Eugene weekly., October 30, 2003, Page 25, Image 25

BY LOIS WADSWORTH
DAVID FENTON
JOHN JACOBS (L) AND
TERRY ROBBINS (R) AT
THE DAYS OF RAGE,
CHICAGO, OCTOBER 1969
You Don't Need a
Weatherman
to know which way the wind blows
THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND
(U.S., 2003): Documentary directed by Sam Green
and Bill Siegel. Produced by Green, Carrie Lozano,
Siegel and Marc Smolowitz. Executive producers,
Christian Ettinger, Mary Harron, Sue Ellen McCann.
Cinematography, Andy Black, Federico Salsano.
Editors, Sam Green, Dawn Logsdon. Narrated by Lili
Taylor. Appearing as themselves: Bill Ayers,
Bernadine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, Brian Flanagan, Todd
Gitlin, Kathleen Cleaver, Naomi Jaffe and David
Gilbert. Upstate Films. Shadow Distribution, 2003.
D
ocumentary filmmakers Sam
Green and Bill Siegel take viewers
deep into the political unrest that
gripped this country from the late 1960s
into the mid-’70s. They focus on one of the
era’s most colorful manifestations — the
young political radicals who called them-
selves The Weather Underground, who
thought the revolution was coming, and
they were leading the way.
You have to put this civic unrest in the
context of the ongoing Vietnam War and
the protests that raged on streets and cam-
puses across the nation, and yes, here in
Eugene at UO, although no one talks about
it much these days. And you have to rec-
ognize that after Richard Nixon won the
1968 election, he turned the power of his
administration into ridding the country of
what he famously called “the same thugs
and hoodlums that have always plagued
good people.” Context: In March of 1969,
Nixon (the “I am not a thug” president)
and National Security Adviser Henry
Kissinger ordered the secret bombing of
Cambodia. In mid-October 1969, some
250,000 peaceful protestors marched on
Washington.
Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS) started as a non-violent movement,
but by the time of its 1969 national con-
vention, a radical faction of the organiza-
tion led by national secretary and lawyer
Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd,
David Gilbert and others broke away. In
effect, this handful of committed activists
took over the organization and its mem-
bership. An outraged Todd Gitlin, an SDS
founder with strong non-violent convic-
tions, calls the act “institutional piracy” in
the film. Gitlin looks as if he’s still pissed
about the splintering of the group, and no
wonder. It was never possible to organize
students on that massive level again.
The Weathermen, as they were known,
called for four “Days of Rage” in Chicago,
facing the armed might of the notoriously
brutal Chicago police in the streets. Black
Panther leader Fred Hampton, greatly
admired by the Weathers, denounced the
call. About 200 people showed up, which
was a hard lesson learned early on.
The film alternates archival film
footage with recent interviews. After a fatal
explosion of a New York townhouse that
killed three Weathermen, the press made a
lot of noise about the “bomb factory.” The
remaining activists went underground, to
what Dohrn called a “parallel universe,”
where many of them led ordinary lives,
raised children and held jobs for years.
But some elements of the leadership
continued to bomb, always making certain
that safeguards were in place so no loss of
life took place. They continued bombing
into the 1970s, but once the Vietnam War
was over, there was less to hold them
together, and individuals began surfacing.
It’s fascinating to see some of these
people again. Dohrn is as beautiful as she
ever was, and Ayers looks healthy and
well. Naomi Jaffe reports how she thought
doing nothing to stop the war was itself a
violent act. Mark Rudd notes they wanted
to bring the war to the streets of Amerika:
“I would be taking an acid trip, and I
would think about the Vietnam War.”
David Gilbert is serving a life sentence for
a Brinks robbery that went wrong in 1981.
With the exception of Gilbert, charges
against the others were dropped by the
FBI, because the agency had so blatantly
violated the law itself. A major culprit was
COINTELPRO, a 20-year-old secret gov-
ernment agency within the FBI that spied
on American citizens and organizations
without benefit of legal jurisdiction.
CONINTELPRO targeted the Black
Panthers, the civil rights movement, and
the Weather Underground. (The program
was discovered following the March 8,
1971 break-in of the offices of the FBI in
Pennsylvania.)
This worthy film opens at the Bijou on
Friday, Oct. 31. See it to learn what these
people discovered about the use of vio-
lence and what they have to say today.
And look with awe at the freedom of
expression they had then, which is simply
not available to you or me today without
serious consequences.
ew
OCTOBER 30, 2003 25