Public Enemy Read online

  There had been a lot of chatter for several months on right-wing blogs about Hyde Park, the now-notorious “neighborhood,” which was in fact a close-knit community on Chicago’s South Side where folks actually knew one another; about the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, the school that all of our kids had attended; and about the Woods Fund. Somehow, these scraps of facts were whipped into a toxic gobbledygook, including a story with growing traction in the self-referencing chat rooms of the Right that we were secret Muslims sharing a shadowy masjid in Hyde Park (proof: one of our kids was named Malik; one of theirs, Malia!), and another that I had ghostwritten his two wildly successful memoirs (proof: maritime allusions appear both in his book Dreams from My Father and in my first memoir, Fugitive Days!).

  On Fox News, Sean Hannity quickly made me into a special project, asserting again and again that Barack Obama had blurbed one of my books and chalking that up as one of his many sins. In reality, the Chicago Tribune had run a feature in its book review section for many years in which they called people and asked them on the phone what they were reading. When Barack Obama was contacted, he was reading my book A Kind and Just Parent, and he had called it “a searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair.” Hannity never bothered to find out if the book was indeed searing and timely.

  Hannity had thrashed around for a time, trying out a wide range of other fantastic plot points. I had written an editorial extolling the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he claimed, and I had killed several police officers. None of this was true. In the end, he simply adopted the story as it was crafted first by Hillary Clinton and eventually by John McCain and Sarah Palin: Barack Obama and I knew one another—no more than that.

  Slightly more surprising was George Stephanopoulos’s willingness to parrot Hannity’s story. Stephanopoulos, an old friend of Clinton’s, denied he was doing Hillary’s or Hannity’s bidding, but the day before the debate, in a radio interview, Hannity prompted him: “There are . . . questions that I don’t think anybody has asked Barack Obama, and I don’t know if this is going to be on your list tomorrow. . . . The only time he’s ever been asked about his association with Bill Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist from the Weather Underground . . . David Axelrod said that they have a ‘friendly’ relationship, and that they had done a number of speeches together and that they sat on a board together. Is that a question you might ask?” Stephanopoulos’s response: “Well, I’m taking notes right now.”

  Later, under intense criticism for the shoddy stupidity of the debate generally, Stephanopoulos defended himself, predictably claiming to “have been researching this for a while,” and protesting that the “questions we asked were tough and fair and appropriate and relevant.”

  Hillary Clinton knew better, but wicked ambition apparently released the forces of opportunism, and she selectively forgot her own New Left leanings—research, writing, and friendships she could have been proud to claim. But nothing about her past affinities raises the question “Is Hillary Clinton a communist?” any more than Obama’s association with me suggests that he was a Weatherman. Still, it’s a long if sad tradition: Bob is a bank robber; Bob is close to Jesse; Clint is friends with Jesse; ergo, Clint is a bank robber.

  The fallout for me was immediate and intense. Dozens of requests for interviews rolled in, as did an avalanche of threats from reactionaries happy to dispatch me to my final judgment right away—“Someone should shoot you in the head, you leftist fuck”—and lots of hate mail and denunciations from liberals who worried that I would bring Obama down simply by living. The weirdest of the liberal hate started that very night, a trickle that would soon became a flood of blogs, e-mail blasts, and mailers from a couple of other guys around the neighborhood. One was a longtime Communist Party organizer who had been to our house on a number of occasions for meetings and fund-raisers, and the other a former high school principal I’d worked closely with in the Chicago school reform efforts two decades earlier. Both urged voters to ignore the smears against Obama because I was a “distraction” and someone they suddenly regarded as a public enemy, a “dreadful person” who “had committed detestable acts forty years ago” and who, they were increasingly certain, had “no real links to the Senator.”

  It took work even for me—and I was motivated and focused—to keep it straight. The Bill Ayers introduced that night on television was a one-dimensional cartoon, while the other Bill Ayers was a contradictory, messy, three-dimensional flesh-and-blood work-in-progress putting one foot in front of the other as best he could, exactly like every human being I’ve ever met. While Bill Ayers may have been marinating up there on a shelf, I’d actually lived in the storm surges and the sunlight every day of those last forty years. I’d loved and changed and worked and built a house, and loved some more—every day. I was wrinkled, to be sure, and perhaps a little vinegary—I was then in my mid-sixties—but I was also living large and leaning forward, hopefully right up to the end. For a moment, I questioned why they’d selected Bill Ayers and wondered why they hadn’t crafted a terrific-looking Weather avatar from his smarter, more radical, better-known, and more notorious partner of almost forty years, Bernardine Dohrn. I’d have chosen her. Well, that’s not really fair—she was much too good for this.

