http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20090507_tom_hayden_on_mark_rudd/
May 8, 2009
By Tom Hayden
Don't go around tonight,
Well it's bound to take your life,
There's a bad moon on the rise.
Creedence Clearwater Revival, 1969
The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure,
To love it you have to explode.
Bob Dylan, 1978
Anyone meeting Mark Rudd today would think him a nice level-headed
guy: retired community college teacher, carpenter, husband, father of
two, rank-and-file peace activist. Turning 62, his hair is gone
white, the paunch protrudes, but the blue eyes are observant. All in
all, laid back but present.
This is the same Mark Rudd I met in the heat of the 1968 Columbia
University student strike, the Mark Rudd who ended a letter to
Grayson Kirk, Columbia's president, by declaring, "Up against the
wall, motherfucker!", the Mark Rudd who proudly led Students for a
Democratic Society to close its offices and end its organizing
efforts in the midst of the greatest student rebellion of the 20th
century, the same Mark Rudd who went underground and supported a plan
to bomb Fort Dix, which went awry and killed three of his friendsall
by the time he was 22 years old.
Rudd struggles to reconcile these two selves, representing two eras,
in his memoir, "Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen," an
important contribution to a growing collection of narratives from
former participants in the revolutionary 1960s' underground. Other
recent works include Bill Ayers' "Fugitive Days," Cathy Wilkerson's
"Flying Close to the Sun," Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff
Jones' "Sing a Battle Song," David Gilbert's "No Surrender," Leslie
Brody's "Red Star Sister," Roxanne Dunbar's "Outlaw Woman," and the
2002 Oscar-nominated documentary "The Weather Underground." The saga
is turned into fiction as well in Dana Spiotta's "Eat the Document."
Other novels that mine the same or similar terrain include Heinrich
Boll's classic "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum," Susan Choi's
"American Woman," and Neil Gordon's "The Company You Keep." No doubt
there will be more.
That may be more books than those devoted to such organizations as
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or the Students for a
Democratic Society, not to mention community organizing or the
farmworkers' movement of those years, and the genre is likely to
grow, revealing an abiding fascination with the question of why it
was that some peaceful dissenters turned to violence so suddenly in
the late '60s. The Weather Underground took credit for 24 bombings
altogether and, according to federal sources, there were additionally
several thousand acts of violence during the same years. In 1969-70
alone, there were more than 550 fraggings by soldiers, according to
one authoritative historian of the Vietnam War.
The fascination with such violence is not new. Similar themes can be
found in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 19th-century novel about young Russian
nihilists, "The Possessed," in Joseph Conrad's "Under Western Eyes,"
Henry James' "The Princess Casamassima," Andre Malraux's tale of the
Shanghai uprising, "Man's Fate," and, of course, Ernest Hemingway's
stories of the Spanish civil war.
What explains the enduring interest in such radicals? I believe it
has something to do with exploring the extremes of personal
commitment. To fail heroically, though miserably, is seen by many as
attaining a greater glory than the rewards to be had from the mundane
life of patient political work. As Karl Marx wrote of the Paris
Commune, the French Communards at least had stormed the heavens. And
as Rudd quotes Erich Fromm quoting Nietzsche, "There are times when
anyone who does not lose his mind has no mind to lose."
Fiction may be a better vehicle than autobiography or history for
ascertaining the truth in clandestine histories where the secret
lives of others are at legal risk. In Rudd's self-description, he is
far from heroic, but more like a confused young man from the Jersey
suburbs staggering out of a novel by Philip Roth, either "American
Pastoral" or "I Married a Communist."
There is an unconsciousness in Rudd's memory of himself, a kind of
bumbling innocence that will disappoint a reader seeking more. When,
for example, the milling students at Columbia sought tactical
direction, Rudd writes: "I had only the vaguest idea of what we were
doing." When Rudd is told by a comrade that his demonstration is out
of control, he replies, "I know. I have no idea what to do." When
Rudd calls for taking a hostage, he says, "I meant a building," not
an administrator. But then he supports taking Dean Henry Coleman
hostage, yelling: "Now we've got the man where we want him! He can't
leave unless he gives in to some of our demands." When the media
selects him as the new revolutionary symbol, he remembers a "gnawing
sense that I was in over my head."
Some of this is funny, as for example when Rudd calls his father in
Maplewood, N.J., to say "We took a building" and the old man
replies, "Well, give it back."
But most of what Rudd tells is deeply disturbing, though
illuminating, in its unemotional matter-of-factness. In describing
the Weather Underground as a cult, Rudd writes: "I knew that the
whole thing was nuts but couldn't intervene to stop it. … I believed
as much as anyone else, perhaps more so, in the need to harden
ourselves through group criticism." Feeling "addled," he agrees to
take a break from the national leadership and accept demotion to its
New York collective. He is unable to tell us exactly why, writing
only that he was experiencing "the competitive world of the
Weatherman hierarchy from the underside now." Yet he "couldn't allow
my conscious mind even a tiny doubt as to the direction of the organization."
