Kathy Boudin and the Dance of Death
Frankfort, Ellen
an inability to hold off demands for pursuits he deemed unsuitable. There were so many requests to fund discussions on topics like "the government and the family" or "the crisis of divorce,"...
...MALIBU, CA.--Right down the road from the Elysium Institute in nearby Topanga Canyon, where oblivion already exists for the nu~lists encamped there, lives a man engaged in a unique occupation...
...F r a n k f o r t reserves her final 21 pages to consider "What Went Wrong...
...And would you believe that, in her opinion, Kathy Boudin was rebelling against male dominance in her own truly idealistic, honest-to-Marx leftist household...
...That very morning, in fact, arrangements were being made for the neighbors to get together their shovels to shore up what they could...
...after five months of visits and correspondence, Lazarre published an 8500-word essay in the Village Voice in February on the eve of the Boudin trial, which is expected to last six months...
...It seems Nyack jailers were inclined to wreak some punishment of their own upon terrorists who had killed two of their town's 22 policemen, including the only black on the force, a highly popular veteran officer...
...her father fought in the Spanish Civil War with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and was imprisoned in Philadelphia "for political reasons...
...Mutual friends arranged for Lazarre to interview Boudin in jail...
...At one point, she recalls that the sixties produced a mythic figure, "The Earth Mother," celebrated with Eugene H. Methvin is senior editor of Reader's Digest...
...She scorns his cushy Greenwich village life-style: Town houses, summer homes, seeing two kids through private school, Ivy League college and graduate school, frequent travels abroad, and tailored suits from Saville Row--these are the hallmarks of a certain class of Northeast Intellectual Leftists...
...Seventy-five years may be what she'll need to sort it all out...
...Leonard Boudin, it appears, was no idealistic c i v i l libertarian, but an old-time Stalinist, hired later by the Castro government...
...That Kathy learned her Lenin well and identified with her father's devotion to the revolutionary cause never occurs to Frankfort...
...Norman Fleishman's wife, Diane, matter-of-factly mentions that the house, along with several others in the neighborhood, is in the process of sliding, along with the hill itself, toward the ocean...
...as "the plow which has opened up the possibility of change for the whole country," a bit of manipulative smugness right out of Chernyshevsky...
...The press usually describes Kathy's father as a "renowned civil liberties lawyer...
...They killed two policemen and in the confusion escaped again...
...Of her 165 text pages, Frankfort expends 127 describing the robbery and ensuing trials and ramifications...
...Thus, says Frankfort, Kathy was caught in a double bind, "the gap between the father's personal behavior and his idealistic politics...
...He has become a self-styled "gentle lobbyist" for the entertainment industry which, he says, with some awe, "reaches 80 or 100 million people every night...
...Muses Boudin, "It was, after all, my concern about the preciousness of life that brought me into politics in the first place...
...Seems to me that Frankfort is letting old man Boudin off easy...
...We see a classic "true believer" in the simple, seductive old Marxian fairy tale of the hero struggling through the long ordeal, "creating a more just and humane society," as Boudin dreamed it, with a typical pinch of messianic martyrdom: "I thought I would rather be a defendant than a defender-lawyer...
...Through her, Frankfort generates real rage and condemnation for the crime of Boudin and her comrades, and against Boudin personally for her role in disarming the cops at the roadblock by playing innocent young lady frightened at the sight of guns--while the terrorists in her truck prepared t o storm out, automatics blazing...
...Such figures are suspiciously modest, and rightly so, for the essence of Fleishman's lobbying consists of the occasional get-togethers he arranges, usually at somebody else's home, and attended by a hodgepodge of television writers, producers, actors, and featuring an eminent guest speaker from the academic or scientific world...
...She was a friend of Boudin's family, her father a prominent radical lawyer, moving in the same Greenwich Village leftist set...
...They killed a guard and wounded two others...
...There were so many requests to fund discussions on topics like "the government and the family" or "the crisis of divorce," he couldn't always keep his scorn prudently hidden...
...Given Fleishman's skill in attracting luminaries to these meetings, it just may be an idea that is working...
...Diane Fleishman regards the whole disastrous, uncertain phenomenon of wondering where you'll be every morning when you wake up as a "lot like life itself...
