Dupes

That said, the 1960s student movement was motivated by some genuine concerns. This youth culture raised legitimate questions about a war that seemed to have no end but produced a definitive list of names of the dead in the local paper. These young people also recognized that the outrageous treatment of black Americans for two centuries was overdue for redress.

  The leadership of the student antiwar movement, in particular, was keenly interested in the issues. But their objectives, which the former student leaders will candidly discuss even today, were different from—and far more militant than—those of the young non-Communist liberals they enlisted for their rallies and protests. Those objectives were colored Red rather than the sunny rainbow of peace placards. The dedicated comrades leading the way really did want a revolution all right—and many still do. And they found their dupes among the rank-and-file protesters.

  One of the most prominent of these student movements was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Categorizing SDS's melting pot of antiwar activists is no easy task, but the leadership of this group—and especially of the contingent that splintered into Weatherman—makes for a fascinating case study of how the anti–Vietnam War movement morphed dramatically from “peace” marches into something far more sinister.

  After the 1967 spring uprising, and especially following the student strikes during Vietnam Week, SDS was invigorated. By the time of its annual national convention in June 1968, where it prepared to storm the Democratic National Convention in August, SDS boasted thirty thousand members and three hundred chapters across the United States, making it the largest radical student organization in the nation. It was ready for big things.

  Socialist Origins

  Though a ’60s group, SDS could trace its origins back much earlier. Initially the group was known as the Student League for Industrial Democracy. Started in the early 1930s, it was the youth arm of the socialist League for Industrial Democracy, an organization founded early in the century by such high-profile socialists as politician Norman Thomas and authors Jack London and Upton Sinclair. In 1959 the Student League for Industrial Democracy changed its name to Students for a Democratic Society. The new SDS lifted the previous ban on Communists as members, and, in fact, welcomed Marxists with open arms. This was no surprise: many of the leaders were Marxists.1

  SDS began attracting a variety of different types of Communists and Communist groups, such as the Maoist Progressive Labor Party. The SDS kids picked a curious time to lie with the Maoists: tens of millions of Chinese perished at the hands of Chairman Mao during his disastrous collectivization known as the Great Leap Forward (1957–60) and, later, during the human insanity known as the Cultural Revolution (1966–69). In September 1965 the League for Industrial Democracy severed all ties with SDS.

  The most important player in the early SDS was Tom Hayden, born December 1939 in Detroit, Michigan. Hayden, unlike most of the SDS leadership, was not a red-diaper baby. His close friend David Horowitz, who was a red-diaper baby, notes that Hayden harbored what Irving Howe once described as an “obscure personal rage,” possibly from his upbringing by an alcoholic father with whom he was not on speaking terms. “Tom was indeed an angry man,” records Horowitz, “who seemed in perpetual search of enemies.”2

  Hayden began his activism as a student at the University of Michigan, eventually an SDS hotbed. He served as SDS president in 1962 and 1963, drafting the organization's founding charter, the Port Huron Statement. This manifesto contained a historically neglected but crucial section on a perceived plague facing America, a “major social problem”—anti-Communism. This section of the statement was written by Hayden's mentor, Richard Flacks, whose parents were Communist schoolteachers.3

  Hayden's fame and impact would spike up in 1968. He was a ringleader of the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention that summer, and his activities in Chicago were nothing short of scandalous, especially his deceptive provocations.4 He was arrested at the convention, becoming one of the “Chicago Eight” charged with inciting the uprising, along with such radicals as Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.

