Demonic (25 page)

The Berkeley “Free Speech” movement kicked off the campus riots in 1964. There were protests, sit-ins, even Joan Baez singing folk songs to demand “free speech.” (Liberals supported free speech until they realized, years later, how bad speech is for them and began demanding hate crimes legislation, speech codes, and sexual harassment laws restricting speech.) After days of protests, the Berkeley faculty responded forcefully by passing a resolution calling for no discipline for the students.

Shockingly, this did not bring the protests to a screeching halt. Vagrants and professional protesters joined the party. Putting their love of speech on hold, the thugs firebombed buildings and hurled rocks at the police. Soon the free speech protests turned into rallies for cop-killer Huey Newton, even though murder wasn’t exactly speech either.

Seeing how well total capitulation had worked in the past, college administrators tried it over and over again. A few years later, student and nonstudent protesters objected to a new dormitory building at Berkeley. They wanted a “People’s Park” so they would have a nice place for more demonstrations. Students, homeless people, and recently paroled criminals occupied the university-owned property and violently attacked the police with rocks, bricks, and pipes. Protesters painted graffiti saying “Yanqui go home”—to demonstrate their solidarity with the Third World against “Amerikkka.”

During one of the brick-throwing melees, a twenty-five-year-old nonstudent, James Rector, who had heard about the riots and come to join the fun, was on a roof above the clash heaving debris on the police. Rector was hit with police buckshot, from which he later died.

Governor Ronald Reagan ordered the National Guard to shut down the violent student protests throughout the state. He blamed Rector’s death on “the first college administrator who said it was all right to break laws in the name of dissent.”
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Appalled by their first-ever glimpse of manly force, the Berkeley faculty and administration were soon demanding that Reagan call off the Guard. Hirsute counterculture girls
gave the guardsmen LSD-laced juice and brownies, requiring some to be taken off duty. These were the “idealists” the faculty was protecting.

Eventually, the protesters prevailed when the college administrators refused the protection of the National Guard and surrendered to the students—as they had always planned to do. The “People’s Park” was established and to this day remains a picturesque quadrant where criminals, drug dealers, and homeless people congregate.

This was the basic set piece for all the university protests of the sixties. The students would cook up some synthetic “cause” that seemed to link them to Third World people, and law enforcement would move in and restore order. Then college administrators would demand an immediate surrender to the drug-fueled protesters while heaping praise on them as the most idealistic and brilliant generation in all of human history. It was the perfect incubator for creating the Worst Generation.

Would the herd of individualists on college campuses in the sixties have been so brave without the approval of college administrators and the mainstream media? Why so violent at home but afraid to go to war?

Student radicals behaved like feral beasts not only because of the group dynamic of a crowd, but because they had no criticism. They never had a reason to pause, reflect, or repent because, between acts of violence, they were busy reading the press reports describing them as “idealists”—indeed, “the best informed, the most intelligent and the most idealistic this country has ever known,” as the Cox Report on the student riots at Columbia University put it.
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In a self-reinforcing circle, the mobs took their cues from the elites and the elites praised the “idealistic” mobs.

Far from rebelling, student radicals were perfectly in tune with authority figures in their lives, both at home and on campus. As political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset pointed out, because of the “enormous growth in the number of liberal Jewish faculty” in the post–World War II years, American universities went from being mostly apolitical to places with strong liberal views.
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The alleged radicalism of the students, Lipset says, was “approved by the community within which they operate.”

The alleged radicals weren’t even rebelling against their parents. Numerous studies at the time showed that left-wing students were
“largely the children of left-wing or liberal parents.”
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Weatherman Eleanor Raskin attended protests at Columbia University and the Pentagon with her mother, who was “as militant as protesters one-third her age” and whose antics “seemed excessive, even unseemly.”
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The left-wing congressman from Boulder, Colorado, Jared Schutz Polis, elected in 2008, has childhood memories of being brought to anti-war rallies by his parents.
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To be sure, the conservative students tended to reflect the views of their parents as much as the liberal students did. Also like the liberal activists, politically involved conservatives had higher IQs than apolitical students.
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The main difference between the conservative and liberal activists, based on a comparison of SDS and YAF conventions, was that the conservatives came from less wealthy families than the liberals.
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In 1970, a violent student mob rampaged for three days at Kent State University, smashing store windows, breaking into a jewelry store, and starting street bonfires. The ROTC building at the university was burned to the ground, as hundreds of students stood around cheering. When the fire trucks arrived, the mob threw rocks at the firemen and slashed the fire hose. The riot had been instigated by Terry Robbins, the Weatherman leader who had sex with Bill Ayers and later blew himself up while assembling a bomb intended for soldiers at Fort Dix.

Day after day, thousands of protesters ran wild, throwing beer bottles, bricks, rocks, and smoke grenades at the police. Wielding baseball bats, golf clubs, and foot-long pieces of steel wire, they screamed “Bring the war home!” and “Death to pigs!” Even after the National Guard had been called in, for days law enforcement responded with nothing more than tear gas.

