Billy Ayers: WeatherCop

September 11, 2001

              Life With the Weathermen: No Regrets for a Love of Explosives

              By DINITIA SMITH

                 " I don't regret setting bombs," Bill Ayers
                  said. "I feel we didn't do enough." Mr.
              Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in
              the Weather Underground, was sitting in the
              kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century
              stone house in the Hyde Park district of
              Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted
              poster are shorn, though he wears earrings.
              He still has tattooed on his neck the
              rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that
              appeared on letters taking responsibility for
              bombings. And he still has the ebullient,
              ingratiating manner, the apparently intense
              interest in other people, that made him a
              charismatic figure in the radical student
              movement.

              Now he has written a book, "Fugitive Days"
              (Beacon Press, September). Mr. Ayers,
              who is 56, calls it a memoir, somewhat
              coyly perhaps, since he also says some of it
              is fiction. He writes that he participated in
              the bombings of New York City Police
              Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol
              building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972. But
              Mr. Ayers also seems to want to have it
              both ways, taking responsibility for daring
              acts in his youth, then deflecting it.

              "Is this, then, the truth?," he writes. "Not
              exactly. Although it feels entirely honest to me."

              But why would someone want to read a memoir parts of which are
              admittedly not true? Mr. Ayers was asked.

              "Obviously, the point is it's a reflection on memory," he answered. "It's true as I remember it."

              Mr. Ayers is probably safe from prosecution anyway. A spokeswoman for
              the Justice Department said there was a five-year statute of limitations on
              Federal crimes except in cases of murder or when a person hasbeen
              indicted.

              Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman
              philosophy as: "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments.
              Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's whereit's really at," is
              today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at
              Chicago. And he says he doesn't actually remember suggesting that rich
              people be killed or that people kill their parents, but "it's been quoted so
              many times I'm beginning to think I did," he said. "It was a joke about the
              distribution of wealth."

              He went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two
              other people were killed when bombs they were making explodedin a
              Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was
              Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.'s 10 Most Wanted List. J.
              Edgar Hoover called her "the most dangerous woman in America" and "la
              Pasionara of the Lunatic Left." Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married.

              In his book Mr. Ayers describes the Weathermen descending into a
              "whirlpool of violence."

              "Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon," he
              writes. But then comes a disclaimer: "Even though I didn't actually bomb the
              Pentagon — we bombed it, in the sense that Weathermen organized it and
              claimed it." He goes on to provide details about the manufacture of the bomb
              and how a woman he calls Anna placed the bomb in a restroom. No one
              was killed or injured, though damage was extensive.

              Between 1970 and 1974 the Weathermen took responsibility for 12
              bombings, Mr. Ayers writes, and also helped spring Timothy Leary
              (sentenced on marijuana charges) from jail.

              Today, Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn, 59, who is director of the Legal Clinic's
              Children and Family Justice Center of Northwestern University, seem like
              typical baby boomers, caring for aging parents, suffering the empty-nest
              syndrome. Their son, Malik, 21, is at the University of California, San Diego;
              Zayd, 24, teaches at Boston University. They have also brought up Chesa
              Boudin, 21, the son of David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin, who are serving
              prison terms for a 1981 robbery of a Brinks truck in Rockland County,
              N.Y., that left four people dead. Last month, Ms. Boudin's application for
              parole was rejected.

              So, would Mr. Ayers do it all again, he is asked? "I don't want to discount
              the possibility," he said.

              "I don't think you can understand a single thing we did without understanding
              the violence of the Vietnam War," he said, and the fact that "the enduring
              scar of racism was fully in flower." Mr. Ayers pointed to Bob Kerrey, former
              Democratic Senator from Nebraska, who has admitted leading a raid in
              1969 in which Vietnamese women and children were killed. "He committed
              an act of terrorism," Mr. Ayers said. "I didn't kill innocent people."

              Mr. Ayers has always been known as a "rich kid radical." His father,
              Thomas, now 86, was chairman and chief executive officer of
              Commonwealth Edison of Chicago, chairman of Northwestern University
              and of the Chicago Symphony. When someone mentions his father's
              prominence, Mr. Ayers is quick to say that his father did not become
              wealthy until the son was a teenager. He says that he got some of his interest
              in social activism from his father. He notes that his father promoted racial
              equality in Chicago and was acceptable as a mediator to Mayor Richard
              Daley and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1966 when King marched
              in Cicero, Ill., to protest housing segregation.

              All in all, Mr. Ayers had "a golden childhood," he said, though he did have a
              love affair with explosives. On July 4, he writes, "my brothers and I loved
              everything about the wild displays of noise and color, the flares, the
              surprising candle bombs, but we trembled mostly for the Big Ones, the loud
              concussions."

              The love affair seems to have continued into adulthood. Even today, he finds
              "a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance,"
              he writes.

              He attended Lake Forest Academy in Lake Forest, Ill., then the University
              of Michigan but dropped out to join Students for a Democratic Society.

              In 1967 he met Ms. Dohrn in Ann Arbor, Mich. She had a law degree from
              the University of Chicago and was a magnetic speaker who often wore
              thigh-high boots and miniskirts. In 1969, after the Manson family murders in
              Beverly Hills, Ms. Dohrn told an S.D.S. audience: "Dig it! Manson killed
              those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they
              shoved a fork into a victim's stomach."