  Also in 1968, Hayden and an SDS delegation traveled to the Communist bloc, where, according to observer Sol Stern, who was there as a privileged correspondent for the radical Ramparts, “The SDSers held a seminar with the Communists on how to conduct their psychological warfare campaign against the United States.”5 Hayden's notoriety surged when he took one of his controversial trips to Cambodia and Vietnam with the young actress Jane Fonda, daughter of liberal actor Henry Fonda, who, along with Humphrey Bogart, had been one of the members of the 1947 Committee for the First Amendment, which protested the work of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

  Of course, Jane Fonda is herself a huge story. The wealthy young actress was a go-go girl for Communism, regularly telling student audiences: “If you would understand what Communism was, you would pray on your knees that we would someday be Communist.”6 Once arriving in Hanoi, she became a cheerleader for the Vietcong.7 The trip was arranged (in part) by Wilfred Burchett, who was later identified by KGB defector Yuri Krotkov as a Soviet agent; Burchett also reportedly helped script Fonda's talks.8 The actress became the toast of the Communist world for her “heroics” on behalf of “anti-imperialism” and anti-Americanism. Her face was splashed across media everywhere—especially by an ecstatic Communist press. As pretty Jane Fonda flirted and cavorted with the Communist enemy, tight clothes, wavy hair, curvaceous figure, fist in the air, grinning aboard and aside Vietcong weaponry, the Soviets and North Vietnamese were smitten.

  And so was Tom Hayden. His first marriage was finished; shortly after Fonda's theatrics in Southeast Asia, he married the actress.

  By that point, SDS was finished as well. It had splintered into rival factions, the most infamous being a domestic Communist-terrorist group called Weatherman. The key leadership figures who made the transition from SDS to Weatherman were Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Jeff Jones, Michael Klonsky, Carl Davidson, John Jacobs, Kathy Boudin, and Mark Rudd. Some of them remained with Weatherman, going underground, in some cases as fugitives from the law, and forming the Weather Underground, whereas others fell away from the faith and the movement—but never completely.

  The Ringleaders

  Among the ringleaders in the transition from SDS to Weatherman was Bernardine Dohrn, born Bernardine Ohrnstein in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in January 1942.9 The young Dohrn was raised in an upper-middle-class suburb. She led a normal life—high-school cheerleader, member of the dance club and honor society, editor of the student newspaper. She left Milwaukee to attend college and law school at the University of Chicago, graduating with bachelor's and law degrees in 1963 and 1967.

  It was Dohrn's early work in law that brought her into contact with Communist radicals, as she began working for the National Lawyers Guild, the legal bulwark for CPUSA. In 1967 she headed to New York to work with the guild. Through that association she began to emerge on the national scene.

  In 1968 Dohrn was an active participant at the January meeting of the National Lawyers Guild, along with comrades Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis, plus about a dozen others. So close was Dohrn to the guild that the minutes for the group's January 26, 1968, meeting actually listed her address as 5 Beekman, New York, NY 10038—the address of the guild offices.10 It was as if she and the National Lawyers Guild were one and the same, though the former Milwaukee schoolgirl managed to drift even to the left of her comrade counselors.

  A few months later, at the June 1968 annual SDS convention, Dohrn and Michael Klonsky—two of the organization's three newly elected national secretaries—announced in a public session that they were Communists.11 By August, Dohrn was front and center in Chicago, playing her part in igniting the city and undermining the Democratic convention.

  She was present, too, at the October 1968 congressional hearings on the Democratic convention. Her name was raised several times, to the point that counsel in the audience interjected to ask committee chairman Richard Ichord if
the young lady could step forward to “respond to her name.”12

  The Midwest girl had a couple of steadies in the movement. Her first beau was Jeff Jones, an SDS leader five years her junior. As the New York regional organizer for SDS, Jones coordinated the rabid chapters at Columbia and Cornell, the heirs of the 1920s radicals in New York City and Ithaca. He was one of three SDS organizers invited to Hanoi in December 1967 by the Vietnamese Student Union. Jones, too, was on hand to disrupt the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.13 By the fall of 1969 he had joined Bernardine in at least one incident that Congress categorized as a “SDS-initiated act of violence or demonstration advocating violence.” Also that fall, Jones was involved in (without Dohrn) what Congress called an “SDS invasion” of several Pittsburgh high schools.14

