Weather Reports
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080211/isserman
January 24, 2008 (February 11, 2008 issue)
Maurice Isserman
One of the shrewdest assessments of the fate of 1960s radicalism was
also among the first: Elinor Langer's essay "Notes for Next Time: A
Memoir of the 1960s," which appeared in 1973 in the pages of the
long-since-defunct radical magazine Working Papers for a New Society
and was reprinted in a 1989 collection edited by R. David Myers
titled Toward a History of the New Left. Langer, a writer and teacher
active in the civil rights, antiwar and women's movement in the '60s,
was dismayed to discover--even as early as 1973--that students who
had just missed out on being part of the '60s generation were already
in the process of idolizing her "as a relic of some brave
revolutionary struggle whose meaning they didn't quite catch--their
La Passionaria perhaps." Hoping that in the future '60s radicals
would come to be remembered "neither as false heroes nor as fallen
idols," she reflected in her essay on her generation's political
illusions. The fate of the student movement of the 1960s, she argued,
was determined when its leaders made the "curiously apolitical"
decision to start thinking of themselves as revolutionaries:
Because revolution was effectively impossible one did not have to
dirty one's hands in compromise, nor mingle much with the hoi polloi
(meaning: the middle class; the un-Chosen) along the way. And it was
also ahistorical and smug, since it mistook revolution, a rare
historical event, for a moral choice.
That the New Left "mistook revolution...for a moral choice" is the
best one-sentence summary I've ever read of the complexities of
late-'60s radicalism. I would suggest a corollary that seems implicit
in Langer's essay. The movement's revolutionary turn was not so much
a measure of its un- or anti-American character, as conservative
critics would have it, but rather an indication that, if anything,
the New Left might have been a bit too American for its own good. Its
impatience with the half-measures of liberal reformism, its lack of
interest in creating a stable constituency or institutional base, and
its promotion of a politics of confrontation and risk ("putting your
body on the line," as the saying went) revealed the movement as an
exotic but recognizable descendant of the powerful Protestant
antinomian tradition of radical individualism--one whose adherents
defied social custom and religious law to follow the inner promptings
of God's voice wherever they might lead. "John Brown is a good symbol
for us," Langer noted in passing. "At one point he wanted to run a
school for Negroes but he came to find the idea too small: he had to
attack Harper's Ferry."
Cathy Wilkerson's memoir, Flying Close to the Sun, offers a
compelling cautionary tale of what comes from mistaking revolution
for a moral choice. Weatherman was a small but influential faction
within Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest campus
radical group of the '60s. Taking their name from a Bob Dylan lyric,
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," the
group's leaders proclaimed it the revolutionary duty of white
radicals in the United States to come to the aid of brethren
revolutionaries in the Third World--including those in the "black
colony" at home--through violent and disruptive protest (and, before
long, armed struggle). Anything less risky, at a time when Vietnamese
peasants by the millions and (as was widely believed) Black Panthers
by the dozens were being killed, was a capitulation to the moral
failure of "white-skin privilege." Weatherman leaders--the most
famous of whom included Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers and Mark
Rudd--gained control of SDS in the summer of 1969; by early 1970 they
had shut down the organization, taking a few score of the most
committed of their followers into the clandestine Weather Underground.
Although never among the top circle of Weatherman leaders, Wilkerson
was nonetheless a charismatic presence in her own right. Susan Stern,
a member of Weatherman's Seattle collective, met her when they were
both in Cook County Jail, following the violent "Days of Rage"
demonstration staged by Weatherman in Chicago in October 1969. "Cathy
Wilkerson was in my tier," Stern recalled in her 1975 memoir With the
Weathermen (recently reissued in a new edition ably edited and
introduced by Laura Browder). "Tall and slender, the beautiful young
woman listened critically but intently as I told her about my life
and the progression of events that had led me to Weatherman."
