Public Enemy Read online

  I’d instinctively been on the side of demonstrators and dissidents my whole life, habitually with the pickets, but now I suddenly had to cross a picket line or break an order just to hear myself speak. That was weirdly dislocating. The threats and swirling controversy and angry demonstrations seemed upside down. But not wanting to cringe or cower—even when tempted—led me to a new space where all I wanted to do was to engage the demonstrators, an eclectic group of folks whose coherence was largely an illusion orchestrated by a group of billionaires at the top. And once started, I rather loved talking with the Tea Party. Their forces distrusted the government—big deal, so did I. They loved liberty—OK, who doesn’t? They didn’t hate capitalism, not yet, so talking to them became a project and my mission.

  Debbie Meier, a friend and colleague for years and Malik’s former New York City elementary school principal, sent me a quick e-mail in the middle of the 2008 presidential campaign. “Why not just apologize?” she asked matter-of-factly. “Get it over with.” She’d CC’d several of our school reform pals from around the country.

  I immediately hit Reply All: “I’m sorry!”

  A few minutes later she wrote a second e-mail: “I don’t actually know what I meant by that, so maybe not.”

  Those back-to-back notes summed up at that moment my own conflicted feelings perfectly: I’m sorry; well, wait, what am I sorry for? Maybe I’m not sorry after all.

  Exactly! Contradiction is my only hope!

  An endlessly repeating epithet had begun to sound—even to me—like a natural part of my given name: “Unrepentant Domestic Terrorist William Ayers.” Who would name their child Unrepentant? And even worse, who would call a kid Unrepentant Ayers, with three middle names? Call me Bill.

  I rejected outright the “terrorist” label, and I was bewildered by the constant repetition of “unrepentant.” George Stephanopoulos, on that presidential debate night, made a point of saying I’d never apologized for my despicable behavior. Was that even true? I wondered. And if I had apologized, would that have made it all go away? Somehow I doubted it then, and I doubt it even more now.

  Why not say you’re sorry? I was; I am.

  I was happy to discuss anything, and I was able to openly regret lots of things in a range of settings, but somehow stubbornly unwilling to say a single line: I’m sorry I engaged extreme tactics to oppose the war; I’m sorry I destroyed war materials and government property.

  I’m not sorry about that, and I can’t say with any conviction that I am. Opposing the US invasion of Viet Nam with every fiber of my being is simply not one of my regrets. And as I considered it decades later, I wanted to defend it all—every bombing and each bit of vandalism, every disabled warplane and destructive act, every exposed police killing, each discouraged aggressor and all the cringing, barricaded politicians.

  “No Regrets”—the repeated headline taken again and again to be proof that my various wrongdoings had not been adequately recognized, that I’d failed to fess up and that my transgressions, then, were enduring and ongoing—was a theme with legs. It was introduction, conclusion, content, and punch line rolled into one, and it had it all: short and memorable, pithy and hard-hitting, vague and entirely unfathomable.

  And so I felt a little trapped: the media chorus demanding a statement of remorse felt to me a bit too close to a gathering horde armed with torches and pitchforks, and the repeating demand for a general admission of guilt seemed impossibly broad. What exactly did the mob expect me to apologize for? I made a short list: being a jerk; destroying draft board files; laughing out loud in church; disrupting the military; my manner; driving too fast and rarely getting a speeding ticket; being born; stopping troop trains; exaggerated claims and inflated rhetoric; dozens of defiant demonstrations; fighting the cops in the streets of Chicago and Washington, DC; talking too much; surrounding the Pentagon; 1968; disabling B-52s headed for Viet Nam; smoking dope; jail breaks; my subversive outlook; being way too happy; doing anarchist calisthenics at odd times and in inappropriate venues; oh, and yes, there’s the matter of vandalism and destruction of property, including a series of high-profile bombings of government and corporate buildings, each a symbol of war and empire, oppression and white supremacy, and each accompanied by an explanatory if rhetorically overheated statement or communiqué. And, if that’s not enough, there’s the fact that I was born in the suburbs.

