Much remains to be learned about the origins of political fanaticism, the connections between consuming resentment and the taking of radical political positions, perverted idealism and political violence. More specifically, it is still not well understood what precisely were the sources of the hostility and anger directed at American society by many of its most privileged members in recent times.
In this long, well written, and generally well documented volume, Susan Braudy does not provide us with any particularly keen insights about these matters. She neglects to back up some of her more piquant assertions with evidence from interviews or printed sources. Nonetheless, she offers a great deal of specific and suggestive information about the individuals whose lives she chronicles. Anybody interested in the psychology of the radical groups of the 1960s (mainly the Weathermen) and the affinity between utopian good intentions and unappealing outcomes will find this book enlightening. Family Circle illuminates the pathology of the violence-prone, young white radicals and the psychological deformations associated with their strenuous quest for uniting the personal and the political aspects of their lives. In the event, they felt their goals could only be accomplished by subordinating the personal to the political goals they pursued.
Kathy Boudin, whose life is the focus of this study, was a key figure in the group of radicals who eventually succeeded in embodying everything that was wrong with the ideas, animating spirit, and actions of the radical protest movements and groups of the 1960s.
It does not take long for the reader to reach the conclusion that the righteous indignation over the Vietnam war, racism, and the assorted inequalities of American society do not fully or satisfactorily explain the anger and behavior of these young people. It is hardly surprising that the combination of their “intense, irrational moral fervor” and fierce hatred culminated in a joyous embrace of violence and in reverence for those most adept at practicing it.
A partial explanation of the beliefs and behavior of these people may be found in their family backgrounds. Many of them, including Kathy Boudin, were “red diaper babies.” That is to say, they came from families with well-established leftist credentials and grew up in subcultures supportive of such beliefs. Leonard Boudin, Kathy’s father, was a famous lawyer who could never turn down a defendant who demonstrated his or her hostility toward American society, capitalism, or U.S. foreign policy. His clients included Judith Coplon, Daniel Ellsberg, the Berrigan brothers, Fidel Castro, the Chilean government under Allende, and the Socialist Workers Party. He was also a compulsive womanizer and egomaniac, facts not irrelevant to the quality of his marriage and relationship with his daughter.
Kathy’s mother was “a self-described parlor revolutionary,” and her aunt was married to I. F. Stone, an iconic figure of the left. Growing up, Kathy Boudin rubbed shoulders with Angela Davis, the Rosenberg sons, Paul Robeson, and many other distinguished members of the adversary culture. From an early age she imbibed a taken-for-granted estrangement from mainstream America. (But to illustrate the limitation of such “nurture” explanations, her brother, raised by the same parents in the same environment, became a conservative lawyer, defender of big corporations, and later an appeal’s court judge appointed by Bush senior.)
An important element in Kathy Boudin’s story, according to Braudy, was her ambivalent and politically competitive relationship with her father which propelled her into political extremism. Braudy believes that Boudin’s radical activism was motivated by both an effort to attract her father’s attention and a wish to embarrass him. In her opinion he did not go far enough in his radicalism, limiting himself to the legal game.
Kathy Boudin easily found congenial friends and comrades-in-arms in school and college; it was not difficult to connect with young people of similar background and disposition. Rejection of the status quo was in the air but few went as far as she and her fellow radicals in the Weather Underground. It was a group that may also be characterized as suffering from a false consciousness of massive proportions. Thus, according to Braudy,
she claimed to see her birth to a family of well-to-do whites as an agonizing defect to be obliterated by rationalization, violence and self-deprivation. Kathy wanted above all somehow to discipline her mind and body into being a member of the black working class.
Bill Ayers (another prominent radical and friend of Kathy Boudin) revealed in his memoirs similar wishful fantasies of being or becoming black. David Gilbert, Kathy Boudin’s fellow conspirator and the father of her child, wanted to gain the respect of young blacks by “transform[ing] himself into a street tough.” Testifying to similar aspirations, Kathy Boudin and “Das” (another radical) “named themselves the Americong, seeking a name as hostile and heavy as ‘Black Panthers.’” Kathy and David Gilbert named their son Chesa Jackson in honor of George Jackson, the murderous Black Panther killed while trying to shoot his way out of prison, “Chesa” is a Swahili word meaning “dancer,” but it “also had an underground meaning: it evoked Joanne Chesimard, A.K.A Assata Shakur in whose honor the baby was conceived.” (Chesimard was a charter member of the so-called Black Liberation Army “dedicated to killing policemen” in “revolutionary executions.” She escaped from prison with the help of the Weather Underground and found safe haven in Cuba.) Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn (another leader of the Weather Underground) named their son after Zayd Malik Shakur, a member of the same Black Liberation Army.
