Graying radicals are facing new ire in America
Recent arrests in the 27-year-old SLA robbery are raising concerns for other ex-
activists.
1.28.02 John Johnson & Geoffrey Mohan LATimes
Their hair is thinner and their girth broader. Their lifestyles tend more to the minivan and gardening than to any
utopian fantasies favoring the overthrow of what they used to call Amerika. Oh, and there's one more thing the
graying lions of the radical left share in the aftermath of 9.11.01 and the arrests of four
former members of the bumbling, trigger-happy Symbionese Liberation Army: a growing disquiet that it could be
open season on countercultural figures of the Vietnam era, whether they were involved in serious crimes or not.
The long-buried divisions that tore at society 30 years ago, they fear, are resurfacing. "At what point do they say,
'We better start rounding up the old activists?'" worried John Buttny, 63, a onetime member of the Weathermen
organization, who now lives outside Santa Barbara and works for a member of that county's Board of Supervisors.
Since the terror attacks, Buttny's old FBI file has been circulated by political enemies to the local media. "I have
often remarked to friends that the '60s were nowhere near this repressive," said Buttny. He now recalls almost
fondly how, as a young radical in Boulder, Colo., he used to joke with FBI agents when they came to buy his left-
wing literature.
Karl Armstrong, who spent 8 years behind bars for blowing up a U.S. Army research building in 1970 at the Univ. of
Wisconsin, killing a researcher, is now facing a boycott of his sandwich shop, Radical Rye, in Madison. "I thought it
was unfair," he said of the boycott called by a conservative radio talk-show host. "But I figure it's all just part of the
karma." And then there's Weathermen stalwart Bill Ayers, who admits in his new book, "Fugitive Days," to playing a
role in blowing up a restroom at the Pentagon in 1972. Ayers, who is married to former radical Bernardine Dohrn,
canceled his book tour after 9.11.01 and issued a statement defending the work as "a condemnation of terrorism in
all its forms." "It would be preposterous," said Ayers, an Univ. of Illinois at Chicago education professor , "to use
[the book] now to suggest that any of the Vietnam-era protesters would endorse acts of terrorism such as those we
witnessed."
Dohrn, once dubbed by J. Edgar Hoover "la pasionara of the lunatic left," has been the focus of a protest by alumni
at Northwestern Univ., where she teaches law. Some have threatened to withhold financial support if she isn't
removed. Law school dean David Van Zandt has so far stood behind her, saying she has expressed an
"abhorrence for violence." Some of the old radicals say they can't understand the arrest of the SLA members last
week, all these years later, unless there is a political agenda attached. "I assume [authorities] didn't prosecute
before because they didn't have a case," said Marshall Berzon, once part of a Weathermen collective in Boston
that was arrested en masse and accused of shooting up the Cambridge, MA police station 3 decades ago. "There
is a significant segment of the population today that lumps people like William & Emily Harris in with John
Walker [Lindh] and Osama bin Laden."
Fellow activist Mark Rudd, accused by the FBI of leading the riots at Columbia University in 1968 and who spent
seven years underground, said he is confused by the SLA arrests these many years later. "They were living openly,
right?" said Rudd, who now teaches at a community college in New Mexico. Prosecutors say there is nothing
suspicious about the arrests now. They say the investigation of Sara Jane Olson in connection with a plot to blow
up Los Angeles police cars provided new evidence on the 1975 Carmichael bank robbery. However it came about,
Rudd is right. William & Emily Harris were not hiding in some bunker or donning sunglasses when they went to
the market. Hoping their radical pasts had receded in the cultural rearview mirror, along with the mod shirt and
white man's Afro that William Harris once sported, they had settled into numbingly normal lives.
Emily Harris, now known as Emily Montague, lived on a quiet street in Altadena and worked as a computer analyst.
Her former husband has worked as a private detective in San Francisco and at times as an investigator for the
district attorney's office. He was driving his two sons to school when he was arrested for a robbery that netted
$15,000 and took the life of Myrna Opsahl, who had been depositing church receipts during the 1975 robbery.
Fellow defendant Michael Bortin has owned a hardwood flooring business in Portland OR, for 20 years. His sister-
in-law, Olson, married a doctor and lived as a Midwestern housewife while on the lam for more than 2 decades.
