Canadian Vietnam Draft-dodger Memorial Angers VFW

From Robert Longley,
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Some 125,000 Americans avoided the draft in Canada

Members of the U.S. Veterans of Foreign Wars are furious about Canada's reported plan to build a memorial to Vietnam draft-dodgers.

"We urge the President and Congress to do whatever is necessary to communicate to the Canadian government that this exercise of free expression is an absolute slap in the face to every man and woman who ever served in uniform ... both in our military and theirs," said John Furgess, the national commander of the largest organization of combat veterans in the U.S.

"Everything America holds dear and every freedom we cherish today came from the blood, sweat and sacrifice of more than 42 million Americans who have answered the call to duty since the Revolutionary War," said Furgess. "More than one million of them died helping to create our country, to save our Union, and to defend the world from tyranny. To create a memorial to those who chose to flee instead of doing their duty must not be allowed to take place."

According to news reports, an estimated 125,000 Americans fled to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft. Half returned to the U.S. when then-President Jimmy Carter granted them amnesty in 1977. The dedication of the bronze stature honoring draft-dodgers is planned for July 2006 in Nelson, British Columbia, about 140 miles north of Spokane, Wash.

The VFW fully supports freedom of expression and the arts, said Furgess, a Vietnam veteran from Nashville who retired at the rank of colonel from the Tennessee Army National Guard.

"But to honor draft-dodgers, deserters, people who brought grief to the families they left behind and anguish to those American men who took their place, is an abomination," he said. "You can say what you want about the war--we all did and some still do -- but do not dishonor the warrior by memorializing cowards."

NEW JERSEY JEWISH NEWS

A sixties radical returns to MetroWest
The Mark Rudd story

by Steven M. Bloom
Special to NJ Jewish News

1968. One year after the Newark race riots. The horrors of the escalating Vietnam war telecast across America. Antiwar sentiments rising to fever pitch with marches on Washington and protests in the streets. The Tet Offensive. Unarmed Vietnamese civilians massacred by American troops at My Lai. Under pressure to end the war, President Johnson announces he will not seek reelection. Four days later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated by a sniper’s bullet; two months later, Robert Kennedy; four months later, the fighting in the streets at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

In the midst of this turmoil, on April 23, 1968, 21-year-old Mark Rudd, head of the Columbia University branch of Students for a Democratic Society, helps a mob of his fellow students seize and occupy Hamilton Hall on the school’s Manhattan campus, shutting down the university for eight days and catapulting himself and his radical organization into the vanguard of militant student activism against war, racism, and other perceived social injustices.

Now, the story of this turbulent time and the radical young man — Jewish boy from New Jersey — who played a major role in a unique political drama, is vividly presented in the 2004 Academy Award-nominated documentary The Weather Underground. In advance of its regular schedule, the New Jersey Jewish Film Festival will screen the film March 20 at the West Orange JCC, with an appearance by Irvington-born, Maplewood-raised Mark Rudd.

Earlier in the 1960s, SDS organized student leftists to stage nonviolent protests calling for a more humane society; by the late 1960s, coinciding with the growth of the antiwar movement, SDS membership had swelled to 100,000 students on campuses across the country. But, following the 1968 Columbia strike and the further escalation of the war, SDS policy was drifting ever closer to protest through direct confrontation and violence. At the organization’s June 1969 convention in Chicago, Rudd, with the help of a dozen or so young, white, intellectual radicals, fractured SDS in a power struggle that co-opted its aims through what Todd Gitlin, former SDS president, called “organizational piracy.” The new faction, dubbing itself “the Weathermen” — from Bob Dylan’s "Subterranean Homesick Blues," which sticks a wet finger into the atmosphere of social change and declares, “You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” — graduated to infamy by staging its “Days of Rage” violence in Chicago in October 1969, by bombing the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, and other public buildings in the 1970s, and by helping drug guru Timothy Leary break out of prison.

“I had become a Marxist; I no longer believed in the existence of God,” Rudd told NJJN in a recent telephone interview from his home in Albuquerque, NM. “Our goal was the violent overthrow of the U.S. government; our slogan, ‘Bring the war home.’ We were trying to form a Fifth Column with the Black Panthers to revolt against social oppression, racism, and the war.” Ironically, said Rudd, Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton considered the Weathermen misguided and “Custeristic.”

