'My Weather Underground' And Why Obama Troubles Even Some On The Left

From MyDD

It is amazing how often this primary season has prompted me to haul out a spyglass to peer back into my life. A lot of the memories are soft focus now, a little more so with each passing year; but the time period from the early 60's to the end of the 70's is when I was young. And I hold the recollections of this time to be dear, shared only with intimates. I have never written about them although I am a fierce critic of those who do.

The tale of the 60's and 70's has never been told to my satisfaction probably because I keep seeking my story, and it is never there. I was more political than a flower child. Free love and drugs were ok, if that was your thing, and I smoked grass, especially when I went dancing; but to me this aspect of the era was more incidental than substantial. Love-ins, flower power, bell bottoms and tambourines were the trappings. The meat of the era was Political and no song summed it up better than "Something Happening Here" by Buffalo Springfield:

There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware

I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

There's battle lines being drawn
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind

I think it's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side

It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
You step out of line, the man come and take you away

We better stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, now, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

The song captures an entire gestalt, the mindset of a generation not only committed to ending a war of intervention, but also determined to make the world into a better, safer, more humane place. One fit for children and animals, which was a slogan one often saw on posters. But we were not self conscious about it. People rarely wrote things down. No one imagined how this time in our lives would become almost mythological. We all believed the way it was is the way it would always be. I didn't write much either. In those days I was just a face in the crowd. I listened, clapped, carried signs, and cheered others. This was fine with me. I didn't aspire to more of a role. The working class part of me remained a little withheld. It took a lot for me to break the law; so many others were way ahead of me. And yet it seems to me now, that I was there, at so many of the Big Moments.

The crucial question to me is similar to the quesiton I have about Wright, and it goes to the issue of his judgment. I was 23. Obama is twice my age, and these associations are recent. For me they have set off an alarm. Every person who loves this country and who hates injustice, sooner or later, must come to terms with how he or she will seek change. Obama, has to answer for his associates. He cannot dodge the issue by saying they are 'harmless.' These people are not innocent. And Obama's association with Wright and Ayers is haunted by the cries of the ordinary and everyday people who have been killed by prejudice and by bombs all over this precious and vulnerable world.

In 1963 during the Cuban Missile crises I was a 17 year-old freshman at Berkeley terrified I would never get to have sex before we were vaporized by a Russian bomb. I had already joined SLATE, which many now consider to be the beginning of the New Left and the Grandaddy of all the student movements that would follow on. The next year some of my friends in SLATE would help to found the Free Speech Movement, but I had already have moved on.

In those days I checked in and out of colleges the way some people check in and out of motels. Scholarships always appeared. Middle class teachers seemed to view me as the working class kid `with all the potential,' and remaking me in their image was a project they enjoyed. At USC, where I had a journalism scholarship, I came close to graduating until Barbara Meyerhoff, the anthropologist who became famous but whose acclaim had not yet arrived, 'adored' my final project. This was a two hour reel-to-reel tape of carefully selected songs to communicate our `revolution.' She asked me to write a paper with her that would accompany the tape and which we would present at an international gathering of anthropologist's. The music had to speak for itself I declared. So I declined. Myerhoff alternately cajoled and ranted, but I remained adamant because the essence of the whole project was: No Words.

My generation didn't trust words at all. Words were the way people lied and exploited other people. What we trusted was music. It was our salvation, our language, and our guided missile launched at the brain of the war machine. From Janis Joplin to Marvin Gay; from Donovan to the Rolling Stones; from the Platters to Simon & Garfunkle; from Joan Baez to Jimi Hendrix, from the Beatles to Pete Seeger, we gamboled inside the greatest explosion of popular music styles than at any other time in American history.

The altercation with Myerhoff unnerved me and true to my MO in those years, I left school to seek fame and fortune back east. Myerhoff eventually came around and gave me a notebook for my trip into `who I would become.' I threw it in the passenger seat, slipped behind the wheel of my blue VW bug, and headed into the future with the radio on high and all my failures still to come.

I arrived in Manhattan in time for the March 7, 1970 townhouse explosion in Greenwich Village which killed 3 weather underground members who were preparing a bomb to be set off at a noncommissioned officers' dance at fort Dix, New Jersey. The bomb, a makeshift anti-personnel weapon studded with roofing nails, exploded prematurely killing Theodore Gold, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins. Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin and Cathlyn Wilkerson, upstairs at the time of the blast, were helped by rescue workers and then disappeared before they could be questioned. William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn also disappeared. The Townhouse Explosion on 11th St. became one of my first feature stories for the Associated Press.

A few months later I wrote the headlines that appeared on the AP sign that went around the top of a building in Time Square. Late in the day on Monday, May 4 that sign announced: Ohio National Guard Memebers Murder Four Kent State Students. A huge crowd gathered and police feared a riot; so they called us to take down the sign. I refused. This became my first taste of the power that comes with authority, and what began as a taste became a meal when on Tuesday the AP not only backed me up, but lauded my judgment.

Still, I left the AP some months later after I participated in a Red Stockings consciousness-raising group and became a full time activist in the women's movement. After waving goodbye to the upscale West Village, I moved to the East Village where I ate at Leshkos and hung out with radicals. Again I was a nobody. A cipher really. But I now embraced feminism with a passion I had until then only given to the antiwar movement. My apartment on E. 6th St, a railroad flat and a 5th floor walkup, was across from the first gay rights office in Manhattan and barely a block from the old Fillmore East.