Wilkerson's fame, or rather infamy, was bound up with a single moment
five months later, on March 6, 1970, the date of the "Townhouse
Explosion." The building in question, on West 11th Street in
Greenwich Village, belonged to Wilkerson's father, a well-to-do New
York City advertising executive who had no idea that his wayward
25-year-old daughter was using it in his absence as a temporary safe
house and bomb factory. While she was upstairs on that March morning
incongruously ironing sheets, three of her comrades were in the
basement putting the finishing touches on a nail-studded dynamite
bomb they intended to plant and set off that night at a dance at Fort
Dix in New Jersey. Their desire to "bring the war home" with a
homemade antipersonnel weapon outstripped their understanding of
electrical circuitry, however, and instead of killing others, Terry
Robbins, Ted Gold and Diana Oughton killed themselves. Wilkerson and
another survivor, Kathy Boudin, stumbled out of the ruins, shaken but
unharmed, and made their escape. Wilkerson spent ten years
underground before turning herself in, and she eventually served
eleven months in prison for illegal possession of dynamite. Boudin
remained underground until 1981, when she was captured in the
aftermath of the Brinks armored car robbery in Nanuet, New York, a
fiasco that cost the lives of a Brinks guard and two policemen. She
was paroled from prison in 2003.
Before Wilkerson became a terrorist, as she recounts in the early
chapters of Flying Close to the Sun, she had been a Quaker-educated
pacifist, a Swarthmore student picketing for civil rights, a reader
of Gandhi. She was particularly taken by the lessons to be learned
from Gandhi's "struggle to apply his political ideas to the minutest,
most personal detail of his life." What came later was not, it should
be noted, Gandhi's or the Quakers' fault: the fact that Wilkerson's
older sister Ann, coming from the same background and influences,
wound up as an American Friends Service Committee staff member at the
same time as Cathy was being drawn to Weatherman suggests the wildly
different ways such lessons could be applied.
After graduating from Swarthmore in 1966, Wilkerson worked in SDS's
national office in Chicago, editing the organization's weekly
newspaper, New Left Notes. It was a time of great optimism in the
student movement: SDS was expanding at an exponential rate (within
another two years, the 15,000 members of 1966 would grow to an
estimated 100,000 members), yet the organization retained some of the
intimacy of the days in the early 1960s when it had only a few
hundred members and a few dozen chapters. "I felt like I had landed
in a community supportive of both women and men," Wilkerson recalls.
"The day-to-day life in the office seemed free of gender
stereotypes.... I was being listened to with more respect than I had
ever experienced."
There were, by this time, forces chipping away at her earlier
pacifist convictions, all part of the familiar narrative of SDS's
decline and fall that one can find in histories by Kirkpatrick Sale,
Todd Gitlin and James Miller, among other sources. These included a
succession of ghetto riots that raised the specter of domestic civil
war, the appalling and ever-escalating conflict in Vietnam and the
need felt by some SDS leaders to come up with a suitably
revolutionary ideology of their own to counter that promoted by the
Progressive Labor Party, a Maoist/Stalinist fringe group bent on
capturing SDS for its own purposes. The early '60s sense of the
movement as a "beloved community" eroded as a multitude of rival
would-be vanguard factions emerged in the SDS leadership. Like many
others in SDS trying to make sense of the chaos of the moment,
Wilkerson turned to theorists like Régis Debray and Frantz Fanon who
celebrated the political and psychological benefits of violence in
Third World revolutionary struggles.
One of the virtues of Wilkerson's memoir is that it suggests that her
path toward the Townhouse Explosion was by no means predetermined.
Her political future, like that of SDS, remained in flux as late as
the fall of 1967. At the famous Pentagon protest in October of that
year, some SDSers wanted to break away from the main event and
skirmish with the police in the streets. Wilkerson was tempted. But
in the end she and the others observed the nonviolent discipline
advocated by David Dellinger of the National Mobilization Committee.
And it worked--the warmakers were confronted on the steps of the
Pentagon in a dramatic tableau that redounded to the antiwar
movement's appeal on the nation's campuses. Wilkerson was one of
those who spoke to the crowd of protesters, urging them not to take
unnecessary risks. "While I had been excited by Debray and Fanon,"
she recalls of that October day forty years ago,
"here in the heat of confrontation it was the model of the nonviolent
confrontations of the civil rights movement that seemed most
powerful. To the extent we had any power at the Pentagon, which
didn't feel like much, it was the power of a moral witness."
Over the next two years, Wilkerson would abandon moral witness, if
not a morally charged politics. The urge to take what she describes
as "decisive moral action," measured by acceptance of an
ever-increasing level of personal risk, crowded out considerations of
strategic ends. Young and politically inexperienced undergraduates
were swelling SDS's membership at the chapter level: "They weren't
looking for a complicated discussion about how to bring about
change," Wilkerson notes, "but for validation, for a community, and
for a way to express their anger about the war." And they looked to
SDS's veteran leaders--which is to say, young people like Wilkerson,
only a few years older than themselves--to provide the answers. What
they were actually offered by SDS leaders in 1968-69, she writes, was
a "lift off from reality."
