THE PRESS: Mark Rudd Returns

...More recently a story appeared that certain WUO leaders were proposing to surface in a process they called inversion, in order to resume legal political activity...

...A period of decompression followed...

...currently, the Weather Underground Organization) held a war council in Flint, Michigan, in December, 1969, at which the group announced (at least in retrospect) that it was going underground...

...With amazement and delight he exclaimed: "Hey...

...Rudd was certainly a maximum leader at Columbia in 1968 but he got a frosty reception when he ran for the SDS national presidency, he was only one of a triumvirate at Weatherman's birth, and his name was never signed to any of their pronunciamentos after they went underground...

...You could all but hear Rudd's grin as he concluded, "Excuse me, can I go through...

...To which an anonymous voice responded: "Fat chancel" Then Rudd's voice was audible, its tone earnest and relenting: "I've just got one thing to say . . ." Pause...

...The future of the women's Catholic college is too critical for us not to be learning more practicaliy from each other...

...Other leaders, including Bernardine Dohrn, denounced the prospective inverts as criminals and class enemies and bid them good riddance...

...Sudden hush...

...The genesis of Weatherman, you'll remember, was a split in SDS in June, 1969, when a so-called national collective "expelled" a numerical majority, dominated by the Progressive Labor Party, by simply walking out...

...It is the true story of a gangster and a moll so passionate and devoted t o him that, after murdering him at his own invitation, she cuts off his penis as a keepsake...

...No answer...

...But the question ruminated upon by the reporters waiting for Rudd's appearance in court was what his role had been in all this...

...I could not have said with confidence he was there at all...

...Customs at a press screening for being pornographic...

...The United States is so far from having a revolutionary potential that the WUO's efforts all came to nothing, but in another, more volatile country they might have achieved what similar revolutionary undertakings in Latin America delivered during the same period...

...Wasn't it customary for a defendant to give some account of himself in such circumstances...

...It is the visible totem of historically complex political relationships among women of genius, assertiveness, and vision who have lived and died in convents...

...They called it Amerika, with a "k," but in their hearts they knew they lived in the softest of all possible worlds...

...Where had Rudd been the last seven years...

...After seven years underground in the belly of the monster, Rudd was welcomed back, given a final final warning about running off again (now Mark, this time we really mean it), and sent home to his parents in Maplewood, New Jersey...

...Reporters do a lot of things, but what they do most is stand around and wait...

...What sort of man would subject his country to such a risk...

...His reception was goodnatured and friendly in the extreme...

...Interviewing at the various colleges, I was startled at the complete willingness of all the women to contribute to my project...

...with Rudd playing an as yet unknown role, sprung at least one man from prison (Timothy Leary), set off bombs in public places, and established an underground organization of sufficient sophistication to keep 40 to 60 underground activists out of the FBI's hands for seven years...

...No doubt he asked himself, in his final days of hiding, if anyone cared anymore, or even remembered him...

...The mass writhed across the street in a kind of agonized labor before delivering the prodigal son through the revolving door of the office of the District Attorney...

...Wolves won't do because there was no howling...

...For them it was truly liberty or death, but the white middle-class student revolutionaries could always pack it in, go home, pick up their schooling and careers...

...They smoke too many cigarettes for something to do, drink too much coffee from soggy paper cups, eat too much damp danish pastry from little cellophane bags and grow thick in the jowl and middle...

...Little is known about how women accept responsibility for their own lives when reacting to a controlling matriarchy...

...Murray Kempton was there from the Post, looking like a long-necked crane with a sense of humor...

...It was rather something on the order of a starving multitude spotting an overturned bread truck...

...But it was only a gesture...

...Kirkpatrick Sale, who knows more about SDS' documentary history than man was meant to know, even suggested in an article on the Times Op Ed page 14 October 1977:658 that Rudd may have been read out of the movement years ago...

...We should be trading our skills, Consciousness and knowledge in order to enrich the life of each campus...

...I got him...

...The radiomen who had missed it borrowed the sound while two-thirds of the press crowd simply evaporated...

...Local and federal prosecutors apparently want to forget the whole affair, but the Weather Underground Organization...

...Word of his impending surrender first surfaced in Chicago the day before, then jumped in a microsecond to New York, where Rudd won the eye of the national press at Columbia University in 1968...

...This strikes me as neglecting Rudd's talent as a crowd-arouser, and as being hard to square with WUO's invective before his surrender, but Kirkpatrick Sale has certainly paid attention to these things and may be right...

