Who is Mark Rudd?

(A biographical profile for those who don’t know the difference

between M.R. and Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin,

besides the fact that he’s alive and they’re not).

(July, 2005)

Mark Rudd was a leader of the 1968 Columbia University strike against the Vietnam War and racism, the last National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the largest radical student organization in the country in 1969, and a founder of the Weather Underground, a revolutionary guerilla group in the seventies. He was a federal fugitive for seven and a half years, until 1977. He is currently an activist and teacher in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Mark was born on June 2, 1947 in Irvington, N.J. He is the son of Lt. Col. Jacob S. Rudd (deceased) and Bertha Rudd (93 years old in 2005). His only brother, David R. Rudd, eight years older than Mark, is a retired attorney. Their father, Jacob, was born in Poland and emigrated with his parents in 1917, at the age of seven. Their mother, Bertha, was born in this country, though her parents had just arrived from Lithuania. Mark’s parents and grandparents were part of the great wave of approximately two million Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who came to America from 1880 to 1920. Both his parents were raised in the immigrant community in Elizabeth, N.J., speaking Yiddish within the family. Bertha’s father was first a peddler with a horse and cart, then ran a series of failing dry goods stores. Jake’s father was a tailor; his mother sold dresses to Polish immigrant women. All their lives they were grateful to this country for having allowed them to escape Europe. [See piece on grandparents]

Mark’s parents came of age during the Great Depression. Bertha Bass (her maiden name) graduated high school in 1930 and went to work as a secretary for three lawyers, earning $5 per week to help support her family. Jacob Rudnitsky (name changed to Rudd in 1954) attended Rutgers University on a scholarship, the first member of his family to attend college. Not able to find a job as an electrical engineer when he graduated in 1932, he went into the U.S. Army as a reserve officer and was assigned to the Civilian Conservation Corps, which was run by the Army. High school sweethearts just married, Bertha joined Jake at his assignments in Florida and Utah, a revelation for the two young people who had never been outside of New Jersey. Jake left the Army in 1939, but was remobilized in 1941 for World War II. He served stateside until the last month of the war, when he was sent to the Philippines in preparation for the assault on Japan which never came because of Japan’s surrender after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After the war, Jake worked as a civilian manager for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service (post exchanges, or PX’s), and maintained his status as an Army Reserve Officer, from which he eventually retired with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, which he was quite proud of. In 1948 the family moved from Newark to the nearby suburb of Maplewood, where Mark and his brother were raised. Bertha worked at home at an occupation at the time identified as “housewife.” Ever ambitious and seeing the opportunity, Jake developed a business with Bertha’s help owning and managing rental apartments in Newark and Elizabeth and surrounding areas. By 1960, when Mark was 13, Jake was able to quit the Exchange Service and work full-time in real estate. The family had achieved the American dream, rising from poor immigrant status to the upper middle-class within one generation. [See piece on Jake and Bertha].

Mark grew up in a tight-knit suburban Jewish family and community in Maplewood, N.J., just outside Newark and 14 miles from Manhattan. He was Bar Mitzvah at age 13 and was the President of the Junior Congregation of Congregation Beth El, though he— very typically—had stopped believing in God around the time of his Bar Mitzvah. He was also a Boy Scout and a ham radio operator. A lonely kid, not very good in sports but reading a lot, he excelled in academics and graduated near the top of his class. Like many other white, middle-class teenagers in the early sixties, Mark was exposed to the folk-music movement, Woody Guthrie, Beat poetry, and liberal publications like the Village Voice and the New Republic. From a distance he observed the left and liberal political trends of the time—the civil rights movement, the movement to ban nuclear testing, the incipient opposition to the Vietnam war—but did not himself participate. In general, he was a good boy, not outwardly rebellious, though he did have moody adolescent tendencies which his mother ascribed to his “reading depressing Russian novels and books by Sigmund Freud.” He also discovered girls and sex in high school. [See piece on high school]

In the fall of 1965 Mark crossed the Hudson River to attend Columbia University, an Ivy-League school located in Manhattan. Earlier that same year the United States had attacked Vietnam with main force troops and Mark found an extremely active anti-war movement among Columbia University students. He was recruited to the anti-war movement in his freshmen year, attracted both by the active opposition to the war and the chance to be part of an intellectual and social life such as he had never experienced. The upper classmen and graduate students at Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a national organization, were debating how best to help end the war, and, even further, how to change the system that created the war. They called themselves “radicals,” and believed that what they did actually mattered. This was heady stuff, and Mark wanted to be one of them. Plus, they smoked marijuana, which was not only fun but was thrillingly illegal. [See piece on Columbia SDS].

