Weather Reports (Page 3)

Wilkerson attributes her "cult-like" adherence to Weatherman doctrine as a product of the group's "clumsy misuse of religious-psychotherapeutic technique" in its famously brutal "criticism-self-criticism" sessions. Weatherman was a cult, but the crucial question of why some succumbed to its appeal and others did not goes unaddressed in Wilkerson's account. Stern, in contrast, makes it painfully clear that her own self-loathing and self-destructive bent had much to do with her joining Weatherman (she made one suicide attempt as a child, another in her Seattle days and eventually succumbed in 1976 to a combination of drugs and alcohol that may have constituted a final successful attempt). Stern, who privately thought of herself as "Susan Stern Sham" while projecting a miniskirted and leather-jacketed image of tough sexy femininity, confessed in her memoir to being

obsessed with death and dying.... I fantasized about shootouts with a dozen pigs, killing some of them, and finally getting killed myself.... I had to die with meaning.

It would be psychologically reductive to suggest that all Weatherman's adherents were motivated by similar obsessions (Ayers's book suggests that his problems were rather the opposite of self-loathing). The trouble with Flying Close to the Sun is that we get no persuasive explanation for Wilkerson's transformation from the woman who, at age 21, could walk into the office of the nation's largest radical group and without previous experience immediately take over the editing of its weekly newspaper to the woman who, four years later, apparently found it difficult to grasp that a nail-studded dynamite bomb could actually kill people.

Carl Oglesby was not a Weatherman, but as we learn from his memoir Ravens in the Storm, he spent a lot of the later 1960s arguing with its leaders, especially with Bernardine Dohrn. Oglesby was elected president of SDS in 1965, much to his surprise. He was 30 years old that year, married, with three children and a job as a technical writer in the defense industry; his profile was hardly that of a typical SDSer. On the other hand, he had educated himself to become a knowledgeable critic of the Vietnam War and had taken part in the first teach-in against the war at the University of Michigan. In 1967 he would publish, with Richard Shaull, an extended critique of American foreign policy called Containment and Change, one of the most influential texts shaping the politics of the radical wing of the antiwar movement. (Wilkerson, in her memoir, devotes five pages to attesting to its importance.)

Within a few years, Oglesby found himself out of step with the organization he had led from 1965 to 1966. As he wrote in 1969 in "Notes on a Decade Ready for the Dustbin" (also included in R. David Myers's invaluable collection on New Left history), "We are not now free to fight The Revolution except in fantasy." He had no use for those who sought to reduce SDS to a "small, isolated band of super-charged cadre who, knowing they stand shoulder to shoulder with mankind itself...face repression with the inner peace of early Christians" (a pretty good piece of prophetic writing, considering Oglesby composed it months before the Days of Rage). Instead, he wanted SDS to focus on what it was good at: building campus chapters and opposing the war, offering a radical critique of American foreign policy while forming alliances with liberals and even libertarian conservatives, wherever and whenever possible. New Leftists, he thought, "should stop being scared of being reformed out of things to do."

Oglesby thus represents a road not taken by SDS, and I wish I could report that he has written a better memoir about the days in which he argued for that alternative. But since he asks us repeatedly in Ravens in the Storm to trust his reconstruction of conversations with Dohrn and others--conversations that took place decades earlier and that spread out over many pages--it is not reassuring to find a text so riddled with obvious errors. He has New York Times reporter Harrison Salisbury filing a famous series of articles on the bombing of Hanoi in 1968 (actually 1966) and the Paris Peace Accords adopted in 1975 (actually 1973). He writes that he admired Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver's book Soul on Ice when it came out in 1968 but "didn't know yet that his record included several rapes" (crimes that, in fact, Cleaver discusses in the opening chapter of Soul on Ice). He has the Weatherman "simultaneously" bombing "eight court houses across the country where movement-related cases were being heard" in October 1969 (they actually bombed two courthouses, a year later.) And so on. The Oglesby legacy is much better served by a re-reading of "Notes on a Decade Ready for the Dustbin."

The last of the wave of new books on SDS is Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History, a radical comix-inspired work edited by historian and former SDSer Paul Buhle. Buhle is one of the "radical elders" who in 2006 oversaw the launching of a new group claiming the SDS name along with descent from the original. This volume seems intended as a combination recruiting pamphlet and internal education document--and its mixed intent is its principal problem, since it jumbles together genuine history with alluring mythology. I can't quite imagine what an undergraduate today would take away from it, other than a confusing mishmash of contradictory ideas about SDS's role in the 1960s. The opening chapter, "SDS Highlights," written by graphic novelist Harvey Pekar and illustrated by Gary Dumm, offers a good overview of SDS's rise and fall, with an appropriate emphasis on the ever-widening split in the late 1960s between chapter members and the national leadership caste ("Man," an SDSer in one panel complains to another, "the N.O. [National Office] doesn't ask us anything. They go ahead and do what they want"). Progressive Labor and Weatherman come in for well-deserved knocks. But some of the later contributions by other authors seem to take it all back, at least as far as Weatherman is concerned. An entire page is devoted to a poem written in 1970 commemorating Ted Gold, one of Cathy Wilkerson's three comrades who died in the Townhouse Explosion, including the line "he is dead/Of a bomb meant for better targets." Really? Would the "better targets" have been just the soldiers at the dance at Fort Dix, or would they have included their girlfriends and wives as well?

The final chapter, written by Buhle and fellow radical elder and former Weatherman Bruce Rubenstein, is pure recruiting pamphlet. Rubenstein is depicted in the opening panel claiming that the new SDS "is back [and] as strong as it was in 1966"--a dubious proposition both mathematically and politically. Marx famously commented that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce; he never dreamed there would be a further cycle in which it would reappear yet again, even further diminished, as comix.

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