Dupes

  But they were reinvigorated when they got back to the anointed halls of Columbia. There, said Rudd, he would listen in rapt attention at SDS meetings, captivated by “passionate debates by upper-classmen and graduate students about China's Cultural Revolution, the Cuban revolution, the nature of American class society.… They all agreed on one solution, Marxist revolution.”29 In addition to the writings of Mao, Lenin, and Marx, the young Reds gobbled up the writings of secret Soviet agent Wilfred Burchett, which the Vietcong were simultaneously force-feeding to American POWs at the Hanoi Hilton.30

  Speaking of those POWs, in 1967 Rudd got himself a cherished gift: a titanium ring hammered from the debris of a downed U.S. aircraft in Vietnam. He couldn't wait to put it around his finger. “I wore mine proudly for years afterward,” said Rudd.31

  Crass as that sounds, it was not unusual. Another New Jersey kid at Columbia, Michael Lerner—later editor of the Jewish spiritual magazine Tikkun and (in the 1990s) celebrated “Politics of Meaning” guru to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton—exchanged such rings with his bride during their wedding ceremony. His wife had brought them back from North Vietnam, with the metal from the downed fuselage to be an eternal symbol of their love, the consummation of a radical marriage.32 Such rings were a badge of honor to certain Columbia faithful.33

  Rudd also found inspiration in Che Guevara's dispatch of “undying militancy” just before he was killed in Bolivia: “Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism and a battle hymn for the people's unity against the great enemy of mankind: the United States of America. Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome.”34

  Mark Rudd and his Communist friends mourned the death of their beloved Che. Now they would elevate him as their “revolutionary martyr and saint” (Rudd's words) at the funeral of the United States of America, the great enemy of mankind.35 They would fight for Che, Fidel, Cuba, and the USSR, and against LBJ, JFK, and the United States.

  This was their religion, their faith. Che was their Jesus Christ: “Like a Christian seeking to emulate the life of Christ,” Rudd remembered, “I passionately wanted to be a revolutionary like Che, no matter what the cost.”36

  Blowing Up Columbia

  To that end, Rudd led riots on the Columbia campus. Most infamously, he spearheaded the shocking Columbia student revolt of 1968. Rudd and the other youth protesters shouted obscenities at the administration through bullhorns, smashed windows, broke down doors, pillaged and seized the offices of the president, occupied university buildings, and shut down the entire campus. At long last at Columbia, it was October 1917; the revolution had finally commenced. As Rudd wrote in his SDS pamphlet, titled simply “Columbia,” “It was no accident that we hung up pictures of Karl Marx and Malcolm X and Che Guevara and flew red flags from the tops of two buildings.”37

  Columbia, declared the agitators, was “liberated.” But in reality the scene was a tragedy. It is a shame that the Potemkin Progressive professors who forty years earlier had sown the seeds for this destruction were not there to witness the bitter fruits of their political indoctrination. John Dewey had long since passed away. Even the once duped who had come to their senses about the Communists, like Whittaker Chambers, had died. Thomas Merton, devoutly focused on transcending this fallen existence and rising above its inanities—he was now a Trappist monk—unexpectedly perished that year at the age of fifty-three.

  Of course, Corliss Lamont probably enjoyed every minute. He likely strolled to the scene from his New York apartment to bask in the images of Lenin, as he and his wife had once done in Moscow. Likewise, Columbia's Religious Left clergy was inspired by the violent revolt. The Protestant pastors were invigorated with a heightened sense of “social justice.” As Diana Trilling described the clergy reaction to the student occupation, they “threw themselves with hearts bleeding and souls aflame into this newest movement of youthful idealism.”38

  As usual, the Religious Left was there as sucker. This time, however, the academic Left was not so willing. College presidents shuddered in fear at the student takeover. Well, not all college presidents:The University of Chicago's Robert Maynard Hutchins, a favorite of Frank Marshall Davis because of his scathing attacks on “Red-baiting,” “witch-hunting” anti-Communism, was impressed by the student coup. The former chancellor suggested that the plotters “not only should be granted full amnesty for taking over five college buildings for six days, but should be honored at special graduation ceremonies for forcing open the door to university reform.”39 Heretofore, Columbia had not been far enough to the left for Dr. Hutchins.

