William

William’s importance in Jenny’s story lies in the way their shared politics and shared life are tested by separation. Together they carried out antiwar bombings; then his arrest left Jenny underground, still devoted to waiting for him but forced to live without the partnership that had given their actions their shape. From prison, William remained a correspondent, adviser, and source of encouragement. Yet as Jenny changed, his support could not restore their former relationship: he continued to care for her while ceasing, finally, to write as her lover.

Identity and Political Partnership

In Berkeley, William was part of the organizing circle through which Jenny entered political work. Mike Sorsa brought Jenny and William to a meeting, and Jenny was then nineteen and William Weeks’s girlfriend. A recollection of Jenny painting a banner for an action against Berkeley’s homecoming game places William within the same political world, though the banner itself was Jenny’s work: she laid out its immense letters with care, and devised a system of weights that allowed it to unfurl on cue. Their partnership was not simply a private attachment alongside activism. Later, Jenny understood that the two of them had acted together so assiduously that their movements seemed to belong to a closed unit.

William and Jenny bombed several government targets, mostly draft offices. They acted late at night, intending that no one would be killed, and believed that violence could force attention onto the Vietnam War and help save lives. In their view, the purpose of the bombings was to persuade Americans who resisted their position; they regarded their own cause as right and thought that its justice would be evident. Jenny later recognized the limits of their outlook: their sense of what ordinary Americans believed had been shaped by people around the Bay Area who were already like-minded. William is therefore associated with both the conviction that political violence could communicate and the intimate, shared world that had made that conviction feel sufficient.

Arrest and Separation

William’s arrest broke the practical and emotional pattern of their life together. He had planned to stop at the garage they rented as a workshop to pick up a tool on his way home. Jenny was at home preparing dinner, listening to the police band as she waited for his footsteps. His arrest came, as she remembered it, as a freak accident; they had discussed what they would do if both were arrested, but had never considered what would happen if only one of them were caught. Jenny was left free while William was imprisoned, a reversal she experienced less as a reprieve than as a devastating separation.

That difference shaped their correspondence. Jenny sent letters to Dana in Boulder, who recopied them and forwarded them to William; William sent his letters to Dana, who passed them on to Jenny. The arrangement allowed them to stay in contact without sharing an address directly. When Rob Frazer later told Jenny that William believed they had remained in touch and wanted Rob to keep looking out for her, the message showed that William still understood her safety as something entrusted to him. Rob said William loved her and expected him to protect her. The care reached Jenny through another person, but the separation that made such mediation necessary remained intact.

Prison Letters and Political Judgment

William’s correspondence also records his reading of political change. In a letter Jenny received during the Watergate scandal, he argued that public opposition to Nixon might create conditions for a general uprising. He saw a change in what the average American was willing to condemn: the critical judgment they had once hoped to encourage over the war now seemed to be directed at the White House. He also wondered how he, or anyone like him, would fare before judges in this altered climate. His response makes prison more than a private circumstance; it places his hopes and uncertainty within a shifting national argument about government and accountability.

William’s suggestion that Jenny contact a lawyer brought their separation into sharper focus. She learned that William and Dana had discussed her situation without her, and the idea of surrender forced her to imagine what prison would mean if she were no longer able to see him. Their past planning had covered the possibility that they would be arrested together, not the possibility that one might remain free while the other was confined. Jenny eventually wrote that she would contact the lawyer, but delayed. The lawyer’s name and number, hidden beneath the insole of her shoe, became a daily reminder of a decision she had not yet made.

Jenny’s Changing Account of Their Bond

As Jenny reconsidered her political past, she also reconsidered the role William had played in it. She had believed that they would have made the same choices even if they had lived separate lives. Later, she recognized that she had given herself to him partly because he could channel her anger and turn it into action. Their partnership had made that transformation feel natural; its closeness also helped conceal from her how much rage lay beneath their carefully reasoned politics. She began to question whether their violence had served justice as they claimed, or whether it had also carried a desire for vengeance and a demand that the powerful feel remorse.

After Jenny and Pauline were imprisoned, William continued to answer Jenny’s letters through her sentencing and entry into prison. He used his prison’s law library to advise her, and sent encouragement and practical counsel. He treated her as a comrade and a worthy person brought low by complicated circumstances, rather than as the lover she had once been. Jenny received his support, but the change in their relationship was unmistakable: he offered her care and solidarity without resuming their former intimacy. His refusal to rebuke her for leaving him could be generous, though Jenny also experienced his rationality as a loss. She knew that it was selfish to want a man she might no longer love to keep longing for her, yet his continued devotion had once been part of the life she expected to return to.

Change and Ending

Jenny’s letters to William grew more frequent as she neglected her journal and directed her reflections to him. She regarded him as a fixed point by which to navigate, a confessor to whom she could send her arguments and uncertainties. At the same time, she doubted whether she could see him again without losing hold of her emerging sense of self, and wondered whether she still loved him. Their correspondence thus continued after the shared political certainty and shared life that had sustained it had begun to dissolve.

William eventually let three months pass before answering one of Jenny’s letters. Jenny understood the silence as his quiet release of her and stopped writing back. The change does not erase his earlier assistance: he had supported her through legal proceedings and offered what he could from his own cell. But his care no longer meant that they would resume their life as lovers. William’s arc is largely seen through this separation, and its ending is defined less by a final confrontation than by the gradual distinction between loyalty, comradeship, and romantic love.