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Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen
Mark Rudd, former ’60s radical student leader and onetime fugitive member of the notorious Weather Underground, tells his compelling and engrossing story for the first time in Underground. The chairman of the SDS and leader of the 1968 student uprising at Columbia University, Rudd offers a gripping narrative of his political awakening and fugitive life during one of the most influential periods in modern U.S. history.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
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February 24, 2026
WELL, as one adult once snidely remarked of me, "I always wondered what became of radicals when they grew up, and now I realize they go to college and become professors". Since Mark Rudd and I wound up in the same place, no, I don't mean prison but teaching college, and even talked once at Kent State University, naturally I was drawn to this memoir of a radical on the run. Susan Stern called him "a viper" and "Stalinist monarch" in her book, WITH THE WEATHERMEN. I was anxious to read his side of the story. Was he a macho celebrity in love with himself? Mark says several times in this political autobiography that he resents having been turned into a media darling by the press, on the cover of NEWSWEEK in 1968, yet acknowledges that is the reason why he is writing and we are reading his book. UNDERGROUND is not easy to classify by genre, though the story is straight-forward enough and the prose of high school level complexity. This book does not belong to the "god that failed" tales of many former radicals. Toward the end of his ten year odyssey he spoke on a prison phone with old comrade, ex-Weatherman and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) recruiter at Columbia University David Gilbert who asked him, "Do you still think this country is imperialist? "Yes". Are you still committed to fighting racism? "Yes". For Mark, the cause he took up in 1968 and sacrificed a decade of his life for is the lodestar of his life. Does this mean he has only tactical differences with those Weathermen like Gilbert, Bernadine Dorn and Bil Ayers who "picked up the gun" to fight the empire on its home ground? The answer is complex, and for the reader, evasive. Rudd thinks the student movement should have fought to build a much broader anti-war, anti-racist coalition of white youth and minorities, a course that was suggested to him and other SDSers in Havana in 1969 by the Cubans and North Vietnamese, but a voice inside him says "SDS would probably have broken up anyway" at the end of the Sixties with the rise of Nixon and decline of the New Left.
What can a middle-class Jewish boy do, except to sing in a rock and roll band, or better yet, follow the counsel, more like instructions, of Dorn, Ayers et al and try to set the streets of America on fire from below, even though you deep down don't believe in what they're preaching and think it suicidal? If you're not as confused by this point, you should be---Mark certainly is. Mark's account of his childhood in New Jersey is too brief to offer any insight on why he turned radical. He mostly uses stories from his early years to establish that he was "the white privileged son of Jewish immigrant parents". Was there anything about his religion, Mark was bar mitzbahed but claims it meant little to him, or being second-generation American that propelled him to the outer shore of politics? The one constant that emerges from stories about his family is a dialectic between wanting to please his parents and assault them for their bourgeois values. A poor and even indifferent high school student Rudd made it to Columbia University anyway, where classes bored him and the growing anti-war movement on campus excited him. Rudd's account of his leadership of the October 1968 student strike at Columbia after he joined SDS, seizing the office of Columbia President Kirk, taking Vice-Dean Truman hostage, consumes close to one hundred pages of his narrative, and the story is too well-known to repeat, except for the political lessons he drew, or should have drawn. The catalyst for the strike was not the Vietnam War or opposition to the draft, both causes already had a large following on campus and besides college students like Mark got exempted from conscription while working-class kids bled and died in Indochina, something he feels guilty about to this day, but Columbia's plan to build a new gym that required the expulsion of Black residents of Harlem next door to the campus; hence the slogan, "Gym Crow Must Go!". The fight to stop the construction of the gym forged an alliance between the Harlem poor, Black students on campus, all 35 of them, plus one Puerto Rican, and white youth in revolt; a rare show of unity Mark wishes had been replicated nationally. The strike also drew visits from from the New Left guest stars, notably Tom Hayden, author of the original SDS manifesto, the Port Huron Statement. Columbia became the site of a successful anti-war, anti-racist mass movement, something SDS and later the Weathermen should have striven for but never accomplished. Why not? White racism? A well-founded suspicion by Blacks that white privileged kids would move on and up to become doctors and lawyers just as Columbia planned? Mark is not sure to this day. The strike did move him up, to National Secretary of SDS; the perfect place to witness and to a great degree initiate the dissolution of the organization, the largest student anti-war movement in the country, in 1969 and birth the Weathermen.
The sectarian rifts that tore apart SDS need not detain us, except to say that one faction favored a Student-Worker Alliance toward revolution in the U.S. while the Weathermen, Dorn, Ayers, Gilbert and Rudd, who took their cool name from Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues", "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows", saw the Communist future coming to fruition by recruiting working-class kids, not college students like themselves, and instigating revolution through armed struggle "in the belly of the beast" inside the mother nation. After all, hadn't their heroes Castro and Che done the same thing in Cuba? No, the fact that Che was two years dead did not faze them. Mark went along with this tripe, and offers up the usual rationale of why people join and stay in cults, namely, "I can't buck the majority, can I?" ; the armed struggle line is wrong, suicidal and, as the Black Panthers told us Weathermen, "Custeristic", but what else were we supposed to do against the most violent nation on Earth?; finally, we are part of a global movement against U.S. imperialism, joining the Vietnamese, Cubans, Koreans, Angolans et al, and must do our share. Bear in mind, Rudd does not actually believe any of this to be true; he simply used it to justify his own inaction inside the group. When the Days of Rage street demonstrations in Chicago in late 1969 failed to activate the American revolution but did get the Weathermen indicted by the federal government Mark and his comrades went underground, hoping to accomplish by bombings what riots had not, bring the Vietnam War home to the American people. This "military option" got Mark demoted to second-tier in the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), as the group now fronted by Bernadine Dorn, called itself, "Weatherman" sounding too sexist. He still can't understand why. Did they not trust him to be a competent general? Were they still jealous of his glory days at Columbia? He prefers to think they valued his organizing skills in recruiting new members and holding the various Weather Collectives together. Yet, even in that capacity he castigates himself for the most notorious tragedy of those underground days, the townhouse bombing in New York City in 1970 when two close friends, Ted Gold and Terry Robbins, along with Peace Corps volunteer turned revolutionary Diana Oughton blew themselves up while constructing a bomb. Rudd did not oversee this autonomous collective but had voted to set up a Weather foco in Manhattan. More broadly, Mark accepts responsibility for the whole crazed notion of championing violence to counter the more horrific violence of the U.S. around the world.
Mark hated life underground. For him it was an exercise in futility, meaningless and existential despair. The Weather Underground accomplished nothing underground, or above with its front organization Prairie Fire. Prairie Fire published its own magazine, OSAWATOMIE, named after the anti-slavery raid by John Brown, and naturally no one read it. One week a bomb here, another a bomb there with no noticeable impact on the conduct of the Vietnam war. Rudd gives credit to the Weather Bureau, the supreme leadership of the cause, for giving warning before all set explosions and never having harmed anyone. Their only casualties were themselves, viz. Gold, Robbins and Oughton. His own work in coordinating the collectives proved exceedingly frustrating. Every year more people dropped out of the WUO, which never numbered more than one hundred people nationwide. Spies and informers were a constant problem, though Mark stayed safe by honing the skills mentioned by Dylan in the WUO anthem, "keep a clean nose/spot the plain clothes". The Weather Underground was among the first left organizations to insist that the personal is the political, inspiring the group's "Smash Monogamy!" campaign. Ladies' man Rudd welcomed this turn, making women more readily available to him. Only late in the game did he own up to his sexism, for which he profusely apologizes. Occasional visits to his parents at home in New Jersey or in out-of-the-way motels convinced him his mother was right that he was breaking her heart by living on the lam, one step away from the cops or death. Sitting on a park bench one day reading the newspaper, Mark had an epiphany: la guerre est finie and, "thirty is too old to be a revolutionary". Contacting his lawyer from the Columbia days, he arranged self-surrender to the authorities in 1977; a step made easier by the fact that the FBI had broken the law in chasing him. The rest of the WUO soon followed suit in 1980. Mark sounds a sour note in recording that "white privilege" got him and his comrades hand slap sentences while millions of Blacks and Latinos are behind bars.
