No redemption song: The case of Bill Ayers

...Nor will it do, as Ayers would have it, to place the entire weight of responsibility for these developments on those who continued to prosecute the Vietnam War...

...But in 2008, the invocation of such themes no longer had the desired effects...

...Fugitive Days contains an entire chapter on the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden, with the clear inference that nothing the Weather Underground did was remotely analogous...

...Ayers recounts a particularly telling anecdote in Fugitive Days...

...In the April City Journal of the Manhattan Institute, Sol Stern first offered that "Obama had a point," that he was being "unfairly attacked" for "a casual political and social relationship" with Ayers, only to incredibly hold Obama responsible for knowing and denouncing Ayers' educational and political views, which Stern described as unchanged since his Weather Underground days...

...If South Africans can forgive the masters of apartheid, Americans can certainly forgive the Weather Underground or others...

...But the political right wingers are not the only ones with a stake in this history...

...He—and all of the Weather Underground leadership—share in the responsibility for what took place in that townhouse: they all decided that it was time "to bring the war home," and the five Weather members in that house were acting on that injunction...

...At a Weather gathering, Terry Robbins, one of the three Weatherman members to die in the 1970 explosion of a Greenwich Village townhouse turned bomb factory, brings out an Associated Press wire photo of a grinning young boy, Marion Delgado, who has derailed a train and thus disrupted train service by placing a rock on the tracks...

...First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in the pig Tate's belly...

...A number of chapters begin with aphorisms of sorts on memory: first, that "memory is a motherfucker," then "we remember in our favor," "everything gets garbled in the end, everything burns to ash, and I can't remember the half of it," and finally "I remember nothing...

...Wild...

...Over the next two decades, Ayers remade himself into a leading advocate of education reform in Chicago, widely known and accepted—even respected—in local political and educational circles...

...I don't remember," Ayers tells us about himself and his comrades, "a lie of presidential proportions"—"the glib dismissal of the assassin, the alibi of the arrogant, the defense of the overprivileged...

...It is simply not enough that, by most accounts, Ayers has led a good life since the end of the Weather Underground, as important and necessary as that is...

...The fears that arose out of the September 11, 2001, attacks were exploited to defend a failed war of choice in Iraq, with the claims that this adventure was the "front" in the war on terrorism and that those who criticized it were "soft" on terrorism...

...Contrary to his demonization, Ayers said, he had many regrets about his years in the Weather Underground, which he described in the most general terms: "mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else...

...But it quickly became apparent that this was not to remain an issue for educational blogs and educational journals...

...Instead of planting bombs in public buildings," Stern wrote, "Ayers now works to indoctrinate teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students...

...There is an important political purpose in achieving this politics of responsibility...

...But a politics of forgiveness and redemption can only be enacted in the context of a politics of responsibility...

...The fact that it took the lives of three Weatherman members, including Ayers's lover Diana Oughton, rather than the lives of scores of working-class GIs and their girlfriends was a function of Weather incompetence, not intentions...

...He came across," wrote Guardian columnist Dan Kennedy, "as intelligent, sympathetic, multi-dimensional and reflective—in other words, like an actual human being...

...Live like him...

...THE POLITICS OF FORGIVENESS AND REDEMPTION The Weather Underground always had a weakness for the lyrics of popular music: its name was taken from a line in Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues"—"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows...

...Unlike Obama's former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Ayers refused to be drawn into the controversy that swirled around the accusations of his relationship to the Democratic presidential candidate...

...In the midst of that whirlwind, we had no difficulty understanding that the violent nihilism of the Weather Underground was a political force that made Americans fearful of the anti-war movement, thereby extending the war...

...Stern and I debated the question in a series of follow-up blog posts...

...The New Left was founded on a politics of moral witness, of speaking moral truth to power through personal sacrifice, in sharp contrast to an Old Left discourse of the development of impersonal historical forces and broad social classes...

...The new afterword to Ayers's Fugitive Days begins with lines from Bob Marley's "Redemption Song," themselves borrowed from a Marcus Garvey speech: "emancipate yourself from mental slavery...

