Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  MARK RUDD

  I think the hippies have gotten no credit for having accomplished a lot. In fact, you say the word hippie and people laugh. It’s like hippie and train wreck are somehow related. But actually, the New Left was a train wreck because we lost bad. In essence, the New Left forgot power, or we thought that power was going to fall into place somehow automatically. We thought the liberals would take power and we would be to the left of them. But that’s not what happened. What happened was a far-right reaction took place. The right-wing reaction, both within the Republican Party and within the Democratic Party, moved everything to the right. It was a closing of the New Deal chapter. And those of us who were self-consciously political, we were the tail end of the entire socialist movement of one hundred and more years. Now there’s no more socialism.

  MARGERY TABANKIN

  I know an enormous number of people who really did wake up and say, “This is a fight for the soul of our country. What kind of country do we want it to be? Do we want to accept that some things are not possible? Or do we want to fight for the possible?” I agree that a civil war happened, that we had to fight for our country, and that everything changed. Yet I can’t help but think that our generation lost with the money. Today I sit in conversations with people my age recounting all that we accomplished: We created a women’s movement and lives were changed; we put the environmental movement on the map; and we ultimately ended a war and made it harder for the U.S. to choose to go to war. But in the end, the forces of corporate capital essentially beat our generation in terms of the power we wield in this country. We were so focused on all these other things that we didn’t really understand that they were taking control of the country.

  MARK RUDD

  Essentially what we need is a new cultural revolution which will repoliticize young people. The problem is the depoliticization of society as a whole, and the very low number of people who are paying attention to politics, especially young people.

  The 1969–70 school year marked a brief moment in the modern era when rebels believed that revolution was possible, and radical political rhetoric had a rare, nearly mainstream place in American political discourse. Now, with historical hindsight, we see that the movement did not bring permanent political change. If anything, its militant, ideological fringe, like the Weathermen and the Black Panthers, hurt the movement’s popularity and certainly helped ignite a conservative backlash that is alive and well today. Committing violence in the name of peace and justice proved to be politically self-destructive—a form of revolutionary suicide. “Every time they burn another building,” said one Nixon administration official in 1970, “Republican registration goes up.”

  MICHAEL KAZIN

  You’ve got to be really mad and organize other mad people if you’re going to get change. People in history who’ve been called extremist often achieve some important things. Sometimes good, sometimes not so good. I recently wrote, “Extremism is the coin of conviction, whether virtuous or malign. It forces middle-roaders to crush the disrupter or adapt.” Abolitionists were called extremists at the time; so were suffragettes. You’re no longer an extremist when you win.

  MARK RUDD

  The errors that were made on the basis of our moral engagement were so enormous that even last night, I dreamt I was in an argument with Bernardine [Dohrn] and Jeff [Jones] and Bill [Ayers] in which we were arguing about their position that our motivation was right, and that’s what should be retained by history.

  They haven’t apologized because in their heads, they haven’t realized the extent of the errors that were made. I realized at some point that good motivations are extremely common. Bernardine and Billy believe that we were morally engaged, and so we made some mistakes.

  Myself, I believe that results are where it counts, and that had we not been so enamored of our own heroic morality, we might have been able to judge the fact that our theories were not working. For example, nobody came to the Days of Rage. Nobody came. We had many fewer people there in Chicago in October than when we started organizing it. We went from about 500 down to about 350. But we were so deeply involved in our rightness. So, I’m for accountability, I’m for democracy.

  The Weather leadership adopted the bombing-light position, which was, we’re not going to kill anybody. And somehow, luckily, we never did, after the first three [in the townhouse]. But I think that the bombing-light business is just a continuation of the same strategy, which is armed struggle, which is a mistake.

  JOHN MURTAGH, JR.

  When they say today, as Bill Ayers has, that they were scrupulous and were targeting government buildings, they were never targeting people, well, wait a second, Bill, you didn’t think that Judge Murtagh and his family were asleep in his house? Let’s not sugarcoat it: We’re all sitting here today, and my mother is about to celebrate her eighty-eighth birthday, not because the Weathermen didn’t try, but because they were incompetent. They set off four firebombs at a house where a husband, wife, and three children were sound asleep in their beds. If they had been any good at what they were doing, they would have killed some or all of us. What was your goal, and what was your endgame? They did such harm, and they accomplished very little.

  BILL AYERS

  What do people want me to apologize for? I would say I was sorry about our political sectarianism and dogma. I’m sorry about the arrogance. I’m sorry about the male chauvinism and sexism and supremacy. I’m sorry that I was mean. I’m sorry that I betrayed a friend. I could go on. And you could, too. So, I’m sorry. But a blanket apology is just too much. And it’s insincere. The Days of Rage? Not sorry. The Pentagon?*1 Not sorry.

