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William Ayers “[W]illiam Ayers … [Was] A Founding Member Of The Group That Bombed The U.S. Capitol And The Pentagon During The 1970s.” (Russell Berman, “Obama’s Ties To Left Come Under Scrutiny,” The New York Sun, 2/19/08) - Ayers’ Wife And Fellow Weather Underground Leader, Bernardine Dohrn, Appeared On The FBI’s Most Wanted List Prior To Her Surrender To Authorities In 1980. (James Litke, “Fugitive Leader Surrenders With No Regrets,” The Associated Press, 12/4/80)
- Ayers And Other Leaders Of The Weather Underground Set Up A Bomb Factory In New York, Planning To Blow Up Ft. Dix In New Jersey And Various Police Headquarters. (Jon Anderson, “Weathering Change ‘60s Revolutionary Bill Ayers Says He Has Always Been A Teacher, But He No Longer Uses Bombs As Study Aids,” Chicago Tribune, 7/8/93)
- The Bomb Factory Accidentally Exploded In 1970, Leveling The Townhouse And Killing Three People. (Jon Anderson, “Weathering Change ‘60s Revolutionary Bill Ayers Says He Has Always Been A Teacher, But He No Longer Uses Bombs As Study Aids,” Chicago Tribune, 7/8/93)
- In 1969, Ayers And 300 Other Radicals Launched An Unsuccessful Attack On The Home Of U.S. District Judge Julius Hoffman. (Jon Anderson, “Weathering Change ‘60s Revolutionary Bill Ayers Says He Has Always Been A Teacher, But He No Longer Uses Bombs As Study Aids,” Chicago Tribune, 7/8/93)
Ayers Is “Flatly Unrepentant About The Bombings.” (Ben Smith, “Obama Once Visited ‘60s Radicals,” The Politico, 2/22/08) - In 2001, Ayers Did Not Express Regret For His Past Conduct And Even Claimed The Weather Underground “Didn’t Do Enough” Bombings. (Russell Berman, “Obama’s Ties To Left Come Under Scrutiny,” The New York Sun, 2/19/08)
Obama First Met Ayers At A 1995 Meeting Of Local Liberal Activists That Took Place In Ayers’ Home. (Ben Smith, “Obama Once Visited ‘60s Radicals,” The Politico, 1/22/08) - The Meeting Launched Obama’s Illinois State Senate Candidacy And Allowed Ayers To Introduce Him “To The Hyde Park Community As The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread.” (Ben Smith, “Obama Once Visited ‘60s Radicals,” The Politico, 1/22/08)
- From 1999 To 2002, Obama Served With Ayers On The Board Of Directors For The Woods Fund Of Chicago. (Timothy J. Burger, “Obama’s Chicago Ties Might Fuel ‘Republican Attack Machine’,” Bloomberg, 2/15/08)
“[Obama And Ayers] Have Also Appeared Jointly On Two Academic Panels, One In 1997 And Another In 2001.” (Russell Berman, “Obama’s Ties To Left Come Under Scrutiny,” The New York Sun, 2/19/08) In 1997, Obama Reviewed Ayers’ Book, A Kind And Just Parent: The Children Of Juvenile Court, In The Chicago Tribune, Calling It “A Searing And Timely Account Of The Juvenile Court System.” (Chicago Tribune, 12/21/97) In 2001, Ayers Contributed $200 To Obama’s State Senate Campaign. (National Institute On Money In State Politics Website, www.followthemoney.org, Accessed 2/15/08) Obama: "This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis." (Sen. Barack Obama, ABC Democrat Candidates Presidential Debate, Philadelphia, PA, 4/16/08) Obama Chief Strategist David Axelrod: "Bill Ayers lives in his neighborhood. Their kids attend the same school … They’re certainly friendly, they know each other, as anyone whose kids go to school together." (Ben Smith, "Ax On Ayers," The Politico’s "Ben Smith" Blog, www.politico.com, 2/26/08) Obama Spokesman Bill Burton: "Senator Obama strongly condemns the violent actions of the Weathermen group, as he does all acts of violence … But he was an eight-year-old child when Ayers and the Weathermen were active, and any attempt to connect Obama with events of almost 40 years ago is ridiculous." (Russell Berman, "Obama’s Ties To Left Come Under Scrutiny," The New York Sun, 2/19/08) Who is William Ayers? - Leader of the 1960s and 70s domestic terrorist group Weatherman
- "Kill all the rich people. ... Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents."
- Participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972
- Currently a professor of education at the University of Illinois
Born in 1944, Bill Ayers, along with his wife Bernardine Dohrn, was a 1960s leader of the homegrown terrorist group Weatherman, a Communist-driven splinter faction of Students for a Democratic Society. Characterizing Weatherman as "an American Red Army," Ayers summed up the organization's ideology as follows: "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents."
Today Ayers is a professor of education and a Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois. He has also authored a series of books about parenting and educating children, including: A Kind and Just Parent; To Become a Teacher; City Kids; City Teachers; To Teach; The Good Preschool Teacher; Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment in Our Schools; and Teaching Towards Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom.
In his 2001 screed, Fugitive Days, Ayers recounts his life as a Sixties radical, his tenure as a Weatherman lieutenant, his terrorist campaign across America, and his enduring hatred for for the United States. "What a country," Ayers said in 2001. "It makes me want to puke."
Ayers was an active participant in Weatherman's 1969 "Days of Rage" riots in Chicago, where nearly 300 members of the organization employed guerrilla-style tactics to viciously attack police officers and civilians alike, and to destroy massive amounts of property via vandalism and arson; their objective was to further spread their anti-war, anti-American message. Reminiscing on those riots, Ayers says pridefully: "We'd ... proven that it was possible -- we didn't all die, we were still there."
A substantial portion of Ayers' book Fugitive Days discusses the author's penchant for building and deploying explosives. Ayers boasts that he "participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972." Of the day he bombed the Pentagon, Ayers says, "Everything was absolutely ideal. ... The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them."
On another occasion, Ayers stated: "There's something about a good bomb … Night after night, day after day, each majestic scene I witnessed was so terrible and so unexpected that no city would ever again stand innocently fixed in my mind. Big buildings and wide streets, cement and steel were no longer permanent. They, too, were fragile and destructible. A torch, a bomb, a strong enough wind, and they, too, would come undone or get knocked down."
All told, Ayers and Weatherman were responsible for 30 bombings aimed at destroying the defense and security infrastructures of the U.S. "I don't regret setting bombs, said Ayers in 2001, "I feel we didn't do enough."
In 1970, Ayers' then-girlfriend Diana Oughton, along with Weatherman members Terry Robbins and Ted Gold, were killed when a bomb they were constructing exploded unexpectedly. That bomb had been intended for detonation at a dance that was to be attended by army soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Hundreds of lives could have been lost had the plan been successfully executed. Ayers attested that the bomb would have done serious damage, "tearing through windows and walls and, yes, people too."
After the death of his girlfriend, Ayers and his current wife, Bernardine Dohrn, spent the 1970s as fugitives running from the FBI. In 1980 the two surrendered, but all charges against them were dropped due to an "improper surveillance" technicality. Ayers' comment on his life, as reported by Peter Collier and David Horowitz in their authoritative chapter on Weatherman in Destructive Generation, is this: "Guilty as sin, free as a bird, America is a great country."
Notwithstanding his violent past, Ayers today does not describe himself as a terrorist. "Terrorists destroy randomly," he reasons, "while our actions bore ... the precise stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate."
In Fugitive Days, Ayers reflects on whether or not he might use bombs against the U.S. in the future. "I can't imagine entirely dismissing the possibility," he writes.
In the mid-1990s, Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn hosted meetings at their Chicago home to introduce Barack Obama to their neighbors during his first run for the Illinois Senate.
In 1999 Ayers joined the Woods Fund of Chicago, where he served as a director alongside Barack Obama until the latter left the Woods board in December 2002. Ayers went on to become Woods' Chairman of the Board. In 2002 the Woods Fund made a grant to Northwestern University Law School's Children and Family Justice Center, where Ayers' wife, Bernardine Dohrn, was employed.
At a 2007 reunion of former members of the Weather Underground and Students for a Democratic Society, Ayers painted a verbal portrait of life in the United States which included the following passages:
- "This is a time not only of great stress and oppression and authoritarianism, and a kind of rising incipient American form of fascism, and what the government counts on, what the powerful count on, is that we will stay quiet. It's the idea that we can tolerate these intolerable things without screaming, without somehow coming out, joining up and coming out and saying something. It's what they count on in terms of keeping things under control."
