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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
As a new film about the Weather Underground opens, former '60s revolutionary Mark Rudd wonders whatever possessed him -- and America.
Jun 7, 2003 | "Some years ago," Mark Rudd says, "I developed this formulation: The Vietnam War drove me crazy. Now, that doesn't explain why it drove me crazy and it didn't drive other people crazy. But I think in actuality the Vietnam War drove a lot of people crazy."
Sitting at a sidewalk cafe table in New York's Soho neighborhood, Rudd isn't likely to attract much attention. He looks like a shaggy, stocky, aging hippie turned academic, which is pretty much what he is. (He teaches at a junior college in Albuquerque, N.M.)
But 34 or 35 years ago, in another era and what must sometimes seem to him like another country, Rudd was a national counterculture celebrity. As head of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, he led the antiwar demonstrations that virtually shut down the Columbia campus in April 1968, occupying the president's office and holding the college dean prisoner (as well as producing the infamous slogan, "Up against the wall, motherfucker!"). The following year, he was one of the founding members of Weatherman, the revolutionary faction that took over SDS and essentially devoured it. (The group's name, of course, derives from the lyrics to Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues": "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.")
Less than a year after that, by the spring of 1970, he was a fugitive terror suspect, fleeing federal charges that he'd planned bombings and incited riots in various Midwestern cities. Three Weathermen had blown themselves up while building a bomb in a Greenwich Village townhouse, no more than a mile from where Rudd is sitting today. To the group's everlasting shame, that bomb was intended for an officers' dance at Fort Dix, N.J., where it presumably could have killed not only military personnel but their civilian dates and whoever else might have been in the building.
"The Weather Underground"
Directed by Sam Green and Bill Siegel
In the wake of the townhouse explosion, authorities finally grasped that the Weathermen, although small in scale and limited in capacity, were earnestly dedicated to the violent overthrow of the United States government. Like two dozen or so other core members, including such movement stars as Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, David Gilbert, Kathy Boudin, Cathy Wilkerson and Brian Flanagan, Rudd lived "underground," moving from city to city under assumed identities and holding a series of menial jobs, for more than seven years.
Dubbed the Weather Underground, the group carried out several more bombings in the 1970s, including high-profile attacks on the U.S. Capitol mailroom and New York police headquarters. Perhaps the Weathermen's greatest achievement, such as it was, came in September 1970, when they helped LSD guru Timothy Leary escape from a California prison and flee the U.S. with a forged passport. Leary lived in Eldridge Cleaver's Black Panther compound in Algeria until the two had a falling out, but was ultimately recaptured by U.S. agents in Afghanistan. In a final twist not mentioned in Green and Siegel's film, once Leary was back in prison he reportedly ratted out his Weather Underground allies to the FBI in exchange for early release.
As misguided and counterproductive as the Weather Underground's activities may have been, after the townhouse bombing the group never again planned attacks against human beings. Their post-1970 bombings were symbolic in nature and happened at night when the buildings were empty. For all the vitriol heaped on the Weather Underground by other leftists -- and especially by ex-leftist neocons like David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh -- it never killed or injured anyone except its own members. (In this regard, it's striking that right-wingers routinely employ the excesses of Weatherman to paint the entire left as anti-American terrorist sympathizers, while the left is either too civil or too cowardly to use the hateful acts of Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and James Kopp to attack conservatives in general.)
Maybe all this history explains my first question to Rudd, the one to which he responds above: "Were you just completely fucking nuts?"
His answer, and I suppose mine too, having talked to him and watched Sam Green and Bill Siegel's documentary film, "The Weather Underground," is yes and no. The movie (now playing in New York, with Chicago, San Francisco and several other cities to follow over the summer) is certain to leave people arguing on the sidewalk after they see it. Some veterans of the New Left's political wars will surely feel it's a little generous to the Weathermen, a group who could be described as combining Cultural Revolution-style ultra-left rhetoric with Keystone Kops incompetence, and they probably have a point.
But for most viewers under 40 or thereabouts, who will know little or nothing about the events in question and for whom the history of the late '60s and early '70s is a newsreel blur of rock concerts, assassinations, Volkswagens, G.I.s with Zippo lighters and jerky Richard Nixon poses, "The Weather Underground" will arrive with the force of revelation. It does something that's almost impossible to do in works of history -- it conveys a sense of what the past actually felt like.
And the past in this case, the past of 1968 through 1970 or so, was completely fucking nuts. As Green and Siegel's impressive collection of video footage (a great deal of which I've never seen before) makes clear, the internal feuds in the antiwar left that drove a handful of radicals to declare war on their own country didn't happen in a vacuum.
By 1968, the Vietnam War was going poorly and public opinion was beginning to swing against it. The weekly body count of dead U.S. soldiers, often in the hundreds, had become a major story. The Tet Offensive, beginning in January -- during which the North Vietnamese briefly occupied the U.S. Embassy in Saigon -- made clear that we were not only not winning the war, we might be losing it. In March, the men of Charlie Company, 11th Brigade, Americal Division, under the command of Lt. William Calley, massacred more than 300 unarmed civilians, including women and children, in the Vietnamese village of My Lai. (The public didn't learn about the My Lai massacre for a year and a half, until journalist Seymour Hersh published his legendary exposé.)
In April, the same month Rudd led the student uprising at Columbia, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and black neighborhoods in more than 100 cities exploded in violent outrage. In May, the student-worker rebellion in Paris brought Charles de Gaulle's government to the brink of collapse. In June, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who seemed likely to become the next president and had vowed to end the war, was assassinated in Los Angeles. In August, the shattered Democrats held their convention in Chicago and were upstaged by pitched street battles between radical demonstrators and Mayor Richard Daley's thuglike police force, while halfway around the world a different set of thugs, commanding Soviet tanks, rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the "Prague Spring" reform movement.
All that in eight months. You could make an argument that 1969, which brought the Manson Family murders, the Chicago Eight trial, Woodstock, Altamont and the police killing of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton under what might generously be described as suspicious circumstances (he was almost certainly murdered in his sleep), as well as the SDS split and the emergence of Weatherman, felt even more apocalyptic.
A lot of people, not all of them on the left, believed that Che Guevara-style Third World revolution was bound to come to North America. To many intellectuals, Western civilization seemed on the verge of destroying itself in one last violent paroxysm. Against this background, the most surprising thing about the Marxist guerrilla movement that emerged from the New Left in 1969 is how small and ineffective it actually turned out to be. (Even the largest and most famous Weatherman action, the "Days of Rage" riots in Chicago in October of 1969, involved no more than 500 people, when organizers were expecting tens of thousands.)
"There was so much violence at the time," Rudd says. "All the violence, especially the violence we were opposing, it permeated us. It was like the interpenetration of opposites."
Rudd had been to Cuba early in 1968, and like many radicals of the time was hypnotized by the cult of Che and the Cuban Revolution with its model of foquismo, the argument that a small revolutionary vanguard could galvanize society and draw the masses to its cause. "It was almost like a religious revelation," he says. "The revelation was that there was a war going on in the world, and you had to choose sides."
