Jeremy Varon (28 page)

Doubting the existence of such a plebiscite or the emergence of an antiwar consensus is not to deny that the movement had an impact. Failing any clear victory, the movement was nonetheless able to establish a limit to what government officials felt they could do abroad. That limit still relied on the notion of “the masses” as arbiters of governmental action. Over time, the antiwar movement both threatened prowar politicians with the loss of electoral majorities and eroded public confidence—

that elusive requirement for effective policies—in the war. In this sense, the movement did achieve critical mass. Even if the American “masses”

never rejected the war, the movement benefited from the assumption that the war was something the masses
could
reject. In this way, they attained a “real” agency.

The same logic holds when assessing the impact of militancy and violence. These may never have functioned as the voice of “the people,”

and neither were they even the preferred tactics of the antiwar move-

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ment. But they did seem to inspire fear among the political and military establishment of a popular uprising that would cripple the government and force intolerable degrees of national division. Militancy had practical value less as a hindrance to the war in a literal, military sense than as the expression of a
possibility
presumed to be latent in the masses. Violence, promoted as the most direct form of direct action, itself functioned as a symbol. Militants appear at times to have been aware of this symbolic aspect of their activism. Commenting on the November 15

march, the Weatherman Shin’ya Ono speculated with some validity that

“the more [government officials] drag their feet in admitting defeat and getting out of Vietnam, the more the candle-holding type [of demonstrator] will join the ranks of the crazies on the street.”94 Abbie Hoffman, in defense of Yippie rioting, warned that the Mobe might turn into

“the Mob” should the war persist.95 In short, the primary contribution of “the crazies” to the antiwar effort lay in the threat that the violence would spread.

Wells ultimately contends that there is no way to gauge the
precise
impact on U.S. policy of the antiwar movement as a whole, let alone that of its different strands. Scholars could likely debate the effectiveness of the diverse forms of activism ad infinitum without settling on any definitive judgment. I doubt whether a method could even be devised for rendering such a judgment.96 The experiences of a single figure convey my sense of the role militants played in the antiwar movement.

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So do your duty, boys, and join with pride

Serve your country in her suicide

Find the flags so you can wave goodbye

But just before the end even treason might be

worth a try

This country is too young to die

I declare the war is over, it’s over, it’s over

Phil Ochs, “War Is Over”

In the mid 1990s, Robin Palmer described the high-point of his long career as an antiwar activist. Though he was already well over thirty during the glory years of the 1960s, he immersed himself in New Left politics and had an uncanny knack for participating in the era’s storied events, making him something of the Zelig of the era’s radicalism.

Palmer was born in 1930 in Harlem, across the street from the Audu-148

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bon Ballroom, where Malcolm X would be assassinated; thirty-five years later, he attended a memorial for the slain Black Power leader not far from his birthplace. He was the son of a Cornell University professor and recalls going as a child to football games and proudly singing the national anthem and Cornell’s alma mater. Despite this patriotic upbring-ing, as a young man, he developed very unconventional views; though he was trained as an Army paratrooper, when called to serve in Korea, he became one of a handful of conscientious objectors to the war.

In 1965, Palmer attended the first large antiwar demonstration in Washington, D.C., organized by SDS. During this time, he met weekly with a veterans group that sent letters to politicians and circulated peti-tions demanding an end to the conflict in Vietnam. On July 4, 1966, the group marched some fifty miles from Valley Forge to Philadelphia’s Independence Hall protesting the war. The following year, Palmer was among those at the Pentagon who broke through a police cordon and laid siege to the building, for which he was arrested on the serious felony charge of assaulting a U.S. marshal. Dr. Benjamin Spock, the renowned pediatrician and antiwar leader, helped bail Palmer out of jail. A picture of him being beaten by police on the Pentagon steps made the front page of the
Washington Post
and was used as the back cover of the paperback edition of Norman Mailer’s
Armies of the Night,
which described the protest. (The
Post
somewhat fatuously captioned the photograph of the thirty-seven-year-old Palmer: “Prone boy, center, protects girls beneath him.”)97 Palmer drove back to his home in New York City with Abbie Hoffman, a newfound friend, with whom he collaborated on Yippie provocations.

