Professor Isserman's version of late 1960s New Left history is an inaccurate one. Most hard-core Columbia and Barnard SDS student activists in the late 1960s realized that US universities and colleges (like Columbia University and Hamilton College) were undemocratic institutions that served as research and manpower training tools of US imperialism. So in the late 1960s and early 1970s, most Columbia and Barnard SDS activists felt it was an act of political opportunism for a New Left activist to become a US corporate university professor when the USAF bombs were still being dropped on Indochinese civilians and Black Panther Party activists like Fred Hampton were still being gunned down.

Professor Isserman may have felt morally comfortable becoming an academic in US imperialism's university system during the 1970s when the most dedicated New Left activists were living underground and resisting, in more than a verbal way, the US war machine and the US universities that collaborated with that US war machine. But that's no reason for him to try to caricature the Weatherpeople and not appreciate why the Weatherpeople became historical folk heroes in the 1970s counterculture, after the May 1970 Kent State and Jackson State Massacres.

For a folk song about the Weatherpeople, Nation readers might be interested in checking out this link.

Also, Columbia SDS people will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1968 Columbia Anti-War Student Revolt with an event on the campus of Columbia University on April 24-27, 2008, which might interest Nation readers who are still "Weatherfans" in the twenty-first century--despite the US mainstream corporate media's continued denial of daily access to most former Columbia SDS activists.

Bob Feldman

Boston, MA

Maurice Isserman has hit the nail on the head with his comparison of some of the new left to Protestant individualist moralism. I was part of a very obscure (and definitely not "sexy") part of SDS (Steve Max, Doug Ireland) which regarded much of this foofaraw as nacissistic posturing. I think Isserman's notion is more correct and more to the point.

There is such a disconnect between the politics of the early SDS and its later iterations that it is really unfair to speak of it as one organization. We wimpy pacifists of the Port Huron generation had little in common with the window-smashing, bomb-making folks who came later. But, of course, we as such were not nearly as newsworthy nor photogenic.

Jim Williams

Savannah, GA

Maurice Isserman's severely academic review of Cathy Wilkerson's Weatherman memoir aptly but dismissively situates John Brown and the 1960s revolutionary New Left together in the American tradition of radical individualism. Yet, absent John Brown's moral outrage at slavery and "putting his body on the line" at Harper's Ferry, it is unlikely the Civil War would have put an end to that odious and peculiar institution. Likewise, without those Days of Rage and other such disruptive and dangerous confrontations, it appears that the vicious destruction of Vietnamese society would have proceeded apace.

What is missing from Isserman's lifeless analysis is an appreciation of the extent to which these individualistic, yet concerted, skirmishes galvanized many others' perceptions of the enormity of what was at stake, thus really changing the course of events. Just as the courage of John Brown and his company terrified slaveholders and inspired more mild-mannered abolitionists to organize and push the cause, so Bernardine Dohrn, Eric Mann and all the SDS Weathermen and their heirs caused Nixon and Kissinger, fearing chaos, to limit their criminal enterprise, while moving many of us, a little less reckless, toward a greater commitment to stop the genocide in Vietnam.

William W. Berry

Buffalo, NY

Good piece, even if it reinforces the distorted emphasis upon Weatherman as the representative, authentic outcome of 1960s radicalism. There were many others, far greater in number than the Weatherpeople, who departed their student enclaves for factories and working class communities during the late 1960s/early 1970s. Some are still there, even if their politics have understandably shifted into new keys. Granted, their story lacks the outlaw romance and flame-out pyrotechnics of the Weatherman saga, but presumably people serious about this history are ready for something more substantive than yet another recounting of the Townhouse Explosion.

What is Isserman suggesting, meanwhile, by his disclaimer--"as was widely believed"--regarding the observation that "Black Panthers by the dozens were being killed" during the late 1960s? Is he saying that they were not? Or that the government bore no responsibility in this matter? Granted, this story is certainly more complex than many of us understood at the time, but I should think what's more important is the degree to which subsequent revelations regarding the COINTELPRO program confirmed our worst suspicions at the time.

John Abbott

Oak Park, IL

Nineteen-sixty-eighty was the turning point in the history of the American New Left. Through the early and mid-1960s the movement was energized by the civil rights struggle and the Vietnam War, but it lost much of its will in the aftermath of the JFK and MLK assassinations and the Chicago demonstrations. When the Democratic Party chose Humphrey instead of McCarthy, many in the left knew that a truly progressive struggle within the system was difficult if not impossible. Most joined the Esatblishment, while a few ( very few) became the radicals like the Weathermen.

I'm afraid the same disillusionment is in store for this generation's progressives.

John Giarratana

Jersey City, NJ