***Carry It On-With Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep In Mind-Take Two

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

A while back, maybe a few months ago now, I watched (and reviewed) a 2012 film starring Robert Redford, Julie Christie, Nick Nolte and about a million other faces that started their film careers in the 1960s or thereabouts entitled The Company You Keep. The film dealt in Hollywood style, although that treatment should not cause one to dismiss the film out of hand, with the question of what happened to those idealistic students and other young radicals (they were not all students, no question, as the social base of the Black Panthers and supporters of the Ohio Seven attest to) who went to the extremes in order to right the wrongs of this American behemoth. Of course that is really the question of the Weather Underground and what happened to those who though they were in the immediate term building a “second front” in aid of the Vietnamese Revolution and more distantly trying to build a new society here “in the heart of the beast.” The film was probably motivated in part by the continuing drama up until recent years of those “fugitives” who went underground when that establishment that was being fought tooth and nail decided to seriously fight back, to defend to the death it prerogatives surfacing to take whatever punishment (or not as in the cases of Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn) or who were “captured” by some law enforcement agency.

Many of us from the generation of ’68, the generation, or part of it and I like to think the best part of it, that tried to turn the world upside down in the turbulent 1960s when all hell broke loose in this country around lots of stuff, war, civil and human rights, the free expression of one’s self and took a bad beating for it have spent some time recently cutting up old touches about the old days. Much to the amazement, or maybe better, the total incomprehensibly of the two generations that have come after. So a lot of that reminiscing really is geared toward ourselves out in our little cafes and other gathering spots and our “new found” wisdom about all the mistakes that we made back in the day.

Chief among them were the sense that we, and here I mean those of us who were students at the time, could face down the “monster” by ourselves without some more socially significant force on our side. As the students in Paris learned in 1968 students can jump start things but if you want to bring down the old regime having working people at your back is the beginning of wisdom (what happens then, what happens if they don’t, won’t or can’t go all the way is a separate question). Also we very seriously underestimated both the actual strength we had (students then and even now are a diverse lot and let us say at South Dakota State then were not as radical as U/Cal-Berkeley students, although some of them were getting there. But most critical was the total misunderstanding of the “blow-back” the establishment was ready to mete out to its own (after all a significant number of radicals were sons and daughters of that establishment) and others. We thought that stuff was only for the Vietnamese, American blacks and uppity third world former colonial countries. The clearest single example of the blow-back that I remember was May Day 1971 when we tried to inadequate forces and under some strange notion that they were going to let us do it to close down the government in Washington if it did not stop the war. Many thousands of arrests and abject defeat is all we got for our efforts.      

In those reminisces we rightly talk about how we had done this or that thing differently then maybe we would not have had to spent the last forty or so years fighting a fierce rearguard cultural war to defend the few gains we did make and defend our honor against those who sat on their hands then waiting for the sea change to change again (all those neo-cons, those guys who populated the Reagan, Bush 1 and 2 and the wonkish Clinton administrations).

While the film was characterized as a fictional thriller in the review blurbs because it takes the 1960s political turmoil and its residual aftermath as it subject matter there are some serious observations that can be made almost despite the film.

If as the late journalist David Halberstam opined in his book, The Best and The Brightest, the best and the brightest of the generation of ‘68s parents spent their post-World War II creating a secure cocoon against the ravishes of the red scare Cold War 1950s night their best and brightest children spent their time trying to turn that created world upside up. There is no question, at least no question now, that the huge social and political questions that started the 1960s with the rise of the black liberation struggle and its earnest We Shall Overcome optimism once the established order began its blowback over Vietnam, American foreign policy in general, and its right to order its society for the benefit of a few would come crashing down with a version of armed struggle by the end. That is how tense, that is how stretched the social fabric in this country was by then.

And that change from soft reformism-“work within the system because we are dealing with rational opponents” and with enough pressure they will see the light, or at least the justice of what we are fighting for, to essentially building an armed “second front” in the worldwide struggle against the beast, mainly the American beast, by the end of the decade is what drove the action that the characters in this film in were driven to. Actions, including bombing of governmental targets that later degenerated into off-hand bank robberies once the sea-change set in to finance revolutionary activities. And the number one group, the number one group of white radicals, although not the only group, associated   with those types of actions were the Weatherman (and their subsequent monikers Weather People, Underground, etc. but we will stick with that designation for convenience).     