The legacy of the Weather Underground is not easy to distill. The current occupations of the ex-leadership provide one clue. Dorn teaches law, though, being a convicted felon, she is not allowed to practice it. Ayers, her husband, focuses on pedagogy. So does Mike Klonsky, author of the WUO manifesto, "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows". This list fulfills the old joke that if radicals can't take over General Motors, they can at least seize the English Department. Mark is a special case. He never belonged to the Big Chill generation of dreamers turned sell-outs. He does, however, have a weakness for Sixties nostalgia. At a Columbia Strike anniversary gig he helped organize Tom Hayden joked with him, "Weren't you purged by the WUO?" Those radical years were days of tragedy and farce, but not without lessons. Mark, a retired English teacher in New Mexico, marched against both wars on Iraq and, using the carpentry and masonry skills he developed underground, built houses in Nicaragua under the Sandinista regime. He feels mighty ashamed of his personal and political conduct from SDS to Weathermen but not for trying to stop the Vietnam war and new imperialist aggression today. The dream endures.
What can a middle-class Jewish boy do, except to sing in a rock and roll band, or better yet, follow the counsel, more like instructions, of Dorn, Ayers et al and try to set the streets of America on fire from below, even though you deep down don't believe in what they're preaching and think it suicidal? If you're not as confused by this point, you should be---Mark certainly is. Mark's account of his childhood in New Jersey is too brief to offer any insight on why he turned radical. He mostly uses stories from his early years to establish that he was "the white privileged son of Jewish immigrant parents". Was there anything about his religion, Mark was bar mitzbahed but claims it meant little to him, or being second-generation American that propelled him to the outer shore of politics? The one constant that emerges from stories about his family is a dialectic between wanting to please his parents and assault them for their bourgeois values. A poor and even indifferent high school student Rudd made it to Columbia University anyway, where classes bored him and the growing anti-war movement on campus excited him. Rudd's account of his leadership of the October 1968 student strike at Columbia after he joined SDS, seizing the office of Columbia President Kirk, taking Vice-Dean Truman hostage, consumes close to one hundred pages of his narrative, and the story is too well-known to repeat, except for the political lessons he drew, or should have drawn. The catalyst for the strike was not the Vietnam War or opposition to the draft, both causes already had a large following on campus and besides college students like Mark got exempted from conscription while working-class kids bled and died in Indochina, something he feels guilty about to this day, but Columbia's plan to build a new gym that required the expulsion of Black residents of Harlem next door to the campus; hence the slogan, "Gym Crow Must Go!". The fight to stop the construction of the gym forged an alliance between the Harlem poor, Black students on campus, all 35 of them, plus one Puerto Rican, and white youth in revolt; a rare show of unity Mark wishes had been replicated nationally. The strike also drew visits from from the New Left guest stars, notably Tom Hayden, author of the original SDS manifesto, the Port Huron Statement. Columbia became the site of a successful anti-war, anti-racist mass movement, something SDS and later the Weathermen should have striven for but never accomplished. Why not? White racism? A well-founded suspicion by Blacks that white privileged kids would move on and up to become doctors and lawyers just as Columbia planned? Mark is not sure to this day. The strike did move him up, to National Secretary of SDS; the perfect place to witness and to a great degree initiate the dissolution of the organization, the largest student anti-war movement in the country, in 1969 and birth the Weathermen.
The sectarian rifts that tore apart SDS need not detain us, except to say that one faction favored a Student-Worker Alliance toward revolution in the U.S. while the Weathermen, Dorn, Ayers, Gilbert and Rudd, who took their cool name from Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues", "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows", saw the Communist future coming to fruition by recruiting working-class kids, not college students like themselves, and instigating revolution through armed struggle "in the belly of the beast" inside the mother nation. After all, hadn't their heroes Castro and Che done the same thing in Cuba? No, the fact that Che was two years dead did not faze them. Mark went along with this tripe, and offers up the usual rationale of why people join and stay in cults, namely, "I can't buck the majority, can I?" ; the armed struggle line is wrong, suicidal and, as the Black Panthers told us Weathermen, "Custeristic", but what else were we supposed to do against the most violent nation on Earth?; finally, we are part of a global movement against U.S. imperialism, joining the Vietnamese, Cubans, Koreans, Angolans et al, and must do our share. Bear in mind, Rudd does not actually believe any of this to be true; he simply used it to justify his own inaction inside the group. When the Days of Rage street demonstrations in Chicago in late 1969 failed to activate the American revolution but did get the Weathermen indicted by the federal government Mark and his comrades went underground, hoping to accomplish by bombings what riots had not, bring the Vietnam War home to the American people. This "military option" got Mark demoted to second-tier in the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), as the group now fronted by Bernadine Dorn, called itself, "Weatherman" sounding too sexist. He still can't understand why. Did they not trust him to be a competent general? Were they still jealous of his glory days at Columbia? He prefers to think they valued his organizing skills in recruiting new members and holding the various Weather Collectives together. Yet, even in that capacity he castigates himself for the most notorious tragedy of those underground days, the townhouse bombing in New York City in 1970 when two close friends, Ted Gold and Terry Robbins, along with Peace Corps volunteer turned revolutionary Diana Oughton blew themselves up while constructing a bomb. Rudd did not oversee this autonomous collective but had voted to set up a Weather foco in Manhattan. More broadly, Mark accepts responsibility for the whole crazed notion of championing violence to counter the more horrific violence of the U.S. around the world.
Mark hated life underground. For him it was an exercise in futility, meaningless and existential despair. The Weather Underground accomplished nothing underground, or above with its front organization Prairie Fire. Prairie Fire published its own magazine, OSAWATOMIE, named after the anti-slavery raid by John Brown, and naturally no one read it. One week a bomb here, another a bomb there with no noticeable impact on the conduct of the Vietnam war. Rudd gives credit to the Weather Bureau, the supreme leadership of the cause, for giving warning before all set explosions and never having harmed anyone. Their only casualties were themselves, viz. Gold, Robbins and Oughton. His own work in coordinating the collectives proved exceedingly frustrating. Every year more people dropped out of the WUO, which never numbered more than one hundred people nationwide. Spies and informers were a constant problem, though Mark stayed safe by honing the skills mentioned by Dylan in the WUO anthem, "keep a clean nose/spot the plain clothes". The Weather Underground was among the first left organizations to insist that the personal is the political, inspiring the group's "Smash Monogamy!" campaign. Ladies' man Rudd welcomed this turn, making women more readily available to him. Only late in the game did he own up to his sexism, for which he profusely apologizes. Occasional visits to his parents at home in New Jersey or in out-of-the-way motels convinced him his mother was right that he was breaking her heart by living on the lam, one step away from the cops or death. Sitting on a park bench one day reading the newspaper, Mark had an epiphany: la guerre est finie and, "thirty is too old to be a revolutionary". Contacting his lawyer from the Columbia days, he arranged self-surrender to the authorities in 1977; a step made easier by the fact that the FBI had broken the law in chasing him. The rest of the WUO soon followed suit in 1980. Mark sounds a sour note in recording that "white privilege" got him and his comrades hand slap sentences while millions of Blacks and Latinos are behind bars.
The legacy of the Weather Underground is not easy to distill. The current occupations of the ex-leadership provide one clue. Dorn teaches law, though, being a convicted felon, she is not allowed to practice it. Ayers, her husband, focuses on pedagogy. So does Mike Klonsky, author of the WUO manifesto, "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows". This list fulfills the old joke that if radicals can't take over General Motors, they can at least seize the English Department. Mark is a special case. He never belonged to the Big Chill generation of dreamers turned sell-outs. He does, however, have a weakness for Sixties nostalgia. At a Columbia Strike anniversary gig he helped organize Tom Hayden joked with him, "Weren't you purged by the WUO?" Those radical years were days of tragedy and farce, but not without lessons. Mark, a retired English teacher in New Mexico, marched against both wars on Iraq and, using the carpentry and masonry skills he developed underground, built houses in Nicaragua under the Sandinista regime. He feels mighty ashamed of his personal and political conduct from SDS to Weathermen but not for trying to stop the Vietnam war and new imperialist aggression today. The dream endures.
October 7, 2022
In his book, former leader of the SDS chapter at Columbia University and Weatherman Mark Rudd retrospects about his life as a student radical in the sixties and seventies. One thing that I can say for sure about this book is that Rudd's thoughts are as ridiculous and unpleasant as he himself was back when he helped destroy the Students for a Democratic Society by leading the Weather faction down the road of terrorism and insanity.
As a freshman at Columbia University in 1965, he was recruited to SDS by David Gilbert. He spent the next three years learning about the nature of imperialism from Gilbert and other SDS members and helping to organize protests against the Vietnam conflict and racism. He travelled to Cuba in February 1968, during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and was radicalized there. The same spring, he became chairman of Columbia SDS when the organization led an uprising against the university’s complicity with the war and racism. Thrown out of college, he became a regional and national traveller for SDS.
