The Company You Keep

by Neil Gordon

  It was not a good choice of words. For one thing, my editor promptly made a mental note—at least I believe he did—to assign the J school graduate to write on the ambient temperature of the Esopus, which he’d known nothing about till I mentioned it. For another, however, my editor, at fifty-five, defined himself precisely by the time that I had called “ancient history,” in particular by the reporting he’d done in Saigon when his father edited the Times. And, like a lot of people around Albany at the time, in 1996 Harmon was already looking toward Kathy Boudin’s 2001 parole date, and planned to use every chance he got to keep the Weather Underground in the negative glare of publicity.

  But lastly, and most importantly, Rick knew something that I, as it turned out, was too young to know: that an important portion of the paper’s demographic—forty-five to sixty—would read anything connected to the antiwar movement, which, for or against, had played a central role in their lives, and that stories of the last radical fugitives always sold issues. So and therefore, in the face of my disagreement, Rick let a moment of thought play behind his gray eyes, and then inquired politely whether or not I actually wanted my job, because if I didn’t, there were plenty of others who did. To my shock and embarrassment, he used not one, but two four-letter expletives in this sentence, both beginning with an f. Nonetheless, I took the man at his word, and seriously entertained the issue, to no small effect. For in fact, a few moments later, it emerged from our conversation that yes, I did want the job, at least enough to sit there quietly, agreeing with a man whose sole qualification to do his job was having inherited the goddamn business from his father, who was also an idiot. In brief, having enthusiastically agreed to research the Sharon Solarz story, I left my editor’s office and returned to my desk, vowing to go to business school, build up a multinational communications empire, buy the paper, and fire his ass.

  But only briefly. Some of Harmon’s sources were so old that I couldn’t even get them on Nexis, and I had to go for the first time in my career to find actual printed sources in the document morgue. By the time I returned, sneezing, the question that most bothered me was how I was going to stay awake through the research.

  But in the event, this particular history I was learning that night, it turned out not to leave much room for sleep at all.

  For one thing, it didn’t seem at all like it would be on the final, you know? I mean, I know how they teach this stuff in American schools: a week on civil rights, a week on Vietnam, then wham! it’s Watergate, and everything’s alright again. Jowly old Nixon humiliated on a global scale, the system has “self-corrected,” and democracy is safe. Never mind that there’s not a damn thing Nixon did that everyone else hadn’t done before, and hasn’t done since—in which, oddly enough, his story and Clinton’s have a lot in common. Maybe it’s different at Dothegirl’s Hall, wherever the hell it is you are. I hope the Brits are honest enough to teach Vietnam in the context of the cold war, are they? You know the word COINTELPRO? Or do they give it to you as part of the history of imperialism, pardon me, the Great Days of Colonialism?

  But this stuff I was reading now, no way I had learned a word of it in school, and I became very interested, very quickly. Not only because it was about the fairly recent past, but also because it was filled with sex, which I’m for; drugs, a couple of which I’d tried; and rock and roll, which was invariably spectacular. And the fact that while I’d worked that night, I’d been listening on my always-on computer feed from WMVY to the Beatles, Hendrix, Dusty Springfield, Joe Cocker, Joni Mitchell, and wall-to-wall Dylan—precisely the music that the subjects of my research had listened to while conducting their failed revolution—was by no means lost on me.

  So in the event, I had had no trouble at all spending the night smoking, drinking coffee, and learning the history Rick Harmon had sentenced me to.

  2.

  I started with a group called Weatherman—a little group of middle-class white kids who, during the Vietnam War, tried to play a leadership role in the antiwar and civil rights movements.

  You with me, Isabel? Listen—if you aren’t, then do me a favor: do a little Web search, will you please? Get a sense of what I’m talking about, then come back—take you ten minutes. See, if I try to teach you too much history, the Committee gets pissed off—they say I’ll lose your attention.

  Because, when you come right down to it, if you’re going to make a real decision about what you’re going to do later this month, you’d better understand what the issues are. What exactly your father did in the summer of 1996. And when. And to understand that, you have to go back another twenty-five years and more to the summers of the early 1960s.

  What you have to understand is that up until the war in Vietnam, for the first time in history, there were more people under twenty-one in America than over. This was the famous baby boom. And this overflow level of young people, of which the whites grew up in towns and cities where there was plenty of money and plenty of fun, created a generation of kids who thought anything was possible. It was a happy time in America, and although it’s pretty hard for you all, who consider cynicism the only proper response to any politics, to understand today, these kids actually took the ideals of American democracy seriously.

  When these clean-cut types like Eisenhower and Kennedy came up on their TVs and said they were building the greatest, fairest, richest society in human history, these kids believed it.

  And when they found out that Eisenhower, and Kennedy, and Johnson, and all those great men were lying to them—lying deliberately and with premeditation—they were pissed.

  Really pissed. Pissed like only disappointed children can be when they realize that despite everything they’ve been told all their lives, their parents are not good parents, but bad parents.

  You see what I mean?