Throughout 1966 and 1967, as the U.S. government intensified and enlarged the war in Vietnam, Mark increasingly devoted himself to anti-war work with the Columbia SDS chapter, which had around 50 active members. The organizing strategy was to attack Columbia’s involvement with the military and complicity with the war in the forms of the University sending students’ class rank to the draft boards; allowing recruiters on campus for the CIA, the Marines, Dow Chemical (manufacturers of napalm); training naval officers through the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC); and finally, participating in direct military-related research for the war effort through the semi-secret twenty university consortium called the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA). SDS members canvassed students in their dorm rooms, set up informational tables in cafeterias and outdoor areas, held teach-ins and other educational events, petitioned against the issues, held protest demonstrations and picket lines, sometimes directly confronting the recruiters or administration officials responsible. Over time, membership in the SDS chapter grew, as did opposition to the war on campus; SDS was little-by-little undermining Columbia’s claims of “objectivity” and “academic neutrality.” [See piece called, “How to Organize.”]

Along with all this organizing, Mark was discovering and deepening his radical analysis of the nature of American society and the United States in the world. In SDS meetings and informal discussions over beer at the West End Bar on Broadway, he listened to upperclassmen who spoke of the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions as part of a global revolt against the U.S. empire. These national liberation movements, as they were known, were both anti-imperialist and socialist; they were opposed to the U.S. government’s control of their country through corrupt dictatorships and to U.S. corporations’ exploitation of cheap labor, resources, and markets throughout the Third World. The Cold War—which had been a constant background Mark’s entire life, since the end of World War II—used stopping communism as a cover for extending U.S. military, political, and economic control over as much of the world as possible. The nuclear arms race, constant enormous military defense spending, the perpetual draft, the overthrowing of elected governments in such countries as Guatemala and Iran, were all part of this system known everywhere else in the world as U.S. Imperialism.

The world was turned on its head: this was definitely not what he was learning in his history and political science classes, which espoused a standard liberal line around pluralism at home and U.S. good intentions in fighting the Cold War abroad. Mark began reading about the revolutions in Cuba, China, and Vietnam; he also read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” when it first came out in 1965 which gave him an insight into the colonization of non-white people in this country. [See piece on JJ]

Mark’s acceptance of this radical analysis paralleled the increasing radicalization of SDS nationally. The organization had evolved “from reform to resistance,” from calling for a left-liberal “realignment” of the Democratic Party in 1962 to advocating open resistance to the draft and the war in the streets and on campuses in 1967. Hoping to carry out the strategy of resistance, Mark was arrested for incitement to riot with other SDS and anti-war people during a demonstration in November, 1967; they were attempting to block mid-town traffic to a hotel in order to stop Secretary of State Dean Rusk from speaking at a Council on Foreign Affairs dinner. It was his first arrest. [See The Red Badge of Courage].

A few national SDS leaders had met with Vietnamese and Cubans to find out about their resistance to U.S. imperialism. Out of these meetings came an invitation for SDS to send a group of students to Cuba in January, 1968. Because of his active work with the chapter, Mark was invited by the National Office to join the trip, which was openly defying the U.S. government’s ban on travel to Cuba. He accepted, working out a month-long absence with his professors, most of whom were themselves curious about Cuba.

