Jeremy Varon (30 page)

Materials distributed at the conference gave an initial sense of Weatherman’s vision of underground combat, stating: “Our strategy has to be Excesses and Limits

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geared towards forcing the disintegration of society, attacking at every level, from all directions and creating strategic ‘armed chaos’ where there now is pig order.”33 After the announcement, much of the conference focused on the practical aspects of clandestine armed struggle, such as the choice of targets, the procurement of weapons, and the building of secure cells. Equally important, the group’s leaders sought to strengthen the resolve of the rank and file in preparation for the descent underground, making Flint, in Kirkpatrick Sale’s description, one of “the most bizarre gatherings of the decade.”34

The Weathermen transformed the ballroom into an environment to further incubate their enthusiasm for violence.35 They decorated the walls with posters of their slain heroes, such as Che Guevara and Malcolm X, and pictures of Fred Hampton arranged to form the words “Seize the Time.” The Weathermen also displayed images of their adversaries—

Nixon and Agnew, certainly, but also pages of the
Guardian,
over which they drew gun sights and wrote the words “P-I-E-C-E N-O-W.” At the center of the room dangled a giant papier-mâché pistol. Activities included karate exercises (one session was led, remarkably, by Tom Hayden), per-formances from a “Weatherman Songbook” that replaced the lyrics of popular songs with variously campy or morbid doggerels, the taking of large doses of LSD, and wild evening dances in which Weathermen chanted “Explode!” Typical of Weatherman’s songs was “White Riot,”

sung to the tune of “White Christmas,” which praised the Days of Rage:

“I’m dreaming of a white riot / Just like the one October 8 / When the pigs take a beating / And things start leading / To armed war against the state.”36 With a humor that had turned plainly sick, another song de-rided Chicago official Richard Elrod, paralyzed in the Days of Rage, to the tune of Bob Dylan’s “Lay, Lady, Lay”: “Stay Elrod stay / Stay in your iron lung / Play Elrod play / Play with your toes awhile.”37 The Weathermen also repeatedly invoked the notion of “barbarism,” as they saw themselves, like the Visigoths, wreaking havoc on a tottering empire. In an especially perverse conversation, the Weathermen debated the ethics of killing white babies, so as not to bring more “oppressors” into the world and denounced American women bearing white children as “pig mothers.”38

Speeches by Weatherleaders most forcefully defined the themes and emotions of Flint. Dohrn began by excoriating the white conspiracy trial defendants and the left generally for not tearing up the courtroom when Seale was bound and gagged.39 According to Dohrn, this passivity had encouraged Chicago’s police to kill Hampton.40 She then presented the 160

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ideal Weatherman not simply as a determined revolutionary but as an unruly agent of disruption and offense. After relating an anecdote of how she and J. J. had recently torn down the aisle of an airplane, grabbing food from the plates of shocked passengers, Dohrn proclaimed, “That’s what we’re about, being crazy motherfuckers and scaring the shit out of Honky America.”41 Dohrn then gave praise to an unlikely hero, uttering a phrase she and the Weathermen would come to dearly regret. Referring to the Manson gang’s Tate–La Bianca murders of the previous summer, Dohrn exclaimed, “Dig it; first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the room with them, then they even shoved a fork into pig Tate’s stomach. Wild!”42 For the remainder of the conference, Weathermen greeted each other by holding up four fingers to represent a fork and chanted periodically “Free Charles Manson!”

In his speech, Mark Rudd stressed the need for a single-minded commitment to revolution by invoking Captain Ahab from Melville’s
Moby
Dick.
Rudd was hardly the first leftist in the 1960s to draw on
Moby
Dick
for political metaphors. Several years earlier, Chairman Mao Tse-tung had written presciently that Southeast Asia was, geopolitically speaking, America’s white whale: the U.S. obsession with military victory in the region would cost the country dearly.43 Eldridge Cleaver had argued that whiteness itself would prove to be America’s fatal lure, as it had been for Ahab. But for Rudd, Ahab was less a figure of self-destructive obsession than an object of emulation. Rudd declared himself “monoma-niacal” and demanded that the Weathermen pursue revolution with the same zeal as Ahab in his hunt for the whale. The Weatherman Howie Machtinger presented a second American icon, Superman’s indefatiga-ble nemesis Lex Luthor, as a role model, because he was “willing to fight forever.”44

