Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn : Bringing the War Home, 1970

News photo taken March 6, 1970, of the New York Fire Department responding to an explosion at an upscale Greenwich Village townhouse. Image from Wikipedia.
Bringing the war home: 1970-2010

Eventually we came to think that we could make a revolution, and that in any case it was our responsibility to try.

By Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn / The Rag Blog / March 22, 2010

Conscience is the sword we wield. Conscience is the sword that runs us through. -- Marge Piercy

A front page headline in the New York Times on March 7, 1970, announced: “Townhouse Razed by Blast and Fire; Man’s Body Found.” The story described an elegant four-story brick building in Greenwich Village destroyed by three large explosions and a raging fire “probably caused by leaking gas” at about noon on Friday, March 6.

The body was later identified as belonging to 23-year old Ted Gold, a leader of the 1968 student strike at Columbia University, a teacher, and a member of a “militant faction of Students for a Democratic Society.”

Over the next several days two more bodies were discovered -- Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins had both been student leaders, civil rights and anti-war activists -- and by March 15 the Times reported that police had found “57 sticks of dynamite, four homemade pipe bombs and about thirty blasting caps in the rubble,” and referred to the townhouse for the first time as a “bomb factory.”

That awful event announced widely the existence of the Weather Underground, in some ways the most notorious, but far from the only group of Americans to take up armed struggle as a protest tool at that moment -- the story took off from there, growing, changing, and accelerating every day

A few days after the Townhouse explosion Ralph Featherstone and William “Che” Payne, two “black militants," associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, according to Time Magazine, “were killed when their car was blasted to bits” by a bomb police said was being transported to Washington D.C. to protest the prosecution of SNCC leader H. Rap Brown. The Black Liberation Army leapt onto the national scene, and other organized groups -- Puerto Rican independistas, Native American first nation militants, and Chicano separatists -- emerged demanding self-determination and justice.

Next door neighbor Dustin Hoffman stands near the West 11th Street townhouse that was destroyed by an explosion and fire on March 6, 1970. Photo from the AP.
Violent resistance to violence was far from an isolated phenomenon: Time noted that in 1969 there had been 61 bombings on college campuses, most targeting ROTC and other war-related targets, and 93 bomb explosions in New York, half of them classified as “political,” a category that was “virtually non-existent 10 years ago.”

According to the FBI, from the start of 1969 to mid-April 1970, there were 40,934 bombings, attempted bombings, and bomb threats. Out of this total, 975 had been explosive, as opposed to incendiary, attacks, meaning that on average, two bombs planned, constructed, and placed, detonated every day for more than a year. Our national history includes times of anarchist resistance, labor militancy, massive unreported (and still largely unacknowledged) slave rebellions, and the armed abolitionism of John Brown; the late 1960’s and 1970’s was becoming one of those times.

How had it come to this?

Empire, invasion, and occupation always earn blow-back. In 1965 most Americans supported the war, but by 1968 people had turned massively against it -- the result of protest and organizing and a burgeoning peace movement, and of civil rights leaders like the militants from SNCC, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King, Jr. denouncing the war as illegal and immoral. Even more important, veterans came home and told the truth about the reality of aggression and occupation and war crimes.

The US government found itself isolated around the world and in profound and growing conflict with its own people inside its own borders. The Vietnamese themselves were decisive: they refused to be defeated. The Tet Offensive in 1968 destroyed any fantasy of an American victory, and when President Lyndon Johnson announced at the end of March 1968 that he would not run for reelection, it seemed to us we had won a victory.

But peace proved to be a dream deferred, for the war did not end -- it escalated into an air and sea war, expanded into all of Cambodia and Laos, and every week the war dragged on another six thousand people were murdered in Southeast Asia. Six thousand human beings -- massive, unthinkable numbers -- were thrown into the furnaces of war and death that had been constructed by our own government.

The war was lost, but the terror continued. All Vietnamese territories outside U.S. control were declared “free-fire zones” and airplanes rained bombs and napalm on anything that moved, destroying crops and live-stock and entire villages. John McCain, an unremorseful war criminal, flew some of those missions. As a young lieutenant, John Kerry testified in Senate hearings at the time that U.S. troops committed war crimes every day as a matter of policy, not choice.

No one knew precisely how to proceed, for the anti-war movement had done what it had set out to do -- we’d persuaded the American people to oppose the war, built a massive movement and a majority peace sentiment -- and still we couldn’t find any sure-fire way to stop the killing; millions of people mobilized for peace, and our project, our task and our obsession, was so simple to state, so excruciatingly difficult to achieve: peace now.

The war slogged on into a murky and unacceptable future, and the anti-war forces splintered then -- some of us tried to organize a peace wing within the Democratic Party, others organized in factories and workplaces, some fled to Europe or Africa or Canada, others to communes, the land, and hopeful but small organizing projects. Some began to build a vehicle to fight the war-makers by other means, a clandestine force that would, we hoped, survive what we thought of as an impending American totalitarianism.

Every choice was contemplated, each seemed a possibility then -- and we had friends and family in every camp -- and no choice seemed utterly beyond the pale.

The Weather Underground carried out a series of illegal and symbolic attacks on property then, some 20 acts over its entire existence, and no one was killed or harmed; the goal was not to terrorize people, but to scream out the message that the U.S. government and its military were committing acts of terrorism in our name, and that the American people should never tolerate that.

Some felt that our actions were misguided at best, off-the-tracks, indefensible and even despicable, and that case is not impossible to make. But America’s longest war itself, with all its attendant horrors, was doubly despicable, and while many stood up, who in fact did the right thing; who ended the war; who transformed the world?

We began to think of ourselves as part of the Third World project -- revolutionary liberation movements demanding justice and freeing themselves from empire, we believed, would also transform the world. We thought that we who lived in the metropolis of empire had a special duty to “oppose our own imperialism” and to resist our own government’s imperial dreams.

Eventually we came to think that we could make a revolution, and that in any case it was our responsibility to try. It was a big stretch, but every revolution is impossible until it occurs; after the fact, every revolution seems inevitable.

All of that was 40 years ago -- lots of water under the bridge since then, raging rivers and cascading falls, rapids and torrents, chutes and ladders -- a long time in the life of a person -- the young become the old, and stories get retold.

