[3 articles] Mark Rudd Emerges from the Underground
http://www.nypress.com/blog-3728-mark-rudd-emerges-from-the-underground.html By: Stephanie Lee 3/24/09 Former radical group leader Mark Rudd of the Weather Underground, a 1960s militant offshoot group of Columbia's Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), returned to New York City to celebrate his new book Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen. Now a retired community college instructor living in New Mexico with his second wife, Rudd continues to stay active locally and spreads his story of organization and mass movement. "It is not a heroic story," he says, but Rudd hopes that his personal narrative might point budding activists in the right direction nevertheless. Stephanie J. Lee spoke with Rudd before his book party last night for an inside look on how to organize mass movements. -- New York Press: Tell me more about this book. What inspired you to write it? What are you hoping to convey? Mark Rudd: Basically the book is a story. It's my own story of good organizing, which is about Columbia, then it's followed by bad organizing, which is about the Weather Underground. By organizing, I mean what people do to build a movement and some of the terrible mistakes you could make while doing it. Good organizing is one-on-one engagement with peoplemuch like what we did at Columbia. Bad organizing is the belief that if you just express yourself, people will join you. I consider Weatherman to be that kind of self-expression and ineffective. From what I've been reading, it's unclear whether or not there was just one specific event that marked the founding of the Weathermen…? That's interesting. In a way, the specific event was the townhouse accidentthe bomb on Mar. 6, 1970 on West 11 St., where three people were killed. But the planning for it had begun before that. Its origins were in the ideas of militancy and armed struggle, you know, and the expression of how much we hated war and racism. That began at Columbia in 1968. In a sense, this is a New York story that I am telling. Can you speak a bit more to the evolution of the group, namely what it had become and your opinions on that? Well SDS very large organization, about 400 chapters on colleges and high school campuses. There was quite a large number in New York City. Within that group, some of us took away a lesson from the Columbia strike of April 1968, which was more militant. That seemed to be the lesson from Columbia. We linked that lesson with the knowledge or belief that there would be revolution around the world. This could be taken from the motto. We were all followers of Che Guevara. Between 1968 and 1970, we thought [the lesson learned] is what we were doing. We formed a factionWeathermen, which wanted to move the bigger organization into what was based on a piece of paper that group wrote for a convention in 1969. After that convention, I was elected national secretary. My faction won control of the national office in Chicago, and yet, we didn't really have that many supporters. There were maybe two dozen chapters that supported this line of anti-imperialism. At the end of '69 we made a decision to go underground and begin an armed struggle. We thought we were applying Che's theory. How successful do you think the Weathermen was in achieving its mission? Not at all! Everything we set out to do…Nothing we set out to do, we accomplished! How did you feel as the leader of this group? Any reflections on that role… I think part of the problem was that I was in over my head. I was posing as a great revolutionary, when in fact, I didn't really know what to do. It didn't take too long for that to catch up with me. Even though I was a founder of this organization, within months of being national secretary, I sort of went downward in the leadership. I demoted myself. I didn't believe I was who I was pretending to bethe great revolutionary leader. This is not a heroic story. Why did you leave the group? I was still a fugitive at the end of 1970. I was a fugitive from Mar. of 1970, and I officially left as a member at the end of 1970. I didn't really voice my criticism till much later. I thought that the problem was mine, that I was not strong enough to be the great heroic revolutionary that was needed. That's kind of one of the themes of the book. Can you speak more to the Ayers/Obama controversy? I would say that I was appalled by the attempt to sort of slur Obama through this casual acquaintanceship with Bill. As it was happening I thought geez, the Weather Underground killed three people by a bizarre accident, and yet John McCain dropped humongous bombs on people from 10,000 feet in the air on villages and towns. And how many innocent people did he slaughter? But they all talk about Ayers being a terrorist. McCain was an actual terrorist! I mean that's what war is, especially mechanized warit's