Rudd had strayed far from his MetroWest upbringing. “We were a very normal, middle-class Jewish family,” said his mother, Bertha Rudd, 92, who still lives in the MetroWest area. Her son became bar mitzva at Congregation Beth El in South Orange and served as president of its junior congregation. Bright and attuned to current events, he graduated in the top 10 of his class at Maplewood’s Columbia High School. Jacob, his father, was in real estate and had previously served as an army reserve officer under a Rutgers University scholarship; David, his brother, served in the army while the younger Rudd was still in high school.

“Little did we dream when we sent Mark to Columbia University that he would become a radical and lead such activities,” said Bertha Rudd. Late during the night that Rudd helped seize Hamilton Hall, he called his father to say, “Dad, I took the building from President Kirk!” Bertha recalled her husband’s reply: “Then give it back to him!”

A mother’s love
On March 6, 1970, the Weathermen’s plot to bomb a military dance at Fort Dix backfired: the bomb accidentally exploded in a townhouse on West 11th Street in Manhattan, killing three of the group’s own. The leadership immediately dropped out of sight and became “the Weather Underground.” At this point, Rudd suffered a crisis of self-confidence; overwhelmed by events, his commitment to the group’s goals wavered and he dropped out.

There was no turning back: he was wanted by the FBI, living under a phony identity, and, perhaps worst of all, essentially cut off from his family and friends. “It was a very bad period in my life,” recalled Bertha Rudd, who was visited periodically by the FBI; she never stopped loving her fugitive son, she said, but never stopped worrying about him, either.

In 1973, federal charges against Rudd were dropped because of the FBI’s controversial methods of obtaining its counterintelligence. In 1977, the war having ended two years earlier and the country experiencing a climate of national reconciliation, Rudd finally surrendered to authorities, and state charges against him were also dropped.

Today, Rudd, 57, is a math teacher in New Mexico, where he remains an active voice in the local labor and environmental movements and in opposing Israeli government policies in favor of Palestinian statehood. Twenty-seven years after his surrender, he said it has taken him that long to heal from the trauma of being the Mark Rudd, stereotyped as all-in-one intellectual hero, media figure, and radical leader of a failed revolution. It is still as clear to him today as it was while underground, he said, that his motives were noble in opposing a capitalist system whose government is on the payroll of corporations and whose goal is global domination. On current events, he likens today’s Iraq war to yesterday’s Vietnam.

But he does acknowledge today that his youthful idealism bordered on cultism, as the Weather leadership, once his close friends, experimented with drugs and sex and insulated itself from those who did not share its extreme worldview. Ironically, that extremism had the effect of dividing the antiwar voice and marginalizing the group’s objectives in the public eye, and he sees himself today as having inadvertently served the government’s purpose at that time. In hindsight, he said, he would have avoided extremism and spent more time building coalitions and uniting people through concerted nonviolent and political means.

The Weather Underground’s director, Sam Green, 37, is too young to remember the events he artfully depicts in the low-budget film but knew, when it was still in production in 2001, that the film would be seen as highly relevant following the events of 9/11. “I could never say what the Weathermen did was right or wrong. I tried to portray their motivations and that moral ambiguity as best I could in the film,” said Green in an interview with NJJN. Through file footage and retrospective interviews with Weathermen leaders, scattered and immersed in activist lives today, the film succeeds in transporting the viewer back to those tumultuous days, an incubator for the group’s radical views.

If true theater is rooted in conflict, then the conflicts portrayed in this film rank on a Shakespearean scale — conflicts between parents and their draft-age children during wartime, between students and authority, blacks and whites, the Weathermen and SDS’ “old guard” leaders, and the dissension among the leaders-in-hiding, which ultimately undermined the group’s cohesion.

Whether during the 1960s you were a parent raising a child, a college student caught in the maelstrom of political protest, or just a casual observer — even if you weren’t there at all — you are sure to find The Weather Underground energizing, provocative, and timely.

