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To: mwl137@PSU.EDU Subject: McMillian's comments on Varon First, I'd like to thank Michael Flamm and Michael Lumish, for all of their work in keeping this listserve running, and for the opportunity to comment on Jeremy Varon's exciting new book, _Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies_ (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2004). Also, let me extend my thanks and congratulations to Jeremy for writing the book, which I think is a wonderful achievement! I hope some senior historian on this listserve will send him a note along the lines of the one that Emerson sent Walt Whitman in 1855: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career." Jeremy's been a friend and colleague for several years, and he let me have a peek at some of the chapters from this book when it was still a manuscript -- so nothing I have to say here will be new to him; but I'm more than happy to try to reproduce certain parts of our dialogue for the purposes of this listserve. Jeremy has already presented us with a good synopsis of his work; I especially like his metaphor describing the book as a kind of cubist painting in which Weatherman and RAF are examined from multiple points of view, almost simultaneously. Unlike many thesis-driven monographs, which can be easily distilled into a single, over-arching argument, _Bringing the War Home_ explores a whole range of factors that gave rise to revolutionary rhetoric and practice in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the moral and existential dilemmas that lurk behind any discussion of political violence. Meanwhile, he takes several distinct approaches to the material. To cite just a few examples: With his close readings of images and texts from the underground press, he does the work of a cultural historian. Where he draws from psychological models of trauma to help explain the RAF's turn toward violence, his work is squarely within the realm of intellectual history. By unearthing a whole range of neglected sources in order to examine Weatherman (in some instances, from "the bottom-up") his work takes on the flavor of social history. And in his riveting accounts of certain events and personalities in the New Left's history - from the Days of Rage to his vignettes on overlooked militants like Robin Palmer and Silke Maier-Witt - he writes as an accomplished narrative historian. In short, there are a lot of "meat and potatoes" in this book. I especially liked the narrative component, although at the same time this strikes me as an area where there still remains much to be done. If for nothing more than to satisfy my own curiousity, I'd like to know more about the biographies of more individual members of Weatherman and RAF (especially the rank-and-file). How did they adjust to their lives as fugitives? What were their day-to-day experiences while underground? I was a little surprised that this book doesn't discuss Weatherman's busting Timothy Leary out of jail - an exciting story that also seems an important part of the group's lore. (I wonder if anyone on this list has read Neil Gordon's quasi-historical novel based on Weatherman, _The Company You Keep_? I highly recommend it, especially as fast-paced summer reading. As a fictionist, Gordon may be better poised to explore some of these areas, at least for now.) Probably the most controversial claim that Jeremy makes is that Weatherman played a role in hastening the end of the Vietnam War. (As he explains, this is "central to any judgement on Weatherman.") Drawing rather heavily (perhaps too heavily) from Tom Wells _The War Within_, Jeremy argues that the new left's ultra-militants helped the antiwar movement to reach a "critical mass" that in turn undermined the US government's ability to prosecute the war. Writes Varon: "The fierce rhetoric of protestors, the violence at demonstrations, the sabotage, the numerous trials, the need for troops to guard government buildings all bespoke a national climate... of hostility to the government" (p. 145). Fair enough. We also know from Wells (and elsewhere) that some political and military leaders feared that escalating the war "would cripple the government and force intolerable degrees of national division" (p. 147). However, I'm not sure I share Jeremy's sense that "the NLF flag wavers, the rock throwers, and the bombers" can all be credited with unsettling policy makers and limiting their range of options in the ways he suggests. True, Jeremy gives equal credit to all of the other elements of the antiwar movement; as he describes it, everyone from GI resisters to housewives at silent vigils were all part of the same "critical mass" that limited the war. But as Todd Gitlin has pointed out, one of the paradoxes we have to deal with is that as the Vietnam War became less popular with the American people, so too did the antiwar movement. Now as Jeremy points out, "Scholars could likely debate the effectiveness of the diverse forms of activism ad infinitum without settling on any definitive judgement." But in alienating and offending millions of middle-class Americans (some to this very day),in opening themselves up to such easy ridicule, in aggravating and inflaming political divisions on the left, and in giving authorities a further rationale for cracking down on the movement, the Weathermen's actions vis-a-vis the War seem hard to defend. Yes, they "played a part" in the antiwar movement (in the same sense that anyone who ever banged on a drum at a demonstration played a part) but if someone asked me to put their actions to critical scrutiny, I'd be inclined to say they hurt the antiwar cause more than they helped. Relatedly, some will be frustrated with Jeremy for not putting forth a stronger moral condemnation of Weatherman. (Naturally, the RAF come in for tougher criticisms.) I don't quite share this concern, in part because I'm convinced that some people are so hysterical about the group that they'll never be able to tolerate any equivocations on this score, and in part because a preoccupation with Weatherman's morality puts unnecessary constraints on analysis. (If you don't believe me, check out the archives at Frontpagemagazine.com) But I do sometimes wonder if Jeremy doesn't bring so much intelligence and theoretical knowledge to bear on his subjects that he risks presenting their behavior in a more lucid or rational light than they themselves have been capable of. Indeed, there's an interesting tension in this book - at several points, Jeremy suggests that Weatherman's actions were driven by an existential impulse to take a decisive moral stance against injustice, and that as a result, questions of strategic or political efficacy were besides the point. But elsewhere in the book, he goes to great pains to contextualize (or "frame" or "code") behavior that strikes me as counterproductive if not ludicrous. As Jeremy puts it in the Introduction, he seeks "to restore a stronger measure of rationality and moral purpose to Weatherman and the RAF in order to better understand both their political histories and the complex nature of political violence more generally" (p. 17). I'd be interested in hearing from Jeremy whether he perceived any risks in this approach? How did he decide when to make use of his considerable arsenal of analytical tools to present the group in this light, and when to defer to the judgement of some of the Weathermen themselves, who sometimes described the group as cult-like, and who are quoted as saying things like: "We were a group of very half-cocked twenty year olds" (Bill Ayers)? Although I may see a few things differently than Jeremy, I've underscored some of my reservations here simply for the purposes of discussion. Overall, I'm hugely impressed with this trail-blazing book. As Jeremy notes, not only have we lacked a decent history of the Weather Underground until now, "the whole topic of new left violence has yet to generate its own historiography" (p. 15). I'm certain that this book will serve as the bedrock for many more investigations. And I suspect that just as historians of the American new left are beginning to move away from some of the SDS-centric approaches of previous scholars, so too will we begin to move away from the Weather Underground to explore the whole topic of leftwing violence more broadly. (Here I think Jeremy would agree; as he makes clear, in the US during the 1960s and 1970s, "dozens if not hundreds" of collectives committed bombings and arson against property.) I've gone on for too long. Again, many thanks again to everyone who's helping to facilitate this discussion! My best, John John McMillian Committee on Degrees in History & Literature Barker Center 122 Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138 cell: (617) 875-4274 fax: (617) 496-5605
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