Posted on 08/23/2008 1:24:50 PM PDT by STARWISE
In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen
''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.''
Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago.
The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings. And he still has the ebullient, ingratiating manner, the apparently intense interest in other people, that made him a charismatic figure in the radical student movement.
Now he has written a book, ''Fugitive Days'' (Beacon Press, September). Mr. Ayers, who is 56, calls it a memoir, somewhat coyly perhaps, since he also says some of it is fiction.
He writes that he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972.
But Mr. Ayers also seems to want to have it both ways, taking responsibility for daring acts in his youth, then deflecting it.
''Is this, then, the truth?,'' he writes. ''Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest to me.''
(Excerpt) Read more at query.nytimes.com ...
Thanks for the ping!
COINTELPRO! Seriously, when the FBI was found guilty of illegal break-ins of suspected Weathermen/Weather Underground "safe houses," government attorneys requested that all weapons and bomb-related charges against the WU be dropped.
It was the late '70's, post-Watergate, Jimmy Carter, amnesty for draft evaders, the Church Commission, etc.
So Ayers and Dohrn got off with some fines: "Free as a bird. Guilty as sin," to quote this egotistical Leninist.
Most of the former Weathermen are in academia now; some have mellowed out, but not Ayers and Dohrn. They've simply changed their tactics -- working within the system to destroy the system. And Chicago is just the place for that, since Ayers' father was a wealthy, well-connected "somebody" there, just as his son is now.
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