But it’s also a matter of perspective: the meaning of any historical event will always be contested, and the more recent the event, the fiercer the contestation. The last word has not been written about the radical movements of youth in Europe in 1968, and certainly the meaning of the Black Freedom Movement or of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Viet Nam and the various American reactions to that catastrophe -- from mindless jingoism to sincere patriotism, from reluctant participation to gung-ho brutality, from protest to armed resistance -- are far from settled.

We’re reminded of the Chinese premier Chou En Lai responding to a French journalist’s question many years ago about the impact of the 18th Century French revolution on the 20th Century Chinese revolution. He thought for quite awhile and finally said, “It’s too soon to tell.” Forty years is less than the blink of an eye.

The big wheel keeps on turning: events and actions and adventures plunge relentlessly forward and nothing withstands the whirlwind of life on-the-move and history in-the-making. No single narrative can ever adequately speak to the diversity and complexity of human experience, for meaning itself is in the mix, always contested and never easily settled.

Because meaning is made and remade in the present tense, our backward glances are now necessarily refracted through the U.S. defeat in Viet Nam, the steady decline of empire, the hollowing out of the economy through militarism, the destruction of our political system, the environmental catastrophe that capitalism wrought, the terror attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent invasions and occupations and wars that continue as defining features of our national life. There is no sturdy accounting of distant times: everything must change, no one and nothing remains the same.

Many who knew and loved them 40 years ago, choose to remember Ted Gold, Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, Ralph Featherstone, and Che Payne every day as beautiful and committed young people who believed fiercely in peace and justice and freedom, believed further that all men and women are of incalculable value, and thought that they had a personal and urgent responsibility to act on that deep belief.

Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
We think of Brecht: a smile is a kind of indifference to injustice. And then we turn to Rosa Luxemburg writing to a friend from prison: love your own life enough to care for the children and the elderly, to enjoy a good meal and a beautiful sunset, to embrace friends and lovers; and love the world enough to put your shoulder on history’s great wheel when required.

We have not forgotten our fallen friends, not for a moment. March 6 was for us a time of more formal remembrance. Their deaths and all that followed offered us an opportunity to reconsider and recover. We were able to recommit and to see that the first casualty of making oneself into an instrument of war is always one’s own humanity, that, in the words of the poet Marge Piercy, “conscience is the sword we wield. Conscience is the sword that runs us through.” We remember our lost comrades, their many brave, as well as their damaging last acts, and we continue to vibrate with the hope and despair they embodied then.

[William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Bernardine Dohrn is Clinical Associate Professor of Law and Director and founder of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University. Both Ayers and Dohrn were leaders in SDS and the New Left, and were founders of Weatherman and the Weather Underground.]

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Dick J. Reavis on Mark Rudd's 'Underground,' and the 1969 SDS Split

Bernardine Dohrn, of the Radical Youth Movement faction of SDS -- and later of Weatherman -- addresses the SDS convention in Chicago in 1969, at which the Progressive Labor Party was "expelled." Mark Rudd, author of Underground, is to Dohrn's right.

Within weeks of the collapse of SDS, Rudd, like most of the leadership of RYM, wound up in the bomb-making Weathermen claque. He regrets it: 'Much of what the Weathermen did,' he writes, 'had the opposite effect of what we intended.'

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / April 30, 2009

[The Rag Blog has run several articles inspired by Mark Rudd’s new memoir, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen. Dick J. Reavis adds an interesting element to the discussion: he addresses Rudd’s account of the 1969 split within the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that led to the formation of Weatherman – and the eventual demise of SDS -- from the perspective of a participant. Links to additional Rag Blog treatment of Rudd’s book follow this article.}

Mark Rudd was the best-known leader of the brief 1968 takeover of Columbia University by its students. He was nationally notorious for a fleeting span of time, and for several years, was on the lam, wanted by the FBI. He has belatedly written a memoir, Underground, which I think deserves a read by all of us who were seriously involved in the Students for a Democratic Society during the group’s waning days.

Rudd’s chief historical contribution, in my view, is a chapter entitled “SDS Split,” his account of the group’s death throes. I have not read all books about the rise and fall of SDS, but I’ve read a few, and Rudd’s work is the first that fully explains what happened there -- in accord with my memory as one who was present, anyway.

Rudd admits that from the podium where he stood, he and his cronies estimated that the Progressive Labor Party faction had a majority or near-majority of delegates. The incumbents with whom he ran, most members of the faction that then called itself the Revolutionary Youth Movement, responded by “expelling” the PLers in a fashion which troubles him yet.

“The long-feared split had occurred without any full debate by the whole organization, without any vote taken,” he writes. “It was a fait accompli, a coup of sorts, presented by the RYM faction.”

In other words, those who claimed -- some of whom still claim -- to have represented the “real” SDS, refused to accede to a changing of the leadership by democratic, if “manipulative” means. They were the tyrants, if any there were, unless “manipulation” is verboten.

As a former member of the PL faction, I could not be honest without admitting that PL manipulated -- played by the rules, but played to win -- in SDS. But politics, on its face, is nothing but the manipulation of other peoples’ behavior. To whimper about it as Rudd occasionally does in deconstructing SDS factional conflicts is to ask for an organization whose soul would have been naiveté.

Rudd is not a poetic writer, but his memoir is highly readable in part because of its humility. It’s a work of self-doubt and self-criticism. He does not repudiate his opposition to the Vietnam War or savage capitalism, but he does confess, time and again, that he and its other leaders were out of their league. Reading the book made me feel sorry for Mark because he blames himself too much.

Within weeks of the collapse of SDS, Rudd, like most of the leadership of RYM, wound up in the bomb-making Weathermen claque. He regrets it: “Much of what the Weathermen did,” he writes, “had the opposite effect of what we intended. We deorganized SDS while we claimed we were making it stronger; we isolated ourselves from our friends and allies as we helped split the larger antiwar movement around the issue of violence. In general, we played into the hands of the FBI -- our sworn enemies. We might as well have been on their payroll.”

