To: H-1960S@H-NET.MSU.EDU
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I read with great interest and appreciation the very thoughtful and probing
responses of John McMillian, David Barber, and Ian Lekus to my book _Bringing
the War Home_.  A big thanks to this gifted trio.  I applaud, by extension,
those who conceived this forum for discussion of ideas, politics, history,
books!

Each respondent was generous with praise.  It was especially gratifying to see
that certain concepts I worked hard to develop registered as interesting or
even significant; that narrative touches I chanced to add inspired a kind of
readerly fascination; that I wasn't "crazy" to make this all a scholarly
obsession at a time (the mid-90s) when political violence or "terrorism" seemed
remote, exotic; and that certain questions I labored to craft incited curiosity
and, in turn, more questions.

All that said, it is likely most fruitful for me to address the areas of
critical engagement by the readers.  My response is a blend of "touché,"
elaboration, disclaimer, counter-punch, and meta-commentary, both on this
dialogue and the curious phenomenon of such intense, recent interest in
Weatherman (yes, the movie, all those books. . .).

If there was a common thread in the criticisms, it is that I was "too kind" to
the Weathermen.  (None of the respondents, all Americanists, likely felt in a
position to critique my treatment of Germany's Red Army Faction; I will thus
invoke the RAF only as it bears on issues raised in relation to Weatherman).
McMillian suggested that I gave violent militants too much credit in the
anti-war movement's successes.  Barber, drawing on personal memories, asserted
that I did not acknowledge sufficiently Weatherman's role in SDS's destruction;
that I imputed too much sincerity to the Weathermen's motives; and that I thus
missed the ways in which their social privilege and related, projective
imagination about race and class drove their arrogance.  Lekus, concurring with
these responses, pressed me to say more about the Weathermen and race, and much
more about how militancy and violence were "gendered" in the discourse and
practice of the New Left.  I will address these in turn, building to a response
to the macro-criticism.  The statement is longish, so feel free to read it in
batches.

The place of the Weathermen in the antiwar movement is an important
discussion given current affairs.  I go out on a limb by arguing that the
violent protest of the Weathermen and others like them - almost uniformly
presented in the existing historiography as detrimental to the goals of the
antiwar movement - may well have helped - in concert with other forms of
dissent - in limiting the war's destructiveness and hastening its end.  Simply
put, I contend that all the violence and turmoil made various authorities fear
the prospect of a kind of broad social disintegration or collapse, and that
this fear functioned as
a constraint on their conduct.  The anxiety was conditioned by assumptions
about
the capacities of an unruly mass to disrupt the prosecution of policies and,
more generally, the functioning of government.  McMillian appears to say,
"Well, yes," but then to ask whether on balance the violence did not ultimately
hurt more than it helped; implicitly, whether the energy, anger, and passion
behind the violence, if applied in different, less controversial or alienating
ways, may not have had greater impact in constraining or even ending the war.

I don't know how to provide a fully credible answer to these cogent
questions.  That is, I know of no way to quantify, or even to qualitatively
assess with a high measure of social-scientific precision, the relative impact
or positive value of distinct forms of antiwar protest.  Answering McMillian's
counterfactual seems even more daunting.  My fascination with and liberal use
of Tom Wells's The War Within (McMillian claims overuse) stem from his ambition
to answer precisely the question of what forms of protest were most effective
and
why.  His "method" was, at its core, to describe various forms of protest and
to
ask in interviews with authorities - military, executive branch, judicial -
"what was your response to them? What was their impact?"  Intriguing approach,
but hardly rigorously empirical.  And Wells never quite answers his own
question.  He seems to suggest that a great variety of forms of protest made
some, if unspecifiable, difference.  I contend that this extends, yes, even to
ultra-radical protest (which Wells generally pans, despite his presentation of
evidence supporting, if read a certain way, my "fear factor" thesis).

