WASHINGTON — They are beginning to die out, or at least
to retire. So long, suckers. Surely the Clintons, Senator
Jean-François Kerry, Al-Gore, and dozens of others who presented
themselves as reasonable alternatives to the radicals of the 1960s
thought they were suckers. I thought about all of them this week as
problems mounted for Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks
thief.
Late in June death took Dwight Armstrong, the anti-Vietnam
War protester who blew up a building at the University of
Wisconsin, killing an innocent graduate student, Robert Fassnacht.
I have always wondered about Fassnacht. He supposedly was
opposed to the Vietnam war too. I wondered what his life
would be like if he had not been in the building at the time the
bomb went off. Armstrong and his accomplices were eventually
caught. None had much promise, but there was a tremendous
legitimacy to them at first, at least in comparison to those of us
who favored the war.
Armstrong was sentenced to concurrent seven-year terms in
prison and was paroled in 1980. On a less idealistic note he was
later apprehended for running a methamphetamine lab in Indiana and
sentenced to ten years in prison. He lived his last years driving a
cab and caring for his mother. “My life,” he told Madison’s
Capital Times,“has not been something to
write home about.” Well, maybe at the end the light began to
dawn.
Then there was Fritz Teufel, who turned room temperature
on July 6. He began his career less spectacularly. Auspicating it
as a “fun guerrilla,” the German equivalent of Abbie Hoffman (a
suicide) and Jerry Rubin (death by jaywalking) demonstrated against
the shah of Iran and planned to ambush Hubert H. Humphrey with
cake-mix “bombs.” His politics were one part Maoism and an equal
part psychoanalysis. He claimed to resent his parents’ softness
toward Nazism. It led him to softness toward Mao. In time he moved
to Munich and joined a radical commune, eventually enlisting in the
Red Army Faction, which carried out assassinations, bombings, and
kidnappings. He spent a couple of years in prison in the 1970. In
1975 he spent another stretch in prison. He devoted his last years
giving interviews to journalists nostalgic for the 1960s and 1970s,
but first his guests had to play him in table tennis.
Now we are told that Bill Ayers is going to retire from
the University of Illinois’ Chicago campus. Ayers was a co-founder
of the radical — today we would say terrorist — Weather
Underground, which in the late 1960s and early 1970s engaged in
quite a lot of political activism that involved bombs, but also
street demonstrations and other acts of violence. Ayers was
involved in blowing up a statue dedicated to police casualties in
the 1886 Haymarket Riot, twice. I take that personally, for my
great grandfather was, for many years, the sole survivor of that
riot. As a little boy I was chosen by the Chicago Police Department
to place a wreath on the monument. Today, I have a splendid picture
of the monument in my office.
Ayers went on to other bombings, for instance at the New
York City Police Department, the United States Capitol, and the
Pentagon. He recalled these acts and others in a spectacularly
ill-time memoir, Fugitive Days, which came out on
September 10, 2001. We all know what happened a day later. When the
New York Times quoted him as saying “I don’t regret
setting bombs” and “I feel we didn’t do enough,” he relied on his
formidable gifts at obfuscation to argue that he was talking about
peaceful ways to end the Vietnam War, though what they might have
been is unclear. All we know is that he relied mostly on bombs, and
several of his colleagues blew themselves up making them. Perhaps
in retirement he will explain.
Which brings me to Assange. He published last month 76,000
documents classified by the U. S. military about the war in
Afghanistan. The left views this act as hugely legitimate.
Undoubtedly soldiers and other friends of democracy have been
killed and will be killed because of it, but Assange promises more
documents. Also, he says this talk of him molesting women is a
dirty trick and he hints darkly at the Pentagon. Will Assange come
out of it looking like a Dwight Armstrong or a Bill Ayers? Will he
perhaps manage to appear reasonable and go into legitimate
politics? It is too early to tell. All we know is that history
works in mysterious ways. Some become footnotes, others
presidential candidates.
