Bill Ayers Doesn't Fully Clear the Air

"The Real Bill Ayres" is the title of a rather self-serving column by Ayers in the Dec. 6th New York Times. He is to be applauded for keeping a low profile and not rising to the bait when attempts were made to smear Barack Obama during the campaign through his casual association with a "domestic terrorist". However, his column gets a bit dicey when he describes his activities 30-40 years ago. Here is an excerpt.

"Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn't me, not even close. Here are the facts:

I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices - the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious - as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.

The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be - and still is being - debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war."

Here is my reaction

I was also part of the anti-war movement 40 years ago, and I participated in many non-violent protests. Ayers is very clinical, almost antiseptic, in describing his "vandalism". His description of the founding of the Weather Underground is rather bizarre. Exactly what group was making bombs in the Greenwich Village Townhouse? No one set a bomb there. Ayers hasn't fully owned up to his past and, fortunately, he remains a marginal figure, especially when it comes to having had any effect on our President-Elect.

To continue, setting off bombs is not a "symbolic act". How can one be sure there will be no "collateral damage". As for Ayres "co-founding" the Weather Underground. That was, in fact, a name change. Before the Greenwich Village explosion, they were known as the Weathermen, but then they went "underground"

And there were deaths associated with Weather Underground "activities". Consider Kathy Boudin. According to Wikipedia

"In the 1960s and 1970s, Boudin became heavily involved with the Weather Underground,... . The Weathermen used bombs to vandalize the Pentagon, the US Capitol, the New York Police Benevolent Association, the New York Board of Corrections, as well as the offices of multinational companies. Boudin, ...was a survivor of the 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, the premature detonation of a nail bomb that had been intended for a soldiers' dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey.[2]

In 1981, she and several members of theWeather Underground and the Black Liberation Army robbed a Brinksarmored car at the Nanuet Mall, in Nanuet, New York. After Boudin dropped her infant son, Chesa, at a baby sitter's she took the wheel of the getaway vehicle, a U-Haul truck. She waited in a nearby parking lot as her heavily armed accomplices took another vehicle to a local mall where a Brinks truck was making a delivery. They confronted the guards and firing immediately broke out, severely wounding guard Joe Trombino and killing his co-worker, Peter Paige. The four then took $1.6 million in cash and rendezvoused with Boudin".

Two policemen were killed in a subsequent shootout. Again, from Wikipedia:

"Boudin hired Leonard Weinglass to defend her. Weinglass, a law partner of Boudin's father, [Leonard Boudin] arranged for a plea bargain and Boudin pled guilty to one count of felony murder and robbery, in exchange for a single twenty year-to-life sentence. She was paroled in 2003."

Bill Ayres and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, raised Boudin's son. This does not mean, of course, that they had any part in, or even advance knowledge, of the robbery. However, Ms. Dohrn did go to jail for seven months for refusing to testify about the robbery. A useful source is the interview with Bill Ayers in the NY Times, published on September 11, 2001 (The mother of all bad timing!)

So is Ayres repentant? No. Remorseful? No. Was he a "domestic terrorist" ? Using his terminology, only a "symbolic" one. We can be certain of one thing, however. For many years, he has not harbored a terrorist bone in his body. If he did, as I've said many times before, the Bush-Cheney crowd would have put him in jail. You can count on it.