Posted on 10/06/2008 5:42:47 PM PDT by AfterManyASummer
Edited on 10/06/2008 6:15:16 PM PDT by Sidebar Moderator. [history]
Remembering a Sixties Terrorist By Donna Ron FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, January 04, 2006
I read occasionally of former Weatherman Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, both now not only accepted, despite their bombing campaign against America in the 1960s and 70s, but successful , establishment educators whose opinions on social issues are taken seriously. Every time I see Ayers’ name I shudder with fear and rage and realize that I will never be able to erase the mark he left on my life one evening 40 years ago.
It was at the Undergraduate Library at the University of Michigan on a Friday night in November 1965. I was a sophomore and was living in a sorority house -- Alpha Epsilon Phi. I was walking down the stairs to leave the library. Billy Ayers was standing on the first floor and started talking to me.
I thought he was cute. There seemed to be jovial kind of instant connection between us. As I am writing this now I think he must have noticed me before , boys were attracted to me in those days , and planned to try to pick me up. As we struck up a conversation, Ayers told me very quickly about his leftist activism as if he knew this would intrigue me. In fact, I had made attempts to join SDS and the anti Vietnam War Movement on campus during my freshman year but had been put off by what hustlers the young male “activists” were. They talked in lofty ideological abstractions, but they also used their political sophistication as a lure for young women who wanted to be on the right side of the great social issues of the day. I picked up on that cynicism early and so spent much of my freshman year at Michigan trying to figure out how to act. I was politically idealistic back then and believed in Tikkun Olam -- that we had to do something to make the world better.
My freshman year at Michigan I attended the Teach-Ins and the campus demonstrations against the Vietnam War and studied hard for my Chemistry exams once a month. At the same time, I decided to pledge a sorority, partially just to prove I could and partially because young women’s options for campus living arrangements were still quite limited in those years.
Despite the caution I’d learned about young ideologues on the make, I was charmed by Bill Ayers and by his savvy talk of politics and the children’s school he was involved with. He asked me to go to a party with him and I did. I have a vague memory of the house where the party was and the people there. I think he got quite drunk and I suppose I drank too. I remember walking home with him. He was very open about himself and told me he was one of 5 children and that he was from Chicago and that his father was rich.
I felt comfortable with Bill. Throughout my life I had always had a friendly buddy-kind of connection with certain boys and felt that I was developing such a connection with him.
I remember going back to his attic apartment -- he describes it in his book Fugitive Days. He had a roommate -- a black man who was 23 and married with children. There was a couch, a table, a stereo and a sink in the room. There were two beds – Ayers’ and his roommate’s on each side of the attic wall. I slept with him there.
I came there a few times afterward to talk and to listen to his LPs. I especially loved Glen Yarbough’s album Come Share My Life. I met Bill’s roommate who also worked at the children’s school. I also met Bill’s younger brother Rick. Bill was a year older than I and his brother was a year younger. He spent a lot of time at Bill’s apartment.
Bill Ayers’ apartment was around the corner and a half a block away from the sorority house. The more time I spent there, the more out of place I felt with my sisters. Sometimes I would stop by just to keep from having to go back to a place I had begun to think of as boring. I guess it was one of those evenings -- maybe on the way back from the library, maybe just to get out of the sorority house, I don’t remember exactly. What I do recall is that when I was getting ready to leave Ayers told me I couldn’t go until I slept with his roommate and his brother. At this point Bill and I had slept together just once. I was sexually inexperienced, having had only one serious boyfriend with whom I had recently broken up.
At first I thought Ayers was joking. I got up; and went to the door. He moved quickly to block me at the doorway. He locked the door and put the chain on it. I went to the couch and sat down and told him that I had no intention of having sex with his roommate and his brother or him. He said that I had no choice but to do as he said if I wanted to get out of there. He claimed that I wouldn’t sleep with his married roommate because he was black -- that I was a bigot. I had gone to school with black kids and had them as friends all my life. I couldn’t believe he was saying that to me
I felt trapped. I had to get out of the situation I was in and because he was so effective a guilt-tripper, I also felt I had to prove to him that I wasn’t a bigot. I got up from the couch and walked over to the black roommate’s bed and put myself on it and he ****ed me. I went totally out of my body. I floated beside myself on the outside and above the bed looking at this black stranger **** me angrily while I hated myself.