terrorism. I think I would have loved it if that fact had come out. It's terroristic but it's called war and sanctioned by the state, and therefore it's okay. The US was murdering millions at the time of Vietnam, and we were all affected by this violence. I think we were a pale reflection of that terrorism. So that's what I thought about the whole business. How do you feel about Obama? I mean I was a strong supporter during the election. I would like to see him take a much more principled stand on Israel, and a more balanced stand rather than an unbalanced pro-Israel stand. And for him to bring out some new economic policies while taking out the old Bush policies. Did you read the Paul Krugman article? The one today about old Bush policies? I want him to do more and take a better, more moral position, and also, not pursue the war. I'm a critical supporter of Obama, you know, to push Obama. And I think he's open for that and that's the beauty of the situation. What sort of advice do you have for protesters who are very unhappy with the way things are going right now, namely the War in Iraq but certainly the concerns of Iran and Afghanistan as well? We've got to organize. We've got to organize a mass movement and keep going and keep pushing Obama. I can put it in a nut shell: We have to organize a movement for a second New Deal, and we have to fund it by taking money away from the military. I think security can be established by diplomacy, but we need a mass movement to make this happen. We need a total turnaround from the U.S. Now back to you, why did you leave New York? Why New Mexico? During the time I was a fugitive, I got to know New Mexico and I fell in love with the place. I'm literally in love with the land and the people, and that's where I want to be. But I when I think about it here in New York, I think one of the wonderful things about New Mexico is that there's less social segregation than in New York. People mix a bit more between classes and races. New York is very segregated internally. Even if you happen to live in the same building, you don't get to know people. You're stuck in the same class and in the same clique. I found New York to be way too segregated for my liking. That's what originally drove me out, and I don't think it changed any. Do you? I can live a more integrated life in terms of diversity of friends in New Mexico. There was a long period of time when you had no communication with your parents. Can you tell me more about how your involvement with this group affected your family life? Yeah we didn't speak for seven and a half years. My parents were very hurt and very fearful for me. It was like a time of terror. When I turned myself in, we made peace with each other. Oh gosh, it's been 30 years since then. I have two children, and I'm about to have grandchildren. And everyone made peace, but it was a horrible time especially for my mother and father. I'm very remorseful about what I put them through. I thought at the time that it was necessary. Are you married? Do you have any kids? Yes, well I'm in my second marriage. My first marriage was with a woman from the Weather Underground. I dedicated my book to her. I was a bachelor for 18 years and now I've remarried. And I have two children. What are you doing now? I've retired from teaching at the community college. I'm organizing in my neighborhood for economic justice issues. Over the years I've been active in peace, labor and environmental movements. I'm doing lots of different things. I speak a lot at colleges and speak to college students about organizing. Basically, I tell my story. -------- 'Underground' by Mark Rudd http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-ca-mark-rudd29-2009mar29,0,4098976.story A memoir by a former member of SDS and the Weathermen -- and we're not talking about William Ayers. By Jon Wiener March 29, 2009 Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen Mark Rudd William Morrow: 326 pp., $25.99 Mark Rudd is the guy from the Weather Underground who is not Bill Ayers. Both were leaders of the group that worked for the violent overthrow of the United States government in the 1970s, but while Ayers remains unapologetic, Rudd is full of regrets. Rudd is not Bill Ayers in other ways: Sarah Palin did not accuse Barack Obama of palling around with him, nor has he been featured on the New York Times op-ed page or interviewed on "Fresh Air With Terry Gross." Instead, he has lived in obscurity, as a community college math teacher in New Mexico, since the government dropped charges against him in 1977. The 2003 documentary "The Weather Underground" celebrated the "idealistic passion" that led Ayers and his comrades to their campaign of bombing public buildings. At the end of the film, Rudd appeared briefly for the first time in 25 years, "a befuddled, gray-haired, overweight, middle-aged guy" full of "guilt and