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Stop Terror
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November 7, 1983
Bomb Explodes in Capitol
The Senate had planned to work late into the evening of Monday, November 7, 1983. Deliberations proceeded more smoothly than expected, however, so the body adjourned at 7:02 p.m. A crowded reception, held near the Senate Chamber, broke up two hours later. Consequently, at 10:58 p.m., when a thunderous explosion tore through the second floor of the Capitol’s north wing, the adjacent halls were virtually deserted. Many lives had been spared.
Minutes before the blast, a caller claiming to represent the “Armed Resistance Unit” had warned the Capitol switchboard that a bomb had been placed near the chamber in retaliation for recent U.S. military involvement in Grenada and Lebanon.
The force of the device, hidden under a bench at the eastern end of the corridor outside the chamber, blew off the door to the office of Democratic Leader Robert C. Byrd. The blast also punched a potentially lethal hole in a wall partition sending a shower of pulverized brick, plaster, and glass into the Republican cloakroom. Although the explosion caused no structural damage to the Capitol, it shattered mirrors, chandeliers, and furniture. Officials calculated damages of $250,000.
A stately portrait of Daniel Webster, located across from the concealed bomb, received the explosion’s full force. The blast tore away Webster’s face and left it scattered across the Minton tiles in one-inch canvas shards. Quick thinking Senate curators rescued the fragments from debris-filled trash bins. Over the coming months, a capable conservator painstakingly restored the painting to a credible, if somewhat diminished, version of the original.
Following a five-year investigation, federal agents arrested six members of the so-called Resistance Conspiracy in May 1988 and charged them with bombings of the Capitol, Ft. McNair, and the Washington Navy Yard. In 1990, a federal judge sentenced Marilyn Buck, Laura Whitehorn, and Linda Evans to lengthy prison terms for conspiracy and malicious destruction of government property. The court dropped charges against three co-defendants, already serving extended prison sentences for related crimes.
The 1983 bombing marked the beginning of tightened security measures throughout the Capitol. The area outside the Senate Chamber, previously open to the public, was permanently closed. Congressional officials instituted a system of staff identification cards and added metal detectors to building entrances to supplement those placed at chamber gallery doors following a 1971 Capitol bombing. |
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Thu Mar 15, 2007 5:12 pm |
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His Story
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July 2, 1915
Bomb Rocks Capitol
A solitary figure slipped quietly into the Capitol on the Friday afternoon leading to a Fourth of July weekend. He cradled a small package containing three sticks of dynamite. The former professor of German at Harvard University, Erich Muenter, came to Washington to deliver an explosive message. Although the Senate had been out of session since the previous March and was not due to reconvene until December, Muenter headed for the Senate Chamber. Finding the chamber doors locked, he decided that the adjacent Senate Reception Room would serve his purposes. He worked quickly, placing his deadly package under the Senate's telephone switchboard, whose operator had left for the holiday weekend. After setting the timing mechanism for a few minutes before midnight to minimize casualties, he walked to Union Station and purchased a ticket for the midnight train to New York City.
At 20 minutes before midnight, as he watched from the station, a thunderous explosion rocked the Capitol. The blast nearly knocked Capitol police officer Frank Jones from his chair at the Senate wing's east front entrance. Ten minutes earlier, the lucky Jones had closed a window next to the switchboard. A 30-year police veteran, the officer harbored a common fear that one day the Capitol dome would fall into the rotunda. For a few frantic moments, he believed that day had come. Jones then entered the Reception Room and observed its devastation—a shattered mirror, broken window glass, smashed chandeliers, and pulverized plaster from the frescoed ceiling.
In a letter to the Washington Evening Star, published after the blast, Muenter attempted to explain his outrageous act. Writing under an assumed name, he hoped that the detonation would "make enough noise to be heard above the voices that clamor for war. This explosion is an exclamation point in my appeal for peace." The former German professor was particularly angry with American financiers who were aiding Great Britain against Germany in World War I, despite this country's official neutrality in that conflict.
