Public Enemy Read online

  The Times’ “Portraits of Grief” aroused a shared impulse and had a transcendence of its own. It felt just as necessary, just as urgent, to share the mourning with everyone in reach and to perform this simple act of Kaddish.

  Over time, the sketches began to merge and collapse into one another, and the homogenizing began to seem artificial and stylized—no one was a drug addict or a drunk, a crummy partner or a cheat, and everyone was a hero in life as well as in their shared victimhood. I thought of Lenny Bruce’s savage bit about the caption of a Life magazine photo of the Kennedy assassination that claimed the First Lady was clamoring onto the trunk of the speeding limousine in order to get help. Not at all, said Bruce. She was trying to get the hell out of there just like anyone else would.

  Still, I read on, compelled to continue.

  “But,” said Nikki late in the term, “the lists are also incomplete.” Some portraits were missing. She evoked the catastrophes of ethnic cleansing in Cyprus, the invasion and occupation of 1974—all open sores and part of a living memory. “There is no monopoly on suffering.” True, true. I kept on, nonetheless, reading every word.

  And then a terrible shock: on December 31, in a long list of the known dead that ran above the portraits, was the name Joe Trombino, the guard who had been so severely injured two decades before in the infamous Brinks robbery.

  Somewhere along the way I got a bad cold that turned into a persistent and disabling cough. When I went to my Chinese doctor for herbs and needles, she said decisively in her cheery and colorful metaphoric language: “Ah, lungs . . . grief!”

  Indeed.

  It was inevitable, I suppose, given the odd public moment that emerged with such chaotic force, that the professor, although nowhere on the syllabus, would become a subject of the class, and soon enough I was part of the substance being picked over and examined and debated in seminar. In week one, a student asked me to sign Fugitive Days for him, and by the second week everyone had a copy in their gym bags and backpacks. Several students had seen the New York Times account of the book, and those who hadn’t were quickly brought up to speed by their classmates.

  As for the Times piece about the book, which had run on September 11, I’d expected nothing nice. Janet Malcolm had long ago starkly portrayed reporters as seductive betrayers locked in an uncomfortable but firm embrace with their subjects, who will inevitably be wooed and then jilted, and Stanley Fish had pointed out in a New York Times op-ed that this kind of reporting “can only be unauthentic, can only get it wrong, can only lie” because writers of these fictions will necessarily “substitute their own story for the story of their announced subject.” I knew that talking to the Times was a bargain with the devil, but what the hell? I’d give them a story, they’d do whatever they do, clouded of course with that irritating superior air of comprehensive examination and considered judgment, and whatever it was, it would help publicize the book, which seemed at the time a reasonable transaction to me—if not to Bernardine—and well worth the hassle.

  I’d met the Times reporter, Dinitia Smith, almost two decades before, when she approached me on a Manhattan street corner as I waited for our children to be dropped off from summer day camp. She proposed then that we collaborate on the story of the Weather Underground, but I declined, saying that I didn’t have the time or distance to tell that story yet, and doubted in any case that I would want a collaborator. Back in July, when she’d interviewed Bernardine and me in our home in Chicago, Smith proved to be a particularly resolute interrogator: she insisted on confidentiality and an exclusive interview; she embodied both the good cop and the bad cop, cajoling and flattering one moment, threatening in the next; and she relentlessly invoked the authoritative power of the Times to make or break the book, implying a kind of collaboration—“Remember, don’t talk to anyone else until my piece runs”—and inviting dependency. In spite of everything, I liked her.

  From the start, she had questioned me sharply about the bombings, and each time I referred back to Fugitive Days, in which I’d discussed the culture of violence so central to the American experience, my growing anger with the structures of racism and the escalating terrorist war, and the complex, sometimes extreme and despairing, sometimes inspired choices I made in those terrible times. She pressed on: “Well, when you bombed the Pentagon,” she began on three separate occasions, and each time I interrupted her and said, “But I didn’t bomb the Pentagon.” A running joke between my publisher and me began, “How should I plead when the Smith piece appears?” “Just confess,” she kidded. “It won’t hurt. Whatever she says, just smile and say, ‘I did it.’”