J. J. concluded the conference by explaining that the “personal pacifism” in which middle-class white youth are bred reflects how thoroughly they have been sheltered from the violence that victimized American blacks and the world’s poor. J. J. was encouraged, however, by the increasing turn of white youth “away from a low energy culture . . . that robbed people of their passion” toward a new culture “of high energy and repersonalization through dope, sex, acid, revolution.”45 He boasted that the Weathermen are “against everything that’s good and decent in Honky America. We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother’s nightmare.”46 According to one reporter, J. J.’s oration left the few non-Weathermen remaining at the conference

“stunned.”47

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Flint devolved into a spectacle of political and emotional fervor, at once disturbing and surreal. Those attending the conference drew on figures of madness in describing it. Jeff Jones characterized Flint in retrospect as the apex of Weatherman’s “group psychosis.”48 To Wilkerson, who recalls spending Flint in a “kind of blur,” the event was “horrible,” “total insanity.”49 Another Weatherwoman described Flint as “a very sad and alienating scene” that seemed like “some kind of a nightmare.”50 Carol Brightman, an antiwar activist mostly critical of Weatherman, recalled that the meeting “was grotesque, but it was like theater,

[because] it didn’t seem related to anything real.”51 Jonah Raskin, a radical professor, found the Weathermen at Flint at once “cogent and mad, penetrating and ludicrous.”52 One left-wing journalist titled his column on Flint “Abstract Barbarians?” concluding, “I wanted to write an article on how to think about Weatherman. It can’t be done.”53 Another paper used the headline, “The Year of the Fork?”54

For much of the left, Flint compounded questions about Weatherman raised by the Days of Rage. Did the group intend to mount a principled campaign, built around comprehensible and potentially popular goals, or would it indulge “violence for its own sake”? However far-flung its vision, did Weatherman at least represent the promise of a society more just and humane than the one it sought to destroy? Though a gathering of only a few hundred among a movement of hundreds of thousands, Flint also raised important questions about the New Left as a whole: Was Weatherman simply an aberration that would burn itself out? A false and dangerous turn, demanding that the group be actively isolated? Or an extreme expression of tendencies present throughout the movement, with which the New Left as a whole had to come to terms?

Reflecting on Flint in a pacifist magazine, Hendrik Hertzberg asked

“Is this our movement?” and answered, sadly, yes. He saw Weatherman as a “logical consequence of [the] intellectual flabbiness and dishonesty”

of the left, which “stripped language of meaning” through “verbal overkill” (as in descriptions of America as “fascist”), spread the reckless idea that revolution was imminent, and more and more thoughtlessly endorsed violence.55 The issue of violence extended beyond political protest.

The movement had recently confronted its capacity for brutality in the disaster at Altamont—a California rock festival that shared nothing of Woodstock’s magic and ended in the stabbing death of a black man by Hell’s Angels—and, to a lesser extent, in Charles Manson, who conceived of his murderous cult partly in countercultural terms.56 Yet the challenge the Weathermen posed to the self-conception of the New Left was greater.

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They were neither seasoned rogues like the Hell’s Angels nor sociopaths like Manson. On the contrary, they were dedicated, well-educated activists, several of whom had been elected the leaders of the New Left’s most important organization.

The Weathermen, looking back on their histories, identify the violence of the state as the ultimate source of the rhetoric at Flint. Gilbert, though denouncing the talk of Manson and killing babies as “sick,” explained that it had “happened in the context of something that was like a complete radical change from anything that we had dealt with before. . . .

We were psyched up, freaked out, upset . . . but it was a very political thing. Panthers were being murdered [and] most of the white movement was sitting by and letting it happen.”57 Stern insisted that “the Mansonite trip was born out of despair and frustration” and “in no way corresponded to the quality of the rest of Weatherman politics.”58 Jaffe recalled that by the time of Flint:

We were so enraged by the war and by the distance between what we wanted to be able to do and what we were able to do. . . . We weren’t interested in mollifying anybody’s taste at that point. We really were interested in turning ourselves into effective instruments to destroy imperialism.

