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my own ideas and decisions led me close to the center of this maelstrom.
I came away from it with a deep sense of my own fallibility (something
that I think is indispensable for a democratic political culture) and con–
cluded over a number of years that I had to rethink my beliefs. In time I
returned to a chastened and sobered version of the liberalism that I
brought to SDS in 1965.
The depth of these memories and the lessons I drew from the late
1960s gave my return to scholarship and to liberal values a special urgency
and intensity. I and many others learned again that guilt, self-hatred, anti–
intellectualism, celebration of violence, and crudity of speech and thought
would never change any society for the better. I had seen that in confusing
times, totalitarian ideologies with their claim of truth grasped by a self–
appointed vanguard had a powerful appeal upon previously sensible people,
and that the ability of ideology to interpret events is a powerful political
force--and not simply a tool of prior interests. This conviction has pro–
foundly influenced my thinking about twentieth-century German and
European history. He or she who arrives on the scene with ready-made
answers to complex questions, who speaks with an air of absolute certain–
ty, who knows that history is on his or her side--in short the ideological
fanatic and demagogue-has a great advantage over the great majority of
us who see shades of gray, a bi t of thi s and a bi t of that, meri t in one's own
arguments but also at times in those of the opponent.
Most of my friends made it through all right, but not all. Bob Starobin
committed suicide with a shotgun in early 1971, a week before I was plan–
ning to visit him near Binghamton, New York. Sylvia Baraldini, a friend
from Madison days, kept going deeper into the radical underground in the
1970s, ending in her participation in the Brinks bank robbery in Nyack,
New York in 1981 in which several policemen were killed. She is still in
prison. Mark Rosenberg twice denounced my "non-struggle attitude," the
second time when we were working on Panther defense in New York. But
he stayed in Weatherman only a few months. In 1972 he moved to
Hollywood where he joined leftist circles and became a spectacularly suc–
cessful and very wealthy agent and then movie producer at Warner
Brothers where he produced The
Fabulous Baker Boys.
I las t saw him in
1970. In Hollywood, he was apparently living life in a very fast lane and
died of a heart attack about five years ago. The rest of us survived and got
on with our lives. For me, that meant understanding how all that could
have happened, how I got so close to it all, and doing what I could as a
scholar to sustain liberal values while preventing another relapse into total–
itarian politics in this country.
No matter how hard I try, I cannot separate the good from the bad in
my memories of 1968 and the New Left. They remain a source of pride as
