Jeremy Varon (35 page)

“New Morning,” in this light, represented the Weathermen’s reassessment of what was possible given the political climate and what kind of action was valid and desirable for white radicals.

Some in the group felt that the Weathermen redrew the bounds of race too sharply. Gilbert explained, “There’s a way in which the Weather Underground . . . was still the white, middle-class underground. It wasn’t a situation in which our own communities [were] being killed. And so there was a way in which we comfortably also limited the level of violence we took on . . . which limited the amount of solidarity we provided Third World struggles.”185 The group’s restraint, in this view, partly reflected political weakness and the retreat into race and class privilege.

Others, likely the majority, saw the group’s moderation more positively.

In the early 1990s, Dohrn described the Weather Underground’s violence Excesses and Limits

187

as an “extremely restrained and highly appropriate response” to the state’s violence.186 Gilbert’s and Dohrn’s comments outline, beyond poles in a tactical debate, very different ways of negotiating a politics of solidarity. Praise for restraint, when read as a muted commentary on issues of race, implicitly signals the acceptance of certain limitations imposed by one’s identity. Part of the difficulty Weatherman had in attracting whites to violence reflected precisely the
experiential
barriers dividing the worlds of black and white and the very different kinds of adversity each community faced. Attempts to artificially collapse those differences could be disastrous. Larry Weiss recalls being briefed that the New York City townhouse collective had believed that to use safety mechanisms on its bombs would be to assert its “white skin privilege.”187 With this ludicrous assumption, Weathermen looked past the fact that the vast majority of American blacks hardly joined the Black Panthers and the BLA in “picking up the gun.”

The Weather Underground never settled on a single conception of the ideal role for white revolutionaries or of the form that their violence should take. Positions such as Gilbert’s and Dohrn’s were enunciated by various members at various times, with every view subject to intense internal debate. Over the course of the 1970s, the clear trend was towards the deescalation of violence and support for a wide range of political activism—much of it nonviolent and legal. The group not only developed an aboveground support group but also engaged in conventional forms of political agitation on such issues as unemployment and the racial integration of northern schools through busing. As the 1970s ground on, underground members even questioned the wisdom of maintaining a clandestine organization whose military capabilities and political effectiveness were severely limited, and whose raison d’être —in an era of waning militancy—was increasingly tenuous.188

.

.

.

Though I could not caution all,

I still might warn a few

Don’t lend your hand to raise a flag

Atop no ship of fools.

The Grateful Dead, “Ship of Fools”

(lyrics by Robert Hunter)

For all their Sturm und Drang, the Weathermen were most notorious for something they had planned to do but did not—take the lives of others 188

Excesses and Limits

in a deliberate act of political murder. Their political and historical significance, by extension, lies not only in the extremes to which they went but also—if less often acknowledged—in the boundaries they never in fact crossed. Seen in this double light, the townhouse explosion looms so large in the history of the New Left both as an emblem of “going too far”
and
as the catalyst for pulling back.

In political terms, “New Morning” came too late: too late to salvage SDS or make up for Weatherman’s role in its destruction; too late to win the Weathermen a sufficient following to make them a broadly influential force in American politics; and too late, as the social movements of the 1960s declined and new ones gained strength, to do much more than shift the emphasis of an armed struggle that in any version was destined to fail in its goal of toppling the U.S. government. Yet, as an articulation of limits, “New Morning” shaped the group’s fundamental identity for most of its existence.

Central to Weatherman’s transformation was its meditation on the ethics of violence—whom it was willing to harm and to what ends. By the decade’s end, these questions set the ultimate stakes in the tension within the New Left between “acting out” and “working through,” transgression and transcendence. Young radicals received eloquent counsel from their elders as they struggled over how to channel their outrage.

Daniel Berrigan, while himself a fugitive in 1970, wrote an open letter to the Weathermen, cautioning:

The mark of inhuman treatment of humans is a mark that also hovers over us. It is the mark of the beast, whether its insignia is the military or the movement. No principle is worth the sacrifice of a single human being.