Wilkerson's self-critical tone stands in marked contrast to that
found in another memoir by a Weatherman, Bill Ayers's Fugitive Days,
published in 2001. As Ayers told a New York Times reporter in a
soon-to-be-infamous interview published on September 11, 2001, "I
don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Wilkerson,
who issued a scathing review in Z Magazine of Fugitive Days when it
appeared, does regret the bombs: the Weather Underground, she writes
in her memoir, "accepted the same desanctification of human life
practiced by Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and William Westmoreland."
And yet at times, despite the tone of regret that runs as leitmotif
throughout the book, she adopts a curious distancing tone.
Wilkerson's self-portrait through 1967 (one that accords with the
memories of those who knew her at the time) is of a young woman
steadily gaining competence and confidence, and emerging as a natural
and accomplished leader. SDS had a reputation, not entirely
undeserved, as a bastion of male chauvinism; but at critical moments,
like the one at the Pentagon, Wilkerson's male comrades
unhesitatingly handed the bullhorn over to her (and it is a picture
of her, bullhorn in hand, that graces the cover of her memoir). But
in describing her actions and beliefs from 1968 on, Wilkerson
increasingly characterizes herself as a classic dependent female, the
passive follower of initiatives taken by others, incapable of
independent judgment and continually surprised by the decisions of
her leaders (mostly men, with the exception of Bernardine Dohrn).
"When Bernardine declared SDS's mission [in 1968] to be the building
of a 'revolutionary movement,'" Wilkerson writes,
I thought she showed both courage and foresight; if she hadn't
explained what she meant, she had, I thought, made a commitment to
take on that challenge.... I assumed the details would become clearer
as we went along.
In October 1969, when only 300 or so of SDS's 100,000 members
responded to Weatherman's call for the Days of Rage action in
Chicago, Wilkerson declares that she was astonished when "the march
leaders and many others [began] smashing windows of stores and cars
as they ran full speed down the street." In contrast, Susan Stern,
lower down the chain of command than Wilkerson, notes in her own
memoir that she and most of those who showed up for the Days of Rage
made sure to wear gloves "to protect the hands from the broken glass
that would soon be flying and shattering." And then, in her weirdest
act of dissociation, Wilkerson writes of the bomb being built in the
basement of her father's townhouse: "I didn't think about the fact
that the nails might actually kill people."
Wilkerson attributes her "cult-like" adherence to Weatherman doctrine
as a product of the group's "clumsy misuse of
religious-psychotherapeutic technique" in its famously brutal
"criticism-self-criticism" sessions. Weatherman was a cult, but the
crucial question of why some succumbed to its appeal and others did
not goes unaddressed in Wilkerson's account. Stern, in contrast,
makes it painfully clear that her own self-loathing and
self-destructive bent had much to do with her joining Weatherman (she
made one suicide attempt as a child, another in her Seattle days and
eventually succumbed in 1976 to a combination of drugs and alcohol
that may have constituted a final successful attempt). Stern, who
privately thought of herself as "Susan Stern Sham" while projecting a
miniskirted and leather-jacketed image of tough sexy femininity,
confessed in her memoir to being
"obsessed with death and dying.... I fantasized about shootouts with
a dozen pigs, killing some of them, and finally getting killed
myself.... I had to die with meaning. "
It would be psychologically reductive to suggest that all
Weatherman's adherents were motivated by similar obsessions (Ayers's
book suggests that his problems were rather the opposite of
self-loathing). The trouble with Flying Close to the Sun is that we
get no persuasive explanation for Wilkerson's transformation from the
woman who, at age 21, could walk into the office of the nation's
largest radical group and without previous experience immediately
take over the editing of its weekly newspaper to the woman who, four
years later, apparently found it difficult to grasp that a
nail-studded dynamite bomb could actually kill people.