  Smith didn’t disappoint, and her angle was captured perfectly in the headline: “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives.” Her piece quoted me as having said, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Did I actually say those words? I probably did, because something like it appears in the book—in what I hoped was a denser and more layered treatment, reminiscences about effectiveness, not tactics. I also said something close to it in 1998 to Connie Chung on a special report about 1968 and again on a MacNeil/Lehrer broadcast.

  Smith and I had spoken a lot about regrets, about loss, about attempts to account for one’s life. I had said at one point that I had a thousand regrets, but no regrets for opposing the war with every ounce of my strength. I told her that in light of the indiscriminate murder of millions of Vietnamese, I still thought the Weathermen showed remarkable restraint, and that while we tried to sound a piercing alarm in those years, in fact we didn’t do enough to stop the war—no one did, and the evidence is clear: we didn’t stop it. We might have been smarter; we should have been more focused; we could have been more effective.

  Bernardine had worried all along about whether the book was a good idea—she didn’t want her current work disrupted or derailed or put on hold because I was dredging up the deep past. Plus she knew, as few others do, the special rage reserved for well-known women of the Left—Angela Davis forever and Jane Fonda at a moment. Bernardine had held a uniquely prominent place in J. Edgar Hoover’s Rogue’s Gallery thirty years before—he saw her as public enemy number one and called her “the most dangerous woman in America” in 1970, reprising a phrase he’d attached to Jane Addams at the start of his career; later he said she was “La Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left,” drawing a neat comparison to the ardent leader of the resistance to fascism during the Spanish Civil War, an association Bernardine found flattering.

  Bernardine had been the object of a low-key but persistent letter-writing campaign led by Charlton Heston to have her fired from Northwestern University long before Fugitive Days was published. Heston was the president of the National Rifle Association and a former president of the Screen Actors Guild, a Northwestern alum, and a major donor to the theater program. After 9/11, the campaign against Bernardine ramped up, and Heston told the student newspaper that he was shocked and appalled that “an unrepentant terrorist like her” was on the faculty of the law school and was the director of the Children and Family Justice Center. He said he would reconsider donating money to his alma mater and urged other alumni to join him in pressuring the administration to fire Bernardine.

  There was a growing firestorm around Fugitive Days, too, in Chicago and beyond. Steve Neal of the Chicago Sun-Times effectively took out his own little fatwa on me and Bernardine, demanding that we not be allowed to speak or teach anywhere any longer. Neal noted that the New York Times article was published on 9/11 and claimed that I’d “made comments supporting the bombings on the morning of September 11.” Not true. He attacked as well anyone who’d endorsed the book, calling Studs Terkel “the village idiot.” Scott Turow told me later that it was the first time in his life he had received hate mail for reviewing someone else’s book favorably. The mood was turning ugly.

  Isabel, one of my brilliant graduate students, brought in the Neal piece, and soon a class “smash-book,” a collection of reviews and commentary, was under way:

&nb
sp; The Nation: “Don’t tell me, as Ayers does, that you had to be there to feel the Weather’s rage.”

  Jonah Raskin: “Ayers offers a highly romanticized view of life as a fugitive.”

  David Horowitz: “[Ayers] wallows in familiar Marxist incitement.”

  The New York Times: “[Ayers was] playacting with violence.”

  The Chronicle of Higher Education: “[Ayers is an] unrepentant New Leftist.”

  Todd Gitlin: “[Ayers committed] absolutely, I mean literally, incoherent and reckless acts in the name of nonsensical beliefs.”

  Commentator after commentator offered evidence of my screwball-ness, and insisted that anything I might say now should be discounted because of what I did then. I thought about Ralph Ellison writing in The Invisible Man: “These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth.” These white folks! As the fragments and phrases were echoed and repeated, reverberations bouncing around and around, any possibility of explaining, contextualizing, or reinterpreting narrowed and then disappeared.