Like many other 1960s activists, Palmer narrates his political history by recounting key moments or epiphanies in which he, the movement, the country, or all three seemed to cross some vital threshold. One such moment took place in 1968 at Columbia University. Palmer had temporarily left his “straight job” as a deep-sea diver (working in a subma-rine owned by the first mate on Jacques Cousteau’s
Calypso
) to join the student uprising. The liberal faculty, as Palmer describes it, played an ambiguous role in the protests, as they ringed the occupied Low Library both to keep conservative students from attacking the rebels and to keep more people from joining the occupation. Palmer, as a professor’s son, had always looked upon faculty with near reverence, esteeming them as the “heart and soul” of an enlightened university. So it was a moment of high Oedipal drama when at Columbia he became so enraged at a professor’s efforts to physically prevent him from climbing into a win-

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dow of Low Library that he literally spat in the professor’s face. “Who have I become?” he wondered in that instant. Fazed, but undeterred in his radicalism, he participated later that year in the mayhem at the Democratic National Convention, for which he was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Chicago 8 trial.

The year 1969 was a pivotal one both for the movement and for Palmer. Just as Weatherman was forming, Palmer became active with the Melville collective. He personally carried the briefcase that held the bomb that exploded at the Criminal Courts Building in New York where the trial of the “Panther 21” was being held. Chance also intervened to enrich his life as a radical. While walking home in late June, Palmer stum-bled, quite by accident, on the Stonewall riot that inaugurated a new phase in the gay liberation movement; seeing police beating a drag queen, he entered the fray and spent the night in jail with the rioters.

In 1970, he joined Weatherman and was arrested trying to firebomb a Citibank office in New York City. He was sent to Attica prison and participated in the 1971 uprising, during which his best friend, Sam Melville, was shot by a state trooper and died in his arms. Palmer can be seen standing naked, herded through the mud with other vanquished and abused inmates, on the cover of Tom Wicker’s harrowing account of Attica,
A
Time to Die.
At a trial about events there, Palmer offered his views on the war and his methods of protesting it. A state prosecutor, trying to discredit Palmer’s testimony praising Melville and condemning his murder, asked in leading fashion if Melville had a nickname among the Attica inmates. Indeed, he was called in prison “the Mad Bomber,” and friends privately confessed that depression and insecurity partly drove his actions. (In Attica, Melville was also called “the Weatherman,” which seems to have been a catch-all name for white bombers.) Palmer answered the prosecutor, “Yes, [Sam] did have a name. He was referred to as the

‘Sane Bomber.’” Johnson and Nixon, in Palmer’s view, were the mad bombers.

Palmer was released from prison in 1973 and then visited Cuba, during which a profound disillusionment with communism began to set in.

He gained a measure of ignominy in 1975 when Jane Alpert denounced him as a “dull-witted misogynist” in a widely read essay she wrote for
Ms.
magazine that blasted the sexism of Sam Melville, the Weather Underground, and the left as a whole.98 More favorably, Dave Dellinger described Palmer in a memoir as one among a group of New Leftists who had fallen into the “trap” of violence but never lost their “humanity and sincerity.”99 Though only a minor historical figure, Palmer is a striking 150

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personification (one could choose others) of the movement’s evolution from protest to resistance and then to revolution—a narrative arc that powerfully shaped postwar American history.

In 1975, Palmer attended a ceremony in a Manhattan church in which North Vietnamese officials personally thanked scores of antiwar activists.

After waiting in line several hours, the activists had the chance to address the Vietnamese and shake their hands. Palmer, overwhelmed at the time with joy, recalls feeling that “they did it [defeated the U.S.]. . . . But we helped them.”100 Palmer’s “we” is significant. It includes no doubt the petitioners, the candle holders, the marchers, the conscientious objectors, the draft resisters, the GI resisters, the clergy and the churchgoers, the college and high school students, and many of their parents. But it includes also the NLF flag wavers, the rock throwers, and the bombers—

all those disparaged so often and so loudly in the antiwar movement.

