An All-American Girl Who Terrorized a Nation; "A Creature of Her Times or Other?" Bernadine Dohrn, Founder of The Weathermen.

April 24, 2008

A Thanksgiving Memory

In 1959 we were invited to Thanksgiving dinner at our friends the Schlesingers, who lived in the comfy suburb of Whitefish Bay, WI. There have been nearly 50 Thanksgivings since then, some of them memorable for culinary reasons, but the reason that Thanksgiving remains the most vivid in my memory is because of one of the guests.

Most of the people there were familiar, but there was one new family, and I was very impressed that its father wore a blazer.

In the Midwest at that time blazers, at least in our circle, were not that common. Men tended to wear sport jackets that by the sartorial standards of today would probably seem raffish. So to me it was remarkable to meet someone in a blue blazer I associated with Connecticut gentry.

Though the family, like everyone else at the Schlesingers’, was Jewish, they were on their way up and, we had been told beforehand, had recently changed their name from something unmistakably Jewish (was it Ohrnstein?) to something you couldn’t quite place, Dohrn.

They had two daughters, one of whom was a freshman at Miami of Ohio, which back then had a reputation as a party school. They were seated with the Schlesinger girls, my sisters and me at The Children’s Table.

Since I was a high school senior and felt a little annoyed to be at The Children’s Table, I can only imagine how the older Dohrn girl, Bern, who was, after all, a college freshman, must have felt.

The Dohrn girls spent most of the meal conversing with each other, much of the time about the teachers at Whitefish Bay High on whom Bern had had a crush and who might have had a crush on her. It was entirely understandable that they might done so. She was very attractive. The tight black cashmere sweater she wore outlined an unusually impressive bosom.

Bern had let us know that she might have to leave early because a high school friend she wanted to see had no other free time but this evening.

At a certain point the doorbell rang. Bern sensed it was her friend. She opened the door and in a deep voice I remember vividly all these years later declared, “Jane darling, how are you?” She quickly found her coat in the closet opposite the door and went off with Jane.

For me, whose understanding of the larger world was already heavily influenced by the theater, it was a scene from “Auntie Mame.” The Dohrns were the Upsons (whose Connecticut estate was called Upson Downs) and Bern was Gloria Upson, the pretentious debutante Auntie Mame was determined to prevent her beloved nephew from marrying.

The impression Bern made was so intense that for years afterward I would ask my mother what news she had. Bern, it turned out, was an excellent student and ultimately graduated from law school with honors.

Eventually it was no longer necessary to rely on my mother for news of Bern, for Bernadine Dohrn had become a newsmaker, a member of the terrorist Weathermen (shouldn't we now call them Weatherpersons?). Most recently she has turned up as one of Barack Obama’s unreconstructed leftwing Chicago friends.

I last recounted my evening with Bern at a dinner party a week after Sept. 11 at a table full of elderly ‘60s radicals, some of whom knew her in her later years, even perhaps during the time she was undercover.

“Why are you telling us this?” an aging enragee bellowed at me. Probably I answered that I thought it would amuse them, but the real reason was that I wanted them to see that this Mme Defarges of the angry ‘60s, cheering on the Manson family, had been a cartoonish social climber in the placid ‘50s. In both cases she was, wittingly or not, a creature of her times.

By Howard Kissel on April 24, 2008 3:26 PM | 

She went to high school with neighbor and creator of "Happy Days", Tom Miller, and graduated girl most likely to achieve. She likely hung out at Arnolds with Fonzie.

Went to Miami University of Ohio, Bastion of Midwestern White Privilege & Greek Row Tradition - soon Transferred to University of Chicago to become a lawyer, established The Weathermen with husband Bill Ayers and the rest is history - a creature of her times or other?