Mark Rudd remembers

Mark Rudd was the colleague of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn in the Weather Underground. He is also the author of a memoir that is out today. Ronald Radosh reviews Rudd’s memoir Underground in the New York Post.

Radosh credits Rudd with remembering a few items that Ayers and his friends seek to airbrush from the record, including the purpose of their terrorism. Radosh points out, for example:

Their attempts at guerrilla warfare ended with the 1970 New York City town house bombing, which Rudd and Ayers and Dohrn all approved. Rudd is honest about its intent, emphasizing how the bomb they built was meant to kill hundreds of GIs and their dates at a Fort Dix dance. It was, he now knows, a “fantasy of revolutionary urban-guerrilla warfare,” done on their own, without police agents provoking them. He and his associates, he ruefully reflects, killed a broad and powerful movement opposed to the Vietnam War, all in the name of a fanciful goal.

Being truthful about his own madness and the crazy path he and his comrades took, Rudd does not go along with what he calls the convenient cleansing of their history carried out by Ayers, who after the town house bomb exploded, still favored “the overall strategy of clandestine armed struggle.”

Radosh also points out that Rudd still believes the United States is evil, and that he and his comrades spent years working “to continue the idealism inherent in our rebellion.” Radosh holds that the facts Rudd presents speak otherwise and that his “idealism” led to catastrophe.

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