160 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographyadded.) In fact, the control mechanism for the Weathermen ran through the foundations rather than
through the FBI, for obvious reasons.
These same themes are developed in Rudd’s retrospective analysis of how the proto-fascist
Weatherman provocateurs succeeded in destroying SDS, which had been growing rapidly until the
crazies seized control of the Chicago National Office in June and July of 1969: ‘Students for a
Democratic Society had been growing almost effortlessly since 1965 when the U.S. attacked
Vietnam with ground troops. By 1968 there were over 300 autonomous chapters on college
campuses, high schools, and even post-college; the number of active members may have been more
than 100,000 (though dues-paying national membership was much smaller). The story of what
happened became known as The Days of Rage has been told elsewhere, including the 2003
documentary, “The Weather Underground.” What’s significant for this story, though, is that the
SDS chapters rejected en masse support for the action. Most chapters had been independent, neither
PL nor RYM, and didn’t participate in or even understand the argument. The effect of the split at
the June Convention was to cut them off from the National Office. We in what became known as
Weatherman had lost our base. But we kept going without one. The effect on SDS as a whole was
disaster. By the beginning of 1970 the national organization had ceased to exist. We in the
Weatherman leadership had made a decision that SDS wasn’t radical enough, that it was an
impediment to the building of a revolutionary movement in this country. We needed an
underground guerilla army to begin the revolutionary armed struggle. So we disbanded the National
and Regional Offices, dissolved the national organization, and set the chapters adrift. Many chapters
kept organizing, in their own ways, against the war and racism; demoralized, others disbanded. We
couldn’t have done the FBI’s work better for them had we been paid agents, which I know we
weren’t. [Maybe not of the FBI, but how about the foundations?] We were just stupid kids too in
love with our ideas to realize they weren’t real. We believed they were real because we thought
them... My recall is that my comrades and I in the leadership of Weatherman made specific bad
decisions based on our evolving and deepening ideology toward the chimera of revolution and the
strategy revolutionary guerilla warfare. One thinks of the roads not taken. We could have chosen to
fight to maintain the organization, to strengthen its anti-imperialism and anti-racism among
students, to build the largest possible coalition against the war. Perhaps we could have ended the
war sooner, who knows?’^52 Rudd is certainly right that without the efforts of the Weatherman
wreckers and saboteurs, the Vietnam War might have been brought to an end much sooner, and
other positive causes could have been advanced on the domestic front. But of course, the
Weatherman domestic program was nothing but race war. Rudd’s commentary on youthful
fanatics, not far removed from their delusions of infantile omnipotence, who hysterically insist that
their egocentric ideas must be real simply because they are thinking them gives us some insight into
the mentality of Obama’s swarming adolescents today. Perhaps someday, when the US and
foundation archives are opened, we will be able to reconstruct the story of how the intelligence
agencies destroyed SDS; we can be sure that an especially lurid chapter in this tale will feature the
activities of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
THE URGENCY OF COUNTERINSURGENCY, 1986-1988:
ADLAI STEVENSON’S DEBACLE, AXELROD, AND THE 1313 GANG
The beginning of Obama’s career with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge under the sponsorship
of Thomas Ayers and Bill Ayers takes us back to a moment when the bi-partisan, financier-
controlled social control apparatus ruling Chicago appeared to be undergoing definite strain and
possible crisis. In the Illinois Democratic primary of March 18, 1986, the corrupt Chicago