...That worthy was Moscow correspondent for the Daily Worker who in 1957 broke with the CPUSA after the bloody suppression of the Hungarian uprising--now there's a reason to hate your father...
...Then she joined the terrorists' "aboveground" support apparatus and became chief plaintiff in a $100 million suit filed in 1978 against the FBI and former President Nixon for the burglaries and wiretaps designed to catch the people who had bombed the Capitol, Pentagon, and State Department...
...Take that, Pops...
...Was Clark rebelling against her father...
...What is one to do with this contradiction: One's father is known throughout Leftist circles for his high ideals as well as his charm and wit...
...For years my social and professional life overlapped that of the Boudins...
...While Ellen Frankfort's feminist perspective proves sterile, a kindred feminist reporter provides interesting though unintended insight...
...And he wants to accomplish his goal by using the single greatest mass communication medium that has ever existed: television...
...Lenin always enjoined Communists to use all "forms of struggle," both legal and illegal, including terrorism so long as it is part of a planned, coordinated strategy of overt and clandestine assault...
...But, recounting twenty hours of conversations, Lazarre opens a window or two on Boudin's mental processes...
...birthings at home in the commune among children, pets, and many bearded men who would mark the occasion with a "placenta stew that was eaten in tribal fashion after it was separated from the newborn child and mixed with a little wine...
...The fiendish guards would, for example, bang on her cell door in the middle of the night, then laugh about their devilishness...
...We all search for love, peace, and giving...
...A federal judge told the jailers to knock it off, and Boudin was transferred to state custody...
...That would have allowed him to offer a sharper definition of the humanities, and to contrast more definitely the rewards of humanistic attainment with the aims of government...
...Finally, we see the Great MarxistLeninist Contradiction: Can you really build a better world by murder, torture, riot, and terror...
...Immediately adjacent to Topanga Canyon's renegade communal atmosphere is a wealthy cliff community overlooking the Pacific where the Fleishmans reside rent-free in actor John Houseman's sprawling, somewhat unkempt house whose living room is dominated by an enormous empty sunken swimming pool...
...The only "freedom fighter" captured at the scene turned out to be Kathy Boudin, one of the 1969 founders of the terrorist "Weather Underground" spinoff of the Students for a Democratic Society, and a magna cum laude alumna of Bryn Mawr and the FBI's "Most Wanted" list...
...Don't need much else, for they have each other...
...Just what does that mean...
...He had been general counsel for the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, an identified Communist front, since its founding in 1951, and was a foremost strategist in the legal attack against the nation's internal security laws and counterintelligence apparatus...
...Boudin, according to Lazarre, has deep regrets over the deaths of the policemen and guard killed in the Nyack robbery, and the fellow terrorist killed two days later by pursuing cops in Queens...
...With time to spare before our 7:30 a.m...
...Frankfort is obsessed with her own feminism, lapsing into animadversions on male chauvinism and female docility, and celebrations of feminist rebellion...
...Also missing from Frankfort's account is Kathy Boudin's fellow gangster Judy Clark, who was also arrested fleeing the roadblock shootout after her car crashed in a high-speed chase...
...We also see the self-aggrandizing notion that the fulltime activists, the revolutionaries, are the engineers of utopia, generalissimos of revolution, building a movement, charting grand strategy for the global struggle...
...Her parents were Communist party members...
...It's just down the road and around the b e n d . . . The people there are a friendly sort with plenty of giving and Dreams to share...
...One needs no more...
...She recounts that in the 1969-70 period when the Weather Undergrounders were leaving the old splintered SDS, the new young middleclass "revolutionaries" were so eager to stamp out their "bourgeois inhibitions" one underground cell even killed and cooked and ate an alley cat...
...I knew some of the more intimate aspects of their lives," she tells us...
...He is Norman Fleishman, a loquacious, intense, 52-year-old native Californian, who wants to make sure that Americans don't forget what he considers to be the single greatest issue of our time: the risk of nuclear war...
...Yet, as it stands, Culture and Politics provides an unmistakable, if unintended, sermon to the effect that when government attempts to enhance endeavors that rise only out of individual freedom, the results are mixed at best, and probably cost more than we should be willing to pay...
...Berman had been more forthright in analyzing the shortcomings of popular impulse...