...The first and only public action of the Weather Underground as an organization, the 1969 Days of Rage in Chicago, was more a collective temper tantrum than a political protest...

...As the attack grew, the New York Times printed a full investigative report on the "crossed paths" of Obama and Ayers on page one of the Sunday, October 4 issue, concluding that their relationship was "not close" and that Obama never "expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Bill Ayers...

...The democratic Left has a direct interest in the accurate and full portrayal of this incredibly destructive chapter in the past of the American Left, one from which it arguably has yet to recover...

...His 2001 memoir of his days in the Weather Underground, Fugitive Days, was republished with a new afterword addressing the 2008 election campaign...

...In this regard, it must be said plainly that Ayers's account of his own past and of the Weather Underground is a self-serving whitewash of a descent into violent nihilism in the name of revolution...

...With distance and reflection, most of us could identify major political mistakes we made...

...Nationally syndicated conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote a May 8 Washington Post column discussing Obama's "friendship" with Ayers, and the blogs of the flagship publication of American conservatism, the National Review, were filled with discussion of Obama and Ayers...

...outstanding charges against the two were dismissed because of prosecutorial misconduct...

...The bomb being made in the Greenwich Village townhouse was as much an antipersonnel weapon, designed solely to kill as many people as possible, as those being dropped in Vietnam: it was being filled with nails to serve as shrapnel, and its target was a dance at Fort Dix...

...GUILT BY ASSOCIATION Those active in the field of education saw keenly one of the first forays in this failed campaign...

...So when Sarah Palin accused Barack Obama of "palling around with a terrorist," and John McCain demanded the "truth" of his connections with an "old, washed-up terrorist," they were invoking tried-and-true tactics that echoed over a century of electoral "scares" from the right, harking back to fear of turn-ofthe-twentieth century anarchism and the "red scare" of the 1920s...

...A politics of the democratic Left must give expression to that human potential for righting wrongs...

...To be engaged in redemption, one must say honestly, to oneself as well as to the other, "as much as I can, I will right this wrong and do good in this world...

...Demonstrating an utter disregard for the truth, the McCain-Palin campaign cited the article as evidence of a nefarious Obama-Ayers relationship and followed its publication with direct attacks by Palin and McCain...

...Ayers is not wrong that by the end of the 1960s and early 1970s many in the anti-Vietnam War movement were caught in a deep depression and sense of powerlessness about our ability to bring an end to the war...

...Many more than three people lost their lives in the political violence of the late 1960s and early 1970s...

...When the "guilt by association" ObamaAyers case was first made by educational conservatives, I wrote a piece on the United Federation of Teachers' blog, Edwize, which laid out the lack of a meaningful, close political relationship between Obama and Ayers and spoke out against the smear of Obama...

...They are "all we ever have...

...Her words at a Weather "war council"—"Dig it...

...No less a figure than Chicago's mayor, Richard M. Daley, vouches for Ayers today: "He has done a lot of good in this city and nationally," says Daley...

...With every smear attack the McCain-Palin ticket lost ground...

...But most important, more than a quarter-century after the fact, he shows no signs of understanding that the Weather Underground had chosen as its model of revolutionary accomplishment a child who engaged in an anti-social action, completely bereft of any political significance, and that this action could easily have led to many pointless deaths...

...An answer that falls back on moral motivations evades the issue...

...But once the election was over, he went on a mini-public relations offensive...

...There is no reason to dispute Ayers's avowal that no one was ever "killed or injured" by his own hand, but that hardly exhausts the question of his moral and political responsibility as the founder and leader of an organization that engaged in a senseless glorification of violence...

...Ayers gets a number of the facts wrong, placing the incident in Italy when it took place in California, and saying the train was freight when it held passengers...

...As Ayers describes it, Marion Delgado became a Weather Underground "anti-hero mascot and icon," with Weatherman members routinely identifying themselves, "I am Marion Delgado," in conversations with each other...

...As a founder and a leader of the Weather Underground, he bears a particular responsibility—as do all who assume public roles of political leadership—to make a full public accounting...

