JEFFREY HERF
249
ment or D4M, to consider possible courses of action. The meeting
began with a sober assessment of the political situation by a former
SDS leader from Columbia . According to him, the United States was
on the edge of going fascist. Perhaps six months were left for legal
publication ofleft-wing magazines and newspapers . Now, he said, it
was time to "prepare work in the country and in the city, to move
stuff from one to another." He was not trying to be histrionic or to
rouse his audience . He believed what he was saying. He ended by
looking vaguely in my direction and saying that "those of us who are
less well known [such as myself] will be able to go underground first,
while those of us who are more well known [meaning him] will be
forced to remain above ground for the time being."
I had finally had enough . I said this is where I get off. America
is not Weimar. 1970 is not 1933. You can do what you want but
without me . My friend, the future Hollywood executive, denounced
me again as a wimp who couldn't overcome a "nonstruggle attitude."
As far as I know, neither of the two male marchers ofD4M ever made
good on the rhetoric , but Sylvia Barildini , one of my good friends
from my student days in Madison, certainly did. I last saw her in
1970. In the seventies, rumors floated around about a furtive Sylvia
who belonged to strange groups . In 1983, I picked up
The New York
Times
to see that she had made good on the rhetoric of 1969. She'd
driven a getaway car during the Brinks robbery in Nyack, New York
when a policeman and a security guard were killed, and is now in
pnson.
It
became commonplace in the 1970s to bemoan the lack of
theory and anti-intellectualism of the late sixties. I drew a different
lesson . No one who was at all remotely familiar with the maelstrom
of 1968 to 1970 could say there was a lack of theory in the move–
ment. The atmosphere was laden with myths and abstractions, from
abstractions about the contradictions of imperialism and the nature
of a mythic working class, to mythic invocations of mythic heroes–
the Panthers , the Vietnamese people, etcetera. Certainly the "theory"
was wrong, crude and destructive, but political ideologies usually
are. The ideas of 1968 to 1970 were coherent, closed systems which
promised their adherents that they would be on the right side of His–
tory , that the Dialectic would move in the direction they desired, and
that the Contradictions of Imperialism would aid the moral aspira–
tions of their members. In a period of great confusion - and the late
sixties were if nothing else confusing - such simplicity, clarity, and
discipline were very appealing for many people, including many