  Hutchins had one thing right: the doors certainly had been forced open; most, in fact, had been kicked down. As a Newsweek cover attested, Rudd and the children were in charge.40 Student strikes ensued, and a general rage enveloped Columbia for weeks. It was sheer madness. It was violence—what Rudd himself dubbed “total war” on campus.41 It had been orchestrated, from the top, by Com-munists—American Communists. And there to supply marchers for the young Bolsheviks were the liberal innocents, likewise protesting “the war.”

  Again, the ringleaders knew much more than the dupes who offered the bodies to fill the streets. One can only hope that some of the naïve at least raised an eyebrow at the sight of Red flags hoisted atop Columbia University's seized buildings at the moment of “victory.”

  To the SDS radicals, Columbia had now richly earned the mantle of Che Guevara. The comrades envisioned it as their own version of Moscow State University. More than that, they saw the uprising as just a start. The goal was to remake campuses across the country in Columbia's image. SDS national secretary Carl Davidson said that the “Columbia rebellion” had provided a model for the nation. Likewise, in Ramparts magazine, edited by young Communists David Horowitz and Peter Collier, who today are prominent anti-Communist conservatives, Tom Hayden employed a new battle cry, a paraphrase of Saint Che's mantra for Vietnam: “Create two, three, many Columbias!”42

  And Mark Rudd and the Columbia militants had much more in store. Within a year of the student revolt, Rudd writes, “Columbia would give birth to the ‘revolutionary’ faction known as Weatherman.”43

  From SDS to Weatherman

  Not surprisingly, the political harlot that was Columbia University spawned a wretched child in Weatherman.

  Rudd succinctly sums up the bastard son that he, more than any other figure, created: “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.”44

  That was the stated objective of the Weathermen: the violent overthrow of the United States government. The ’60s Communists were not much different from CPUSA; both sides shared the same end goal, differing only in means, and candor and maturity.

  The shift toward Weatherman was the culmination of a deep split within SDS. The hardcore Marxists among the SDS leadership had balkanized into different factions, from Maoists to followers of Che and Fidel and even to Stalinists. One Stalinist was Mike Klonsky, the SDS national secretary based in Chicago. Klonsky had Communism in his bloodline, particularly from his father, who, according to liberal lore, was another of those innocent practitioners of civil liberties hounded by the evil Joe McCarthy. Rudd recalls a meeting in 1969 when Klonsky “several times” told Rudd and Howard Machtinger that “Stalin is the cutting edge.” This “adulation of Joseph Stalin” (Rudd's description) made no sense to Rudd and Machtinger.45 Such internal differences drove a wedge between SDS principals, which led Rudd and others to break off with Weatherman.

  Another critical area of separation involved the divergent feelings about violence. The typical rank-and-file SDSer was an antiwar, pro-peace, nonviolent liberal, whereas certain leaders—Rudd among them—openly expressed their commitment to violence in order to hasten the revolution. Mercifully, endorsements of violence woke up some of the duped non-Communist liberals in SDS. Eventually the more violent among the SDSers formed Weatherman. In addition to Rudd, We
atherman would include such bomb-setting fanatics as Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers.

  Two events in Chicago in 1969 precipitated the formation of Weatherman. First, there was the final SDS national convention. It opened June 18, 1969, at the Chicago Coliseum on South Wabash, just down the street from the Chicago police headquarters, home of the “pigs” with whom Rudd and his violent cohorts prepared for war. With America and its policemen and servicemen as the identified enemy, Che's partisans were ready for action. It was at this convention that Rudd and his fellow militants began publicly referring to themselves as “Weathermen.”

