1998 Interview About 1968 Columbia Student Revolt With Ex-Weatherman Leader Bernardine Dohrn--Part 3

(The following 1998 interview first appeared in the May 1998 issue of Z magazine. See parts 1-2 below. To see the current issue of Z magazine, you can check out its web site at

http://www.zmag.org/zmag ).

Why would the National Lawyers Guild agree to defend the Columbia and Barnard students? You mentioned that people went through files. The occupation of buildings. And the media, when they covered it, stress: “Students used violence to shut down and deny the academic freedom rights of an academic institution.”

Bernardine Dohrn [BD]: When I look back at the 1960s, including what was to come—which was certainly more militant than Columbia—I’m astonished at how restrained the movement was. The notion that people could be worrying now about the small amounts of violence committed by the anti-war movement, compared to the massive U.S. extermination of populations at home and abroad that was going on in our name. To me, the movement had an incredible record of restraint and appropriateness of response.

There was the nightly “body count” from Vietnam. The class and racial inequality of the draft and who was dying. The massive assault and occupations of urban Black communities by National Guard and police. Then you have students breaking a lock on a door? Going into files?

The response to me was highly contained and appropriate. Yes, it was breaking the law. Yes, it was taking risks. But people were acting in a larger framework, an illegal and immoral war abroad and cruel inequality at home. They were engaging in activist civil disobedience, willing to sign up for the consequences. People were actually getting off their career paths. The notion that “I have to be good and obedient all my life” is not what democracy is really about.

One of my favorite critiques of the 1960s comes from Samuel Huntington, a Harvard history professor who was advising the government.

He’s also an IDA trustee now in 1998.

BD: Is that right? At the time, he called the youth anti-war movement “an excess of democracy.” That is one of my favorite negative critiques of the 1960’s movements. We believed in John Dewey. We believed in the notion that democracy was the active participation of citizens, not just the pulling of a lever every four years.

Student activism revealed that the war was not what the authorities said it was, that the university was a citadel of learning and also a private landowner. And a racist landowner at that. And a profit machine. These were shocking revelations. And when a large number of students said: “We’re not buying it. We will not be complicit. And if it means it’s going to affect the rest of my life and my career and what you’re molding me into—so be it.”

The Columbia rebellion was in the finest tradition of American social activism and real democracy. We thought that we were part of a global movement for liberation and real democracy.

Let me tell you about the role of the National Lawyers Guild, because you asked me about that. The Guild challenged the legality of the Vietnam War. As you know, it was the longest undeclared war in American history and had no legal basis, ever. It was in violation of international law.

Secondly, we were committed to supporting people who were arrested in mass demonstrations against the war and the draft, including military resistance. We organized law students and lawyers at the Pentagon protest, at the Foreign Policy Association [Hilton Hotel demo]—which involved a lot of the Columbia students protesting the relationship of this elite group of policymakers to the war in Vietnam. The Guild took responsibility for organizing legal defense.

The Guild had a noble history of being involved in the Southern Civil Rights movement. Our notion was that lawyers should make themselves accountable to the movement, and that law students needed to be participants in social movements, as well as being trained to be legal experts. (end of part 3)

1998 Interview About 1968 Columbia Student Revolt With Ex-Weatherman Leader Bernardine Dohrn--Part 2

(The following 1998 interview first appeared in the May 1998 issue of Z magazine. See part 1 below. To see the current issue of Z magazine, you can check out its web site at
http://www.zmag.org/zmag ).

But why Columbia? Why would a major Ivy League university be affected by that [the world historical situation in 1968]?

Bernardine Dohrn [BD]: Columbia students, SDS, and the African-American students—Student Afro-American Society (SAS)--had been organizing—only small numbers—around two big issues at Columbia. One was the presence of secret war research. The university denied that it participated in this consortium, called the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA—a Pentagon-sponsored group of universities that were advising the government on defense strategy in return for lots of funding). Second was the construction of a gym for Columbia students in Morningside Park, which is part of the Harlem community, to which Harlem residents would be denied access.

SDS, three weeks before, had taken a petition with 1,800 signatures to the office of Columbia’s president, Grayson Kirk, demanding that Columbia stop its participation in war research.

IDA still exists, by the way, in 1998 [and in 2009].

BD: They were doing research, for example, on the “chemical control of vegetation,” the creation and use of Agent Orange or napalm, which ends up poisoning not only the countryside of Vietnam, but American troops as well.

IDA has a web site in which they brag about their current research in “deep attack analysis.”

BD: Right. And one of the other things that was also a major research project was “exo-atmosphere nuclear detonations.” So the students presented this petition and the president said it was a violation on a ban on indoor demonstrations. Columbia put some of the leadership on probation.

