Larry Grathwohl, the FBI informer who spent a year with the Weathermen terrorist group, has remained a powerful witness to the subversive intentions of the communist radicals who sought to destroy America from within -- and who continue to work toward this result today.

In 1976, Grathwohl (with Frank Reagan) wrote the book Bringing Down America, detailing his experiences with the Weathermen, including his personal interactions with Bill Ayers and the rest of the leadership group, many of whom were still living in hiding at that time.  In 1976, Grathwohl's inside information was part of the effort to demythologize New Left radicalism and to frame it as what it really was: grotesque thuggery in the name of feeling like "players" in the international communist movement.  These radical "youths" (who planned and carried out terrorist acts without regard for human life well beyond their "youthful" years) deserved to be exposed and isolated as the inhuman instruments of tyrannical puppet masters that they were. 

Today, however, Grathwohl's work has taken on a new, and even graver, significance.  For members of the Weather Underground leadership have, in defiance of all plausibility, become subversives of a much more dangerous sort, trading in their bomb-making materials and manifestos for lecterns and law degrees.  In their new life of ersatz respectability, they directly affect education and child welfare policy, undermining American society at its roots in ways their "youthful" treachery could never have achieved.  And of course, who could have imagined that Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, America-haters extraordinaire, operatives of Cuban intelligence, souls twisted by power-lust and delusions of grandeur, would become key figures in American electoral politics, personal friends and mentors to a man who would become president of the United States?

Grathwohl could not have predicted, in 1976, that his vital and shocking information about the nature and intentions of communist revolutionaries in America would become relevant -- nay, indispensable -- to understanding the beliefs, methods, and goals of a sitting two-term president.  And yet it has, and America and the world are extremely fortunate that Grathwohl and his message are still with us, and speaking the ugly truth as clearly as ever, to all those still capable of caring about the truth.

For information on the re-issue of Bringing Down America, go to the book's official website, here.  To read the three installments of my own recent in-depth interview with Larry Grathwohl, see here, here, and here.