After that I had to go lie down on Bill Ayer’s bed for his brother to screw me. Rick Ayers was a decent person, unlike his brother, and couldn’t go through with it He started and stopped and let me go. I also thought I had to let Bill screw me but at that point he unbolted the door and I left.
I remember going back to the sorority house and talking to my best girlfriend and telling her what had happened. But there were no words yet to describe it. There was no term “date rape” yet in our political vocabulary. The notion of a psychological rape was not on the table.
I was a mess and felt it was my fault for letting it happen. I was ashamed. Back home at the end of the semester, I got my parents to send me to a psychiatrist. What had happened affected my ability to trust in a relationship with a man and I didn’t have a close relationship again for a long time.
I graduated in 1968 and went to Europe for the summer and came back right before the Democratic Convention. I worked for McCarthy in the Indiana primary. Wherever I went over the next few years, I carried with me the shame and guilt with me. I felt it had been my fault for not putting up more of a struggle against Ayers.
I started a PhD program in clinical psych at Yeshiva University in 1969. I was also working part time for a branch of the University of Chicago Institute for Social Research which was in the same building. I was there in a room with other employees one day sitting around a big table and coding questionnaires for a research study on Head Start when we heard a huge explosion. Soon after we discovered that it was a bomb that went off in the brown stone on 10th street which killed three buddies of Bill Ayers, who was now one of the leaders of the WeatherUnderground, a terrorist cult. One of the victims was Diana Oughton, his girlfriend at the time. I had known her: a kind soul who had worked at the Fresh Air Camp for troubled kids before she got mixed up with ever so persuasive Bill and the other Weatherman terrorists. When I found out she had been blown up, I thought how like him to send his girlfriend to make the bomb rather than do it himself.
I eventually moved to Israel, married and had a family. But for a long time I felt as if I existed in a time warp in relation to events in the US that were a continuation of the 1960s. In 1994 I returned to the States for my 30-year Mumford High School reunion. I was in NYC visiting a friend and asked about the Weathermen. He told me that Billy and Bernardine Dohrn had come up from the underground and resumed middle class life—including the radical politics—without being prosecuted for their crimes.
Later I read about Ayers and his book Fugitive Days on the Internet. This was just after the terrorist attack on 9/11 and he was entirely unrepentant for having been a terrorist himself. “I would do it again,” he told the Times when he was asked about having set a bomb in the Pentagon. I also discovered that he was a Distinguished Professor of Education at University of Illinois Chicago campus. I think that freaked me out more than anything. That a man so cruel and conscienceless could attain such a position enraged me. I contacted him by email through the University’s website. He wrote back that he didn’t remember me.
I was in Detroit in November 2001 and bought his memoir at Book Beat at Lincoln Plaza in Oak Park. I looked to see if there was some hint in it of what had become the defining event of my life. Nothing. But why should he remember me if he has convinced the world to forget, or is it forgive -- that he set out to launch a bombing campaign to blow up America?
-Donna Ron is involved in non-profit resource and program development in Israel where she has been living on a kibbutz for many years.
And the media.
Just watched a Nightline segment that compared Ayres/Obama connection to McCain/Keating. No mention of Ayres standing on the flag 3 years ago, joking “guilty as sin and free as a bird” or his unrepentant attitude. Just that he is a tenured professor.
McCain/Keating..no mention that he was exonerated of the association..along with John Glenn.
The closing statement..”Which is worse, an activist from 40 years ago or someone that cost the taxpayers billions of dollars 20 years ago?” (paraphrased)
I am steamed...the communists aren't the only one that belong in prison.
He was a sixties radical, by 1970 he was already in hiding for what he had done. The Weathermen came from SDS.
“Ayers became involved in the New Left and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).[7] He rose to national prominence as an SDS leader in 1968 and 1969. As head of an SDS regional group, the “Jesse James Gang”, Ayers made decisive contributions to the Weatherman orientation toward militancy.[5]The group Ayers headed in Detroit, Michigan became one of the earliest gatherings of what became the Weatherman. Between the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the June 1969 SDS convention, Ayers became a prominent leader of the group, which arose as a result of a schism in SDS.[5]”During that time his infatuation with street fighting grew and he developed a language of confrontational militancy that became more and more pronounced over the year [1969]”, disaffected former Weatherman member Cathy Wilkerson wrote in 2001. Ayers had previously become a roommate of Terry Robbins, a fellow militant, Wilkerson wrote. Robbins would later be killed while making a bomb.[8]In June 1969, the Weatherman took control of the SDS at its national convention, where Ayers was elected Education Secretary.[5] Later in 1969, Ayers participated in planting a bomb at a statue dedicated to riot police casualties in the 1886 Haymarket Riot confrontation between labor supporters and the police.”
