some of the explosives and primacord had been stolen from northern Minnesota. He began reading books on explosives, and he cut his shoulder-length hair short and shaved off his beard. In mid-August he rented a U-Haul trailer from a Madison station, using his own driver’s license as identification and the Armstrong family Corvair. From a construction site he took six 55-gallon drums and purchased 1,700 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, using an alias and telling the salesperson he was a farm worker. All the materials were collected on a site outside Madison where the bomb was constructed inside a van stolen from a professor.21
Around 2 A.M. on the morning of the AMRC bombing, witnesses testified that they saw a yellow Corvair and a white Ford van carefully making their way down Pennsylvania Avenue and onto Johnson Street in Madison. The van slowed to a crawl as it crossed the railroad tracks near Johnson and First streets. At 3:40 A.M. the enormous explosion shook the area around Sterling Hall, awakened people throughout Madison and for miles around, including Karl’s father who asked his wife the next morning if she had heard what sounded like an earthquake.22