The Cuban revolution was just nine years old at the time. Mark met young Cubans in positions of responsibility such as running schools and farms and medical institutions who were fired up with revolutionary enthusiasm: they were remaking society along non-capitalist lines, creating socialism! Meeting with Vietnamese delegates in Cuba, he learned about the nature of the resistance to American aggression, that these people believed they would inevitably drive the Americans from their country, no matter how long it took. As if to prove their point, the Tet Offensive was raging at the time in Vietnam, giving the lie to the American military’s claims that they were winning the war. His group was told by a Vietnamese diplomat in Havana, “The American people will eventually tire of the war and the troops will have to be withdrawn.”

Most of all, Mark experienced in Cuba the cult of Che Guevara, “the Heroic Guerilla,” who just a few months before had been murdered in Bolivia by the local military backed by the U.S. CIA. Che had been a hero of the Cuban guerilla war against the pro-U.S. dictator, Batista. He had spent the first years of the revolution directing the transformation of the Cuban economy to socialism. Committed to the strategy of guerilla warfare, he had gone to Bolivia to spark a continental war to liberate Latin America from U.S. domination. Inspired and thrilled by Che’s heroism and altruism, Mark decided he would “live like Che” and devote his life to the struggle against U.S. imperialism. Che had said, “The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution,” meaning to not just talk about it; “Now is the time of the furnaces and only light should be seen,” was the battle-cry Che quoted from Jose Marti, the great Cuban patriot who led the war against the Spanish and then the Americans in 1892. Mark returned to New York determined to throw himself into the battle. [See Che and Me].

While he was gone, a new issue had emerged at Columbia: the university had begun constructing a gymnasium in a city park located between the University and Harlem. Many people in Harlem saw this as not only a land-grab, appropriating city property in classic white colonial style, but also racial segregation, due to the fact that 15% of the building would be devoted to community use, with black people entering via a separate lower-level door. Students led by SDS had joined in protests with community people to demand construction be stopped. The gym became the symbol of Columbia’s institutional racism toward the Harlem community. [See chapter on Columbia University].

Soon after returning from Cuba, Mark was elected Chairman of Columbia SDS. He advocated that the chapter take more militant, aggressive action, which he and others in the Action Faction caucus believed would attract more students to support the SDS demands. The chapter, however, turned down his proposal to greet the colonel who headed New York City’s Selective Service System (the draft boards) with some sort of confrontation. But believing in the power of screwball “agit-prop” (agitation and propaganda), he clandestinely organized the New York Knickerboppers, a non-existent group, to present the colonel with a coconut-meringue pie in the face, the least that should be done for a big-shot recruiter to a criminal war.

A few days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Mark led a walk-out from the University’s hypocritical memorial service by first seizing a microphone and speaking about the “moral outrage” of a racist university which wouldn’t allow its Black and Latino cafeteria workers to organize claiming to honor a black leader who died while helping sanitation workers organize in Memphis. Both these actions helped galvanize energy on campus for events that were to follow within the next weeks. [See piece on the Action Faction]

In late March, SDS had held a demonstration attempting to present a petition to University officials with 1500 signatures demanding an end to Columbia’s involvement with IDA. Since the demonstration was indoors, violating the university policy, Mark and five other people identified as leaders faced probation or suspension. To support those being disciplined, several hundred people attempted to hold another indoor demonstration on April 23. Things did not go as planned, and the demonstration became a confrontation with police at the gym construction site in Morningside Park, where a student was arrested, followed by the seizure of Hamilton Hall, the main undergraduate classroom building. This latter action was joined by black Columbia students of the Students’ African-American Society (SAS); a joint steering committee, of which Mark was a leading member, produced a list of six demands, the main points of which were an end to Columbia’s involvement with IDA, the cessation of construction of the gym, and amnesty for all demonstrators.

In the next six days that occupation grew to become one of the signal events of the student anti-war and anti-racism movement of the era, covered by news media around the world. Four more buildings were occupied by over 1,000 students, with more students and community people supporting them on the outside. The University refused to cede to the occupiers’ demands and instead called in the New York City Police, who arrested over 620 people, beating and brutalizing many of them and attacking on-lookers and innocent by-standers. As a result, more than 15,000 Columbia students and some faculty went on strike, which lasted until the end of the academic year. Additional demonstrations and arrests continued the whole month of May. [See Columbia pieces]

Throughout, Mark played the dual role of strike leader and public spokesperson. To the national media, much of which was located in New York City, he became the symbol of the student radical movement of the time. To the Columbia administration, he became persona non-grata, and was expelled from the university the same day his parents received notification that he had made the Dean’s list for academic excellence the previous semester.