Steven M. Bloom is a freelance writer from Springfield.

All the rage

They emerged from 1960s radical chic to become America's most wanted fugitives. John Patterson on the Weather Underground, urban terrorists who never killed anyone - except themselves

Friday July 4, 2003
The Guardian

At precisely five minutes before high noon on March 6, 1970, the emergent radical-fringe bombers the Weather Underground had a terrifying and lethal showdown with its own cackhandedness.

In a townhouse on leafy, prosperous West 11th Street in Greenwich Village, close by houses once occupied by Poe, Melville and Whitman, there was, at 11.55am, a series of horrifying explosions; first one, then two more of equally shocking force. The detonations collapsed the three-storey house in on itself, leaving a ragged hole in the street's facade, as though a tooth had been torn from a smile.

A nearby neighbour - and our story is filled with odd connections like this - was one Susan Wager, who had briefly been the stepmother of sometime Weather-fan Jane Fonda. Emerging into the street, Wager was astonished to see two young women, one clad in jeans and soot, the other in just soot, staggering from the wreckage and narrowly escaping death a second time when the front of the building collapsed yards behind them. Offering them clothes, Wager then called the police, but returned to find the women had vanished.

They were Kathy Boudin, daughter of a progressive lawyer, and Cathy Wilkerson, daughter of the radio-station owner whose house had been destroyed. Unbeknownst to Wager, the pair were both on bail - Wilkerson for $20,000, Boudin for $40,000 - for destructive acts committed during the infamous Days of Rage protests fomented by a radical section of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Chicago the previous autumn.

If the Days of Rage - which involved a minority of students tooling themselves up with bats and helmets and vandalising shopfronts along Chicago's Gold Coast - had seemed like anti-war politics at the very end of its tether - they were nothing compared to the campaign of bombings that the hardcore SDS splinter group that soon dubbed itself the Weathermen would commit during the early 1970s after announcing their decision to go underground to fight the power. Contradicting Bob Dylan, these young people believed that in fact you did need a weatherman to know which way the wind blew.

By then Dustin Hoffman, who lived in the house next door, was also outside examining the wreckage, a mild exemplar of the counterculture (since The Graduate), looking into the gaping maw left by members of the wilder peace movement. What police found inside the ruins was evidence of an accidental holocaust, arising from preparations for another, fully intentional one. Sixty sticks of dynamite were found, plus pipe bombs, a live anti-tank shell and stolen student ID cards from campuses across the country. One bomb-maker had inadvertently closed a circuit and immolated himself and two others. One corpse, identifiable only by the print on a severed finger, was that of Diana Oughton, daughter of an Illinois state politician, and granddaughter of the founder of the Boy Scouts of America. Ted Gold, a leader of the 1968 Columbia University shutdown, was also found in pieces, and of Terry Robbins there was only a torso remaining. It was understood later that the bombs were to have been detonated at a non-commissioned officers' dance at Fort Dix: apocalypse here and now, bringing the war home, indeed.

The end for the Weather Underground came 11 years later, with a botched armoured-car robbery in Nyack, upstate New York, that went even more horribly wrong. Still a fugitive, Boudin and her partner David Gilbert, another Columbia '68 veteran, had agreed to act as white getaway drivers for members of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), a formation composed of politicised street criminals and convicts radicalised in the aftermath of the 1970 Attica prison uprising. Although Gilbert and Boudin were unarmed, their cohorts killed three policemen, including the first black cop in the county. Another had his arm severed by machine-gun fire but survived, only to die in the World Trade Centre on September 11. Boudin pleaded guilty and received 25 years- to-life. Gilbert bought two life terms and will die in prison. In Attica, as it happens.

As documentarian Emile de Antonio asked in 1975: "What the hell is an essentially white, middle-class revolutionary group doing in America?" It's this question that fascinated film-makers Sam Green and Bill Siegel, whose remarkable documentary The Weather Underground now tells the whole story, or as much of it as can safely be related.

