In the summer of 1970 and for years after, photos of Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and other members of the Weather Underground were emblazoned on FBI wanted posters. In Bad Moon Rising, Arthur Eckstein details how Weather began to engage in serious, ideologically driven, nationally coordinated political violence and how the FBI attempted to monitor, block, and capture them and failed. Eckstein further shows how the FBI ordered its informants inside Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to support the faction that became Weather during the tumultuous June 1969 SDS convention, helping to destroy the organization; and how the FBI first underestimated Weather's seriousness, then overestimated its effectiveness, and how Weather outwitted them. Eckstein reveals how an obsessed and panicked President Nixon and his inner circle sought to bypass a cautious J. Edgar Hoover, contributing to the creation of the rogue Plumbers Unit that eventually led to Watergate. Based on interviews and 30,000 pages of previously unreleased FBI documents.

Introduction -- 1. "Angels of destruction and disorder" -- 2. "We sentence the government to death" -- 3. "A menace of national proportions" -- 4. "Our own doors are being threatened" -- 5. "The Hoover cutoff' -- 6. "Hunt them to exhaustion" -- 7. "One lawbreaker has been pursued by another" -- Conclusion.