Weather Underground and 1968

A friend and loyal reader of this blog mailed me a copy of the PBS documentary on the Weather Underground. We watched it last night, and were riveted, for several reasons.

Part of it was seeing Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn still utterly unrepentant for their violent, revolutionary communism. They don't regret the bombings. As Ayers said in a related interview:

I think what we did was to respond to a situation that was unconscionable.

Two thousand people a day were being murdered in Vietnam in a terrorist war, an official terrorist war… This was what was going on in our names. So we tried to resist it, tried to fight it. Built a huge mass movement, built a huge organization, and still the war went on and escalated. And every day we didn’t stop the war, two thousand people would be killed. I don’t think what we did was extreme…. We didn’t cross lines that were completely unacceptable. I don’t think so. We destroyed property in a fairly restrained level, given what we were up against.

A man who was a child when the Weathermen firebombed his house trying to kill his father, a judge, commented the other day about Bill Ayers' lack of remorse, and his connection to Barack Obama through progressive politics in Chicago:

Though never a supporter of Obama, I admired him for a time for his ability to engage our imaginations, and especially for his ability to inspire the young once again to embrace the political system. Yet his myopia in the last few months has cast a new light on his “politics of change.” Nobody should hold the junior senator from Illinois responsible for his friends’ and supporters’ violent terrorist acts. But it is fair to hold him responsible for a startling lack of judgment in his choice of mentors, associates, and friends, and for showing a callous disregard for the lives they damaged and the hatred they have demonstrated for this country. It is fair, too, to ask what those choices say about Obama’s own beliefs, his philosophy, and the direction he would take our nation.

At the conclusion of his 2001 Times interview, Ayers said of his upbringing and subsequent radicalization: “I was a child of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire.”

Funny thing, Bill: one night, so did I.

Here's an Associated Press explainer about the connection between Obama and Ayers. It's pretty thin stuff, even though Obama knew the guy more than casually. Still, given how shockingly radical Ayers and Dohrn were, and are, this is going to stick to Obama. I knew something about the Weather Underground, but I had forgotten how truly violent and fanatical the Weathermen were. They bombed the US Capitol at one point. Can you imagine?

Which brings me to the larger impact of the PBS documentary, at least on me. It set the scene for the emergence of the Weather Underground out of the student left. The filmmakers spent a good amount of time talking about the atmosphere of chaos and violence and tumult all across America. The murders of King and Bobby Kennedy. The political radicalism of the student and racial left, and their willingness to commit violence in the name of revolutionary communism. The savage war in Vietnam, which, according to a Cronkite report excerpted in the film, killed nearly 300 American soldiers in a single day (to say nothing about the Vietnamese killed). That, and government corruption: I wondered all along why Ayers and Dohrn and some of their confreres had never gone to jail; the answer, we learn, is that the FBI broke so many laws fighting them that it was impossible to bring the revolutionaries to trial.

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the student uprising in France that, because it was echoed in so many places around the world, made 1968 such a historical touchstone for radicalism and violence. Watching the film last night was a tonic: no matter how crappy and even frightening things might look today, I cannot imagine how they must have appeared in the years 1968-1975. Several of the Weathermen say in the film that the war made them crazy -- offloading guilt over what they did to others. But one, Brian Flanagan, says at the end that once you convince yourself that your cause is so just that anything you do in its service is morally acceptable -- ahem -- you open the door to unlimited criminality. In that sense, Todd Gitlin, the former New Left leader and now a professor, said in the film that the Weathermen weren't made crazy by the war: they chose to be insane:

I think what has to be stared at is that they brought themselves, they were not brought, they brought themselves to that point, to the point of which they were ready to be mass murderers. This is mass murder we’re talking about. They came to this conclusion which is the conclusion that was come to by all the great killers, whether Hitler or Stalin or Mao, that they have a grand project for the transformation and purification of the world. And in the face of that project, ordinary life is dispensable. They joined that tradition.

Looking back on the tumult of that time, it's hard to believe that the kind of fanaticism that we now think belongs only to Islamic religious nutters was once alive and well among a fringe of the student left. It is interesting to contemplate Ayers' and Dohrn's rehabilitation and acceptance into respectable academic society. Were they unrepentant right-wing domestic terrorists who'd been part of a cult that bombed abortion clinics and government buildings, how likely do you think they would be to have good jobs at a prestigious university today? Being on the left never means having to say you're sorry.

Then again, neither Henry Kissinger nor Robert S. McNamara (who served Democratic presidents) suffered professionally for their role in Vietnam, which resulted in incomparably more death and destruction than anything the Weather terrorists did. Does the fact that both men acted as government officials absolve them of responsibility? I wonder. If Ayers and Dohrn had had their power, I'm quite sure they would have done far, far more damage. So how do we decide who stays in "respectable" society, and who is to be shunned?

What I find hard to work through is how easy it is for so many prominent people guilty of having done terrible things to evade ultimate responsibility for them. There always seems to be an establishment -- of the left, of the right -- willing to absolve without question. Having nearly wrecked our military, Rumsfeld's at the Hoover Institution now, probably getting ready for happy hour martinis as I write this. Bad people seem to be able to march through the institutions with great fanfare.