...But Mark Rudd's surrender meant the end of an era all the same, and I decided to go down and watch him settle up Wednesday morning with not much more by way of reason than a curiosity to see the last act, having spent so many weeks at the first...

...The issue of the laywomen professor and upward mobility has generally been raised in a framework of patriarchy...

...Free of the absurd legal entanglements that followed, it finally opened in the U.S...

...Greyhounds are more graceful...

...There was quite a crowd to greet him at the Manhattan Criminal Court building on Wednesday morning, September 14...

...During those five hours I heard in embryonic form pretty much everything that appeared in the press later, and it was pretty thin stuff...

...But such questions were very far from reporters' minds in the days following Rudd's return...

...Back in the Sixties the SDS radicals used to excoriate themselves for what they called white skin privilege...

...A network cameraman with a videotape machine stood on the curb, watching a replay on a tiny screen inside his machine...

...Not only the inevitable television crews were idling there, but every radio reporter in the city, hordes of photographers with their motor-driven Nikons, and a rabble of the inky wretches who live by pen and typewriter, called, in this allegedly late twilight of Guttenberg, the writing press...

...Other professions have lunch...

...In "dosed" institutions feelings of estrangement are attributed to the belief that Sister faculty are privy to decisions that remain secret to the laywoman, thus allowing the religious woman power over her...

...But I am not calling my colleagues to caucus...

...As Rudd stood there in his blue shirt and tan slacks, looking like a graduate student in poli sci, I wondered if he was struck by the ease of his return...

...No one wanted to make a federal case out of it...

...Mark Rudd came home a few weeks ago, back from a seven-year tour of parts unknown...

...Reporters live in the stale middle of an eternal coffee break, exchanging idle gossip and reflection, waiting for Something to happen...

...Above the hubbub I heard a single radio reporter's question: "Did you accomplish anything, Mark...

...Thus it was on Wednesday morning, September 14, at about 9:40 when a sudden movement 50 yards off at the corner of Center and Leonard Streets had the effect of a starting gun at a track meet and the press took off in a pack of a sort for which there is no easy metaphor...

...The Sixties were a rat's nest better left alone...

...Ironically, laywomen professors are generally unaware of the policies of similar colleges...

...No one was interested in pursuing the question asked by the reporter in the crush outside: "Did you accomplish anything, Mark...

...they might not see him again until 1984...

...And partly it is because, Commonweal: 659...

...Could Lefcourt offer anything by way of guarantee the defendant wouldn't skip for another seven years7 His assurances weren't worth much the last time...

...At the end of two separate interviews, for example, young women who were positive about their colleges, asked why I thought they had been selected by their respective presidents...

...Lefcourt had worked things out with the DA beforehand...

...We should share experiences and expertise in positive ways with professorial exchanges, seminars, faculty and student internships...

...But suspicion also hovers in "open" systems...

...The women's Catholic college is a microcosm for studying this phenomenon, but only the tip of the iceberg...

...I am encouraging, however, the concept that women's Catholic colleges should share their strengths and emerge from isolationism with each other...

...The crush inched forward with little dainty steps while Rudd within was all but invisible...

...Rudd's voice again: "I hope nobody picks my pocket...

...One of the reasons the Weathermen went underground was to prove their bona tides...

...The Weathermen (later, Weather People...

...After that, nearly five hours of solid waiting until Rudd finally appeared briefly before Judge Milton L. Williams on a handful of misdemeanor charges from 1968, left pending when Rudd had gone underground early in 1970...

...Radio reporters replayed their tapes...

...Lewis wanted to know...

...Reporters liked him, were in no mood to rake up ancient history, never considered his revolutionary ambitions more than a nutty dream of youth anyway, and forgave him in their stories without ever taking time to consider what, if anything, there might be to forgive...

...The F'BI, as we know, was energetically looking for the runaways but their methods were so egregiously illegal that the Justice Department abandoned its prosecution of some peripheral Weather figures who had fallen into their hands...

...What he intends to do now is anybody's guess--he hasn't said--but what he was trying to do nine years ago was to lead a revolution in the United States, and he said it all the time...

...this summer, and is still playing here in New York...

...Microphones were reached in by lanky arms...

...A few months later a mis-wired bomb destroyed a townhouse in New York, killing three Weather people, and since then the group has pretty much disappeared from the public prints...

...When I got there a little after nine I found an astonishing crowd around the entrance to the Manhattan District Attorney's office at 155 Leonard Street...

...What happened...

...Indeed, the entire movie is nothing but such scenes...

...5, 1976], which was seized by U.S...