Olson, who was sentenced Jan. 18 to 20 years to life for her role in the police car bomb plot, will also face murder
charges in connection with Opsahl's death.
Even though Patricia Hearst wrote a book implicating the 4 defendants in the robbery, 3 Sacramento County district
attorneys felt there was not enough evidence to file charges. But after 9.11.01, some say, things changed. "The
difference is being attacked in your own country changes everything," said Buttny, a founder of the Students for a
Democratic Society chapter in Boulder. "I feel absolutely helpless," he said. "There is a huge fishing expedition
going on." Buttny attended the 1969 Flint, Mich., "War Council" that led members of the Weathermen group to go
into hiding. They later resurfaced as the bomb-making Weather Underground. Buttny said he dropped out of radical
politics after being arrested 15 times during demonstrations. The next arrest, he felt, would bring a long prison
sentence. "One of our slogans," he said, "was to bring the war home. By that we meant agitating to stop the
Vietnam War. As soon as I saw [the attacks on the World Trade Center] that phrase popped into my mind."
If Osama bin Laden brought war to America, Buttny thinks he is suffering the collateral damage. He is a deputy to
Santa Barbara County Supervisor Gail Marshall, who is now embroiled in a recall movement launched by people
questioning her and Buttny's patriotism. Critics accuse her of opposing a salute to the flag at a community meeting,
which she denies. As the war of words escalated in Santa Barbara County, Buttny's old FBI file surfaced. It said
Buttny trained in guerrilla warfare methods abroad with the goal of infiltrating govt. He denies planning to overthrow
the govt, but he admits he once liked to joke that he'd accomplished his secret mission by going to work for the
county. He's not laughing any more. "I find myself with e-mails and phone calls being careful" what he says. "I don't
joke about something that might be taken the wrong way."
Measured against 9.11.01, some of the violence in the late '60s & early '70s seems almost quaint, but at the
time, the bombing of a restroom at the Pentagon shocked "Laugh In"-era America. Violence peaked with an
explosion at a Weather Underground bomb factory in New York in 1970, which killed 3 members of the group. "I
was in Cuba when the townhouse blew up," said Berzon, who now lives in the Berkeley Hills and has an 11-year-
old son. "That changed everything. We realized this is real." Although the Weather Underground never killed
anyone but its own members with its bombs, that wasn't true the same year in Madison, where the Army
Mathematics Research Center was bombed. A man working inside was killed. "We felt really bad about someone
dying and we were never able to reconcile it," said Armstrong, who was not affiliated with the more well-known
radical groups. "It was the farthest thing from our minds. We knew even if anyone got hurt in the bombing it would
be politically counterproductive."
The SLA burst into prominence 3 years later, with the murder of Oakland school Supt. Marcus Foster and the
kidnapping of newspaper heiress Hearst, who morphed into the gun-toting, beret-wearing Tania. In her 1982 book,
"Every Secret Thing," Hearst described the Carmichael robbery, during which, she said, Olson, then Kathleen
Soliah, emptied the tills while Emily Harris stood guard and William Harris waited outside. Opsahl was killed when,
Hearst said, Emily Harris' shotgun went off accidentally. "She was a bourgeois pig anyway," Emily Harris reportedly
said. 6 members of the SLA, including its leader, Donald DeFreeze, died in a spectacular firefight in Los Angeles in
1974. After leaving prison, Armstrong reclaimed a semblance of a normal life in 1980, and these days tends his
shop, as well as a performance space above his Madison eatery. Called Che's Lounge, it is named for Che
Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary, who is still among his cultural heroes, Armstrong said. "It's the last thing I
thought I'd be doing," Armstrong, 55, said by phone from his shop, where customers and employees interrupted,
and the sounds of soft reggae wafted in the background. "When you run a small business, you develop a
storekeeper's mentality. You have a different set of concerns. Now, I have to fire people. In a restaurant, if I catch
someone with drugs, they're out the door. I'm personally opposed to the whole war on drugs, but running a
business is a whole different shtick."