I am - and here McMillian presses me fairly - conspicuously general in
asserting the value of militancy and violence to the antiwar movement.  When
the
time comes to clinch my case, I deliberately do something dearly non-empirical:
profile a single antiwar militant, Robin "The Bomber" Palmer (part of a bombing
collective and briefly a Weatherman) and assert that he and his incendiary
comrades "did it too" (helped stop the war).  My hope was to have the pathos of
his curious life and commitments, as the culmination of a rather complex
analysis of competing discourses about the war, itself bear some of the burden
of
argument.  Perhaps it stands in too much for argument.  Touché.

I should stress also, by McMillian's sound prompting, that my saying that the
Weathermen "did it too" with respect to the war is meant neither as a blanket
defense of their violence - some of which was horribly misguided and
destructive - nor a comprehensive exoneration of them.  Part of their bad
historical reputation they indeed earned by their words and deeds.  But we
needn't let go unchallenged the assumption that antiwar violence was simply a
scourge to the antiwar movement.  Claiming that antiwar violence had some value
potentially
rehabilitates, but only partially, Weatherman's reputation.  And let's recall,
the Weathermen were joined by hundreds if not thousands of activists in direct,
physical assaults on the "war machine" (the numbers of bombings, arsons, etc.
between 1969-71 are staggering).

Last, I certainly do not mean at all to elevate Weatherman-esque violence above
other forms of protest.  There are so many conscientious, courageous, and even
heroic examples of resistance; many activists comported themselves with greater
dignity and compassion than the Weathermen, and their activism, by sound
measures, made a far greater difference. (I am reading currently Mike Foley's
_Confronting the War Machine_; a moving profile of an impressive group of
Boston-area draft resisters who assumed great personal risks in openly defying
the government.  I have always held militant pacifists like the Berrigans in
extremely high regard.)

Conceding all this, I am nonetheless adamant on some things.  One is that we
need to critically confront what I regard as a myth conjured in so many
histories of and tributes to the antiwar movement: that at some magical moment,
a literal majority or critical mass of Americans, seeing the light long shone
by courageous dissenters at long last rejected the war, and then Nixon, et. al.
wound it down.  I find no solid evidence that this plebiscitary "moment" ever
took place, and think we have to stop comforting ourselves with the story that
democracy "worked" with respect to Vietnam insofar as our side eventually won
the nation's hearts and minds and forced a change in policy.  The reality was,
I think, far more ambiguous, and we need to look not just at poll data,
editorial opinion, rally sizes, presidential papers, and the remembrances of
officialdom, but at the functioning of the entire language of hearts and minds,
silent and vocal majorities, popular opinion, the popular will, etc. in
democracies, particularly in times of war.  This was the great theoretical
ambition of my chapter on violence and the antiwar movement.  Rather than
rehearse its moves, I'll simply refer potential readers of the book to it and
invite either public or private response.

Second, let me underscore that I think it far from clear, looking at Vietnam,
what dissenters should do to stop a war they find politically and morally wrong
when, after years of patient, peaceful pleading, it seems that nothing is
working.   One way - and, again, I grant it, historically speaking, a qualified
efficacy -- is to go berserk: trash property in the streets, physically attack
draft board offices, shut down or ruin buildings, harass politicians, scare the
public, demonize authority.  One may feel that people shouldn't do such
intemperate things.  But Vietnam-era activists did because they were angry and
anguished (whatever else motivated them), and the retrospective scolding by
historians and others - when done in a reductive way -- threatens to
misrepresent a sense of how desperate the times were.  (I recall a prominent
historian suggesting recently that the antiwar movement, once McCarthy proved a
non-starter, should have rallied around Humphrey because he would have likely
de-escalated the war more quickly than Nixon.  This may be true about Humphrey,
but by 1968 many in the anti-war movement loathed Johnson and had zero faith in
his purported successor; a mass gravitation to Humphrey may have been
strategically
"correct" but strikes me as out of the bounds of the possible, given "where
people were at," and hence anachronistic as a retro-prescription.  Think also
of how Kerry has had to dodge the charge of guilt by association with
communists in the VVAW; well, yes, a lot of antiwar vets became so deeply
cynical that they wanted to smash the entire system and were drawn toward
revolutionary ideology; it seems extreme, in hindsight, but such were the
times.)