PL’s student leaders of the era, who perhaps should speak on the question, haven’t been heard from in 30 years, as far as I know. Nobody I know, including a dozen ex-PLers, has any idea about what has become of them. I was never a full-fledged PLer, and so am perhaps an unauthorized voice. But I was as much a PLer as anybody in Texas, and if I can still presume to speak for what was our faction, I’d say that Rudd and his comrades have long been forgiven, at least by us, their vanquished former rivals.

The split in SDS, I’ve always thought, was nearly inevitable. Smarter leadership could perhaps have prevented it, but only by abdication, and only in a limited way.

The problem was that what might be called the Port Huron generation had by 1969 spent several years protesting the Vietnam War without any significant effect on the nation’s policies or actions. Most of us had graduated or were graduating from college. We were facing 40 years of life as adults and we dreaded the prospect because we didn’t know what we would do, or where we would fit. To guide us, as we’d gone along organizing protests, we’d formed world views that were bigger than the anti-war cause.

Those of us who had become Marxists -- in SDS, mainly followers of PL and of the Spartacist League -- had adopted a plan that stunted our ambitions and shrunk our sense of self-importance. We’d been convinced that we had to join the industrial working class, from whose ranks we’d agitate for unions and revolution perhaps until we retired or died. PL sloganized our nearly humdrum agenda as “Build a Base in the Working Class.”

Rudd and the Weathermen claimed to be Marxists, but in effect, they substituted American youth, including themselves, for industrial workers, as the agents of socialism. Their attitude, and I’m afraid, even their political wisdom was summed-up in chants like “Oink, oink, bang, bang! Dead pig!” They wanted Revolution Now! -- or if not that, Vengeance Now!—and they thought that they could spark it.

The plain facts, seen in retrospect, are that the industrial working class was already doomed to decimation, and that the much-vaunted youth rising was more nearly a generational tiff than a political one. Most of us whom PL sent into factories gave up as soon we saw that the workers wouldn’t listen. Most Weathermen dropped out after learning, as Rudd did, that life on the lam was brutish, lonely and impotent. It hurts to say so, but Bill Clinton and George Bush, and maybe even Nixon and Reagan, gauged the political capacity of our generation far better than we did.

SDS could have survived, I believe, only if it had preserved its innocence, only as a group that held out hope for capitalism and its parties and sought merely to be heard by the people in power. But to have done so, those SDSers who had learned the lessons of the protest movement -- that appeals to rulers are routinely ignored or deflected -- would have had to distance themselves from their base. We would have had to stand aside while greener students repeated the mistakes that we had made.

Even our abnegation would not have produced an anti-war movement of the scale we had known, because the millions of young whites who attended anti-war protests -- the recruiting pool for both the PL and Weathermen factions—returned to purely personal and domestic concerns almost as soon as the draft lottery was instituted.

If anybody is responsible for the death of SDS, it is the officials who, with our concurrence, abolished conscription. They placed the question of war and peace on a new stage, on which we haven’t gotten our footing yet. The hour is late and we are nearing our graves: it’s highly unlikely that we will lead any movements now. If we are as honest as Rudd, we will admit that back in the day, we failed. Neither he nor the rest of us are to blame. It is perhaps heresy to say so in the United States, where optimism is a tenet of a Foucaultian, nearly mandatory faith, but for all of a polity’s problems, solutions are not always at hand.

[Rag Blog contributor Dick J. Reavis is an award-winning journalist, educator and author. He was active in the civil rights movement in the South and with SDS at the University of Texas in Austin. He wrote for Austin’s underground newspaper The Rag, and was a senior editor at Texas Monthly magazine. Dick Reavis’ book, The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation, about the siege and burning of the Branch Davidian compound, was published by Simon and Schuster and may be the definitive work on the subject.]

Find Mark Rudd's Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen on Amazon.com.

See other Rag Blog articles on Mark Rudd's memoir and related subject matter:

• Judy Gumbo Albert : It's 'Celebrate 60s Radicals' Week! by Judy Gumbo Albert / The Rag Blog / April 22, 2009
• Rudd: Put the War Budget Into Peace, Diplomacy, Law, and Sustainable Energy Development by Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / April 7, 2009
• BOOKS / Jonah Raskin on Mark Rudd : Underground, Again by Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / March 30, 2009
• Thomas Good : An Interview With Mark Rudd by Thomas Good / The Rag Blog / March 30, 2009

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Judy Gumbo Albert : Peoples' Park and Our Sixties Legacy

Art from Peoples' Park 35th anniversary celebration in Berkeley, April 25, 2009. Photo by Z / Bay Area Indymedia.
Berkeley's Peoples' Park Remembered and Zayd Dohrn’s play, Magic Forest Farm

I repeat this phrase, loudly and with more emphasis: 'Our politics have not changed.' Suddenly, with no conscious effort on my part, in an atavistic, Monty Pythonish gesture, my left arm -- and clenched fist -- shoot straight up in the air.

By Judy Gumbo Albert / The Rag Blog / April 29, 2009

[This is the second of two articles written for The Rag Blog by Judy Gumbo Albert, a founder of the Sixties countercultural protest group the Yippies, on recent activities in California commemorating the work of Sixties radicals. See her previous article here.]

Sunday around 3 p.m. I find myself in Berkeley’s People’s Park, in front of a crowd of at least 500 what, back in the day, we called hippies and freaks, letting their freak flags fly. Actually, the crowd was maybe 50% hippies and freaks, and the other 50 % just plain folks: men, women, children, neatly dressed students, Vietnam vets, homeless women and men, belly dancers, bongo drummers, black, white and multi-ethnic, one crowd, together, happy under the warm California sun. Sitting on remarkably well tended and clipped grass, with the unmistakable sweet odor of that other grass thick in the air. Just like I remember.

Building People’s Park led to Berkeley’s largest community uprising of 1969. And gave Ronald Reagan a platform on which to build his greed-driven, free-market, laissez-faire, capitalist-loving presidency -- whose upshot is, at least in part, the global financial crisis we suffer today. The economic “chickens” that Malcolm X first warned us about at the time of the Kennedy assassination have “come home to roost.”

