Recommended

Invaluable in this film is the original footage accompanying a mostly true telling of events, somewhat non-chronological. Like many presentations of youth during the Nixon years the participants-interviewees glom onto an event or a group to use as a stepping stone to go to another issue or time in one particular life.

ONE PROBLEM, NOT ALL EVENTS ARE IN THE FILM.

The Weatherman did not usurp SDS. They split, as well as groups could in 1969. SDSers said of their departing members: “You don’t have to be a weatherman to know who the assholes are.” Next, significant structural changes affecting young American men happened. The first Draft-Lottery was in December 1969. About 40 percent of young men were excluded from being drafted at that time. For the remainder there were ways and means to avoid being drafted. Moreover, after the draft-lottery, Cambodia (six months later) and the bombing of the math building at the U of Wisconsin (eight months later), campus opposition to the Vietnam War was much reduced (save the bombing of Haiphong/Hanoi in the Spring 1972 – also omitted from the film).

The Women’s Movements preceded the 1969 split of the Weathermen from SDS. The Woman Movements gained steam in 1967 after the SDS convention; they gained notoriety (burning bras) in August 1968. The film indicates a later birth of the Women Movements. Likewise, the Black Panthers were not allies of the Weathermen, and Kathleen Cleaver was not a spokeswomen for either. She was the wife of Eldridge Cleaver, but Cleaver had a split with fellow Panther leaders. The Panther/Weatherman disconnection should have been made more apparent.

As people went underground, distancing themselves and losing communication with one another, the film implies tactics of the authorities (like COINTELPRO) were responsible. No one says the obvious, the Weathermen were a marginal group doomed to failure; their numbers were so few that no one knew who they were. Plus people on the Left, including the Weathermen, were not the most likable human beings to outsiders or to one another. From the film one conclusion is obvious: No one builds a political/social movement by being disagreeable.

This last point may be wrong. There are striking similarities between the Weather Underground and the far-right, gun totting forces today, including personal appearance: All men (if they have hair) is longish; they are decorated with jewelry and/or tattoos; many have beards; they appear dirty, or at least unwashed. Americans should be reminded of George Wallace’s four- letter words for such derelicts: Soap and work.