He was elected the last national secretary of SDS in June 1969, when the Weatherman faction took over the National Office. He helped found the Weather Underground in early 1970, but left the organization by the end of that year due to changes in his thinking about revolutionary warfare.
When depicting her first meeting with him, political activist Susan Stern noted that the feeling he provoked in her was seething resentment. Although she did not realize it back then, when she was awed by his status in the organization, her initial impression was about right. Rudd was cocky and so full of himself that he conversed with people in an obviously scornful manner, like a king with peons. However, inside he was clearly an insecure and unhappy person. For instance, he despised people who were white, Jewish, and from wealthy families not because they were the supporters of the System, as his fellow Weathermen believed, but because he himself was from such a background and he was ashamed of that because the SDS and the Weather Underground had come to the point where it did not tolerate "privileged kids" despite being privileged kids. When he spoke, he was flippant and arrogant. When others spoke, he was disrespectful, pacing around the room and banging on objects.
Rudd was one of the organizers of the vicious Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969. The aftermath of those violent and unnecessary riots, the Students for a Democratic Society disbanded. Furthermore, he gave his approval to the Fort Dix operation, which resulted in the Greenwich townhouse explosion that took the lives of Diana Oughton, Terry Robins, and Theodore Gold.
He dwells a lot on his allegedly tortured relationship with his parents, but his stories point to the fact that the torture was one-sided. Although they disagreed with his ideology and actions, his parents never withdrew their support for him. When he was thrown out of Columbia for his disruptive activities there, they welcomed him with a meal. When he had to go underground, they arranged secret meetings with them.
For someone who left the Weather Underground as early as 1970 because he allegedly changed his views, Rudd is surprisingly confident in his belief that what he did in the sixties and seventies can inspire the younger generation to build a peaceful world. His account is centered around this idea, but it is difficult not to wonder which of his actions precisely Rudd considers to be inspirational. As a young person, I do not feel inspired by someone who committed armed robbery and planted bombs. To me, this person is a terrorist – and an irrational one at that.
Like a typical Weatherman, Rudd is also slow to acknowledge that he was wrong. He admits that he committed a few mistakes, which is an understatement, but maintains that he was right to be part of the protest movement. He is right. The protest movement was important. However, this does not make his actions any less wrong. Weatherman Bill Ayers, once a great champion of the revolutionary motto “Audacity, audacity, and more audacity,” confessed to Rudd in an unsent letter that he had “lost, killed, alienated, or driven away” all his friends, and that life was “sad and lonely,” whether he was a fugitive or not. Rudd does not seem to feel the same way about the Weather Underground's craziness, which he started.
UNDERGROUND is not worth the time that it takes to read it. Unlike some of his fellow Weathermen, Rudd has not learned anything from his experiences. Maybe this is because he was not punished for his actions, while other student radicals set through prison sentences. This book is great only for learning about Rudd as a person.
As a freshman at Columbia University in 1965, he was recruited to SDS by David Gilbert. He spent the next three years learning about the nature of imperialism from Gilbert and other SDS members and helping to organize protests against the Vietnam conflict and racism. He travelled to Cuba in February 1968, during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and was radicalized there. The same spring, he became chairman of Columbia SDS when the organization led an uprising against the university’s complicity with the war and racism. Thrown out of college, he became a regional and national traveller for SDS.
He was elected the last national secretary of SDS in June 1969, when the Weatherman faction took over the National Office. He helped found the Weather Underground in early 1970, but left the organization by the end of that year due to changes in his thinking about revolutionary warfare.
When depicting her first meeting with him, political activist Susan Stern noted that the feeling he provoked in her was seething resentment. Although she did not realize it back then, when she was awed by his status in the organization, her initial impression was about right. Rudd was cocky and so full of himself that he conversed with people in an obviously scornful manner, like a king with peons. However, inside he was clearly an insecure and unhappy person. For instance, he despised people who were white, Jewish, and from wealthy families not because they were the supporters of the System, as his fellow Weathermen believed, but because he himself was from such a background and he was ashamed of that because the SDS and the Weather Underground had come to the point where it did not tolerate "privileged kids" despite being privileged kids. When he spoke, he was flippant and arrogant. When others spoke, he was disrespectful, pacing around the room and banging on objects.
Rudd was one of the organizers of the vicious Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969. The aftermath of those violent and unnecessary riots, the Students for a Democratic Society disbanded. Furthermore, he gave his approval to the Fort Dix operation, which resulted in the Greenwich townhouse explosion that took the lives of Diana Oughton, Terry Robins, and Theodore Gold.
He dwells a lot on his allegedly tortured relationship with his parents, but his stories point to the fact that the torture was one-sided. Although they disagreed with his ideology and actions, his parents never withdrew their support for him. When he was thrown out of Columbia for his disruptive activities there, they welcomed him with a meal. When he had to go underground, they arranged secret meetings with them.
For someone who left the Weather Underground as early as 1970 because he allegedly changed his views, Rudd is surprisingly confident in his belief that what he did in the sixties and seventies can inspire the younger generation to build a peaceful world. His account is centered around this idea, but it is difficult not to wonder which of his actions precisely Rudd considers to be inspirational. As a young person, I do not feel inspired by someone who committed armed robbery and planted bombs. To me, this person is a terrorist – and an irrational one at that.
Like a typical Weatherman, Rudd is also slow to acknowledge that he was wrong. He admits that he committed a few mistakes, which is an understatement, but maintains that he was right to be part of the protest movement. He is right. The protest movement was important. However, this does not make his actions any less wrong. Weatherman Bill Ayers, once a great champion of the revolutionary motto “Audacity, audacity, and more audacity,” confessed to Rudd in an unsent letter that he had “lost, killed, alienated, or driven away” all his friends, and that life was “sad and lonely,” whether he was a fugitive or not. Rudd does not seem to feel the same way about the Weather Underground's craziness, which he started.
UNDERGROUND is not worth the time that it takes to read it. Unlike some of his fellow Weathermen, Rudd has not learned anything from his experiences. Maybe this is because he was not punished for his actions, while other student radicals set through prison sentences. This book is great only for learning about Rudd as a person.
May 15, 2012
If, like me, you were around for the birth of the SDS and its unhappy child, the Weather Underground, you might wonder what happened to the likes of those who did not go to pieces in a Greenwich Village townhouse. One of the group’s survivors, years after emerging from life on the run, having settled in to a more regular way of living, has offered the story of his days in the movement and of his journey from the life of a student radical, through years as a fugitive to a life as a more or less regular political citizen.
We begin with demonstrations at Columbia University, in protest against the Viet Nam war and against Columbia’s real estate expansion into the surrounding community. This is pretty interesting material, and gives a real feel for the zeitgeist. It was a very volatile time, and young people really believed it was possible to change the world. They were not wrong, but while progressives like Pete Seeger chose a less confrontational, more educational direction, into ecological work, there were plenty of people who thought a better way was to seek a larger overthrow, and part of that was not only to demonstrate, but to stage sit-ins at university buildings. We might call it Occupy Columbia today. Rudd offers a vibrant description of the activities of the students, the organizers and the police, who did what police often do and went out of their way to bust some heads. The mainstream press did not manage to report on that somehow.
Rudd offers considerable detail into where and when the leaders led and where and when they were dragged by the rank and file protesters. He also goes into some of the mind numbing internal politics. There were plenty of factions, each espousing a particular political line. And there were groups within groups, infiltrating, undermining, competing. I got to see some of that personally back in the day, so can attest that the sort of ridiculousness Rudd describes is quite real. Some blokes from across the pond lampooned the tendency of powerless political forces to splinter in their quest for ideological purity. I have included a script excerpt from Monty Python’s Life of Brian at the bottom of this review. What, you haven’t seen it? Wanker! The sort of thing the Python crew mocks was unfurling big time during the Columbia shutdown, and picked up even bigger time as time and tide opened a host of new wounds.
It is pretty clear that despite his calls for armed insurrection, Mark Rudd is not someone with whom you would want to share a foxhole. He cites several instances in which his physical courage is shown wanting. No actual bomb-thrower, Rudd. His projectiles were of the verbal variety. I suppose there is a bit of courage involved in so clearly admitting that he was a coward when it came to physical combat. As there was never a case made by the government against him for any involvement with the real bomb-makers of the Weather Underground we take him at his word that he was not a part of the more explosive splinters of leftist activism. It is clear, though, that among other emotions, he felt admiration for those willing to go to extreme lengths to change the direction in which the nation was heading, however misguided they might have been. Perhaps a contemporary echo of that sort of feeling is the public joy expressed by some Muslim populations at the horror of 9/11. If one has identified one’s enemy as evil, it does make a bit of sense to wish him dead. Personally, I am not up for popping a few rounds into those I consider representatives of the dark side, (in reality, that is, but a guy can dream) but I would certainly cheer should Cheney’s medical device suddenly fail, Putin fall off a horse and break his neck, or Bashar al-asad find himself on the receiving end of his thugs’ assaults.
