Arthur M. Eckstein - Bad Moon Rising: How the Weather Underground Beat the FBI and Lost the Revolution

Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund.

Copyright 2016 by Arthur M. Eckstein.

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016933043

ISBN 978-0-300-22118-3 (hardcover: alk. paper)

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For Jeffrey

Contents

Introduction

W RITING THIS BOOK was a journey back into my own younger days, and into old feelings. I am part of the Sixties Generation; born in 1946, I was at UCLA between 1964 and 1968: years of transformation in politics, society, and culture. Then I went off to graduate school at Berkeley, arriving in the autumn of 1968. While I am now a professional historian, and in Bad Moon Rising I have sought to write objectively about the facts as I see them in a professional way, no one who was politically involved as a young person in the sixties can write about those years without emotion. I was politically involved. I deeply supported the civil rights movement, generally supported the Black Panthers, was involved in antiwar demonstrations, witnessed some street violence (and even participated in it). This puts me in the 15 percent of my generation who were active politically on the Leftonly 15 percent, but people who would come to have a large influence in culture and society (and especially in the university world).

I well remember my first antiwar demonstration on June 27, 1967a march of about twenty thousand people at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, where President Lyndon B. Johnson was staying. The march turned into a confrontation with the Los Angeles Police Department, whose officers attacked the crowd. I was angered by the police violence, and saw many innocent people clubbed and beaten. But the attack wasnt altogether a surprise. Friends in SDS had told me before the march that the leaders planned to stop the crowd in front of the Century Plaza, in violation of the city march permit they had been issued, in hopes of provoking exactly the sort of police riot that occurred. I was simultaneously radicalized by the event and left with a cynicism about how SDS leaders had manipulated the thousands who had gathered to peacefully protest the war.

In Berkeley in autumn 1968 I witnessed from the outskirts of the crowd the demonstrations over Eldridge Cleaver, whose appointment to teach a class had angered Governor Ronald Reagan and other conservatives. That winter the demand for the creation of Third World Studies at Cal resulted in further confrontations: seeing police pelted with rocks by students on the roof of the Student Union, I thought, They wont allow this to happen to them again. In the spring of 1969 I participated in the demonstrations over Peoples Park. I was in the march to the park that led to another terrible police riot, and two days later I threw rocks at the cops in a confrontation in downtown Berkeley, along Shattuck Avenue. Decades later, I came to realize just how dangerous it was to do these things, but I didnt see it at the time (even though James Rector had been killed by police shotguns on the first day of demonstrations, and another bystander blinded); I guess I was just too young. Like a lot of people on campus, I was later hit with pepper gas sprayed indiscriminately from a National Guard helicopter. But I was never arrested.

Nevertheless, the violent events of 19681969 were emotionally draining, and I left Berkeley and didnt come back until the autumn of 1971, when I returned to do graduate work in Roman history, my I received my Ph.D. under a series of inspiring advisers and mentors in spring 1978, having spent three years teaching independent courses (including one on Freedom and Authority) in the Division of Interdisciplinary and General Studiesanother Berkeley experiment from the sixties that was eventually discarded.

My political trajectory bent in an anticommunist arc over the next decades. In part this was as a result of reading Solzhenitsyns Gulag Archipelago in 1976. In part it was a result of my minor involvement in the trade union movement Solidarity in its struggles with the Polish Communist government in 19801981. This involvement also led my wife and me to a friendship with the novelist Jerzy Kosinski. Because of his support of Solidarity, Kosinski was defamed as a CIA agent by the Polish secret policedefamations that were eagerly picked up and spread by some writers for the Village Voice in New York, where Kosinski then lived. I found this nave and vituperative character assassination appalling. This sort of denialism tainted other issues as well, such as the bitter and steadfast refusal in some diehard corners of the American Left to believe that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were Soviet spies and allies when the evidence against Julius was overwhelming. I grew steadily suspicious of my own political milieu even as I still held to my youthful ideals, which as a budding historian included allegiance to the truth, however politically uncomfortable. This led me to write essays which looked, for instance, harshly at the whitewashing of the Hollywood Ten (all of whom were devoted apologists for Stalinism) by modern supporters who really had no idea the extent to which belonging to an orthodox communist party meant toeing a party line at the expense of intellectual honesty. But my critical reevaluation of one element of leftist dogma didnt signal a lurch to the cultural Right. The core of my sixties activismhuman rightsremained just as sacred in the nineties, when I played a leading role in securing equal rights for gay people on my own campus at the University of Maryland, and received recognition from the LBGT community and from minority organizations for my efforts in protecting minority faculty members against a system that tried to undermine or prevent their success.

The response to the 9/11 attacks by some on what was left of the far Leftessentially blaming the United States for the terrorism inflicted on it, while excusing or turning a blind eye to the religious fanaticism prompting the attacks (as long as such fanaticism was associated with Islam, even in its most extreme form; fundamentalist Christianity did not get such a pardon)deepened my disillusion. But the manipulative and dishonest official rationale for the Iraq War took me aback, and by 2008 my wife and I were donating to Barack Obamas campaign for president. Thus by 2010 I found myself more or less back on the moderate Left, where I remain.

My scholarly work had been on the nature of imperial expansion in antiquity, with an emphasis on the integration of modern political science theory with ancient events; but in the autumn of 2012 I was unexpectedly asked by William Roger Louis at the Woodrow Wilson Centera fellow scholar of imperialism who knew I had been something of a hippie in my youthto deliver a paper on the differences between the counterculture and the New Left. I was intrigued by the idea of such a talk. As I prepared my lecture, I became interested in the memoirs and essays by Weatherman veterans that had been published in the previous ten years. I quickly saw that there was a major discrepancy, seemingly intended, between what Weatherman leader Bill Ayers had written in