The Columbia strike became a model of student insurrection against the war and racism. National SDS put forward the slogan, “Create two, three, many Columbias!” which became a reality over the next two years, as student unrest grew to the boiling point at hundreds of campuses. After being expelled from Columbia, Mark took on the role of New York regional organizer and national traveler for SDS, speaking at dozens of college campuses about the events at Columbia and the growing radical student movement.

Having lost his student draft deferment, Mark was notified by his draft board to report for pre-induction physical in December, 1968. He held a press conference jointly with the American Servicemen’s Union, a radical GI organization, in which he stated his willingness to go into the Army in order to organize against the war from inside. Accompanied to his physical by dozens of Columbia SDS members demonstrating outside, he handed out anti-war leaflets to the other draftees. To his great relief, the military chose to show him the door and awarded him a psychological deferment. [See piece on the draft].

As he traveled the country, from the fall of 1968 to the summer of 1969, Mark met many other activists in SDS who were thinking along the same lines as he, that SDS could move from anti-war resistance to full-scale socialist revolution. By the spring of 1969, an informal national collective, with organizing centers in New York City, Michigan-Ohio, Chicago, and Seattle, had coalesced. This grouping advocated the development of a “revolutionary youth movement.” In their theory, SDS needed to move from a middle-class student base to a working-class youth base which would side with Third World people at home and around the world in their struggle against U.S. imperialism. White students would reject their “white skin privilege” and actually begin armed struggle against the U.S. government; this, in turn, would attract broad youth support as the struggle increased, following the Cuban model. This theory became fully articulated in a paper presented to the SDS National Convention in Chicago in June, 1969, authored by a collective of eleven, of which Mark was a member. Its title was “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” from which Mark’s faction of SDS became known as “The Weathermen.”

That convention proved to be SDS’ last. Following a titanic ideological battle concerning “the correct revolutionary direction,” a split occurred between the Weathermen and allies grouped around the National Office and a competing faction of Maoist Progressive Labor Party members and their allies. When it was all over, Mark found himself elected National Secretary of SDS, along with comrades Billy Ayers as Educational Secretary, and Jeff Jones as Inter-organizational Secretary, and the Weathermen in control of the National Office backed by a small number of chapters around the country. The vast majority of chapters remained independent of either the Revolutionary Youth Movement or Progressive Labor, and understood the split to varying extents, if at all. [See piece on the Death of SDS]

Also emerging from that convention was a call for a National Action to be held in Chicago October 8-11, 1969, the second anniversary of the death of Che Guevara, and to coincide with the opening of the trial of the Chicago Eight, charged with conspiracy for organizing the demonstrations the previous year at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The idea was to demonstrate the correctness of the Weatherman position by bringing the revolutionary youth to Chicago to “fight the pigs!” ie., the police. Weatherman supporters from campus SDS chapters reorganized themselves into off-campus collectives in working class neighborhoods of several dozen cities to organize over the summer and fall for the National Action.

Mark, along with the other members of the Weatherman leadership—which naturally became known as the Weather Bureau—traveled from collective to collective building the campaign to bring thousands of revolutionary working class white youth to Chicago. This is the period which became notorious for provocative street fighting, high school “jailbreaks,” collective experiments involving “smashing monogamy,” group sex, drugs, and collective “criticism, self-criticism.” Their thinking was that they had to kill off the old, bourgeois individual, and create revolutionary communist cadres. Weatherman was organized hierarchically, like an army, with the Weather Bureau at the top, second-level leadership below, and the cadres (soldiers) at the bottom. Mark believed whole-heartedly that all of this was necessary in order to wage a revolutionary war; he formulated many of the more excessive practices, and benefited from many of them, such as “smash monogamy,” which in the guise of liberating women actually freed them up for sex with the male leadership. There were many cult-like aspects of the Weatherman period, which lasted in total not more than six months. [See piece on Weatherman collectivet]

