Interview With Mark Rudd:
By Nancy Muldoon
• Mark Rudd is one of the founding members of The Radical 60’s group The Weather Underground and has recently published UNDERGROUND, about his time at Columbia University, his time with SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and his experience of being a fugitive.
Citizen Nancy: Mark, on being a fugitive, for those who do not know much about you, how long were you on the run?
Mark Rudd: Seven and a half years.
Citizen Nancy: While I was reading your book UNDERGROUND, it occurred to me that it must have been easier to elude authorities 25-30 years ago compared to today given all the technology that we have nowadays. And I want to make it clear that I don’t think it was easy for you but what are your thoughts on that?
Mark Rudd: I’ve read that there are currently 13 million undocumented immigrant workers in this country and two million fugitives from the law. Obviously things are tighter now, and yet these people survive.
Citizen Nancy: What was the worst aspect of being a fugitive? The best?
Mark Rudd: The best wasn’t very good: it was the freedom of being nobody and not knowing anyone. The worst was related: the loneliness, the insecurity, the feeling that I was wasting my time.
Citizen Nancy: How long did it take you to write UNDERGROUND?
Mark Rudd:I wrote a draft in the eighties, put it away and then picked it up again in 2004. I guess you could say it took either five, ten, or twenty five years.
Citizen Nancy: Has anyone ever challenged you at any of your book readings?
Mark Rudd: A crazy right-wing blogger trying to get at Obama tried to disrupt one of my readings at a college in California. He claimed that the Weathermen killed a cop in 1970 and started a futile campaign to get Rupert Murdoch to kill my book. It didn’t work.
Citizen Nancy: Do you think that UNDERGROUND is the most accurate book on the subject of the The Weather Underground?
Mark Rudd: I tried to tell the story honestly and accurately. Other people have also tried their versions. In one case there was some fiction involved. Much of the story is subjective, ie., people’s individual feelings about what happened.
Citizen Nancy: Susan Braudy’s book entitled FAMILY CIRCLE about the Weather Underground and the family history of the Boudin’s in particular has been criticized for many inaccuracies and out-and-out lies, have you read her book? What are your thoughts on her making stuff up?
Mark Rudd: I read half the book and couldn’t continue. She had zero understanding of our politics or how the underground worked. It was all a crazy story she made up about the Boudin family and Kathy wanting to get Leonard’s love and attention. But a lot of it was gossip. She seemed to have a desire for revenge against Kathy for not noticing her in college.
Citizen Nancy: Are there any misconceptions about the WUO that you would like to clear up?
Mark Rudd: That it had a positive impact on radical politics: I think it was entirely negative in that it helped split the anti-war movement and helped destroy SDS, the largest student radical organization in the country. It was a total disaster. I’ve written many times that we did the work for the FBI for them. Young people shouldn’t idealize us just because our intentions were good and we had guts.
Citizen Nancy: Do you ever get over the “creepiness factor” in regards to COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) a notorious program of the FBI and the fact that J. Edgar Hoover was so incensed by the Weather Underground and that he had a whole file on you?
Mark Rudd: I never felt that FBI surveillance was “creepy.” It was just to be expected. They surveilled and infiltrated the legal above-ground movement and they tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to get at us when we went under. They were doing their jobs, to protect the status quo.
Citizen Nancy: Now that you have become a teacher yourself, do you now have any sympathy for how you viewed and treated your former professors at Columbia? Have you ever written to them? Have any of them ever contacted you?
Mark Rudd: Just a few professors at Columbia understood and were sympathetic to the strike. They were all mostly interested in their jobs, no matter how “radical” they claimed to be. I never forgave them their hypocrisy.
Citizen Nancy: There are a lot of poignant and amusing moments in your book one of which is that you are in a diner while you were a fugitive and you happen to strike up a conversation with the waitress and she says that the Columbia Protests/ Riots had a big impression on her and how it changed her life and then adds that she was “really good friends with Mark Rudd.” Did you have to resist the urge to tell her it was you?
Mark Rudd: No, I didn’t want to contradict her (since we didn’t really know each other) and also I needed the security that comes with discipline.
Mark, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule for this interview.
My pleasure. Thanks for the offer.
A more accurate and balanced view of the WUO's history than the book that Murdoch's HarperCollins corporate firm published, "Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity" by Dan Berger, was published in 2006 by the non-commercial alternative/anti-corporate Movement publishing collective, AK Press. See following link:
http://www.akpress.org/2005/items/outlawsofamericaak
Bill Ayers' "Fugitive Days" book, Thai Jones "Radical Line" book and Emilio DeAntonio's 1976 documentary about the WUO also do a better job than the Murdoch publishing firm's book of explaining why WUO members continued to be regarded as folk heroes by most anti-war counter-culturall/underground press newspapers and most grassroots anti-imperialist and anti-racist Movement activists and campus student activists during most of the 1970s.