William Powell, who renounced his notorious bomb-making guide ‘The Anarchist Cookbook’, dies at 66
Controversial 1971 guidebook was linked to attacks including Oklahoma bombing and Columbine massacre
“I don’t like to think that I contributed to people being killed,” William Powell once said, wrestling with what he had wrought as a disaffected 19-year-old when he hunkered down with military manuals and revolutionary writings and compiled The Anarchist Cookbook.
His volume - a guide to drugs, booby traps, sabotage, hand-to-hand combat and explosives - entered circulation in 1971 and reportedly sold more than 2 million copies. Still in print, and accessible online in PDF form, the book has been linked in recent years to the perpetrators of crimes including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, and the 2011 Tucson shooting that wounded then-U S Representative Gabrielle Giffords.
Powell, who has died at 66, ultimately renounced his book, which he described as a “misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in.” He became an educator, working in schools around the world.
“The central idea to the book was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change,” Powell wrote in an author’s note that since 2000 has accompanied the book’s listing on Amazon.com. “I no longer agree with this.”
Powell died last July 11 of a heart attack while travelling with his family near Halifax, Nova Scotia. A son, Sean Powell, announced the death shortly afterward on Facebook. But the news did not receive wide notice until the release on March 24 of a documentary film about Powell, American Anarchist, by director Charlie Siskel.
The central idea to the book was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change. I no longer agree with this
Efforts to reach Powell’s family were not immediately successful.
Siskel, who said the family had notified him of Mr Powell’s death, said in an interview that he saw The Anarchist Cookbook as an example, however extreme, of something “quite universal”: “a youthful indiscretion or mistake that can haunt someone during their early years or even longer.”