The Weather Underground, and the SDS functioned not just as political organizations at the bleeding edge, but as cults. The same sort of top-down decision-making wound up becoming de rigeur, with criticism of decisions clearly not welcome. There was also an insistence on discarding monogamy, which made for a pretty lively sex life, (and resulting medical unpleasantness) particularly for the leaders. Such cultish entities often breed a sort of bubble mentality that is capable, eager even, to ignore outside opinions and even actual reality. Believing one’s own bullshit is neither good for the effectiveness of one’s organization, or for one’s mental health. Turns out it is not so good for one’s physical health either.
The most interesting part of Rudd’s story for me was his time underground. It was detailed and offered a very compelling portrait of the joys of never being able to settle down anywhere, of not being able get too close to anyone who was not already part of your movement, and even then, having to wonder who might be a government agent and which smiling old comrade might turn you in for a sentencing advantage.
In Underground, Rudd comes across as an arrogant, entitled, middle-class kid from a nice suburb who had an enlarged sense of his own importance, and impact on the world. On the other hand, if you can do it, it ain’t bragging, and he did, for a while. It is humanizing that he is able to portray himself as less than a heroic figure. He has moved past his legal and extremist issues, and has found a way to do good without putting himself or others in peril. Would that were true of our corporate overlords.
QUOTES - a few passages
P 97 – The New York Times was intimately entangled with Columbia at all levels, from the board of trustees on down, and became the house organ for the Columbia administration. Times publisher Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, a Columbia graduate, was a trustee of the university. Many of the editors were Columbia Journalism School graduates or teachers. My favorite tale of New York Times complicity with Columbia was its lead piece in the first edition of the April 30 paper. The newspaper reported that the police has peacefully removed all the4 demonstrators from the buildings. However, that early edition hit the newsstands before the bust had occurred. The Times had been tipped off to the plan the afternoon before the bust by police leadership so that the story could be written ahead of time. In later editions the< i>Times barely mentioned that one of its own reporters, Robert Thomas, Jr., was severely beaten by New York City cops using handcuffs as brass knuckles; that fact didn’t square with the story of violent students and peacable police.
P 162 [ re self-criticism]
I did not realize at the time that we had unwittingly reproduced conditions that all hermetically sealed cults use: isolation, sleep deprivation, demanding arbitrary acts of loyalty to the group, even sexual initiation as bonding. It’s strange that these practices can arise without any conspiratorial mastermind or leadership cabal.
P 168
On a hot Saturday in early August at the Mall in Central Park, I was among a contingent of several dozen New York Weathermen who marched up onto the stage at a rally commemorating the twenty-fourth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We elbowed aside the surprised organizers from the fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee and seized the microphone. Jeff Jones, my comrade in the Weather Bureau, commenced to rant at the several thousand peaceful protesters assembled. “It’s not enough to be for peace, like the liberals who organized the rally; you’ve got to be for revolution. And that revolution will be violent, so get ready.” As he continued, the audience just drifted away; we had destroyed the rally more effectively than any right-wing counter-demonstrators of government agents might have.
P 226 [regarding breaking Timothy Leary out of jail]
We were opportunistically glomming on to the counterculture. For years SDS had stood to the side, criticizing the hippies for not being political enough. The Leary jailbreak appeared to me to be a transparent attempt to insinuate ourselves with our potential base, the flower children.
P 312
The culture of this country in the first decade of the twenty-first century is fundamentally different compared to that of forty years ago. There’s no draft, so young people don’t need to pay attention to the war, as we had to. (which explains why a draft is not on the war planners’ agenda.) The seductions of the entertainment and consumer cultures, fueled by cheap goods and easy credit, have achieved almost total hegemony as the purpose of individual life. To top this off, the cost of a college education, even at public institutions, is so much higher than it was forty years ago, when no one graduated with anything like the level of debt that students have now.. huge student loans keep young people so shackled that it never even occurs to them to stray from the career path for a protest or a meeting.
=======================THE MONTY PYTHON BIT
BRIAN: Are you the Judean People's Front?
REG: Fuck off!
BRIAN: What?
REG: Judean People's Front? We're the People's Front of Judea! Judean People's Front. Cawk.
FRANCIS: Wankers.
BRIAN: Can I... join your group?
REG: No. Piss off.
BRIAN: I didn't want to sell this stuff. It's only a job. I hate the Romans as much as anybody.
PEOPLE'S FRONT OF JUDEA: Shhhh. Shhhh. Shhh. Shh. Shhhh.
REG: Stumm.
JUDITH: Are you sure?
BRIAN: Oh, dead sure. I hate the Romans already.
REG: Listen. If you wanted to join the P.F.J., you'd have to really hate the Romans.
BRIAN: I do!
REG: Oh, yeah? How much?
BRIAN: A lot!
REG: Right. You're in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah...
JUDITH: Splitters.
P.F.J.: Splitters...
FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People's Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
LORETTA: And the People's Front of Judea.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
REG: What?
LORETTA: The People's Front of Judea. Splitters.
REG: We're the People's Front of Judea!
LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.
REG: People's Front! C-huh.
FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?
REG: He's over there.
We begin with demonstrations at Columbia University, in protest against the Viet Nam war and against Columbia’s real estate expansion into the surrounding community. This is pretty interesting material, and gives a real feel for the zeitgeist. It was a very volatile time, and young people really believed it was possible to change the world. They were not wrong, but while progressives like Pete Seeger chose a less confrontational, more educational direction, into ecological work, there were plenty of people who thought a better way was to seek a larger overthrow, and part of that was not only to demonstrate, but to stage sit-ins at university buildings. We might call it Occupy Columbia today. Rudd offers a vibrant description of the activities of the students, the organizers and the police, who did what police often do and went out of their way to bust some heads. The mainstream press did not manage to report on that somehow.
Rudd offers considerable detail into where and when the leaders led and where and when they were dragged by the rank and file protesters. He also goes into some of the mind numbing internal politics. There were plenty of factions, each espousing a particular political line. And there were groups within groups, infiltrating, undermining, competing. I got to see some of that personally back in the day, so can attest that the sort of ridiculousness Rudd describes is quite real. Some blokes from across the pond lampooned the tendency of powerless political forces to splinter in their quest for ideological purity. I have included a script excerpt from Monty Python’s Life of Brian at the bottom of this review. What, you haven’t seen it? Wanker! The sort of thing the Python crew mocks was unfurling big time during the Columbia shutdown, and picked up even bigger time as time and tide opened a host of new wounds.
It is pretty clear that despite his calls for armed insurrection, Mark Rudd is not someone with whom you would want to share a foxhole. He cites several instances in which his physical courage is shown wanting. No actual bomb-thrower, Rudd. His projectiles were of the verbal variety. I suppose there is a bit of courage involved in so clearly admitting that he was a coward when it came to physical combat. As there was never a case made by the government against him for any involvement with the real bomb-makers of the Weather Underground we take him at his word that he was not a part of the more explosive splinters of leftist activism. It is clear, though, that among other emotions, he felt admiration for those willing to go to extreme lengths to change the direction in which the nation was heading, however misguided they might have been. Perhaps a contemporary echo of that sort of feeling is the public joy expressed by some Muslim populations at the horror of 9/11. If one has identified one’s enemy as evil, it does make a bit of sense to wish him dead. Personally, I am not up for popping a few rounds into those I consider representatives of the dark side, (in reality, that is, but a guy can dream) but I would certainly cheer should Cheney’s medical device suddenly fail, Putin fall off a horse and break his neck, or Bashar al-asad find himself on the receiving end of his thugs’ assaults.
The Weather Underground, and the SDS functioned not just as political organizations at the bleeding edge, but as cults. The same sort of top-down decision-making wound up becoming de rigeur, with criticism of decisions clearly not welcome. There was also an insistence on discarding monogamy, which made for a pretty lively sex life, (and resulting medical unpleasantness) particularly for the leaders. Such cultish entities often breed a sort of bubble mentality that is capable, eager even, to ignore outside opinions and even actual reality. Believing one’s own bullshit is neither good for the effectiveness of one’s organization, or for one’s mental health. Turns out it is not so good for one’s physical health either.