shame." At least that's the way he describes himself at the beginning of "Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen." It was that image, Rudd says, that drove him to write this book -- because in the film "I never get to explain what I'm guilty and ashamed of." The Weather Underground was a splinter faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the radical antiwar group that by the late 1960s had chapters on hundreds of campuses. Around 1969, the Weathermen (who named themselves after Bob Dylan's line "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows") concluded that the American people would never stop the war in Vietnam. Rather, it was up to them -- a few dozen kids -- to act on behalf of the Vietnamese people by placing small bombs in places like the Capitol and the Pentagon. The kids knew best This, or so the logic went, would somehow spark an uprising of young blacks and Latinos to overthrow the government. Even the Vietnamese Communist leaders believed the Weathermen had the wrong strategy, that they should work to persuade mainstream Americans to end the war. But the American kids knew better. Rudd gets right to the point in the opening pages of "Underground": "Much of what the Weathermen did had the opposite effect of what we intended," he writes. "We de-organized 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. . . . We might as well have been on their payroll." Rudd's story begins with his parents dropping him off at Columbia University the first day of freshman week 1965. What follows is a straightforward narrative of events, in which he and millions of other young Americans were radicalized by the war. The book has a series of climaxes: first, the triumphant student occupation of Columbia's administration building in the spring of 1968 and the brutal police bust that followed -- which made headlines internationally and set an example for radical students at colleges across the country. Next, he details the formation of the Weathermen in 1969 and the disastrous explosion that killed three members in a Greenwich Village town house in 1970. After that came seven years of life underground, lonely and intermittently terrifying. Finally, we get the happy ending -- Rudd coming up from underground in 1977, settling his legal case, embracing normal life and returning to antiwar activism when President George W. Bush invaded Iraq. Rebellion in bloom Rudd conveys well the festival-like joy of the springtime campus uprisings of the late 1960s: passionate discussions under the trees about the causes of war and strategies for stopping it; music and drugs on all sides; dancing long into the night; "a fluorescence of energy and imagination such as Columbia had never seen." It was like that at hundreds of other schools over the next few years. The authorities looked at these developments and saw only violence and destruction. The New York Times quoted a Columbia administrator's description of Rudd as "totally unscrupulous and morally very dangerous . . . an adolescent having a temper tantrum." The media embraced this image of him as quintessential student rebel, but to his credit, Rudd says that "the organizing at Columbia was the work of hundreds of people at least as committed, intelligent, and articulate as I was." The heart of "Underground" comes about halfway through, in 1969, when SDS was challenged by the hard-core Maoists of the Progressive Labor Party. The Progressive Labor faction had a strategy for revolution: a "worker-student alliance" to overthrow capitalism. The national leadership of SDS -- Rudd and his friends -- concluded that they needed one too. What they came up with was to call on young people to become urban guerrillas to fight "Amerikka." The overwhelming majority of SDS rejected both perspectives, but the faction fight destroyed the organization. "The destruction of SDS was probably the single greatest mistake I've made in my life," Rudd declares forthrightly. "It was a historical crime." You might think all that is obvious now. But it isn't -- at least not to Ayers. He wrote about the Weather Underground in the New York Times in December 2008, declaring that "our effectiveness can be -- and still is being -- debated." His only real regret, he said on "Fresh Air," is that the violent tactics of the Weathermen didn't end the war. But, he added, neither did peaceful protest -- so who can say who was right and who was wrong? Both Rudd and Ayers want today's activists to learn from the mistakes of the 1960s. But nobody opposed to the war in Iraq thinks that becoming an urban guerrilla and putting a bomb in the Pentagon is going to help bring the troops home. Rudd's historical judgments are, to use a phrase from the era, "right on." Still, what may be most striking about "Underground" is how irrelevant its lessons are for our time. -- Wiener teaches American history at UC Irvine