BERNARDINE DOHRN
I went to the SDS convention in June of ’68 and lo and behold, by the end of it I had put my name up and was one of three people elected as national secretary. I was twenty-six. I was old compared to most of the SDS people.
In August of ’68, I took a delegation of thirty people to Budapest, where we spent ten days meeting with a delegation of twenty-five Vietnamese from North Vietnam. It was a life-altering experience. They convinced us of two things. One is that the struggle to expel the United States from occupying Vietnam was a decisive struggle in the world at that moment for a variety of reasons—mainly because the United States had committed to interrupting the unification of Vietnam. The Vietnamese reminded us of that history, and of their determination to do anything and everything to reunite Vietnam and get the Americans out.
The trip gave me a very strong sense that we had a unique role to play, and that our job was to mobilize the broadest possible opposition to this immoral, illegal, and genocidal war. I can remember coming back to New York and having a hard time talking to people because I felt like I had really changed inside. I felt that history had thrust us into this moment, and the moment was calling on us to act as our most aggressive moral selves to stop the slaughter. We knew that almost two thousand people a day were being killed in Vietnam by the Americans.
BILL AYERS
In 1968, there was a convergence of unprecedented events—it’s important to remember that we were twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three years old then. We were kids. Most of us did not come out of a political background or framework. We were just learning. And we were learning as New Leftists, meaning we were not part of the old communist left. We were people who’d learned and developed our politics in the streets; we’d come up in activism. We were born in the civil rights movement. We were, then, born in the antiwar movement. We were born in the women’s movement, and the beginning of the queer movement. And there was an environmental movement, and movements of Mexican Americans for land in the Southwest, and of Puerto Ricans for independence. So, all of this ferment was bubbling up and setting the context.
I was an SDS regional organizer in ’68, ’69 in Michigan and Ohio. My district went all the way from Lake Michigan to Lake Superior, and I was on a lot of those campuses all the time. Come the spring of ’68, Lyndon Johnson announces that he won’t run for reelection and that he will work to end the war. It was March 31, 1968. I was in Ann Arbor that night, and we just went nuts. There were, suddenly, thousands and thousands of people in the streets. We exploded in Ann Arbor, but they exploded all over the place—Cambridge, Berkeley—everywhere there had been an organized antiwar presence.
We ended up on the steps of the president of the university’s house. We were raucous, and having a good time. He came out and he said to us, “Congratulations. You’ve won a great victory. Now the war will end. And you should go home and be happy.” And we agreed. I thought we had ended the war. There were a million unnecessary deaths. It was a cataclysmic catastrophe for the Vietnamese people, but it was over. So, we should be happy. Four days later, King was killed. And two months later, Bobby Kennedy was killed. And a couple of months after that, Henry Kissinger emerged from the swamp he was living in, which happened to be Harvard. He had a secret plan to end the war. And that secret plan was a plan, it turned out, to expand the war.
So not only did the revolution not happen in ’68—of course, none of us would have known how to pull that off anyway—but Nixon was elected, and Kissinger came along. And they expanded the war under the guise of shutting it down. They made it an air war and a sea war. They expanded into Cambodia and Laos. And all of our efforts were for nothing. And so, what should we do?
GERALD LEFCOURT
After I was fired from Legal Aid for organizing the union and a New York Times story about it made me a cause célèbre, Abbie Hoffman called me. It was late August or early September of ’68. He said, “I have a dentist and a doctor but because I have three criminal cases I really need a lawyer.” I didn’t know who he was, but I went to his apartment and we talked all night. By the morning, we had a pact. He said he would make a revolution if I kept him out of jail. I believed him. I was twenty-six years old.
I started representing Mark Rudd after his arrest during the April Columbia uprising, and Abbie*15 in August–September. So, within three months in 1968, I was counsel for Abbie, Mark, and the Panthers. Because I knew all their cases and talked about them to each other, I remember introducing Mark to Abbie, Mark to the Panthers, and Abbie to the Panthers. It seemed like I was in the middle of everything.
Credit 4.5
Ericka Huggins dropped out of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania at age eighteen to join the Black Panther Party. She drove across country with classmate and soon-to-be husband John Huggins, and they both became leaders in the Black Panther Party’s Los Angeles chapter.
PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN SHAMES.
ERICKA HUGGINS
John [Huggins] and I got married and joined the Black Panther Party in Los Angeles. They had an office in South Central and we met the leader of the L.A. office, Alprentice (Bunchy) Carter. John and Bunchy became immediate friends. Bunchy was a natural leader, and John worked directly with him. They became students through the High Potential Program at UCLA and were supporting students who wanted to make changes on the UCLA campus.
FBI MEMORANDUM, SEPTEMBER 25, 1968
To: Director, FBI
From: SAC, Los Angeles
Information has been received that there is considerable friction between the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the “US” organization headed by RON KARENGA. Several sources have reported that the BPP has “let a contract” on KARENGA because they feel he has sold out to the establishment….It would appear that most black nationalist organizations are now afraid of the BPP and in some cases are looking to the BPP for approval of their own actions. It is believed that in the future, there will be additional trouble between the BPP and other Negro groups. Los Angeles will utilize every technique in an attempt to capitalize on this development.