In April 1969 a few thousand of us, including my late husband Stew Albert and I, along with many, many others, created a green, eco-before-it-was-fashionable community out of a muddy parking lot owned by the University of California. We dug the earth, laid sod, planted gardens, cooked food, played music, built stuff, and just enjoyed. There were no official or elected leaders, just strong personalities; most of us felt empowered to be our own leader, some of us ended up more “leadership” than others. Decisions (such as they were) were made by consensus (such as it was in those days). At least that’s what I recall.

Shortly after we seized the Park, the Berkeley police sealed it off with a barbed wire fence. Police and National Guard tear gassed the entire city, battled thousands of us in the streets, and, for the first time that I know of in the 1960s, used deadly force against white demonstrators, wounding 100 protestors and killing a young man named James Rector.

Forty years later, it’s easy to spot Michael Delacour. Mike, one of the Park’s originals, is always recognizable by his craggy face and long formerly black now silver hair falling way past his shoulders. He is, as far as I can tell, one of the unofficial keepers of the park’s flame.

He asks if I want to speak. How can I decline?

I start by quoting the Berkeley Liberation Program which a group of about 40 of us put together in an Oakland hotel because, in the immediate aftermath of the Park uprising, the City of Berkeley banned gatherings of more than a few people. Naturally, we model our program on the 10 point Platform and Program of the Black Panther Party. The people of Berkeley, I begin, passionately desire human solidarity, cultural freedom and peace. No reaction from the crowd. Not interested? Too stoned? Time to move on -- I’ll talk about Stew’s death. I urge anyone with Hepatitis C to get tested. I tell the story of how, two days before he dies, Stew asks me to type on his blog: “My politics have not changed.” I repeat this phrase, loudly and with more emphasis: “Our politics have not changed.” Suddenly, with no conscious effort on my part, in an atavistic, Monty Pythonish gesture, my left arm -- and clenched fist -- shoot straight up in the air.

It’s just like driving or riding a bike. There are some things you never forget.

I feel great. The crowd doesn’t exactly roar but at least I’ve caught their attention. Stewie would have been really happy.

Wavy Gravy is the event MC. By now his trademark clown outfit is a bit worn, yet he’s still the same kindly, funny person who used to unintentionally scare my young daughter if he turned in her direction. Which leads, in some roundabout, two degrees of separation way, to Zayd Dohrn’s play Magic Forest Farm, which I saw recently at the Marin Theatre Company. Zayd was born when his parents, Weather Underground folks Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, were underground. His play directly addresses the question: “How do kids raised in the shadow of the Sixties keep the parts of that experiment that were healthy -- the idealism, the hope, the courage -- while getting rid of the narcissism and silliness that had the potential to undermine it?”

How indeed? It turns out that some of our most cherished, countercultural values—”do your own thing,” dope, nudity, sexual experimentation—had, at least in Zayd’s fictional recreation of Magic Forest Farm, negative, dysfunctional consequences for some -- not all -- of the kids who lived there. I don’t doubt for a moment that the play speaks an inconvenient truth -- especially because, immediately after the play, I meet a total stranger in the woman’s bathroom who feels compelled to spill her story to me. The headline is that, as her mother lay dying, this woman was finally able to forgive her for raising her in such a commune.

As I recall, the women’s movement was just coming into full flower in Berkeley during People’s Park. We were not especially sympathetic to mothers of young children. Nor did it occur to us -- or me at least -- to empathize with the mothers of those teenagers we so warmly welcomed in People’s Park. The Free Speech Movement’s Jack Weinberg coined the phrase: “Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty” which morphed into Yippie leader Jerry Rubin’s “Kill Your Parents” -- a slogan which, Jerry later admitted, didn’t work because people thought he meant it literally. But symbolically Jack and Jerry were right -- to change the system and completely re-invent ourselves, we had to break from the repressive, war-mongering, right wing, dysfunctional values of our parent’s generation.

The kids of 1960’s parents I know today are terrific people. They are teachers, lawyers, parents, playwrights, writers, documentary film makers, professors, health care professionals, entrepreneurs. But there are also some who didn’t make it, kids who tragically ended up in jail or dead by their own hand. Despite all the humane, positive and progressive values we passed on to our children, our 1960’s activism also gave them difficult stuff to work through. And resent. And rebel against. This may be the moment when our 60’s generation’s chickens are coming home to roost in their own right.

I’m glad that Stew and I were able to pass our Yippie values to our daughter. I’m saddened if they caused her grief or harm in any way. Still and all, my politics have not changed.

[Judy Gumbo Albert was an original member of the 1960s countercultural protest group known as the Yippies --along with Abbie and Anita Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, the journalist Paul Krassner, the folk singer Phil Ochs and her late husband Stew Albert who died on Jan. 30, 2006. Judy co-authored The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (Greenwood Press, 1984) and The Conspiracy Trial (Bobbs-Merrill, 1970). Her articles available online include "The Battle of Chicago," about the 1968 Democratic Convention, and "What Were Those 1960’s Terrorists Thinking Anyway," about the 1971 Mayday anti-war protests.

Albert currently lives in Berkeley and is writing her memoir titled Yippie Girl: My Remarkable Adventures with the Yippies, Black Panthers, North Vietnamese and Weathermen. Judy can be reached at yippiegirl@gmail.com or through her website yippiegirl.com.]

Also see Judy Gumbo Albert : It's 'Celebrate 60s Radicals' Week! by Judy Gumbo Albert / The Rag Blog / April 22, 2009.

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Judy Gumbo Albert : It's 'Celebrate 60s Radicals' Week!

Judy Gumbo with (left) Stew Albert and Jerry Rubin, May, 1971. Photo from yippiegirl.com.
In California this week, book signings, an historic poster exhibition, a theatrical event and a 'Champion of Justice' award all shine a light on Sixties activists and their progeny.

By Judy Gumbo Albert / The Rag Blog / April 22, 2009

For some cosmic reason, this is Celebrate 1960s Radicals-And-Our-Children week in California. On Saturday April 18, in Oakland, I and at least 600 others witnessed my friend Steve Bingham get the National Lawyers Guild’s prestigious Champion of Justice Award. On Sunday I attended the opening of the Berkeley Historical Society’s “Up Against the Wall” exhibit of 1960’s posters and artifacts. Last night, in downtown Berkeley, former Weatherman Mark Rudd spoke and signed his long-awaited book Underground.