  As I’ve said for years, I think we’re badly in need of a truth and reconciliation process. Put me and Bernardine on a stage, please, with John McCain, John Kerry, Bob Kerrey, George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger—and have every one of us say what we did—what our bad work was—and ask forgiveness. I want to be on that stage. I want to say what I did that was wrong. I want to ask forgiveness. But I want Kissinger to say what he did that was wrong, because he killed three million people, and I killed no one. John McCain bombed civilians in an act of terror. I killed no one. Bob Kerrey slit the throats of two elderly people on the outskirts of a village, because he was leading a group of Navy SEALs into a Viet Cong–held village and he had to quiet them. That’s a war crime. He did it. Is he sorry? Why doesn’t he say so publicly? And in that company, I’ll tell you exactly what I’m sorry for, and I’ll even tell you the names and places of the things I did. But, without that, I don’t feel like I have a unique responsibility to apologize.

  I’m saying it’s ludicrous to single me or us out, as if we’re the representatives of going off the tracks. The country was off the tracks. How do you act in an insane time? How does love answer genocide? How do you organize a sane response? We’re not heroes. But, frankly, everybody our age can measure their own commitment against our commitment, and ask themselves, Did I do enough? And when I say we didn’t do enough, that’s not a statement of tactics. That’s a statement of fact. We didn’t stop the war. So, people like to pretend that “the wonderful antiwar movement—look at all the great it did.” You know what? We convinced the American people to oppose the war in three years, and the war went on for seven more years. And every week that the war went on, six thousand people were murdered in our names. Every week. We couldn’t stop it.

  CATHY WILKERSON

  On some level I don’t have any regrets. I don’t see how it could have been done differently. I feel like I tried my best at every step of the way, and failed miserably on many occasions, particularly in joining Weathermen. The forces aligned against us were enormous in terms of seeing these dead Vietnamese children on the front page of the newspaper every day and knowing what was happening to the black movement and feeling like the police were out of control. It was very hard to maintain your equilibrium. So, to look back at the movement, there’s huge amounts to learn from it, both goo
d and bad.

  MICHAEL KAZIN

  One of the things that makes the sixties somewhat different from other periods of rebellion in American history—and there have been a lot, going back to the American Revolution—is that everything seemed to be up for grabs. All received authority was suspect for people who were rebelling. That meant that authorities representing gender and race, media, politics, and business were all seen as being on the wrong side of morality and history by people who saw themselves as rebels. There was general agreement that the whole system was at fault.

  JOHN PERRY BARLOW

  I think in terms of consciousness in general, there are a lot of fundamental, almost invisible, things that are different now that we can take responsibility for having made different. The biggest of these is that I can really remember living in a world where just about everybody believed in God-given authority. William Burroughs believed in God-given authority. Jack Kerouac certainly did. Whether you were the president, or the general, or the CEO, there was this assumption that you had been ordained in the holy hierarchy to be there. But after about 1972, you really had to earn it in most people’s minds. You were no longer automatically worthy of respect just because you had power. That’s a pretty big shift.

  JULIUS LESTER

  There was a set of values by which America knew itself that the sixties challenged vigorously. The set of values was the way democracy had been defined, and the way democracy had been defined was white men on top. Well, the black power movement comes along and says, “No, we will define ourselves.” Black studies comes along and says, “No, black studies is not the study of black people. Black studies is the study of Western civilization from another point of view, from the point of view of those who have suffered under Western civilization.” That’s a huge value change.*2

  So who’s going to have power? Then the women’s movement comes along, and that really challenges white men at their core. Who controls the home? Who defines what women do? Well, men have always in American history been in charge of that. Women were saying what the black movement was saying, which was, “No, we define for ourselves who we are. We define for ourselves what our history is, and we’re going to look at history differently than you look at history.”

  ROBIN MORGAN

  For some of us it was transformational and there was no going back. There were moments when you could not but be incredibly proud to be part of anything that showed the human spirit in the way that some of these movements did. Primarily the civil rights movement, where you had children scrubbed with their little pigtails standing and singing while fire hoses were trained on them, or the peace movement, where you had people linking arms and being pepper sprayed or beaten for calling for an end to the war. You were part of moments where the human spirit was really at its best.

  I wouldn’t go back to 1970 for anything in the world. But I wouldn’t have not been in that year for anything in the world, either—in that time, in that place, doing what I did with the people I was doing it with. It was a real gift. People who get misty-eyed about that period drive me nuts because then I trot out all the things that were wrong with that period. But it was also a visionary period in the life of this country, and I’m glad I was a part of it.

  Whether rebelling against the draft, the atrocities of the war, police and FBI repression, the conformity of the 1950s, the sexist, racist establishment, or all of the above, the movement in the final years of the sixties threatened the entire power structure of American society and transformed the country.

  * * *

  *1 On May 19, 1972, Ho Chi Minh’s birthday, the Weather Underground exploded a bomb in a bathroom on the fourth floor of the Pentagon, causing serious damage and flooding.