The result of the summer and fall Weatherman organizing was a terrible disappointment: only three to five hundred people showed up for what came to be known by the press as the Days of Rage in October, not many more than the faction had started out with in June. Their courage “screwed to the sticking point,” the small band engaged in three days of violent street demonstrations against the trial of the Chicago Eight and the war in general by smashing windows in businesses and cars, attacking police lines, and being arrested and beaten themselves. Before one demonstration began, Mark was jumped by a group of Red Squad Chicago Police, himself beaten, then arrested for assaulting an officer. In all, X people were shot, Y injured, and 287 people were arrested. 800 automobiles and 600 store windows were smashed. Combined bail was over $2 million, [See piece on Days of Rage]

Assessing the results, the Weather Bureau declared the defeat a victory on the grounds that anyone standing up to fight the power was a great step forward for the revolution. The context was increased government repression of the black movement for national liberation. In December, 1969, a combined FBI and Chicago Police taskforce murdered Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton and a comrade in their beds. Mark and the Weathermen concluded that talk of revolution was just that, and that white people had to share some of the costs of revolution, by “picking up the gun.” To not do so was racist, they believed. [See piece on the Black Panther Party]

In January, 1970, the Weather Bureau made the decision to abandon SDS and go underground. Mark was part of this decision. The National and regional offices were closed, the campus chapters, of which there were more than 300, were left on their own. Some survived as local radical activist organizations, others ceased to exist. Mark and his comrades prepared to go underground. Small clandestine groups, called “tribes,” were established in several places around the country in order to collect ID’s, apartments, cars, and begin bombing military and governmental targets. [See piece on the Death of SDS]

On March 6, 1970, a bomb exploded in a townhouse in Greenwich Village in New York City, killing three of Mark’s comrades. The bomb was intended for a social dance at the army base at Fort Dix, N.J. The townhouse explosion marked the end of what can be called the “terrorist” period of the Weathermen, a brief few months in which innocent Americans were considered to be legitimate targets. It was also the beginning of a re-evaluation of the strategy of armed struggle. As an immediate result, Mark went underground completely, changing his appearance and ID papers. He remained a fugitive for the next seven and a half years. A few weeks later federal felony charges for bombings, conspiracy, incitement to riot, were brought against Mark and eleven other Weather people, confirming their status as wanted fugitives. [See piece on the Townhouse]

Mark attended a meeting on the West Coast in June, 1970, in which the remnants of the Weather Bureau agreed that the Townhouse had occurred because of excessive “militarism,” and that from then on the organization, now known as the Weather Underground, would take all precautions not to harm people, only property. By this time Mark was out of the leadership of the organization, having suffered a crisis of self-confidence and courage. He felt he had been posing as a revolutionary leader. It was only years later that he realized that the problem was not a personal failure, but represented his implicit recognition that the strategy of guerilla warfare was useless. Mark demoted himself into the ranks of the organization and became a cadre in a “tribe” based in San Francisco. He played a support role in the prison escape of acid guru Tim Leary. He worked as a longshoreman on ships docked at the harbor and hitch-hiked around California, blending into the hippie environment of the time. [See piece on San Francisco]

During that period, Mark was able to reconnect with Sue LeGrand, his girlfriend at Columbia University two years earlier. Sue was not herself a fugitive, but eventually decided to join him underground, changing her identity. The two of them decided that Mark would withdraw from the Weather Underground Organization and that the two of them would make a life together. At the end of 1970 they set off from San Francisco and wound up, in the summer of 1971, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they lived under assumed names. Mark worked as a construction laborer and Sue worked as a typesetter. Santa Fe proved too small a place, since Mark was recognized there several times, and they left in the summer of 1972, moving to the East Coast. Thus began a pattern of repeated moves, changing identities, jobs, cars, and apartments, which continued until 1977. In July, 1974, Mark and Sue had their first child, Paul, born in Philadelphia, Pa.

