The Will to Change

The controversial generation of the 1960s made history by bringing its follies to a halt. No other generation in American history successfully mounted a massive resistance that helped end a war, the tragedy in Vietnam that America would rather forget.

Bill Ayers and Ronald Radosh are veterans of that movement who have written memoirs that complement each other with different experiences and outcomes. Ayers was an upper-middle-class prep school WASP from Glen Ellyn, Ill., whose parents were as apolitical as the rest of the ‘50s generation. Radosh, a veritable “red diaper baby,” was weaned on the communist passions of his Depression-bred Polish Russian parents and relatives. Ayers ended up a Weatherman who fantasized about blowing up the Pentagon; Radosh became a disillusioned radical who tried to force the left to face what it preferred to deny. One author remains arrested in his convictions; the other has moved on to more thoughtful reflections.

Ayers’ happy childhood and normal teenage life involved his affection for his younger brothers, playing offensive guard in high school football though he weighed only 145 pounds and his telling curiosity about zip guns and firepower. After attending the University of Michigan for a year, he dropped out to head south for the voter registration drive, joined the Students for a Democratic Society, became a full-time peace activist and community organizer in Cleveland and taught in experimental schools there and elsewhere. “Fugitive Days” offers a gripping account of the raging Democratic convention at Chicago in 1968, and he honestly records the tensions within SDS regarding insensitive chauvinist men treating women as inferior objects who were there simply to do the chores and provide sexual favors.

But Ayers is not without his own blinders on this issue: It seems that on every seventh page of the book, he is either falling in love or hopping into bed with some beauty.Ayers’ efforts to improve the lives of the poor and powerless are commendable and represent the idealism of the ‘60s. But such involvements also led to a myth that would become gospel truth in the later academic world: the conviction that history moves from the bottom up. As Ayers puts it, “We believed fervently that any legitimate and just change should be led by those who had been pushed down and locked out, and we were certain that struggling in the interest of these forgotten people crushed at the bottom held the key to social transformation that would shake the whole world to its core and ultimately benefit everyone.” The idea that the poor and virtuous represent a challenge to the rich and famous is a pathetic delusion. “There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor,” observed Oscar Wilde. “The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor.”

Life in the ghetto seems to have taught Ayers that white society is so guilty about everything that blacks need not be responsible for anything. Thus a black man throws his “gal” out the window, and Ayers, obsequiously deferential to African Americans, suggests that the onlookers are right to complain, not of the assault, but of the time it took for the police to arrive.

Ayers describes well the deep emotions that inflamed the ‘60s. But like other New Leftists, he suffers from the disease of “interconnectivitis,” the conviction that nothing happens by coincidence but instead everything follows from one -ism to another. With such a mentality, Vietnam is an expression of militarism carried out for reasons of racism and imperialism, which in turn have their roots in a liberal capitalism that rests on private property and possessive individualism. What happened had to happen. But then there are the 1989 demonstrations at Tiananmen Square, when behavior reversed itself and American capitalism rushed to the side of the Communist regime to turn a demonstration for freedom and human rights into a brutal bloodbath.

“Fugitive Days” opens in 1970, with the author stumbling in horror from a phone booth after learning that three members of the Weathermen had just died in a bomb explosion in a Greenwich Village townhouse. Ayers had joined the Weathermen’s Revolutionary Youth Movement--led by Bernadine Dohrn (whom he would later marry) and others, some of whose members went underground only to surface in full fury. “I felt giddy and emboldened,” Ayers recalls, about to go on a rampage in Chicago with his fellow Weathermen. “We shrieked and screamed as we ran, ululating in imitation of the fighters of the ‘Battle of Algiers,”’ Ayers exclaims in reference to the film. “I saw us become a real battalion in a guerrilla army.”

But the points of the film were that the Algerian street fighters lost to the French when they resorted to isolated acts of terror and that only when faced with massive popular resistance did the French relinquish colonial rule. What lessons is Ayers, a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois, imparting to his students? The resort to violence has more to do with desperation than with wisdom.

Radosh’s “Commies” is less righteous and more reflective. Radosh was not only an activist but also found himself at the center of bitter, protracted debates that embarrassed the left, from the nature of communism in Asia to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from the trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to the legendary Pete Seeger, the folk singer who so followed the Communist Party line on every twist and turn that his guitar could have been wired to the Kremlin.

The young Radosh was educated to be a true believer in the communist cause. His parents sent him to a summer school (Camp Unity) run by communists and to an elementary and high school in the Village known as “the Little Red School House.” Many of Radosh’s fellow students would eventually attain cultural acclaim in New York circles (including Mary Travers, later part of the popular Peter, Paul and Mary); few broke away from the ideas imposed on them by their doctrinaire teachers. Radosh admits that he often led the pack of true believers. In high school, he wrote a “crude tract opposing ‘bourgeois’ civil liberties,” and an instructor, a rare non-communist, “criticized my work mercilessly and had me read John Locke and Milton in order to learn the necessity of intellectual freedom.”

It’s amazing to learn from Radosh’s book how many youths from communist backgrounds went on to become eminent American historians. Their mentor was University of Wisconsin professor William Appleman Williams, himself not a communist but an old-fashioned progressive and moralist who viewed the Cold War as America’s economic drive to corner world markets. Radosh has many interesting observations on radical graduate students at University of Wisconsin-Madison who founded “Studies on the Left” and on the tensions between New Leftists and older warriors like Irving Howe and Michael Harrington. Radosh also writes about his personal life with sensitivity, offering keen portraits of his anarchist uncle Jacob Abrams and recollections of romance and deception in an era dizzy with sexual freedom.

Radosh’s break with the left was far from intentional but resulted unexpectedly in the aftermath of the publication of “The Rosenberg File” (1981), which he co-authored with Joyce Milton. Through exhaustive research, the authors established that Julius Rosenberg was indeed guilty of espionage but that his wife, Ethel, was, at most, an assessor. (Research is being conducted to try to explain why the Eisenhower administration, some of whose officials knew of the wife’s innocence, nonetheless allowed the execution of both to go forward.)

In “Commies,” Radosh discusses his disappointment with the reception of the Rosenberg book. Although liberal historians Alan Brinkley and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. praised it, the left roundly denounced it--particularly Eric Foner, another “red diaper baby” and a president of the American Historical Assn. Foner claimed that the book violated the canons of historical scholarship and accused Radosh of succumbing to “liberal anti-communism,” the unpardonable sin.

Radosh records that the more he grew skeptical of left mythologies and questioned communist causes in Asia and Central America, the more the radical academy shunned him.

Although Radosh fails to mention it, what he has experienced is a peculiarly American phenomenon. In Europe, the left was shocked to discover the Gulag and the fate of the Vietnamese boat people, and many academics came to scorn communism and revise, if not completely reject, Marxism. In America, however, there has been no shock of recognition, no event or idea that can shake to its senses the lingering left. Against this entrenched solidarity of stubbornness, Radosh’s memoirs are all the more courageous in telling us of episodes in the life of an important generation that held America up to severe scrutiny, which it deserved. “Commies” also reminds us of the presence of a radical academic mentality that, placing politics ahead of knowledge and valuing tenure more than truth, hardly represents, as one conservative liked to put it, “the closing of the American mind,” because, having been molded in the “Little Red School House,” it never knew what it was like to be open.