And I have been moved, myself too young to have experienced Vietnam, to
wonder: what if the Iraqi resistance, like the VC, more or less legitimately
represented the nationalist aspirations of an occupied people; if U.S.
atrocities were rampant - massacres, not just prison torture, napalm, willful
environmental ruin, carpet bombing, civilian casualties in the 10s or 100s of
thousands; if American soldiers, fielded partly by a draft, died at the rate of
700 every few weeks, not in a year; and that all this went on for years and
years despite
a mass mobilization to end the war.  What would people do then at the
sharpest edges of anger and how would we judge their conduct?


Moving on now to Barber, there is the charge that I don't pay enough
attention to Weatherman's role in trashing SDS.  Part of my answer is not ideal
- that this aspect of the Weatherman story has been told often and well (by
Sale especially) and that I wanted to focus on elements of the story that were
new and exciting to me, as someone immersed in all this.  I may have thus
underplayed, by cause of my own priorities, what is nonetheless a key narrative
element.  (I do, however, map out at length the terms of ideological debate.)

At the same time, I wonder how SDS could have been saved, and by whom.  My
sense
is that the die was really cast circa 67-8 when lots of SDSers (and influential
ones especially) became "revolutionaries" and wanted to make SDS a
revolutionary organization, whatever that may have meant.  Progressive Labor,
the RYM folks, and others clearly groped for a useable revolutionary model and
concluded that SDS had to shed its student identity and focus and somehow
appeal to the working class (working class youth, for the RYM).  100 years of
Marxist and Marxist-derived theory, as well as the "teachings" of contemporary
revolutionaries, hammered this home.  The models clearly did not work
(especially, but not only, in the American case) and this was a gross error of
theoretical and political judgment.  In the book, I try at great pains to show
the anatomy of this error and conclude that radicals scarcely had a set of
conceptual/ideological resources adequate to describing the qualities and
circumstances of their society.  There were some promising starts to developing
such resources, but the instinct was often to lapse into Marxist-Leninist
anachronisms.  Before being dismantled by post-structuralists, or
disintegrating when the Soviet
Union collapsed, or getting lost in the jungles of Central and Latin America
(home to many failed guerrilla struggles, and, still disturbing residues like
the FARC and Shining Path), Marxism withered in the debates of 60s student
radicals in New York, Chicago, Paris, Berlin, and Milan.  Reality and the
frames for understanding it suffered a horrible dissonance.

In general, with respect to SDS's demise I am torn between, on the one hand,
wishing it were otherwise and imagining "what if" and, on the other hand,
recognizing "that's how the cookie crumbled" and drawing some useful lessons so
that maybe it does not crumble next time (we always assume, as the curse of our
faith, a "next time," don't we?).  In this tension are different possibilities
of just how we may approach history.

Barber makes an additional, perceptive point in remarking that I deal at
length with the RAF's relationship to history but not with Weatherman's
relationship to history.  This really made me think about my categories of
analysis.  As I rethought, it seems that I stress history in the German case -
how young radicals related to the fascist legacy and tried to overcome the sins
of that past - and identity in the American case - how US radicals acknowledged
and tried to overcome their race and class privilege.  This is of course a
somewhat strained distinction: identity or subjectivity are always historically
conditioned and constructed.  My emphasis, I see now, grew largely out of the
material; German references to the past were intense, explicit, and incessant
as they
tried to define the special rights and responsibilities Germans had in the
post-Nazi era.  The Americans, by contrast, had little articulated historical
consciousness; yes, in a general way they saw their "white skin privilege" as a
consequence of legacies of white supremacy, but there was not much language of
"overcoming" the past as such; rather, they sought to dismantle contemporary,
if deep-rooted, structures of oppression.  The Weathermen would have done well
to be more historically conscious.  I thank Barber for this point, and if I had
a chance to redraft the text I would comment on my use of the categories
"history" and "identity" and acknowledge more clearly that they cross-pollinate

and the reasons for my differing emphases.

