Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left
by Susan Braudy
Knopf. 460 pp. $27.95
On the morning of October 20, 1981, Kathy Boudin, a Bryn Mawr graduate and the daughter of Leonard Boudin, a renowned left-wing lawyer, dropped off her infant son with a sitter near her apartment in New York City and went to work—which, in her case, involved helping a group of self-professed revolutionaries rob a Brinks truck in nearby suburban Rockland county. The botched job left three men dead, including two police officers, and landed Boudin in prison.
Susan Braudy’s reference to “aristocracy” in the subtitle of Family Circle, her new book about Kathy Boudin and her clan, is pierced with irony. The Boudins were political radicals, of course, but they were also the Astors of a snobbish and glamorous elite. The family patriarch, Leonard’s uncle Louis Boudin, was a prominent labor lawyer in the early decades of the 20th century who had helped to found the U.S. Socialist party. Jean, Leonard’s beautiful but long-suffering and emotionally frail wife, hung around in her Philadelphia youth with Clifford Odets and other radical intellectuals and followed the breastfeeding advice of her friend Margaret Mead when her first child was born in 1939.
Under Jean’s shaky supervision, the Boudins held regular salon-style Sunday brunches at their Greenwich Village home, bringing together Leonard’s famed clients—Paul Robeson, Benjamin Spock, Daniel Ellsberg, Joan Baez—with other notables of the Left. These included the journalist I.F. Stone, who happened to be married to Jean’s sister. The couple’s first-born child, Michael Boudin, graduated at the top of his class from Harvard Law School in 1965 and clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan. Such was Michael’s brilliance that his father, who had been an indifferent student himself (accepted at City College only after some paternal string-pulling), was willing to forgive his son’s conservative politics and embrace him as the crowned prince of the Boudin dynasty.
For Kathy, the Boudin’s younger child, the family legacy was far more damaging. According to Braudy, Kathy was in Oedipal thrall to her father, a fact even more significant to the girl’s development than her mother’s emotional instability. Leonard Boudin was the sort of man for whom the phrase “Hide your daughters!” was invented—a narcissistic and seemingly insatiable Lothario whose affairs took in clients, family friends, his children’s psychologist, Fidel Castro’s mistress, and a pregnant friend of his daughter. Denied her father’s erotic attention, Kathy instead sought to win his love by becoming, Braudy suggests, a kind of left-wing Joan of Arc.
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In 1961, and to the disappointment of her Harvard-worshipping family, Kathy enrolled at Bryn Mawr, where she quickly earned a reputation as a civil-rights activist. Her achievements included a successful protest in support of the black maids who served the students their meals, and demonstrations at a local Wool-worth’s against the chain’s segregated Southern lunch counters. Kathy was also known for her sanctimony. She would scornfully interrogate her classmates about their political bona fides, and in one famous instance, when she felt she was not getting enough support for a planned protest, threw her dinner plate against the wall. Still, her intellectual ambition and passion dazzled her peers, who voted her “the most admired” member of the class of 1965.
In the years after college, Kathy’s radicalism steadily intensified—a trend closely tied, as Braudy tells it, to her determination to earn her father’s respect. Working for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at a poverty project in Cleveland, she became involved with other young activists now mobilized by their opposition to the Vietnam war. In 1968, SDS helped to spearhead the historic street protests outside the Democratic convention in Chicago. When Kathy got arrested, Leonard, who had recently defended Benjamin Spock and William Sloane Coffin, Jr. against conspiracy charges for their anti-war activities, came to her rescue.
But after the high of the frenzied street demonstrations, Kathy was ready to define heroism on a grander scale. She and her allies formed a splinter group called the Weathermen and began viewing themselves as warriors against a “sick bourgeois society.” Spending their days doing paramilitary exercises and denying themselves all ordinary comforts-Diana Oughton, a Bryn Mawr classmate, killed and ate an alley cat to prove her mettle—they considered themselves the vanguard of a youth revolution. In 1970, while attempting to make an antipersonnel bomb, Weatherman Terry Robbins short-circuited the timer and blew up the elegant townhouse on 11th Street in Greenwich Village where he and his “comrades” had been staying. The blast killed three, including Oughton and Robbins. Kathy, who had been in the upstairs sauna, narrowly escaped.
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For the next eleven years, Boudin stayed underground, planning symbolic acts of “revolutionary violence.” The Weathermen took credit for at least twenty such attacks during the 1970’s, including a bomb detonated by Kathy and Bernadine Dohrn in the ladies’ restroom of the Capitol building, which they considered “a monument to U.S. domination all over the planet.” Throughout these years, Leonard continued to meet with the daughter whose face adorned FBI most-wanted posters. Braudy reports that he even helped in brainstorming sessions about potential targets and that he “relished the cops-and-robbers aspect of their assignations.”
