Jeremy Varon (12 page)

Weatherman sought, above all, to destroy any vestiges of “bourgeois individualism” that would dilute members’ commitment to the group and its goal of revolution. To this end, the collectives instituted a strict set of rules, rites, and rituals. All personal property was either shared or renounced outright. To sustain themselves and fund their political activities, the members stole food from grocery stores and begged or borrowed money from friends and family (though some held jobs, turning their income over to the group). Even so, the Weathermen were nearly broke and lived in Spartan dwellings on a diet of noodles and other simple foods.

Nais Raulet had entered the University of Michigan in 1968 at seventeen and within a year plunged into the world of Weatherman. While in 58

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a Detroit collective, she worked full-time, donating her modest income to the collective, which was already purchasing firearms. “Guns,” she lamented, “took priority over food.”123 In the collectives, conventional comforts—from conversations with old friends to afternoons devoted to idle pleasures—were forbidden as well. Entranced by the Leninist notion of “democratic centralism,” Weatherman exalted their leaders, granting them immense power to control—and, as former “cadre”

members would later charge—to manipulate those below them. In some collectives, nearly all personal decisions in the collectives, as basic as where one went at any given time, were subject to the approval of the leadership.124

As part of its infamous “smash monogamy” campaign, Weatherman mandated the splitting apart of couples, whose affection was deemed impermissibly “possessive” or even “selfish”; the forced rotation of sex partners, determined largely by the leadership for reasons both political and, it is alleged, crudely “personal” (the charge is that some male leaders essentially shuttled particular women between collectives in order to sleep with them);125 and even eruptions of group sex in which taboos broke down in variously uncomfortable and exhilarating scenes of libidinal confusion. On occasion, collectives deemed the “most advanced” in “smashing monogamy” were called in to discipline others, savaging their members for their “counterrevolutionary” attachments and purging those deemed incorrigible.126 To sharpen their skills at fighting, the collectives held karate practice; to spread their message, they spray-painted “revolutionary” slogans in subway stations and on building walls. All this was done on virtually no sleep and frequently on drugs—large amounts of speed initially, but also pot and LSD.127 (Phoebe Hirsch, a Weatherwoman based in Chicago, confessed to having become “hooked on speed” just to keep up with the group’s “frantic” pace; fearful of a breakdown, she left the collective and went to New York, where she “collapsed on [her]

sister’s doorstep,” before being drawn back to the group by a friend.)128

Finally, Weatherman used “criticism-self-criticism” sessions to keep members unflinchingly wed to the “correct line.”

By all accounts, the “criticism-self-criticism” sessions—also called

“CSC” or “Weatherfries”—were the most harrowing aspect of life in the collectives. Loosely derived from techniques used by Maoist revolutionaries in China, CSC ostensibly sought to encourage political and emotional honesty and group bonding (criticism came first so as to prevent members from using “self-criticism” to preempt the scrutiny of others).

More deeply, the Weathermen used the practice to confront and root out

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their racist, individualist, and chauvinist tendencies. In tone and substance, the sessions were part political trial, part hazing, part shock ther-apy, part exorcism, and, in a word used by more than one former member, part “brainwashing.”129 At their most intense, collectives singled out individuals for “criticism” and then berated them—five, seven, a dozen hours or more without break—about their flaws. Though they were designed to break down barriers among members, the effect of the sessions was to enhance suspicions and rivalries within the group and to suppress fears and doubts.130 Ayers recalls being denounced as a “liberal creep”

after confessing to a friend his affection for the poem “To Posterity” by Bertolt Brecht, which pleaded that future generations “judge not too harshly” the necessarily harsh actions of revolutionaries.131 Hirsch explained that the group would batter you until you admitted, in a moment of exhausted “catharsis,” to being “deep down a white suprema-cist.”132 Wilkerson complained that the Weathermen set the stakes unbearably high as they judged one another, such that some “error” of political understanding was declared “a mortal sin that will stain history forever.”133 Raulet described CSC as a “vicious tool to disgrace people into accepting collective discipline.”134 Dohrn wondered years later: “I don’t know if there’s a good Maoism somewhere, but the Maoism that we adopted was stupid and lethal.”135