On May 4, National Guard officers were trying to disperse thousands of violent protesters in the middle of the campus. According to the recent reporting of James Rosen,
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the guardsmen were fired upon first, leading twenty-nine guardsmen to shoot back at the protesters, killing four students in thirteen seconds—Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Knox Schroeder.
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If Louis XVI had been that decisive, 600,000 Frenchmen might not have had to die. As his grandfather, Louis XIV, had said: When
war is necessary, it is a “grave error to think that one can reach the same aims by weaker means.” Though decried thoughout the land—and in a Neil Young song!—the shooting at Kent State soon put an end to the student riots.

Student radicals had never imagined anyone would fail to praise them, much less shoot at them. Taken in by the establishment, they were instantly commercialized, hailed as “idealists”—and then most of them headed off to law school and university jobs.

Consider the complete absorption of Weathermen member Kathy Boudin into the liberal elite of this country.

Truly psychotic radical behavior was the only thing Kathy Boudin had left to impress her father when she couldn’t get into a top-notch law school. As described by Susan Braudy in her book
Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left
, poor Kathy had terrible board scores. First, she couldn’t get into Oberlin, then she couldn’t get into Yale Law.
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She was terrified of “losing her place as [her father] Leonard’s most cherished offspring.”
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Her brother Michael, the Republican, had nearly perfect board scores and would go on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard, attend Harvard Law School—where he was president of the
Law Review
back when it meant something—and work for the Reagan administration. Today, he is a federal appeals court judge, appointed by the first President Bush.

The only path Kathy had to impress her radical lawyer father was to be more insane than he. It wouldn’t be easy. Boudin père was a member of a communist front group, the National Lawyers Guild, and had represented Fidel Castro and Soviet spies Judith Coplon and Alger Hiss, as well as Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, among other left-wing celebrities. When passing through customs at Logan Airport after arriving from London, Boudin grandly announced to the nonplussed Customs official, “I am the lawyer for the revolutionary government of Cuba. My destination is my office at Harvard Law School.”
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Leonard and his wife Jean relished inviting celebrities to their home for dinner, where they showily displayed tchotchkes from their radical fame, such as Kathy’s motorcycle helmet from her participation in the Days of Rage in Chicago. Jean Boudin’s “pride in her aristocratic
position on the left,” Braudy writes, made her “the match of any Palm Beach hostess.”
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Kathy called her branch of the Weathermen “the Fork” in honor of the Manson family’s murder of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Manson’s followers had defiled the bodies, most famously by leaving a two-tined carving fork protruding from Mr. LaBianca’s gut. This charming scene was first commemorated by Boudin’s fellow Weatherman Bernardine Dohrn, who gave the “fork” salute at a rally, saying, “Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!”

These are the people who became respected advisers to a Democratic president.

The Weathermen predicted that 20,000 students would show up at their Days of Rage protest of the Chicago 7 trial in October 1969, an imitation of the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago the year before. Planning for war in the streets, they did push-ups and practiced street fighting in public parks to prove they weren’t “hippie faggots associated with SDS.”
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The Weathermen were too psychotic even for the Black Panthers, who denounced the Days of Rage in a beautiful statement from Fred Hampton saying, “We oppose the anarchistic, adventuristic, chauvinistic, individualistic, masochistic, Custeristic Weathermen.”
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The Black Panthers may not have been the Girl Scouts, but they were not insane. While liberal elites enjoyed the constant tumult, most blacks did not; they just wanted the crime to stop. In 1968, the NAACP’s Harlem branch was calling for mandatory five-year sentences against muggers, minimum ten-year sentences for drug pushers, and thirty-year sentences for first-degree murderers.
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In the event, no more than a few hundred wastrels showed up, prepared for battle with the police by wearing helmets and fatigues and carrying poles and baseball bats. Flying the Vietcong flag, they called themselves the “Americong.” They started a bonfire with park benches and blew up a statue of a policeman by placing a bomb between its legs. The explosion was so huge it blew out nearly a hundred windows in surrounding buildings. Then the Weathermen ran into the streets, smashing cars and storefront windows, throwing rocks, and swinging their
bats at cops. Approximately ten minutes later, they were all in police custody with lots of broken eyeglasses.
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In a way, what the Weathermen did was even more serious than Sarah Palin’s putting crosshairs on congressional districts.

After a Chicago Democratic official, Richard Elrod, became paralyzed for life while fighting with a privileged looter during the Weathermen’s Days of Rage, Obama adviser Bernardine Dohrn led the Weathermen in a song sung to the tune of Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady, Lay”:

Lay, Elrod, Lay
,

Lay in the street for a while

Stay, Elrod, stay

Stay in your bed for a while

You thought you could stop the Weatherman

But up-front people put you on your can
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Stay, Elrod, stay

Stay in your iron lung
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Play, Elrod, play

Play with your toes for a while

The author of that ditty, Ted Gold, was later blown up in an elegant Greenwich Village townhouse while assembling the bomb intended for a new-recruits dance at Fort Dix.

Kathy was part of the brain trust that blew up the townhouse, but fled before the police could talk to her. Kathy’s parents were delighted with the townhouse bombing. Her mother had always envied the home’s owners for their wealth anyway,
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and her father thought seeing his daughter on FBI “Wanted” posters was “good for his legend.”
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Usually the aging radicals cite their ineptitude at setting bombs to brag about how few humans they murdered. But these bombs were made with nails, and nails don’t destroy property, they maim and kill people. The three Weathermen who accidentally dynamited themselves were completely dismembered, their body parts splattered all over the walls and ceiling.
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