During last night’s debate Barack Obama was asked, for the first time, about his association with a guy named Bill Ayers. While most Americans probably shrugged their shoulders at the question, the New York Times notes that the roots of the question go back more than 40 years:
On March 6, 1970, a bomb explosion destroyed a Greenwich Village town house, killing three members of the radical Weather Underground and driving other members of the group even deeper into hiding. On Wednesday night, those events emerged as the focus of a sharp exchange between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama at their debate in Philadelphia.
Mr. Obama was asked by a moderator, George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, about his relationship with Bill Ayers, a former Weather Underground leader who is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In the early 1970s, the Weathermen, who took their name from a line in a Bob Dylan song, claimed responsibility for bombing the Capitol, the Pentagon, the State Department Building and banks, courthouses and police stations.
Mr. Ayers is married to Bernardine Dohrn, another Weather Underground figure. Both were indicted in 1970 for inciting to riot and conspiracy to bomb government buildings, but charges were dropped in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct, including illegal surveillance.
Mr. Ayers is listed as a member of the nine-member board of the Woods Fund of Chicago, an offshoot of the Woods Charitable Fund, founded in 1941 by a prominent lawyer and telephone company executive. According to the fund’s Web site, it has focused in recent years on “issues that affected the area’s least advantaged, including welfare reform, affordable housing” and “tax policy as a tool in reducing poverty.”
For a time, Mr. Obama was on the board with Mr. Ayers, though he no longer has a formal association with the group. At the debate, he described Mr. Ayers as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” but “not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.” Mr. Obama said he was being unjustly linked to “somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old.”
Leaving aside for a moment the question of just what the relationship between Obama and Ayers might be, it’s important to note that Ayers is more than just a 60’s radical, as this article published in the Times on the morning of the September 11th attacks indicates:
”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, 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.”
Some joke. This ain’t just some charming ex-radical. This is a terrorist.
I am old enough to remember the Weathermen. Back in the days when I was a newspaper boy on Old Dominion’s campus, there was a small group of “radicals” who posted Weathermen material along with material from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). If the ODU group was any indication of the rest of their affiliates, these guys were always high, or between getting high. Nobody took them very seriously with regard to politics, but they did put on some pretty good parties.
I do recall posters and bumper stickers that read, “Kill Your Parents” and “Eat the Rich” along with a plethora of other anti-establishment rants. People of the current era need to understand that thee was no oppressive “political correctness” imposed on campuses of those days, so the students were free to put up posters that basically said things like Fuck the Establishment, and both faculty and students would nod their heads and say, “Right on!”
Conservative voices were also free to be heard on colleges. Unlike today, where conservative students are banned from campuses at leftist run indoctrination camps, such as the University of Richmond, students who supported the Right also were free to openly debate their views. At ODU, when the Weathermen tried to stage an anti-war protest, only about three students from the left showed up. They were outnumbered by counter-protesters who held up signs with a B-52 bomber superimposed over a peace sign that read, “Drop the Big One, NOW! The meaning was that they advocated the use of nukes against Vietnam.
When talking about the crazy Vietnam era, it is most useful to consider the context of those times and consider that most “radical” thinking people were foremost in favor of Peace and Love. Very few were bomb throwers.
In my view, our current climate of surveillance cameras and oppressive “political correctness” is far more damaging to our nation than any of the acts of the Weathermen or similar groups back in the sixties.