They “did it” too.

c h a p t e r 4

The Excesses and Limits

of Revolutionary Violence

Following the Days of Rage and the antiwar demonstrations in Washington, notions of space—distance, height, location, and boundaries—defined the experience of the Weathermen. One Weatherman explained, “[W]e felt we had to be undaunted; if we ran into an obstruction, we had to leap over it or go around it; we could never just fall back.”1 The group now sought to “bring the struggle to the next level” by inflicting “material damage” on America’s military-corporate apparatus. The transition from street fighting to bombing entailed more, though, than a tactical shift in an improbable war of liberation. Weatherman also intensified a politics of transgression that was not reducible to its anti-imperialist ideology or its strategic goals. Weatherman thus made its own vivid contribution to the ethos in the 1960s of “going further” that pushed political and cultural rebellion to exhilarating, disorienting, and often dangerous extremes.2

Two events signaled the extent and perils of Weatherman’s provocation. In December 1969, in Flint, Michigan, Weatherman held its last public meeting, at which the group finalized plans for going underground.

The meeting, called the “War Council,” was most conspicuous for its rhetoric. The Weathermen lauded Charles Manson and projected a scenario of virtually random violence, meant to consume the country in chaos. The “vision” of Flint, as it gloried in defiance and subversion without limits, was seemingly realized when two months later a Weatherman collective accidentally blew up a New York City townhouse while making bombs, killing three of its own members. Following the townhouse explosion, Weatherman quickly completed its descent underground. As fugitives pledged to violent insurrection, the Weathermen were now both 151

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Excesses and Limits

literally and figuratively outside the boundaries of the law and the norms governing civic life.

The townhouse explosion was a watershed for the Weathermen, causing them to confront the hazards of their path. The group began to rethink not only its purpose and methods, but also a sense of political and ethical limits. As a result of these deliberations, the Weather Underground would engage exclusively in “armed propaganda” actions aimed at property, whose main effect was to dramatize opposition to the state’s violence abroad and at home. Once called “the id of their generation” by Tom Hayden, the Weathermen tried to refigure themselves as something closer to America’s conscience by punishing the state for
its
continued transgressions.3 In its new guise, the group also became in part the kind of symbol it had once denounced. Initially intent on making a “real” or “material”

contribution to anti-imperialist struggles, the group now functioned largely as a shadowy reminder of the resentment U.S. policies bred internationally and at home, and of an anger and alienation among white American youths that would not fully dilute with the passing of the Vietnam War and the waning of the New Left. In a sense, the greatest achievement of the Weather Underground in the mid 1970s was that it avoided capture.

Both the Flint meeting and the townhouse explosion have had important places within the historiography and the broader mythology of Weatherman, the New Left, and the American 1960s in general. For most, they represent the fruition of aggressive, self-destructive or even nihilistic tendencies in the New Left—striking instances of “going too far.” Yet Weatherman’s escalating violence was far from a simple case of zealotry or excess. It was also an outraged or even traumatized response to the Vietnam War, to racism, and to domestic repression. Equally important, the Weathermen pulled themselves back from a kind of abyss; where they stopped powerfully defined the entire journey.

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Oh but you who philosophize disgrace and

criticize all fears,

Bury the rag deep in your face

For now’s the time for your tears.

Bob Dylan,

“The Lonesome Death of Hattie Caroll”

Even before the Days of Rage, Weatherman’s leadership had planned to submerge parts of the organization and develop a clandestine capability Excesses and Limits

153

to complement the group’s aboveground work.4 The legal fallout from the Days of Rage made the move underground all the more pressing. Up until the October protest, the FBI had done with respect to Weatherman largely what the movement had done: pore over the group’s public statements, try to determine its ideological orientation, and assess what its future actions might be; the FBI’s early “intelligence” on the group, judging from its reports, consisted mostly of excerpts from New Left publications and the (often clumsy) summaries of the speeches of Weatherleaders by agents who had simply attended public meetings.5 By the end of the Days of Rage, many Weathermen faced jail time, mostly for felonious assault and “mob action,” for their actions in Chicago. Equally important, the FBI was now convinced that Weatherman represented a significant threat to the nation’s security. On the basis of the Days of Rage, the federal government indicted Weatherleaders for interstate travel to induce riots, speculating that the charges might well “mark [the group’s]