[Marxism] Jon Wiener reviews Mark Rudd memoir

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-ca-mark-rudd29-2009mar29,0,3918461.story

BOOK REVIEW
'Underground' by Mark Rudd
A memoir by a former member of SDS and the Weathermen -- and we're not 
talking about William Ayers.
By Jon Wiener

Underground
My Life With SDS and the Weathermen
Mark Rudd
William Morrow: 326 pp., $25.99

Mark Rudd is the guy from the Weather Underground who is not Bill Ayers. 
Both were leaders of the group that worked for the violent overthrow of 
the United States government in the 1970s, but while Ayers remains 
unapologetic, Rudd is full of regrets.

Rudd is not Bill Ayers in other ways: Sarah Palin did not accuse Barack 
Obama of palling around with him, nor has he been featured on the New 
York Times op-ed page or interviewed on "Fresh Air With Terry Gross." 
Instead, he has lived in obscurity, as a community college math teacher 
in New Mexico, since the government dropped charges against him in 1977.

The 2003 documentary "The Weather Underground" celebrated the 
"idealistic passion" that led Ayers and his comrades to their campaign 
of bombing public buildings. At the end of the film, Rudd appeared 
briefly for the first time in 25 years, "a befuddled, gray-haired, 
overweight, middle-aged guy" full of "guilt and shame." At least that's 
the way he describes himself at the beginning of "Underground: My Life 
With SDS and the Weathermen." It was that image, Rudd says, that drove 
him to write this book -- because in the film "I never get to explain 
what I'm guilty and ashamed of."

The Weather Underground was a splinter faction of Students for a 
Democratic Society (SDS), the radical antiwar group that by the late 
1960s had chapters on hundreds of campuses. Around 1969, the Weathermen 
(who named themselves after Bob Dylan's line "You don't need a 
weatherman to know which way the wind blows") concluded that the 
American people would never stop the war in Vietnam. Rather, it was up 
to them -- a few dozen kids -- to act on behalf of the Vietnamese people 
by placing small bombs in places like the Capitol and the Pentagon.

The kids knew best

This, or so the logic went, would somehow spark an uprising of young 
blacks and Latinos to overthrow the government. Even the Vietnamese 
Communist leaders believed the Weathermen had the wrong strategy, that 
they should work to persuade mainstream Americans to end the war. But 
the American kids knew better.

Rudd gets right to the point in the opening pages of "Underground": 
"Much of what the Weathermen did had the opposite effect of what we 
intended," he writes. "We de-organized 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. . . . We 
might as well have been on their payroll."

Rudd's story begins with his parents dropping him off at Columbia 
University the first day of freshman week 1965. What follows is a 
straightforward narrative of events, in which he and millions of other 
young Americans were radicalized by the war. The book has a series of 
climaxes: first, the triumphant student occupation of Columbia's 
administration building in the spring of 1968 and the brutal police bust 
that followed -- which made headlines internationally and set an example 
for radical students at colleges across the country.

Next, he details the formation of the Weathermen in 1969 and the 
disastrous explosion that killed three members in a Greenwich Village 
town house in 1970. After that came seven years of life underground, 
lonely and intermittently terrifying. Finally, we get the happy ending 
-- Rudd coming up from underground in 1977, settling his legal case, 
embracing normal life and returning to antiwar activism when President 
George W. Bush invaded Iraq.

Rebellion in bloom

Rudd conveys well the festival-like joy of the springtime campus 
uprisings of the late 1960s: passionate discussions under the trees 
about the causes of war and strategies for stopping it; music and drugs 
on all sides; dancing long into the night; "a fluorescence of energy and 
imagination such as Columbia had never seen." It was like that at 
hundreds of other schools over the next few years.

The authorities looked at these developments and saw only violence and 
destruction. The New York Times quoted a Columbia administrator's 
description of Rudd as "totally unscrupulous and morally very dangerous 
. . . an adolescent having a temper tantrum." The media embraced this 
image of him as quintessential student rebel, but to his credit, Rudd 
says that "the organizing at Columbia was the work of hundreds of people 
at least as committed, intelligent, and articulate as I was."

The heart of "Underground" comes about halfway through, in 1969, when 
SDS was challenged by the hard-core Maoists of the Progressive Labor 
Party. The Progressive Labor faction had a strategy for revolution: a 
"worker-student alliance" to overthrow capitalism. The national 
leadership of SDS -- Rudd and his friends -- concluded that they needed 
one too. What they came up with was to call on young people to become 
urban guerrillas to fight "Amerikka." The overwhelming majority of SDS 
rejected both perspectives, but the faction fight destroyed the 
organization.

"The destruction of SDS was probably the single greatest mistake I've 
made in my life," Rudd declares forthrightly. "It was a historical crime."

You might think all that is obvious now. But it isn't -- at least not to 
Ayers. He wrote about the Weather Underground in the New York Times in 
December 2008, declaring that "our effectiveness can be -- and still is 
being -- debated." His only real regret, he said on "Fresh Air," is that 
the violent tactics of the Weathermen didn't end the war. But, he added, 
neither did peaceful protest -- so who can say who was right and who was 
wrong?

Both Rudd and Ayers want today's activists to learn from the mistakes of 
the 1960s. But nobody opposed to the war in Iraq thinks that becoming an 
urban guerrilla and putting a bomb in the Pentagon is going to help 
bring the troops home. Rudd's historical judgments are, to use a phrase 
from the era, "right on." Still, what may be most striking about 
"Underground" is how irrelevant its lessons are for our time.

Wiener teaches American history at UC Irvine and is a contributing 
editor to the Nation.

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