Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [79]
Consider the complete absorption of Weathermen member Kathy Boudin into the liberal elite of this country.
Truly psychotic radical behavior was the only thing Kathy Boudin had left to impress her father when she couldn’t get into a top-notch law school. As described by Susan Braudy in her book Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left, poor Kathy had terrible board scores. First, she couldn’t get into Oberlin, then she couldn’t get into Yale Law.12 She was terrified of “losing her place as [her father] Leonard’s most cherished offspring.”13
Her brother Michael, the Republican, had nearly perfect board scores and would go on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard, attend Harvard Law School—where he was president of the Law Review back when it meant something—and work for the Reagan administration. Today, he is a federal appeals court judge, appointed by the first President Bush.
The only path Kathy had to impress her radical lawyer father was to be more insane than he. It wouldn’t be easy. Boudin père was a member of a communist front group, the National Lawyers Guild, and had represented Fidel Castro and Soviet spies Judith Coplon and Alger Hiss, as well as Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, among other left-wing celebrities. When passing through customs at Logan Airport after arriving from London, Boudin grandly announced to the nonplussed Customs official, “I am the lawyer for the revolutionary government of Cuba. My destination is my office at Harvard Law School.”14
Leonard and his wife Jean relished inviting celebrities to their home for dinner, where they showily displayed tchotchkes from their radical fame, such as Kathy’s motorcycle helmet from her participation in the Days of Rage in Chicago. Jean Boudin’s “pride in her aristocratic position on the left,” Braudy writes, made her “the match of any Palm Beach hostess.”15
Kathy called her branch of the Weathermen “the Fork” in honor of the Manson family’s murder of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca. Manson’s followers had defiled the bodies, most famously by leaving a two-tined carving fork protruding from Mr. LaBianca’s gut. This charming scene was first commemorated by Boudin’s fellow Weatherman Bernardine Dohrn, who gave the “fork” salute at a rally, saying, “Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!”
These are the people who became respected advisers to a Democratic president.
The Weathermen predicted that 20,000 students would show up at their Days of Rage protest of the Chicago 7 trial in October 1969, an imitation of the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago the year before. Planning for war in the streets, they did push-ups and practiced street fighting in public parks to prove they weren’t “hippie faggots associated with SDS.”16
The Weathermen were too psychotic even for the Black Panthers, who denounced the Days of Rage in a beautiful statement from Fred Hampton saying, “We oppose the anarchistic, adventuristic, chauvinistic, individualistic, masochistic, Custeristic Weathermen.”17 The Black Panthers may not have been the Girl Scouts, but they were not insane. While liberal elites enjoyed the constant tumult, most blacks did not; they just wanted the crime to stop. In 1968, the NAACP’s Harlem branch was calling for mandatory five-year sentences against muggers, minimum ten-year sentences for drug pushers, and thirty-year sentences for first-degree murderers.18
In the event, no more than a few hundred wastrels showed up, prepared for battle with the police by wearing helmets and fatigues and carrying poles and baseball bats. Flying the Vietcong flag, they called themselves the “Americong.” They started a bonfire with park benches and blew up a statue of a policeman by placing a bomb between its legs. The explosion was so huge it blew out nearly a hundred windows in surrounding buildings. Then the Weathermen ran into the streets, smashing cars and storefront windows, throwing rocks, and swinging their bats at cops. Approximately