Friday will be the world premiere in nearby Marin County of Zayd (son of Weather leaders Bernardine Dohrn and Billy Ayers) Dohrn’s play Magic Forest Farm, advertised as a young woman’s journey back to her past to confront the truth. Next Wednesday, Chesa (raised by Bernardine and Billy, the son of former Weather person Kathy Boudin and still imprisoned David Gilbert) Boudin, will be in San Francisco signing Gringo -- his coming-of-age work which recently provoked a disgustingly arrogant and mean-spirited review in the New York Times.

Not too shabby for us Bush-battered 1960s types!

It’s difficult for me to convey how heart-warming and deeply emotional Steve’s recognition event turned out to be. Steve Bingham, you may recall, spent almost 14 years underground in Europe after being charged with five counts of conspiracy murder for allegedly smuggling a gun past metal detectors into San Quentin so that prison leader George Jackson could “escape” -- and be shot to death. In 1984 Steve resurfaced in the Bay Area with his wonderful wife Francoise, and, after a trial lasting six months -- one of the longest, if not the longest trials ever in the State of California -- Steve was completely exonerated.

It felt like a miracle seeing this tall, sweet, gentle man, flying silver hair somewhat trimmed for the occasion, wearing a deep reddish/pinkish crushed velvet shirt and garlanded with a lei, get a long, enthusiastic standing ovation recognizing his lifelong contributions to social justice -- not just the 1960s struggle, or his survival underground, but also for his last 20 years at Bay Area Legal Aid protecting the rights of the imprisoned, the poor and the homeless. For me this was time-travel—back to the day when we proudly used the words radical and revolutionary as self-descriptors. It felt a lot like coming home.

Next day, I ran into Gus Newport, the well known African-American former mayor of Berkeley at the poster exhibit. Many posters came from the remarkable collection of the late FSM (Free Speech Movement) activist turned children’s science teacher and author Michael Rossman. One, the Berkeley Liberation Program, is the exact same poster I gave to the Stew and Judy Gumbo Albert Archives at the Labadie Collection at University of Michigan. My late husband Stew Albert, SDS founder Tom Hayden, I, and a large contingent of Berkeley radicals collectively wrote the Berkeley Liberation Program during the 1969 People’s Park uprising. We begin by making a declaration that still resonates:

The people of Berkeley passionately desire human solidarity, cultural freedom and peace.

Gus and I reminisced about how, back in the day, we rarely put the year on political posters -- just the month and day. We lived so much in the intensity of the present; we were so busy “making history” that documenting it by putting the year on a publication was the furthest thing from our minds.

My favorite long-forgotten artifact was a small pamphlet that Tom, Stew, I, and others put together in 1969, titled "Every Soldier a Shitworker, Every Shitworker a Soldier.” 1969 was the year that, at least in Berkeley, Women’s Liberation came into full flower. This tiny handbook was published, as was the Berkeley Liberation Program, by a collective we named, with no lack of youthful grandiosity, the “International Liberation School.” For a mere 25 cents, young radicals learned, among other organizational skills, that women and men must equally share the “shitwork.” Good soldiers in the revolution give women’s work equal importance to everything else. So we believed and so we attempted to act.

At the exhibit I also ran into Mario Savio’s widow Lynne Savio Hollander, and Michael Rossman’s widow Karen McClellan. We widows of well-known 60s guys share a unique bond, but our grieving process is no different from anyone else—up/down, forward/back, eventually you survive and thrive, but your life is never the same. Mario, a gentle soul and truly charismatic speaker was at the center of Berkeley’s 1964-65 Free Speech Movement. Every fall Lynn and her fellow FSM’ers put on the Mario Savio Memorial Lecture at which they award an annual $6000 prize to a young person or persons with a deep commitment to human rights, social justice, and proven ability to transform their commitment into effective action.

Last night was Mark Rudd’s turn. I had not seen Mark for ages up until two years ago, when my fiancé David Dobkin and I had a warm, affectionate reunion with him and his wife Marla Painter at their New Mexico home. At the time, Mark said he figured Bernardine and Billy wouldn’t like his book. It’s not because of the narcissism that my dear friend Jonah Raskin called him on in The Rag Blog -- I mean, he is Mark Rudd, what else do you expect? It’s his memoir, he’s allowed. Last night Mark described his trajectory as going from schlemiel to media darling, to being wanted by the FBI to going underground—but never truly leaving the schlemiel behind.

I really appreciate Mark’s highly personal writing style -- there are even places where, in my opinion, he could have gone deeper and been more authentic. Marla said essentially the same thing last night. But Mark does explore his feelings with way more emotional openness than Cathy Wilkerson did in Flying Too Close to the Sun -- and for this he is to be congratulated.

What Bernardine and Billy aren’t likely to enjoy about Underground is Mark spilling his version of the beans about his former friends. He has his regrets and doesn’t especially hold back about who he blames. I believe that blaming and regretting are part of the grieving process -- for a while I blamed Stew for dying, for the terrible loss he inflicted on me. Perhaps this is just Mark’s way of channeling his anguish at all the losses: loss of life in the Townhouse and the Brinks robbery, the loss of comrades forced underground and those still in jail, to say nothing of factionalized friendships, lost youth, and the demise of an organization he so dearly loved. A North Vietnamese friend once gave me some strategic advice about dealing with friendships which Mark, perhaps, might have benefitted from: “Be good to friends who are good to you, also be good to friends who are bad to you, for only friends will go with you on the long road to revolution.”

Mark never considered himself a Yippie. He said last night he lost his sense of humor pretty early on in SDS. And we Yippies never felt close to SDS -- we experienced the organization as too serious, too focused on ideology and, as Yippie leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin never forgot or forgave, SDS initially advocated not coming to Chicago for the 1968 protests -- before having a last minute change of heart.

Those who are making the movies and writing the books, memoirs, blogs and graphic novels will ultimately define our history. As best as I can reconstruct, both Mark and Cathy Wilkerson believe that, after a certain amazing moment in which everyone in SDS felt empowered to change the world, divisive internal conflicts turned the organization into a cult of isolated, fanatic, self-destructive individuals with, at least for a time, an ideological commitment to offensive violence. Both Mark and Cathy say they disagreed in their hearts with this direction as it was happening, but also went along, victimized by their own ambivalence.

