Conscious Choice: That '60s Show

February 2002 | Choice Books

That '60s Show

by Mark Harris

"You reject everything, my dad said to me around that time, and you seem to want to reinvent the wheel." And I said, "Yes, exactly, the old wheels are all broken and bent, and we have to reinvent everything, especially the wheels." — Bill Ayers

In the summer of 1969, my family had just moved back to the Chicago area after two years in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I was entering my junior year in high school and we had settled in the affluent western suburb of Glen Ellyn. I was sixteen years old and I used to walk home from school every day along the park that borders the town’s Lake Ellyn. Along the way I would pass huge old homes set along peaceful tree-lined streets. In some ways it was an almost idyllic setting, a Jimmy Stewart version of the quintessential American town.

But it was not quite a wonderful life. Every day the news brought reports of the war then being fought in Vietnam; reports of body counts and napalm, carpet-bombing, and incessant slaughter that never seemed to end. For many of us who were young then, Vietnam festered on our psyches, gnawing away at everything we’d been taught to believe about the fairness of American values and the rightness of our democracy.

Instead of democratic virtue we saw hypocrisy and support for a corrupt, murderous dictatorship thousands of miles away. Instead of democratic truths we saw official lies and meaningless suffering and the arrogance of power. Instead of individual freedom and opportunity we saw a draft that if you were male could sweep you up with capricious indifference and possibly dump you into an early grave.

Instead of peace we saw killing everywhere.

Even if the war itself didn’t touch us directly, it was never quite beyond the view of the young generation. For many young people in those days, stopping the war became a defining quest, one more than a few of us were willing to do almost anything to achieve.

Politics by Other Means

Bill Ayers, author of Fugitive Days: A Memoir, was one of those young people driven to stop the war. As a student at the University of Michigan in the early 1960s, Ayers had been involved in the civil rights movement, soon joining the newly formed Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). By the mid-1960s SDS had become the largest student organization in the country, sponsoring the first major anti-Vietnam protest march in April 1965, which drew some 25,000 people to Washington, DC. Later, in 1969, Ayers was part of a faction that split from SDS, calling themselves the Weathermen and embracing more militant and sometimes violent antiwar tactics.

Under the aegis of the Weathermen, Ayers and his cohorts then stormed through another year or so of confrontational protests. They staged the infamous Days of Rage in Chicago, a four-day street battle of smashed store windows, enraged police, and hooting protesters running through the streets like extras from the famous film Battle of Algiers. They also broke LSD guru Timothy Leary out of prison and conspired to stage a series of small bombings of government offices. But after a bomb in the making accidentally exploded in a New York apartment, killing three Weathermen members, Ayers and his companion Bernadine Dohrn (at the time J. Edgar Hoover called her "the most dangerous woman in America") ended up on the run, fugitives from the FBI.

After several years underground, the charges against Ayers and Dohrn were dropped, and they emerged to build a different kind of life in a different time. Today, Ayers is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of several books on teaching and juvenile justice. Dohrn is a law professor and director of Northwestern University’s Children and Family Justice Center.

Fugitive Days is a highly personal account of one man’s sojourn through the militant edges of 1960s radicalism. It is at times compelling reading by a talented writer. Ayers successfully re-creates the sense of almost limitless possibility that gripped the youth movement of the era, recounting powerfully the grim realities of the Vietnam War and the tensions, fears, and generational divisions that so defined the times. For better but perhaps for worse, the book’s publication just prior to the September 11 tragedy has also sparked something of a backlash against Ayers (and Dohrn).

In fact, when Ayers’s picture appeared on the cover of the Chicago Tribune Magazine only days after the horror of 9-11, his unrepentant look back at his radical youth evoked a barrage of new accusations. An attorney by the name of Sean O’Shea, a Northwestern law school graduate, initiated a highly vocal campaign (both the Tribune and WGN radio have covered the story) calling for Dorhn’s removal from the Northwestern faculty. Concurrently, a small group of UIC and Northwestern alumni have withdrawn charitable contributions to protest their alma maters’ association with the two.

Such objections should raise some concerns. Neither Ayers nor Dohrn are currently charged with any crime, nor does anyone question their academic credentials or the work they’ve done as educators for the past twenty years. Yet O’Shea and others seem to believe that it is appropriate to insist upon the passing of some sort of ideological litmus test to teach at a public or private institution. In other words, Ayers and Dohrn should be made to mouth certain platitudes about how wrong they were, as condition for continued employment. The name Joseph McCarthy comes to mind when I hear such things.