...Waiting for press conferences to start, for meetings to break up, for announcements and releases and the infinite variety of "no comment" with which those who Commonweal: 6~7 run the world litter their progress...

...Tim Crouse was there from the Village Voice, and Ron Rosenbaum from that Great Republic of Letters which is the only home of writers who do not draw salaries...

...Until the psychodynamics of the sponsoring religious community is exposed, probed, and written, no one can possibly understand how Sisters of the past (and present) were (and are) anointed college presidents and deans, and why other talented Sisters were (and are) screened out for such positions...

...Oshima's movie aims at being accordingly sensational itself, with explicit scenes of copulation and various perversions...

...Lefcourt's voice: " . . . will make no statement to any government b o d y . . . " End of tape...

...THOMAS POWERS TWO WOMEN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN The Japanese, it seems, like to make a fable out of history...

...What sort of reasons would justify it...

...My interviews convinced me that future research on the woman academic cannot be careless of her experience on the campuses of women's Catholic colleges...

...When Rudd finally got into a courtroom on the fourth floor of the Criminal Courts building,' Judge Milton Lewis momentarily resisted Lefcourt's application for Rudd's release in his own recognizance...

...We live on private cut-de-sacs...

...It is as surprising for laywomen academics at Carlow College to know that search committees operate on other campuses as it is for faculty at New Rochelle to know that search committees are not standard procedure...

...The only thing missing was bunting...

...More hubbub...

...Another is that when Something does happen it is likely to be quick, confusing and violent...

...How, Rudd must have asked himself, can you make a revolution in a country like that...

...Last year at this time a film that was creating a certain controversy was Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses [Commonweal, Nov...

...Nikons and television cameras were held high, shooting blind...

...Incredibly, Lefcourt's calm voice came through clearly, explaining they were going to the DA's office and would have no statement to make now or thereafter of any sort, Rudd did not intend to say anything to anybody about his whereabouts the last seven years and if everybody would plebe back up and let them walk freely they would proceed slowly so the photographers could get all the pictures they wanted...

...An occasional statement circulated by the remnants of the underground press, a handful of bombings (most notably of the Capitol building in 1971 ), a book called Prairie Fire and then a magazine called Ossawatomie...

...Confusion on the left...

...Only when that complex story is told and analyzed will it finally be clear why the role of the laywomen academic so fluctuates in parallel institutions...

...For all that, however, what strikes us about the film is the fact that it doesn't seem particularly raunchy...

...Curious not because the press assumed Rudd's surrender meant the game was up, but because it neglected so completely what Rudd had been trying to do...

...He needn't have worried...

...These promising professors perceived themselves blessed by a small group of creative, scholarly Sisters, who, in many small ways, were somehow (secretly) forwarding their careers...

...When the woman on whom this character is based was caught, the sensation was considerable in Japan because her case brought out so much about sex that had been suppressed in ~Iapanese society...

...That, in a depressing number of cases, has been the death of thousands of people, political crisis, military takeover, and wholesale repression...

...The answer, as it appeared in the press the week after his surrender, was that Rudd was never really a leader, but only a creature of the press, a media fiction, shaky in his politics (wouldn't read Lenin), resented by serious SDS politicos as a kind of overweening adventurist bad boy, and by Weatherwomen as a male chauvinist...

...Anyway...

...They closed in around Rudd and his lawyer, Gerry Lefcourt, in a dense mass as impenetrable as a circle of musk oxen...

...This is partly because the two lovers' story, which actually occurred in the thirties, has been stripped of all historical context and detail...

...Not only did he announce them clearly, he backed them up with action...

...A handful of Weather people had surrendered in the last few months, and others, furious at the defectors, were still underground, determined to go on fighting, as they used to say, in the belly of the monster...

...This is the bedrock of their lives...

...No one was angry about having had her experiences neglected, but each was happy to have them discovered...

...An old friend at UPI called up the day the story broke to say Rudd was leaving the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) he'd helped to organize at the end of the 1960s...

...This seems quixotic now, to say the least, but his intentions then were perfectly serious...

...This is one way in which reporting is like war...

...Black revolutionaries like the Panthers were on the edge, they used to say...

...It was time that we had met...

...Jimmy Breslin was there from the News, so round and stolid he seemed to be smuggling contraband beneath his suitcoat...

...A glimpse of brown suede jacket, sandy hair, the corner of a pair of tortoise shell hornrims, and that was it...

...The curious thing here, characteristic of the press, was the momentary intensity of its interest in Rudd's surrender, just as it had pursued him so relentlessly at Columbia years ago...