Notes From the Underground
FBI agents searching for clues at the site of the bombing of the Pentagon, May 19, 1972. Fair use.
I debated reviewing Zayd Dohrn’s memoir of his life as a child growing up in the radical left underground. Hell, I debated even reading it. It was after a chance conversation I had with a recently laid-off Washington Post journalist who urged me to do both that I opened the book. Suffice it to say, it was good advice and I’m glad I took it. Dohrn’s text, titled Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground, is not only very well-written, it is also a unique narrative that combines personal reflection and contemplation with a history that may not be forgotten, but is rarely told from such a perspective. In part, the latter’s truth is directly related to the fact that most children did not grow up with parents wanted by the FBI for actions done in the name of revolutionary change.
My book on the Weather Underground (The Way the Wind Blew) is arguably the first history of the organization. A couple of memoirs published in the 1970s by former members naturally revealed some of that history, but for political, personal and legal reasons much more was left unwritten. Similarly, when I was writing my book over the course of six or seven years, most former WUO members did not talk to me and those that did wished to be left unidentified in the book. One thing I’ve noticed since the publication of my text in 1997 is that as the years move further from the time period being discussed, more details regarding the Weather Underground (and other leftist groups around at the same time) are uncovered/revealed. Yet, even today, author Zayd Dohrn informs the reader that people with whom he conversed while writing his text would not reveal certain events, names and other details for fear of governmental and other reprisals. This fact reveals much more about the nature of the police state we continue to live in than it does about the paranoia of old radicals and revolutionaries.
As I read Zayd’s wonderfully composed story, I thought about how I might approach writing a review. This is a standard part of my process—looking for an angle, an entry point and a focus in the text I am reading that will reveal what I want to tell others about whatever book it is I am reviewing. While reading Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young, I compared my political activities in the late 1960s and 1970s to the story Zayd was revealing in the book’s 
pages. I remembered my appreciation of groups like the Weather Underground and my support for some of their actions; I also contrasted my origins as the son of a career US military officer to the upbringings of Zayd’s parents Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Besides the difference between civilian and military life, there was also the age difference. My birth seven or eight years after the births of Bill and Bernardine meant my understanding of the antiwar and antiracist movements of the period was quite different, even if the issues were the same. Most importantly, I think was the fact that activists in the decade prior to the year my friends and I started going to protests had already moved the understanding much further to the left of the political spectrum than it was when Zayd’s parents began their journey to revolution. In other words, the people five, ten, fifteen years older than us had not only paved the way, they had also moved the struggle to the point where anti-imperialism became my starting point: the war in Vietnam was not a mistake, it was US policy and revolution in the US seemed not just possible but necessary.
There’s a 1973 film directed by Lina Wertmuller titled Love and Anarchy. The plot involves a young Italian peasant and anarchist named Tunin who is assigned to assassinate fascist ruler Benito Mussolini. The young man, angry and sad after the murder of his friend by Italian fascist police, undergoes training in Paris, travels to Rome where he meets his contact, a prostitute in one of the city’s brothels. While living at the brothel, Tunin and another prostitute at the brothel fall in love. This causes him to question whether or not he wants to go ahead with the assassination plot which boils down to the question, should he be happy in love and forget about the danger fascism promises for the world, or should he stick to the anarchists’ plan to kill Mussolini and remove the fascist leader, thereby throwing the fascist movement into disarray and potentially saving Italy and the world from the hell a successful fascist movement is certain unleash upon the world? I mention this film here because it revolves around one of the (if not the primary) questions Zayd Dohrn raises in his book. Of course, he raises this question of the personal vs. the political question as it regards underground revolutionaries having children. Obviously, it’s a valid question and one he understands primarily from his vantage point as the child of two committed members of the US revolutionary underground in the period many call the Long Sixties. While reading Zayd’s consideration of this question, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the children of other adults whose fathers (like mine) were deployed to Vietnam. Some of those dads, if not most of them, also believed in what they were doing and were willing to kill for it. Indeed, as Zayd reminds the reader, they were willing to kill Vietnamese children in the belief that they were protecting their “American” children. I suppose each person faced with this question makes the decision that they can live with.
Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young is a riveting history of the revolutionary underground and the years that lead so many activists of the period into its milieu. It’s an extremely personal and thoughtful story that only a well-spoken child of the Weather Underground could have written. At the same time, it is a history of the period in which it takes place; a history that begins with a certain amount of optimism that the United States could live up to the principles it used to teach in its schools and celebrated in its holidays. Zayd describes how that optimism turned to anger and a rage that became suicidal and, for too many, ended in cynicism or retreat, their dreams of revolution and social justice channeled back into a system designed to destroy both.
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