  Take SDS. The main political organizing group of young people working for civil rights in the early sixties and, a little later, organizing to oppose the war. Know what SDS stood for? Students for a Democratic Society. You see? Not Students for a Violent Marxist-Leninist Revolution; not Students for Undermining the American Way of Life with Sex and Drugs and Long Hair; not Students for Glorifying Charles Manson and Eldridge Cleaver. Bizarre, right? All that demonstrating, fighting—at one point Nixon called it a “civil war.” But what were they actually demonstrating for? When you think of it, they already existed in a democratic society.

  And that’s my point: at the beginning, all that this great movement of American youth was asking for was for the adults around them to make good on the promises that had been made to them all their lives—on TV, in commercials, in their public schools. All they were doing was asking the adults around them to put their money where their mouths were, and be the good parents they had always said they were.

  But it’s like your father told you, isn’t it? All parents are bad parents, and as the sixties went on, a lot of young folk began to wake up to the fact that American Democracy wasn’t happening the way that had been promised. No one denies this, Izzy, left or right: the long march from McCarthy to Watergate proved to everyone in the country that somewhere the idea of democracy and the idea of government had diverged, if they had ever been what they said they were. Let’s just look at one simple, easy fact that I learned that night in 1996: the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Think of it, Izzy: it took until 1965, a century after the Civil War, for the government to enforce the constitutional right of all Americans to vote. Imagine how you’d feel if in England today, say, Parliament had to be forced, by popular and often violent protest, to guarantee the right of Arab citizens to vote. Think you’d be going to class and studying calculus so you can go to university? I don’t think so. I think you’d be at Piccadilly Circus right now getting your ass arrested in a protest.

  Now imagine this. Imagine that you were also being told that when you turned eighteen, if you weren’t in college and you weren’t sick, you could kiss your ass good-bye because the government had the right to force you—to f
orce you—to go to this little country in Southeast Asia and shoot ferocious big bullets into people who, likewise, were going to shoot ferocious big bullets into you. And you weren’t allowed to raise your hand and say, uh, Mr. Kennedy, or Mr. Johnson, or Mr. Nixon—two Democrats and one Republican, note—I wish to be excused from this part because I didn’t volunteer for any army, I don’t want to kill anyone, and I sure as hell don’t want to be one of the 58,000 of us who are about to be killed in Vietnam—58,000 Americans. Be excused? Fuck you, kid. And if you’re not white, then fuck you twice, because when you turn eighteen, you are going to be cannon fodder.

  Now, relax. I’m not going to go on in this vein. All I want to tell you is that this massive group of organized young folk developed during the sixties, SDS, and some of the biggest hearts and best minds of the times put everything they believed into it. They gave up school, they gave up careers, they were arrested and they were beaten, and you know what? The more they went on, and the more they grew, the greater the number of people all over the country and all over the world who came to agree with them. Don’t make any mistake, Isabel: the opposition to the war in Vietnam was massive in this country, and all sorts of people were in it, from mainstream television newsmen like Walter Cronkite to big-time athletes like Muhammad Ali to Martin Luther King to white middle-class Americans all over this country. Americans wanted out of this war. You ask people if they went to Vietnam to fight communism, know what they’ll tell you? Nine times out of ten, the reason Americans went to Vietnam is because of the company they kept: their friends were going, and they weren’t going to sleaze out of what they saw to be their responsibility. But you come right down to it, they didn’t want to fight, they didn’t want to win, and they sure as hell didn’t want to kill.

  But you know what? Pay attention now, Isabel, ’cause this is the kicker, and if you don’t get this, you won’t get anything, and then all these bozos’ll have wasted their time sending you e-mails. The bigger the opposition grew, you know what? This odd thing happened: the war didn’t get any smaller, it got bigger. They didn’t send less soldiers in, they sent more. And the government didn’t get more responsive but more oppressive. In fact, as they declassify the papers of Nixon’s secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, we learn even today that they had used the same tactics against the antiwar activists that they used against Communists, only worse, in a big FBI program called COINTELPRO—the counterintelligence program—and most of what they did was so illegal that one president, Nixon, was actually, for the first time in American history, kicked out of office for it!

  Isabel, I’ll tell you. I was twenty-seven in 1996, and I was a reasonably well-informed person, but I swear to you, when I went into this stuff, I couldn’t believe it. A couple times that night I actually called my father and asked him if this was all true. Which amused him no end, I can tell you.

  Anyway, to cut to the chase—and to get your daddy to stop instant-messengering me mean notes asking me why I’m taking so long on this: by the end of the sixties, when SDS had not only failed to diminish the level of racism in our country and failed to stop the war, but to the contrary, three different presidential administrations had increased the legal and illegal pressures on American blacks and escalated the war into outright illegal and secret activities—once again, Isabel, I’m not (as you can imagine) giving you any lefty line here, just the facts, on which everyone, including the people who ran the war, agrees—a group of people in SDS start growing, shall we say, impatient. And fueled by a whole lot of speed, and helped by Black Panthers kicking the shit out of selected members of the opposition—who knows, maybe they deserved it—a gang of four took over the organization and renamed it Weatherman, from a line from a Dylan song.