ERICKA HUGGINS
On January 17, 1969, after a meeting on [the UCLA] campus to discuss the election of the High Potential Program presidency, two men created an argument and then when John and Bunchy walked into the room to talk to those men, one was shot in the chest, the other in the back. Bunchy and John died immediately. Two other men were arrested, but they were not the men who shot or killed anyone. Long story short, those murders were orchestrated by the FBI, although mass media stated that two black rival organizations had a shoot-out.*16
When John was killed, I was a widow and a single mom immediately. Our daughter was three weeks old.
BERNARDINE DOHRN
By the spring of 1969, SDS had become a mass organization. There were SDS chapters where they’d never been—in community colleges, in high schools, in working-class technical schools. SDS had existed by and large in the big Midwest universities and in the elite schools until that time. Suddenly the national office was scrambling to keep mailing lists and enough pamphlets in people’s hands, and buttons and things like that. But in the face of getting that big, we were set upon by these organized, ideological groups with ties to particular Maoist organizations.
CATHY WILKERSON (SDS officer)
SDS was so huge! Nobody had any clue how to run an organization like that. Unlike the civil rights movement, which sometimes had a lot of money—we had none. The rent was never paid on time. We didn’t have money for travel. We couldn’t pay the phone bill. And yet we had one hundred thousand members participating.
MARK RUDD
In June of ’69, two things happened. SDS split into two entities. One was the Progressive Labor (PL) Party, and it’s almost impossible to describe what it was about. It was about these people who were absolutely certain that Mao Zedong had defined the way the revolution was going to happen in the United States. They were one group. And then there was the other group that was absolutely ce
rtain that Che Guevara had defined the way the revolution was going to happen in the United States. Our belief was that the nonwhite people of the world are going to bring down American imperialism. This was happening around the world in Cuba, China, Vietnam—especially Vietnam—the revolts in Latin America. Internally, the African American struggle and the various Latino struggles and the Native American struggle were all part of the movement of national liberation against U.S. imperialism.
We became followers of Che Guevara, and not only did we see this happening around the world, but we fantasized that it was going to happen in the U.S. We had a pro-third-world view, whereas the other views tended to put workers, and especially white workers, at the center of things. And we knew we were right, and we knew they were fuckheads, and they knew we were wrong, and that’s what we split over. Of course, all of these positions were wrong, they were all fantasies, but I think the context is important.
BILL AYERS
Let’s talk about the movement. At that point, the black movement splintered, the antiwar movement splintered, the student movement splintered. Radical feminism was born, and that eventually splintered. In other words, it wasn’t like there were some crazy people in SDS driving this thing. There were forces much bigger than the pretty small individuals, who were either in positions of leadership or emerging as leaders. So, it’s too narrow a lens to think that SDS did something that was so unique and bizarre that nobody else was doing. It was in the water we were drinking and the air we were breathing: Nobody knew what to do. No one knew the way forward. We had tried everything that we could think of: organizing, knocking on doors, mass demonstrations, getting arrested, militant nonviolent resistance, disrupting draft boards, stopping troop trains, a little bit of sabotage here and there, burning draft cards. People had tried everything. And we had won the hearts and minds of the American people. So, all of this is going on, and here comes the summer of 1969.
So in ’69, a dozen of us got together as a study group, and those discussions resulted in drawing up this paper, which was basically a resolution to SDS. The thesis was simple: The world was on fire. At the last minute Terry Robbins put this whimsical title on it: “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” which is a line from Bob Dylan’s song “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Terry offered a bit of self-mocking irony with the title to this insufferably dense and difficult text about the world situation that can be summed to a rock-and-roll beat.
Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot
Talkin’ that the heat put
Plants in the bed but
The phone’s tapped anyway
Maggie says that many say
They must bust in early May
Orders from the DA
Look out kid
Don’t matter what you did
Walk on your tiptoe
Don’t try “No-Doz”
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don’t need a weatherman
To know which way the wind blows.
GREIL MARCUS (music critic)
In “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” when Bob Dylan says, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” he’s saying you don’t need a protest singer to tell you what’s going on in the world. That’s one way of reading that line. And then you have the Weathermen naming themselves after that. In essence they are saying, “You do need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind is blowing, and we’re the Weathermen.” On the other hand, the last line of that song is, “The pump don’t work, ’cause the vandals took the handles.” And they at one time considered calling themselves the Vandals, not Weathermen, which probably would have been a better name.
Better jump down a manhole
Light yourself a candle
Don’t wear sandals
Try to avoid the scandals
Don’t wanna be a bum
You better chew gum
The pump don’t work
’Cause the vandals took the handles.
