Weatherman Dohrn (Updated)

There are few coincidences in life. Had it not been for Obama’s run for the White House, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn may well have continued their entry into Hyde Park senior citizenhood undisturbed. However, that is not to be. The more elusive and dismissive Obama is about his association with these unrepentant Communist revolutionaries/terrorists,¹ the more deeply RBO continues to dig.

Although articles are being disappeared at a remarkable rate since Google 2001 has been available, there is a lot still awaiting discovery.

For example, a November 1996 book review of Victor Rabinowitz’s “Unrepentant Leftist: A Lawyer’s Memoir” by John Mage, prominent radical lawyer and an officer and director of the Monthly Review Foundation, provided some interesting information about Bernardine Dohrn, the path she led before becoming a full-fledged domestic terrorist, and a totally unexpected link to her adopted son, Chesa Boudin.

^{Victor Rabinowitz, Benjamin Spock, Leonard Boudin, 1968 AP}
Victor Rabinowitz and Leonard Boudin were partners in the law firm Rabinowitz Boudin which defended an assortment of leftist clients.

Following Rabinowitz’s death November 16, 2007, at age 96, Marjorie Cohn wrote in Monthly Review that, in addition to defending “known Communists” in the McCarthy hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee and having defended the “Cuban government’s nationalization of U.S.-owned property” in the U.S. Supreme Court, Rabinowitz Boudin “counted as clients Daniel Ellsberg, Paul Robeson, Julian Bond, Dashiell Hammett, Dr. Benjamin Spock, the Rev. Philip Berrigan, Alger Hiss, the Black Panthers, the Salvador Allende government in Chile,…. During the Vietnam War, the Rabinowitz Boudin firm represented hundreds of men facing the draft or criminal charges for refusing induction due to their opposition to the war.”

In 1967, Rabinowitz was president of the National Lawyers Guild, described by some as a Communist front group, he had helped co-found. John Mage wrote in 1996:

Almost all the organizations in which members of the Communist party took a leading role in the 1930s and 1940s were purged and/or destroyed. By the late 1960s, there were left some (not large) labor unions and the National Lawyers Guild. Victor Rabinowitz, reflecting on the achievements of a distinguished career, places first his role in preserving the National Lawyers Guild. It is today an effective nationwide organization, many thousand strong, committed to the goal of radical social change. It is an important exception to the prevailing rule, and Victor’s pride is justified.

Victor’s credible account is that the community of 1930s lawyers in and close to the CPUSA preserved this organizational treasure, more or less intact, through the great storm in order to hand it over to their 1968er successors.

Jesse Rigsby wrote April 25, 2003, in a Front Page Magazine article about the National Lawyers Guild (the “Guild”):

As the 1960s began, the Guild began to focus much of its efforts on fighting for civil rights for black Americans. Part of the reason for the Guild’s newfound emphasis was pure opportunism: a means of acquiring new membership, both black and white (interestingly, one of the Guild’s black members was elected to Congress in 1964: John Conyers (left), one of the more liberal Representatives currently serving in the House). The Guild defended rioters and others involved in civil unrest as the 1960s progressed, and “helped” the U.S. war effort in Vietnam by encouraging young men to become draft evaders and then defending them. Guild lawyers were active in defending such “movement” participants as “demonstrators” arrested during the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention riots and members of the militant Black Panther Party in their many run-ins with law enforcement.

John Mage now literally drops the Bernardine Dohrn bomb on us:

Victor places the transition as beginning in 1967, when he was President of the Guild, and culminating in the memorable electrically tense Boulder, Colorado convention of the National Lawyers Guild of the summer of 1971. In August of 1971 many of the best of the youth movement against the Vietnam War had just gone underground (the “Weathermen”). Bernardine Dohrn, leader of Weatherman, in 1967 had been hired by the national office of the Guild as a student organizer.

Student organizer! Hold that thought!

In a May 1998 interview with ZMag, Dohrn was asked

In terms of Columbia SDS, you have Dave Gilbert still locked up. In other countries they give amnesty to political prisoners. In the U.S., that doesn’t happen. Why do you think the establishment’s so reluctant to release some of the activists from the 1960s? And, in terms of the Columbia Revolt and student activism, what was Dave Gilbert’s role?

Still unrepentant Dohrn answered (emphasis added):

I met David in 1967 when I spoke at Columbia Law School to organize a Guild chapter there. Then saw him during the November 1967 anti-war Rusk demonstration. I met Teddy Gold both of those times, too. Teddy, who died in March 1970 in an explosion at a New York townhouse, was an activist and a leader of the SDS chapter at Columbia.

David, you know, is one of those brilliant figures who was a real intellectual. A classic Columbia student. A political economist, who loved to talk theory. Who, if it hadn’t been 1968, would surely have become a professor and an academic and written books. Who was and is a gentle person.