On April 23, a group of some 500 students met to protest putting students on probation. They marched to the gym site. There was a scuffle with police there. The fence got torn down. The SAS students and SDS marched over and occupied Hamilton Hall, taking an acting dean “hostage” in the process. Within a day and a-half, four other buildings were occupied by students.

My view is that a couple of things were going on here. One was that students at one of the most privileged places in the country were turning away from what universities were shaping them into: the technological products who benefit from inequality and world conquest. What they were doing is making a highly moral statement: “We won’t be molded into the future leaders of the society that you have in mind, if this is the society that you have in mind. And we can do something better.”

And with that action was released a spirit and an outpouring of creativity that attracted more people.

Once the students were occupying Low Library—which is where Grayson Kirk’s offices were—and went through the files, there was proof of everything that the university had been denying. In fact, Columbia and the other major universities were not only participants in IDA, they were discussing with the government and each other how to lie about it to the students.

So you have the kind of smoking-gun evidence of their manipulation of public relations. You have the wonderful research that had been done about Who Rules Columbia? And its interlocking corporate directorships. So everyone could see that universities really are part of the whole business of military, corporate and real estate power.

Then the Harlem community marched through the campus while the buildings were occupied by students. Obviously, Columbia was hesitant about what to do about getting the students out because of the presence of the Harlem community. Finally, Columbia decided to unleash a police riot against the students. A thousand police took part in what was really the largest police action at a college.

Did you see any of that?

BD: I didn’t see it. I was traveling for the National Lawyers Guild and was speaking at Morgan State, a traditional all-Black college, when I heard the news that the students had occupied the buildings. When I returned 700 students had been arrested. (end of part 2)

1998 Interview About 1968 Columbia Student Revolt With Ex-Weatherman Leader Bernardine Dohrn--Part 1

(The following 1998 interview first appeared in the May 1998 issue of Z magazine. To see the current issue of Z magazine, you can check out its web site at

http://www.zmag.org/zmag ).


Thirty years ago [now 41 years ago] Columbia University was the scene of “The Battle Of Morningside Heights”—when [then-] 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). [And during the 1970s Dohrn was a leader of the Weather Underground.]

It’s now 30 years [currently 41 years] since New York City police were used to suppress the 1968 Columbia student revolt. Thinking back, what are your most vivid memories of that time?

Bernardine Dohrn [BD]: I remember the creative spirit of liberation and the moral force generated by Columbia students. Black and white students took action in solidarity with justice and freedom for others (in Vietnam and Harlem)—and by risking their own privileged futures, they forged meanings and discovered their own humanity. When several hundred students disrupted the status quo and defied their own upbringing by seizing university buildings, they uncovered a flood of creativity: daily wall newspapers, art posters, real learning in a crucible of activity, strike solidarity, legal defense strategies, freedom schools, unity with the Harlem community.

From this inventive rebellion would come activists of the women’s movement, the environmental struggle, Puerto Rican independence, labor, the gay liberation movement, Wounded Knee, struggles for the disabled, veterans, the elderly, health care, children, and a renewed peace movement.

Let me remind you of the context:

On January 5, 1968, Dr. Benjamin Spock and four other intellectuals were indicted for “conspiracy to aid, counsel, and abet” young men to violate the draft laws.

On January 30, the Tet Offensive began in Vietnam. The U.S. embassy in Saigon was overrun by Vietnamese liberation forces. In 36 cities of South Vietnam, there was a military uprising, ripping apart the illusion that the United States was on the verge of winning the war in Vietnam.

In the middle of January and continuing for 77 days, the Vietnamese surrounded the military outpost of Khe Sanh. The U.S. military made Khe Sanh the most heavily bombed target in the history of warfare for the next six months, until it was quietly abandoned.

On March 5, the Kerner Commission issued a report about the uprisings in Black communities across America, with the famous statement: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black and one white, separate and unequal.”

On March 15, the week’s casualty figures from Vietnam were 509 U.S. soldiers killed, 2,766 wounded. At that point, U.S. casualties in Southeast Asia—these numbers never included Southeast Asian casualties—surpassed the war in Korea.

The next day, Robert F. Kennedy announced that he was running for president. Also on March 16, although not yet known to the United States public, U.S. troops entered a hamlet called My Lai in the middle of the Mekong Delta. They reported to headquarters that they killed 128 “Viet Cong troops” and captured 3 weapons. My Lai was later exposed as a barbaric example of the nature of the war against an unarmed civilian population.

During the last week of March, a group called “the wise men” that President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) convened, composed of military and corporate leaders with whom he talked about the Vietnam war. The “wise men” told LBJ that the United States could not win in Vietnam, and they were concerned about the deep divisions in American society.

On the same day, SDS convened its National Council meeting in Lexington, Kentucky with 102 delegates. Primarily, we debated the question of support for the Black Liberation Movement.