[See piece on life underground]

The entire time underground, Mark felt he was wasting his time. His only political work was not getting caught, and as time went on, the significance of that became less and less. The federal charges were dropped in 1973, as the Watergate scandal unraveled: the government had committed numerous illegalities in trying to find the Weather fugitives. Such violations of civil liberties would be allowed today. Mark did not even consider turning himself in until after the war ended, in January, 1975, since he and Sue did not want to give the government any sort of victory. [See piece on FBI and Watergate]

In 1976, the Weather Underground organization, having reached the end of the guerilla warfare strategy and having tried publishing a book and a magazine in order to become politically relevant, imploded in an orgy of internal faction-fighting, name-calling and recriminations. The organization had previously provided support, resources, and friendship to Mark and Sue, but now they were truly on their own. [See piece on the death of the WUO]

After the election of Jimmy Carter in November, 1976, and the change in the mood of the country to wanting to put Vietnam and Watergate behind it, Mark and Sue decided that Mark would surrender. Because of not wanting to jeopardize other fugitives, it took until September, 1977, to do so. Only low-level state charges remained, in New York City and Chicago, and Mark was able to make plea-bargain deals involving penalties of only two years probation and $2,000 fine. Many other weather fugitives surfaced after him. [See “A Middle Class Hero].

Mark and Sue settled in Brooklyn, N.Y., in order to be near his family in New Jersey, friends from the pre-Weatherman period, and to have their second child, Elena. However, they missed New Mexico and moved to Albuquerque in the summer of 1978. There they immediately became involved in fighting uranium mining and nuclear waste-dumping and in the Native American solidarity movement. Mark went back to school, earning his B.A. from the University of New Mexico in 1980. He immediately began teaching english as a second language and remedial math at the Albuquerque Technical-Vocational Institute, TVI, where he has remained for most of the last twenty five years. [See piece on Albuquerque]

In 1980 Sue and Mark split up, probably because the strictures imposed by underground life were lifted. They continued to co-parent Paul and Elena, with the two kids going back and forth between houses until they graduated high school. Mark and the kids built a passive-solar adobe house in a semi-rural part of the city where they planted many fruit and shade trees.

Mark continued active in the movement against nuclear weapons in the early ‘80’s, then in 1985 was arrested at a sit-in at a Congressman’s office in order to demonstrate opposition to U.S. aid to the Contra in Nicaragua. With a number of other people, Mark helped organize the New Mexico Construction Brigade to Nicaragua in 1986; with the first brigade, he traveled to that country to help build houses and to show solidarity with the Sandinista Revolution in February of that year. Until 1990, he continued organizing opposition to the U.S. government’s attacks on Nicaragua and its interventions in civil wars throughout Central America. [See piece on Nicaragua].

Mark attempted to write a political memoir covering the years 1966 to 1986, producing a first draft manuscript in 1989. However it was never published because he did not feel he had sufficiently explained certain key questions, such as the decision to opt for revolutionary violence in 1969. That manuscript then sat in the closet for fifteen years, until 2004, when he picked it up again.

Throughout the early ‘90’s, Mark was active in organizing a union at Albuquerque TVI. The effort succeeded in 1995 with the recognition of the TVI local of the American Federation of Teachers and its first contract for full-time faculty. Subsequently, the union was able to extend its coverage to part-time faculty and to tutors. Mark has served as Co-chair of the local’s Committee on Political Education (COPE) since 1995.

Having been a bachelor for 18 years, Mark married Marla Painter, an environmental educator and community organizer from California and Nevada, in 1998. It is her first marriage. They have been active together in environmental organizing in their neighborhood, fighting for clean air and water and to clean up a nuclear waste dump at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.

In 2003, coinciding with the beginning of the Iraq War, a documentary movie, “The Weather Underground,” was released, which featured Mark. The movie was nominated for an Academy Award and was shown widely. Mark has been traveling around the country conducting post-movie discussions and question and answer sessions with enthusiastic audiences. The discussions cover both the past and the present. [See piece on the Weather Underground documentary].