  Inclined to apologize—sorry, sorry—it would be tough to know where to begin. Blanket apology: Sorry! (It sounds so insincere, even to me). Specific apology: Sorry I didn’t vandalize more war materials (I don’t know if that quiets the mob a single decibel).

  I read time and again that I was wandering around place to place muttering something incoherent about being “guilty as hell, free as a bird”—unrepentant, triumphant, arrogant. No regrets. What I’d actually written was quite different: “Among my sins—pride and loftiness—a favorite twinkling line . . . guilty as hell, free as a bird.” I’d said “my sins” for God’s sake, and I’m not a bit religious. What do they want already? Still the stuttering mantra: no regrets!

  But there are many, many things to regret, of course, and atonement is sometimes appropriate: the wretched years of the American war in Viet Nam, the desolate decade of serial assassinations of Black leaders, the exhilarating upheaval and the sparkling fight for freedom and peace and justice can’t possibly justify everything everywhere. That’s too cheap and altogether too trouble-free. Mistakes were made—no, no, no, scratch that cliché with its evasive passive voice. It’s the caption of a classic Matt Groening cartoon in which a kid with a guilty look sits alone in the midst of his trashed and torn-up room, the refuge of every rascal weaseling away from an honest accounting or some serious reckoning.

  I did adopt a hyperpartisan stance within the movement: you’re either with us or you’re with the enemy. Every discussion devolved into a clash of creeds; words lost all liberatory potential as they were forged into crude weapons put down as traps to entangle partisans from different factions or other sects. Dialogue disappeared—speaking became more geared toward posturing and performing than persuading—and was replaced with slogans that concealed much more than they revealed.

  The Weather canon held that every action must be bent and then directly linked to destroying US imperialism on behalf of a humane future for all the people of the world. My own strict system of received wisdom and right beliefs was as controlling and totalizing as any other. It left me along with several close comrades isolated in a well-lit prison of our own construction with a blinding light bulb hanging from the ceiling by a single strand of wire.

  The consequences were dreadful: the movement fractured, deep schisms and fissures ran us through, and all the progressive forces were weakened. I’m sorry for my role in that.

  But schismatic sectarianism was the surface symptom of a deeper dis-ease—everyday dogmatism and orthodoxy. No one was free of it, and in fact there was (and is) nothing quite as insistently dogmatic as the rule of common sense—though it’s always harder to see one’s own dogma than the doctrine, say, of the House Republicans.

  In Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, a reluctant messiah stands on a rampart addressing the masses below: “Look, you’ve got it all wrong!” he cries. “You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for yourselves! You’re all individuals!” “Yes! We’re all individuals!” the masses repeat in unison. “No, no,” he says, frustrated. “You’re all different!” “Yes, we are all different!” “Yes, we are all different!” they reply together. One bewildered man in the crowd turns to those around him and says, “I’m not,” and the others gang up to reprimand him: “ShhhShhh!”—the easy compliance to the crowd.

  Fugitive Days had been perhaps the ultimate non-apology, no matter what was in it, because it provided a snapshot of an excruciating decade by someone—me—who had lived on one extreme edge of it and somehow survived. Of course no one can ever write the real story of a life
; the real story is the story of life’s humiliations, and my memoir was more a story of loss and regret than it was a defense or a justification. Neither manifesto nor history, it was an account of a single soul set down in turbulent times, a brash beginner making his twisty way across a strange landscape without a map, and certainly without the benefit of hindsight.

  Michelle Goodman, a dear and admired friend of mine who’d been a mentor for me in graduate school, wrote an agitated note when Fugitive Days came out to say that she was not sure what the point of my book was. “Do you think your actions were right?” she asked. Michelle had volunteered to go to Spain during the Civil War and had had a brush with the Communist Party—she knew the painful lash of McCarthyism. I wrote back to say that I tried simply to say what it was like, not to defend anything, but to show how a boy like this got into a place like that. She responded that I “seemed to want it both ways,” and I guessed that she was right—I wanted it both ways. Didn’t everyone? I wanted to do the heroic thing, and I wanted to survive; I wanted the romance of the outlaw and the moral high ground of the righteous dissident; I wanted to be right but complicated, opinionated but generous, public and private. Every American seemed to want both the good life and a good conscience at the same time. Everyone wanted to be a peaceful person and close their eyes tight to the violence erupting all around and in their names. Yes, I definitely wanted it both ways—I’m sorry; I’m not sorry, just as Deb Meier said.

