In Defense of Bill Ayers
http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/obama-and-weatherman-connection-in.html
The Bill Ayers I knew in the late 1960's was a very thoughtful and
serious person.'
By David P. Hamilton / The Rag Blog / October 6, 2008
John McCain couldn't hold Bill Ayers' jock strap.
I left graduate school at the Univ. of Texas in September of 1968 and
headed north to work for the Radical Education Project (REP) in Ann
Arbor. REP had been founded by Tom Hayden and was responsible for
selecting, printing and distributing literature to be used by SDS
chapters. The staff was an SDS chapter and we shared offices with the
Michigan Regional Office of SDS. The main people running the Michigan
Regional were Bill Ayers and Diana Oughton. They were a couple at the
time and both devoted to education issues. Together they worked at
the Children's Community School in Ann Arbor, a progressive private
school for underprivileged children based on the Summerhill model.
The Bill Ayers I knew in the late 1960's was a very thoughtful and
serious person. Besides working at the school, he traveled the region
organizing SDS chapters. He also was prominent in the developments
within SDS on a national level and attended National Interim
Committee meetings at the Chicago national office and all our
quarterly conventions. Although we were not close friends, my
observation was that Bill was highly conscientious and not
particularly involved in the more cultural aspects of those times.
Sex, drugs and rock-n-roll were not his passions. Instead, he was an
unswerving opponent of the Vietnam War and the American imperialism
of which it was a manifestation.
I ran with Bill in a street "affinity group" at Nixion's
inauguration, January 20, 1969. By this time, militancy and defying
the cops had become a principal strategy. I'll omit the details of
what we did that day, but we had the cops running, the tear gas
flying and we all got away. I last saw him at the fateful final SDS
national convention in the summer of 1969. Weather took over the
national office. Most of the REP staff sided with the Revolutionary
Youth Movement II faction, but supported Weather against the
Progressive Labor faction. In September, I returned to UT.
The Weather analysis was largely correct. They recognized that there
was a worldwide struggle going on against American imperialism, with
Vietnam as the leading edge of the struggle, but only one theater of
operation. We had just experienced the May Days in France, the
student uprising in Mexico, dozens of major riots in black
communities coast to coast and multiple assassinations of progressive
American leaders among many other revolutionary events. American
imperialism was being attacked on many fronts. Weather's position was
that another front in the struggle should be opened within the US. My
problem with their position was largely tactical. They did not see
the need to mobilize masses. Instead, they sought to engage in
violent acts carried out by small groups in solidarity with the
Vietnamese, hopefully forcing the US government to deploy its
military domestically and, thus taking pressure off the Vietnamese.
My own position was that the movement having an armed wing was not
necessarily a bad idea, but I wasn't willing to be part of it. But
Bill and others had that level of commitment. They put their lives on the line.
The Weather Underground (WUO) committed dozens of bombings over the
next several years. They bombed the memorial statue dedicated to the
police who killed striking workers during Chicago's 1886 Haymarket
Riot (twice), the NY City police headquarters, the US capitol
building, the Pentagon and many Bank of America branches. It should
be pointed out that they went to great lengths to avoid killing
innocent people, but cops were not considered innocent. They are
blamed for killing a policeman in a bombing in San Francisco in 1970,
but a SF grand jury in 1999 refused to indict anyone. Another person
was killed during a bombing of a Defense Department lab at the Univ.
of Wisconsin. The victim was in the building at 3 am when the
explosion occurred and that bombing was reputedly carried out by
Weather copycats, not the WUO itself. The most people who died in a
WUO bombing were the three Weather members, Diana Oughton, Ted Gold,
and Terry Robbins, who died while making a bomb in a Greenwich
Village townhouse in 1970.
It must be pointed out that at the same period, John McCain was
flying bombing missions over Vietnam in support of American
aggression. The number of people he killed in the process is unknown,
but with a doubt, it is considerable. He was shot down when he broke
Navy rules by flying back over his bombing target to admire the carnage.
When Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn turned themselves in 1980, most
of the charges against them were dropped because of prosecutorial
misconduct, primarily searches without warrants carried out by the
FBI. All charges against Ayers were dropped. Dohrn received probation
and a fine.What the Weather Underground did between 1969 and the end
of the Vietnam War must be seen in the context of the times. Malcolm
X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and Fred Hampton had all been
assassinated. The American invasion was responsible for the deaths of
roughly 2 million Vietnamese. Cambodia and Laos were mercilessly
bombed – in secret. In Indonesia, the Sukarno government was
overthrown with US support and subsequently an estimated 500,000
"communists" were killed. In 1973, the CIA instigated the overthrow
of the democratically elected government of Chile. It also illegally
spied on US citizens. Hundreds of African Americans were killed by
police and National Guard during the insurrections in black
communities. These events are just a few examples of the
voraciousness of American imperialism during that period. By
comparison, the actions of the WUO hardly merit mention.
Ayers was asked in a January 2004 interview, "How do you feel about
what you did? Would you do it again under similar circumstances?" He
replied: "I've thought about this a lot. Being almost 60, it's
impossible to not have lots and lots of regrets about lots and lots
of things, but the question of did we do something that was
horrendous, awful? ... I don't think so. I think what we did was to
respond to a situation that was unconscionable." On September 9,
2008, journalist Jake Tapper reported on the comic strip in Bill
Ayers's blog explaining the soundbite: "The one thing I don't regret
is opposing the war in Vietnam with every ounce of my being....'When
I say, 'We didn't do enough,' a lot of people rush to think, 'That
must mean, 'We didn't bomb enough shit.'" But that's not the point at
all. It's not a tactical statement, it's an obvious political and
ethical statement. In this context, 'we' means 'everyone.'"[Bill
Ayers in now a Distinguished Professor at the Univ. of Illinois,
Chicago. He worked with Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley in shaping the
city's school reform program and was one of three co-authors of the
Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant proposal that in 1995 won $49.2
million over five years for public school reform. Since 1999 he has
served on the board of directors of the Woods Fund of Chicago, an
anti-poverty, philanthropic foundation established as the Woods
Charitable Fund in 1941.
Bernadine Dohrn is an associate professor of law at Northwestern. She
also serves on the board of numerous human rights committees and
since 2002, she has served as Visiting Law Faculty at the Vrije
Universiteit in Amsterdam. Her legal work has focused on reforming
the much criticized juvenile court system in Chicago and on
advocating for human rights at the international level. Dohrn is
director and founder of the Children and Family Justice Center, which
supports the legal needs of adolescents and their families. It is
instructive that the media, in its attempts to link Ayers with Barack
Obama, has generally ignored Bernadine.Bill and Bernadine have two
children. They also raised, Chesa Boudin, child of imprisoned WUO
members, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert. Chesea Boudin later
graduated at the top of his class at Yale, became a Rhodes Scholar
and has written a recent book on the Venezuelan revolution.
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