Jeremy Varon (62 page)

90. Wells,
War Within,
357.

91. Ibid., 413.

92. Ibid., 394.

93. Ibid., xxi, xiv.

94. Ono, “Weatherman,” in
Weatherman,
ed. H. Jacobs, 239.

95. Abbie Hoffman, in
Seed
4, no. 9 (1969): 3.

96. Any such judgment would only provide one variable among many in answering the daunting and more important question of why exactly the United States lost the war.

97.
WP,
October 22, 1967, A1.

98. Jane Alpert, “Mother Right: A New Feminist Theory,”
Ms.,
August 1975, 55. Palmer readily admits to having been a chauvinist in the 1960s but objects to the severity of Alpert’s public accusation.

99. Dellinger,
More Power Than We Know,
139.

100. Palmer interviews.

4 . t h e e x c e s s e s a n d l i m i t s

o f r e v o l u t i o n a r y v i o l e n c e

1. Mellen interview, 14.

2. The imagery of boundary crossing was most explicit in the drug culture.

In one of the defining gestures of the era, Ken Kesey and his LSD-soaked “pioneers of consciousness,” the Merry Pranksters, emblazoned the word “furthur”

(deliberately misspelled for effect) atop the psychedelic bus in which they toured America in the early 1960s.

3. Tom Hayden, “Justice is in the Streets,” in
Weatherman,
ed. H. Jacobs, 299.

4. Neufeld and Braley interviews.

5. The FBI’s first extensive report on Weatherman, prepared by the Chicago Notes to Pages 153–57

333

office, consisted largely of publicly available texts, such as the SDS constitution and the writings of SDS’s warring factions. FBI Report, “Students for a Democratic Society,” November 7, 1969. FBI-WUO.

6. FBI memo, Brennan to Sullivan, December 19, 1969. FBI-WUO.

7. Airtel, FBI director to SAC offices, October 23, 1969. FBI-WUO.

8. FBI memo, Brennan to Sullivan, October 20, 1969; Airtel, FBI director to SAC offices, October 28, 1969. FBI-WUO.

9.
The Weather Underground: Report of the Subcommittee to Investigate the
Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of
the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate
(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1975), 19. Hereafter cited as
WUR.
Michael Wood, “Weather Report: A Dove in the Kitchen,”
WIN,
February 1, 1970, 7.

10. Ayers,
Fugitive Days,
177.

11. Roth interview.

12. Neufeld and Roth interviews.

13. Thirteen Weathermen, among them Dohrn, Weiss, and Neufeld, were arrested on charges of aggravated battery and mob action. Ten days later, Roth and Boudin were arrested and warrants were issued for four others. FBI report,

“Students for a Democratic Society,” November 7, 1969, 39. FBI-WUO.

14. Seale was also under indictment at the time for an attempted murder in a separate jurisdiction. Judge Hoffman removed Seale from the trial, thus reducing the Chicago 8 to the Chicago Seven, and scheduled his retrial, which never took place. See Ward Churchill, “‘To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy’: The FBI’s Secret War on the Black Panther Party,” in
Liberation, Imagination, and the Black
Panther Party,
ed. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (New York: Routledge, 2001), 106–7.

15. On the murders, see ibid. and the documentary
The Murder of Fred
Hampton,
dir. Howard Alk (Chicago: MGA Video, 1971). The details of the murder plot were revealed in
Hampton v. Hanrahan
and in a civil trial resolving in 1982 in favor of Hampton’s family and associates.

16. Jones interview.

17. Ayers interview.

18. Neufeld interview.

19. To an outsider, the French novelist Jean Genet, the differences in the state’s response to white and black radicals were “dizzying.” Genet, who toured the country with the Panthers in 1970, observed that they “were forced to defend themselves with rifles. . . . [In their offices] the doors and windows are barricaded.

And there, in the same room, there were women and little kids. That’s the reality of the situation [that] everyone has to know about.”
Philadelphia Free Press,
February 1971.