- "Empire resurrected and unapologetic, war without end, an undefined enemy that's supposed to be a rallying point for a new kind of energized jingoistic patriotism, unprecedented and unapologetic military expansion, white supremacy changing its form, but essentially intact, attacks on women and girls, violent attacks, growing surveillance in every sphere of our lives, on and on and on, the targeting of gay and lesbian people as a kind of a scapegoating gesture to keep our minds off of what's really happening."
And here is how Ayers characterized himself and the longtime radical comrades to whom he was speaking:
"Even though we think of ourselves as political, we weren't politicians. We were people who had a moral vision of what was possible. And when we talk, for example, about health care, about peace, we're talking a language of ethics, not a language of instrumentalism or opportunism, or what we might get. So we have to speak in a language that's large and generous and encompassing. And then we have to act." Obama’s Real Bill Ayers Problem
The ex-Weatherman is now a radical educator with influence.
23 April 2008 Barack Obama complains that he’s been unfairly attacked for a casual political and social relationship with his neighbor, former Weatherman Bill Ayers. Obama has a point. In the ultraliberal Hyde Park community where the presidential candidate first earned his political spurs, Ayers is widely regarded as a member in good standing of the city’s civic establishment, not an unrepentant domestic terrorist. But Obama and his critics are arguing about the wrong moral question. The more pressing issue is not the damage done by the Weather Underground 40 years ago, but the far greater harm inflicted on the nation’s schoolchildren by the political and educational movement in which Ayers plays a leading role today. A Chicago native son, Ayers first went into combat with his Weatherman comrades during the “Days of Rage” in 1969, smashing storefront windows along the city’s Magnificent Mile and assaulting police officers and city officials. Chicago’s mayor at the time was the Democratic boss of bosses, Richard J. Daley. The city’s current mayor, Richard M. Daley, has employed Ayers as a teacher trainer for the public schools and consulted him on the city’s education-reform plans. Obama’s supporters can reasonably ask: If Daley fils can forgive Ayers for his past violence, why should Obama’s less consequential contacts with Ayers be a political disqualification? It’s hard to disagree. Chicago’s liberals have chosen to define deviancy down in Ayers’s case, and Obama can’t be blamed for that. What he can be blamed for is not acknowledging that his neighbor has a political agenda that, if successful, would make it impossible to lift academic achievement for disadvantaged children. As I have shown elsewhere in City Journal, Ayers’s politics have hardly changed since his Weatherman days. He still boasts about working full-time to bring down American capitalism and imperialism. This time, however, he does it from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students. Indeed, the education department at the University of Illinois is a hotbed for the radical education professoriate. As Ayers puts it in one of his course descriptions, prospective K–12 teachers need to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.” Ayers’s texts on the imperative of social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the syllabi of the nation’s ed schools and teacher-training institutes. One of Ayers’s major themes is that the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony. Thus, the mission of all progressive teachers is to take back the classrooms and turn them into laboratories of revolutionary change. Unfortunately, neither Obama nor his critics in the media seem to have a clue about Ayers’s current work and his widespread influence in the education schools. In his last debate with Hillary Clinton, Obama referred to Ayers as a “professor of English,” an error that the media then repeated. Would that Ayers were just another radical English professor. In that case, his poisonous anti-American teaching would be limited to a few hundred college students in the liberal arts. But through his indoctrination of future K–12 teachers, Ayers has been able to influence what happens in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of classrooms. Ayers’s influence on what is taught in the nation’s public schools is likely to grow in the future. Last month, he was elected vice president for curriculum of the 25,000-member American Educational Research Association (AERA), the nation’s largest organization of education-school professors and researchers. Ayers won the election handily, and there is no doubt that his fellow education professors knew whom they were voting for. In the short biographical statement distributed to prospective voters beforehand, Ayers listed among his scholarly books Fugitive Days, an unapologetic memoir about his ten years in the Weather Underground. The book includes dramatic accounts of how he bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings. AERA already does a great deal to advance the social-justice teaching agenda in the nation’s schools and has established a Social Justice Division with its own executive director. With Bill Ayers now part of the organization’s national leadership, you can be sure that it will encourage even more funding and support for research on how teachers can promote left-wing ideology in the nation’s classrooms—and correspondingly less support for research on such mundane subjects as the best methods for teaching underprivileged children to read. The next time Obama—the candidate who purports to be our next “education president”—discusses education on the campaign trail, it would be nice to hear what he thinks of his Hyde Park neighbor’s vision for turning the nation’s schools into left-wing indoctrination centers. Indeed, it’s an appropriate question for all the presidential candidates. Sol Stern is a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice. |
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