  A favorite demonizing story about the Weathermen in 1969 held that we ate cats in the collectives. We were American dissidents, and like dissidents here and everywhere throughout history we were ignored, ridiculed, marginalized, beaten, and jailed (but not assassinated as were our Black dissident comrades—the legacy of white-skin privilege), all the while being deemed crazy by all the established powers. We were pretty goofy and weird in those days, it’s true—and I don’t claim to be completely free of traces of eccentric nuttiness today—but it was a weirdness I tried to honestly portray in Fugitive Days. I’ll say it here once and for all: we were often wrong or off base, but we never killed or ate a cat in the collectives. I’d heard the story so often from so many different people, not all of them hostile, that I began to wonder, and so I called a lot of comrades to be sure. No cat snacks, no cat-on-a-stick, and no cat barbecue that anyone would admit to. But the cat story endured, and packed a little power—they eat cats for God’s sake; what could they possibly think or say or advocate that’s sane? Try to provide evidence of nonindulgence in the cat feast, or to prove you don’t even like the taste of cat, and the trap tightens: I sounded like a complete idiot flailing with shadows.

  Todd Gitlin, a sociologist at Columbia University and an early president of SDS, was a steady and consistent critic. Todd seemed to be the first name in every reporter’s Rolodex or computer file for all things sixties, and he popped up in every story of a notable anniversary, every reference comparing current events with the olden days, and every obituary of a prominent character from the movement—and that right there could provide a strong motive to stay alive, just to keep any remembrances Todd-free. I borrowed an irreverent idea from my teacher Philip Lopate, who had written about a certain commodifying of Holocaust literature into “The Holocaust, Inc.,” and began to think of Todd in his later incarnation as the unofficial, self-appointed CEO of a small business that might be called “The Sixties, Inc.” His steady string of op-eds and articles and books and appearances in the press read like the work of a scrivener defending the enterprise’s most profitable “patents.”

  Whenever I ran into Todd on the street near Columbia we exchanged friendly greetings—we’d known each other since the early days in Ann Arbor—but little more. I made Todd uncomfortable in part I think because my existence challenged a revisionist theory he promoted wildly that “the sixties” was a bifurcated decade: the early or “good sixties” all participatory democracy and sacrifice and the beloved community, the later “bad sixties” all stormy Weather and nationalist Black Panthers and revolution. I was—along with Ralph Featherstone and Stokely Carmichael and Kathy Boudin and Dottie Zellner and Tom Hayden and thousands more—part of both. I still embraced the beloved community, and I saw no necessary contradiction between that and movement-building or making a revolution.

  Todd and I were both public people, and our politics were too well-known and too knitted into our identities to make for much easy banter—Todd, an insider in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, hosting fund-raisers for the likes of John Kerry and Wesley Clark; me, allergic to military men by nature and still searching for the revolution I knew we needed.

  Bernardine and I did have one face-off in public with Todd, on a national radio show shortly after 9/11. The interview and conversation began cordially enough, with long stretches of agreement among the three of us about the horrors of war and the importance of dissent and opposition. But after several minutes, Todd disrupted the surface calm, saying, “We’re being overly polite and deferential here, and we’re acting as if our disagreements are cultural when in fact our differences were deeply political.” Yes, yes, we agreed quickly—let’s talk politics and let’s go deeper.

  “Let me read you something that these two folks wrote in 1969 that they apparently believed at the time,” I recall Todd starting, “which is absolutely insane.” Bernardine and I exchanged a look. Oh, God, brace yourself, I thought. Our rhetoric, while very much of the time, was regularly off the rails. We each held our breath and waited, her eyes shining in anticipation as she sent me a telepathic message: What does Todd have in his back pocket? Eat the cats? Off the pigs? Kill your parents? Eat your parents? Eat the pigs? Todd read: “To a large extent the wealth of this country—certainly the wealth of Standard Oil and General Motors and Coca-Cola—already by right belongs to the people of the world.”

  Yes, yes, go on. We still believe all that; get to the crazy part.

  I was waiting for the other shoe to drop when he said, “You see what I mean? This is absolute political madness.”

  “Wait, wait! That’s all you’ve got?” Bernardine relaxed with an amused smile and asked Todd calmly what part of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism he didn’t understand.