  Another younger man to Dohrn's liking was Bill Ayers, who took Bernar-dine's hand from Jeff Jones. A Chicago native, Ayers was, like Corliss Lamont, like Fred Field, a champion of the proletariat who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. His father, Thomas Ayers, was CEO of Commonwealth Edison of Chicago and a big shot in the corporate world who served on the boards of companies, foundations, and universities. His well-born son would demand that others (under force of government fiat) give up their possessions while not surrendering his own. In fact, as author Daniel J. Flynn reports, Bill Ayers “still accepted his allowance [from his father] despite engaging in parricidal rhetoric, rationalizing that it was fine by him if his dad bankrolled the revolution.”15

  Like Tom Hayden and Arthur Miller before him, Ayers was a student at the University of Michigan, preparing for a life of revolution and education.16 The University of Michigan was the right place for Ayers's budding interest in educational development. During this period, the University of Michigan, which had proudly hosted John Dewey's first academic appointment, produced influential textbooks for the field of education with titles like Training for Change Agents: A Guide to the Design of Training Programs in Education and Other Fields.17

  Ayers would spend the rest of his life seeking to be a “change agent” and working to advance the political careers of “change agents.”

  Initially, however, that change was not coming quickly enough for him—or for his comrades over at Columbia.

  The Columbia Cell

  As in the 1920s, Columbia University had itself quite a crew in the 1960s. The roster was so loaded that it is difficult to condense it to a short list.

  Among others, there was Howard Machtinger, who earned bachelor's degrees in sociology and English from Columbia in 1966 before moving on to do graduate work in sociology at the University of Chicago, where he would be on-site for the SDS-Weatherman eruptions.

  Also at Columbia was John Jacobs. Born in September 1947, Jacobs was raised in a far-left family where he imbibed the readings of Karl Marx. His father, Douglas, was a well-known leftist journalist. Young John enrolled at Columbia in 1965.

  Arriving at the university that same semester was Mark Rudd, who became Jacobs's best friend, and would become the most influential of the entire Columbia apparatus.

  Rudd was born Mark William Rudnitsky in Irvington, New Jersey, in June 1947. His mother and father were non-Marxist Jewish immigrants from Poland and Lithuania. His parents, hardworking and more blue-collar, had a very different worldview from the Jacobses and other parents of radical Columbia children.

  After struggling to find his place in the world as an uneasy youth, and spending many hours on a couch talking to his psychiatrist, Rudd found his calling at Columbia University, where he ended up heading the school's SDS chapter. He practically set the college on fire. Columbia was the perfect place for Rudd, given its history, its far-left activism, and its reinforcement of Communists.

  Drawn to Rudd and the boys were several female comrades, particularly Kathy Boudin, another founding member of SDS and Weatherman. Boudin was born May 19, 1943, to a family of prominent Jewish Marxists and progressives in New York City. This included an uncle, Louis Boudin, who was a well-known theoretician, and her father, Leonard Boudin, who was a Harvard constitutional law professor and National Lawyers Guild attorney whose clients included Paul Robeson, the Socialist Workers Party, the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (for which he served as general counsel), Fidel Castro, and Benjamin Spock. Leonard's brother-in-law was I. F. Stone.18

  Of course, the Boudins’ identification with the workingman went only so far. They lived in an opulent New York brownstone that the hit 1980s sitcom The Cosby Show later used as the façade for the wealthy TV family's home.19 Such, of course, has always been the arrangement between the Left's leaders and the masses they purport to represent: the apparatchiks get their dachas; the serfs get their ghettoes.

