It took several months, but a copy of Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young, the autobiography of Zayd Ayers Dohrn, the son of late 1960s Weathermen Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, found its way to me via the local library consortium this week. [I will continue to use Weathermen as a gender-inclusive term--not least because they themselves did.] It took me just two days to read through it. Zayd, now hearing 50, is an academic himself (I will use his first name to avoid confusion with his mother.) He has written a very well-researched book about his notorious parents, drawing on long talks with them and their co-revolutionaries and family members, as well as on very copious FBI files. Despite some minor splits which only someone my age would be likely to catch--James Chaney, who was murdered along with Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman in 1964 in Mississippi, was a local Mississippi man, not another student from the North, and the Book of the Month Club in the 1950s did not distribute paperbacks--he does a good job of recreating his young parents' student world. He is also very frank about their underground activities, tentatively identifying his mother as one of two bombers of the Capitol Building in 1970 (she would neither confirm nor deny) and detailing their peripheral involvement in other famous crimes, such as the prison break that sprung Timothy Leary in California. They were not charged for any of these crimes after turning themselves in in late 1980, because the FBI had had to close the cases after its own wrongdoing during investigations had come to light. His mother did have to spend some months in prison not long afterwards because she had helped create fake IDs that were used in a bank robbery in New York in 1981 in which several people were killed, but the court ordered her release after she refused to talk. Subsequently both of them re-established careers as a lawyer (Dohrn) and teacher (Ayers), remaining politically active in Chicago, and eventually becoming acquainted with Barack Obama.
As I have mentioned many times, I saw the emergence of the New Left first hand in the late 1960s as an observer and a critic. Two of my best college friends became deeply involved with it--although not in any illegal activity. Both abandoned its views within a few more years. Steve Kelman, who was one year behind me, captured the atmosphere of that time brilliantly in his early memoir, Push Comes to Shove. Neither Kelman nor I, for different reasons, ever bought the radical line of the SDS. He was a proud Norman Thomas socialist. I was, first of all, a proud liberal Democrat even after I turned against the Vietnam War, and secondly, a student of Orwell, who had handed in his dissertation on the development of Orwell's thought just a couple of weeks before the Harvard SDS occupied University Hall. The SDS reminded me too much of the totalitarian movements Orwell had polemicized against. I was also influenced by the social psychologist Thomas Pettigrew. I took his extraordinary course in race relations in the fall of 1968, and he talked at some length about the damage that the Black Power movement--to say nothing of the Black Panthers--had done to the civil rights movement.
I am not going to narrate the various activities of Ayers and Dohrn in any great detail, fascinating though they were, but I will talk about their early lives and the key turning points in their revolutionary careers, in order to try to get at the question I have been intermittently wondering about for 60 years: why, exactly, did a significant number of my contemporaries decide, within just a few years, that our country and its elite were irretrievably evil, and any and all possible means needed to be used to try to overthrow its government and society? And why do significant numbers of young people still adopt such views today, even though there is no violent underground now?
Neither Dohrn nor Ayers, unlike a number of other leading student revolutionaries, were Red Diaper babies whose parents had been communists in the 1930s or 1940s. Dorhn's father was the children of Jewish immigrants who had married two Protestants (the first one died young), changed the family's name from Ohrnstein to Dorn, and struggled with some success to reach the middle class. He was, by his daughter's account, a racist, and voted Republican. Bernadine, born in 1942, was the first member of her family to attend college, at Miami University of Ohio. Bill Ayers, born two years later, was well-off--his father ran a large electric power company in Chicago, and was a typical liberal Republican of that era. He arrived at the University of Michigan in 1963--where the SDS had been founded one year earlier. He tried to join the Freedom Summer project in Mississippi in late 1964 but found that it had come to an end, partly because of the passage of the Civil Rights Act. He dropped out of college and spent a year in the Merchant Marine. Dohrn's boyfriend had talked her out of going to Mississippi in early 1964, and she had gone to the University of Chicago Law School in the fall of that year. In the summer of 1966 she became involved in Martin Luther King Jr.'s protests in the Chicago area, where King said he had encountered more bitter hatred than he had ever seen in the South. She joined SDS then. She was beautiful, often provocatively dressed, and charismatic, and she almost immediately became a leading figure in the organization.
Ayers, meanwhile, returned to Michigan in the fall of 1965 as the Vietnam War was heating up, and joined SDS almost at once. After being arrested in a protest, he dropped out again and went to work at the Children's Community School in downtown Detroit. There he met his first love, a young woman from a wealthy family named Diana Oughton, who also became a revolutionary and was eventually blown up with two comrades in a bomb factory in Greenwich village in early 1970. By the middle of 1967, with the Vietnam War getting bigger and bigger, they both quit the school to become full-time activists.