“In 1970 he “went underground” with several associates after the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, in which Weatherman member Ted Gold, Ayers’ close friend Terry Robbins, and Ayers’ girlfriend, Diana Oughton, were killed when a nail bomb (an anti-personnel device) they were assembling exploded. “
Patty Hearst who was actually kidnapped... served more time in jail than Ayers ever did.
the porn internet is full of sick white guys who like to watch their wife get gang banged by black guys...it’s like a micro industry
so Ayers is that kid of limp ***** perv too as well as being a bomber?
how nice....
maybe we should check if he left Obama alone with Bernadine much.
They need to note that the only reason Ayers wasn’t thrown in Prison to rot was because of a technicality that got him off.
to be fair nearly all the Weathermen has their start in the SDS earlier in the middle 60s ans some even earlier in the Civil rights and Freedom Rider days
many of the radicals were far older than college aged
but some of the girls were young
“many of the radicals were far older than college aged”
In this story all of them were college age, all were McCains generation the authoress (the raped one), the black guy, Bill Ayers, even his wife Bernardine Dohrn. The little brother was young enough that he may have been born in 1946.
this was 4 years before the Weathermen were founded
just google all the famous radicals from the 1960s and their ages at their peak and you will see they were mostly late 20s or even early 30s Pied Pipers leading gullible college kids
let’s take Woodstock ...the zenith of the yippie-hippie movement as benchmark
even Horowitz...born 1939, aged 30 in 1969
Abbie Hoffman...born 1936.....aged 33 in 1969
Jerry Rubin.....born 1938, aged 31 in 1969
Mark Rudd.....actually the age of a college senior in 1969
Leonard Weinglass....born 1933, aged 36 in 1969
Tom Hayden.....born 1939, aged 30 in 1969
Ayers, born 1944 was 25 when he founded the WU...past college undergrad age and then some
Wavy Gravy, born 1936...aged 33 at Woodstock
David Crosby, .....born 1941, aged 28 at Woodstock
Paul Krassner....born 1933, aged 36 at Woodstock
Phil Ochs, born 1941, aged 28 at Woodstock
note how few of these notables were even Boomers although Boomers (myself a fairly late boomer) get all the blame for that silliness
I thought folks 28-40m were old when I was in college.
You read the writings of some of those guys and the candor is that it was about the Punani and the Dope first....
and so forth
“just google all the famous radicals from the 1960s and their ages at their peak and you will see they were mostly late 20s or even early 30s Pied Pipers leading gullible college kids”
We are on the same page on this. Even Dirtyharry’s, a blog I like, put a picture of the Chicago Seven up to start a diatribe against “Boomer” Scum.
Not a one of those guys is a boomer they went all the way back to 1915.
The bombings occrued in the 1970s (the Pentagon was bombed in 1972). He was a 1970s terrorist. Just as the Unabaomber was.
How much did bombing the Pentagon, investigation, prosecution, and subsequent increase in security cost the US taxpayer?
He never was an “activist”. He was a self-proclaimed COMBATANT. That makes hims a TRAITOR in a time of war.
And just because he was a “professor” doesn’t mean crap. Timothy Leary, Ward Churchhill, and the Unabomber were also professors.
“Don’t trsust anyone over 30”. Rock against the Barack vote.
OK, I agree with you now.
He was an activist in the sixties, he did that one, less substantive bombing in 1969, but his real terrorist activities and identity are from the 1970s.
He is either a 1970s terrorist or a terrorist from the 60s and 70s, but he is not a 1960s terrorist.
It took me a while but I very much agree with you now.
BUMPING AN OLD THREAD RELEVANT TO OBAMA’S BACKGROUND.
This has to do with BILL AYERS and RAPE.
This has to do with BILL AYERS and RAPE.
BTTT again
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