All the Madison bombers had lived as fugitives for several years, but only one, Leo Burt, remains at large. Sightings
of him have become folklore. Friends of Burt from that era, including Armstrong, declined to talk about him. "First of
all, I don't know where he is and I wouldn't want to know where he is," said Armstrong. "And if I did find out, I
wouldn't tell." As for other notable extremists, 2 other SLA members, Russell Little & Joseph Remiro, were
arrested in connection with the Foster slaying. Remiro remains in prison; Little was retried & acquitted. San
Francisco attorney Stuart Hanlon said Little works as a teacher outside California and has "a wonderful life."
Hanlon refused to say where he is.
Berzon said it will be hard for a contemporary jury to understand the context of these decades-old crimes. "The
legal system doesn't recognize political crimes. I think it should be recognized that however misguided [SLA
members were], they were acting out of a deep sense of wanting to do something good. Although the same thing
could be said for bin Laden, couldn't it?" After being cleared of the Cambridge shooting, which he called a police
setup, and his return from Cuba, Berzon dropped out of the movement. Today, he's not politically active, which he considers a personal failure. "Family life is hard enough," he said.
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Born in Hamakua Poko on the island of Maui and raised by Nisei ( 2nd generation Japanese American) parents, Mink won her first election in her high school junior year, becoming student body president.
Mink overcame great anger from most of student body which hated anything Japanese-oriented since, months before, Honolulu had been attacked by the Japanese.
The only female ever having shown ambition for student office in the school's history, Mink orchestrated a strategy of impressing the various cliques on campus including the popular football team.
She transferred to the Univ. of Nebraska where long standing university racial segregation policy forced students of color to live in the same dormitories apart from the whites. Angered Mink organized & created coalition of students, parents, administrators, employees, alumni, sponsoring businesses and corporations and ended the university's segregation policies.
Despite dual Univ. of Hawaii bachelor's degrees in zoology & chemistry, none of 20 medical schools to which she applied in 1948 would accept women. Disappointed Mink decided best way to force medical schools to accept women would be through judicial process. Mink decided to go to law school.
Univ. of Chicago Law School policy against accepting women aside, the admissions committee thought Patsy a proper man's name. They only found out she was a woman when she arrived in Chicago. Mink obtained her doctorate of jurisprudence in 1951. She was became first woman in Hawaii to practice law.
She was first non-white woman to serve in Congress and authored Title IX Amendment of the Higher Education Act. Her ability to build effective coalitions was her trademark accomplishment on House floor.
After losing Senate race, Jimmy Carter appointed Mink to cabinet as Asst Sec. of State alongside Cyrus Vance, Edmund Muskie, and NatSec Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.
In 1990, voters sent Patsy Mink back to Congress representing 2nd Dist. (Rural O'ahu, Neighbor Islands). In a strong, stirring voice that had become her trademark, Mink said Democrats have never waivered from the fundamental party idea of using "the force of govt for the good of all"
incl. constituents such as taro farmers in Kipahulu, Maui, about as remote a place as there is in Hawai‘i, who asked Patsy to come and see their problem personally, and she did, donning boots and walking through their lo‘i; and the pig hunter in Waimea on the Big Island; he was concerned that she understand an issue and the only way, he thought, was to show her the issue up in the forest; she went.
In the last decade of her political leadership, Patsy Mink was a vigorous advocate on behalf of poor families. Faced with the bi-partisan tidal wave that pounded poor women, insisting that they "get to work," Mink worked tirelessly to promote policies that truly addressed the realities of poverty and last year garnered substantial support in the House of Representatives for her legislation to provide additional education and skills that would support true self-sufficiency.
Happa daughter Gwendolyn is professor of women's studies at Smith College.
In 2002 Mink was hospitalized in Honolulu with complications from chicken pox. Her condition steadily worsened. 9.28.02 Mink died in Honolulu of viral pneumonia at age 74.
Mink won her re-election to U.S. Congress after her death. For significant contributions towards equal rights, Congress commissioned likeness of her image to forever look down upon those who tread through the halls of the U.S. Capitol.
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re Patsy Takemoto Mink elegy
[ Like MLK, she effectively switched
from biological discrimination
(gender rather than race)
to class discrimination aka poor folks,
so they shut her up,
only with a germ instead
of a Manchurian patsy's bullet.
Senior citizens do not get chicken pox in the U.S., fundamentally a juvenile disease. ]
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