...Thirteen of these pages comprise a verbatim reprinting of Boudin's affidavit describing and protesting conditions in the Rockland County hoosegow...
...In Ellen Frankfort, Boudin has a worthy chronicler...
...But Frankfort sees in his prominence the seeds of the daughter's "rebellion...
...A t a recent "social seminar" highlighted by Carl Sagan's appearance as guest speaker, "we had about 90 people squeezed into the very small home of actress Blythe Danner 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984...
...Just living, in a world that he believes is on the brink of nuclear holocaust, is one thing Norman Fleishman is unwilling to do...
...Jane Lazarre, like Boudin and Clark, is a former "red diaper baby" who grew up in Greenwich Village...
...According to information THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1984 43 the Justice Department released during the 1980 trial of two top FBI executives charged with bugging and burglarizing relatives and friends of Weather Underground fugitives, the FBI in a 1956 briefing to President Eisenhower and the National Security Council identified Boudin as a secret Communist party member...
...For all we know, Kathy may have been trying to win Daddy's approval...
...The one nice piece of original reporting is Frankfort's sensitive narration of the story of Mary La Porta, commonlaw wife of Chipper Brown, the murdered black cop...
...Boudin regards "third world people in the U.S...
...The ambiance of the place, spelled out by the framed prose hanging on the wall, may or may not be indicative of the caliber of the existing local talent, but is probably a clue to the collective local yearning...
...He, his wife and their four children live on the $30,000 salary he takes out of these grants...
...On October 20, 1981, in Nyack, N.Y., twenty miles up the Hudson River from Manhattan, a gang of about a dozen black and white "revolutionaries" robbed a Brink's armored "truck of $1.6 million...
...The idea is that when the creative types are exposed to the academic or scientific types the metamorphic result will show up in the nation's favorite television shows...
...Just in Living...
...encounter, I stopped at a local seaside landmark of the Topanga people for a cup of coffee and a taste of the local flavor...
...According to the Chicago Tribune, "Over the years, Fleishman has received financial support from 9 or 10 by Marjorie Lewellyn Marks liberal organizations, such as the Stewart Mott Foundation...
...Last year's budget of Microsecond (the name derives from the amount of time it takes for a thermonuclear bomb to vaporize a city) was $53,214...
...A swashbuckling, bonafide feminatic who now lives in a "country compound" or feminist commune near Sag Harbor, N.Y., Frankfort was one of the founders of the Feminist Review, along with Kathy Boudin's poet-pacifist mother, and one of her previous books was Vaginal Politics...
...Pursuing the question, I drove out fog-shrouded Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu at dawn one recent Saturday morning to interview Marjorie Lewellyn Marks is a media analyst and free-lance writer who #ves in Los Angeles...
...Very little here could not be gleaned from newspaper clip files...
...Norman Fleishman, an early riser, at home...
...Also a Weather Underground fugitive, Clark made the mistake of attending a movie in 1970 near FBI headquarters in Manhattan, encountered the G-man in charge of her case, and served a nine-month prison stretch...
...These people have found this...
...I wish Mr...
...Flanked by aging, clich~'d photos of California surfers, captured at their brief crests, one aphorism reads: There's a place on this Earth that I found to bring peace...
...Fleishman, it says at the end of his monthly Emmy magazine columns, is "director of Microsecond, a non-profit educational organization that serves as a resource on [sic] conflict resolution for the entertainment industry...
...They escaped in two cars and a rented U-Haul van, but four miles away encountered a roadblock...
...Let me mention a Washington Post news clip she has either missed or omitted...
...Clark has already been convicted and sentenced to 75 years...
...What such delectable detail has to do with the Nyack terrorist gang or Boudin is beyond me, but one other culinary note is relevant, even if not a Frankfort original...
...Norman Fleishman, however, believes there are some things he can change and he has set out to do so...
...This vivid bit of reporting is lifted from Thomas Powers's 1971 opus, Diana: The Making of a Terrorist, source for most of Frankfort's factual detail on the early days...
...Yet when it comes to women, his behavior is no different than that of any man regardless of his politics...
...Most of Lazarre's essay is standard sob-sister, feminist empathizing and leftist angst...
Vol. 17 • May 1984 • No. 5