I’ve learned in my life that, when more than one person says essentially the same thing about a shared experience, there’s likely some kernel of truth in what they say. It truly saddens me to recognize that Weatherman turned into a cult. Romantic idealist that I am, I prefer to remember historical Weatherman for what it stood for -- inspirational courage, exemplary risk-taking and a passionate commitment to ending racism and an immoral, illegal war in Vietnam.

Each one of us from back in the day has her or his own Sixties. Mark has made a terrific contribution by sharing his. I encourage you to buy Underground and go to here for his speaking schedule.

On Friday I’ll see what Zayd Dohrn’s play reveals about the search for past truths. I’ll keep you posted.

[Judy Gumbo Albert was an original member of the 1960s countercultural protest group known as the Yippies -- along with her late husband Stew Albert who died on Jan. 30, 2006. Judy co-authored The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (Greenwood Press, 1984) and The Conspiracy Trial (Bobbs-Merrill, 1970). Her articles available online include "The Battle of Chicago," about the 1968 Democratic Convention, and "What Were Those 1960’s Terrorists Thinking Anyway," about the 1971 Mayday anti-war protests.

Albert currently lives in Berkeley and is writing her memoir titled Yippie Girl: My Remarkable Adventures with the Yippies, Black Panthers, North Vietnamese and Weathermen. Judy can be reached at yippiegirl@gmail.com or through her website yippiegirl.com.]

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BOOKS / Jonah Raskin on Mark Rudd : Underground, Again

Underground, Again
Mark Rudd’s 'Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen'

A charismatic individual with very little sustained radical organizing, he came out of nowhere at a crucial moment in the 1960s and was instantly catapulted into the national spotlight.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / March 30, 2009

[Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen, by Mark Rudd, published by William Morrow, March 24, 2009.]

In the beginning was the underground. Indeed, the “underground” as a form of resistance to established power is a thread that runs through the centuries. Specific, historical undergrounds have existed whenever and wherever “the state” has existed. If there are police, prisons and judges, there will be undergrounds – oppositions that are clandestine, and invisible. It’s in the nature of human beings the world over to form secret organizations, and networks aimed at sabotaging the structures of society: the military, the work place, the church, and the family.

Ironically, the 1960s was an era in which the concept and the practice of the underground thrived, even as a generation of hippies, freaks, misfits, Yippies, feminists, Black Panthers, radicals, and non-conformists came into the open, took to the streets, and went naked both literally and figuratively. It wasn’t until the 1970s, which, one might argue is when “the 1960s” really happened, that political undergrounds – such as the Weather Underground, and the Symbionese Liberation Army – were born. About those two groups there has been almost uninterrupted fascination. There have been dozens of books and movies about them: Patty Hearst, Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and the SLA members.

In the 1960s and 1970s, I wrote for underground newspapers, like The Seed and The Liberated Guardian, and worked for Liberation News Service. I was also affiliated with the Weather Underground; my wife, Eleanor Raskin, was part of the underground. I wrote most of “New Morning,” a communiqué from the Weather Underground, and I also aided and abetted -- to use the legal terminology -- Abbie Hoffman when he was underground in the 1970s. My own parents had been clandestine members of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. from 1932 to 1948, when they resigned. I grew up with the assumption that going underground was a necessary part of any political movement, and knew that one day I’d go underground, too.

A new book by Mark Rudd entitled Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen, takes yet another look at the underground phenomenon. Mark Rudd was underground for seven years in the 1970s. Previously, he had been a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), then a leader of Weatherman, the SDS faction that advocated rioting in the streets, and committing acts of violence, including the detonation of bombs. Though Rudd was underground from 1970 to 1977, and though he had contact with the Weather Underground, he was not a member of the organization, neither as a leader -- there was a central committee -- nor a follower. The title of the book is ambiguous; a casual reader might look at it and assume that it’s about the Weather Underground. In fact it isn’t.

Like Abbie Hoffman, Mark Rudd wasn’t suited for the underground life – he needed attention, and attention is, of course, the last thing that any fugitive wants. Unless of course, he or she really wants to be caught, and to receive attention.

The Townhouse Explosion of March 1970 which resulted in the deaths of three members of the fledgling Weather Underground so profoundly shook Rudd that he could not be connected to former friends who were now making bombs. He calls them “comrades” but it’s a word that sounds odd coming out of his mouth. True enough, he wants “comrades” but he also wants to be the # One Comrade, which isn’t in the spirit of comradeship at all.

I saw Rudd twice when he was underground and a fugitive wanted by the FBI. The first time, he expressed genuine regret and remorse for the explosion and the death of Ted Gold, Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins. He made it clear to me at that time, in 1970, that he did not believe in the use of violence by revolutionaries in order to achieve political goals. The second time I saw him, in New Haven, Connecticut, he was a silent, anonymous bystander during the demonstrations to protest the trial of Bobby Seale, the founder of the Black Panther Party. In a sense, he was a father of those demonstrations. Protesters were doing what he had been urging students to do for years. But now, he couldn’t take part.

I have seen Rudd several times since he surrendered to the authorities, in New York and in Albuquerque, New Mexico where he lives. He is also in Sam Green’s documentary film, The Weather Underground, which offers far more fiction than fact about the organization. Green’s film has made Rudd’s name and face familiar to today’s radicals. The fact that he was not in fact a member of the Weather Underground makes no difference to them. He’s in the movie, and the movie has replaced the historical record. In the popular mind, Rudd and Weatherman have become nearly synonymous. This book will likely solidify that impression, so ironically the more he insists on his distance from the underground the more he’s linked to it, which enabled him to have all the glamour associated with the underground and to have clean hands at the same time.

Underground: My Life with SDS and Weathermen reflects Rudd’s curious relationship with SDS, Weatherman and the U. S. mass media. A charismatic individual with very little sustained radical organizing, he came out of nowhere at a crucial moment in the 1960s and was instantly catapulted into the national spotlight. In that sense, he is a representative figure of that time when unknown, minor actors on the stage of history briefly became major heroes of the revolution. In 1968 and 1969, Rudd became a spokesperson for the New Left. More accurately, one might say that the news media selected him as to be a spokesperson -- and a symbol of youthful rebellion. He went along for the ride, and he tells a lot of that story here.