But David and Teddy, like all of us, were thrown into this, were lucky enough, really, to be offered the opportunity to step into this cauldron. We felt the world didn’t have to be like this.

Oh, yes. It has been assumed by those of us who don’t know better that it was Bill Ayers (right), who came out of the 1969 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) National Convention as one of three Weatherman leaders along with Mark Rudd and Jeff Jones. But on numerous listservs and in several articles, as well as in Rabinowitz’s memoir, we find Dohrn called the Weatherman leader — whether because she was the first to physically walk out at the convention, or because she was actually viewed in that leadership role — is not for us to determine. But she is, in fact, often referred to as the Weather leader.

Brian Hect wrote February 16, 2005, at FrontPageMag.com:

But Dohrn’s initial foray into the legal field was short-lived—she quickly became even more extreme than her NLG comrades (no small feat) and branched out as a leader of some of the most ultra-radical elements within the anti-Vietnam war movement.

Sadly, when we find the words Communist, ultra-radical, and student organizer within a few short phrases, our ears perk up here at RBO.

But John Mage has even more to satisfy our interest (emphasis added):

Many of us at Boulder had been brought into the Guild by Bernardine and none would dispute Victor’s characterization of her as “brilliant” and with “inexhaustible energy.” As he says, “in her travels around the country she spent half her time organizing antiwar demonstrations and the other half organizing Guild chapters to defend the demonstrators.”

BAM!!!

Did you get that? This is just so, so …. Alinskyesque? Identify a problem, then agitate for the “solution”. It’s no wonder Obama fits so well into the Hyde Park radical niche.

Columbia University 1968

Confirmation comes from that May 1998 Dohrn interview (emphasis added):

Thirty years ago Columbia University was the scene of “The Battle Of Morningside Heights”—when Columbia President (and Institute for Defense Analyses Director) Grayson Kirk called in 1,000 NYC police to clear the campus of protesting students on two occasions—711 students were arrested, 148 injured, and 120 charges of police brutality were filed.

In July 1968, following the revolt, a National Lawyers Guild activist who coordinated some of the legal defense work on behalf of the arrested Barnard and Columbia students, Bernardine Dohrn, became a national officer of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Mark Rudd (left), later to become a co-leader of Weather, became nationally prominent for his role in the Columbia revolt.

Democratic National Convention 1968

Additionally, in the interview, Dohrn says that she helped plan the Guild’s legal support for the August 26-29, 1968, Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago.

In a 1996 retrospective, PBS Online NewsHour writes

But the 1968 Democratic convention was less notable for its politics than for its televised display of social unrest and national disunity. The country had reached the boiling point. Two American icons, Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy’s brother, Bobby, had just been assassinated. Everyday, young American boys were being slaughtered in a war that, for many, had already lost its meaning. War protesters decided to gather in Chicago and send a message to candidate Hubert Humphrey and the Democratic party. But Chicago Mayor Richard Daley was unsympathetic. He posted 12,000 police officers on the streets, and called in the Illinois National Guard. Television cameras recorded a bloody riot as police arrested over 500 people in clashes that injured more than 100 police and 100 demonstrators.

Kent State 1968-1970

In a June 1974 American Opinion article, Alan Stang gives us some contemporary graphic information about how well Dohrn’s SDS agitation worked:

So it was in Chicago at the 1968 Democrat National Convention, where students got their skulls fractured when their leaders attacked the police. And on May 4, 1970, on the campus at Kent State University, in Ohio, the revolution finally killed four students. The anti-American Conspiracy had the martyrs it needed. The killings at Kent State have been used to radicalize students across America—and around the world. And recently, after four years, a federal grand jury indicted eight members of the Ohio National Guard, which was also victimized at Kent State. Their conviction would mean another disaster for America. [...]

But the fact is that the killings on the campus were the predictable result of almost two years of Communist agitation by such terrorist gangs as Students for a Democratic Society.

For instance, in the fall of 1968, Kent State was treated to two appearances by Mark Rudd, the S.D.S. Ieader who had led the seizure of campus buildings earlier that year at Columbia University in New York. Another frequent visitor was Bernardine Dohrn, an S.D.S. official who calls herself a “revolutionary Communist,” and who according to James Michener, in Kent State, told the students: “They’ve shot blacks in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and they’re certainly going to shoot whites here.”

Members of the staff at the regional S.D.S. office in Cleveland constantly made the short trip to Kent, where they propagandized and recruited. A student revolutionary told Michener: “We established our communes in three Ohio cities, one in Columbus, two in Akron, two in Cleveland. The idea was to teach severe discipline. Every single decision—was a girl member entitled to buy an ice cream cone?—was decided by group discussion. The object was to produce revolutionaries programmed to obey orders, even if they involved severe personal sacrifice or death. You surrendered all personal money, idiosyncrasies and will power, assured that you would come out of the experience with total dedication.” [...]