  When Kathy Boudin was a little girl, her parents sent her to primary school at the Downtown Community School, a supplement to the Little Red School House, which was founded in the early 1920s by New York Communists and progressives. There, Kathy met musical talents like Pete Seeger, who regularly played and taught at the school, and who performed at the summer “Commie camps” where the New York faithful sent their children (the Red version of Vacation Bible School).20 Other New York comrades placed their children in the Downtown Community School, including Franklin Folsom, a writer for TASS, the official Soviet news agency; Simon Gerson, editor of the Daily Worker; and V. J. Jerome, editor of the Communist Party's theoretical journal Political Affairs. Famed anthropologist Margaret Mead (a liberal, with graduate degrees from Columbia), also sent her daughter there, and Lillian Hellman was on the school's board of trustees.21

  The leftist parents and the administrators at the school frequently bickered: Stalinists versus Trotskyites, progressives versus Communists, liberal Christians versus secular liberals, observant Jews versus nonobservant Jews. The only theories they universally adhered to were those of John Dewey, their unifying force. The director of the Downtown Community School was Norman Studer, a Ph.D. student of Dewey at Columbia. While a teacher at the Little Red School House, he had taken his pupils on field trips to Communist May Day parades. He also wrote for New Masses.22

  As Kathy Boudin matured, she entered radical circles of her own. She dated one of the sons of convicted Soviet atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (the Soviets’ code name for Julius was “Liberal”).23 When she went to college at Bryn Mawr, her academic “role model,” according to Boudin family biographer Susan Braudy, was Corliss Lamont, a close friend of her father.24 She was already to the left of her father when Mr. Boudin decided to send her to the Soviet Union for fifteen months of study in 1965. There she held forth on a Soviet collective, endeavoring to enlighten the young Soviet masses about how American fascists responded to Communism with hysteria. She was taken aback, however—not only by the poverty of the Soviet youngsters but also by their insistence that the Soviet system was far worse than anything Joe McCarthy had done in America. “How many of your friends, for all their protests, are in jail now?” they asked her. Boudin's answer: none.25

  Returning to the United States, Boudin knew where to go to find youth who actually believed in Communism: Columbia University. While organizing protests from New York City to Chicago, she hooked up with the Columbia contingent to drink in the bountiful opportunities for campus Communist politics that only this radical university afforded.

  Who Are We Fighting? Liberal Democrats

  All of these young activists were against the Vietnam War, of course. But they were also against the Democratic Party, and against liberals.

  As a freshman at Columbia, Mark Rudd learned this quickly from his senior classmates. “The liberals say the war in Vietnam is a well-intentioned mistake,” a classmate lectured Rudd from a platform in March 1966, in one of the earliest campus protests of the war. “Bullsh-t! It was the liberals who started it.”26

  These youngsters did not like Lyndon Johnson. They had not liked John F. Kennedy. They were against the war well before Republican Richard Nixon was its commander in chief. “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids
did you kill today?” Columbia's comrades chanted as they marched down Fifth Avenue from Ninety-first Street to Seventy-second Street.

  In his 2009 memoir, Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen—a depraved but commendably honest tell-all—Mark Rudd made plain that he and his fellow apparatchiks were fighting against liberal Democrats. “It was the liberal enemy [that was] trying to destroy our movement,” wrote Rudd. “Liberals, including Robert Kennedy, his martyred brother John, and LBJ had given us Vietnam in the first place.”27 Again, this is a point that many of today's liberals seem not to grasp.

  If the young radicals were fighting against liberals, who were they fighting for? Like so many others in the antiwar movement's upper echelons, plenty of the ringleaders favored the enemy; they were for the North Vietnamese, and for Communism. They were pro-Mao, pro-Castro, pro-Che, pro-Lenin, and some were even pro-Stalin. Very few were working-class kids. Most, in fact, had been pampered rich kids, red-diaper babies from well-off, highly educated families in New York and the Northeast.28 Rudd made this clear in his memoir, in which he acknowledged that he and his fellow Ivy League Marxists made frequent trips into blue-collar neighborhoods around the country, especially in Chicago, to preach to the proletariat, only to get beaten up by the “greasers.” This saddened the enlightened apparatchiks: the unwashed, ignorant masses did not know what was good for them; the brave new world would need to be imposed upon them.