  Next, with Rudd, Ayers, Dohrn, John Jacobs, and Jeff Jones taking the lead, the cadre came together in the protest they called the National Action, held in Chicago October 8–11, 1969. The group gathered under the banner “BRING THE WAR HOME!”—Jacobs is credited as the author of that slogan—and issued battle cries like “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is going to win!”46

  The National Action had been planned a year earlier in Boulder, Colorado. Jacobs had drafted the resolution, which was titled “The Elections Don't Mean Sh-t—Vote Where the Power Is—Our Power Is in the Street.” Jacobs declared an “all-out civil war over Vietnam” and against “fascist U.S. imperialism.”47

  Rudd affirmed the plan of action: “In Chicago the pigs have to be wiped out. We're going to fight with violence and wipe out Chicago.” SDS planned to have fifteen thousand student demonstrators on hand for the event, which coincided with the trial of the Chicago Eight.48 Joining Rudd and Jacobs for the festivities were Ayers, Dohrn, Tom Hayden—on hand for an inspiring pep talk—Michael Klonsky, David Gilbert, Kathy Boudin, and the other usual suspects. What ensued was an organized riot, commenced on October 5, when the “flower children” dynamited the statue commemorating the Chicago police who had been killed in the 1886 Haymarket Riot. As far as the “students” were concerned, these men were not Chicago's finest but jackbooted swine. In the ensuing upheaval the protesters violently clashed with more than a thousand policemen.

  Mayor Daley's police won the battle, but it was not a total loss for the student revolutionaries. They found solace in the roughly thirty “pigs” they injured and in the city official who was paralyzed.49

  The day after that initial rampage, with the student Reds bruised and cut and beaten, or locked in jail, Bernardine Dohrn, the former cheerleader, tried to boost the spirits of the protesters at a rally in Grant Park. She was anointed the commissar to spearhead the Women's Militia.

  Coincidentally, that fall of 1969 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the American Communist Party in that same city. These young Reds were the heirs of those Marxist forebears. They walked the same streets where Charles Ruthenberg, long since buried at the Kremlin, excitedly reported to the Comintern back in the fall of 1919. At the Kremlin, Ruthenberg's corpse now rested close to Lenin in body; at Chicago, the comrades from Columbia and the University of Michigan and elsewhere were close to Lenin in spirit.

  Men of God, Days of Rage

  The National Action had become the “Days of Rage.” This was one of the ugliest incidents in the history of Chicago.

  The radicals who orchestrated this violence had the help of dupes, of course. Naïve non-Communist liberals helped the protesters deal with a sticky issue: where would this large radical contingent, upwards of six hundred organizers, find housing? There was no easy solution, especially since many were already wanted by the law for violent activities.

  The Religious Left stepped up to help. The liberal mainline denominations in Chicago and nearby Evanston established a special group to find housing for the young folks.50 As Mark Rudd put it, many of the protesters stayed in “churches loaned to us by sympathetic clergy.”51

  According to the official congressional investigator tasked to probe the incident, the revolutionaries stayed at University Disciple Church in Chicago and, in Evanston, at St. Luke's Lutheran Church, Covenant Methodist Church, and Garrett Theological Seminary. At Garrett a police officer was beaten.52

  The clergy had laid down one condition for the dope-smoking, weapons-toting militants: no dope or weapons in the churches. That simple rule, naturally, was violated. The Vietcong had used “sanctuaries” in Cambodia to launch attacks on American troops inside Vietnam, and now the young radicals used literal sanctuaries to stage assaults on their domestic enemies: the “pigs” that had always protected these churches and their congregations.

  Of course, the folks in the pews were not thrilled when they caught wind of this news. Members of the congregations and people from the surrounding community soon demanded that the duped preachers expel the extremists from their houses of worship. Fighting the fight for “social justice,” the good reverends sided with the marijuana smokers.

