Appreciation: Braudy on the Boudins

I’ve been meaning to read Susan Braudy’s Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left (2003), ever since I saw it at a Barnes & Noble near Greenwich Village, just blocks away from the center of the book’s action. I’m a sucker for family sagas, and a particular sucker for the politics of the period when I was just coming to political awareness, i.e., the dark decade just after World War II.

I finally got to the book, and I’m not disappointed. It’s not by any means the best book in its genre; not so redolent with atmosphere as Murray Kempton’s Part of Our Time, nor so judicious as Sam Tannenhaus’ biography of Whittaker Chambers (to be fair, most of the action takes place in a much later period, albeit cast against the context of what went before). More important, I’m not always sure Braudy herself always understands what she’s writing about. But she’s patient, attentive and open to assimilating whatever she can get.

The title is perhaps a bit of a mischaracterization. This isn’t quite so much the story of the Boudin family as it is the story of Kathy Boudin, sometimes underground radical, and her difficult relationship with her father Leonard, lawyer and a celebrity in his own right, all as cast against their relationship with the larger family network.

The master presence in the narrative is Louis Boudin who established himself as a labor lawyer back in the days when such a career demanded daring and imagination, not to say raw physical courage, and who lived long enough to get caught in the updraft of the New Deal, particularly the Wagner Labor Act of 1938.

Leonard was not Louis’ son. He was a nephew, and a bit of a runt in the litter. Leonard’s own father supported his family by foreclosing mortgages. Leonard did his law training at St. John’s. He had to claw his way into Louis’ law firm and seems never quite to have won the old man’s approval.

Leonard did establish himself in time as the defender-advocate of a procession of anti-establishment luminaries: Paul Robeson, Judith Coplon, Julian Bond, Benjamin Spock, Daniel Ellsberg. He was also, and not at all incidentally, a compulsive skirt-chaser. He married young and stayed married (to Jean Roisman, the mother of their two children). But that didn’t stop him from accomplishing any number of liaisons—more than Braudy can attempt to catalog—from the beginning of the marriage right through to his death.

Exactly what Jean thought of all this is unclear. Clearly she knew about it, or at least a good deal of it. Sometimes she took Leonard’s lovers into her circle; at least twice, she tried suicide (with her brother Michael, it was Kathy who found her and saved her form her second attempt; Kathy would have been ten).

A father-daughter relationship pairing like this is bound to produce electricity. Braudy knows this and tries to understand it, and it may not be her fault that she can’t disentangle all the competing forces. She’s probably right to believe that Kathy always wanted Leonard’s approval, always felt that she fell short. Yet it is remarkable how much time she spent in setting standards for herself or the world at which one or the other was bound to come up short.

There are two defining moments in Kathy’s public life. The first came a bit after noon on Friday, March 6, 1970, when chain of dynamite blasts blew up the town house at 18 West 11^th Street in Greenwich Village. Members of the Weather Underground were making a nail bomb; three of them were killed and Kathy (and one other) fled the burning wreckage. The second moment came 11 and a half years later on October 20, 1981, when a security guard and two policemen were murdered during a botched robbery of a Brink’s armored car in Nanuet, New York. Kathy was a passenger in the getaway truck, which she had rented for the purpose.

Braudy works hard to understand what led Kathy down the path that took her to the town house, and then on to the getaway truck—into the Weather Underground with a crowd of disaffected college kids and then on into the armed-robbery enterprise with a bunch of glorified street thugs. And although it is evident from Braudy’s presentation, there is one central fact that seems to have eluded her. That is: Kathy seems never to have been more than a second-tier figure in revolutionary circles. She was assertive and articulate, and she was present at a lot. But there is no point where you can say she gave direction or definition to the movement, that it wouldn’t have had without her. Indeed in her long sojourn underground between the townhouse explosion and the Brink’s job, it seems harder and harder to identify any principle to her life except constancy, the hard job of keeping on keeping on.

Ironically, Kathy’s best years may have been 20-plus she spent in custody after the Brink’s job, mostly at New York’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. She seems to have done honorable and constructive work there in teaching her fellow prisoners to read, and helping them to cope with AIDS. She is out of prison now; both Leonard and Jean are dead, though neither lived long enough to see her again free. Braudy offers an account of Kathy appearance at her parole hearings, but she doesn’t make it clear whether or to what extent or how Kathy has come to terms with her past. Probably Braudy doesn’t know. Chances are Kathy doesn’t know either.