After making this cogent point, Barber's response careens somewhat into an
anti-Weather harangue, less and less focused on my text, and here I don't know
quite what to say.  When I do address issues of identity, I thought I was
rather hard on the Weatherman by showing, for example, how they idolized and
idealized activists of color; how they claimed to act "in solidarity" with
blacks, though received little public acclaim or thanks from them; and that
"white guilt" partly drove their actions.  I also feel, however, that the
"white guilt" analysis can be overdone; so too the notion that the group's
arrogance and vanguardism were essentially an extension of their social
privilege: that as middle-class whites (or richer) they were used to being in
charge and getting their
way (even as they tried to renounce privilege).  Again, this was part of it,
but
only a part, and I wanted to avoid the dismissiveness implied by the "affluent
revolutionaries" approach, which goes back years as a way of trivializing
student radicalism.

I'll push now toward a conclusion by addressing Lekus's way of framing what all
respondents agree is my over-gentle regard for Weatherman.  Lekus seizes on my
point that the Weathermen themselves conceived of their armed struggle such
that its triumph lay in its existence, not its political efficacy, and that
they thus ducked accountability to a vital, properly political standard by
which they must be judged.  Well, yes.  But there are other wages of judgment
as well.

The Weathermen made serious errors, no doubt, and treated many in the
movement horribly.  Armed struggle was errant as a strategy for radical change.
But Weatherman risked not only a lapse into tactical/political error, but a
compact with sin; the loss not only of political reason and effectiveness but
of their souls.  This danger was manifest in the apparent enthusiasm of some in
the group to become cold-hearted killers; in the exaltation of Manson as an
anti-establishment hero; in the group's totalitarian or fascistic assumption,
expressed at least rhetorically, of near-total license to victimize others in
the name of "justice," "history," and "struggle."  Gitlin, in the movie, is
powerful in articulating this; in a private consult, I urged the filmmaker Sam
Green to leave in Gitlin's damning lines.  In places I accuse the Weathermen of
being not merely wrong, but something close to depraved (however sadly common
the seductions of zealotry and the claim of absolute virtue).  Thankfully, the
Weathermen did not plunge fully into the moral abyss, and the group's unholy,
ultra-transgressive phase was fleeting.  They were saved partly by their own
incompetence - the townhouse disaster ended the fascination with lethal
actions.  But they also consciously chose, in its wake, not to be killers.
This does not
absolve their early extremism, or redeem their political concept.  But it did
represent a triumph of their better selves.

The RAF, by contrast, observed few such limits and descended, at its worst,
into
brazen immorality (brutal assassinations, etc.).  My estimation of Weatherman
is very much informed by the contrast with the RAF, who made the Weathermen
look like Boy and Girl Scouts.  There are distinct political and historical
reasons for that, and I urge readers more interested in the American sections
to read also the German part; the entire book is structured as a dialectic
between the two.  Most primally, I ask how and how groups claiming to represent
an alternative to the existing order may reproduce, often in seemingly crazed
form, its most disturbing features, while remaining blind to this fateful
mirroring or repetition.

From Weatherman's edge-walking I draw an existential conclusion, one perhaps
hard to understand at 18 or even 25, but which I'm grasping as I live and
learn, about history and from life.  That life is not necessarily about not
making mistakes; mistakes are often the products of risk, and without risk,
nothing magnificent happens.  The measure of a person may be not only what
mistakes he or she has made, but how he or she has responded to them.  The
Weathermen responded to their early errors in admirably conscientious and
responsible ways, relative to the RAF; as a result the groups, for all their
similarities, have an almost totally different moral cast, and must be
represented and remembered
differently.  With this "existential" frame I depart somefrom "politics" and
speak more broadly to life.  And it was very hard not to engage the
Weathermen at this level.  After all, I faced the challenge of making public
judgments on people with very controversial and complicated pasts - people with
whom I talked at length, who were honest and generous with me, whom I grew to
like.  I could not not in some way speak to the ways they lost, regained, and
negotiated their humanity.  My job was neither to damn nor praise them,
nilly-willy, but to elaborate categories for thinking about them and hazard
responsible
judgments.