MARK RUDD
There were about two thousand people in the Chicago Coliseum for the ninth annual [June 1969] SDS convention, representing this enormous organization of over one hundred thousand members, screaming at each other and waving the Little Red Books of Mao Zedong quotations. All of us were in a frenzy of sectarian infighting. On one side of the hall there were chants, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Cong are gonna win.” And on this side, “Mao, Mao, Zedong…”
MICHAEL KAZIN (Harvard SDS)
The convention in Chicago was crazy. The Panthers were there, talking about pussy power. PL [Progressive Labor] was incensed because they thought the other people were trying to drive them out of SDS, which they kind of were. Bernardine Dohrn was an avatar of a certain kind of rebellion. She was very smart and charismatic and other people from her faction of SDS were arranged behind her, like John Jacobs, and Mark Rudd—people who formed the Weathermen, mostly from Columbia and Michigan. All of them I knew by then. About halfway through the meeting the non-PL people started to have separate meetings, and they eventually walked out and went to a nearby church. The main convention took place in the Chicago Coliseum, which was known for having wrestling matches, which I believe was appropriate.
MARK RUDD
We were being disrupted by what we later learned was COINTELPRO. We knew we were being fucked with because suddenly leaflets appeared putatively from us, saying things that we didn’t say. And then there’d be other leaflets appearing, putatively from the Progressive Labor people, with sexist drawings of Bernardine in bed with Black Panthers and shit, and then we would get pissed-off. “PL’s really unprincipled bastards.” But it wasn’t PL. It was somebody else.
FBI MEMORANDUM, JUNE 30, 1969
To: Director, FBI
From: [blackout] Chicago
Subject: COINTELPRO–NEW LEFT
1. POTENTIAL COUNTERINTELLIGENCE ACTION
The recent split between pro–national office and pro–Progressive Labor factions of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) presents possible opportunities for counterintelligence action with the objective of widening the split and preventing possible reunification of SDS….
2. PENDING COUNTERINTELLIGENCE ACTIVITY
A recommendation was made to attempt to weaken or destroy an alliance between SDS and the Black Panther Party (BPP). The Bureau approved use of informants to attempt to point out that SDS was exploiting the BPP, intending to use them as a black army for a white revolution. This has been done, but no tangible results have been noted from this action at this time….
BERNARDINE DOHRN
The issues seemed so important at the time. At that point, the Progressive Labor group had built up strength inside SDS, arguing that we should support workers, and that the National Liberation Front and North Vietnam had betrayed the workers’ struggle. They took the Chinese position. They also denounced the Black Panther Party. But our view was that Americans had invaded Vietnam, and our job was to get the United States out of Vietnam. And the Vietnamese should decide their own destiny; for us to denounce the Vietnamese was the height of white chauvinism and arrogance—and the same for the Panthers. The Panthers were being shot and murdered by now. I’d been to Panther funerals on the West Coast—the first funerals in my life. We thought it was dangerous and wrong and we couldn’t go along with it.
So that all came to bear at the national convention in June of ’69 and resulted in me giving a speech about the history of SDS, and about our core values in terms of participatory democracy, which is a different idea than democracy. It wasn’t parliamentary rules and voting, but it was democracy at the grass roots. So that led to us walking out and pretty much the end of SDS, the meaning of which has been fought over ever since.
MARK RUDD
I was on the stage next to Bernardine, who w
as accusing the other side of being racist. So in effect, she read them out and we physically left the building. People screamed all kinds of stuff like “Shame! Shame!” at us, and other people were screaming “Racist!” at the Progressive Labor faction. It was pandemonium. Bernardine was the central organization secretary, the most recognized leader in SDS. She took the stage and expelled PL. Now, there was no basis to do it. But the handwriting was on the wall. In our arrogance and our fantasy, we saw this as the moment that we became true white revolutionaries.
Credit 4.6
SDS leader Bernardine Dohrn gives a defiant speech at the June 1969 SDS convention in Chicago. Standing at Dohrn’s left are fellow activists Susan Stern and Mark Rudd. Dohrn’s radical group, the Action Faction, split off from SDS to create the Weathermen. “Bernardine was very charismatic,” Mark Rudd told me. “She’s the most seductive person I have ever met in my whole life, without exception, and without even trying to be. She just is.”
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID FENTON.
MICHAEL KAZIN
Bernardine’s speech was impressive, but also a little scary because I was beginning to learn what the Weathermen were all about. They were about urban guerrilla warfare. They were emulating the Panthers, they were emulating the Viet Cong,*17 emulating the Cubans—all of us in my faction were, too, but that didn’t mean we were ready to go out and pick up guns and start shooting people. But the way she was talking, it was clear that we might be ready to commit violence. She basically said people who don’t support all these revolutions in all these communist countries are counterrevolutionary. I remember she mentioned Albania. I thought, Do I want to go to war for Albania? I don’t think so. I didn’t have the same feeling about Albania as I did for the Vietnamese and the Cubans.
Witness to the Revolution Page 10