  I thought for a moment about pitiable Gregor Samsa, who awoke one morning after disturbing dreams to find himself transformed in his bed into an enormous cockroach. The metamorphosis was, of course, incomplete because Gregor was still Gregor inside himself—same mind, same memories, same consciousness—and he remained painfully aware of the revulsion he induced in everyone around him, including his beloved family. Poor Gregor. And I thought about the professor in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, who experienced the shock of a major toxic event engulfing his small town, the panic spreading as a poisonous chemical cloud drifted overhead and people were forced to evacuate, and the weird dislocation he experienced when he was proclaimed officially, statistically dead in spite of being very much alive. What could he say to explain himself? Who would listen to him now? How could he adequately grasp his situation, split at the core of his being and stumbling through a familiar landscape unexpectedly made strange? I knew that I didn’t want to be that professor; I knew that I didn’t want to become some character from Kafka flailing around as I tried to set the record straight for a hundred years.

  There was a lot of unexpected love from the start, too. The sweetest and quirkiest came from a colleague at the University of Illinois at Chicago who was a Democratic Party activist.

  For several months, Espie Reyes had stopped by my office—right next door to hers—with the current gossip or insights or hopes or fears from the Democrats, and always with the latest combat from within her own family. She and her daughter were die-hard for Hillary, her husband and son-in-law equally strong for Barack. She suspected a deep sexist attitude in her husband, mysteriously undetected somehow in decades of marriage. I always listened a bit bemused: I’m glad I’m not a Democrat, I would invariably say. I can watch and not worry. She would smile impatiently. “It’s Hillary’s turn, Bill, and you know it. . . . Obama’s so young, and he can come next,” she’d say, or, “For women of a certain age this is a dream come true,” or, “She can beat whoever the Republicans put up, but Obama’s a kid and he’ll get crushed.”

  One day she reported that the tension at home over the primary had finally reached a fever pitch and boiled over, and that John was now sleeping on the couch. I sympathized: Now I’m really glad I’m not a Democrat, I said.

  I flew to California the morning after the Stephanopoulos moment to do some work with my brother Rick. When I finally got settled and could open my e-mail, I found four messages from Espie that she’d sent over a span of eighteen hours. The first was a magical note of friendship and love and sympathy for what she imagined I must be going through. The second, sent many hours later, was a copy of a long letter she’d drafted to Hillary Clinton detailing how
much money she’d donated and how many weekends she’d devoted to organizing on her behalf, explaining who I really was in her “humble opinion,” and encouraging, then demanding, that the campaign apologize to me personally and denounce the smears—or else she would have to rethink her commitments. The third letter was another copy, this one of a message fired off in haste and anger to the Democratic National Committee and its chairman, Howard Dean, in which she proposed a détente and insisted that Dean resolve the escalating warfare for the good of the party—oh, and apologize to me, of course. She attached a copy of my CV so that Howard Dean could see what a great guy I was—in her “humble opinion.”

  The fourth and final e-mail was sent after she’d had “a good night’s sleep” and was just this, in full: “I let John come off the couch and back to bed. Hope you’re OK.”

  Ah, love: I was at that moment happily beyond OK. All the attacks that had come, all the nonsense hovering just beyond the horizon, seemed for that moment a small price to pay for the ecstasy of reunion and the many blissful years ahead beckoning to Espie and John.

  But when I returned to Chicago, I found that things had changed for the worse. The university had received hundreds of messages, mostly criticisms for having a public enemy in its midst, and heated threats to rectify the situation with vigilante justice as soon as possible. This was not the first time my notoriety had surfaced and stirred some creepy reactions, but it was more forceful and frenzied than ever before. My university assigned a campus police officer to stay close whenever I taught or had office hours. Officer Muhammad (true—his parents had been Black Nationalists and close to the Panthers back in the day) was a good guy with a happy heart and an open mind, and while he always wanted to walk with me on campus, he was never a heavy or a menacing presence.

  The threats poured in, and I would dutifully turn them over to Muhammad. Eventually, he had a pretty fat file in his desk drawer. Once when he came by I’d gathered two gruesome notes that had just arrived into a folder. The first was signed by “The Waco Justice League,” who said they would be in Chicago soon—they planned to grab me, take me to an undisclosed location (“already in operation”), and water-board me, the infamous torture technique employed by US forces at Guantanamo Bay and military bases abroad that painfully simulated the experience of drowning for its victims. The second, from the “Avenger,” announced that I was already in his sights (my home address was listed as authentication) and that soon I would be “blasted front and back—dead before you hit the ground you piece of shit.” Muhammad read them slowly, shook his head thoughtfully, and as he tucked them away put a friendly hand on my shoulder. He joked, “I hope the Avenger gets here first, Bill—you don’t want to be water-boarded by the Waco Justice League in that undisclosed location, only to come home and get shot. Better to get shot first.” I, of course, agreed.

  Muhammad sometimes followed me home in the evenings, and the police kept a car close by on the street. One morning I came out quite early, and a cop I didn’t know was under my car with a flashlight. Years earlier, he might have been planting a surveillance device, or worse. But now he stood up, smiled, and shook my hand. “Just checking,” he said.

  ONE

  A New American Revolution

  Smoke and fire blazed up from decades earlier, ancient embers that had never been fully extinguished. For my students this was mostly vague and ancient history, but my road to becoming a public enemy in 2008 had begun when I was just about their age.

