Selective memory: textbooks whitewash the '60s

Education Next, Fall, 2004 by Diane Ravitch

Then came the fateful day in 1970 when Kathy was staying in a luxurious townhouse in Greenwich Village with four friends. One busied himself in the basement, assembling a powerful bomb packed with hundreds of roofing nails so as to inflict maximum damage. Possible sites for detonation included a department store, an army base, or the Columbia University campus. But the bombmaker erred; the bomb exploded, killing him and two other revolutionaries. Only Kathy and the daughter of the townhouse owner escaped.

Kathy went underground for the next decade, advancing her cause with an occasional bombing, living in the actor Jon Voight's houseboat, finding shelter in safe houses wherever she went. In one ludicrous scene, Kathy and Bernadine Dohrn set a bomb in the ladies room of the U.S. Capitol, on behalf of the revolution. Kathy, her biographer says, found this clandestine existence "exciting." While underground, Kathy and her group managed prison breaks for Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychology professor famous for experimenting with LSD, and for Joanne Chesimard, a black radical who had participated in the murder of police officers in New Jersey.

This fugitive lifestyle ended in 1981 when Kathy left her 14-month-old baby with a sitter and said she would return that afternoon. She and the child's father, fellow revolutionary David Gilbert, had agreed to drive the getaway van for a group of heavily armed bank robbers who planned to rob a Brinks truck. (The robbers claimed to be black revolutionaries but actually used proceeds from their heists to buy drugs.)

They drove to a suburban shopping mall north of New York City. While Kathy and David waited in a rented U-Haul truck, the "revolutionaries" cornered the Brinks truck and gunned down its guards, killing one of them and snatching canvas bags of money. The gang drove to the getaway van and piled into the back; the plan was that police would be looking for black robbers, not a middle-aged white couple driving a U-Haul van.

But the police did stop Kathy and David at a roadblock. Kathy got out and told the police to put down their guns. Foolishly, they did. The robbers hiding in the back of the van sprang out firing; two police officers were killed. Kathy was captured and convicted and even-tually spent 20 years in prison for her role in the Brinks robbery and murders (she was released in 2003). David Gilbert got a life sentence.

One reads this book with a sense of disbelief that men and women who led such privileged lives could have been so stupid and hateful, could have thought themselves revolutionaries acting on behalf of "the people" when they had nothing but contempt for ordinary working people. Encountering their petulance, their hatred of democratic institutions, and their isolation from reality, one can only imagine the terror they would have inflicted if given the opportunity.

Surely these are lessons that our own children should study when learning about the 1960s.

Reviewed by Diane Ravitch

Diane Ravitch is a research professor at New York University and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.