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A Clearer Voice: Mark Rudd’s Underground: My Life with the SDS and Weathermen

By Rus Bradburd
Just before the November 2008 election, the name “Bill Ayers” became a Republican talking point. Ayers was a founder of the Weather Underground, the radical organization that formed in the late 1960s. Their purpose, believe it or not, was the overthrow of the American government, something they cooked up in response to our slaughter of millions in Vietnam.
Years later, as a highly respected expert on childhood education, Ayers wound up on the same board of directors as Barack Obama (as did the Republican head of the Chicago Tribune and the Northwestern University chancellor).  The right wingnuts went crazy: Obama was pals with a terrorist!
Bill Ayers remained silent on the issue until after the election. Then he spoke and wrote at length about his time in the Weather Underground, as well as his limited and casual relationship with Obama. Ayers also discussed his memoir, Fugitive Days.
It wasn’t just the national election that thrust Ayers back in the spotlight. In 2003, the documentary film “Weather Underground” was released to great critical acclaim. In the movie, Ayers walks around with a baseball bat, retracing his steps during the 1968 riots around the Democratic Convention, and stares defiantly into the camera. Ayers has nothing to apologize for.
The movie put other Weathermen back on the radar. The most interesting person on the big screen was Mark Rudd, who was the leader of the Columbia University student uprising in 1968 before he and Ayers joined forces to create the Weather Underground. Rudd was featured then on the cover of Newsweek, and became a 1960s icon.
Besides getting booted from Columbia, Rudd was the national secretary for SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), the enormous radical student organization.  When Rudd, Ayers and others decided to dump SDS to pursue more violent means, they founded the Weather Underground.
In the film, which intersperses footage from the late 1960s with interviews over 30 years later, Rudd appears befuddled, passionate, inquisitive, reflective, angry and remorseful. His willingness, unlike the other Underground members, to question his life and actions retrospectively make him a much more compelling figure.
Thankfully, that kind of retrospection make him a more compelling author as well, and the perfect storyteller in his new book, Underground: My Life with the SDS and the Weathermen (Harper Collins, 2009).
Grief-stricken by the attack of Vietnam, but inspired by the civil rights movement, Rudd and his 20-something pals left their two-car garages to change the world. When the SDS broke up and the Weather Underground formed, most of the leaders pushed for violent overthrow of the U.S. Government. Rudd did too, but even then he had the passion for violence that Dick Cheney might have for a solar energy convention.
The Weathermen disbanded in the early 1970s – the war was over, and now what was the purpose? Rudd’s photo hung from every post office and police station in America, but he was in hiding.
His story – the plotting, the philosophy, the meetings, the townhouse explosion, the drugs, the motivation – has been a source of both wonderment and legend among the American left. In this brilliant book, Rudd sets everyone, including himself, straight about what happened with the Weather Underground.
Rudd’s sense of learning, joy and sorrow fuel his writing. At times the memoir is hilarious, as when Rudd phones his Jewish mother immediately after seizing the Columbia University president’s office. Other moments are heartbreaking – we watch up close as Rudd and Ayers’ Underground tears apart the SDS, the largest anti-war organization this country has ever seen.
Rudd claims he wanted to “hold a mirror up to this country,” to confront America about their role in the murder of poor people across the globe. More interesting in this book, though, is the way Rudd holds the mirror up to himself. At one point, Rudd gets challenged by one of his peers after a violent night of window-smashing in DC: He watched Rudd closely, and Rudd didn’t destroy anything.
Building a mass movement and increasing the size of the anti-war movement is what Rudd talks about today. (Rudd never served a day in jail, but did do a couple of decades as a math teacher in Albuquerque.)  In his book, Rudd drags us along to the radical meetings, and we watch – as alarmed as he was – as the movement spins out of control. You can feel the burgeoning egos, smell the dope and incense, sense the middle-class guilt, and hear the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead soundtrack.
Coming to grips with his and America’s relationship to violence is what drives this book, as does Rudd’s interest in the American attack of Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s also what makes the book a fascinating read today, and, sadly, a timeless and important memoir: The struggles of the left are not over – how will progressives react to endless and senseless war this time?

Rus Bradburd is the author of Paddy on the Hardwood.  His book
about race and college sports, 40 Minutes of Hell will be out in 2010.

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