The most interesting part of Rudd’s story for me was his time underground. It was detailed and offered a very compelling portrait of the joys of never being able to settle down anywhere, of not being able get too close to anyone who was not already part of your movement, and even then, having to wonder who might be a government agent and which smiling old comrade might turn you in for a sentencing advantage.
In Underground, Rudd comes across as an arrogant, entitled, middle-class kid from a nice suburb who had an enlarged sense of his own importance, and impact on the world. On the other hand, if you can do it, it ain’t bragging, and he did, for a while. It is humanizing that he is able to portray himself as less than a heroic figure. He has moved past his legal and extremist issues, and has found a way to do good without putting himself or others in peril. Would that were true of our corporate overlords.
QUOTES - a few passages
P 97 – The New York Times was intimately entangled with Columbia at all levels, from the board of trustees on down, and became the house organ for the Columbia administration. Times publisher Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, a Columbia graduate, was a trustee of the university. Many of the editors were Columbia Journalism School graduates or teachers. My favorite tale of New York Times complicity with Columbia was its lead piece in the first edition of the April 30 paper. The newspaper reported that the police has peacefully removed all the4 demonstrators from the buildings. However, that early edition hit the newsstands before the bust had occurred. The Times had been tipped off to the plan the afternoon before the bust by police leadership so that the story could be written ahead of time. In later editions the< i>Times barely mentioned that one of its own reporters, Robert Thomas, Jr., was severely beaten by New York City cops using handcuffs as brass knuckles; that fact didn’t square with the story of violent students and peacable police.
P 162 [ re self-criticism]
I did not realize at the time that we had unwittingly reproduced conditions that all hermetically sealed cults use: isolation, sleep deprivation, demanding arbitrary acts of loyalty to the group, even sexual initiation as bonding. It’s strange that these practices can arise without any conspiratorial mastermind or leadership cabal.
P 168
On a hot Saturday in early August at the Mall in Central Park, I was among a contingent of several dozen New York Weathermen who marched up onto the stage at a rally commemorating the twenty-fourth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We elbowed aside the surprised organizers from the fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee and seized the microphone. Jeff Jones, my comrade in the Weather Bureau, commenced to rant at the several thousand peaceful protesters assembled. “It’s not enough to be for peace, like the liberals who organized the rally; you’ve got to be for revolution. And that revolution will be violent, so get ready.” As he continued, the audience just drifted away; we had destroyed the rally more effectively than any right-wing counter-demonstrators of government agents might have.
P 226 [regarding breaking Timothy Leary out of jail]
We were opportunistically glomming on to the counterculture. For years SDS had stood to the side, criticizing the hippies for not being political enough. The Leary jailbreak appeared to me to be a transparent attempt to insinuate ourselves with our potential base, the flower children.
P 312
The culture of this country in the first decade of the twenty-first century is fundamentally different compared to that of forty years ago. There’s no draft, so young people don’t need to pay attention to the war, as we had to. (which explains why a draft is not on the war planners’ agenda.) The seductions of the entertainment and consumer cultures, fueled by cheap goods and easy credit, have achieved almost total hegemony as the purpose of individual life. To top this off, the cost of a college education, even at public institutions, is so much higher than it was forty years ago, when no one graduated with anything like the level of debt that students have now.. huge student loans keep young people so shackled that it never even occurs to them to stray from the career path for a protest or a meeting.
=======================THE MONTY PYTHON BIT
BRIAN: Are you the Judean People's Front?
REG: Fuck off!
BRIAN: What?
REG: Judean People's Front? We're the People's Front of Judea! Judean People's Front. Cawk.
FRANCIS: Wankers.
BRIAN: Can I... join your group?
REG: No. Piss off.
BRIAN: I didn't want to sell this stuff. It's only a job. I hate the Romans as much as anybody.
PEOPLE'S FRONT OF JUDEA: Shhhh. Shhhh. Shhh. Shh. Shhhh.
REG: Stumm.
JUDITH: Are you sure?
BRIAN: Oh, dead sure. I hate the Romans already.
REG: Listen. If you wanted to join the P.F.J., you'd have to really hate the Romans.
BRIAN: I do!
REG: Oh, yeah? How much?
BRIAN: A lot!
REG: Right. You're in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah...
JUDITH: Splitters.
P.F.J.: Splitters...
FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People's Front.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
LORETTA: And the People's Front of Judea.
P.F.J.: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters...
REG: What?
LORETTA: The People's Front of Judea. Splitters.
REG: We're the People's Front of Judea!
LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.
REG: People's Front! C-huh.
FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?
REG: He's over there.
July 6, 2009
what a totally weird book. i have never been big on mark rudd. i have read a lot about SDS (i really recommended kirkpatrick sales's book on the subject for a thorough history & understanding the politics of the group & what broke it apart) & weatherman, including all of the various autobiographies of former weatherpeople that have been published in the last ten years or so. even back when i was reading my dad's old history books about the 60s student movements when i was like 13, mark rudd always seemed like a preening, sexist asshole to me. so when i heard that some publisher had finally taken the bait & agreed to publish his long-unpublished manuscript (or this is what i have heard from sources that are perhaps less vested in mark's story than he himself is--he claims in the epilogue that he retired from teaching a mere three years ago in order to write the book, which doesn't at all tally with what i have heard about a completed manuscript kicking around since at least 2001), i was somewhat intrigued, somewhat trepidatious.
while looking for an apartment in kansas, i stayed with a friend whose scholarship focuses on oral histories. she had interviewed mark rudd several years before & told me that he was a really dull interview, over-apologizing for the actions of weatherman, completely flummoxed by certain questions she raised about, say, the lack of conspicuous female leadership in the student movement of the 1960s. you'd think that in the forty years he's been psychologically beating himself up for adhering to an anti-imperialist violence line for a couple of years during which he didn't even really do much of anything violent (if this book is to be believed), he might have stopped to think about ladies as more than just an amusing toy to fuck, but whatever. she'd picked up a copy of his autobiography & let me borrow it. i got a few chapters in before i had to put it away again because i couldn't bear the descriptions of mark rudd's sex life. do i care that he lost his virginity to an older married neighbor woman? no, i do not. nor do i need to hear about midwestern accents being a "sexual turn-on" or references to his penis as a "magic wand of [women's:] liberation". YUCK.
i requested it from the local library back in boston though, since i can't seem to leave a book unread once i've started it. the sexual stuff is strictly abhorrent. he writes about having a threesome with a married woman & another male weatherman member, & feeling "excited" by the pospect of his semen "mixing" with the other dude's "inside a woman". come on! it's not like this book is really all that long. it's just barely over 300 pages. he spends the first half of the book recounting the columbia strikes & building seizures, & pretty much the rest of the book detailing his seven & a half years living underground as a weather fugitive. surely he could have ditched the repellant sexual fantasies & written more substantively about the political work he has done since surfacing in the late 70s? he went to nicaragua to build houses. that's interesting, right? roxanne dunbar-ortiz wrote an entire memoir about doing solidarity work with nicaraguans in the 80s. it's not boring shit. i don't know if mark was trying to maybe atone for having fucked up attitudes toward the ladies or what, but he came across as pretty unrepentant in a lot of ways. he actually writes at one point, defending his characterization as a borderline-sexual predator using his prestige within the student movement to score with girls (including very young girls who were virgins whom he never spoke to again), "i was 21. i was living out the standard american male fantasy." OH! i see! every dude is a disgusting scum fucker. that makes it okay then? he also writes about jane alpert, palling around with her in new mexico, & then feeling betrayed when she cited his bad behavior with the ladies in a piece she wrote for "ms." magazine. he writes about fantasizing about smashing her head in with a 40-pound concrete block. um...what the fuck?