...All of us who opposed it faced the same challenges and circumstances of the war, and yet most found political paths that, for all of their flaws, made much more strategic sense and were far more morally defensible than those taken by the Weather Underground...

...In 1980, as the Weather Underground was finally dying a richly deserved death, Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, a leader of the organization in her own right, ended their lives as fugitives and turned themselves in to the authorities...

...Given the dishonesty with which the McCain-Palin campaign and conservatives had pursued the smear of Obama, many were ready to take Ayers's post-election self-presentation at face value...

...This line of argument, most often taking the form of a claim that the violent acts of the Weather Underground paled against the violent acts of the American state, is a common Ayers refrain...

...But such comparisons cut both ways...

...Other former leaders and members of the Weather Underground, none with the visibility and prominence of Ayers and Dohrn, have done so...

...That is the social compact that underlies the South African Truth and Reconciliation process...

...In Fugitive Days, Ayers attempts to avoid this reality by writing a memoir that makes much of the unreliability and particularity of memory...

...The "terrorist pal" of Obama was Bill Ayers, a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago and a leading figure on the Chicago educational scene...

...While Ayers now wants to identify himself with the anti-war movement, we have not forgotten that the Weather Underground call to "bring the war home" did incalculable damage to that cause...

...So it continued until Election Day...

...Ever the children of American popular culture, this became the Weather version of "I am Spartacus...

...Unfortunately, the "acting out" of the Weather Underground, its words and actions, had all too real consequences on uncounted lives...

...As soon as it was apparent that Obama would win the Democratic nomination, the assault began in earnest...

...He penned an oped in the December 6, 2008, New York Times, "The Real Bill Ayers," and was interviewed at length on Terry Gross's National Public Radio Fresh Air show and in the pages of the Internet Journal Salon...

...Despite this invocation, Ayers's book is no redemption song...

...Ayers was never an educational consultant to Obama, and he had no connection to the Obama campaign...

...The question of how substantial parts of these movements could so quickly degenerate into a number of violent and authoritarian sects, of which the Weather Underground was only the most extreme manifestation, is a vexing one, of considerable political and historical import...

...The "unrepentant domestic terrorist" narrative of the election campaign was an unrecognizable caricature, Ayers contended...

...it is a deeply ahistorical text, celebrating the ability to forget—an anti-Book of Laughter and Forgetting, if you will...

...Voters read them as signs of a desperate campaign bereft of a positive agenda and new ideas...

...Therein lie the true redemption songs, those songs of freedom...

...It is important, I would insist here, that we embrace a politics of forgiveness, based on the potential for redemption, no matter the extent of the transgression...

...It was true, he allowed, that the Weather Underground carried out "symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism," but these "attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam War...

...Out of disgust with the attacks on Obama, others signed an online petition in Ayers's defense...

...This was the legacy bequeathed to the civil rights and anti-war movements of the New Left by our pacifist founders, the Norman Thomases, A. J. Mustes, Bayard Rustins, and Martin Luther Kings...

...none but ourselves can free our minds...

...As the campaign wore on, and the prospects of the McCain-Palin candidacy appeared increasingly bleak, the Republicans turned to an old playbook, one that had been used to much positive effect over the last decade...

...Yet with little to fashion into a compelling educational agenda out of their all-too-predictable attacks on teacher unions, a number of educational conservatives set out to make the most of the so-called Obama-Ayers connection...

...Obama knew Ayers casually, just as he knew hundreds if not thousands of other politically active Chicagoans...

...Ayers had been a founder and leader of the long defunct Weather Underground, a self-styled "urban guerrilla" organization that was a central actor in the late 1960s implosion of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the New Left...

...To be a truly radical democratic force, a politics of moral witness needs to be part of a politics of civic virtue, tempered by a deep respect for the demos with all of its imperfections...

...Ayers was the son of one of the most powerful members of the Chicago elite, the CEO of Commonwealth Edison who was once offered a cabinet position, and with his family's help, Ayers and Dohrn eventually landed on their feet with comfortable academic positions in schools of education and law...