We weren’t going to stick any forks into anybody. [Manson] might have been a stupid choice of metaphors, but we . . . were trying to make the leap to be people that could [destroy imperialism]. . . . Could we have made the leap in a way that was more principled and less insane? I don’t know. That’s what we felt we needed at the time—to say to ourselves we’re ready . . . to do anything. And that didn’t seem so crazy to me at the time.59

In addition to stressing outrage and frustration, these accounts allude to the fundamental
alienness
and traumatic impact of violence for the Weathermen. Todd Gitlin described how New Leftists experienced a kind of “violence shock” as the Vietnam War and physical attacks on dissidents intruded upon their previously safe worlds.60 Noting that violence was virtually absent from the childhoods of most New Leftists, the psychologist Kenneth Kenniston reasoned that they could therefore initially see violence as something existing “‘out there’ . . . in their adversaries, in American Racism and American foreign policy.”61 The University of Wisconsin Professor Harvey Goldberg, defending in court the bomber of a campus building, described the youth of the 1960s as a “traumatized generation.”62 Gilbert’s sense of the Weathermen having “freaked out” in the context of the “complete radical change” caused by the state’s violence affirms these models of trauma.

Violence was also disorienting for the Weathermen as they tried to Excesses and Limits

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develop their own capacities for aggression. The heavily ritualized atmosphere of Flint seemed designed to help the Weathermen make that transition. The pattern of Weatherman’s role models is telling. Two that they “honored,” Lex Luthor and Captain Ahab, were drawn from fiction and had to be thoroughly recontextualized to serve Weatherman’s narrative of armed revolution. The radical abolitionist John Brown, whom the Weathermen also praised at Flint, was the closest thing the Weathermen had to a genuine historical exemplar indigenous to white American culture.63

Manson could be attractive to the Weathermen of late 1969 at a variety of levels. Lacking precedent or seeming purpose, the murders by his

“family” were nihilistic, summoning Doestoevsky’s formula of distinctly modern crime: “Nothing is forbidden, everything is permitted.”64 To elevate Manson was to take on the mark of radical otherness, to announce oneself, in Jaffe’s words, as at least “
capable
of doing anything,” even if the Weathermen had no intention of repeating his acts. Praising Manson, Weatherman rhetorically blurred the revolutionary imperative to use

“any means necessary” for political ends with a fascination with normlessness and total license.65

The status of the Weathermen as largely middle-class whites was essential to their politics of transgression. The Weathermen were not, like the Panthers, the self-described representatives of poor urban blacks, whose claim that they were oppressed was transparently credible to the American mainstream. To enhance their menacing image, militant blacks frequently played up a host of long-standing stereotypes of blacks as irrational and violent, codified in the image of the “crazy nigger.” Cleaver exploited racist fears of black male sexuality by infamously describing in
Soul on Ice
the rape of white women as an act of political rage.66 In addition, he dubbed Huey Newton the “baddest motherfucker ever to set foot inside of history” for his audacious, face-to-face confrontations with police on the streets of Oakland.67 Most provocatively, the Panther’s David Hilliard threatened the life of Richard Nixon from the stage of the massive November 15, 1969, antiwar protest in San Francisco. His obscenity-laced speech concluded, “Nixon is an evil man . . . responsible for all the attacks on the Black Panther Party. . . . Fuck that motherfucking man. We will kill Richard Nixon. We will kill any motherfucker that stands in the way of our freedom.”68 Indicted for advocating the president’s assassination, Hilliard explained that his comments were essentially a “metaphor” uttered within the “language of the ghetto,” where profanity and hyperbolic threats are common.69 Whatever the status of 164

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such rhetoric, the government certainly saw the Panthers as a source of peril. In September 1969, FBI Director Herbert Hoover declared the group the “greatest threat to the internal security of the country.”70

White radicals, to put it crudely, had comparatively little means of being “bad motherfuckers,” regardless of their stated hatred of the status quo and the dubious notion, originally asserted by Norman Mailer, that the deviant white was a “white negro.”71 Weatherman’s talk at Flint of frightening “Honky America” appears a rather transparent and forced mimicry of a black radical idiom. Manson, however, was a product of white culture, whom the Weathermen could rally around to code their rebellion as genuinely menacing and, through their tortured mediations, narrow their distance from black radicals. The
Ann Arbor Argus,
while denouncing Manson as a contemptible “mindfuck,” explained that Manson might lead Americans to fear the counterculture “as people who murder and torture with IMPUNITY!”72 The LNS stated bluntly that Weatherman “digs Manson” because “he’s a ‘bad motherfucker.’”73