http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/books/review/Barrett-t.html
By PAUL M. BARRETT
Published: May 1, 2009
UNDERGROUND
My Life With SDS and the Weathermen
By Mark Rudd
Illustrated. 324 pp. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.99
It would be easy to dismiss Mark Rudd's memoir of how he helped
destroy Students for a Democratic Society by leading its Weatherman
faction down the road to violence and insanity. Rudd and colleagues
like Barack Obama's notorious former neighbor William Ayers poisoned
the 1960s antiwar movement with their nihilistic ambition of
demolishing "honky America." They also provided J. Edgar Hoover with
potent ammunition for attacking the entire New Left.
Rudd, a retired community college instructor in New Mexico with a
penchant for understatement, admits he made some mistakes. But he
can't help claiming that his exploits offer inspiration to the young
people whose political imagination was ignited by the election of
Obama: "I hope my story helps them figure out what they can do to
build a more just and peaceful world." Please. By throwing a brick
through a post office window? Committing armed robbery? Planting a
bomb in a courthouse men's room?
Despite its laughable and at times infuriating aspects, Rudd's book
has value. He has an eye for telling detail and an ear for
conversation, even if he doesn't make much sense of his chaotic brush
with celebrity.
"My mother" are the first two words of the opening chapter, and
fittingly so. Vignettes of his tortured relationship with his
parents, strivers from suburban New Jersey, form the most absorbing
narrative thread in "Underground." Rudd's very first move upon taking
over the office of the president of Columbia University in April
1968, part of a roiling protest that put S.D.S. in the national and
international headlines, was to call home. "We took a building," he
told his father. "Well, give it back," Jacob Rudd, a retired
lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and a real estate investor, replied.
Rebellion against status-conscious parents helped spur campus unrest
almost as much as opposition to the Vietnam War and the desire to
avoid the draft. But Rudd's recollections show that for at least one
S.D.S. leader, winning some kind of parental approval constituted
another motivation. After his father had bailed him out of jail on
one occasion, Rudd told his dad: "You always worked hard. . . . You
did what needed to be done. . . . Well, I'm the same as you, in my
own way: I'm doing what needs to be done."
Though baffled by Mark's posturing, his parents never wavered. When
he was thrown out of Columbia, they showed up with home-cooked veal
parmigiana. The three of them had a picnic in the family sedan,
parked on Amsterdam Avenue. Later, after he'd been indicted for his
role in Weatherman mayhem and was on the run as a fugitive, they
arranged secret meetings and passed him wads of cash.
Rudd once led a group of protesters who were clashing with security
guards at Columbia. In the midst of the pushing and shoving, one
guard, an older black man with whom he was friendly, "touched my arm
lightly," the author recalls. " 'Mark, Mark, what are you doing?' His
gentle reproach snapped something inside me, and I immediately put my
hands down, pulled back and told the others on the front line to do
likewise. The confrontation stopped."
But "the revolution" didn't stop. Rudd went on to help organize the
vicious Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969. S.D.S. disintegrated in the
wake of those pointless riots, though its Weatherman faction
persisted for several more years. In 1970, three of Rudd's friends
died in the explosion of a town house in Greenwich Village. They were
preparing shrapnel bombs dynamite wrapped with nails which they
planned to detonate at a noncommissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix
in New Jersey.
Rudd had approved of the Fort Dix operation. If only his parents or
the kindly college security guard had been there to ask what the
would-be terrorists thought they were accomplishing, maybe those
three lives wouldn't have been wasted.
--
Paul M. Barrett is a journalist and the author, most recently, of
"American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion."
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