Lekus also raises the issue of gender and sexuality.  I began to develop an
analysis of these, but only small parts made it in (I greatly look forward to
seeing Lekus's work!).  There is a powerful story here, only parts of which I
know.  In short form, within my limited understanding, 60s militancy was a very
macho affair and often coded as "male."  When feminists angrily broke with the
mainstream of the New Left, some denounced militancy and violence - even on the
left, even from Third World fighters - as expressions of patriarchy.  The
Weathermen were, in a few notorious instances (Alpert and Morgan, esp.),
singled out for condemnation.  There was tremendous excitement among women
arguing that they represented a kinder, softer, more cooperative, supportive,
and
constructive way; that if women were in charge maybe there would be no war
(worth a try!); that a truly compassionate and just society depended on the
empowerment of women.  This idealism was rather quickly downgraded, but it was
a powerful strain in early 70s feminist radicalism.

It did not, however, go unchallenged.  Figures like Dohrn, a leader in the WUO
after 1970, raised problems for the critique of militancy-as-patriarchy.  Some
feminists argued that she was in essence a token with little real power in the
group, or a carefully crafted sex symbol, or a traitor to sisterhood.  Women
fighters in the black movement, and women in the Viet Cong or N. Vietnamese
army created greater problems.  A counter-charge was, given the activities of
these women, that the feminist line was racist. And then there was a lesbian
strain to the debate, inspired partly by the fugitive status of Susan Saxe
(wanted for a 1970 murder of a Boston cop), who apparently sought refuge in
various lesbian communes/collectives and became a hero to some as a woman
warrior.  Some of my most exciting research was reading large runs of Off Our
Backs, an important feminist paper from Washington, D.C. that discussed all
this thoroughly in the early 70s. I hope someone excavates these sources more
fully and unpacks all the debates in them.  (Alice Echols' When We Were Rad
provides a good start, but only a start.)

To close, let me say that I myself am - however much I want people to read my
book - ambivalent about all the attention Weatherman has recently received.  In
the last 3 years there has been a Weather-memoir (Fugitive Days), two novels
about armed struggle (those of Gordon and Choi), a documentary (The Weather
Underground), a psycho-biography (Family Circle), and my scholarly effort. A
feature length movie is on the way. All we'll need then is the concept album!
On the one hand, these texts represent an impressive public working through of
an important and tricky piece of history.  And obviously Weatherman is newly
resonant (the terrorism of 9-11; new wars and movements opposing them;
resurgent imperialism).  At the same time, we risk giving Weatherman - arguably
now as then - too much attention; both too much credit and too much blame,
depending on point of view.  Too much, because we may lose sight, by the
seductions of violence and style, of the quieter contributions of countless
activists who in their own way, and as part of other communities (black, brown,
yellow, red, purple, and pink especially), fought just as hard by other means -
and at substantial, equal, or  even greater risk -- accomplished much greater
things.  There has already been some of this grumbling on this list, and even I
sometimes grumble along.  We clearly need many more histories of the histories
of folks left out of the tapestry of 60s protest.

And yet (and this is my final reversal), I began the project with the belief
that Weatherman was poorly understood; that the RAF was, unfortunately,
virtually unknown to Americans; and that their complicated histories needed to
be presented in appropriately complicated terms.  What's more, both groups were
part of this larger phenomenon called armed struggle, which had, I've come to
believe, a specific political meaning at a special historical moment, but which

has, along with the crises from which it sprung, been repressed within our
national memory.  I still feel this way, for all that has been said and written
in the last days.  Last, I tried to transcend the stories Weatherman and RAF as
such and speak to bigger, eternal things: war and peace, hope and despair, the
ongoing challenge to do the right things in the midst of emergency, the wages
of regret, shame, and reckoning.

jeremy

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