  I was almost sixty years old in 2001, and no one can live that long with their eyes even partially opened without a million everyday regrets: once I walked away from a friend in distress; once I accused the innocent; once I bowed to the guilty. I’m sorry for all of it.

  And of course people who lived through the years of war and upheaval were still trying to measure their own contributions—Michelle Goodman referred insistently to the marches and the teach-ins and the letters to Congress she’d sent—against the horror of what we had all witnessed. Many of us recognized how small our contributions to peace really were, and that was its own difficult reckoning.

  And I wondered where in all the noise there was any authentic call for a process of truth-telling about the war and the movement for peace and justice—where was the proposal for an honest means to reconciliation and a sincere space of accountability? America, it seemed to me, was in urgent need of some kind of truth and reconciliation process—not because I wanted to see Henry Kissinger, for example, wheeled in front of a magistrate and forced to confront his millions of victims. Well . . . it’s tempting, but not the heart of the matter. We needed a process to understand the truth of the past in order to create the possibility of a more balanced future. It was really that simple.

  I began to imagine just such a process: a large, lighted stage—the Kennedy Center in Washington or the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood—with a big spiral staircase leading to a central podium. When a name was called, that person—dressed to the nines or making some sly fashion statement—would descend the stairs to a spirited ovation and face the live audience with “millions watching at home.” In the spotlight and at the microphone our star would read a list of all of his or her failures to act with integrity, transgressions and offenses, stupid statements and malevolent acts, wrongdoings and misconduct, gaps and omissions and avoidances. Victims would be invited onto the stage to round out the story and to fill in the picture—villagers from all over Viet Nam and Indochina, the parents of Fred Hampton and the families of James Cheney, Diana Oughton, and others. Everyone together would have the opportunity to tell their stories of suffering, and the victimizers would be asked why and how they created that misery. Society would have the opportunity to witness all of it in order to understand the extent and depth of the disaster as a step toward putting it behind us and moving forward. In that setting and standing with Kissinger and McCain, McNamara and Kerry, Bush and Cheney, I’d be happy to say exactly what I did, take full responsibility, and bow deeply. But without any chain of culpability whatsoever, I’ll stand on the record, or just stand aside.

  The reactionary apostate David Horowitz wrote that if Bernardine and I said we were sorry for everything we’d ever thought or done, and then donned sackcloth and ashes to beg alms on the public highway, it would be inadequate—there would still be more to account for. To be effective the apology must be enacted every day, its sincerity proved by ongoing symbolic purges, no one of which would ever be fully satisfactory.

  Alas, poor David, we knew him well: his parents had been devoted Communist Party members in the 1940s and ’50s, and he was a red-diaper baby who became a respected left journalist in the 1960s and ’70s. When his parents were gone, David had a rebellion and a rebirth as founder of Radicals for Reagan in the ’80s, plunging ever-rightward with the zeal only an apostate can muster. David knew more than most about political apologies and public recantations—his parents had been caught in that nasty web themselves, and now he was a self-appointed avenger.

  David tried to launch a campaign to purge colleges and universities of radicals, and appointed himself, of course, chief prosecutor and defender of the faith. He wrote a shabby pamphlet called “America’s 100 Most Dangerous Professors” with little profiles and sketches of scholars and academics he deemed treacherous and subversive—poisoning the minds of our youth. It was a completely random register—so many amazing radicals and powerful scholars failed to make the cut—but Bernardine and I were both prominently on the list. I got calls and messages from colleagues across the country for months kidding me and complaining that they’d been overlooked: “I’m sure I was 101!” “Hey, no fair—I’m as radical as you are.” “There must be some mistake—I’ll send Horowitz my latest book.” I told each one that I sympathized with the disappointment at being slighted but reminded them that like every other monarch or ayatollah David’s fanaticism was blinding, and being fidei defensor was exhausting work—I was certain that they’d be included in a forthcoming edition. Stay the course!

