A cuddly, bearish man with a beard and a soft voice, Mark Rudd hardly looks like one of America’s Most Wanted. Fifty-six and a father of two, these days Rudd can be found teaching maths in Albuquerque, New Mexico. But for the first half of the 1970s Rudd lived on the run, a revolutionary firebrand and founder member of a terrorist group whose aim was “the violent overthrow of the United States government”.
The Weathermen, aka Weather Underground, were the first white Americans to take up arms against the government since the revolution in 1775. A splinter group of the 1960s anti-Vietnam protest movement, they took their name from Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
Young, angry and glamorous, they were photographed by Richard Avedon, wanted by the FBI and briefly became pin-ups for a generation. Like a classic 1960s revival, after largely disappearing from the collective consciousness the Weathermen are back. The group is now the subject of a documentary by the film maker Sam Green. The film, The Weather Underground, has been bought by the BBC and will premiere this autumn at the London Film Festival. Next month the thriller writer Neil Gordon publishes a novel based on the Weathermen’s exploits. And there is talk that Fugitive Days: A Memoir, the autobiography of Weathermen member Bill Ayers, may be made into a film. It never rains but it pours.
The Weathermen started as a faction inside Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), an anti-Vietnam student organisation that had more than 1m supporters. The SDS organised huge, largely peaceful rallies against the war and was supported by the likes of Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell.
American involvement in the Vietnam war lasted from 1961 to 1975. Incensed by the failure of the peace movement to end the conflict in the early 1970s, the Weathermen split from the SDS and went underground in their war against American “imperialism”.
Ayers and others had helped organise the Days of Rage riots in Chicago. Mainly middle class and all white, the group’s slogan was “Bring the war back home”. They attempted to align themselves with the militant black group the Black Panthers, but were dismissed as “muddleheaded scatterbrains” by Fred Hampton, the movement’s charismatic leader.
The Weathermen’s initial intentions were deadly. Their first bomb had been designed to go off at an army dance. All white Americans were legitimate targets for attack, the Weathermen declared in their 16,000-word manifesto. But the bomb blew up in the New York town house they were using, killing three members. From then on they took great pains to avoid civilian casualties.
In total, the Weathermen bombed two dozen American buildings, including the Capitol in Washington, the offices of the National Guard and the police headquarters in Manhattan, without loss of life. In a plot straight out of a thriller, the group also sprang acid guru Timothy Leary from prison in California.
The renewed interest in their activities comes as people once again take to the streets, in protest against globalisation and the war in Iraq. But the Weathermen, says Rudd, are no role model for today’s protesters.
“In response to the horrible, terrible things that were occurring in Vietnam I did the wrong thing,” he says. Rudd says he was to some extent driven mad by Vietnam. “There was no moment between 1961 and 1970 when I was not thinking about Vietnam. That’s madness,” he says. “That’s not healthy.”
He adds that apart from the death of his friends, the Weather Underground’s great failure was to turn the focus away from the peace movement and onto a violent sect. The ultimate result of the Weathermen’s actions, he says, was to make it easier for the warmongers to dismiss the protesters as violent thugs. “Objectively, I was an agent of the FBI,” he says.
Not all the Weathermen are so apologetic. Naomi Jaffe, who appears in the documentary with Rudd, told me that given the opportunity she would do it all again. These days she chairs a women’s charity and looks after her ageing parents. “All the reasons we needed to take drastic action, all of the US violence around the world has just got worse,” she says. “I still think that to do nothing is a form of collaboration.”
Nor does she like the use of the word “terrorist” being associated with the Weathermen, given that their targets were “empty buildings”. “If we had killed people then we would have to talk about that,” she says.
But after September 11, attacks on public monuments have taken on a new meaning. Green was in the middle of making the film when Al-Qaeda struck. He says his attitude towards the Weathermen changed. “Before September 11 there was something a bit ridiculous about them,” he says. After that he says the subject took on a serious new resonance.
It is a view shared by former Weathermen member Brian Flanagan, who now runs a New York bar. “When you feel you have right on your side, you can do some pretty horrific things,” he says, comparing the Weathermen to Islamic terrorists and Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.
Jaffe disagrees, insisting the Weathermen have to be seen in context. In 1968 students were rioting across the world. “I am very proud of what we did. The opportunity to make a contribution like that was very precious. The need to take risks is greater than ever.”
The Weathermen evaded the law and eventually handed themselves in after the Vietnam war. Most of them escaped jail sentences, helped largely by the illegal tactics the FBI used in their pursuit.
Today most of them are back in mainstream society; teaching seems to be a favourite occupation. But two of their number, David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, did go on to take part in a robbery which left three people dead. Boudin is the daughter of the late Leonard Boudin, a radical lawyer whose clients included Jessica Mitford.
When the Weathermen split up she and Gilbert stayed underground. The pair joined the Black Liberation Army and in 1981 killed a security guard and two policemen during a security van hold-up. The pair have been in jail for more than 20 years.
Rudd insists that violence is not the answer. “We were not heroes,” he says. “We were people who tried something and it didn’t work. The only legacy of the Weather Underground is this movie.”
