Ayers about his falling-out with the Weathermen: “I said to Bill one time, ‘I think I’m going to quit.’ He said, ‘You can’t quit, you’re in it for life.” In addition to her, his survivors include two children from an earlier marriage, George and Emily Mellen his sister, Jackie Kendall a brother, Donald Simonet and a grandchild. He retired in Mexico with his wife in 2008. He also studied Buddhism and often set out on long solo motorcycle and hiking journeys throughout California, Mexico and Australia. Mellen earned a law degree in the mid-1980s and opened his own practice in the San Francisco area, where he focused on economically challenged clients fighting employers and insurance companies. He further honed his anti-establishment leanings by mingling with beatniks at coffee houses in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood.Īfter his years in the 1960s revolutionary vanguard, Mr. In the late 1950s, he began studying politics at San Francisco State College (now University), where he fell in with a small left-wing campus group protesting the proliferation of nuclear weapons. No one is known to have been killed in those bombings. The Weather Underground claimed responsibility for 25 bombings, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, including at the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, the California attorney general’s office and a New York City police station. “Our intention is to disrupt the empire” and “to incapacitate it, to put pressure on the cracks,” according to one of its communiqués. Operating as furtive cells in safe houses scattered around the country, the members of the Weather Underground did their best to disappear from society, even as they declared war on it. Ayers) and other members took a more violent turn, rechristening themselves the Weather Underground. Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn (who is now married to Mr. “We brought experience from the streets, but he brought experience from the academy, and from books.”īut that seasoned professor was left behind as the decade turned when Mr. “He brought gravitas, seriousness and Marxism with him, and we didn’t have that,” Mr. Mellen became a resident philosopher and historian for the Weathermen. With his grounding in Marx, Lenin and Mao, Mr. Mellen himself, in a 2016 video interview about his radical activist days, said that he had written only an earlier, less extreme paper that was rejected by the group. Mellen was a principal author, although Mr. Bill Ayers, one of the group’s principals, said in a phone interview that Mr. Mellen was one of the 11 Weathermen members who signed the manifesto. imperialism and the achievement of classless world: world communism.” The group took its name from its famous 1969 manifesto, “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows”- the title taken from a line from the Bob Dylan song “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” It called for white and Black revolutionaries to band together with other insurgent groups to bring about “the destruction of U.S. faction that came to be known as the Weathermen. Taking up the cause of young radicals nationwide, despite the fact that he was a decade older than many of them, he became a vocal supporter of Students for a Democratic Society, an antiwar activist organization with chapters on college campuses around the country, and one of the original members of the militant S.D.S. Mellen’s rise within the so-called New Left began when he lost his job teaching political science and international affairs at Drew University in Madison, N.J., in 1965 after a speech at a teach-in in which, he told a television reporter, he had said he agreed with t he historian Eugene Genovese’s stated view that “the impending Vietcong victory in Vietnam” wasn’t something to be feared or regretted. His wife, Terry Baumgart, said the cause was chronic pulmonary obstructive disease. Jim Mellen, a Marxist former college professor and ideological firebrand who in the 1960s became a founding member and philosophical leader of the Weathermen, the headline-grabbing brigade of far-left revolutionaries, died on Feb.
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