  I got a message a few weeks later from a kid who said he’d seen the pamphlet and wanted to set up a debate between David and me, and without much thought I said sure. Over the next days the kid wanted me to get a space at UIC, organize, publicize, and host and pay for the event. It turned out that the fake debate was all part of a larger strategy: get each one of the “100 most dangerous professors”—each flattered beyond measure, naturally narcissistic, and now further addled due to all this media attention—to act as subcontractors and organize a David event under the guise of a debate, amplifying the impact way beyond any merit it might have had on its own. Everyone figured it out quickly, and the debates never materialized.

  Naming names during the McCarthy years was the prescribed act of contrition for a youth of radical thought or activity, and people were coerced into providing information when no information was needed—the rift was long past, the names all known and the ghosts all gone, stage right. The ritual was one of expiation, isolation, and realignment—subservience became the essential rite of passage and the price of growing up: “I am not now nor have I ever been . . .” Even when true, the words were mortifying. They spelled the end not only of a dream but of an entire life. The apology in general was uttered, and suddenly someone breathed their last shameful breath. It seemed a particularly dishonorable suicide in the service of power, and I surely didn’t want to die like that. I embraced the line of a left-wing union leader hauled before McCarthy: I’d rather be a red to the rats, he’d famously said, than a rat to the reds. That became my security blanket and my mantra.

  In any case, the Weather actions were all well known, the legal charges long ago resolved, and I’d faced the consequences with the state and with my parents, my comrades, and my friends. What was there left to do? Those who refused and suffered the lash of McCarthyism—those who “stood on principle”—had a terrible time explaining what the principle was precisely: support for the Communist Party USA? Not exactly. Love of Stalinism? No, definitely not. Opposition to anything
the US government does? The importance of never telling on friends? Free speech? I felt the same bind. What did I do? What could I say?

  I wanted it both ways.

  It was a strange sensation to be assigned a role—in my case, “unrepentant terrorist”—and to be handed a script, only to discover that no editing or improvisation was permitted. There was nothing in Fugitive Days that I hadn’t said out loud for thirty years, and it surprised me that the book sounded like a departure, but of course 9/11 and the militaristic response of Bush/Cheney had brought the terrorist label back with a vengeance, or created a whole new meaning for an ancient word—something we’d never thought about or imagined before, really (although much of the rest of the world had). Perhaps some modest successes in our professional lives and our “normal-looking family” constituted a kind of implied apology, and then the book by contrast was so, well, so unapologetic. Perhaps, as my student Isabel said to me after class one evening, we were like the punk rock band that suddenly got a record contract—some unstated but assumed agreement was breached. Success was never supposed to be part of the deal. Be a punk! Stay a Weatherman! I will; I am.

  EIGHT

  Only Dissent Can Save Us

  During the heat of the primary battle, Senator Obama had been asked which candidate he thought the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. would likely support, and he responded without hesitation—Reverend King would not endorse any of us, he said, because King would be in the streets mobilizing an unstoppable movement for justice. That seemed to me exactly right, and the kind of answer only a community organizer could summon. It was a reminder, too, that Lyndon Johnson, who had passed the most far-reaching civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, was never involved in the Black Freedom Movement but was instead responding to a powerful popular social movement for justice erupting from the grassroots; that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was never part of the labor movement but answered to a movement on the ground for workers’ dignity and a measure of economic justice; and that Abraham Lincoln never belonged to an abolitionist party but could not ignore or hold back the agitation of free Blacks, the widespread rebellion of enslaved people, and the noble, unstoppable movement from below. Reality forced upon Lincoln the opportunity to declare the freedom of an enslaved people, allowed FDR to make a mark for social justice, and let LBJ to do the right thing when it mattered. Each offered a hint about our task and direction if we would just pay attention.