Life in the collectives could be especially difficult for the women, who made up nearly half of Weatherman. On the one hand, their strong presence in the group was evidence of how deeply outrage at the Vietnam War and racism cut across gender lines; women and men joined Weatherman for essentially the same reasons. On the other hand, the Weatherwomen had significantly different experiences from their male counterparts, as a growing awareness of sexism was part of their political awakening. Hirsch, in a scene familiar to women activists, recalled her aggravation “sitting silent” in the mid 1960s in the University of Wisconsin’s “Socialist Club” while the men, rapt in theoretical discussion,

“were being ‘profound.’” Later, while in an apartment of the “Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers,” she observed the men debating and the women “cooking, cleaning, and changing diapers,” leading her to ask “So what’s different here?”136 Future Weatherwomen, similarly frustrated, at times openly challenged the male domination of New Left organizations, worked to have them address issues of gender oppression, and participated in all-women organizations and initiatives. Yet in Weatherman, the women were confined mostly to the “second-tier leadership,”

had to mute or disavow certain of their feminist beliefs, and, no matter 60

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their activist credentials, had to prove their commitment once again by showing their ability to engage in “independent” actions as part of

“women’s cadres.”137 Raulet explained: “The male Weather line was,

‘Our women can fight as well as anyone. Our women can kick ass. Our women are tough.’ [So] we all spat nails and wore combat boots.”138 Yet for Raulet, the actions of the women’s cadres were driven by a coerced machismo and encouraged neither true autonomy nor solidarity among the women. Finally, while the group’s sexual politics provided a space for women to assert desire and explore relationships with one another, they also invited the sexual exploitation of female members.

As word of the group’s behavior seeped out, the “Weathermyth”

steadily grew, and rumors quickly spread. One collective, it was alleged, had skinned and eaten an alley cat.139 The Weathermen themselves, while acknowledging excesses, remember the collectives as being far more serious and purposeful than such sensational and surely apocryphal stories suggested. Part of their energy was devoted to the sober study of “revolutionary” texts. Deep friendships
did
develop within the group, beyond the contrivances of the “revolutionary bond.” In moments declared “off the record,” members could speak more frankly about their anxieties.

And some of the collectives were certainly more restrictive than others.

The collectives nonetheless remained chaotic and often dismal places, driven by a strange combination of excess and asceticism, self-indulgence and self-renunciation. Psychologically harsh environments, they rewarded assertive and even aggressive personalities, while chewing up those less confident or able to defend themselves. Reflecting on what he described as the group’s “cultish” qualities, Neufeld confessed: “I think all that stuff was really horrible” and caused “real harm to a lot of people.”140 One Weatherwoman in the Cleveland collective, where ten people slept in two bedrooms on two ratty mattresses, recalled: “Our lifestyle was in so many ways so hideous back then.” Observing the depressing scene, she doubted whether the group represented “a path that we should go in. . . . Before I joined Weatherman I had . . . a sense of the counterculture and radical political movements leading to something positive, but I think once I was in Weatherman . . . I knew there was something fundamentally wrong.”141 Raulet had similar reservations, which drove her from the group within a matter of months. Weatherman, she recalled, felt “that because we were in [an] army . . . we, ourselves, were not going to be able to live in any way suitable for human beings. We were well aware we weren’t living like human beings. We weren’t even

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acting like human beings. We would have been unfit for any society we wanted to see by the time [the revolution] was over.”142