For those, like this writer and many other of his generation, the relentless bombing and killing fields of Vietnam and other locales in Southeast Asia by the American government against our vehement but unheeded protest drove us up the wall, drove us to thoughts of more militant actions. It is hard now to tell the young just how bad that was, the closest they could see in their lifetimes were the short momentary protest actions just before the beginning of the second Iraq war. Multiple that by almost a decade of mass youth uprising and you begin to get a sense that something more was needed that never-ending street protests (although that strategy had it advocates until the end-until the North Vietnamese/NLF forces sent the American beast and its South Vietnamese allies running for the helicopters in 1975). And so some of those very people who started out their political careers driven by sweet reason in say the early civil rights struggle down south or the nuclear disarmament movement, were driven to more drastic actions.

In the story line here (based somewhat on real actions that did occur in the 1970s and 1980s as the world that the Weathermen tried to turn upside down turned back again and those who had become “outlaws” became fewer and degenerated into isolated fugitives) Nick (played by an aging, very aging Robert Redford) who has been underground as a lawyer (using the alias Jim Grant) for thirty years has to confront his past as a participant in a bank robbery where a guard was killed. That confrontation was ignited when one underground fugitive Sharon (played by an aging, very aging Susan Sarandon) decided to turn herself in and the FBI went wild to clear its old file of ex-most wanted white radicals. The problem was that Jim really was not involved in the robbery (some righteous bonds of social solidarity and a love interest kept him from being a ‘snitch” inmy old neighborhood the worse sort of heel), had long ago personally renounced his radical past and if you can believe this now had motherless eleven-year old daughter who was clueless about his past and whom he wished to protect at all costs.

So he needed to get to Mimi (played by an aging, very aging Julie Christie, leaving me sighing for Doctor Zhivago days) who was knee-deep in the robbery, who could clear him, but who has kept the radical faith (and who in a sweet twist of fate had a child with Nick when they were on the run which they put up for adoption and has a role in the plot). So most of the film is about our boy Nick, still a resourceful underground operative, eluding said “Feds” (with help from his old pal Donal, played by a youthful, very youthful Nick Nolte. Not really but I was getting kind of depressed saying “aging, very aging.”) finally confronting Mimi and after a lot of talk he/she finally turn themselves in for the sake of- that eleven year old. Yeah, that part is pure Hollywood.              

What is not pure Hollywood was/is the way that the various Weathermen-type organizations (one thinks also of the Ohio 7 and some black liberation groups split off from the demise of the Black Panthers) have been portrayed. Here a little sympathically through an eager-beaver young reporter desperate to make a name for himself as a journalist, Ben (played by a truthfully very young Shia LeBeouf), although all the way around the use of violence is roundly condemned. In the real world of political struggle in the late 1960s and early 1970s many, including many on the left condemned the Weathermen strategy of “building the second front (in aid of the Vietnamese and third world struggle under the political influence of Franz Fanon and his classic Wretched Of The Earth)” and “bringing the war” home out of hand.

Would moreover, and this was an act of truth political cowardice by some of those who now write for the major establishment publications, sit in the groves of academia or work like beavers for corporate America, not defend the Weathermen against the governmental onslaught that came raining down on them (although most had no problem justifying the same kinds of political actions by the Panthers and other black radicals, so go figure).  I disagreed with their strategy, saw that there random and isolated actions without trying to build a mass base had nowhere to go (although like I said I too was absolutely frustrated with our inability to take the government down most notably as I mentioned previously when I was involved in May Day 1971 when we tried to shut down the federal government on in streets of Washington, D.C. and took nothing but tens of thousands of arrests for our troubles). I did however defend the Weathermen against much resistance from radicals I was working with at the time.

And watching this film brought back that same emotion. As I wrote one time when reviewing a memoir by Bill Ayers one of the leading Weathermen when he was asked if he was sorry for his actions back in the day- I said he/they had nothing to be sorry for against a government that was raining hell and damnation upon many of the peoples of the world as a matter of conscious daily policy. Yeah, that still sounds about right.