and is a contributing editor to the Nation. -------- Days of Rage Recalled http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123819009072860721.html An unrepentant 1960s radical recounts his past as protester and fugitive By STEFAN KANFER MARCH 28, 2009 Underground By Mark Rudd William Morrow, 325 pages, $25.99 Mark Rudd was a prominent student leader in 1968 when the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) occupied several buildings at Columbia University in New York. I lived across the street at the time and well remember their collective tantrum. Taking over the administrative offices by force, they issued a roster of demands. These included (a) the abandonment of plans for a gym that Columbia intended to build in Harlem -- even though community leaders had approved the proposal seven years earlier; (b) a break between the university and the Institute for Defense Analyses, a weapons-research think tank; (c) official denouncement of the Selective Service System, which was drafting college-age men for military duty in Vietnam; and (d) total amnesty for Mr. Rudd and the Ruddlets. Police were brought in and hundreds of students rioted, trashing the campus along with parts of the surrounding neighborhood. In Mr. Rudd's "Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen" -- a series of rationales for the autobiographer's toxic behavior as a young man, followed by one of the most unconvincing mea culpas since Bernie Madoff turned himself in -- he cluelessly describes the collision of authority and adolescence at Columbia. "It certainly didn't help that we antagonized the cops by calling them 'pigs' and 'm---------ers.' " (Mr. Rudd doesn't bother with the hyphens.) He goes on to describe his behavior following an argument with a professor. The prof actually wanted to teach students rather than help them destroy an institution of higher learning: "Breaking away . . . I ran down the street, picked up a brick I saw lying around, and, in a puny gesture, shattered the post-office window next door. Throwing that brick gave me no solace." Not to worry. There were many other balms for self-styled militants. Mind-altering drugs, for example, group sex, visits to Cuba for training in revolutionary tactics and, in later years, grabbing credit for ending the Vietnam War. (In fact, because the Nixon administration worried about appearing to bow to the radicals' pressure, they actually helped prolong the conflict.) "To this day," Mr. Rudd writes, four decades after the uprising on the Upper West Side, "I encounter people who tell me the Columbia strike changed their lives: a woman who gave up French literature to study law and work for welfare clients; a male career community organizer who found direction for his life during the strike." Unmentioned by Mr. Rudd are Columbia students who were pleased with the direction of their studies but whose classes were shut down and whose Ph.D. theses, in a some cases, were burned in the riot (a disaster in the days before the ubiquity of the copying machine). A more significant casualty of the Columbia violence: the suffocation of civilized debate on campus. The university has never fully recovered from the traumas of 1968. Over the years its presidents and administrations have tacked one way and another as the winds of political fashion dictate, lest "the kids" get upset again. In September 2007, when Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to speak at the university, criticism from outside Columbia that Mr. Ahmadinejad hardly merited the school's hospitality prompted two ludicrous screeds, one from the president of the university, the other from the president of Iran. Both Lee Bollinger and Mr. Ahmadinejad essentially defended the Iranian's right to free speech in America -- this for the representative of a country where speaking freely is often rewarded with prison time. (And, of course, the U.S. military that defends free speech at Columbia is denied a campus presence in the form of the ROTC.) By contrast, a year earlier another invited Columbia speaker -- Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, an independent group that patrols the border between the U.S. and Mexico -- was mugged onstage by student intimidators in classic SDS style, and the school authorities issued only the mildest rebuke. A trailblazer of that style, of course, was Mr. Rudd. After fomenting the Columbia brawl in 1968, he moved on to help found a more violent organization called the Weathermen (later renamed the Weather Underground). At Indiana University in September 1969, he exhorted students to follow his lead. In "Underground," he quotes from an FBI file that he says "all too accurately" captured his remarks that day: "Some people will get hurt, some killed, to build the revolution. We want whites to take risks now -- affinity groups will be the main tactics. Whites in twos