By the late 1970’s, even as the Weathermen had fallen apart and Dohrn, now the mother of two boys, made plans to leave life underground, Kathy dug in deeper. She and her boyfriend David Gilbert (with whom she now had a baby) began working with radical black groups who were even more outlandish—and more conventionally criminal—than the Weathermen. It was one of these groups, the Black Liberation Army of “Doc” Shakur, a drug counselor who recruited his clients for “revolutionary purposes,” that finally brought an end to Kathy’s adventures.
Seeing their role as entirely subservient to Doc and other “third-world revolutionaries,” Kathy and her radical friends unquestioningly followed his orders, even after the group began spending an increasing amount of its loot on cocaine and referring to its white helpers as “crackers.” When Doc’s men held up the Brinks truck that fateful day, Gilbert drove the getaway van, with Kathy in the passenger seat beside him. The three murders committed by the gang left nine children fatherless. Though Kathy had at no point held a gun, she received a sentence of twenty years to life for her role in the crime.
For the next two decades, in an irony that the severe Kathy herself would never be capable of appreciating, the woman who had left her fourteen-month-old child with a babysitter while she aided a group of cocaine-hyped thugs spent her time teaching parenting skills to fellow inmates and earning a master’s degree in education, as well as counseling AIDS patients. In 1981, when she sat in the silver U-Haul getaway van with David Gilbert, she was thirty-seven. This past fall, when she was finally paroled, Leonard Boudin’s daughter was approaching her 60th birthday.
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Though filled with fascinating detail, Family Circle too often has the feel of a multipart profile for a women’s magazine: strong on personalities, weak on history and context (the Vietnam war, for instance, seems to start just a few days before the Chicago convention of 1968). The same superficiality prompts Braudy to present Kathy’s radicalism as the product of a dysfunctional family life. But that is too easy. After all, there were many educated young extremists like Kathy, and none of them had parents like Leonard and Jean Boudin.
In fact, most of them were the children—and a remarkable number were the daughters—of ordinary middle-class parents intent on living out the postwar American dream and, as often as not, firm in their liberal views. Young women like Dohrn, or Susan Rosenberg, one of Kathy’s accomplices in the Brinks robbery, or like Philip Roth’s fictional creation Merry, the bomb-throwing daughter in American Pastoral, were driven not by Oedipal longing but by ideology. Their radicalism was more than a reaction to the brutalities of the Vietnam war and racial segregation. It sprang from a careless nihilism and an arrogant hatred of “Amerika,” for its bourgeois comforts, for its aspirations to tolerance, for its very success.
What Braudy does provide, with her psychological focus, is considerable insight into the pedigree of the New Left’s extremism. Beginning with Uncle Louis, the Boudins’ politics were steeped in abstraction, moral arrogance, and a callous contempt for ordinary people who did not fit their romantic image of the proletariat. For her part, Jean, scornful of petty bourgeois ambitions, did not even invite her pickle-salesman father to her wedding. As Braudy astutely observes, Jean was part of a crowd that loved the entire working class, except “their own tired parents.”
Indeed, by devoting so much attention to Leonard, Braudy may understate just how much Jean’s crude leftism helped to stunt Kathy’s character. For all of his flaws, Leonard comes across as less of an ideologue than his wife. On the day in 1970 when Kathy and her Weathermen friends inadvertently blew up the townhouse on 11th Street, Jean happened to be strolling nearby with a bunch of just-purchased daisies in hand. Even as her stunned, naked, and hopelessly misguided daughter was escaping destruction, she was consoling herself with the thought that the rich people who owned the house could “damn well afford to lose it.”
What was unusual in Kathy Boudin’s case is that unlike many of her more conventionally raised peers, she was no rebel; she learned her arrogance and rage at her mother’s progressive breast. At Bryn Mawr, Kathy cursed the “self-indulgent rich-bitch girls.” Underground, she despised all the “mothafuckas” working within the system—“antiwar draft counselors, activist lawyers like Leonard, and middle-class blacks.” In an interview with Kathy years after the Brinks robbery, Braudy mentioned the name of the child of one of the murdered police officers. “Who?” Kathy asked. “Waverly Brown’s son,” Braudy explained. “Really?” she responded. “I never knew the guy had a son.”
Kathy’s uncle, IF Stone, famously described the Weathermen as “the most sensitive of a generation.” By the end of Susan Braudy’s compelling book, epithets of a far different sort come to mind for Kathy and her cohort, as for the entire morally corrupt world of the Boudin clan.
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