And this is when the Weather Underground entered my own personal space, impacting me outwardly as well as reverberating internally, so that I finally decided where I stood on the issue of violence and civil disobedience. You could not be a radical in that time without confronting violence: the use of force by the government, `violent action' by our side, the sds who immolated a dog with napalm, gay kids kicked and mauled by police, protestors of all kinds beaten with nightsticks and worse, not to mention Vietnam and My Lai. As early as Los Angeles, when I worked for the City News Service, we carried a story saying that no one had been seriously hurt in the Century City anti-war demonstrations, when our own reporter was in the hospital, perhaps paralyzed from injury to his spinal cord after the police shoved him and he fell on a sprinkler head.

Violence was everywhere. The best leaders of my generation disappeared in blood drenched assassinations. Nightsticks and police dogs and bombs dotted the south like ornaments on some macabre tree where hate and prejudice replaced the normal limbs of life. A woman was murdered and the police questioned me and my friends. We knew it was her boyfriend, but they didn't believe us.

How far were you prepared to go? We talked about it All the time. And even in sleep violence prevailed. I would soon move into a woman's collective in Washington DC, and after that I often dreamed that men with long handled axes, who could slip under doors and slide along walls, chased me with red tongues lolling like mad dogs announcing their intention to hack me into pieces for moving in with a `bunch of women.'

It was because of the collective we named Amazing Grace that I met some Weather Underground people, and then my phone was tapped by the feds. I was one of 4 from New York invited to join this collective, which was to be housed in Washington DC. In the planning stages we drove down to DC on a Friday night only to find our place to stay had evaporated. So someone, a friend of a friend of the DC women, fixed us up at another `house.'

I didn't like the looks of the place from the second I saw it. Weeds grew everywhere, the blinds were all down, inside there was only a hodge podge of furniture; and it was like no one actually lived there. Everything was makeshift. The kitchen smelled and the counters appeared overrun by red spaghetti splashes and dried milk stains. Some cereal boxes, one canted sideways decorated the kitchen table. The faces of the people I met were pinched and hard. They didn't smile. A kind of hostile paranoia invaded the place. I never got the story straight, but in the middle of the night we were awakened and told to get out fast. The police were going to raid the house because Weather Underground people were there now or had been there right before us.

As we were rushing out to our car, a woman from the `house' whispered to me, 'Be careful. The pigs will nail you. They are taking everyone down.' I was so furious I couldn't speak. We were threats to society now. And you couldn't just go and say, "Hey, policeman, sir; this is all a big mistake.'

And that's when what I felt about violence crystallized. Sure, I was scared. But the fear did not arise out of some imagined harm. I was scared that I would be seen as someone I was not. Someone who could kill innocents. And I couldn't. I was a lot more Ghandi than terrorist. I didn't know that word then, but I didn't have to know the word to understand the behavior. These people hated. They killed. And they did it because they believed in themselves above all others. I would place my commitment to peace and to liberation alongside anyone's in those days, but I would not kill to make the world more like I believed it should be.

Timothy Noah in Slate Aug22, 2001 wrote:

The weather underground was full of rich kids who thought they knew best. Who wanted to kill in order to stop killing. To many on the left they were heroes, I thought they were jackals. And Lewis Ayers exemplified the worst when on 9/11, 2001, in an interview for his book " Fugitive" he said in the NY times:

I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough.

...Much of what Ayers self-interestedly leaves out of his book is more personally embarrassing than illegal. Ayers takes care not to dwell on his own Establishment credentials. (His father was chairman of the energy company Commonwealth Edison, a fact Ayers conveys only by writing, "My dad worked for Edison.") Ayers omits any discussion of his famous 1970 statement, "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at." He also omits any discussion of his wife Bernardine Dohrn's famous reaction to the Manson killings, as conveyed by journalist Peter Collier: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!" (In a 1993 Chicago Magazine profile, Dohrn claimed, implausibly, that she'd been trying to convey that "Americans love to read about violence.") Nor does he address fellow radical Jane Alpert's charge that Ayers was "notorious for his callous treatment and abandonment of Diana Oughton before her death and for his generally fickle and high-handed treatment of women" (though Ayers does manage to get across the message, to those few who haven't heard it, that the late 1960s and early 1970s were a golden age for getting laid).

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I didn't last in the DC collective long. Rich kids who wanted to play poor infuriated me. I returned to my apartment to find out my phone was tapped and that the police had been by. The phone tap, accompanied by clicking sounds and by guys who would occasionally snicker at some conversations intended to be private, lasted for years. I got used to it. And eventually people would stop by to hear what a real tap sounded like. It became a giggle.

And 'Grandma,' an older Ukrainian lady of indeterminate age with an expanding waistline and grey hair who daily sat on the front stoop of our building with her Yuncheck, a fiercesome German shepherd, turned out to be my friend. 'Grandma' guarded the building. There is no other way to describe it. No one got in our out without first getting by Grandma and Yunchek. My friends and I would laugh how if the police ever came they would have a hard time with Grandma. I never saw this as anything but a joke. And then the police did come.

"I tell them notink," she announced grabbing my arm as I walked up the stairs. It took awhile for me to understand from her broken English that the police had actually come looking for me. When I asked her to describe them she said, "Men in suits with no smiles. They want you." I stayed with friends for a few days. And then mustered the courage to go home. They never came for me again.

I do not understand how William Ayers wound up teaching at a University, holding forth on how he didn't do anything wrong. I can understand people in succeeding generations wanting to talk to the real deal. But I cannot understand lauding a man who does not regret setting bombs. I believe Weather Underground takes responsibility for over 200 bombings nationwide. I also cannot understand the attitude of a man who wants to be President of all the people of this country associating with Ayers. Let's not debate the association. It is well documented and it goes beyond 'we met a few times.'