Mark Rudd on the lessons the Weather Underground learned, and those they have to teach.

Desperate times may call for desperate measures, but few American political groups have let desperate times drive them further than the Weathermen. As recounted in Sam Green and Bill Siegelís documentary The Weather Underground -- the name for the few dozen Weathermen who spent the 1970s on the run from criminal charges -- the Weathermen burst into the public consciousness at the 1969 national conference of Students for a Democratic Society, the largest student antiwar organization in the country. Led by some of SDSí most charismatic leaders, the Weathermen proclaimed a break with the organizationís policy of nonviolent protest, in favor of a confrontational approach aimed at ending not just the war in Vietnam but American imperialism everywhere. Mark Rudd, who helped lead the revolt, recalls being inspired by the words of the Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti: "Now is the time of the furnaces, and only light should be seen." Says Rudd, "I remember thinking: Now is the time for action, not talking about it."

A former campus radical, Rudd had been expelled from Columbia University the previous spring, after leading protests that effectively shut down the campus, and penning a letter to the university's president that signed off with a quote from LeRoi Jones: "Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stickup." Radicalized by a three-week trip to Cuba and what he saw as a wave of revolution spreading around the globe, Rudd developed an "action faction" within the Columbia chapter of SDS, based on a strategy of escalating conflict with the authorities. The approach would find an echo the following summer in the self-proclaimed "days of rage," when a group of Weathermen staged violent demonstrations in the Chicago streets in response to the police killing of Black Panther Fred Hampton.

"At the time, there was a feeling that the world, especially the Third World, was in open revolt against U.S. domination. I was a young person and I wanted to be part of it," recalls Rudd, who now teaches math at a community college in Albuquerque. "The belief in violence was very current globally: The system was so violent, the only way to change it was to overthrow it."

Though Rudd emerges as The Weather Underground's most contrite voice, particularly with regard to what happened next, he pretends to no such reservations at the time. In an unpublished memoir quoted in the film, Rudd writes, "I cherished my hate like a badge of moral superiority." It was such hate that allowed a group of Weathermen to hatch a plot to plant a bomb at an officers' dance at Fort Dix, which would have killed not just soldiers but their civilian wives and dates. Instead, the bomb exploded in the Greenwich Village townhouse where it was being constructed, killing three Weathermen and sending the rest running from the authorities, who were already on their trail. Bernardine Dohrn, Rudd's old SDS colleague, made the FBI's Most Wanted list.

The death of their comrades dulled the Weathermen's taste for violence, but not destruction: Over the next several years, they bombed dozens of targets -- government buildings, courthouses and police stations, even corporate headquarters -- always ensuring the building would be empty when the bomb went off. Still, the distinction seemed a fine one and politicians from Richard Nixon to Walter Mondale scored points with the law-and-order crowd by denouncing the Weather Underground as the lunatic fringe of the antiwar left.

By Rudd's account, he was never directly involved with the bombing plans, though he admits that his former Columbia schoolmate Ted Gold, later killed in the explosion, told Rudd of their plans beforehand, and Rudd said nothing to dissuade him. "I was passive," Rudd says. "In retrospect, I wish I hadn't been. I wish I would've yelled stop." The explosion proved to be the last straw; by the end of 1970, Rudd had extricated himself from the Weathermen's political activities, although he remained part of the network that helped him and the others stay underground. Green and Siegel's documentary, oddly, never mentions the split, but it's obviously key to understanding why Rudd has emerged as the former member most critical of the group's actions. (Brian Flanagan, now a bar owner on Manhattan's Upper West Side, expresses some poignant regrets in the film, but he recently told The New York Times that he felt the directors focused overly on his criticisms, and that "95 percent" of his feelings about the time are positive.)

"We felt that the most important thing that could be done was to åbring the war home,' which meant showing the American people what the war was about -- namely violence and terror. That was a terrible mistake. And the organization, after the townhouse, did turn away from it," Rudd says, acknowledging the irony that it took the death of three friends to turn the Weathermen away from violence. "I think it was lucky -- not lucky that three wonderful people died, but lucky that we didn't do worse." Rudd won't speculate on whether they might have gone through with the Fort Dix bombing if not for the townhouse accident, but he will say, "Had that bombing happened, I think the general condemnation would've been so great, it would've been the last one we ever did."

After the townhouse explosion, Rudd says ruefully, "My major political work for seven and a half years was not getting caught." Soon after his 30th birthday, he turned himself in to the authorities, but the FBI had broken so many laws surveilling the Weathermen that they proved effectively impossible to prosecute. (Some were later jailed for violent acts connected with other revolutionary groups, including David Gilbert, interviewed while serving a 75 years-to-life sentence for murder.) Not all crimes, though, are adjudicated by a court of law. "You could argue that you try something, it doesn't work, you learn from it, and you go on," Rudd reflects. "And that would be fine, except for the fact that we had done three horrible things: We made the decision to scuttle SDS; we killed three of our own people; and we split the left over the bogus issue of violence."

In retrospect, it's obvious to Rudd that even if the Weathermen's goals were sound, their divisive politics hurt the antiwar cause more than they helped it. "Instead of condemning the antiwar movement as not being radical or revolutionary enough, we should've been uniting as many people as possible against the war, and also argued for anti-imperialism. I think our analysis of U.S. imperialism was and is substantially correct. But it was not a revolutionary time, and we thought it was."

Rudd remains active on a variety of issues from Native-American solidarity to nuclear disarmament, and committed to nonviolence. His critique of American imperialism hasn't changed, though his willingness to compromise has; if it was necessary to defeat Bush, Rudd ventures he might even end up working for "someone like Lieberman." It's his hope that The Weather Underground will resurrect the Weathermen's ideals, as well as the bitter lessons of their experience, for a younger generation. "I think young people are waking up," he says, "and the young generation, 20 and under, are really waking up. They know. Whether they're going to do anything about it is a whole other thing."

The Weather Underground opens Friday at Ritz Bourse. See Sam Adamsí review on p. 34.