& then there's all the shit where he's all, "when i found out about what was going on in nicaragua, i felt really depressed...when iraq invaded kuwait, it made me really depressed...when this huge geopolitical tragedy occurred, here's how it made me feel." i know autobiographies are by their very nature perhaps a conduit for selfish explorations of feelings, but oh my god! i don't care how sad the first iraq war made you feel. suck it up, dude.
so why was this book given two stars? because it was all right. there was some nice dishy stuff about how crazy the weather underground's politics got as they lost touch with reality living as fugitives, fighting with each other all the time over minute differences in political flavor, which is plenty familiar to me as a veteran of a gazillionty-nine different collectives full of people hung up on their own egos. it's always nice to know that i don't just have bad luck, but that maybe there is something about the isolating nature of this work that makes people pick each other apart. but i definitely won't be giving this one a re-read anytime soon. seriously, comparing his penis to a magic wand? i still can't get over how disgusting that is.
while looking for an apartment in kansas, i stayed with a friend whose scholarship focuses on oral histories. she had interviewed mark rudd several years before & told me that he was a really dull interview, over-apologizing for the actions of weatherman, completely flummoxed by certain questions she raised about, say, the lack of conspicuous female leadership in the student movement of the 1960s. you'd think that in the forty years he's been psychologically beating himself up for adhering to an anti-imperialist violence line for a couple of years during which he didn't even really do much of anything violent (if this book is to be believed), he might have stopped to think about ladies as more than just an amusing toy to fuck, but whatever. she'd picked up a copy of his autobiography & let me borrow it. i got a few chapters in before i had to put it away again because i couldn't bear the descriptions of mark rudd's sex life. do i care that he lost his virginity to an older married neighbor woman? no, i do not. nor do i need to hear about midwestern accents being a "sexual turn-on" or references to his penis as a "magic wand of [women's:] liberation". YUCK.
i requested it from the local library back in boston though, since i can't seem to leave a book unread once i've started it. the sexual stuff is strictly abhorrent. he writes about having a threesome with a married woman & another male weatherman member, & feeling "excited" by the pospect of his semen "mixing" with the other dude's "inside a woman". come on! it's not like this book is really all that long. it's just barely over 300 pages. he spends the first half of the book recounting the columbia strikes & building seizures, & pretty much the rest of the book detailing his seven & a half years living underground as a weather fugitive. surely he could have ditched the repellant sexual fantasies & written more substantively about the political work he has done since surfacing in the late 70s? he went to nicaragua to build houses. that's interesting, right? roxanne dunbar-ortiz wrote an entire memoir about doing solidarity work with nicaraguans in the 80s. it's not boring shit. i don't know if mark was trying to maybe atone for having fucked up attitudes toward the ladies or what, but he came across as pretty unrepentant in a lot of ways. he actually writes at one point, defending his characterization as a borderline-sexual predator using his prestige within the student movement to score with girls (including very young girls who were virgins whom he never spoke to again), "i was 21. i was living out the standard american male fantasy." OH! i see! every dude is a disgusting scum fucker. that makes it okay then? he also writes about jane alpert, palling around with her in new mexico, & then feeling betrayed when she cited his bad behavior with the ladies in a piece she wrote for "ms." magazine. he writes about fantasizing about smashing her head in with a 40-pound concrete block. um...what the fuck?
& then there's all the shit where he's all, "when i found out about what was going on in nicaragua, i felt really depressed...when iraq invaded kuwait, it made me really depressed...when this huge geopolitical tragedy occurred, here's how it made me feel." i know autobiographies are by their very nature perhaps a conduit for selfish explorations of feelings, but oh my god! i don't care how sad the first iraq war made you feel. suck it up, dude.
so why was this book given two stars? because it was all right. there was some nice dishy stuff about how crazy the weather underground's politics got as they lost touch with reality living as fugitives, fighting with each other all the time over minute differences in political flavor, which is plenty familiar to me as a veteran of a gazillionty-nine different collectives full of people hung up on their own egos. it's always nice to know that i don't just have bad luck, but that maybe there is something about the isolating nature of this work that makes people pick each other apart. but i definitely won't be giving this one a re-read anytime soon. seriously, comparing his penis to a magic wand? i still can't get over how disgusting that is.
July 18, 2009
Mark Rudd came up to Oneonta State in the winter of 1969. I was one of about 100 that on short notice crammed into the Morris Hall lounge to hear him speak. He wore work boots, jeans and a flannel shirt. He spoke (shouted) for about 40 minutes, a talk full of profanity and marxist jargon. He postured himself as hard core SDS, the vanguard of the revolution. I remember then thinking the guy was a phony, play-acting what he thought a revolutionary should sound like.
This book reinforces my first impression. Mark Rudd was weak, vain, under the thrall of others who seemed to be resolutely militant. He burst into fame when he led the Columbia strike in 1967. Even there, he was more carried along by events rather than a leader. The occupation of the administration buildings and the demonstration at the gym under construction at Morningside Heights were spontaneous decisions.
Expelled from Columbia, he became a leader of the SDS for a short time and followed the group known as the Weatherman to break from the SDS and to go underground to wage violent actions against the state and the Vietnam war. Rudd professes now to know that he and is small cadre were ill advised and ill equipped to wage war. They were after all by and large the sons and daughters of well off parents who had little clue what they were doing.
After the explosion in greenwich village that killed 3 weatherman bombmakers, the myth arose that this was an aberration and the group shifted to benign bombing on symbolic targets with no casaulties. Rudd shows that the weatherman were wacky and not in a good endearing way, paranoid, ineffectual, self destructive and prone to violence. They went underground and cut themselves off from the mass antiwar movement and also were responsible for a backlash that helped elect right wing politicians for a generation.
This book reinforces my first impression. Mark Rudd was weak, vain, under the thrall of others who seemed to be resolutely militant. He burst into fame when he led the Columbia strike in 1967. Even there, he was more carried along by events rather than a leader. The occupation of the administration buildings and the demonstration at the gym under construction at Morningside Heights were spontaneous decisions.
Expelled from Columbia, he became a leader of the SDS for a short time and followed the group known as the Weatherman to break from the SDS and to go underground to wage violent actions against the state and the Vietnam war. Rudd professes now to know that he and is small cadre were ill advised and ill equipped to wage war. They were after all by and large the sons and daughters of well off parents who had little clue what they were doing.
After the explosion in greenwich village that killed 3 weatherman bombmakers, the myth arose that this was an aberration and the group shifted to benign bombing on symbolic targets with no casaulties. Rudd shows that the weatherman were wacky and not in a good endearing way, paranoid, ineffectual, self destructive and prone to violence. They went underground and cut themselves off from the mass antiwar movement and also were responsible for a backlash that helped elect right wing politicians for a generation.
May 3, 2009
Earlier this week my sister sent me an email about a reading by Mark Rudd at a bookstore with walking distance of where I was that day. I've been interested in the thinking of 60's radicals for some years so I went. It was well worth the walk. Rudd is an interesting speaker. The book was good too.
I've read Fugitive Days by Bill Ayres, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times As a Weatherman by Cathy Wilkerson and Family Circle about Kathy Boudin. I came away from these books feeling important things had been left out in order to make the main characters seem more sympathetic. Mark Rudd doesn't do this. He tells stories about SDS and the Weatherman that do not portray him in a flattering light. He clearly regrets many of his own actions which is what allows him to tell the truth about what was going on within the Weatherman faction. Even with the dirty laundry of SDS and The Weathermen aired, Rudd looks to the future with an optimistic attitude that really feels genuine.
I've read Fugitive Days by Bill Ayres, Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times As a Weatherman by Cathy Wilkerson and Family Circle about Kathy Boudin. I came away from these books feeling important things had been left out in order to make the main characters seem more sympathetic. Mark Rudd doesn't do this. He tells stories about SDS and the Weatherman that do not portray him in a flattering light. He clearly regrets many of his own actions which is what allows him to tell the truth about what was going on within the Weatherman faction. Even with the dirty laundry of SDS and The Weathermen aired, Rudd looks to the future with an optimistic attitude that really feels genuine.
January 2, 2011
When: Summer 2010
Why I read it: Mark Rudd was a student at Columbia College in New York City, participating in the big student strike in spring 1968. I started Barnard College, Columbia's sister school, in fall 1968. He was a true hero for many students. Then I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1980. And it turned out that Mark had moved to Albuerque in 1979. Our paths have crossed too closely.
Format: Hardbook, which my sister, Nancy, bought at an event in Eugene, OR, and it is autographed by Mark.
The student uprising at Columbia directly affected me, and I wanted to find out the story behind it. I had a bit of a problem keeping track of the players. But I loved that Mark did not seem to embellish anything. He tells the events from 1967 to 1977 from a mostly unbiased viewpoint. He is quite willing to say that he made mistakes, that he really cared for friends that he lost, that he enjoyed being treated as a rock star. The revolutionary approach of the weathermen probably wasn't the best road for him, but it made sense at the time.
I met Mark at an event in Santa Fe, showing the documentary "Weather Underground." It was ostensibly for young people, but there were a bunch of his contemporaries there. Like me. He seems like a pretty happy man now. And happy to be in New Mexico.
Why I read it: Mark Rudd was a student at Columbia College in New York City, participating in the big student strike in spring 1968. I started Barnard College, Columbia's sister school, in fall 1968. He was a true hero for many students. Then I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1980. And it turned out that Mark had moved to Albuerque in 1979. Our paths have crossed too closely.
Format: Hardbook, which my sister, Nancy, bought at an event in Eugene, OR, and it is autographed by Mark.