The main work of the Weatherman collectives in the summer of 1969

was to build enthusiasm for demonstrations in Chicago on October 8–11

in which the group would showcase its strategy of leading working-class youths in revolt. The June SDS meeting had ratified a call for a “National Action,” conceived of as a series of conventional protests against the war, racism, and domestic repression. Weatherman, now the leadership of SDS, rebaptized the demonstrations the “Days of Rage” and gave them a new purpose: “to establish another front against imperialism right here in America—to ‘bring the war home.’”143 The choice of Chicago was significant. National SDS, put off by the Yippies and fearful of police violence, had not supported the demonstrations at the Democratic convention in 1968 (although individual SDSers, including several future Weathermen, participated in the demonstrations). The Weathermen would redeem SDS’s failure. They left the scenario for Chicago vague but spoke of their intention to “tear up pig city” and “kick ass” when fighting the police. Violence was the incessant theme of Weathermen promoting the action to student activists around the country, and rumors quickly spread that they intended to bring guns to Chicago. RYM II, fearful of the Weathermen, planned to hold its own, nonviolent demonstrations in Chicago the same weekend.

To attract working-class youths to the demonstration, the Weathermen leafleted at high schools, talked to teenagers at popular hangouts, and engaged in calculated displays of toughness. These included skirmishes with police and “jailbreaks” in which Weathermen invaded high school classrooms to deliver lectures about the evils of imperialism, talk up the Days of Rage, and invite the students to “escape.”144 Student reactions ranged from shock, to anger, to delight, at least at the prospect of fleeing class.145 In one “jailbreak” at a community college in subur-ban Detroit, nine Weatherwomen barricaded the doors of the classroom they entered, briefly held the class hostage, and allegedly assaulted a professor, for which they were arrested and served time in jail. Though they had worn conventional clothes during the action, Weatherman later dressed them in its unofficial uniform of boots, jeans, and jean jackets, put a photo of them in a mock bust in the SDS newspaper, and dubbed the group the “Motor City Nine” (a reference to the “revolutionary”

rock band “MC5” from a working-class Detroit neighborhood). In another action, Weathermen ran with Viet Cong flags on a Detroit lakeside 62

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beach where working-class kids gathered. The latter apparently took offense at the flags and promptly got into fistfights with the Weathermen, their would-be allies. Unfazed by the chilly response, the Weathermen confidently predicted that tens of thousands of youths would flock to Chicago and give birth to a “white army.”

More dramatically, the Weathermen engaged prior to the Days of Rage in what Hirsch called, half seriously, “low-level molestation of the police.” The purpose seemed, more than anything else, to break down internal barriers by shattering the aura of the police. Hirsch explained that at one point she had “socked [a] cop to prove to myself that I wasn’t intimidated.” Her audacious act, as a small-framed woman, left her feeling, “If I can do that I can do anything, because that uniform is so scary.”146

.

.

.

The organization of armed resistance groups in

West Germany and West Berlin is correct, possible,

and justified.

RAF, “Das Konzept Stadtguerilla”

(“The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla”)

The birth of the Red Army Faction in May 1970 was both slow and sudden. In October 1968, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Horst Söhnlein, and Thorward Proll had been convicted of the Frankfurt arsons and sentenced to three years in prison. In June 1969, the four were released while their conviction was being appealed. Baader and Proll began working with troubled teens in two youth centers in Frankfurt. With the backing of the centers’ administrators and money from SDS and private donors, they established an “apprenticeship” program with the youths. Baader and Proll led them mostly in rebellion: against the regulations of their residence halls, against the maze of institutions—from courts, to social agencies, to churches—that had tried to “reform” them; and against “the system” as a whole, presented as a main source of their difficulties with authority and troubles in life. Ensslin soon took similar initiative with young women in Frankfurt halfway houses. Without quite trying to build a “revolutionary youth movement,” as Weatherman had explicitly done, Baader, Proll, and Ensslin seemed intent on shaping the disaffection of those young and disadvantaged into a source of sustained political rebellion.

In November 1969, the appeal was rejected, and Baader, Ensslin,

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Proll, and Söhnlein were ordered to return to prison. Söhnlein did so, but the others chose to flee. With the help of Proll’s sister Astrid and a loose network of sympathizers, they made their way to Paris, where they stayed in the vacant apartment of Régis Debray (imprisoned at the time in Bolivia for political activities). Lacking focus and direction in France, Ensslin, Baader, and Astrid Proll soon reentered the Federal Republic, leaving behind Thorward, whose commitment to the fugitive life they questioned.147