Rudd did not have a long involvement with 1960s activism. Unlike Tom Hayden and Mario Savio of the Free Speech Movement he did not participate in the Civil Rights Movement in the South, nor did he push SDS to become the anti-imperialist organization it became in the mid-1960s. He wrote no significant political manifesto, such as the Port Huron Statement, and he did not forge any new organization -- like the Yippies and the White Panthers. Nor did he create a significant alliance –- like the Venceremos Brigades that brought young Americans to Cuba, though he did go to Cuba in 1968.

Rudd was in the public eye for a brief moment that peaked with the student protests at Columbia in New York in the spring of 1968. From then on he was assured fame, infamy and notoriety. In 1968 and 1969, he was defiant, outrageous, and confrontational. He had Chutzpah. He said “Shit” and “Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker” and he shocked his Ivy League teachers at Columbia. Once the media got hold of him it did not let him go; when he turned himself into law enforcement in 1977 the media descended on him once again, as they had in 1968 and fed him up to the nation.

I read a draft of Rudd’s memoir several years ago, and made suggestions to him, including an idea for the title. I urged him to call his book “Che and Me.” That title seemed to reflect accurately his own sense of grandiosity, and indeed one of the chapters in the early manuscript was entitled “Che and Me.” It is not in this book, alas. Years ago, Rudd also posted essays about himself on his website, and I read them there, too. They were written, he told me, for today’s teenagers, and indeed the language seemed simplified and the ideas rendered cartoon-like.

His new book, Underground, does not sound like the previous iterations of his life. This new account reads as though it was carefully massaged by an editor to make Rudd seem more palatable to readers today. It is written for adults, not children: for aging radicals, not young, irreverent protestors. Rudd also seems to want to make himself appear to be likeable, adorable, and cute. All that time in the 1960s, he now says, when he called people “shithead,” and urged students to smash the state, he was really afraid. Then, he didn’t care who he offended. Now, he says nice things about almost everyone -- even Bernardine Dohrn, the leader of the Weather Underground, with whom he has had a running feud -- as much personal as political -- since 1970.

If this book were to be faithfully adapted for the movies, it would be a long close up of Rudd, with other characters, like his parents, appearing on screen briefly. Rudd would be the star of the show. When it was first published, I didn’t like Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism perhaps because I was too close to the New Left and to the kinds of New Left people -- like Kathy Boudin of the Weather Underground -- he thought were examples of American narcissism. Now, Rudd strikes me as narcissistic. Lasch was insightful. Underground shows that he’s in love with himself, and with his own image. He has little self-awareness, probably because he’s so caught up in himself and with his image.

In this memoir he tells the story about the time that he and SDS members barged into the offices of Grayson Kirk, the President of Columbia, and made themselves at home there. Kirk had gone home for the day. Rudd describes himself picking up Kirk’s telephone and calling his middle class, apolitical Jewish parents in New Jersey. He wonders now why he did it, and though he offers suggestions, he doesn’t see the obvious -- that he was rebelling against his parents -- and that he wanted them to know. Lots of us were in rebellion against our parents, including the children of the Old Left. That’s why we spoke of the generation gap.

In this book, Rudd is glib about that telephone call, glib about his parents, and glib about his relationship to them. He wants to be not only Che but Lenny Bruce, too, so he writes of that phone call, “Maybe it was simply that Jewish boys call home, it’s that deeply ingrained.” Maybe it’s this and maybe it’s that. Mark Rudd has that Jewish-American habit of shrugging his shoulders ambiguously and leaving it at that. It could mean this and it could mean that.

Some of the passages from the old manuscript haven’t made it into the new book. Some of the ideas Rudd shared me with, and said he wanted to include, aren’t here, either, like the time his father called him a “schmuck.” Rudd can also be an astute literary critic of the novels of Philip Roth -- that other Jewish boy from New Jersey who wanted attention -- but his reflections on Roth aren’t here either.

In 1980, when Abbie Hoffman turned himself in to the authorities in New York, I had a conversation with Rudd about Abbie, and Abbie’s need for media attention. I said then that I thought that there’s a basic human need for attention and recognition. Some of us, like Abbie, need it, or think we need it, more than others. Some hardly seem to need it or want it at all. Underground suggests, implies, and shows that Rudd is up there, along with Abbie, near the top of the list of 1960s radicals who wanted attention, and who received far more attention than they needed. Media attention is a dangerous thing. It undid Abbie, and it also helped to undo Rudd. It remains to be seen whether the attention he will receive from the publication of, and from the publicity surrounding, this book about his underground life will undo him once again.

[Jonah Raskin is a prominent author, poet, educator and political activist. His most recent book is The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution.]

Find Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen by Mark Rudd at amazon.com.

Also see Thomas Good : An Interview With Mark Rudd by Thomas Good / The Rag Blog / March 30, 2009

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Thomas Good : An Interview With Mark Rudd

Mark Rudd speaks at the West End Bar in New York last week. Photo by Thomas Good / NLN.

Beneath the gray beard and the wrinkles I could clearly see the boyish face of the 20-year-old SDS leader.

By Thomas Good / The Rag Blog / March 30, 2009

See Thomas Good's interview with Mark Rudd, Below.

[Thomas Good is the editor of Next Left Notes, where this interview also appears.]

I first photographed Mark Rudd in 2006, at Drew University. I was struck immediately by something trapped in the lens of my camera: the 60-year-old face of Rudd contained a hidden image. Beneath the gray beard and the wrinkles I could clearly see the boyish face of the 20-year-old SDS leader. When I mentioned this to Mark he agreed immediately -- Rudd’s boyish enthusiasm had not dissipated with age.

Over the next three years I photographed Rudd a number of times. I filmed an MDS Public Service Announcement with him. I witnessed an interesting exchange as Rudd and Tom Hayden traded wisecracks. And I argued with Rudd on a variety of topics. In every instance, I found Mark to be very generous and very gracious, a bit smug and undeniably a smartass. Conversations with Rudd reveal a very charming arrogance -- and this is not a negative assessment. Mark has worked diligently to redefine himself and in the process has been his own harshest critic. The self-conscious metamorphosis transformed a 20-year-old advocating armed struggle into a nonviolent 61-year-old activist committed to calm, patient organizing -- and a Lefty with a sense of humor, a rare commodity. I am fortunate to have the opportunity to disagree with Mark on a regular basis -- he embodies Murray Bookchin’s ideal of democratic debate and discourse.