Three days later, LBJ declared he would not run again. I don’t think it was tied to the SDS meeting. It was probably tied to the “wise men”’s determination that the U.S. could not win the war against Vietnam.

On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. There follows uprisings in 125 cities in the United States. Fifty-five thousand National Guard and federal troops are called out. Forty-six dead. Twenty thousand people arrested in that one week.

A week later, the worker/student strikes began in France. (end of part 1)

Would W.E.B. DuBois Have Supported Bail-Out Of Big Media Monopoly's Newspapers?

The newspaper subsidiaries of the Big Media Monopoly’s media conglomerates are no longer as super-profitable as they were before they had to compete for younger readers with non-profit bloggers and alternative journalists on the Internet; and before the current U.S. economic depression led to a decline in their super-profits from the sale of corporate advertising space.

So, predictably, some of the lobbyists for the White Corporate Male Power Structure’s media conglomerates have apparently been starting to lobby recently for some more tax breaks and public bail-out funds from local, state and federal government institutions for the Big Media Monopoly’s newspapers.

But it’s not likely that the now-deceased prominent 20th-century African-American intellectual, W.E.B. DuBois, would have wanted the tax money collected from U.S. working-class people to be used to bail-out the Big Media Monopoly’s newspaper industry. As early as 1955, for example, DuBois characterized the White Corporate Male Power Structure’s daily newspapers in the following way:

“Truth makes us free and lack of it enslaves us. Yet we have become accustomed to expect to have truth furnished us daily…at the hands of makers of clothes, cigarettes and toothpaste, who pay its main costs.

“When we slowly awake to the fact that much of the real news never reaches us, much is deliberately misinterpreted, we contemplate gathering our own news…”

DuBois had also asserted on July 29, 1953 that “the average New York Sunday paper is a vast bundle of pounds of advertisements enmeshed in a mass of propaganda and wrapped in a rag bag of entertainment, distraction and escapism…all calculated to make upon the reader the impression which the owners of this vast economic organization want made on the people of the U.S. and the world…”

(Downtown 11/9/94)

NYU's Historic Richard Nixon Connection

In his introduction to the 1974 book Big Brother and The Holding Company: The World Behind Watergate, Noam Chomsky asserted that “Richard Nixon is one of the major criminals of the 20th century, and the same is true of those who have designed and implemented the foreign policy of his administration;” and “it is plain that Nixon’s pleasant crew succeeded in stealing the 1972 election.”

In an essay, titled ‘Nixon and the Miami Connection”, which appeared in the same book, 1990s New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth also wrote that “from his smear campaigns in the late 1940s, to the secret slush fund that led to the Checkers speech in 1952, to the Hughes loan in 1960, to the $400,000 ITT scandal in 1972 to the Watergate break-in and the secret Republican war chest, Nixon’s ascendancy to power has been surrounded by the stigma of suspicion.”

Another essay in Big Brother and The Holding Company also described the now-deceased Nixon’s 1960s and 1970s connection to New York University’s board of trustees:

“Until 1963, Mudge, Stern, Baldwin & Todd was a stodgy old Wall Street law firm…One of its oldest clients was Warner-Lambert Pharmaceuticals, whose chairman, vitamin king Elmer Bobst, had a personal stake in finding a job for his old friend Richard Nixon…

“…Bobst…convinced the partners of Mudge, Stern, Baldwin & Todd that Nixon’s presence would bring in new clients…

“Nixon joined the firm in mid-1963 and on January 1, 1964, the name became Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander…

“Salmon Brothers has a pragmatic and self-serving interest in New York University. They made a `gift’ of $3 million to an education and research center relating to financial organizations…Other Mudge, Rose clients have an interest in New York University. Former chairman of Irving Trust, George A. Murphy is a trustee. Elmer Bobst, of Warner-Lambert, is not only a trustee, but also gave $11 million to New York University’s newly dedicated Elmer H. Bobst Library…”

(Downtown 5/11/94)

The FBI's Historical KKK Connections

The FBI apparently had a long history of being involved in the actions of U.S. right-wing groups like the Ku Klux Klan. As the 1992 book Spying On America: The FBI’s Counter-intelligence Program by James Kirkpatrick Davis revealed, by the end of 1965 the FBI “had more than 7,000 undercover informants in place and operating within the klaverns” and “undercover informants were used in 85 percent of Klan actions.” The same book also noted that “about 15 percent of the entire KKK” was composed of FBI “informants” and “about half” of the FBI informants “were elected to leadership positions” within the KKK in the 1960s. (Downtown 7/19/95)

Following the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, the Democratic Clinton Administration announced that it would hire yet another 1,000 FBI agents to “counter terrorism.” Yet as The True Story Of The Greensboro Massacre by Paul Bermanzohn and Sally Bermanzohn observed in 1980:

“The U.S. government has been using the Klan and other fascist groups for a long time. As far back as 1959 the FBI inserted Gary Rowe into the Alabama KKK. In the course of a 15-year terrorist career he instigated `many dozens’ of violent attacks, including a bloody assault on Birmingham freedom fighters in 1962, the church bombing murder of four schoolgirls and the murder of Viola Liuzzo. During the late 1960s, the FBI set up `more than 40’ all-informant Klan chapters in North Carolina alone.”