Arriving in New York City early the next morning, Muenter headed for the Long Island estate of J. P. Morgan, Jr. Morgan's company served as Great Britain's principal U.S. purchasing agent for munitions and other war supplies. When Morgan came to the door, Muenter pulled a pistol, shot him, and fled. The financier's wounds proved superficial and the gunman was soon captured. In jail, several days later, Muenter took his own life.
Reference Items:
U.S. Congress. Senate. History of the United States Capitol: A Chronicle of Design, Construction, and Politics, by William C. Allen. 106th Congress, 2d sess., 2001. S. Doc. 106-29. |
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Thu Mar 15, 2007 5:14 pm |
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B. Bailey
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September 11, 2001
The Capitol Building as a Target
In 1833, Massachusetts Representative Rufus Choate captured the grandeur and symbolism of the recently completed U.S. Capitol Building. He wrote, “We have built no national temples but the Capitol; we consult no common oracle but the Constitution.”
In the years before and since Choate’s time, enemies of the United States have repeatedly chosen this “national temple” as a target for their hostilities.
In 1814, while the United States was at war with Great Britain, invading British troops attacked the Capitol and used books from the Library of Congress to fuel the fires that badly damaged the then only partially completed structure. Nearly 50 years later, in 1861, hastily recruited Union troops rushed to Washington to protect the Capitol against Confederate armies in their unsuccessful drive to capture the city. Another half-century passed before the next major attack. In 1915, as the United States asserted its neutrality during the early months of World War I, a German sympathizer detonated a bomb in the Senate Reception Room to protest America’s evident sympathies toward Great Britain. Again, in 1971 and 1983, protestors of American foreign policies set off explosives that caused significant damage to the Capitol.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, the Capitol once again became the target of foreign enemies. As two hijacked commercial airplanes thundered into the twin towers of New York City’s World Trade Center, and another flew into the Pentagon, a fourth plane—through the heroic struggle of its passengers—missed its intended target and crashed into a Pennsylvania field southeast of Pittsburgh. All 40 passengers and crew members on United Airlines Flight 93 perished. Subsequent investigations by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks discovered a high probability that the Capitol was the intended target of the Flight 93 hijackers.
News of the first strike against the World Trade Center reached the Capitol within minutes. In an unprecedented act, the Senate canceled its session moments before the appointed convening time. At 10:15 a.m., officials ordered evacuation of the Capitol and office buildings. While congressional leaders were taken to a secure facility, other members and staff were urged to leave the area amidst rumors that the Capitol was a bombing target.
Over the weeks and months that followed the terrors of September 11, despite unprecedented security enhancements, congressional leaders insisted that the Capitol remain open, continuing more than two centuries of service as the “national temple” of representative democracy.
Reference Items:
Daschle, Tom. Like No Other Time: The 107th Congress and the Two Years That Changed America Forever. New York: Crown, 2003.
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States. The 9/11 Commission Report. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004. |
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Fri Mar 16, 2007 11:55 am |
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Mr Lister
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1971 : Bomb explodes in Capitol building
A bomb explodes in the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., causing an estimated $300,000 in damage but hurting no one. A group calling itself the "Weather Underground" claimed credit for the bombing, which was done in protest of the ongoing U.S.-supported Laos invasion. The so-called Weathermen were a radical faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); the Weathermen advocated violent means to transform American society. The philosophical foundations of the Weathermen were Marxist in nature; they believed that militant struggle was the key to striking out against the state to build a revolutionary consciousness among the young, particularly the white working class. Their primary tools to achieving these ends were arson and bombing. Among the other targets of Weathermen bombings were the Long Island Court House, the New York Police Department headquarters, the Pentagon, and the State Department. No one was killed in these bombings, because the bombers always ca!
lled in an advanced warning. However, three members of the Weather Underground died on March 6, 1970, when the house in which they were constructing the bombs exploded. |
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Sat Mar 17, 2007 12:07 pm |
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