Children Of The Revolution

I've debated saying anything about Bill Ayers, the Ex-Weatherman turned University professor, whose early support and backing of Barack Obama has become part of the discussion in the primary season, most notably when George Stephanopolous, following a line of argument put forth by Sean Hannity, asked Obama if Ayers was a problem for his campaign.  This question was clearly one of the most troubling for Obama supporters, as the "Ayers issue" has chiefly, but not solely, been part of the right wing noise machine.

The question of Bill Ayers is in many ways a fascinating one, one about how we deal with people with a past, when do past afilliations matter, and how, especially we reconcile the violent elements of late sixties protest with the nation we are now, and the rejection of much of what happened then. Complicating this, in our ahistorical way as a nation, is that few people really understand the context for this discussion... including me, in no small measure. Still, after some thinking, and some reading, I've decided to weigh in.

The thing is, Ayers as an issue is not going to go away, partly because the right has never let go of their anger at the revolutionary elements of the far left, from the Panthers to SDS to The Weather Underground. Nor has the left really reconciled that part of our past: as the groups became more radical and violent, they were disavowed by more mainstream folks, to be sure. But the rage and energy that they provoked and that in turn pushed them further, was never so much resolved as simply marginalized into nonexistence. In some ways, there's still a romance on the left for The Revolution That Might Have Been.

It's worth understanding that, despite the attempts to minimize who he is, Bill Ayers is not someone "kind of" associated with The Weather Underground. He was, really, THE Weather Underground, along with his now wife Bernadine Dohrn, an activist lawyer and professor.  Dohrn and Ayers, along with Kathy Boudin and others, went into hiding  in 1970 when a New York City building used for bomb making blew up. Boudin, you may remember, was eventually arrested in 1981, during a bank robbery in Nanuet, and sentenced to prison, released in 2003.

Ayers and Dohrn resurfaced prior to Boudin, in 1980, pleading guilty to jumping bail after arrests in 1969. Though they were never charged with acts of violence, they were part of a movement involved in a number of high profile bombings, meant to demonstrate opposition to The Vietnam War, the persecution of The Black Panthers, and against the Establishment in general.

Since returning from The Underground, Ayers has made a name for himself as a policy expert and instructor on education issues; Dohrn is a lawyer specializing in children's issues. Both clearly have moved on from their pasts, though their commitment to the ideals they believed in and the idea of power for the people is still very much alive. Though Dohrn was on the "10 Most Wanted List" for a time in the early seventies, she eventually came off of it, along with other student radicals of the period (including Angela Davis).

It's complicated to try and balance out who they were with who they've become, how to reconcile the upheavals of the late sixties, and the passion of the radical left, along with the polarized nature of the antiwar debate in a way that can relate it to all that's happened since. I remember the seventies as a time of such uncertainty and dismay, when the fears of random violence and the holdovers of free floating rage kept the idea of "The Panthers' and "The Weathermen" alive for longer than they really were active (partly, I think, it has to do with the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and all that followed).

Many have, and will, suggest that none of this is for Barack Obama to explain, and it's probably not; but the organization Ayers and Dohrn led in the sixties was not benign, and "I was only 8" is a dodge, not an explanation of decisions made as an adult about overlooking, or ignoring, past acts. John Murtagh, in City Journal this week, makes clear the very real threat the Weather Underground posed:

Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his relationship with Ayers. Obama’s answer: “The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.” Obama was indeed only eight in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers’s Weathermen tried to murder me.

In February 1970, my father, a New York State Supreme Court justice, was presiding over the trial of the so-called “Panther 21,” members of the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. Early on the morning of February 21, as my family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at our home on the northern tip of Manhattan, two at the front door and the third tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car. (Today, of course, we’d call that a car bomb.) A neighbor heard the first two blasts and, with the remains of a snowman I had built a few days earlier, managed to douse the flames beneath the car. That was an act whose courage I fully appreciated only as an adult, an act that doubtless saved multiple lives that night.

I don't know that the left has ever really come to terms with the path some radicals took, and I think we've avoided doing much more than saying "that was then" and "things have changed." And it's just not that simple.  And I think until we do more to wrestle with a lot of our history from the Vietnam era - history that intruded in our last Presidential election in unexpected ways, and given McCain's past, will doubtless come up again this time - there's no way to answer the questions posed by candidates associating themselves with radical holdovers like Ayers and Dohrn. And that holds for Hillary Clinton: Bill Clinton's pardon of granting of clemency to Susan Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans, two Weather Underground members imprisoned for their role in a bank robbery and murder of a security guard, were two of the more controversial of his final days in office.

I am not one who thinks that there's a lot of romance for a return to violence of the sort attempted by The Weathermen; I think my generation, the Children of that Revolution, have lived in far less polarized times, and  our idea of protest is probably more along the lines of peacful Civil Rights marches than random acts against "the man" (especially now, when we are The Man, in many cases - even the women). At some point, as with so much, we really do, though, have to face the painful parts of our past. And we haven't done it. Without that, I think, there really is no closure on a discussion of someone like Bill Ayers.

Comments

[Declarations of Pride]

Very nicely done.

[AM]

Bill Clinton didn't pardon Susan Rosenberg and Linda Sue Evans; he commuted their sentences after they had served many years.

[weboy]

Thanks AM - I conflated "clemency" and "pardon" into the same thing. My bad.