revolutionary’s favorite movie was The Battle of Algiers , a 1966 film that portrayed heroic Algerian guerrillas doing battle against their French occupiers. In time, once people actually began going underground, their bible would become Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla , written in 1969 by a Brazilian Marxist named Carlos Marighella; it outlined dozens of strategies and tactics, analyzing weapons, outlining ways to organize a guerrilla cell, even describing the best ways to rob a bank. A number of underground newspapers would excerpt Marighella’s manual.
“We actually believed there was going to be a revolution,” remembers a Weatherman named Paul Bradley. * “We believed the world was undergoing a massive transformation. We believed Third World countries would rise up and cause crises that would bring down the industrialized West, and we believed it was going to happen tomorrow, or maybe the day after tomorrow, like 1976. We really thought that would happen. I know I did.”
For the moment, it was all just talk, and crazy talk at that. But by early 1968 apocalyptic revolutionaries—“kamikazes,” one SDS report called them—were rising to the fore in every SDS chapter, prophesying the coming conflict. They always seemed to be the loudest, the angriest, the most voluble, and they refused to be shouted down. Chapter after chapter was split between armchair protesters and “action factions” who wanted action, often violent action, right this second. The spark could have happened anywhere. In the event, it happened at Columbia University in New York, where in April 1968 the SDS chapter’s action faction grew outraged at the segregation of a proposed gymnasium and the university’s ties to a Pentagon-sponsored think tank. After a peaceful protest, a group of SDSers occupied Hamilton Hall, Columbia’s administration building, and refused to leave until the gym was scrapped and ties to the think tank were severed. When an administrator named Henry S. Coleman went to meet them, he was taken hostage andbarricaded into his office. Police surrounded the building but declined to storm it, worried about inflaming adjoining black neighborhoods. A kind of siege ensued, with the occupying students using bullhorns to harangue crowds of the curious.
Had all this happened in San Diego, it might have been dismissed as a random instance of especially aggressive protesters. But because it happened in New York, the world’s media center, Columbia became an overnight phenomenon as images of angry, shouting students were beamed to television sets around the world. As far as the press was concerned, the star of the show was the student spokesman, a soft, husky New Jersey sophomore named Mark Rudd, whose dramatic poses—typically one fist raised, the other wrapped around a bullhorn—appeared seemingly everywhere, climaxing with the cover of Newsweek . For mainstream America Rudd became a dismaying symbol not only of SDS but of the Movement itself, the prototypical nice Jewish boy from the suburbs transformed into something new and angry by these strange times.
Behind the scenes, however, the driving force behind the occupation, and the man who would eventually craft the philosophical framework for Weatherman, was Rudd’s best friend, a hyperintense, motormouthed Connecticut leftist named John Jacobs, universally known as JJ. Brilliant and handsome, with a streetwise style marked by beat-up leather jackets and slicked-back hair, JJ was already a legend at Columbia when the protests began. Some thought him a prophet, some a poseur, but either way he was surely the purest voice of the apocalyptic revolutionary. Where mainstream commentators viewed Columbia as a student protest, JJ told anyone who would listen that it was far, far more: the first step toward a genuine American revolution, concrete evidence that young people working together could bring the country’s white elites to their knees. More than anyone else in the SDS
“We actually believed there was going to be a revolution,” remembers a Weatherman named Paul Bradley. * “We believed the world was undergoing a massive transformation. We believed Third World countries would rise up and cause crises that would bring down the industrialized West, and we believed it was going to happen tomorrow, or maybe the day after tomorrow, like 1976. We really thought that would happen. I know I did.”
For the moment, it was all just talk, and crazy talk at that. But by early 1968 apocalyptic revolutionaries—“kamikazes,” one SDS report called them—were rising to the fore in every SDS chapter, prophesying the coming conflict. They always seemed to be the loudest, the angriest, the most voluble, and they refused to be shouted down. Chapter after chapter was split between armchair protesters and “action factions” who wanted action, often violent action, right this second. The spark could have happened anywhere. In the event, it happened at Columbia University in New York, where in April 1968 the SDS chapter’s action faction grew outraged at the segregation of a proposed gymnasium and the university’s ties to a Pentagon-sponsored think tank. After a peaceful protest, a group of SDSers occupied Hamilton Hall, Columbia’s administration building, and refused to leave until the gym was scrapped and ties to the think tank were severed. When an administrator named Henry S. Coleman went to meet them, he was taken hostage andbarricaded into his office. Police surrounded the building but declined to storm it, worried about inflaming adjoining black neighborhoods. A kind of siege ensued, with the occupying students using bullhorns to harangue crowds of the curious.
Had all this happened in San Diego, it might have been dismissed as a random instance of especially aggressive protesters. But because it happened in New York, the world’s media center, Columbia became an overnight phenomenon as images of angry, shouting students were beamed to television sets around the world. As far as the press was concerned, the star of the show was the student spokesman, a soft, husky New Jersey sophomore named Mark Rudd, whose dramatic poses—typically one fist raised, the other wrapped around a bullhorn—appeared seemingly everywhere, climaxing with the cover of Newsweek . For mainstream America Rudd became a dismaying symbol not only of SDS but of the Movement itself, the prototypical nice Jewish boy from the suburbs transformed into something new and angry by these strange times.
Behind the scenes, however, the driving force behind the occupation, and the man who would eventually craft the philosophical framework for Weatherman, was Rudd’s best friend, a hyperintense, motormouthed Connecticut leftist named John Jacobs, universally known as JJ. Brilliant and handsome, with a streetwise style marked by beat-up leather jackets and slicked-back hair, JJ was already a legend at Columbia when the protests began. Some thought him a prophet, some a poseur, but either way he was surely the purest voice of the apocalyptic revolutionary. Where mainstream commentators viewed Columbia as a student protest, JJ told anyone who would listen that it was far, far more: the first step toward a genuine American revolution, concrete evidence that young people working together could bring the country’s white elites to their knees. More than anyone else in the SDS
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