  As the American-made catastrophe in Viet Nam was reaching full ignition in the mid-sixties, I was arrested with thirty-seven other University of Michigan students and one fabulous professor—my first defiant act of civil disobedience—for a militant, nonviolent sit-in at the Ann Arbor draft board. We had seized the ordinary looking office with its tidy files and typical clerks and standard procedures, because to us it had become an odious accomplice to war, issuing its toxic warrants to kill and to die in plain manila envelopes, bit by bit and day by day. When the police ordered us to disperse, we refused and locked arms, and the cops hauled us roughly down the stairs and into the police wagons one by one.

  I’d returned to school from the Merchant Marines months earlier and had attended the first-ever teach-in against the war. I’d heard Paul Potter, then president of Students for a Democratic Society, end a talk on the necessity of agitation and dissent by issuing a challenge that echoes in my head to this day: “Don’t let your life make a mockery of your values.” I was twenty years old, and I signed up on the spot.

  My brother Rick was a freshman, and we met up in the student union every day between classes to discuss life and love and politics with kids from all over the country and the planet—a rolling seminar fueled by coffee and cigarettes with a unity based mostly on frank questions and open argument, uninhibited analysis, solidarity, and rebellion. Most nights Rick would stop by my ramshackle rented garret to do homework, read, and talk some more. Leading up to the draft board sit-in, we focused urgently on whether we should participate, and we turned the idea over and over. It felt somehow necessary, but also in some sense way beyond our capacity. Was either of us really prepared for such a thing? And how did you prepare anyway? Was it too risky? The questions hung in the air until the morning of the action itself, when we met for an early coffee—I had decided to plunge in, and Rick got the tougher assignment: call our uncomprehending parents, defend and explain my arrest, and get me out of jail as soon as possible.

  Rick and I had grown up in a place of privilege and prosperity, of instant gratification and seemingly endless superficial pleasures, of conformity and obedience and a kind of willful ignorance about anything that might exist beyond our neatly trimmed hedges. We were all anesthetized to one degree or another, all insistently sleeping the deep, deep American sleep of denial, but Rick, though a year and a half younger, was on to things early, and he had introduced me to the Beat poets and Mad magazine, for starters. My next steps were improbable, perhaps, but true.

  Like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Rick and I felt that we were defending not our short-term present privileges but our long-term future interests—a world free of the degradation of social classes. Like them, we were from bourgeois backgrounds, and like them we wanted to risk our privilege, or at least deploy it in the fight for liberation and justice. Too lofty? Well, that’s where the similarities end, but we took heart as we abandoned our entitled standpoints—race traitors to Dinesh D’Souza, class traitors to Mike Royko—to place ourselves alongside Third World liberation, Black Power militants, workers, women, indigenous folks, the marginalized, the despised, and queers of all kinds. We went in search of a radically egalitarian world.

  The war further illuminated everything: my country stood on the wrong side of an exploding world revolution, the hopes and dreams of people everywhere—for peace and bread and worthwhile work to do, for a world free of nuclear threat, for independence and self-determination, for dignity and recognition and justice—contested in every corner of every continent. The Black civil rights movement was the clearest expression of the world revolution inside the United States, and my own government was the command center of the counter-revolution both at home and abroad.

  “Which side are you on?” began a traditional freedom song. I belted it out as I joined the movement—I wanted to usher in an era of racial justice and world peace, to end a war and demolish Jim Crow, and soon enough, I wanted to end the system that I figured made war and racism so predictable and so agonizingly inevitable.

  When I was arrested that first time, the war was broadly accepted and even popular. We’d happily raised the banner of refusal, noisily urging all within our reach to join in, and we had the active support of hundreds of other students. But we had opposition from many more: Americans overwhelmingly supported the US invasion at the outset, and even on campus we were massively outnumbered.

  So we got busy and invented a thousand different ways to organize and educate. War resistance mustered mothers an
d students, lawyers, returning veterans and union workers, churchgoers, teachers and nurses, and whole communities. Sites of protest included draft boards and induction centers, coffeehouses set up outside of military bases, ROTC offices on campuses, institutes conducting secret war research, Dow Chemical headquarters, the Pentagon, and appearances by every politician associated with the administration. The iconic images of the time are true—I took to the streets, marched and picketed and demonstrated and clashed with the authorities, who mobilized to put us down—but they were only a part of the story and a fraction of the action. Being arrested, beaten up, and tossed into jail quickly became a commonplace for me and for a lot of other activists, and I felt I could do it all standing on my head.

  But there was so much more to do: we drew up fact sheets, created teach-ins, made spontaneous pop-up theatre, circulated petitions, and embraced music, dance, murals, and agitprop. I was in Detroit for two years with “Vietnam Summer,” a concerted effort to knock on every door in working-class neighborhoods across America and meet people face to face in order to engage in a dialogue about peace. In a single day, Rick and I were called traitors three times, spit on and threatened with physical violence once, and invited in for coffee or cookies four times. One young woman burst into tears and came outside to sit on the front steps with us: her cousin Kenny, who’d grown up with her, had been killed a month earlier near Hue, and the family was still trying to understand all the specifics of his death and come to terms with their immeasurable loss. She talked, cried, and told us stories about Kenny for almost an hour.