  *2 In 1967, less than 5 percent of research universities offered black studies courses, and by 1971 the number had increased to 35 percent. Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire, p. 349.

  VOICES

  Karl Armstrong (born 1948) was the leader of four University of Wisconsin–Madison students who, on August 24, 1970, bombed Sterling Hall, home of the Army Mathematics Research Center, accidentally killing a thirty-three-year-old postdoctoral physics researcher, Robert Fassnacht. Armstrong went into hiding following the bombing and was caught on February 16, 1972, in Toronto. Sentenced to twenty-three years in prison, Armstrong was released after seven. Upon his release, he returned to Madison, where he operated a juice cart called Loose Juice on the university campus in Madison. He became friendly with Robert Fassnacht’s widow, Stephanie, and daughter, Heidi, who also live in Madison.

  Rick Ayers (1946), an antiwar and anti-draft activist during the 1960s and 1970s, is the brother of Bill Ayers. After dropping out of the University of Michigan and fleeing to Canada to avoid the draft, Ayers returned to America in 1969 and joined the army with the intention of organizing fellow soldiers to go AWOL. Ayers briefly joined the Weather Underground after deserting the army in 1970. Today he is a professor of education at the University of San Francisco, as well as the author of five books, including Teaching the Taboo (2010), which he coauthored with his brother Bill.

  William “Bill” Ayers (born 1944) was a founding member of the radical Weathermen group. Ayers is married to Bernardine Dohrn and the two were fugitives from 1970 to 1980. They had two sons while living underground. When they surfaced, the charges against Ayers—and most of the other members of the Weather Underground—were dropped, because the FBI had been illegally spying on the group. Ayers is now an elementary school theorist, author, and retired professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a prolific blogger and lecturer, has published dozens of articles about education policy, and has written thirteen books (including two memoirs). Barack Obama, as a presidential candidate in 2008, was attacked for serving on the same charity board with Ayers in Chicago.

  Phil Ball (born 1949) served as a marine in Vietnam in 1968. Afterward he enrolled as a student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and became an antiwar activist. He published a book of combat diaries, Ghosts and Shadows: A Marine in Vietnam, 1968–1969 (2012).

  John Perry Barlow (born 1947) is a poet, writer, lyricist, cyber-rights activist, and former cattle rancher. Barlow wrote many of the Grateful Dead’s best songs with his high school friend Bob Weir. We have Barlow to thank for “Cassidy,” “Mexicali Blues,” “Looks Like Rain,” “Estimated Prophet,” “Let It Grow,” and many others. He is the cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and has been a fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School since 1998. Barlow travels the globe as a consultant and lecturer on civil rights, freedom of speech, and cyber civil liberties. He is a friend and supporter of Edward Snowden.

  Jan Barry (born 1943) is a poet, author, journalist, and educator. Barry served in the army in Vietnam and is cofounder of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He carried the first VVAW banner during a New York antiwar demonstration in 1967. Barry’s poems on the war have appeared in the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times and anthologies such as From Both Sides Now: The Poetry of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath (1998).

  Carl Bernstein (born 1944) is a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and investigative journalist who has written books on Richard Nixon, Hillary Clinton, and Pope John Paul II. In 1972, Bernstein and Bob Woodward, young reporters at The Washington Post, broke the Watergate story. Together they wrote All the President’s Men (1974) and The Final Days (1977). Bernstein has written for Vanity Fair, Time, USA Today, Rolling Stone, and The New Republic, and was a Washington bureau chief and correspondent for ABC News.

  Heather Booth (born 1945) is a civil rights, peace, and feminist organizer and one of the country’s leading strategists for progressive issue campaigns. Booth is the president of Midwest Academy, which trains social change leaders and organizers. As a student at the University of Chicago, Booth initiated one of the first campus women’s consciousness-raising groups, Women’s Radical Action Program. She is a founding member of t
he Jane Collective, a Chicago women’s health group that performed about twelve thousand safe, illegal abortions between 1969 and 1973.

  Sam Brown (born 1943) is a political organizer and an antiwar activist. Brown was the head of ACTION under President Jimmy Carter, and ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. He was an antiwar activist and the youth coordinator of “Get Clean for Gene,” an effort by antiwar students to cut their hair and shave their beards to campaign door-to-door for Senator Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential run. Brown was also a founding member of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, which organized the largest U.S. antiwar demonstration of all time, on October 15, 1969.

  Wesley Brown (born 1945) is a playwright, novelist, and emeritus professor at Rutgers University, where he taught creative writing and literature for twenty-six years. His most recent novel, Push Comes to Shove (2011), focuses on an African American activist group in the late 1960s that is targeted by the U.S. government. Briefly a member of the Black Panther Party, Brown went to federal prison for eighteen months for resisting the draft.