Notwithstanding their self-proclaimed identity as liberated women, Kathy and her fellow feminists “believed [that] they must play subservient roles [to Blacks]. . . . Thus they followed orders, renting and driving getaway cars for Family robberies. . . . The women were not disturbed by Family members’ use of heavy drugs.” They also resolutely overlooked the fact that the violence of the Black Liberation Army and the Black Panthers—violence supposedly inspired by a higher purpose—degenerated into ordinary criminality.
The abject admiration and reverence for tough Blacks and the Vietcong were rooted in dispositions only marginally political. These groups symbolized daring, defiance, strength, and authenticity—attitudes, postures, and ways of life diametrically opposed to everything the white radicals perceived to be characteristic of American society and often of their parents as well. It was their defining obsession to become tough enough to belong to a select revolutionary vanguard:
they added to nearly all comments the word fuck, aggressive black street slang, and harsh code words for police and other middle-class villains. . . . Kathy and her friends were trying desperately to make themselves into warriors. This they hoped to accomplish by rooting out of their personality any feelings that smacked of attachment to “the sick bourgeois society.” They were trying to replace old habits with programed anger. . . . [T]hey were now strictly enforcing group sex as well as homosexuality to “smash monogamy.” . . . Rigid rules were meant to force each person to discard much of his individual will, his personality. Nobody had his or her own bed or possessions [in the underground commune]. . . . No pets were allowed; they elicited affection, which led to vulnerability. . . . Das cooked and ate an alley cat to prove she was overcoming bourgeois ways.
They also engaged in relentless criticism and self-criticism sessions during which “each member revealed his own bourgeois inadequacies and accused others. They were terrified of harboring a fear of violence or feelings of loyalty or love for a mate . . . . Kathy and other core members of the Weather group clung to their identity as terrorists.” It was precisely these attitudes—the cult of toughness, the experience of violence as liberating, the fierce hatred of the “pigs”—that point to murky emotional-personal undercurrents that had a questionable connection with the grand social-political agenda.
For Kathy “each of the bombings was a roller coaster of pure terror followed by ecstatic relief when a bomb went off on schedule and without human injury. It was addictive.” Such concern for human lives was absent during the Brinks hold-up in 1981 (which claimed three victims and led to her imprisonment) and when anti-personnel bombs, assembled by her comrades-in-arms in a New York townhouse, blew up earlier than intended.
The Weather radicals, although far more extreme than their old-left forebears, received moral support from them. As the cliché of the times had it, “their hearts were in the right place.” I. F. Stone spoke for many on the Left when he wrote:
The Weathermen kids can be seen as distraught children or spoiled brats in a tantrum with a world that will not change overnight. But they are the most sensitive of a generation which feels in its bones what we older people only grasp as an unreal abstraction, that the world is headed for nuclear annihilation and something must be done stop it.
Of all the excuses for the radical-left violence of the period, this was the most lame and unconvincing.
The old left-liberal sympathy for these violent radicals was further conveyed when (after the murderous the Brinks robbery) “well-known and illustrious visitors . . . trooped to five different prisons includ[ing] Dr. Ben Spock, Dave Dellinger, Noam Chomsky, and Philip Berrigan” to convey their solidarity to the imprisoned. A similar group of older leftists published a letter protesting Kathy Boudin’s treatment.
Family background, family conflicts, and a privileged social position were among the main ingredients of the attitudes examined in Family Circle. There was also the sense of entitlement (exemplified by Kathy Boudin’s many complaints about the restrictions and inconveniences of life in prison) paradoxically combined with a vocal rejection of the privileges with which they grew up. “Inauthenticity”—in the ways of life of their family, class, and in American society at large—was another major preoccupation. As had many utopians before them, the Weathermen entertained highly unrealistic expectations about the imminent revolutionary transformation of society expunging from it all injustice, deprivation, and disharmony.
Problems of identity loomed large among these idealistic and privileged youth. They disdained conventional careers and the expectations of their parents. Their inchoate personal ambitions and diffuse but intensely felt grievances found expression in political extremism. In a peculiarly contradictory fashion, they longed for both an authentic, freely chosen community and the pursuit of heroic, individualistic self-assertion. To compensate for class guilt they desperately and grotesquely sought to identify with and imitate the real underdogs: blacks, Vietcong, Latin American peasants, and guerillas. The venerable American quest for self-realization thus became thoroughly politicized. For a while they seemed to succeed, illustrating what stupendous folly struggling for the unity of the personal and political begets.