  The cats-for-snacks tale was small potatoes (an appetizer, so to speak) next to the notorious, persistent, and fictional story of Bernardine’s abiding love affair with Charles Manson. She was reported to have said in the middle of a speech at an SDS meeting in 1969 in Flint, Michigan, “Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in their bellies. Wild!”

  I didn’t hear that exactly, but the words were close enough I guess. Her speech was focused on the murder just days earlier of our friend Fred Hampton, the Chicago Black Panther Party leader, a murder we were certain—although it would take decades to prove beyond a doubt—was part of a larger government plot, the Gestapo-like tactics of a repressive police force. Bernardine linked Fred’s murder to the murders of other Panthers around the country, to the assassinations of Malcolm X and Patrice Lumumba, the CIA attempts on Fidel’s life, and then to the ongoing made-in-the-USA terror in Viet Nam. “This is the state of the world,” she cried. “This is what screams out for our attention and response. And what do we get from the media? A sick fascination with a story that has it all: a racist psycho, a killer cult, and a chorus line of Hollywood bodies. Dig it!”

  So I heard it partly as political talk, agitated and inflamed and full of rhetorical overkill, and partly as a joke—tasteless, perhaps, but a joke nonetheless. Hunter S. Thompson was making much more excessive, and funnier, jokes about the fascination with Charles Manson then, and so was Richard Pryor. I thought again about my protest outside State ville prison on the night the State of Illinois executed John Wayne Gacy and immediately saw the conspiracy and the connection: they eat cats, they love Charles Manson, and they’re in cahoots with John Wayne Gacy. Yes, yes, yes: “Unrepentant terrorist supports serial killer!!!” It fed a stuttering but established plot point, while piling on additional color and spice—one could envision Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy Jr., Bernardine, and me all settled in to our own little satanic psycho cell with the grilled cats.

  Not only was it an apocryphal story, it was irrefutable—every attempt to explain, including possibly what I’ve just written, was held up to further
ridicule as deeper dimensions and meanings were slipped into place and attached to the story. Elizabeth Kolbert of the New Yorker, for example, after a three-hour conversation, reached out and touched Bernardine’s arm and said, “I just have to ask you about the Manson quote. It’s my duty as a journalist.” Bernardine responded in full, explaining the context, the perverse humor of it, Fred’s murder, the savagery in Viet Nam, her own meaning-making, and her sense of its meaning to insiders and outsiders alike. She said pretty much what I wrote above, but it made no difference: Kolbert reported the received story intact without any mention of any part of their exchange. One of her colleagues at the New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg, looked over her piece. Since he’d been in the Trotskyite Left back in the day and was a popularizer of the Manson myth, perhaps it was him and not Kolbert who tacked on this added fiction: “The Manson murders were treated as an inspired political act.” Not true—not even close. A lie on every level. And we didn’t eat cats!

  Two months later, Steve Neal, playing off Kolbert, wrote: “The Weathermen idolized killer Charles Manson and adopted a fork as their symbol.” What’s the use? By the end of the year a Time magazine essayist called me an “American terrorist” and, echoing the Times, said of me that “even today he finds ‘a certain eloquence to bombs.’” It was an endlessly repeating story, and the echo grew and grew as it bounced off the walls.

  Two of my students started a project to count up the number of terrorist events in the modern world and tally them by category: religious group, political sect, individual, established government. Two others examined high school history textbooks and began a chart of the “good terrorists” in US history (Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, George Custer, Teddy Roosevelt, John McCain) and the “bad terrorists” (Geronimo, Joe Hill, Lolita Lebron, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Oscar Lopez, Reies Tijerina, Mabel Robinson and Robert Williams, the Earth Liberation Front, Weather), with the textbooks conflicted and the jury still out on John Brown and Harriet Tubman. One of my conservative students created on poster board a large and elaborate portrait of me crafted from torn newspaper clippings; diagonally across its front, he had taped a fat piece of yellow police tape and scrawled in thick black marker the words PUBLIC ENEMY! I think he was being ironic.