Protest: Memories of Diana

Bomb threats plagued the nation again last week, but very few bombs were going off. Nonetheless, the reverberations of recent blasts could still be heard. In Washington and in state capitals, officials were searching for new means to control dynamite and dynamiters. In Maryland, where two black militants died in bomb blasts, the trial of Rap Brown was moved once more to a new site as an indirect result of the explosions. In Manhattan, police picked carefully through the rubble of the West 11th Street house, where at least three people died. There, in the ruins, they found a severed finger, which enabled them to identify one of the victims as Diana Oughton, 28, a talented, idealistic girl whose turn to radicalism brought her in the end to a rebel bomb factory.

Most Americans find it difficult to grasp that some of the brightest and best-cared-for young are so enraged that they have opted for the nihilism of blowing up society. Diana Oughton's story provides some answers—and engenders some pessimism as well:

Diana was born on Jan. 26, 1942, and raised in Dwight (pop. 3,100), a town set in the prairie cornfields of northern Illinois. Her conservative, Episcopal family is one of the community's most prominent. Her paternal great-great-grandfather established the Keeley Institute for alcoholics. Her maternal great-grandfather, W.D. Boyce, founded the American Boy Scouts. James Oughton, 55, Diana's father, is a Dartmouth graduate and restaurateur. Diana and her three sisters were cherished and deeply loved. Said her father: "The social life in Dwight has never separated adults from children. Dinner was a family affair, and there was a pretty wide discussion all the way through."

Storybook Child. TIME Correspondent Frank Merrick met in Dwight last week with Oughton and one of Diana's sisters, Carol, 26, who now lives in Washington. At first, Jim Oughton was remarkably composed for a father who had just learned that his eldest child had been blown apart. He told of her storybook childhood, of how she became a good horsewoman and swimmer, played a social game of tennis, studied piano and the flute. Her father remembers Diana as "independent in her thinking. She always had her own ideas, and they were sound ideas." About what? "A picture she liked, the best way to treat an animal, which was the finest season of the year—almost anything."

Aware of the limitations of Dwight, Oughton sent Diana off to Madeira School in Greenway, Va., and Bryn Mawr. She spent her junior year at the University of Munich. It was at Bryn Mawr that Diana first showed an interest in social problems. Like many collegians, she was active in voter registration and tutored junior high school students. At night she would go by train to Philadelphia, where for two years she tutored two ghetto boys. Said Carol: "I remember how incredulous Diana was that a seventh-or eighth-grade child couldn't read, didn't even know the alphabet." A Princeton football player proposed marriage, but Diana said: "I don't want to get married now. There are too many things to do."