That’s a very hard statement. At various stages of the movement some have acted as if almost the opposite were true, in that we got purer. . . . A revolution is interesting only insofar as it avoids like the plague the plague it hopes to heal . . . and will be no better and no more truthful than those who it brought into being.189

Berrigan begged the Weathermen to see themselves as givers of hope, like Che Guevara or even Jesus, and to view their lives as about “something more than sabotage.”190 Dave Dellinger similarly implored, “compassion, rejection of violence, refusal to treat other human beings as objects or as means to our own good or bad ends, these are all necessary virtues.

To reject them
during
the struggle to create a good society is to reduce dangerously the possibility of achieving them
after
the revolution has apparently triumphed.”191

Marcuse was no pacifist. Beyond defining a “natural right” of extra-Excesses and Limits

189

legal and even violent resistance, he distinguished between reactionary and emancipatory violence, “white” and “red” terror, based on their differing goals and emancipatory violence’s quality of implying its own abolition.192 While all forms of terror, he insisted, were equally condemnable from a
moral
standpoint, “in terms of their historical function,” much separated the violence “of the oppressed and the oppressors.”193 The “terror employed in the defense of North Vietnam,” for example, he thought

“essentially different from the terror” used against it.194

Yet in his 1969
An Essay on Liberation,
Marcuse discussed the creation of a “new sensibility” instinctively resistant to “cruelty, ugliness and brutality”
as both the means and the end of liberation
in the developed Western world.195 “Our goals, our values, and our own new morality—

our
own
new morality, must already be visible in our actions,” Marcuse explained to an approving New Left audience in 1969. “The new humans who we want to help to create—we must already strive to be these human beings right here and now.”196 Marcuse never wavered in his belief that the New Left’s most urgent tasks were political education and the creation of this new sensibility, and he never saw the development of a military capability as an appropriate or desirable goal for white American radicals.

Advocates of violence countered by describing pacifism as the luxury of privilege and by arguing the futility of peaceful protest. For some, revolution required the creation of a shrewdly instrumental or even callous subjectivity. Criticizing Marcuse for emphasizing “the new, humane consciousness and sensibility,” Harold Jacobs, a sociology professor at Berkeley, insisted: “We indeed have to remake ourselves but not only in the humane ways we might wish. We have to learn to discipline ourselves, to hate, to destroy, and to kill. This society will be liberated, but at the cost of much blood.”197 Such sentiments echoed, consciously or not, the 1869
Catechism of a Revolutionist
written by the Russian student radical Sergei Nechayev, perhaps the best-known text of a generation of Russian anarchists widely regarded the pioneers of modern-day “terrorism.”

Within a global rebel culture, it has functioned for decades as a psychological and existential template for aspiring guerrillas seeking to train themselves in the cold “science of destruction.” With unflinching conviction, Nechayev declares the revolutionary “a doomed man” who must suppress any trace of “attachments,” “belongings,” “feelings,” “pity,”

and “love,” all of which may stand in the way of his “single passion—

for revolution.”198 With rituals and a dogma all their own, the Weathermen of 1969 and early 1970 sought to cultivate this lethal discipline.

190

Excesses and Limits

The townhouse explosion prompted the Weathermen to reflect on how dehumanizing their experiences had been and to consider whether inhumane conduct was a valid or necessary dimension of revolutionary politics. Evaluating their histories, former members stress the importance, and also the difficulty, of balancing competing imperatives. One demanded militant, even violent responses to injustice; the other required conscientiousness and compassion. For Gilbert, the townhouse explosion indicated that

it isn’t a game. It is real. I mean, yes, we had seen that [with] the Panthers. . . . But then there was someone very close [to us who died]. It is life and death, and it’s a big, big decision to try to be a revolutionary. It’s not just this romantic thing of being in the mountains, or this morally pristine position. . . . And part of the risk of being a revolutionary is not just personal harm, but making mistakes that will hurt [others]. But to me the risk of not doing anything when so many people are being destroyed . . . that’s even worse. But there’s no neat sort of easy choice there.199

Gilbert described the Weather Underground’s restraint: “It’s not accidental that [in] over twenty or thirty [actions] no one got hurt. . . . There are some situations of revolutionary struggle where people do get hurt, but the point is that revolutionary morality has a very high standard.

