Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen - Hardcover

Rudd, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0061472751 ISBN 13: 9780061472756

Publisher: William Morrow, 2009

Synopsis

“Honest and funny, passionate and contrite, meticulously researched and deeply philosophical: an essential document on the ’60s.”
—Washington Post

 

Mark Rudd, former ’60s radical student leader and onetime fugitive member of the notorious Weather Underground, tells his compelling and engrossing story for the first time in Underground. The chairman of the SDS and leader of the 1968 student uprising at Columbia University, Rudd offers a gripping narrative of his political awakening and fugitive life during one of the most influential periods in modern U.S. history.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Rudd is now a teacher in New Mexico, where he lives with his family.

From the Back Cover

The leader of the student uprising of 1968 and founding member of the notorious Weather Underground tells his story—for the first time

In 1968, Mark Rudd led the legendary occupation of five buildings at Columbia University, a dramatic act of protest against the university's support for the Vietnam War and its institutional racism. Rudd was the charismatic chairman of the Columbia chapter of SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, the largest radical student organization in the United States. After a violent police bust, the Columbia occupation turned into a student strike that closed down the entire campus, turning Rudd into a national symbol of student revolt. Rudd went on to become the cofounder of the Weatherman faction of SDS, which took control of the student organization and helped organize the notorious Days of Rage in Chicago in 1969.

But Mark Rudd wanted revolution.

Rudd and his friends sought to end war, racism, and injustice—by any means necessary, even violence. After a tragic turn that led to the death of three people, who were killed when the bombs they were making in a Greenwich Village town house exploded, they transformed themselves into the Weather Underground Organization. By the end of 1970, after a string of nonlethal bombings by the organization, Rudd, now one of the FBI's Most Wanted, went into hiding for more than seven years before turning himself in to great media fanfare.

In this gripping narrative, Rudd speaks out about this tumultuous period, the role he played in its crucial events, and its aftermath, revealing the drama and tension, as well as the naïveté of young activists, fighting in the name of peace and social justice, who believed that their actions mattered.

"I've spoken and answered questions at scores of colleges, high schools, community centers, and theaters about why my friends and I opted for violent revolution, and how I've changed my thinking and how I haven't, and most of all, about the parallels between then and now," Rudd writes. Powerful and shocking, Underground sheds new light on this controversial time, which still haunts the nation.

Reviews

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by James Rosen "So how does it feel to be the mouthpiece for the murderers?" Those were the first words of Mark Rudd, the former student radical and Weatherman revolutionary, when I called him for an interview five years ago and introduced myself as a reporter for Fox News. A dose of guilt ("This is how it begins, Mark?") calmed him down, and the interview lasted an hour. But the opening jab showed that Rudd, then 56, had not lost the cutting humor or antiwar fervor of his youth. A good thing, too, for without those attributes, his memoir "Underground" would not be the gem that it is. Even those who condemn Rudd's work in history can be grateful for Rudd's work of history. "Underground" is honest and funny, passionate and contrite, meticulously researched and deeply philosophical: an essential document on the '60s. While the author hasn't resolved all the contradictions inherent in his old urban-guerrilla guise, he confronts them admirably, ready to acknowledge the worst in himself. Raised in a middle-class Jewish family in suburban New Jersey, Rudd was radicalized soon after his arrival at Columbia University in 1965. Disgusted by racism and the military-industrial complex, he became active in the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, which applied the missionary zeal of the civil rights movement to what had become the defining issue for American college students: the Vietnam War. In April 1968, Rudd was a key figure in the events that culminated in the seizure of several buildings at Columbia. The crisis lasted six days before university administrators called in the cops, who evicted the students in a pre-dawn raid that ended with scores of injuries and 700 arrests. Rudd became an instant media icon, the model for Doonesbury's "Megaphone" Mark Slackmeyer and "in the eyes of the press an easy personification of an entire generation of students in revolt: the middle-class kid who had all the advantages, attended an elite university, but who angrily turned against 'the system' . . . [and] made campus revolt fashionable." Expelled from Columbia, Rudd became a full-time SDS organizer, preaching antiwar radicalism across the nation and bedding every nubile believer who threw herself at this charismatic young evangelist of anti-imperialism. Internal feuding suffocated SDS by June 1969. That's when Rudd and a few hardened comrades -- among them Bill Ayers, whose early support for Barack Obama became an unlikely issue in last year's presidential campaign -- broke away to form the Weathermen. Determined to overthrow America's war machine, the Weathermen mounted the Days of Rage, a chaotic, bloody and sparsely attended three-day rampage on the streets of Chicago in October 1969. Five months later, three Weather members died in a New York City townhouse when the nail bombs they were constructing to use at an officers' dance at Fort Dix detonated prematurely. After that, the group's members assumed false identities, changed their collective name to the Weather Underground and planted two dozen bombs at courthouses, correctional facilities, police stations, the Capitol and the Pentagon. Although his 1970 federal indictment (stemming from the Days of Rage) was dismissed amid revelations of government misconduct, Rudd remained a fugitive. He scouted an occasional bomb location, helped spring Timothy Leary from prison and drove the getaway car in an armed robbery before finally surrendering in September 1977 so that he and his wife could raise their two children in a "normal" home. He never served time and became a math teacher at a community college in New Mexico. The recurring theme in all of Rudd's exploits was cognitive dissonance. He realizes now, he writes, that the Weathermen "reproduced conditions that all hermetically sealed cults use: isolation, sleep deprivation, demanding arbitrary acts of loyalty to the group, even sexual initiation as bonding." But he wouldn't admit this to himself at the time. Even as he "postured and gave speeches on the necessity for violence, I was terrified," he writes. "I knew I was no fighter. . . . I knew that the whole thing was nuts but couldn't intervene to stop it. . . . I felt like a member of the crew on a speeding train, dimly aware of disaster ahead but unable to put on the brakes." He recounts bouts of depression and breakdowns from the strain: "I was exhausted from playing a double role -- the public revolutionary leader and the private scared kid." The irony is that Rudd's turn to radical politics at Columbia was cemented by a friend's remark that he couldn't watch America devastate Vietnam and stand by "like a good German." Yet from 1969 through 1977, no thought voiced or deed done by his Weather comrades, no matter how lunatic or murderous, could dislodge Rudd from his loyalty to their cause; and he is left today with considerable regret that he either took part in the madness or stood idly by, like a good German. The most wrenching scenes in "Underground" depict the suffering of the author's beloved parents, simple, hard-working people who found the whole business unfathomable. "I wonder if I'll ever be able to laugh again," Bertha Rudd said after her son's expulsion from Columbia, "my heart is so broken."
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

With the war in Iraq provoking memories of Vietnam, Rudd gave up a 25-year silence on his role in the radical student movement of the 1960s when he lead the Weathermen. The group grew out of the Student for Democratic Society behind massive anti-war and social-justice protests at Columbia University. Rudd recalls his personal journey from idealistic freshman to student radical and the escalating violence that led to the riot during the 1969 Democratic party convention in Chicago and the bombing of a townhouse in Greenwich Village. Rudd spent seven years, from 1970 until 1977, living underground as a federal fugitive before turning himself in. Rudd writes from the perspective of a middle-aged teacher living in New Mexico, still concerned about social justice and heartened by the new administration and growing involvement of young people in politics and civic engagement. He admits shame and guilt about some of the excesses and violence of the radical 1960s, but maintains an enduring pride in the passion and idealism of the time. An engrossing look back at a turbulent time by an iconic figure. --Vanessa Bush

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0061472751
• ISBN 13: 9780061472756
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336