''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 has been 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 where it'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
exploded in 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 of privilege and I woke up to a world on fire. And hope
and history rhymed.'' |