Weather Underground—Things That Happened to Me When I Was a Kid
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William Morrow An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Mark Rudd My Life with SDS and the Weathermen Contents Preface vi PART I: COLUMBIA (1965–1968) 1 A Good German 3 2 Love and War 27 3 Action Faction 38 4 Columbia Liberated 57 5 Police Riot: Strike! 85 6 Create Two, Three, Many Columbias 104 PART II: SDS AND WEATHERMAN (1968–1970) 7 National Traveler 119 8 SDS Split 141 9 Bring the War Home! 154 10 Days of Rage 171 Photographic Insert v | CONTENTS 11 To West Eleventh Street 187 12 Mendocino 204 PART III: UNDERGROUND (1970–1977) 13 The Bell Jar 219 14 Santa Fe 233 15 Schoolhouse Blues 250 16 WUO Split 270 17 A Middle-Class Hero 285 Epilogue 301 Acknowledgments 323 Appendix: Map of Columbia University Main Campus, New York City, 1968 325 About the Author Credits Cover Copyright About the Publisher Preface or twenty-five years I’d avoided talking about my past. During that time I had made an entirely new life in Albu- Fquerque, New Mexico, as a teacher, father of two, inter- mittent husband, and perennial community activist. But in a short few months, two seemingly unrelated events came together to make me change my mind and begin speaking in public about my role in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weather Underground—things that happened to me when I was a kid. First, in March 2003, the United States attacked Iraq, beginning a bloody, long, and futile war of conquest. What I saw, despite some significant differences, was Vietnam all over again. As a reflex I joined the antiwar movement with millions of others, just as I had done thirty-eight years before, when I was eighteen years old. From 1965 to 1968, the years of the big escalation of the Vietnam War and the maturation of the civil-rights movement, vii | PREFACE I was a member of SDS at Columbia University in New York City, one among many hundreds who made as much noise and trouble as pos- sible to protest the university’s pro-war and racist policies. The orga- nizing was good and the time was right, so the campus blew up in April 1968 with the largest student protest up to that point. Having been recently elected chairman of the Columbia chapter of SDS, I was identified by the press as the strike’s top leader; the impudent young twenty-year-old with the megaphone. The cartoonist Garry Trudeau even created a Doonesbury character modeled after me, Megaphone Mark, a true icon of the sixties. As both the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement grew red hot, I went over the cliff with a tiny fragment of the much larger SDS. We thought we were living a line from the Rolling Stones song “Street Fighting Man”: “Think the time is right for Palace Revolution / But where I live the game to play is Compromise Solution.” My friends and I formed an underground revolutionary guerrilla band called Weatherman which had as its goal the violent overthrow of the United States government. Confirmed idealists, we wanted to end the under- lying system that produced war and racism. It didn’t work. From 1970 to 1977, I was a federal fugitive, living the whole time underground inside this country. Just a few months after the Iraq War began, the documentary movie The Weather Underground was released. The project of two young men then in their thirties, Sam Green and Bill Siegel, the movie had been more than five years in the making. I am featured both as a contemporary talking head and also in archival footage as a twenty- year-old revolutionary. Nominated for an Academy Award and broadcast nationally on PBS, the movie has been a great success with audiences and critics; it remains in circulation as a DVD and contin- ues to be shown frequently in college and high-school classes, stimu- lating much comment and many questions. The closing images of the movie show me as a befuddled, gray- haired, overweight, middle-aged guy observing that thirty years later I still don’t know what to do with my knowledge of who we are in the PREFACE | viii world; then the film cuts to aerial shots of carpet bombing in Vietnam and, finally, to a close-up of a skinny twenty-two-year-old kid, the same guy, with the same grief-stricken look on my face. This ending hits audiences like a blade going right to the existential gut of our problem. In the years since 2003, I’ve spoken and answered questions at scores of colleges, high schools, community centers, and theaters about why my friends and I opted for violent revolution, how I’ve changed my thinking and how I haven’t, and, most of all, about the parallels between then and now. Young audiences are hungry to know this history, sensing its relevance to today. They seem genuinely amazed to learn that once there was a group of young white kids from privileged backgrounds who risked everything for our antiwar, anti- racist, and revolutionary beliefs, to act “in solidarity with the people of the world.” Sometimes passion doesn’t rule the day. In The Weather Under- ground, I say I haven’t wanted to talk about my past because of my “guilt and shame.” I never get to explain what I’m guilty and ashamed of, but it’s implied: Much of what the Weathermen did had the oppo- site effect of what we intended. We deorganized 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— our sworn enemies. We might as well have been on their payroll. As if all this weren’t enough, three of my friends died in an accidental explosion while assembling bombs. This is not a heroic story; if any- thing, it’s antiheroic. Having made such disastrous mistakes on such a big level—even granted that I was twenty years old at the time—I spent decades doubting my judgment. It took me a long time to sort out what was right from what was wrong in my own history. But in conversations with young people since 2003, I’ve found that Weatherman’s failures are less important to them than the simple astonishing fact that we existed. As a result of this ongoing dialogue, ix | PREFACE I’ve shifted my opinion some about my own past, and in doing so I’ve rediscovered a voice that I bottled up for two and a half decades— longer than most of the people I was speaking to have been alive. I’ve also reclaimed what I can be proud of: Along with millions of other people, I was part of a movement of history—that’s what a “move- ment” is, after all, a shift of history caused by millions—that helped end the war in Vietnam. Combined with the civil-rights movement, the period was American democracy’s finest hour. Historical move- ments aren’t made of heroes, just ordinary people trying to do right. The movements of the sixties succeeded in transforming laws and practices concerning the position of black and other minority people in this country, and they helped stop a major war of aggression by our own government That sucessful mass movements happened in my lifetime tells me they can happen again. The election of Barack Obama has liberated young people’s political imagination and energy. I hope my story helps them figure out what they can do to build a more just and peace- ful world. At the very least, it might show some serious pitfalls to avoid. PART I Columbia (1965–1968) 1 A Good German y mother tells this story about dropping me off at the dorm at West 114th Street and Broadway on the first Mday of Freshman Week. She and my father and I were unloading the car when a kid came up to me and handed me a blue and white beanie, the official headgear of the Columbia College freshman. He said, “We have to wear it all week.” I replied, “That’s stupid, I’m not gonna wear that thing!” Bertha, my mother, looked at Jake, my father, and said qui- etly, “We’re in for trouble.” Actually, my mother had it wrong about my refusal to wear the beanie. It wasn’t instinctive rebelliousness; I just didn’t want to act like a kid. I had dreamed of this moment through- out my childhood in suburban New Jersey, longing to go off to college and finally not have to pretend to be a child. I’d always felt like a misfit with other kids. Play didn’t interest me: I liked to read—history, biography, science, novels—and to work, to 4 | UNDERGROUND: COLUMBIA (1965–1968) chop firewood, to build things. At last I had escaped the loneliness and shame of childhood, and I didn’t want this, my coming-of-age moment—my true bar mitzvah, the day I was supposed to become a man—ruined by anything so juvenile as a stupid beanie. I spent those first months at Columbia roaming the campus and glorying in the great classical brick-and-limestone-faced buildings, the columned libraries, even the herringbone-patterned brick side- walks. I was awestruck to be part of this mighty international uni- versity. Columbia was built upon one of the highest points in Manhattan, first called Harlem Heights and later Morningside Heights.