  Maggie comes fleet foot

  Face full of black soot

  Talkin’ that the heat put

  Plants in the bed but

  The phone’s tapped anyway

  Maggie says that many say

  They must bust in early May

  Orders from the D.A.

  Look out kid

  Don’t matter what you did

  Walk on your tip toes

  Don’t try “No Doz”

  Better stay away from those

  That carry around a fire hose

  Keep a clean nose

  Watch the plain clothes

  You don’t need a weather man

  To know which way the wind blows

  That’s where they got the name. Dylan, to these guys—and quite a few other guys—was God. But, as a man called Shin’ya Ono put it, it turned out that a lot of people felt you did need a weatherman after all:

  The whites in this country are insulated from the world revolution and the Third World liberation struggles because of their access to, and acceptance of, blood-soaked white-skin privileges. In large measure, this insulation from the struggle holds true for the radicals in the movement. The whole point of the Weatherman politics is to break down this insulation, to bring the war home, to make the coming revolution real.

  He went on to say,

  I am confident…that in the near future…[Weatherman] will come to occupy a widely recognized position as the revolutionary vanguard of the entire movement in the white mother country.

  Well, he was wrong about that, of course. There was to be no revolution, and no vanguard, and as for how people on the left saw Weatherman then, and how they see them today, Ono could no more have guessed that than he could have guessed that his cousin Yoko was going to marry John Lennon or that, before all the Weather fugitives would have even surfaced, Lennon would be shot dead on a street in Manhattan and everything anyone had ever hoped for in the days—everything good, everything hopeful, everything peaceful—would be ruined, and no one would ever try to change the world again.

  Now. That’s some of what I had learned that night, and I’m already in trouble for telling you this much. But because this is, my dear, the history that defines you, and I highly doubt you have ever heard it before—because of this, I am going to go on a little more, and let me inform the Committee here, including your own father, who have abrogated to themselves the right to dictate what I say, that they can go to hell: I’m the big-time journalist now, and I think Isabel wants to hear what I’m saying, and I think she’s paying attention, and therefore I am going to go on, for a few more minutes anyway.

  It’s not easy to talk politely on the subject of Weatherman. For one thing, there’s a lot I’ve agreed not to tell anyone, and if you want to know it, you’ll have to find out from someone other than me. What you need to know about Weather was that one of the major differences between SDS and Weather was that SDS was a resolutely anti-Communist organization, whereas Weather was essentially Marxist-Leninist. This made a massive difference. It meant for example that the same army that executed Donny Sackler, Molly’s husband, in Vietnam in 1972 hosted our little buddies from Weather on several occasions in several countries. As did Fidel Castro, and several heads of Soviet satellites during the cold war.

  You hear what I’m saying? That makes them a properly treasonous organization. And there’s a lot else you can say about them. Like, for example, the fact that because a Marxist-Leninist revolution has also to be a revolution within, Weatherman lived in collectives, with a centralized leadership so strong that they could order couples apart and together, homosexual, heterosexual, whatever. A great innovation, right? Destroy monogamy, all that? Add that to things like their criticism-self-criticism sessions, in which they ganged up on each other and tore each other’s livers out, and the “acid tests” for loyalty—self-explanatory, no?—and the fact that some of them were and indeed are highly manipulative people who, like so many on the left, are pretty convinced they have a monopoly on what’s right, well, you have a portrait of the American Weatherman Revolutionary. Bunch of pricks, for the most part.

  Charles Manson, for example, was a big hero to them for a while—fucking college kids praising the murderers, for fuck’s sake,
who buried forks in the pregnant stomach of Sharon Tate. Talk about épater les bourgeoises.

  But it wasn’t all attitude. No one knows exactly how many actions they were responsible for, though it’s clear that they bombed dozens of government and corporate targets across the country, including the Pentagon. And there were other things they did, such as the thing my anonymous tipster referred to: in 1970 the Weather Underground was contacted by the organization called, if you will pardon me, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. The Brotherhood was a network of marijuana growers and smugglers out in northern California, and what they wanted—and were prepared to pay for—was to have one of their heroes, a man called Timothy Leary, broken out of jail.

  Do I need to explain to you who Timothy Leary was? I hope not. What I will tell you, though, because for some reason very few people know about it, is that Weather succeeded in removing Dr. Leary from jail and spiriting him all the way to Algeria. True, it was a minimum-security jail. Nonetheless, to remove a convicted felon from the possession of the law and take him out of the country to freedom—and that not as insiders with government connections, but from the platform of being sought-after fugitives themselves—you can, Isabel, say a lot about the Weather Underground organization, but you can’t deny that they did what they did, and they did not, in general, get caught.

  What they’re best known for, however, was not what they did to others, but what they did to themselves. In March 1970 three members of Weather, building a bomb in the basement of a house at 18 West Eleventh Street, crossed the wires of a timing device and blew themselves into pieces so small that one of them was identified only by the print of a single surviving finger. Ted Gold, Terry Robbins, Diana Oughton, none over twenty years old. You can see it now, next time you go to New York: just west of Fifth Avenue on the south side of Eleventh Street, the only new house on the block. See, the old one was leveled.