At that time, the state’s former conservative Republican governor was president of the United States. Thus he misses what is really the most important lesson to be gleaned from his subject.īy the time I came of age and started reading about the New Left, nearly all of Haut California assumed that the whole ordeal was behind us-an interesting subject for KQED documentaries but otherwise confined to the past. Nordlinger mentions that suggestive bit of Greenwich Village real estate trivia in order to link the bombing to a poem, but otherwise passes over it without connecting any other dots or noticing any other patterns.
But for almost a hundred years it was one of Wall Street’s biggest and most profitable brokerages and, for a time, the largest securities firm in the world.
“Merrill Lynch” is today-owing to mismanagement leading to its near-collapse in the financial crisis of 2008-only a name, a brand owned by Bank of America. 18 West 11th Street-the house a few Weathermen (and wymyn) blew up on March 6th, 1970 while in the basement building a bomb intended to kill soldiers and their dates at a dance-once belonged to the founder of Merrill Lynch. Yet Nordlinger brings to light something I didn’t know. The first two-thirds of Nordlinger’s piece offers a fine, if well-trod, overview of the Weather Underground, one of the New Left’s most notorious groups (its only real competitor in infamy being the Black Panthers). The best account by far remains Destructive Generation by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, which is both: a firsthand retelling by direct participants who later became disillusioned with the entire movement and sought to explain what went so disastrously wrong, augmented by interviews, original reporting and research. I attended or was affiliated with more than one institution that either incubated or suffered from New Left violence-in most cases both.įascinated by the subject from an early age, I sought and read the literature, original as well as secondary. My mother, who served as a career criminal prosecutor in two counties in that region, tried some New Left figures and personally knew and faced off against Faye Stender. I grew up in its heartland-which is not, contra the impression Jay Nordlinger leaves the reader, New York City but Northern California. I know, I believe, more than the average person about the New Left.
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