Interview with Lawrence Robert “Pun” Plamondon

Interview with Lawrence Robert “Pun” Plamondon Ann Larabee Revolutionary activist and Ottawa storyteller Pun Plamondon was one of the founders of the White Panther Party in 1968. Fearing he would be arrested for the bombing of a CIA office in Ann Arbor, he went underground, living in Algeria. When he returned, he, along with John Sinclair and John Forrest, was charged with the bombing. During the pretrial hearings, Attorney General John Mitchell revealed that the government had wiretapped Plamondon's conversations. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided that warrantless wiretaps were unconstitutional. A fuller account of his experiences can be found in his autobiography, Lost from the Ottawa: The Story of the Journey Back (Trafford online ISBN 1-4120-2265-7). AL: So, many of the memoirs about the New Left and the new culture movement are from the perspective of those who were middle class students at the time, like Bill Ayers, Tom Hayden, Margot Adler, and Todd Gitlin. They have defined much of our collective memory of those days. But you were a poor high-school dropout, whose father was a grocery store owner in Traverse City, Michigan. Why did you write a memoir, and what do you see as the role of the memoirist in our understanding of this period? PP: Well, I've been asked several times why I wrote the book, and my most immediate, off the top of my head answer, is that because I could, because I lived these things, and I had these stories in me, and I'm a storyteller. But, deeper than that, I wrote it because I think that the history of the Left, the history of struggle against oppression and against government is significant and important, and it was the highlight of my life. It was the thing that motivated [End Page 111] my life. It's the struggle, the pitting oneself against the machine and trying to rally others against the machine that really gives my life spirit. So, I took those things into account when I wrote the book. I want the book to be of value to people who are younger than I am and who are growing in their lives as I did. I want the book to inspire them. I want the book to motivate them. I want them to learn from my mistakes, from some of my foolishness, some of my lack of discipline; but ultimately I want them to carry on the struggle. I connect myself and my history to the labor struggles of the '30s, the struggles of Native Americans against the genocide and theft of their lands, and the antislavery movement of John Brown. I draw that connection to past struggles. I feel connected to the people of Cuba, to the people of South Africa, to the people of Vietnam, and the war for freedom and national liberation. And so I hoped that my book would simply be part of that. I don't want to lead this movement; I was only part of it, and that's the motive for writing the book; I wanted to take part, and I wanted to leave a legacy. I have no children, and, speaking for myself, I wanted to leave something, and this history, in my view, is a glorious history. Not just mine individually, but the history of the struggle is a glorious thing. I can remember being in prison and reading Emma Goldman's book and reading about Crazy Horse or Che Guevara or Kwame Nkruma, those African struggles, and reading about Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tsetung. Those books moved me to want to try to live up to their level of struggle, to their standards, and so I'm hoping that my book can in some way do the same. It won't do it for everybody. I'm aware of that. But there will be one person, or two, a few, who get moved by my book, and that is the more deeper reason why I wrote it. AL: So your memoir is part of an ongoing struggle then? PP: Right. It's just another tool in...

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