There were, by this time, forces chipping away at her earlier pacifist convictions, all part of the familiar narrative of SDS's decline and fall that one can find in histories by Kirkpatrick Sale, Todd Gitlin and James Miller, among other sources. These included a succession of ghetto riots that raised the specter of domestic civil war, the appalling and ever-escalating conflict in Vietnam and the need felt by some SDS leaders to come up with a suitably revolutionary ideology of their own to counter that promoted by the Progressive Labor Party, a Maoist/Stalinist fringe group bent on capturing SDS for its own purposes. The early '60s sense of the movement as a "beloved community" eroded as a multitude of rival would-be vanguard factions emerged in the SDS leadership. Like many others in SDS trying to make sense of the chaos of the moment, Wilkerson turned to theorists like Régis Debray and Frantz Fanon who celebrated the political and psychological benefits of violence in Third World revolutionary struggles.

One of the virtues of Wilkerson's memoir is that it suggests that her path toward the Townhouse Explosion was by no means predetermined. Her political future, like that of SDS, remained in flux as late as the fall of 1967. At the famous Pentagon protest in October of that year, some SDSers wanted to break away from the main event and skirmish with the police in the streets. Wilkerson was tempted. But in the end she and the others observed the nonviolent discipline advocated by David Dellinger of the National Mobilization Committee. And it worked--the warmakers were confronted on the steps of the Pentagon in a dramatic tableau that redounded to the antiwar movement's appeal on the nation's campuses. Wilkerson was one of those who spoke to the crowd of protesters, urging them not to take unnecessary risks. "While I had been excited by Debray and Fanon," she recalls of that October day forty years ago,

here in the heat of confrontation it was the model of the nonviolent confrontations of the civil rights movement that seemed most powerful. To the extent we had any power at the Pentagon, which didn't feel like much, it was the power of a moral witness.

Over the next two years, Wilkerson would abandon moral witness, if not a morally charged politics. The urge to take what she describes as "decisive moral action," measured by acceptance of an ever-increasing level of personal risk, crowded out considerations of strategic ends. Young and politically inexperienced undergraduates were swelling SDS's membership at the chapter level: "They weren't looking for a complicated discussion about how to bring about change," Wilkerson notes, "but for validation, for a community, and for a way to express their anger about the war." And they looked to SDS's veteran leaders--which is to say, young people like Wilkerson, only a few years older than themselves--to provide the answers. What they were actually offered by SDS leaders in 1968-69, she writes, was a "lift off from reality."

Wilkerson's self-critical tone stands in marked contrast to that found in another memoir by a Weatherman, Bill Ayers's Fugitive Days, published in 2001. As Ayers told a New York Times reporter in a soon-to-be-infamous interview published on September 11, 2001, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Wilkerson, who issued a scathing review in Z Magazine of Fugitive Days when it appeared, does regret the bombs: the Weather Underground, she writes in her memoir, "accepted the same desanctification of human life practiced by Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and William Westmoreland."

And yet at times, despite the tone of regret that runs as leitmotif throughout the book, she adopts a curious distancing tone. Wilkerson's self-portrait through 1967 (one that accords with the memories of those who knew her at the time) is of a young woman steadily gaining competence and confidence, and emerging as a natural and accomplished leader. SDS had a reputation, not entirely undeserved, as a bastion of male chauvinism; but at critical moments, like the one at the Pentagon, Wilkerson's male comrades unhesitatingly handed the bullhorn over to her (and it is a picture of her, bullhorn in hand, that graces the cover of her memoir). But in describing her actions and beliefs from 1968 on, Wilkerson increasingly characterizes herself as a classic dependent female, the passive follower of initiatives taken by others, incapable of independent judgment and continually surprised by the decisions of her leaders (mostly men, with the exception of Bernardine Dohrn). "When Bernardine declared SDS's mission [in 1968] to be the building of a 'revolutionary movement,'" Wilkerson writes,

I thought she showed both courage and foresight; if she hadn't explained what she meant, she had, I thought, made a commitment to take on that challenge.... I assumed the details would become clearer as we went along.

In October 1969, when only 300 or so of SDS's 100,000 members responded to Weatherman's call for the Days of Rage action in Chicago, Wilkerson declares that she was astonished when "the march leaders and many others [began] smashing windows of stores and cars as they ran full speed down the street." In contrast, Susan Stern, lower down the chain of command than Wilkerson, notes in her own memoir that she and most of those who showed up for the Days of Rage made sure to wear gloves "to protect the hands from the broken glass that would soon be flying and shattering." And then, in her weirdest act of dissociation, Wilkerson writes of the bomb being built in the basement of her father's townhouse: "I didn't think about the fact that the nails might actually kill people."

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.