The student uprising at Columbia directly affected me, and I wanted to find out the story behind it. I had a bit of a problem keeping track of the players. But I loved that Mark did not seem to embellish anything. He tells the events from 1967 to 1977 from a mostly unbiased viewpoint. He is quite willing to say that he made mistakes, that he really cared for friends that he lost, that he enjoyed being treated as a rock star. The revolutionary approach of the weathermen probably wasn't the best road for him, but it made sense at the time.
I met Mark at an event in Santa Fe, showing the documentary "Weather Underground." It was ostensibly for young people, but there were a bunch of his contemporaries there. Like me. He seems like a pretty happy man now. And happy to be in New Mexico.
May 4, 2009
I've admired Mark Rudd for over 20 years when I first learned about the Columbia University take over in 1968. I've often wondered what took this young person down the road to violence and armed struggle. Now, at last, we have his own account of the passion that lead him to organize against the Vietnam war and the juvenile confusion that turned him into a terrorist. I'm glad this book is out (and it helps that he signed my copy last week!)
November 7, 2020
This is better than you are thinking. It isn't proselytizing. It isn't pro violence. It is, very well written. Good story ,details,move through the take off radical anti war pro people's concerns politics from start to finish. Plus a good amount on unexpected details, human stuff, romance and marriage. Parents love for their and worry about,their young adult protesting radical children. I got a lot of enjoyment from the book!
June 11, 2011
This is the most exciting autobiography I have ever read, and a tremendous lesson in later twentieth century American history. About the Columbia University student takeover by the Weather Underground in the sixties. The author was a revolutionary who believed in violence, at one time, as the response to the Vietnam War and imperialism, but he changed his mind. He realized that he could be killed, and that violence would alienate too many people. The goal of SDS and, initially, the Weather Underground, was to get Americans to reject the Vietnam war, our imperialist foreign policy, and internal racism. Rudd and his comrades did help end the war by promoting the mobilizations of millions of college age people. He never did graduate from Columbia; he was expelled, even though he was a top student.
The book is about not only the struggles of antiwar activist groups but also Rudd's personal struggles. He lived in urban communes where monogamy was regarded as bourgeois and everyone's body belonged to everyone else. The lifestyle was truly communistic and they bought into Stalin's line that the individual should always be sacrificed to the party. So Rudd was definitely extremist, yet his middle-class suburban Jewish roots kept haunting him.
Down to earth. Reads like a novel.
The book is about not only the struggles of antiwar activist groups but also Rudd's personal struggles. He lived in urban communes where monogamy was regarded as bourgeois and everyone's body belonged to everyone else. The lifestyle was truly communistic and they bought into Stalin's line that the individual should always be sacrificed to the party. So Rudd was definitely extremist, yet his middle-class suburban Jewish roots kept haunting him.
Down to earth. Reads like a novel.
January 19, 2020
I have read a number of biographies, histories and memoirs by participants of the 1960'-1970's radical upsurge in the US. This is one of the better ones.
Mark Rudd seems to have given a good bit of thought about his life and actions prior to writing this book, and I was happy to see his analysis and self-criticisms especially about how the Weatherman faction participated in the destruction of SDS, what Weather ignored about Che and focoism, his participation in sexist behavior, as well as his fears and love of family.
The book is in three parts, the first is about the Columbia University uprising in 1968. I knew very little about the specifics and this section was both fascinating and exciting. In the Epilogue, Rudd relates lessons he learned about that uprising which focused on the issues of war and racism.
One of the characters who appears throughout the book is David Gilbert, how has been imprisoned since the early 1980's. Gilbert consistently comes across as smart, reasonable and sensitive. He should be released from prison.
Mark Rudd seems to have given a good bit of thought about his life and actions prior to writing this book, and I was happy to see his analysis and self-criticisms especially about how the Weatherman faction participated in the destruction of SDS, what Weather ignored about Che and focoism, his participation in sexist behavior, as well as his fears and love of family.
The book is in three parts, the first is about the Columbia University uprising in 1968. I knew very little about the specifics and this section was both fascinating and exciting. In the Epilogue, Rudd relates lessons he learned about that uprising which focused on the issues of war and racism.
One of the characters who appears throughout the book is David Gilbert, how has been imprisoned since the early 1980's. Gilbert consistently comes across as smart, reasonable and sensitive. He should be released from prison.
July 15, 2018
Re-read, 07/2018: Mark Rudd's account of his radical life remains a fantastic read. I am, again, particularly struck my his willingness to admit to many mistakes made during his life, while remaining unapologetic for his beliefs and ideals.
Mark Rudd's autobiography on his role in the student strikes at Columbia University, and his time in SDS and the Weather Underground, is both an excellent companion to Bill Ayers' book (Fugitive Days, a book that I also would highly, highly recommend reading), and an excellent stand alone read for anyone interested in sixties counterculture. Rudd's story of his time underground is fascinating. I, for one, did not realize that he broke with Weather Underground rather early on while he was a fugitive, as this is a fact that other tales of the organization gloss over or ignore altogether. This book is an inspiration to anyone interested in a vital aspect of the sixties that most mainstream histories ignore altogether or leave to the footnotes; if you're at all interested in counterculture or the sixties in general, I recommend giving this, and pretty much any other book written about the Weather Underground organization, a thorough read.
Mark Rudd's autobiography on his role in the student strikes at Columbia University, and his time in SDS and the Weather Underground, is both an excellent companion to Bill Ayers' book (Fugitive Days, a book that I also would highly, highly recommend reading), and an excellent stand alone read for anyone interested in sixties counterculture. Rudd's story of his time underground is fascinating. I, for one, did not realize that he broke with Weather Underground rather early on while he was a fugitive, as this is a fact that other tales of the organization gloss over or ignore altogether. This book is an inspiration to anyone interested in a vital aspect of the sixties that most mainstream histories ignore altogether or leave to the footnotes; if you're at all interested in counterculture or the sixties in general, I recommend giving this, and pretty much any other book written about the Weather Underground organization, a thorough read.
September 23, 2017
This book surprised me. It’s an easy, almost colloquial read, and quite a candid autobiography of one of the leaders of the 1968 Columbia University events, and a participant in the crazy world of the “Weather Underground.”
I was present for the 1968 foofaraw, and this account has a certain verisimilitude. Rudd’s account of living underground is also quite interesting. It seems to me that being a father and working at everyday jobs “made a man of him.”
Rudd is candid about the futility of Weatherman’s violent tactics and its increasingly cultish atmosphere. He’s also candid about the Jewish nature of much of the movement and how much these ethnic considerations underlay the motivations of many, although rarely acknowledged in the public rhetoric of the movement.
Natheless, this book has its limitations. Rudd is no theorist or even much of a political analyst. He’s still some kind of lefty, but has neither much insight into how society works, nor any notion that communism might not be all of what it was cracked up to be in his milieu back in the day. He still gallivants about dabbling in agitprop.
Still, the book might make a good road movie in the right directorial hands.
I was present for the 1968 foofaraw, and this account has a certain verisimilitude. Rudd’s account of living underground is also quite interesting. It seems to me that being a father and working at everyday jobs “made a man of him.”
Rudd is candid about the futility of Weatherman’s violent tactics and its increasingly cultish atmosphere. He’s also candid about the Jewish nature of much of the movement and how much these ethnic considerations underlay the motivations of many, although rarely acknowledged in the public rhetoric of the movement.
Natheless, this book has its limitations. Rudd is no theorist or even much of a political analyst. He’s still some kind of lefty, but has neither much insight into how society works, nor any notion that communism might not be all of what it was cracked up to be in his milieu back in the day. He still gallivants about dabbling in agitprop.
Still, the book might make a good road movie in the right directorial hands.
April 22, 2018
Even though I witnessed the events of 1968 on the Columbia campus, I was not particularly interested in Mark Rudd. I had seen him ranting at a distance and more or less dismissed him as a spoiled kid, and I never had any use for the Weatherman craziness. Then I happened to pick up this book and actually I couldn't put it down. What is most striking about the memoir is his unflinching honesty about himself, his values and above all his many mistakes. Unlike fellow Weather Underground figures like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, he faces up to his responsibility for helping to damage the whole antiwar movement and above all, for the lives that were destroyed by that ideology. He is particularly troubled by the fact that he knew about the 1970 bomb plot that would have killed countless soldiers and their guests at Fort Dix and did end up taking the lives of three of the bomb makers. I recommend it highly to anyone with an interest in that era.
February 9, 2021
So interesting. Readable, yet intellectual. Takes you to the 69's, through the 70's ,family establishment , he has children, up to the more current years. Very relevant and a good read.