You don’t want innocent bystanders hurt. You try to minimize casualties. It’s not like reactionary violence, ruling class violence, that’s napalm on villages.”200 Naomi Jaffe, reflecting on the townhouse, confessed: I was a little dazed by that time. I must have been repressing a lot of my feelings because it was really years before I even cried about it. I didn’t really experience it when it happened. . . . It seemed like what we had to do was so hard . . . [that] we had to put aside everything else, repress everything else. We were young. It doesn’t seem like that to me now. I feel more vulnerable than I’ve ever been to all the pain of what’s going on in the world. But at that time I didn’t know how you could be vulnerable to all that pain and still do the work.

For Jaffe, militant action seems to have required psychic and emotional numbing, which robbed her of the ability to mourn even the death of her friends, let alone the potential targets of their violence. With distance from armed combat, Jaffe now rejects the trade-off she once felt necessary.

Still an activist, she praises the vulnerable and sentient warrior—however she may fight—whose very conviction that “
every
life is precious” guides her efforts.201

When asked if the Weathermen had considered the political and moral consequences of their early vision of armed rebellion, Larry Weiss an-Excesses and Limits

191

swered, “Hell no! . . . To actually have killed somebody else—you can’t grasp it.” The group, he insisted, was prepared only in “the stupid, adren-aline sense—ready in . . . that you don’t actually think about what it means in any real sense, any human sense.”202 Other New Leftists gear-ing up for violence appeared equally unprepared. One message the Weathermen privately conveyed to radical collectives throughout the country following the townhouse explosion was, in Dohrn’s words, that “you can’t do political kidnappings”—as some Latin American guerrillas had recently done and American radicals imagined doing with figures like Kissinger—“unless you’re willing to kill somebody, so if you’re not willing to kill somebody, don’t even play around with it.”203 Whether heeding such pleadings or their own consciences, American New Leftists never made kidnapping part of their arsenal.

In retrospect, Bill Ayers contrasted the Weathermen to the Vietnamese revolutionaries and to the South Africans who had toppled apartheid, whose achievements had been forged in generations of political struggle:

“We were a group of very half-cocked twenty year olds. We had no past, no history, no knowledge . . . I don’t think we thought it through, no, and . . . had we continued down a certain road . . . not only all of us would have died, but the things we believed in . . . would have been set back deeply.”204 Reflecting on what it might in fact mean to kill, Ayers stressed the importance of mourning one’s own violence:

I often think and wonder: to be the guy who slips into the general’s tent and slit his throat— can you do that and still grieve about what you’re doing, . . . about what a horrible, hideous asshole you are? It seems to me to not be able to act, even in an extreme way . . . is a kind of paralysis

[and a way of saying] it’s OK if
they
fight, but I can’t possibly because I’m too good. . . . On the other hand, to get yourself to the point where it means nothing to you, where you just say, “Fuck it,” is to sell out the revolution.205

Struggling to find a middle ground between passivity and callous violence in the service of a “just” cause, Ayers invokes a language of morality—

long explored by philosophers and ethicists—that tries to reconcile rebellion and restraint, the imperative to act against injustice and the limits on action that the commitment to justice imposes.

Albert Camus, though not a direct influence on Weatherman, was one such thinker. In his play
Les Justes
(translated as
The Just Assassins
), Camus used the experiences of a Russian anarchist cell in 1905 to explore precisely the conditions in which a political murder may be regarded as 192