1968 - Mark Kurlansky [208]
In Mark Rudd’s assessment, “The Europeans were too pretentious, too intellectual. They only wanted to talk. It was more talk. People made speeches, but I realized nothing would happen.”
Rudd had no doubt that he was at a historic moment, that a revolution was slowly unfolding and his job was to help it along. A bit of Che—“The first duty of a revolutionary is to make a revolution”—mixed with the notion called “bringing the war home” and the theory of exemplary action, and in June 1969 he came up with the Weathermen, a violent underground guerrilla group named after the Bob Dylan lyrics “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” In March 1970 they changed their name to the Weather Underground because they realized that the original name was sexist. In hindsight, it seems evident that a guerrilla group started by middle-class men and women who name their group from a Bob Dylan song will likely be their own worst enemies. Their only victims were three of their own, who blew themselves up making bombs in a house in Greenwich Village. But others turned to violence as well. The government was violent. The police were violent. The times were violent and revolution was so close. David Gilbert, who had first knocked on Rudd’s dormitory door to recruit him for SDS, continued after the mid-1970s when the Weather Underground dissolved and more than twenty years later was still in prison for his part in a fatal 1981 shootout. Many 1968 student radicals became 1970s underground guerrilla fighters in Mexico, Central America, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy.
Politics sometimes has longer tentacles than imagined. That fateful first day of spring when Rockefeller collapsed the earth from under the liberal wing of the Republican Party unleashed a chain of events that the United States has been living with ever since. A new kind of Republican was born in 1968. That became clear at the end of June, when President Johnson appointed Justice Abe Fortas to succeed Earl Warren as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Warren had resigned before the close of the Johnson administration because he believed Nixon would win and he did not want to see his seat taken over by a Nixon appointee. Fortas was a predictable choice, a friend of Johnson, who had appointed him to replace Arthur Goldberg three years earlier. Fortas had distinguished himself as a leader of the liberal activist judges who had characterized the Court since the mid-1950s. Although he was the fifth Jewish justice on the Court, he would have been the first Jewish chief justice.
At the time, the Senate rarely battled over Court appointments. Both Republican and Democratic senators recognized the right of the president to have his choice. In fact, there had not been a battle since John J. Parker, Herbert Hoover’s appointee, was rejected by two votes in 1930.
But when Fortas was named there was an immediate outcry of “cronyism.” Fortas was a long-standing friend and adviser to the president, but he was also eminently qualified. The charge of cronyism was more effective against Johnson’s other appointment to take Fortas’s seat, Homer Thornberry. Thornberry was an old friend of Johnson, who had advised him not to accept the vice presidential nomination and then changed his mind and was at Johnson’s side when he was sworn in as president after John Kennedy’s death. A congressman for fourteen years, he became an undistinguished circuit court judge. He had been a segregationist until Johnson came to power