So the purpose of all this agitation at Kent State was to recruit as much cannon fodder as possible, and then to provoke a “major confrontation.” When it came, it would be neither accidental nor spontaneous. It would be exactly what the revolutionaries wanted. [... ]

At a meeting in Williams Hall on April 28, 1969, revolutionary Communist Bernardine Dohrn said that people fighting “oppression” would have to carry weapons for “self defense.” [...]

Bear in mind that we have room here to cite only a few examples of the inflammatory agitation and propaganda on the campus at Kent State for almost two years. The evidence establishes—in the words of the revolutionaries—that the goal of S.D.S. was to provoke a violent confrontation in which somebody would be hurt, or even worse.

Weatherman

John Mage also writes:

The Guild increasingly promoted “liberation” (i.e. Marxist) movements or groups overseas in the 1970s, including the Palestine Liberation Organization (which the Guild recognized as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”), the Viet Cong, the African National Congress, pro-Soviet Angolan and Mozambican factions, the Puerto Rican FALN, and the Philippine New People’s Army, “the military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines.” The Guild also launched an effort to end the U.S. embargo on communist Cuba, a longtime friend of the organization.

The activities of the Guild go hand-in-hand with the activities of the Weatherman. The August 1976 highly-redacted FBI summary report on the Weatherman is filled with pages upon pages of mini profiles of the Weatherman and their circumtuitous international travel to and contact with Communist countries. For example:

The WUO obtained their revolutionary methodology from the Cubans and Vietnamese and, importantly, put into practice what they had learned from them. The Weathermen, of course, did not just happen to come about during the June, 1969, SDS National Convention. They fully admit their radical heritage began during experiences gained in SDS and as shown herein their international contacts with representatives of the DRV and NLF which began in 1967 increased their anti-imperialist consciousness to that by 1969 they had solidified their revolutionary commitment to include the maximum optimum of armed struggle. … The WUO has existed since early 1970. Since then, their ideological statements have developed a more consistent Marxist-Leninist revolutionary stance, and along with their numerous “underground communiques” which have accompanied significant bombings throughout the country, their statements quite clearly show they continue to consider themselves revolutionaries of the international order….

In a September 25, 1980, New York Times article, Robert Pear wrote:

… one of the leading Weatherman fugitives Bernardine Dohrn, met in Cuba with representatives of the Vietcong in 1968 and 1969 and traveled to Algeria about 1970 to meet with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization. At some time in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s, … Miss Dohrn lived in San Francisco at the home of a “Chinese Communist agent.”

Just in case you might not think Dohrn appeared to be “in charge” in 1969, watch this brief video clip of a Chicago interview with Dohrn and Michael Klonsky, described as SDS leaders.

Posted 10/23/08 by YouTuber morgenr

Also see recent related RBO articles:

• The Ayers-Dohrn Resource List.
• Ayers: “I don’t regret setting bombs”.
• Uppity Woman, Remarkably “Now”: Excerpts From “Prairie Fire”–Weather Underground’s Communist Manifesto.
• Just your everday Hyde Park radicals — Obama, Ayers, Dohrn, Young.
• “Team Cuba” — Ayers, Dohrn, just “two political activists” from Obama’s neighborhood visited Cuba in September 2008.
• Obama = “Tricky Dick”? Not when it comes to Communists.
• Trevor Loudon, More Weathermen for Obama.
• Trevor Loudon, Even More Weathermen For Obama — Connections, Connections, Connections.

Boudin Connection

Oh, and the Chesa Boudin connection? John Mage has that covered, too (just in case you’ve not already figured it out by now):

Victor also recounts the events, insofar as he was involved in them, that led to the sentencing of Kathy Boudin (Leonard’s daughter) to twenty years to life for a politically motivated offense committed in 1981.

Weatherman Kathy Boudin, Chesa Boudin’s natural mother, was convicted in 1984 for her role in the 1981 Brinks armed robbery in which three people were killed. She was granted parole August 21, 2003.

Remember that in the May 1998 interview with ZMag, Dohrn was asked about David Gilbert (right)? He writes of himself on the back cover of his pamphlet “SDS/WUO”:

He has been a political prisoner since the failed Brinks expropriation in 1981 by a unit of the Black Liberation Army.

He is also Chesa Boudin’s father.

So, there you have it. The Rabinowitz Boudin law firm is the nexus for radical legal activities leading to radical organizing activities that fed the …. and so forth. It was also the nexus for Dohrn and Kathy Boudin, the Weatherman, etc.

Truly amazing! And where, again, is MSM on all this?

---

h/t Carl Davidson for making RBO see the light! Indeed, no Socialists here — just your average garden variety assortment of Maoists, Marxist-Leninists, and Communists.