It was 41 years ago today, on April 23, 1968, that Mark Rudd led the most famous 1960s college riot of them all. Hundreds of Columbia University students, protesting the Vietnam War and assorted other things, assembled chaotically, occupied half a dozen university buildings, and ended up shutting down the campus for a month. Rudd soon moved on to more ambitious and violent activities, which eventually made it necessary for him to go into hiding.

In his new memoir, Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen, Rudd describes his encounter with an old revolutionary buddy in 1976, when Rudd had been hiding from the law for six years and was thinking about going straight:

“What will you do aboveground — if you’re not in jail? Join the Democratic Party?”
“Any form of organizing is better than this,” I replied. “At least we’ll be accomplishing something.”
JJ just shook his head, disgusted. I had become a right-winger on the order of William F. Buckley.

Along with demonstrating that WFB always had the best of enemies, this passage, which appears on page 280, shows that I actually read the whole book. Anytime you see a review in which all the quotations are from the preface, it’s a good bet that the reviewer didn’t go any farther — which is, in fact, the best way to read many books.

Including this one, because Rudd’s preface tells you everything you need to know. The Iraq War, “despite some significant differences, was Vietnam all over again”; today’s students “seem genuinely amazed to learn that once there was a group of young white kids from privileged backgrounds who risked everything for our antiwar, antiracist, and revolutionary beliefs”; “Weatherman’s failures are less important than the simple astonishing fact that we existed”; the 1960s were “American democracy’s finest hour.”

After that, you know exactly what he’s going to say in the rest of the book. By heroically passing out flyers, carrying signs, and occupying buildings, these brave souls brought the Vietnam War to a close in a mere seven years. Emulating the holy trinity of Mao, Castro, and Che, they won the American public’s firm allegiance through the unshakeable righteousness of their cause. Halfway around the world, sturdy Vietnamese peasants were fighting out of pure ideological zeal to expel the imperialist aggressors and their local puppet army, but the American government was too stupid and corrupt to figure this out. And so on, and so on, and so on.

If the guy at the food co-op with the long white beard rattled on like this while weighing out the lentils, you would smile indulgently and glance at your watch. If a Distinguished Professor of Education said it during a speech, you would wearily shake your head. But when a forgettable 1960s relic goes on in the same vein for 300 pages plus, it’s like a four-CD box set of Iron Butterfly’s Greatest Hit.

THINGS LEFT UNSAID

Yet while there are no surprises to be found in what Rudd says, it’s revealing to look at what he doesn’t say. For instance, he makes only a few brief mentions of an issue that held overwhelming importance at the time: the draft. The main reason campus opposition to the war was so widespread was that students did not want themselves or their friends to get killed — a legitimate objection, to be sure.

Rudd scorns this concern. When his fellow Columbia students vote to bar the college from cooperating with the Selective Service, he sniffs that many were “driven more by self-interest — staying out of the army — rather than a principled opposition to the government’s policies in Vietnam.” Even worse were the faculty members, “all liberal men,” who were “nominally against the war, but only because the United States was losing, which was the worst reason, in my opinion.” Rudd’s objection to the war was that America was impeding the spread of Communism. Yet a large fraction of his fellow protesters based their opposition on individual rights and a concern for America — two principles directly antithetical to the ones Rudd was preaching.

Similarly, Rudd hardly ever uses the terms “North Vietnam” or “South Vietnam” — once every few dozen pages at most, and only when absolutely necessary. The rest of the time it’s just “Vietnam,” in keeping with the party line that it was a single country with a foreign-occupied south. He speaks with admiration of Vietcong guerrillas “who were willing to sacrifice so much for their independence,” ignoring the fact that they were actually fighting to subjugate an independent South Vietnam. And he describes the day in 1975 when the Communists sacked Saigon (strangely uncelebrated by Rudd’s old student allies) as “the final victory by the Vietnamese.” Even now, two decades after the rest of the world got the news, Rudd can’t bring himself to admit that the Vietnamese people he professes to love had powerful reasons to fear living under a Communist dictatorship.