20. Gilbert, Columbia, 200.

21. Wilkerson, Columbia, 85.

22. Gilbert, Columbia, 187; Jaffe interview.

23. Dohrn interview.

24. Neufeld interview.

25. Ayers,
Fugitive Days,
145–46.

334

Notes to Pages 157–62

26. Neufeld interview.

27. Roth interview.

28. Braley interview.

29. FBI memo, Brennan to Sullivan, December 19, 1969. FBI-WUO.

30.
WUR,
20–22, 117–29.

31. LNS, “Stormy Weather,” in
Weatherman,
ed. H. Jacobs, 341.

32. Stern,
With the Weathermen,
196.

33. “Everyone Talks about the Weather” in
Weatherman,
ed. H. Jacobs, 444.

34. Sale,
SDS,
626.

35. On Flint, see
Weatherman,
ed. H. Jacobs, 341–50; Sale,
SDS,
626–29; Jonah Raskin,
Out of the Whale
(New York: Links Books, 1974), 145–50; Stern,
With the Weathermen,
195–206; Grathwohl,
Bringing America Down,
99–111;
Ann Arbor Argus,
December 31, 1969, 2–3, 19;
Berkeley Tribe,
January 9–15, 5;
Quicksilver Times,
January 9–19, 4;
Fifth Estate,
January 22–February 4, 1970, 12–4; and
Scanlan’s,
January 1971, 13–15.

36.
Weatherman,
ed. H. Jacobs, 356.

37. Ibid., 353.

38.
Fifth Estate,
January 22–February 4, 1970, 14.

39. Ibid.

40. Dellinger, by contrast, speculated that the Days of Rage may have precipitated Hampton’s murder by riling Chicago’s police. Dellinger,
More Power
Than We Know,
165.

41.
Fifth Estate,
January 22–February 4, 1970, 13.

42. Dellinger,
More Power Than We Know,
152. Palmer reports that Dohrn was criticized internally for the Manson comment. Palmer interview.

43. “The Reminiscences of Carol Bightman,” Columbia, 30.

44. Grathwohl,
Bringing America Down,
102, 105. The
Ann Arbor Argus
titled its coverage of Flint “Moby Dick.”

45. This quote is the paraphrase of the
Ann Arbor Argus,
December 31, 1969, 19.

46. Stern,
With the Weathermen,
199.

47.
Ann Arbor Argus,
December 31, 1969, 19.

48. Gitlin,
The Sixties,
399.

49. Wilkerson, Columbia, 76–77.

50. Interview with anonymous Weatherwoman.

51. Brightman, Columbia, 88.

52. Raskin,
Out of the Whale,
148.

53.
Berkeley Tribe,
January 9–15, 1970, 5.

54.
Fifth Estate,
January 22–February 4, 1970, 12.

55. Hendrik Hertzberg, “Weather Report: White Tornado,”
WIN,
February 1, 1970, 5–6.

56. Both events were widely interpreted by the left as marking the souring of its idealism. See, among countless commentaries on Altamont, “Stones’ Concert Ends It,”
Berkeley Tribe,
December 12–19, 1969, 1.

57. Gilbert, Columbia, 188–89, 200–201.

58. Stern,
With the Weathermen,
204–5.

59. Jaffe interview.

Notes to Pages 162–66

335

60. Gitlin,
The Sixties,
316–18.

61. Kenneth Kenniston, “The Agony of the Counterculture,” in
The Eloquence of Protest: Voices of the 70s,
ed. Harrison Salisbury (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 220.

62. Tom Bates,
Rads: The 1970 Bombing of the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin and Its Aftermath
(New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 415.

63. On the praise of Brown, see
Quicksilver Times,
January 9–19, 1970, 4.

64. Albert Camus invokes Doestoevsky’s epigram in a discussion of modern political murder in
The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt
(1951), trans. Anthony Bauer (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), 67.

65. The Weathermen were not alone in praising Manson. An underground newspaper in Los Angeles named Manson its “Man of the Year” for 1969. Jerry Rubin actually visited Manson in prison and claimed him as a great “inspiration.” Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry,
Helter Skelter: The True Story of the
Manson Murders
(New York: Bantam Books, 1975), 296–97.

66. Eldridge Cleaver,
Soul on Ice
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967).

67. Cleaver,
Post-Prison Writings,
41.

68. David Hilliard, “If You Want Peace You Have to Fight for It,” in
The
Black Panthers Speak,
ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Lippincott, 1970), 130.

69. “Interview with CBS News, December 28, 1969,” in ibid., 133.

