The Revolutionaries Ayers, Dohrn, and Rudd

Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen
03/22/09 - NewYorkPost by Ronald Radosh

Mark Rudd worked with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn to change the world through terrorist violence.

[edited] In 1969, Rudd, Ayers, Ayers' wife Bernardine Dohrn favored "the necessity for violence in order to end the war and also to make revolution." They were fighting "a revolutionary war from within the United States," Rudd explains. When successful, the Weathermen would then build a new revolutionary army staffed by young defectors from the US armed forces.

At some level, Rudd knew that all he was doing was a terrible mistake, but, he writes, "I felt like a member of the crew on a speeding train, dimly aware of disaster ahead but unable to put on the bakes." Rudd acknowledges he was part of a "classic cult, true believers surrounded by a hostile world that we rejected. We had a holy faith, revolution, which could not be shaken."

Their attempts at guerrilla warfare ended with the 1970 New York City town house bombing, which Rudd, Ayers, and Dohrn 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.