Weathermen in the United States during the 1960s were in the vanguard of violent social revolution. They endorsed terrorism as part of the armed struggle against the right-wing establishment, and openly conducted workshops and seminars on sabotage and urban warfare. More than one of their number figured on the FBI's list of notorious "most wanted criminals".
Oh, surely not? Surely the smiling weathercaster, colourless, even to the point of being seen in black and white, was not a raging anarchist when not on duty, with a live bomb nestling concealed among his radiosondes? Or did Shakespeare have it right - that "one may smile, and smile, and be a villain"?
Let me set your mind at ease. "The Weathermen" was the rather incongruous name adopted by a radical and very violent group of students who were part of the more general unrest endemic on US campuses in the late 1960s.
The organisation was an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society, a radical leftwing movement founded in Chicago in 1960; the SDS called for, not unreasonably some might say, an end to poverty and exploitation, and demanded "participatory democracy" in which the individual could share in the political decisions that were to shape his or her ends.
But the Weathermen formed a separate and rather nasty faction, extending their reforming zeal beyond the norm. They hoped to unite the workers, the poor and the exploited in one vast, violent crusade against the existing order. The Weathermen endorsed terrorism, and their explicit aim was to overthrow by force the American political structure of the day.
The name, it seems, was coined inadvertently by Bob Dylan, whose provocative and haunting lyrics in the new rock genre reflected the profound cultural and political changes sweeping through Western society at the time.
Dylan's songs combined incisive social comment with strong criticism of the perceived hypocrisy of the established order, and one of them, Subterranean Homesick Blues, written in 1965, contained the following lines:
"Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose;
Keep a clean nose,
Watch the plain clothes;
You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows."
The subversives chose the last two lines as a title for their manifesto in 1969, and in due course adopted the catchy theme as a name for the organisation itself. It was short-lived, however; when several people were killed in an explosion detonated by the Weathermen in New York the following year, the tide of youthful opinion turned very much against them. Violence, happily, became unfashionable among the more conservative and ambitious student body of the 1970s.