In the early 1970s, the group, operating in cells across the country, claimed up to 300 members, and planted over two dozen pipe bombs. They bombed the Pentagon, the US Capitol, NYPD HQ, the New York Board of Corrections (after Attica), and the offices of companies invested in Chile and Puerto Rico. The gruesome lesson of the Townhouse explosion ensured they always struck at night, in empty offices, and gave detailed advance bomb-warnings. They never killed anyone. They nevertheless expressed their solidarity with weird revolutionary groups like the Symbionese Liberation Organisation, which kidnapped Patty Hearst, and the BLA.

In 1976, they appeared on film, heavily disguised, for De Antonio and his cameraman Haskell Wexler. The resulting documentary, Underground, became a cause célèbre a year later when the FBI tried and failed to seize De Antonio's raw footage. By the end of the 1970s, most Weather people had surrendered themselves and, ironically, most were acquitted, or never charged, because the FBI itself had violated so many laws while hunting them down.

After three years of research, Green and Siegel persuaded several eminent Weathermen to speak, people once seen as fresh-faced young radicals in the SDS, and later glimpsed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. Appearing in the movie are Bernadine Dohrn, la pasionara of the 60s student left, who - cue more surreal connections - had been a law school classmate of rightwing US attorney general John Ashcroft, Dohrn's husband Bill Ayers, whose memoir Fugitive Days - including his account of planting a bomb in the Pentagon - had the misfortune to be reviewed on page one of the New York Times on September 11 2001 (d'oh!), and David Gilbert, described by Green as "an absolute sweetheart, which is amazing since he's been locked up for 20 years".

Kathy Boudin declined to participate because she was facing a parole hearing - it was denied in 2002. Green and Siegel were also careful to include the dissenting opinions of SDS founder Todd Gitlin, who rightly says the Townhouse debacle proves that some Weathermen "were ready to be mass murderers", and of members of FBI Squad 47, who came to admire the Weather folks' ingenuity, but who used some fairly despicable methods in their hunt.

Then there is Mark Rudd, glimpsed as a beautiful young man yelling to a crowd of students, "We gotta knock these motherfuckers right on their asses!" and now a portly maths teacher at a community college in Albuquerque. Rudd says that when his students ask him what he did in the 1960s, he always announces, "I was a leading figure in a violent leftwing revolutionary organisation dedicated to the overthrow of the United States government." You can imagine those teenage jaws all dropping in unison. It's Rudd's way of making himself face the music, and of all the Weathermen, he seems the most conflicted and contrite. "I was drawn to the romance of the outlaw revolutionary." he told Newsweek recently, "But remember, we're talking about a 20-year-old kid. I'm not a violent person. I think I was posturing. I wanted to be tough."

The outlaw revolutionary: it was indeed a potent image. Weather activists often raved about Bonnie and Clyde as countercultural role models, and Gitlin recalls that Ayers and fellow SDS-er Jeff Jones comported themselves "like Butch and Sundance". Dohrn infamously congratulated the Manson Family in late 1969 for killing Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, saying: "Dig it! first they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. Then they even shoved a fork into the victim's stomach. Wild!"

John Jacobs, another Columbia 1968 veteran: "We're against everything that's 'good and decent' in honky America. We will burn and loot and destroy." And as if to prove that, in the slogan of the time, " We're the people our parents warned us against," the Weathers abolished monogamy and embraced the acid-inflected orgy. One unpublished memoir quoted in the movie recounts a van ride into Chicago with a dozen revolutionaries fucking-for-chastity in the back.

To us today, and especially since September 11, these people and events have an almost Martian foreignness. Though the Weather Underground were the last in a long line of left-inclined bombers and violent insurrectionists - like John Brown the abolitionist, the Molly Maguires of the Pennsylvania coalfields in the 1870s, and the McNamara brothers, who killed 20 people when they dynamited the Los Angeles Times offices in 1910 - they still seem to defy comprehension. But as Sam Green says, "It's all about the context. Take away the context and what they did does seem insane, but given five years of the Vietnam war, years of nationwide protests and student anger, and it may simply have felt to them that all other rational avenues had been utterly exhausted."