Also revealing is what Rudd says but does not understand. Learning about the Holocaust as a child, he writes, taught him “that evil exists and that it is associated with racism.” While that’s way too sweeping a statement, he is correct to suggest that most evil mass movements originate in, or at least take advantage of, group-versus-group hatred. Rudd himself is a prime example of this. He grew up, he says, “in a suburban New Jersey town, always knowing that the world consisted of two kinds of people: Us and Them, the Jews and the goyim.” On first joining Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), he writes: “Having served my sentence as a loner, a bookworm, a nerd in high school, I had finally found my gang.” He airily dismisses the protesters’ student opponents as “jocks” and sneers at their crew cuts, WASPy demeanor, and preppy clothes. Later he imagines himself promising his parents to “bring down the dumb goyim who run this country.”

There’s nothing unusual about such feelings, of course; many of our beliefs and allegiances spring from reasons no more rational. If I had been at Columbia in Rudd’s day, I would have opposed the protesters simply because of those godawful folk songs they sang. Ultimately, lots of the choices we make in life are based on which team we think has the cool kids; this kind of “not exactly our set” sentiment is responsible for many of the fissures within today’s conservative movement, for example. But while most people eventually learn to rise above such resentments, Rudd seems to have built his whole life around them.

Instead of treating everyone the same, Rudd — like many leftists, then and today — equated being non-racist with giving in to the most vocal black leaders at every opportunity. When his SDS faction took over Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, a group of black protesters, student and non-student, first joined Rudd’s group, then ejected them because they wanted to have their own building and their own protest. After getting kicked out of the building shortly before dawn, a crestfallen Rudd staggers crying and bewildered through the campus, with “no plan or strategy, other than the single universal thought that we couldn’t abandon the blacks back in Hamilton.”

Once in a great while, when Rudd can bring himself to set aside the hectoring and just tell his story, the old son of a bitch is almost endearing. He describes his confusion at the start of the April 23 demonstration, when he realized he had no idea of what to do next and ended up running after the people he was supposed to be leading. He’s nerdy enough to mention that he made the dean’s list that semester. And in a case of life imitating a Jackie Mason routine, when Rudd finally surrenders to police after a decade spent preaching Marxism, plotting violent revolution, and hiding out from the law, his father asks if he might be interested in joining the family business.

At other times Rudd can be downright creepy. In Havana he gratefully accepts from the North Vietnamese ambassador a pin made of metal from a downed American plane, which he wears for years afterwards. (On a later visit to Havana, Communist-party officials from Cuba and North Vietnam advise a group of Weathermen to lighten up and tone down their rhetoric. When those guys are the moderates, it should tell you something.) Elsewhere Rudd is awe-inspiringly clueless: After a blow-by-blow account of the Days of Rage in October 1969, when he and a few hundred fellow rioters spent three days in Chicago setting off bombs, smashing windows and cars, and fighting with cops, he whines about “one-sided police violence.”

Rudd’s account of the insular spiral of insanity within his revolutionary cult in 1969 and 1970 is scarily vivid and exhibits rare self-awareness. Weatherman (the organization’s correct name, singular with no “the”; its members were “Weathermen,” and the board of directors was the Weather Bureau) practiced ruthless self-criticism, subordination of all social and family relationships to The Cause, and (as he shares with us in unwelcome detail) plenty of mandatory and voluntary sexual experimentation. Oddly, while he ladles on the sex, Rudd barely acknowledges the other two-thirds of the Sixties troika, mentioning drugs only rarely and rock ’n’ roll virtually not at all. Was he secretly a 1910 Fruitgum Co. fan?

When they weren’t writhing around together on some garbage-strewn floor — and sometimes when they were — the Weatherfolk passed the time by minutely and exhaustively discussing the prospect of armed proletarian revolution in Amerika: when it would come, how it would come, among whom it would originate, whether it could be hastened, and so on ad infinitum. They disputed these points calmly and rationally, with frequent citations of scholarly studies and radical tracts, unaware that it all had as much to do with reality as an analysis of what would happen if Spiderman fought Mr. Spock.