An FBI informant, Bill Wilkinson, apparently also set up the KKK’s Invisible Empire organization in 1980. As Blood In The Face by James Ridgeway recalled in 1990:

“In 1975 (David) Duke formed his own Knights of the Ku Klux Klan…

“In 1980, Duke ally, Bill Wilkinson, left the Knights to set up his own competing Invisible Empire…Wilkinson was able to persuade Duke to…sell the membership list of the Knights of the KKK for $35,000. Wilkinson secretly videotaped Duke making the deal. He then threatened to play the videotape for a Klan membership meeting. Soon thereafter, Duke quit the Klan…Klansmen later discovered that Wizard Wilkinson himself had been an FBI informer since 1974…”

Blood In The Face also pointed out that “an FBI informant was among the Klansmen who organized the 1961 attack on the Freedom Riders” during the Civil Rights Era, but “the FBI did nothing to stop the attack, and its silent complicity was not revealed until 14 years later.” (Downtown 5/17/95)

In the early 1970s, the FBI apparently also ordered one of its undercover agents to set up a terrorist bombing in Seattle. As Spying On America: The FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program by James Kirkpatrick Davis also noted in 1992:

“David Sannes, a special agent, served as the undercover liaison…in the Seattle area. He later testified that he was instructed by bureau counter-intelligence officials to develop a terrorist bombing operation, and to develop the explosives in such a way that they would misfire and kill those who were doing the bombings. In May 1972, after he had left the bureau, Sannes said that he had `decided to make what I had done public so that the people of the United States could be informed of what was going on.’”

(Downtown 6/14/95)

`Greensboro Massacre Song'

The Klan arrived
The cops moved aside
The sharpshooters aimed their guns
The FBI laughed
The Nazis attacked
And shed five workers’ blood.
Five fighters for freedom now lay dead
Slain in Greensboro, their deaths will be avenged.

Jim Waller
Was a doctor
Who always served the poor
And he also saw
That mill workers
Needed to wage class war.
He led a strike and workers chose him head
But those who owned the factories wished him dead.

And brave Cesar
Was a fighter
Inside Duke Hospital
He fought the Klan
With his bare hands
Until they mowed him down.
He saw that those who work are still enslaved
And for his thoughts, they sent him to an early grave.

And Mike Nathan
Carried no gun
Yet still helped Africa
He did not run
But helped the wounded
Till shot from the Klan car.
On his deathbed, the Party honored him
But those who sent his killers, they still grin.

And Bill Sampson
Did not give in
And fired in self-defense
And as he died
He said “keep on firing”
As the bullets took effect.
He also led a union at his plant
And was not afraid to be a communist.

And Sandy Smith
She knew racists
All wished to see her dead
She saved children
Then took a gun
To make sure the Nazis fled.
They shot her down like many women before
The government killed her, `cause she was a fighter.

To listen to "The Greensboro Massacre" protest folk song, you can click on the following music site link:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/More+Protest+Folk+Songs/The+Greensboro+Massacre

“The Greensboro Massacre” protest folk song was written nearly 30 years ago, shortly after five anti-racist left activists were murdered on November 3, 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina.

According to The True Story Of The Greensboro Massacre by Paul and Sally Bermanzohn:

“The U.S. Treasury Department Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms [BATF] had sent agent Bernard Butkovich to North Carolina to join the Nazis and oversee the assassination. On Nov. 3 [1979] he brought the list of who was to be shot and helped the killers escape. The caravan of Klan and Nazis were recruited and organized by Klansmen and FBI provocateur Edward Dawson. Dawson worked in league with the Greensboro Police Department. While Dawson led the caravan into our demonstration, Greensboro Police Detective Jerry Cooper followed them, deliberately delaying the arrival of any other cops.”

On Nov. 17, 1980 the Southern jury found the six Klansmen and Nazis indicted for murder, as a result of their apparent involvement in the Greensboro Massacre, to be “not guilty.” Coincidentally, African-Americans had not been allowed to serve on the jury. (Downtown 11/9/94)

To listen to some other protest folk songs, you can check out the “Columbia Songs for a Democratic Society” music site at the following link:

http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music


Additional protest folk songs from the 1970s and 1980s can be found at these other links:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman

and

http://www.mp3.com/artist/bobafeldman/songs/