universe, it was JJ who popularized the parallels between Columbia and the Cuban Revolution, who preached that a select group of hard-core rebels could, as Castro and Guevara had with Cuba, lead America into revolution. “At first everyone thought JJ was crazy,” remembers his friend Howie Machtinger. “But then events kind of caught up with him, and suddenly what he was saying seemed almost sensible.”
As outlandish as this idea might sound today, it emerged as a popular argument among apocalyptic radicals in 1968 and would endure as the rationalization behind almost every underground group of the 1970s. Known as the foco theory, it had been advanced in a 1967 book, Revolution in the Revolution? ,by a French philosophy professor named Régis Debray. A friend of Guevara’s who taught in Havana, Debray argued that small, fast-moving guerrilla groups, such as those Che commanded, could inspire a grassroots rebellion, even in the United States. Debray’s theory, in turn, drew on what leftists call vanguardism, the notion that the most politically advanced members of any “proletariat” could draw the working class into revolution. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these ideas were catnip to budding revolutionaries like JJ, many of whom had no problem imagining themselves as American Ches. Their ardor was undiminished by their hero’s inability to make the foco theory work in Bolivia, where soldiers had captured and executed Guevara in 1967.
Veterans of the Columbia occupation, which ended with police storming the occupied buildings and arresting many of the protesters, would eventually constitute the largest single group of Weathermen. In Columbia’s aftermath, both JJ and Mark Rudd emerged as stars in the SDS firmament. While Rudd embarked on months of fund-raising trips, JJ fatefully fell in with another up-and-comer, a strikingly attractive twenty-six-year-old law student named Bernardine Dohrn. Dohrn was destined to become the glamorous leading lady of the American underground, unquestionably brilliant, cool, focused, militant, and highly sexual; J. Edgar Hoover would dub her “La Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left.” A high school cheerleader in her Wisconsin hometown, she graduated from the University of Chicago in 1963 and, while working toward her law degree, began assisting a host of protest groups, including SDS.
Clad in a tight miniskirt and knee-high Italian boots, Dohrn burst onto the scene at Columbia, where she helped arrange bail bonds. Everyone who met her—every man, at least—seemed mesmerized. “Every guy I knew at Columbia, every single one, wanted to fuck her,” remembers one SDSer, and Dohrn knew it. She liked to wear a button with the slogan CUNNILINGUS IS COOL, FELLATIO IS FUN . She and JJ were immediately smitten with each other. “Bernardine would be arguing political points at the table with blouse open to the navel, sort of leering at JJ,” an SDSer named Steve Tappis recalled. “Icouldn’t concentrate on the arguments. Finally, I said, ‘Bernardine! Would you please button your blouse?’ She just pulled out one of her breasts and, in that cold way of hers, said, ‘You like this tit? Take it.’” Another SDSer, Jim Mellen, recalled, “She used sex to explore and cement political alliances. Sex for her was a form of ideological activity.” 2 Yet even many SDS women soon idolized Dohrn. Everyone “wanted to be in her favor, to be like her,” a Weatherman named Susan Stern said years later. “She possessed a splendor all her own, like a queen . . . a high priestess, a mythological silhouette.”
In the summer of 1968, buoyed by her sudden popularity, Dohrn mounted an out-of-left-field bid to become SDS’s “inter-organizational secretary”—one of three coequal leadership positions—and, to widespread surprise, won election at the national convention that June. More than a few found her too beautiful to take seriously. When one questioner asked whether she was in fact a
As outlandish as this idea might sound today, it emerged as a popular argument among apocalyptic radicals in 1968 and would endure as the rationalization behind almost every underground group of the 1970s. Known as the foco theory, it had been advanced in a 1967 book, Revolution in the Revolution? ,by a French philosophy professor named Régis Debray. A friend of Guevara’s who taught in Havana, Debray argued that small, fast-moving guerrilla groups, such as those Che commanded, could inspire a grassroots rebellion, even in the United States. Debray’s theory, in turn, drew on what leftists call vanguardism, the notion that the most politically advanced members of any “proletariat” could draw the working class into revolution. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these ideas were catnip to budding revolutionaries like JJ, many of whom had no problem imagining themselves as American Ches. Their ardor was undiminished by their hero’s inability to make the foco theory work in Bolivia, where soldiers had captured and executed Guevara in 1967.
Veterans of the Columbia occupation, which ended with police storming the occupied buildings and arresting many of the protesters, would eventually constitute the largest single group of Weathermen. In Columbia’s aftermath, both JJ and Mark Rudd emerged as stars in the SDS firmament. While Rudd embarked on months of fund-raising trips, JJ fatefully fell in with another up-and-comer, a strikingly attractive twenty-six-year-old law student named Bernardine Dohrn. Dohrn was destined to become the glamorous leading lady of the American underground, unquestionably brilliant, cool, focused, militant, and highly sexual; J. Edgar Hoover would dub her “La Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left.” A high school cheerleader in her Wisconsin hometown, she graduated from the University of Chicago in 1963 and, while working toward her law degree, began assisting a host of protest groups, including SDS.
Clad in a tight miniskirt and knee-high Italian boots, Dohrn burst onto the scene at Columbia, where she helped arrange bail bonds. Everyone who met her—every man, at least—seemed mesmerized. “Every guy I knew at Columbia, every single one, wanted to fuck her,” remembers one SDSer, and Dohrn knew it. She liked to wear a button with the slogan CUNNILINGUS IS COOL, FELLATIO IS FUN . She and JJ were immediately smitten with each other. “Bernardine would be arguing political points at the table with blouse open to the navel, sort of leering at JJ,” an SDSer named Steve Tappis recalled. “Icouldn’t concentrate on the arguments. Finally, I said, ‘Bernardine! Would you please button your blouse?’ She just pulled out one of her breasts and, in that cold way of hers, said, ‘You like this tit? Take it.’” Another SDSer, Jim Mellen, recalled, “She used sex to explore and cement political alliances. Sex for her was a form of ideological activity.” 2 Yet even many SDS women soon idolized Dohrn. Everyone “wanted to be in her favor, to be like her,” a Weatherman named Susan Stern said years later. “She possessed a splendor all her own, like a queen . . . a high priestess, a mythological silhouette.”
In the summer of 1968, buoyed by her sudden popularity, Dohrn mounted an out-of-left-field bid to become SDS’s “inter-organizational secretary”—one of three coequal leadership positions—and, to widespread surprise, won election at the national convention that June. More than a few found her too beautiful to take seriously. When one questioner asked whether she was in fact a
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