In the summer of 1969 the SDS held a famous national convention in Chicago dominated by a split between the Maoist Progressive Labor Party on the one hand--whose Harvard members had defied a majority SDS vote NOT to occupy University Hall and gone ahead a few months earlier--and a revolutionary faction led by Dohrn, which, according to Zayd, believed that white revolutionaries had to ally with the Black Panthers. Dohrn and some of her allies then spent several weeks in Cuba which, she acknowledged much later, convinced her that revolution in the United States was still possible. Ayers and others, including Kathy Boudin, daughter of one of the leading left wing lawyers in the US, were now going through struggle sessions to enforce ideological purity and group sex orgies to break down bourgeois values. The new group became the Weathermen, and eventually the Weather Underground. Some also began learning how to handle dynamite, and on October 6, a big explosion in a Chicago park that destroyed a statue of a policeman kicked off the Days of Rage, several days of violent protests in which the Weathermen battled the police, who responded with mass arrests. Two months later, Fred Hampton, the leader of Chicago's Black Panthers, was murdered in the middle of the night during a Chicago police raid. The Weathermen, including Dohrn and Ayers, decided to go underground and go to war with the government in alliance with the Black Panthers. Their bombings began in early January 1970, and their most destructive planned bombing--of a dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey, which might have killed dozens of soldiers and their girlfriends--never came off, because the planners, including Diana Oughton, were killed when their Greenwich Village townhouse exploded. The bombing campaign peaked in 1970-2, including large late night explosions in both the US Capitol and the Pentagon, and tapered off until 1975. As Zayd explains, the bombs were generally planted during the day by well-dressed young women posing as secretaries, inspired by Muslim Algerians who passed as Europeans and planted bombs in soda fountains as depicted in the film, The Battle of Algiers. They did take precautions to try to insure that no one would be hurt, setting the bombs to explode late at night and telephoning in warnings. That was not all. In 1970 Ayers and Dohrn took $25,000 from friends of Timothy Leary, the former Harvard Professor turned LSD advocate, to organize his breakout from a California prison. Smuggled out of the country, he eventually reached Algeria and moved in with fugitive Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. They fell out not long after, and the US government eventually caught up with Leary in Afghanistan.
Dohrn, Ayers, and eventually their children remained on the run throughout the 1970s. The government had to drop most of its cases against the Weathermen because of misconduct on its own part, and Dohrn and Ayers turned themselves in in 1980. They were not charged with any further crimes. During the rest of the 1970s, however, underground Weathermen assisted the underground Black Liberation Army in carrying out bank robberies and other crimes. They often provided white female drivers for getaway cars, whom the police were unlikely to stop. Dohrn worked for a while an upscale baby clothing store in Manhattan, where she would ask for driver's licenses from customers who wrote checks, memorize and write down the data, and give it to underground figures who would use it to secure copies of the licenses that could be used to rent cars for robberies. One such car was used in the robbery in Nyack, New York in 1981, in which one security guard and two policemen were killed. The perpetrators were caught immediately, and served long sentences. Dohrn's connection to the crime was discovered but she was not charged. The government jailed her for months to try to compel testimony, but she would not talk, and eventually a judge had to release her.
I turn now from this narrative, based on Zayd's far more detailed account, to the question of why. My answers are speculative, based literally on decades of reading and thinking about these issues.
Adolescence involves developing one's own world view, and Jean Piaget pointed out that many adolescents easily fall for sweeping explanations of what makes the world work. In addition, I am now convinced, many of us carry around the effects of trauma that we have literally inherited from our parents, often without even knowing what their source was. The trauma makes one feel that he or she must have done something terrible to warrant it. It can also leave one with enormous unresolved anger. All these elements, in my opinion, played into late 1960s activism.
The Vietnam War was indeed a terrible mistake that inflicted enormous cruelty on the people of Indochina. took the lives of about 58,000 young Americans, and crippled others for life. My question, however, is why so many young people not only opposed it, but also eagerly concluded that it proved that the whole of American society was irretrievably imperialist, racist, and unjust, and that any means could properly be used to bring it down. Following the late Alice Miller, a German Jewish psychoanalyst, I am convinced that this world view temporarily relieved its adherents of their own guilt, which they had suffered without any idea of where it came from. It also allowed them violently to express their anger. I saw that anger first hand in many Harvard demonstrations, and it was terrifying. This may also explain why the SDS and the Weathermen both began terrorizing their own members, forcing them in struggle sessions to admit terrible ideological error, as Dohrn herself eventually had to do while underground, confessing to accusations of sexism herself. Because they had no idea where their guilt and rage come from, they had to keep finding new targets upon which to vent it. And some of them eventually decide that only by resorting to illegal violence can they prove that they are actually worthy people on the right side of history.
The Black Panthers--who have now been mythologized beyond recognition even in the mainstream media--also exemplified` this, I think, and they played a key role in the splits in the SDS. They were waging a generational fight against their older generations, who had endured so much and worked so patiently to overcome legal segregation. The Panthers distinguished themselves by their willingness to resort to violence, especially against the police, and the white radicals accepted their self-image as the only true representatives of the black urban population. That is why they continued to help them carry out robberies after they had all gone underground. The white radicals were looking for absolute virtue, and they chose to identify it with the Panthers because the Panthers claimed to be fighting racism. It is easier for many people--and here I speak from personal experience, too--to feel pain on behalf of other people than on their own. It is also easier to locate virtue among people that one does not know very well, and one of the enduring left wing legacies of that period is the idea that virtue can be found only among the oppressed. That is the key to wokeness. Indeed, in Zayd's book one finds the direct ancestors of nearly every major tenet of contemporary leftism. The ideas of white privilege and intersectionality, which had not yet been named, come up again and again. There was a period in the late 1960s when any blow against society and its values suddenly became heroic, and Dohrn herself fell victim to this when she expressed some admiration for the daring of the Manson family.
Despite the Vietnam War, the society that many of my contemporaries rebelled against was healthier in many ways than ours today. It had made several decades worth of dramatic progress against racism and against economic inequality--the latter of which soon came to a screeching halt. That however made no difference. To me, the whole radical revolutionary movement illustrates a disease to which modern society remains vulnerable. I have not written this post to suggest how things might have been different or how recurrences might be avoided, but merely to provide a different perspective on why it breaks out, and to suggest that it undeniably grows out of very real aspects of human nature.