Carl Oglesby was not a Weatherman, but as we learn from his memoir
Ravens in the Storm, he spent a lot of the later 1960s arguing with
its leaders, especially with Bernardine Dohrn. Oglesby was elected
president of SDS in 1965, much to his surprise. He was 30 years old
that year, married, with three children and a job as a technical
writer in the defense industry; his profile was hardly that of a
typical SDSer. On the other hand, he had educated himself to become a
knowledgeable critic of the Vietnam War and had taken part in the
first teach-in against the war at the University of Michigan. In 1967
he would publish, with Richard Shaull, an extended critique of
American foreign policy called Containment and Change, one of the
most influential texts shaping the politics of the radical wing of
the antiwar movement. (Wilkerson, in her memoir, devotes five pages
to attesting to its importance.)
Within a few years, Oglesby found himself out of step with the
organization he had led from 1965 to 1966. As he wrote in 1969 in
"Notes on a Decade Ready for the Dustbin" (also included in R. David
Myers's invaluable collection on New Left history), "We are not now
free to fight The Revolution except in fantasy." He had no use for
those who sought to reduce SDS to a "small, isolated band of
super-charged cadre who, knowing they stand shoulder to shoulder with
mankind itself...face repression with the inner peace of early
Christians" (a pretty good piece of prophetic writing, considering
Oglesby composed it months before the Days of Rage). Instead, he
wanted SDS to focus on what it was good at: building campus chapters
and opposing the war, offering a radical critique of American foreign
policy while forming alliances with liberals and even libertarian
conservatives, wherever and whenever possible. New Leftists, he
thought, "should stop being scared of being reformed out of things to do."
Oglesby thus represents a road not taken by SDS, and I wish I could
report that he has written a better memoir about the days in which he
argued for that alternative. But since he asks us repeatedly in
Ravens in the Storm to trust his reconstruction of conversations with
Dohrn and others--conversations that took place decades earlier and
that spread out over many pages--it is not reassuring to find a text
so riddled with obvious errors. He has New York Times reporter
Harrison Salisbury filing a famous series of articles on the bombing
of Hanoi in 1968 (actually 1966) and the Paris Peace Accords adopted
in 1975 (actually 1973). He writes that he admired Black Panther
Eldridge Cleaver's book Soul on Ice when it came out in 1968 but
"didn't know yet that his record included several rapes" (crimes
that, in fact, Cleaver discusses in the opening chapter of Soul on
Ice). He has the Weatherman "simultaneously" bombing "eight court
houses across the country where movement-related cases were being
heard" in October 1969 (they actually bombed two courthouses, a year
later.) And so on. The Oglesby legacy is much better served by a
re-reading of "Notes on a Decade Ready for the Dustbin."
The last of the wave of new books on SDS is Students for a Democratic
Society: A Graphic History, a radical comix-inspired work edited by
historian and former SDSer Paul Buhle. Buhle is one of the "radical
elders" who in 2006 oversaw the launching of a new group claiming the
SDS name along with descent from the original. This volume seems
intended as a combination recruiting pamphlet and internal education
document--and its mixed intent is its principal problem, since it
jumbles together genuine history with alluring mythology. I can't
quite imagine what an undergraduate today would take away from it,
other than a confusing mishmash of contradictory ideas about SDS's
role in the 1960s. The opening chapter, "SDS Highlights," written by
graphic novelist Harvey Pekar and illustrated by Gary Dumm, offers a
good overview of SDS's rise and fall, with an appropriate emphasis on
the ever-widening split in the late 1960s between chapter members and
the national leadership caste ("Man," an SDSer in one panel complains
to another, "the N.O. [National Office] doesn't ask us anything. They
go ahead and do what they want"). Progressive Labor and Weatherman
come in for well-deserved knocks. But some of the later contributions
by other authors seem to take it all back, at least as far as
Weatherman is concerned. An entire page is devoted to a poem written
in 1970 commemorating Ted Gold, one of Cathy Wilkerson's three
comrades who died in the Townhouse Explosion, including the line "he
is dead/Of a bomb meant for better targets." Really? Would the
"better targets" have been just the soldiers at the dance at Fort
Dix, or would they have included their girlfriends and wives as well?
The final chapter, written by Buhle and fellow radical elder and
former Weatherman Bruce Rubenstein, is pure recruiting pamphlet.
Rubenstein is depicted in the opening panel claiming that the new SDS
"is back [and] as strong as it was in 1966"--a dubious proposition
both mathematically and politically. Marx famously commented that
history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce; he never
dreamed there would be a further cycle in which it would reappear yet
again, even further diminished, as comix.
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