Tom Hayden on Mark Rudd

click here />Posted on May 8, 2009

Don't go around tonight,
Well it's bound to take your life,
There's a bad moon on the rise.

                      ""Creedence Clearwater Revival, 1969

William Morrow, 336 pages

Rudd struggles to reconcile these two selves, representing two eras, in his memoir, "Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen," an important contribution to a growing collection of narratives from former participants in the revolutionary 1960s' underground. Other recent works include Bill Ayers' "Fugitive Days," Cathy Wilkerson's "Flying Close to the Sun,"- Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, and Jeff Jones' "Sing a Battle Song,"- David Gilbert's "No Surrender," Leslie Brody's "Red Star Sister," Roxanne Dunbar's "Outlaw Woman," and the 2002 Oscar-nominated documentary "The Weather Underground." The saga is turned into fiction as well in Dana Spiotta's "Eat the Document."  Other novels that mine the same or similar terrain include Heinrich Boll's classic "The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum," Susan Choi's "American Woman," and Neil Gordon's "The Company You Keep." No doubt there will be more.

That may be more books than those devoted to such organizations as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or the Students for a Democratic Society, not to mention community organizing or the farmworkers' movement of those years,  and the genre is likely to grow, revealing an abiding fascination with the question of why it was that some peaceful dissenters turned to violence so suddenly in the late '60s. The Weather Underground took credit for 24 bombings altogether and, according to federal sources, there were additionally several thousand acts of violence during the same years.  In 1969-70 alone, there were more than 550 fraggings by soldiers, according to one authoritative historian of the Vietnam War.

The fascination with such violence is not new. Similar themes can be found in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 19th-century novel about young Russian nihilists, "The Possessed,"  in Joseph Conrad's "Under Western Eyes," Henry James' "The Princess Casamassima," Andre Malraux's tale of the Shanghai uprising, "Man's Fate," and, of course, Ernest Hemingway's stories of the Spanish civil war.

What explains the enduring interest in such radicals?  I believe it has something to do with exploring the extremes of personal commitment. To fail heroically, though miserably, is seen by many as attaining a greater glory than the rewards to be had from the mundane life of patient political work. As Karl Marx wrote of the Paris Commune, the French Communards at least had stormed the heavens. And as Rudd quotes Erich Fromm quoting Nietzsche, "There are times when anyone who does not lose his mind has no mind to lose."

Fiction may be a better vehicle than autobiography or history for ascertaining the truth in clandestine histories where the secret lives of others are at legal risk. In Rudd's self-description, he is far from heroic, but more like a confused young man from the Jersey suburbs staggering out of a novel by Philip Roth, either "American Pastoral" or "I Married a Communist."

There is an unconsciousness in Rudd's memory of himself, a kind of bumbling innocence that will disappoint a reader seeking more. When, for example, the milling students at Columbia sought tactical direction, Rudd writes: "I had only the vaguest idea of what we were doing."- When Rudd is told by a comrade that his demonstration is out of control, he replies, "I know. I have no idea what to do." When Rudd calls for taking a hostage, he says, "I meant a building," not an administrator. But then he supports taking Dean Henry Coleman hostage, yelling: "Now we've got the man where we want him! He can't leave unless he gives in to some of our demands." When the media selects him as the new revolutionary symbol, he remembers a "gnawing sense that I was in over my head."

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