Look at the events of the months before they disappeared. The Chicago police murdered the charismatic, highly effective Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in their beds; the My Lai massacre became public, the most gruesome images many Americans had ever seen; Nixon entered the White House and immediately escalated the war to insane levels; the Manson murders; Altamont - nothing but bummers and downers. "There seemed to be," says Brian Flanagan, "a mass mania in society." These were molten times, and something had to give.

The Weather people had no home but the struggle. They were inspirational figures in many ways, dedicated, visionary and effective activists in the mid-to-late-60s, but somehow got tangled up in sectarian infighting that isolated them from SDS and sent them finally underground. There they essentially deluded themselves on several fronts. Though they alone pointed up the centrality of race in American politics, they also developed a specious, patronising self-identification with developing-world revolutionary movements and domestic black groupings that they, as extremely privileged middle-class whites, had little in common with.

They also spurned the labour left, believing American workers had been "bought off" by consumer durables and bad TV. Rudd dissociated himself from the bombers early on and lived on the run, incognito within the working-class, people he suddenly realised he knew nothing about. Until then, he says in the movie, he'd been gripped "by this terrible, demented logic. I was seized by hate. I cherished it as a badge of moral superiority." After Saigon fell in April 1975, the Weather Underground was deprived of its primary raison d'être. All they were left with were sunglasses, wigs, safehouses, internecine struggles, criminal records and a debilitating sense of impotence. It was time to surface.

Twenty years later, they come across as intelligent, concerned citizens, justifiably proud of what they achieved before disappearing underground, less sure of their subterranean activities, but not altogether ashamed of them. There is something deeply reassuring about seeing ex-Weatherman Brian Flanagan, a working-class Irish-American, back behind the bar in the Manhattan saloon he owns, and something utterly surreal about seeing him on Jeopardy, the squarest TV game show ever, and winning $23,000 in the process. I'm guessing he didn't spend it on handguns or blasting caps, maybe just a few drinks on the house.

The Weather Underground will be screened at the London film festival in the autumn.

Beyond contempt. But I will say this for these sleazeballs: they are nothing if not resilient. After the Cindy as Flip-Flopper story was revealed as a very poorly done hatchet job, a second load of sludge was quickly dumped: the ludicrous statement from the (ahem) “Sheehan Family” condemning Cindy’s “political motivations and publicity tactics” (run under a banner headline proclaiming “Family of Fallen Soldier Pleads: Please Stop, Cindy”).

Where do I start with this piece of manufactured offal? How about the fact that no one put their names on the statement, which was “signed” by “Casey Sheehan’s grandparents, aunts, uncles and numerous cousins”. Don’t these folks have names? The only name attached to the “Sheehan Family” statement (delivered to Drudge via email with permission “to distribute as you wish”) belongs to Cherie Quartarolo who describes herself as Casey’s aunt and godmother. So did I miss something? Since when does godmother outrank mother? What I really want to know is: how does Casey’s second-cousin-twice-removed feel about Cindy’s vigil? How about his ex-brother-in-law’s cleaning lady?

Cindy deals with all this very succinctly in her latest post, but suffice it to say that Casey’s dad and their three other children are all supportive of what Cindy is doing. Hmm… I always thought conservatives were big proponents of the importance of the nuclear family. Does James Dobson know about this attempt to undermine the primacy of a mother?

I guess it takes a village to trash a grieving Gold Star Mom.

Free Republic Thugs ..... "There will be a showdown!"

	Richard St. Clair, left, of Canton, along with Ray and Darlene Holcomb, of Lewisville, show their support for President Bush across the street from the camp of Cindy Sheehan near Crawford, Texas, Friday, Aug. 12, 2005. A conservative radio talk show host organized for a bus load of President Bush supporters to come from Dallas-Ft. Worth to counter protest the Sheehan supporters.
	Conservative radio talk show host Mike Gallagher uses a bullhorn to talk to his followers across the street from the camp of Cindy Sheehan near Crawford, Texas, Friday, Aug. 12, 2005. Gallagher organized for a bus load of President Bush supporters to come from Dallas-Ft. Worth to counter protest the Sheehan supporters. (AP Photo/LM Otero)
	Police stop Pro-Bush, Jewish, Anti-Cindy hate mongers.