November 22, 2025
Mark Rudd was an intelligent, privileged, white, Jewish, college student who opposed the Vietnam War. He joined the Students for a Democratic Society and held high offices in the organization. He led other students in protests, which shut down his university for a time. He also traveled the country speaking for the organization and recruiting new members. In my mind, that's on the edge of being law-abiding.
But Rudd took it over the edge and, with a few other students, insisted on revolution and violence. This hardcore, ready-to-kill-and-die-for-a-cause group became known as the Weathermen. It is beyond my comprehension how objecting to America's involvement in Vietnam could develop into such a violent and murderous group.
Three Weathermen died when a bomb they were building exploded prematurely. Others were involved in an armed robbery, which resulted in death of the police and the Weathermen. Rudd was not involved in either of these incidents, but was still a fugitive from the FBI. He and his wife and two children lived underground, using fake identities.
When Rudd decided to turn himself in, it was because he was tired of hiding, not because he regretted any of the things he had done. He received merely a slap on the wrist and still held radical, anti-government political views.
But Rudd took it over the edge and, with a few other students, insisted on revolution and violence. This hardcore, ready-to-kill-and-die-for-a-cause group became known as the Weathermen. It is beyond my comprehension how objecting to America's involvement in Vietnam could develop into such a violent and murderous group.
Three Weathermen died when a bomb they were building exploded prematurely. Others were involved in an armed robbery, which resulted in death of the police and the Weathermen. Rudd was not involved in either of these incidents, but was still a fugitive from the FBI. He and his wife and two children lived underground, using fake identities.
When Rudd decided to turn himself in, it was because he was tired of hiding, not because he regretted any of the things he had done. He received merely a slap on the wrist and still held radical, anti-government political views.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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October 13, 2020I treated myself to a nice deep-dive into the sordid state of the 60s-70s American Left. I read Rudd and Ayers’ accounts of their time in the Weather Underground. I also rewatched The Century of Self, which featured some of the same characters (I highly recommend The Century of Self). What this cornucopia made clear for me was how attempts at “left” politics, especially from the WU, were immediately subsumed by an encompassing 70s culture of individual pursuit. Politics become good fodder for personal branding exercises. It still remains practically difficult, if not impossible to effectively live political values. The conditions under which the WU operated still exist today. What these guys (yes, mostly guys it must be emphasized) embraced, while it was fun and affordable for them, was expressing their values in social terms. No wonder they all sort of hated each other and were constantly isolated.
"Smoking pot makes you a criminal and a revolutionary. As soon as you take your first puff, you are an enemy of society" - Jerry Rubin
Sure dude.
"Smoking pot makes you a criminal and a revolutionary. As soon as you take your first puff, you are an enemy of society" - Jerry Rubin
Sure dude.
December 21, 2024
That was disappointing, definitely as to Mark Rudd the person, somewhat as a memoir. I'm having trouble believing the level of detail he provides and as there are no sources cited--yes, he mentions his FOIA requests but we get no details on which records he consults--we're left wondering how he can possibly remember all of this if he was as chemically AND emotionally impaired as he says he was. Yes, he recognizes his many failures, but the tone is still weirdly self-congratulatory. This is best read as a primer on how not to defeat captialism/imperialism. EDIT: he does mention an address book/notebook he kept during the Columbia years but it's not clear how much he relies on the copies he obtained through his FOIA requests.
December 2, 2020
Altogether a pretty engaging and interesting memoir. Has a couple cringe-y moments, and perhaps some under-interrogated thinking at times, but on the whole, a good read. Rudd has very much repudiated the violence of the WUO, so there is probably some retrospective bias, but generally he's quite honest, sometimes painfully so.
June 13, 2021
Very informative and eye opening
I had no idea such countercultures existed in the US and I was born in the 50s. It’s amazing how history repeats itself, of course not exactly the same, but with an eternal thread of similarities.
I had no idea such countercultures existed in the US and I was born in the 50s. It’s amazing how history repeats itself, of course not exactly the same, but with an eternal thread of similarities.
December 21, 2021
I probably would have divorced him too. Definitely a good read for us millennials if just to hear about the radicals of the 70's and all of the rakes they stepped on continuously, for decades, literally didn't stop stepping on them.
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November 2, 2024A refreshing escape from reality. The vivid descriptions bring the world to life, and the author’s knack for blending the fantastical with relatable characters is impressive. I found myself lost in the setting, completely immersed in its magic and charm.
March 16, 2025
An Interesting Read
The book gives good insights into how to organize and why to organize. He's clear on the counterproductive effects of violence. These are skills we all may need to learn in the very near future.
The book gives good insights into how to organize and why to organize. He's clear on the counterproductive effects of violence. These are skills we all may need to learn in the very near future.
June 30, 2017
For a potentially fascinating topic, this was a big snooze.
July 1, 2020
A fitting book for the times, and really shows old school left-wing extermism . I wonder what this would look like today
July 14, 2025
My goodness. There's some-ish "remorse" towards the end-ish... some-ish.
March 17, 2026
I'm reading this one too.
update 3/6/2026: page 64
update 3/8/2026: page 85
update 3/13/2026: page 184
https://kudera.blogspot.com/2026/03/a...
https://kudera.blogspot.com/2026/03/a...
It is a stronger book than Fugitive Days by William Ayres.
update 3/6/2026: page 64
update 3/8/2026: page 85
update 3/13/2026: page 184
https://kudera.blogspot.com/2026/03/a...
https://kudera.blogspot.com/2026/03/a...
It is a stronger book than Fugitive Days by William Ayres.
February 14, 2013
Stalin killed over 700,000 of his fellow citizens (teachers, bakers, clergy,ordinary citizens) in a mere 24 months.
Mao killed over 15 million of his fellow country men through mismanagement.
Fidel Castro imprisoned an entire peaceful island, repressed its people, drained them dry to become one of the worlds richest dictators
These are the men, the animals, that Mark Rudd idolized. Mark Rudd, through his participation in the SDS and Weathermen, wanted to bring these monster's horrific form of government to the USA in the 1970s.
You can read all about it in this book and it is scary.
Police officers stop rapists, stop bank robbers, and stop irate students from burning down their campus, but this did not matter to Mark. According to Mark all cops are pigs and must die.
If a group of soldiers wives get together for a dance at Fort Dix, Mark wanted to bomb them.
When young soldiers in flag draped coffins came from the Vietnam war, Mark continued to support the North Vietnamese as they killed more of America's sons and brothers.
This is a book of a very disturbed man.
Mao killed over 15 million of his fellow country men through mismanagement.
Fidel Castro imprisoned an entire peaceful island, repressed its people, drained them dry to become one of the worlds richest dictators
These are the men, the animals, that Mark Rudd idolized. Mark Rudd, through his participation in the SDS and Weathermen, wanted to bring these monster's horrific form of government to the USA in the 1970s.
You can read all about it in this book and it is scary.
Police officers stop rapists, stop bank robbers, and stop irate students from burning down their campus, but this did not matter to Mark. According to Mark all cops are pigs and must die.
If a group of soldiers wives get together for a dance at Fort Dix, Mark wanted to bomb them.
When young soldiers in flag draped coffins came from the Vietnam war, Mark continued to support the North Vietnamese as they killed more of America's sons and brothers.
This is a book of a very disturbed man.
December 25, 2015
I started reading this book thinking that Mark Rudd was infatuated with himself and his brief moment of fame when Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was a potent force on college campuses in the late sixties. As the student movement grew, Mark and others were sidetracked into forming the violent, ultra radical Weathermen faction. All productive attempts at SDS organizing against the war came to a halt as a few egotistical white radicals vowed to overthrow the US government. It was a communal fantasy that soon ended. Rudd experienced life as a fugitive. He worked at menial jobs. His revolutionary ardor eventually softened, however to Mark Rudd's credit, he remains an individual with a social conscience, willing to work against injustice. By the end of the book, he had my respect.
November 21, 2011
Some great reflection, but also a few points that left me uneasy--especially with regard to the conflict between the new left and feminism (there are some personal jabs against particular feminists that are unnecessary, even as Rudd is generally pretty conscious of having grown up with misogyny and mistreated women in his life and in the movement). Overall, this confirms what I suspected about the futile, macho, cultish fundamentalism of Weatherman and other "urban guerrilla" organizations, and I respect Rudd for admitting that the escalation to a farcical attempt at armed struggle (that even their poorly chosen heroes the NLF didn't endorse when they met with them) and the attendant Weather/SDS split killed SDS and gutted the student-leftist movement in the US.
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