The mindset becomes lethal. Rudd "assented to the Fort Dix plan when
Terry [Robbins] told me about it." He dropped off Robbins, one of the
architects of the plan, at the West 11th Street townhouse in
Manhattan two days before the bomb Robbins was assembling would
accidentally go off, demolishing the site. Rudd spent March 6 at a
friend's house in New Jersey "to establish an alibi," then watched
"Zabriskie Point," the Michelangelo Antonioni film in which a fancy
bourgeois house is blown up. All this while three of his comrades
were being killed by the bombs they intended for the noncommissioned
officers, which would have included their dates, wives, and others,
too, of Fort Dix.
Rudd, by his own account, often seems to be under the spell of
charismatic, authoritarian leadership, vulnerable to the most fanatic
of the fanatics, severed from his realities of only two years before.
After the townhouse bombing, he meets a few weeks later with John
Jacobs, known as JJ, an old friend from Columbia and the charismatic
leader of the New York Weather faction, who wanted to kill soldiers
and noncombatants. Rudd, who says he was befuddled, agreed to support
JJ's newest ideas: blowing up a B-52 on the ground, knocking out a
government computer, or considering a "selective" assassination or
kidnapping. Then he joins JJ in bed with a married woman who'd given
Rudd a place to hide. He enjoys the "intense excitement at the
thought that my semen was mixing with JJ's inside a woman." Later he
tells the woman's husband that "women's liberation shouldn't threaten him."
There is much more, some of it extremely explosive, though
unprovable, such as Rudd's assertion that JJ was a willing scapegoat
for the entire Weather leadership that approved, or, at the least,
did not oppose, the Fort Dix plan. But recounting any more of Rudd's
story here will bring no more revelation, only a kind of nausea. Rudd
in these pages resembles the Roth character who says, "Eve didn't
marry a communist, she married someone who couldn't find his life."
Yet I know Mark Rudd to be a good man, a useful person despite all
this, and one must ask, how can that possibly be? Partly it is
because I believe individuals are capable of surprising changes. I
have befriended, and worked with, numerous people who have inflicted
enormous damage on themselves, their loved ones, and society at some
stage in their past lives. They include strung-out returning
soldiers, prison inmates, former gang members, addicts, suicidal
personalities of all kinds. Some of them have killed people. They
have done unspeakable things but are not incorrigible. As the woman
character says in Bernard Malamud's "The Natural," "We have two lives
… the life we learn with and the life we live after that. Suffering
is what brings us towards happiness."
I don't know if Mark Rudd will or even should be happy, but he is
living a life of amends. In this book, he takes responsibility for
"the destruction of SDS [as] probably the greatest single mistake of
my life [and I've made quite a few] … a historical crime." In
speaking to young people, he can vividly describe the difference
between radicalism and fanaticism, and the moral, emotional and
political costs of the latter. He can confide that the best of us are
capable of the worst. His wounds are gifts; he becomes a character in
one of those Scared Straight performances, an important signifier for
the next generation. And he continues working humbly, patiently and
energetically as a rank-and-file activist.
There is a larger reason for trying to understand a Mark Rudd. He was
only an inflated individual symbol of many young people around the
world who took up weapons, or dreamt of taking up weapons, or went
underground, or dreamt of going underground, or sheltered people
underground, or dreamt of sheltering people underground, in the years
between 1966 and 1975. During the same short period, less than a
decade, there were more than 100 violent rebellions in American
cities. Hundreds of campuses were shut down. The murders of the
Kennedys and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. seemed to confirm, on a deep
existential level, that peaceful change was impossible. The greatest
flare-up of urban violence in America followed Dr. King's death on
April 4, 1968, two weeks before Columbia and six months before the
formation of the Weathermen. It would take a contortionist to reduce
this collective rebellion to Freudian categories reserved for
individual diagnoses, or to forms of mass psychosis like Eric
Hoffer's notion of true believers. This massive cohort of mutinous
and violent young people within the '60s generation is little
researched or remembered in mainstream culture. They were young,
educated, and mostly lived in societies with civil liberties and elections.
In Latin America, other young people, struggling often in dictatorial
societies, participated in at least 20 guerrilla insurgencies modeled
after the Cuban revolution, inspired by writers like Regis Debray and
Carlos Marighella, the same authors studied by the Weathermen.
Thousands were abducted, tortured, assassinated, disappeared. Though
none of the Latin American movements, with the exception of
Nicaragua, succeeded militarily, theirs was the generation that
directly produced or influenced many leaders of today's successful
democratic revolutions across the continent. It was revolutionaries
from Mexico City's 1968 massacre of students, for example, who went
on to create the Zapatistas.
