Their hair is thinner and their girth broader. Their lifestyles tend more to the minivan and gardening than to any utopian fantasies favoring the overthrow of what they used to call Amerika.
Oh, and there's one more thing the graying lions of the radical left share in the aftermath of Sept. 11 and the arrests of four former members of the bumbling, trigger-happy Symbionese Liberation Army: a growing disquiet that it could be open season on countercultural figures of the Vietnam era, whether they were involved in serious crimes or not.
The long-buried divisions that tore at society 30 years ago, they fear, are resurfacing. "At what point do they say, 'We better start rounding up the old activists?'" worried John Buttny, 63, a onetime member of the Weathermen organization, who now lives outside Santa Barbara and works for a member of that county's Board of Supervisors.
Since the terror attacks, Buttny's old FBI file has been circulated by political enemies to the local media. "I have often remarked to friends that the '60s were nowhere near this repressive," said Buttny. He now recalls almost fondly how, as a young radical in Boulder, Colo., he used to joke with FBI agents when they came to buy his left-wing literature.
Karl Armstrong, who spent eight years behind bars for blowing up a U.S. Army research building in 1970 at the University of Wisconsin, killing a researcher, is now facing a boycott of his sandwich shop, Radical Rye, in Madison. "I thought it was unfair," he said of the boycott called by a conservative radio talk-show host. "But I figure it's all just part of the karma."
And then there's Weathermen stalwart Bill Ayers, who admits in his new book, "Fugitive Days," to playing a role in blowing up a restroom at the Pentagon in 1972. Ayers, who is married to former radical Bernardine Dohrn, canceled his book tour after Sept. 11 and issued a statement defending the work as "a condemnation of terrorism in all its forms."
"It would be preposterous," said Ayers, an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, "to use [the book] now to suggest that any of the Vietnam-era protesters would endorse acts of terrorism such as those we witnessed."
Dohrn, once dubbed by J. Edgar Hoover "la pasionara of the lunatic left," has been the focus of a protest by alumni at Northwestern University, where she teaches law. Some have threatened to withhold financial support if she isn't removed. Law school dean David Van Zandt has so far stood behind her, saying she has expressed an "abhorrence for violence."