              In Chicago recently, Ms. Dohrn said of her remarks: "It was a joke. We
              were mocking violence in America. Even in my most inflamed moment I
              never supported a racist mass murderer."

              Ms. Dohrn, Mr. Ayers and others eventually broke with S.D.S. to form the
              more radical Weathermen, and in 1969 Ms. Dohrn was arrested and
              charged with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer during the Days of
              Rage protests against the trial of the Chicago Eight — antiwar militants
              accused of conspiracy to incite riots at the 1968 Democratic National
              Convention.

              In 1970 came the town house explosion in Greenwich Village. Ms. Dohrn
              failed to appear in court in the Days of Rage case, and she and Mr. Ayers
              went underground, though there were no charges against Mr. Ayers. Later
              that spring the couple were indicted along with others in Federal Court for
              crossing state lines to incite a riot during the Days of Rage, and following that
              for "conspiracy to bomb police stations and government buildings." Those
              charges were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct,
              including illegal surveillance.

              During his fugitive years, Mr. Ayers said, he lived in 15 states, taking names
              of dead babies in cemeteries who were born in the same year as he. He
              describes the typical safe house: there were usually books by Malcolm X
              and Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara's picture in the bedroom; fermented
              Vietnamese fish sauce in the refrigerator, and live sourdough starter donated
              by a Native American that was reputed to have passed from hand to hand
              over a century.

              He also writes about the Weathermen's sexual experimentation as they tried
              to "smash monogamy." The Weathermen were "an army of lovers," he says,
              and describes having had different sexual partners, including his best male
              friend.

              "Fugitive Days" does have moments of self-mockery, for instance when Mr.
              Ayers describes watching "Underground," Emile De Antonio's 1976
              documentary about the Weathermen. He was "embarrassed by the
              arrogance, the solipsism, the absolute certainty that we and we alone knew
              the way," he writes. "The rigidity and the narcissism."

              In the mid-1970's the Weathermen began quarreling. One faction, including
              Ms. Boudin, wanted to join the Black Liberation Army. Others, including
              Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Ayers, favored surrendering. Ms. Boudin and Ms.
              Dohrn had had an intense friendship but broke apart. Mr. Ayers and Ms.
              Dohrn were purged from the group.

              Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Ayers had a son, Zayd, in 1977. After the birth of
              Malik, in 1980, they decided to surface. Ms. Dohrn pleaded guilty to the
              original Days of Rage charge, received three years probation and was fined
              $1,500. The Federal charges against Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn had already
              been dropped.

              Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn tried to persuade Ms. Boudin to surrender
              because she was pregnant. But she refused, and went on to participate in the
              Brink's robbery. When she was arrested, Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Ayers
              volunteered to care for Chesa, then 14 months old, and became his legal
              guardians.

              A few months later Ms. Dohrn was called to testify about the robbery. Ms.
              Dohrn had not seen Ms. Boudin for a year, she said, and knew nothing of it.
              Ms. Dohrn was asked to give a handwriting sample, and refused, she said,
              because the F.B.I. already had one in its possession. "I felt grand juries were
              illegal and coercive," she said. For refusing to testify, she was jailed for seven
              months, and she and Mr. Ayers married during a furlough. 

              Once again, Chesa was without a mother. "It was one of the hardest things I
              did," said Ms. Dohrn of going to jail.

              In the interview, Mr. Ayers called Chesa "a very damaged kid." "He had real
              serious emotional problems," he said. But after extensive therapy, "became a
              brilliant and wonderful human being." .

              After the couple surfaced, Ms. Dohrn tried to practice law, taking the bar
              exam in New York. But she was turned down by the Bar Association's
              character committee because of her political activities.

              Ms. Dohrn said she was aware of the contradictions between her radical
              past and the comforts of her present existence. "This is where we raised our
              kids and are taking care of our aging parents," she said. "We could live much
              more simply, and well we might."

              And as for settling into marriage after efforts to smash monogamy, Ms.
              Dohrn said, "You're always trying to balance your understanding of who you
              are and what you need, and your longing and imaginings of freedom."

              "Happily for me, Billy keeps me laughing, he keeps me growing," she said.

              Mr. Ayers said he had some of the same conflicts about marriage. "We have
              to learn how to be committed," he said, "and hold out the possibility of
              endless reinventions."

              As Mr. Ayers mellows into middle age, he finds himself thinking about truth
              and reconciliation, he said. He would like to see a Truth and Reconciliation
              Commission about Vietnam, he said, like South Africa's. He can imagine Mr.
              Kerrey and Ms. Boudin taking part.

              And if there were another Vietnam, he is asked, would he participate again in
              the Weathermen bombings?

              By way of an answer, Mr. Ayers quoted from "The Cure at Troy," Seamus
              Heaney's retelling of Sophocles' "Philoctetes:" " `Human beings suffer,/ They
              torture one another./ They get hurt and get hard.' "

              He continued to recite:

              History says, Don't hope

              On this side of the grave.

              But then, once in a lifetime

              The longed-for tidal wave

              Of justice can rise up

              And hope and history rhyme.

              Thinking back on his life , Mr. Ayers said, "I was a child ofprivilege and I
              woke up to a world on fire. And hope and history rhymed."


 

 
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