  In one case, the police were forced to enter the Covenant Methodist Church with warrants to arrest those who had engaged in violent action. There, reportedly, the Methodist minister complained that the police broke down the door. But as the congressional investigator calmly explained during hearings, “They broke the door down because the Weathermen had barricaded the door of the church and had refused to let the police serve the warrants.”53

  The pastor was shocked at what was happening in his church—shocked, that is, by the behavior of the police.

  War Council

  As so often happens with extremist movements, the increasing violence among the revolutionaries was descending into a bloodlust.

  Just a couple of months after the Days of Rage, the newly launched Weatherman organized an appropriately titled “War Council” meeting in Flint, Michigan. On December 27, 1969, some four hundred student troops attended the gathering, which the jocular activists described in the pamphlets as a “Wargasm.”

  John Jacobs, with his knack for bombast, conjured up another fitting slogan: “We're against everything that's good and decent.”54

  That vulgar certainty was made manifest when Bernardine Dohrn grabbed the microphone. True to form, the militant Milwaukee maiden went on a scorching rant. She described the group's mission thusly: “We're about being crazy motherf—ers and scaring the sh-t out of honky America!”55

  As if at a radical revival meeting, Mark Rudd got caught up in the fervor. He found himself uttering words he later regretted: “It's a wonderful feeling to hit a pig. It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up something.”56

  Likewise moved by the spirit, Kathy Boudin declared all mothers of white children to be “pig mothers.” Invoking the unity of the Christmas season, she led the faithful in a new rendition of Bing Crosby's “White Christmas”: “I'm dreaming of a white riot … ,” she sang. Boudin then shouted about “doing some sh-t like political assassinations.”57

  Bernardine Dohrn wanted to do even more. Much as Lenin was always adding to his list of “harmful insects”—the people destined for death or the gulag—Dohrn's category of “pigs” was rapidly expanding. In the very recent past, the pigs had been America's police and boys in Vietnam. Now Dohrn applied the “pigs” label to the innocent people whom the Charles Manson “family” had brutally murdered earlier that year. The future children's rights advocate expressed no sympathy for the victims of the satanic Manson brood, who broke into homes and mutilated a host of innocent people—including a married couple, the LaBiancas; the actress Sharon Tate, eight and a half months pregnant; three of Tate's friends; and a teenager named Steven Parent. Instead, Dohrn gleefully described the demonic spectacle produced by the Manson “revolutionaries”—including their horrifying act of ripping open Tate's belly, slashing her unborn child. Dohrn thrilled: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs. Then they ate dinner in the same room with them. Then they even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach! Wild!”58

  One would like to say that this moment of gory madness shocked even the hardcore in the room, but that would not be accurate. The faithful, from Dohrn's sweetheart, Bill Ayers, to everyone else in the hall, knew that she was serious59—and they dug it. As M
ark Rudd reported, the assembled “instantly adopted as Weather's salute four fingers held up in the air, invoking the fork left in Sharon Tate's belly.”60

  Rudd translated this message for the wider world: “The message was that we sh-t on all your conventional values, you murderers of black revolutionaries and Vietnamese babies. There were no limits to our politics of transgression.”61

  No, there were not. This is not quite the flowery image of the children dancing with daisies captured by modern hagiographers and ’60s documentarians.

  A line had been crossed—the first steps into a dark world. As with the Jacobins after the first drop of the guillotine, the blood began to flow, rushing from the altar where Bishop Dohrn exhorted the faithful. A “new decade now dawned,” judged Rudd, as “the New Red Army marched out from Flint, exhilarated and terrified.”62 Exhilarated to commit terror.

  Terrorism

  The New Red Army that Rudd described was the Weather Underground. This was itself an offshoot of Weatherman, as the revolutionaries most committed to destructive action decided that “peace” marches must be replaced by domestic terror cells and bomb-making units. In time the Weather Underground would proudly take credit for upwards of a dozen bombings. Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Kathy Boudin, David Gilbert, and Jeff Jones were among the violent founders of Weatherman who went underground. For at least some the decision to hide out was not a choice: they were wanted by the law for criminal acts and refusals to appear before courts to testify.