In Europe, formations like the Weathermen burst out in several
countries. In Germany, at the time of the Columbia student strike,
radical youth protesting civic apathy toward Vietnam set fire to a
Frankfurt department store, on grounds that it was better to burn it
down than to run one. A well-known journalist, Ulrike Meinhoff,
feeling that in her role as a columnist she was only a pressure
relief valve, joined a violent underground group, was imprisoned with
others and hung herself on May 8, 1976, the anniversary of the end of
World War II. In its beginning phase, her Red Army Faction had the
sympathy of one of every four Germans under 30, according to a 1971
survey. Her Red Army Faction, like Italy's Red Brigades or Japan's
Red Army, was more violent by far than the Weather Underground, and
would spiral into lethal destruction.
Another example is the Irish Republican Army, revived in the late
1960s, which fought a 30-year war against England before signing the
Good Friday Agreement in 1998. And in Quebec, revolutionary
nationalists carried out kidnappings and bombings. As with Latin
America, many of the participants in these revolutionary currents
evolved to hold political office or serve in prominent professions today.
To my knowledge, no one has convincingly explained how all these
events took place concurrently and with little coordination, or how
so many middle-class young people chose violence as a moral and
political necessity. The Paris revolutionaries of May 1968, for
example, sent the striking Columbia students a telegram saying,
"We've occupied a building in your honor. What do we do now?" In
Rudd's book, he typically writes that "I don't remember our answer."
In Derry, Northern Ireland, the slogan "Free Derry" was adopted from
"Free Berkeley."
There is a logical sequence from protest to resistance in the late
1960s. Protest assumed the authorities were listening, while
resistance meant their institutions had to be disrupted, forcing them
to pay a price. Resistance at first meant street battles with police,
occupying buildings, burning draft cards, attempts to stop business
as usual, and then gradually the beginnings of destroying property.
It seems clear that the resistance escalated as the authorities chose
to escalate an unpopular Vietnam War, or continue supporting
dictatorships like the Shah's in Iran, in utter disregard for public
opinion, petitions and peaceful protest. People were dying every
day, on television, making a moral mockery of appeals for gradual
change. It is clear, however, that the moves from protest to
resistance, and from there to underground revolutionary action, took
place as necessary reforms were rejected by the authorities while
wars like Vietnam and dictatorships like the Shah's seemed to rage
beyond democracy's reach. For example, street violence escalated
decisively in Germany after the shooting of student leader Rudi
Dutschke. Perhaps the advent of a televised war, combined with
repression by police and the impatient inexperience of youth, caused
the rapid escalations toward violence. I often wonder whether the
propensity toward violence was greatest in the Western countries or
communities that suffered fascism in the previous generation, like
Germany, Italy and Japan. Even in America, Rudd, who was born two
years after World War II ended, grew up wondering whether he would
have bowed in the face of such evil.
The sudden subsidence of this violence in the mid-1970s also points
to a sociological, rather than a pathological, explanation of its
nature. The end of the Vietnam War, the forced resignation of Richard
Nixon from the Oval Office, the U.S. rapprochement with China, the
new openings for voter participation inside the political system, all
contributed to a sharp abatement of the revolutionary fevers of the
1968-73 period.
Ironically, the Justice Department dropped federal charges against
Rudd and the Weather Underground for fear of revealing their
undercover techniques, and in 1978 federal prosecutors actually
brought charges against the FBI for their Weathermen probes. One
might even say, as the rhetoricians of the Weather Underground might
have put it, that white-skin privilege helped to exonerate Mark Rudd.
Or, more importantly and fundamentally, to put it another way, public
opinion caught up with the radicalism of the 1960son issues like
Vietnam and Watergateat the very moment that the revolutionaries had
given up on public opinion in order to go underground.
As the research and writings of James Gilligan demonstrate, violence
is more situational than innate. Violence and shame are closely
connected. The acceleration to violent behavior can be breathtaking.
The violence of the young signals a dysfunction of the elders, not a
nihilist seed. As John F. Kennedy famously said, those who make
peaceful change impossible make violent revolution inevitable.
Now we have chosen a president, Barack Obama, who has known some of
the Weather Underground veterans in their later incarnations. If he
had been born 20 years earlier, Obama too might have given up on
community organizing and become a black militant. The question he and
the rest of us face today is whether we as a nation are prepared to
act rapidly and deeply enough to prevent the conditions that provoke
avoidable violence in a new generation yearning for substantial
change. That's the question a reading of Rudd's book should make us ponder.
--
Tom Hayden, a founder of Students for Democratic Society (SDS) in
1962 and principal author of "The Port Huron Statement," is a former
longtime California legislator, serving in both the state Assembly
and the state Senate. He is the author of many books, including the
forthcoming "The Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama," "The
Newark Rebellion," "The Trial," "The Love of Possession Is a Disease
With Them," "Street Wars," "The Lost Gospel of the Earth," "Ending
the War in Iraq," and, most recently, "Writings for a Democratic
Society: The Tom Hayden Reader."
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