and three will off" -- that is, murder -- "the pigs. . . . Don't have non-violent marches." Of course, Mr. Rudd was not alone in portraying the U.S. as an imperialist, sexist, racist society led by Caucasian male oppressors -- in a word, "Amerika." There was, for example, Bernardine Dohrn, who styled herself as a valorous antifascist fighting the Fourth Reich. Speaking alongside Mr. Rudd in Chicago in October 1969, she told a crowd: "We refuse to be good Germans. We live behind enemy lines." On March 16, 1970, Mr. Rudd's life as a revolutionary took an unexpected turn. At a townhouse on 11th Street in Greenwich Village where five of his "comrades" were preparing an attack on a dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey for noncommissioned officers and their wives and girlfriends, a bomb loaded with dynamite and nails exploded prematurely. The blast killed three Weathermen; two others survived and fled the scene. The group's leadership went underground to avoid arrest. Mr. Rudd, it should be noted, was fully aware of the planned attack: One of the bombers who would die in the explosion had told him a few nights before that they were going to "kill the pigs at a dance at Fort Dix." The military officers, of course, were meant to "pay for the American crimes in Vietnam," Mr. Rudd writes. As for their dancing partners, well, "at that point we had determined that there were no innocent Americans, at least no white ones." He stayed on the lam for seven years, dodging federal charges in the Fort Dix bombing conspiracy and other crimes. Mr. Rudd was unhappy with the revolution's failure to accomplish much of anything, but he certainly did not repudiate its methods. In "Underground," he describes participating, a few weeks after the Greenwich Village explosion, in a "fund-raising" event that would be colloquially described as armed robbery at a restaurant, and he recounts a bungled attempt several months later to bomb the Marin County Courthouse in California. But he also fell from favor within the organization, which was rife with political infighting, and drifted into the "insanely boring" life of a simple fugitive from justice. Still, he had talked his long-suffering wife into joining him underground, and in 1974 they had a baby, a son "born under an assumed name." In 1977, Mr. Rudd finally surfaced in a well-hyped, thoroughly lawyered surrender to federal authorities. He gloats that at his arraignment he was "treated more or less as a V.I.P. rather than a bail jumper and an accused felon revolutionary." Another delight: Most of the charges against him were dropped, and he got off with two years' probation and a $2,000 fine. Since then, the memoirist assures us, he became a sober community-college math teacher in New Mexico (he retired in 2007), rueful about the Weathermen's violent history -- though only faintly so. He is hardly contrite about trying to sow revolution. The U.S. is still a racist, imperialist stronghold, Mr. Rudd claims, and "there's no shortage of organizing work to be done." The awakening youth of America, he says, give him hope. The real value of "Underground" is not its feeble repentance or its sham modesty. ("My part in the destruction of the Weather Underground was actually very small.") Mr. Rudd's essential contribution is his self-portrait as a youth who persuaded others to wreck rather than create -- and his snapshots of like-minded contemporaries. Consider the aforementioned Bernardine Dohrn. In the 1970s, a "Revolutionary Committee" of fanatical leftists who had deposed her Weather Underground leadership group released a tape of the contrite Ms. Dohrn's confession of her antirevolutionary sins. On the tape, she owned up to "naked white supremacy, white superiority, and chauvinistic arrogance," Mr. Rudd reports, and to "denying support to Third World liberation. . . . She even named names of her co-conspirators." Among the "leading criminals" she denounced, the author notes, was Bill Ayers. As the world knows, Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn are now man and wife -- and professors well respected in some quarters. Such are the after-lives of revolutionaries. During the presidential campaign, because of Mr. Ayers's connection to Barack Obama, the names Ayers, Dohrn and Rudd were in the air again, occasioning wistful admiration from the left and fresh anger from the right. Few noticed that the superannuated rebels now operate at a safe distance from the barricades. The main activity of these "activists" is offering alibis, teaching the naïve and writing books about the days before Amerika got wise to their party line. -- Mr. Kanfer is a Manhattan Institute scholar and the author, most recently, of "Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando" (Knopf). . --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. 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