70. Quoted in Churchill, “‘To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy,’” 83.

71. Norman Mailer,
The White Negro
(San Francisco: City Lights, 1957).

72.
Ann Arbor Argus,
December 31, 1969, 2.

73.
Fifth Estate,
January 22–February 4, 1970, 13.

74.
RAT
1, no. 26 (1969): 7.

75. Quoted in Leslie Fielder,
Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self
(New York: Touchstone, 1978). The “freak” was an especially important figure in the underground “comix” of the era, notably Gilbert Shelton’s endearing, doped-out Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.

76. Notes on the lyrics’ origins can be found at www.airplane.freeserve.co.uk/

interviews/comments.htm. Some of the lines appear in the
Niagara Liberation
Front Program for Action
(Buffalo SDS pamphlet, 1969). LFK-SDS. Mark Rudd threatened Columbia’s president during the 1968 rebellion, saying, “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up!” (Caute,
Sixty-Eight,
142). He was quoting the black radical playwright Everett LeRoi Jones (who subsequently renamed himself Amiri Baraka, or Imanu Amiri Baraka).

77.
Fifth Estate,
December 11–14, cover.

78. Brightman, Columbia, 88.

79.
Berkeley Tribe,
January 9–15, 1970, 5.

80. I. F. Stone, “Where the Fuse on That Dynamite Leads,” in
Weatherman,
ed. H. Jacobs, 172.

81.
Berkeley Tribe,
January 9–15, 1970, 5.

82.
Weatherman,
ed. H. Jacobs, 343.

83. Stern,
With the Weathermen,
87.

84. Arthur Koestler,
Darkness at Noon
(1941; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1961).

336

Notes to Pages 166–68

85. Herbert Marcuse,
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).

86. Roth interview.

87. Stern,
With the Weathermen,
198.

88. On the “power of the negative” in dialectical criticism, see Marcuse’s preface to his book
Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1961).

89. See his 1972
Counterrevolution and Revolt.
Marcuse devotes much of the book, which offers a postmortem on the New Left, to the question of “art and revolution.”

90. Marcuse also criticizes the “ideological” quality of bourgeois art, arguing that by creating an idealized world of form, such art provides an imaginary reconciliation of and escape from the contradictions defining social existence.

Bourgeois art is therefore “affirmative” in a double sense: it points to emancipation, while helping to preserve the established order. See “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” in Herbert Marcuse,
Negations: Essays in Critical Theory,
trans.

Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).

91.
News from Nowhere
used the line on its November 1969 cover.

92. Marcuse,
Counterrevolution and Revolt,
112. A New Left tribute to Artaud, titled “Artaud’s Electroshock Theater Recipe: Rip Off Amerika’s Mommy Mask,” appeared in the
San Diego Free Press,
September 3–17, 1969, 7. Extolling the kind of theatrical effect Marcuse questions, the
Free Press
wrote, “The dia-bolical magic of Artaud’s theater reverses the world to expose reality [and] . . .

the truth of repression, and suddenly the actors of the play become the shock troops of liberation.”

93. Scholars have used the categories of acting out and working through to interpret political, cultural, and social phenomena mainly as they involve ways of responding to (or repressing) historical trauma. See especially Dominick LaCapra’s
Representing the Holocaust
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995) and
Writing History,Writing Trauma
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). I focus on repetition less as a delayed reaction to trauma than as a form of mirroring.

94. Kenniston, “Agony of the Counterculture,” 219.

95. Ibid., 220.

96. Ibid., 221.

97. Within Kenniston’s framework, Manson becomes a figure of “the uncanny” in a strict Freudian sense. According to Freud, the uncanny seems radically unfamiliar based only on a fundamental misrecognition. In fact all too familiar, it is the “return of the repressed,” often appearing in disguised or even crazed form. See “The Uncanny,” in
Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers,
vol. 4, trans. supervised by Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1956), 403. Manson now appears a condensation of pathologies present throughout American culture, the youth movement included. Manson himself seemed to apprehend just this, warning America from the witness stand, “[Y]ou haven’t got long before you are all going to kill yourselves, because you are all crazy. . . . I am only what lives inside each and every one of you. My father is the jailhouse. My father is your system. . . . I am only a reflection of you” (Bugliosi,
Helter Skelter,
526).

Notes to Pages 168–74

337

98.
RAT
1, no. 26 (1969): 8. Rubin was referring to Guevara’s ideal of the