After SDS and Weather, Mark moved to New Mexico where he taught algebra at the college level. As someone who barely survived algebra in college, I needed help when my teenage son was struggling with the A-word. I contacted Mark. He responded immediately and offered useful suggestions. Typical Rudd.

In 2008, Mark asked if he could use one of my photographs [the Drew University shot] in his new book. I said of course -- Mark had previously mentioned that he had decided to spend some time finishing his memoir and I was glad to be involved in a minor way.

Underground: My Life In SDS And The Weathermen was released on March 23, 2009, and there were two signings in New York that week. I caught the second and videotaped some of the event. The book signing was held at Rudd’s old hangout, the West End Bar. A number of Columbia SDS veterans showed up -- as did former Weather Underground activist Cathy Wilkerson who released her memoir last year. Wilkerson, an impressive speaker in her own right, thanked Mark for his generosity and told the crowd that Rudd had made the transition back from a militant, tough-talking activist into what he always was, beneath the bluster: “a really nice guy”.

Right on, Cathy.

Tom Good: What do you think of Obama so far?

Mark Rudd: I think he’s acted in an extremely predictable way, knowing what we already know about him. He’s cautious and strategic. He knows that there is no mandate yet for abrupt shifts to the left. I think he’s trying to work toward improvement on the economy, healthcare, education, and Israel. On Afghanistan, no. He knows that the biggest internal enemy is the military-industrial-security complex, and he’s not going to give them the excuse to organize to defeat him (as they defeated Kennedy). I know that the official left position is that JFK was a cold-warrior, no different from any others, but I’ve been reading “Brothers,” by David Talbot, a good journalist who makes a compelling case for the fact that the military and CIA loathed Kennedy and conspired to kill him. Since Obama isn’t a leftist (thank God), he’s not hampered by our prejudices. I’m sure he believes that Kennedy was killed by the military and CIA. JFK had zero control over both. They rarely carried out his orders.

TG: What do you make of his appointments?

MR: All terrible at the top level, except maybe Hillary Clinton, whom I’m expecting to win a Nobel prize for forcing the Israelis to accept a settlement. Who but the nation’s #1 shiksa, a certified lover of Israel, would the rightwing accept to force the settlement? That was a strategic appointment. All the others are strategic in the same way–giving the right the top positions. The trick is to look at the next level, where Podesta put center-leftists, predominantly. He learned from Cheney. Actually, the director of CIA, Minetta, a center-leftist, probably gave them conniptions.

TG: What is your view of the Ayers bashing that started with the election and is ongoing?

MR: Obama has almost no chinks in his armor. The right has very few ways in, and they’re so stupid that they don’t realize that the Ayers business has zero traction outside their own circles. Don’t ever underestimate the far right’s utter stupidity.

TG: You often say that Columbia SDS represented some great organizing - what in particular is noteworthy and/or useful to young activists?

MR: That’s why I spent so much time on it in my book. The chapter was run by red-diaper babies who knew nothing but old-style traditional organizing–patient, long term, base-building, coalition-building, involving engagement between people you’re trying to win over. Lots of study,analysis, research. The Praxis Axis was right! Of course the irony was that Ted Gold and David Gilbert got seduced by the apparent success of “militancy” at Columbia.

TG: Can you tell me about any organizing you are doing now in your community?

MR: My wife and I are organizing around environmental justice and health issues in our neighborhood, a working-class chicano/mexicano neighborhood. We have a bilingual “Neighborhood Association,” involving rich and poor, brown and white, immigrants and US citizens. It’s NOT ideological: we rarely push our left analysis, though people know who I am. Many republicans among us.

Also, I’m working with a small group called “Another Jewish Voice” to create a pro-peace in the middle east lobby in New Mexico. We’ve had some good luck with the congressional delegation, primarily because my wife and I are involved heavily in electoral politics.

Marla is the chair of New Mexico Conservation Voters. They’ve achieved almost a green majority in the state legislature. Both of us work on local Demo electoral campaigns, and have had some success electing progressives lately (after years and years of losing). We’re both on the central committee of the county Demo party !!

TG: Why should NLN readers buy your book - and can they get signed copies?

MR: It’s a great story, that’s why I hope people read it. I tried to be accurate and honest. I’m not pushing left heroism. I’m just this kid from the suburbs who got involved in the movement. It’s a story of good organizing followed by bad (Weatherman).

You know, I don’t believe in signed copies. What are they good for? I do it because people want them. Go to Morningside Bookshop at the corner of Broadway and West 114th St and you’ll find all the signed copies you might want. Readers can check out my “Book Tour” page on my website, http://www.markrudd.com/ www.markrudd.com to meet me and I’ll sign their copies.

TG: What do you have to say to Radosh’s comment that you haven’t grown up (and abandoned your Lefty beliefs)?

MR: Poor Ronald Radosh is a right-winger. His assuption is that anything left is childish. What more is there to say, except see my comment above on rightists’ intelligence.

TG: Do you support BDS [ Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions ] as a means of ending apartheid in Israel?

MR: Absolutely. My group is attempting to get a campaign going in New Mexico.

TG: How is your mother doing? Is she pleased about the new book?

MR: My mother is lucid less than 50% of the time. She’s thrilled about the book, though she seems fixated on the question of how I make money off it. Since I have no idea how the money works, I can’t explain it to her or anyone else. That confuses her even more, because she can’t understand why I’m so ignorant.

TG: Is there any hope I’ll ever learn algebra?

MR: Yes! Come out to New Mexico, hang with me a week or so, and I’ll help you figure it out. The trick to algebra is the ability to pay attention, and I know you have that. You’re just defeated by your own self-conception as a person who can’t learn algebra. It’s simple. I use geometry drawings to explain it.

Also see Jonah Raskin on Mark Rudd : Underground, Again by Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / March 30, 2009

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