...I never killed or injured anyone," and "was not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately...

...For us, memory was the ally of our pursuers, a danger to our survival, to our lives and to our insurrection...

...You judge a person by his whole life...

...Leading the way was the Flypaper blog of ehester Finn's Fordham Foundation, where former Bush assistant deputy secretary of education Mike Petrilli and others described the "unrepentant bomber" and "terrorist" Bill Ayers as "Obama's shameful ed school friend...

...Others survived, but their lives were broken and in tatters...

...With a number of other figures from the world of the Chicago elite, some liberal and some conservative, the two had served together on the board of the Annenberg Challenge, an educational reform effort designed to promote the establishment of new small schools...

...To be forgiven, one must say, "I lost my way, I did wrong, and I am sorry...

...The bitter insight is that a politics of moral witness can all too easily become moral selfrighteousness, the fuel for self-appointed vanguards of the pure that seek to impose revolutions from above...

...are as raw a rhetorical expression of the Weather Underground glorification of violence as one could imagine...

...It must be remembered and understood, so it will not be repeated...

...AYERS REDEEMED...

...There is no evidence to suggest even the slightest Obama sympathy with the politics of the Weather Underground, and as soon as Ayers was raised as a campaign issue, Obama unequivocally dissociated himself from the actions of Ayers and others in the Weather Underground—actions, he pointed out, that took place when he was a child...

...Start down that road of moral self-righteousness, and the likes of the Weather Underground will appear, sooner rather than later...

...Robbins starts a playful chant, "Marion Delgado...

...All who fed the descent into violence of those years—and here the Weather Underground played a pivotal role— share in the political and moral responsibility for those lost lives...

...To claim, as Ayers now does, that the Weather Underground only engaged in "attacks on property, never on people," and that these attacks "were meant to respect human life" goes beyond the particularity and partiality of memory to a fundamental intellectual dishonesty...

...Those who lived through that moment understand the sense of political desperation that many of us felt, and the ways in which it warped our political judgment and threw us off of our moral balance...

...But in practice, Ayers's remembering/forgetting simply yields a most convenient narrative...

...The human condition is one of fallibility, no less in public than in personal affairs, but it also includes the capacity to rise above our faults and to rectify our wrongs...

...In those days I was deeply involved in the pacifist Catholic Left, and that was certainly true of us...

...In Ayersspeak, "remembering is a way of forgetting...

...Yet there is no question that all of us, including those who ended up in the Weather Underground, began this process with the best of moral motivations...

...A picture of Delgado appeared on the front of one of the first issues of New Left Notes produced by the Weather Underground once it was in control of SDS...

...Ironically, those who claimed to be the most appalled by Ayers's actions in the Weather Underground had done more for his political rehabilitation than he could ever have accomplished on his own...

...In the decade or so of its existence, the Weather Underground engaged in a "propaganda of the deed" that included the bombing of the Pentagon, the U.S...

...What was passing for politics, and revolutionary politics at that, shared far more with the behavior of spoiled youth, acting out, than a serious political project...

...He has no difficulty remembering the details of sexual conquest after sexual conquest, but one looks in vain for a single word on a subject he could not possibly have forgotten, given its prominent place in the public record: Bernadine Dohrn's infamous celebration of the Manson murders...

...In recent elections, the patriotism and good names of Democratic war hero candidates, from John Kerry to Max Cleland, had been impugned so successfully that a neologism for such smears—to "Swift-boat"—was coined out of the assault on Kerry...

...It is the absence of a forthright politics of responsibility in Ayers's self-presentation, his shift into the passive "mistakes were made" voice that speaks in evasive generalities about undefined regrets, that prevents a politics of redemption...

...By October, Stern was back in the pages of the City Journal, and directly on Republican campaign message: where once he said that Obama had "a point" about being "unfairly attacked," now he accused Obama of lying about his relationship with Ayers and demanded that the American voters be given "an accurate picture" of the relationship...

...Capitol, and New York City police headquarters...