By this point, Rudd was already washed up. After his brief day of prominence at Columbia, he would never be a leader again. Plagued by depression and irresoluteness, he became a recruiter, a raiser of funds from wealthy donors (sometimes his parents), and a high-level administrative assistant, carrying out the plans of the Weather Bureau firebrands despite (he now says) increasing misgivings — which did not, of course, keep him from working to exhaustion calling contacts, raising bail, making mimeographs, arranging safe houses, and taking care of the thousand other mundane tasks that plague a busy revolutionary.

The turning point of Rudd’s memoir comes in March 1970, when a secret bomb factory in a Greenwich Village townhouse blows up, killing three Weathermen. In the aftermath of this accident, Rudd goes into hiding and the book gets even duller. Except for a briefish epilogue, it ends in 1977, when he resurfaces, pleads guilty to minor charges, and gets off with probation. Stopping there was a wise editorial decision, because when removed from his radical context, Rudd is worse than unlikable; he’s pedestrian. Today he lives in New Mexico, where he builds houses, teaches at a community college, and spouts Marxist philosophy to anyone who will listen.

RETROSPECTIVE Looking back, Rudd is proud but regretful. While holding firmly to his political views, he admits that he and his colleagues made many tactical errors. For instance, there was the evening that he and his high-spirited girlfriend spent running through the streets, “stopping traffic, banging on limos, dousing them with cow’s blood, and grappling with the police,” all of which was meant “to disrupt people’s normal lives in order to compel them to consider the war.” With the wisdom that comes with age, he now reflects: “What they were probably considering was how much they despised us for inconveniencing their commute.” You think? Later, when a hard-line Maoist faction tries to take over SDS, Rudd decides that the best response is to outflank them by moving even farther left and becoming even more violent: “Bold action — propaganda of the deed — would cause more people to become radicalized and join us.” That didn’t work out too well. He also rues the sexism that permeated the 1960s Left, though he assures us that he has grown since then: “Today, if I were aware of a man brutalizing his partner, I would protect the woman without hesitation. The last thing I’d do would be to make the man the leader of an underground guerrilla group.” That’s reassuring. Yet through it all, he insists that the cause was just, his brothers-in-arms were noble if misguided, and together they did many good and important things. His unspoken guiding principle is that any mistake is excusable if it was meant to help The Movement. In the end, what did they accomplish? Richard Nixon eventually put a stop to the war, but it’s unclear whether even peaceful demonstrators, let alone violent radicals like Rudd, hastened the end or delayed it. The only thing their tedious political manifestos achieved was to show how irredeemably crazy and destructive Communism was, and the climate of radicalism that the anti-war protesters helped to create did no favors for the black-power movement or the emerging cause of feminism. Meanwhile, back at Columbia, student protests have long since become a silly but heartwarming tradition, like lousy football. With the faculty and administration safely parlor-radicalized, the demands typically revolve around some bureaucratic detail, like creating a department of ethnic studies or eliminating due-process rights for students accused of sex crimes; during one demonstration, the university president actually brought food to protesters camped out on a lawn. First time tragedy, second time farce, and the hundredth time a crashing bore. Still, as Rudd tours the nation to sell his book, and his Weatherman colleagues Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn pal around with the president of the United States, it’s worth remembering that they leave behind a trail of dead, mangled, and crippled bodies, ruined and interrupted lives, broken marriages, emotionally scarred victims, and destroyed property and dreams — just like another famous pair:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. (The Great Gatsby)

And as the rest of the world struggles to come to grips with the 21st century, Rudd and his dwindling band of 1960s comrades “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” — an era of obvious choices and easy certainties, complete with noble heroes and wicked villains and a bright, shining collectivist future that always seemed to be just around the corner, but somehow kept getting farther away. – Fred Schwarz is a deputy managing editor of National Review.