But perhaps for the sake of consistency those who now call for Ayers’s and Dorhn’s ouster should extend their witch hunt to those faculty members who once gave their political blessing to the official terrorism of the war itself. They could search out anyone who might have expressed remarks in class defending Operation Phoenix, for example, the CIA assassination program reported to have led to the murder of as many as 50,000 South Vietnamese. Or to simplify matters, perhaps they could just suggest removing anyone who ever said anything nice about Henry Kissinger or voted for Richard Nixon.

As far as I know, Ayers and Dohrn never committed genocide. In fact, the Weathermen never killed anyone — unless you count the accidental deaths of their own members. Actually, I think it’s a stretch to interpret Fugitive Days as a defense of terrorism. Ayers isn’t writing a political critique or defense of the Weathermen as much he is trying to describe and explain the feeling, mood, and political climate of those intense, now long-ago days. In interviews since September 11, he seems as horrified as anyone at the atrocity of that day. He also writes now with the critical perspective of a man in his fifties, who if he hasn’t lost his idealism, has at least come to distance himself from what he admits was a rigid, youthful arrogance, a self-righteousness as audacious as it was dogmatic and self-serving.

Yet Ayers’ book raises broader issues about violence in the world. In late December, an article in the Tribune entitled "Should She Be Teaching Now?" gave a forum to O’Shea’s campaign against Dohrn. I couldn’t help but notice a certain irony in it all. The very same edition of the Tribune included another article, "U.S. Bombs Leave Wasteland," that described how a U.S. air strike on the Afghan village of Madoo had left fifty-five local civilians dead. What struck me were the words of one Afghan villager, as described by reporter Paul Salopek:

"’Is that an Al Qaeda,’" asked [Paira] Gul, pointing to a child’s severed foot he had excavated minutes earlier from a smashed house.

"’Tell me,’ he said, his voice choking with fury,‘is that what an Al Qaeda looks like?’"

Would it not be understandable if Mr. Gul should come to the conclusion that his friends and neighbors were also victims of a certain kind of terrorism? After 9-11 many Americans will certainly argue that the air strikes were justified. I think that’s debatable, but right or wrong we shouldn’t pretend that they are not a kind of terrorism. In fact, some credible reports now claim that in eight and a half weeks of air strikes, U.S. bombs killed some 3,700 Afghan civilians. Obviously, the ways in which we define terrorism in this world remain highly subjective.

Days of Rage, Days of Persuasion

I remember back in my high-school days in Glen Ellyn, one day on my familiar route home from school. It must have been sometime in late 1970, and I was walking with a friend. Along the way the friend suddenly said, "See that house over there, that’s the Ayers house. Their son is Bill Ayers, one of the leaders of the Weathermen. He’s underground. His dad’s the president of Commonwealth Edison."

At the time I found Ayers’ notoriety both fascinating and frightening. Here was this son of privilege, then so far over the edge, a revolutionary on the dodge from the government. How cool! Yet two years later as the local chairperson of the Student Mobilization Committee, I don’t think I gave a thought to the Weathermen group. They were an irrelevancy by then, effectively neutralized by their own self-defeating tactics from any kind of continued impact upon the broader antiwar or social justice movements.

In the spring of 1971, just a few months before I went to college, I was driving a cab in Wheaton. I will never forget the elderly woman I picked up in my cab during that week. Had I seen the news, she asked me as she settled in the back seat? No, not yet. She paused for a moment as if she suddenly had to compose herself. Tears began to fill her eyes as she described the veterans’ protest, watching one vet after another step up to a Washington stage to denounce the war, then throw away their medals. She just shook her head; she had never seen anything like that. She just hoped the war would end soon, I remember her telling me. We didn’t belong there, it wasn’t right.

More than 500,000 people had come to Washington, DC, in the largest protest ever organized against the war, an effort called by the National Peace Action Coalition. That to me was the power of protest. Not days of rage but days of persuasion, days of education and organization and mass peaceful protest. That’s what eventually won over the hearts and minds of millions of Americans to oppose the war. Unfortunately, the early initiatives of SDS to organize students against the war had by the late 1960s imploded. As for the Weathermen, they wanted to "bring the war home," to ignite a revolutionary uprising against imperialism on American soil — and they wanted it to happen right away. But despite the climate of questioning and protest, it was not to be, nor could it have been, at least not without a very different kind of public consciousness emerging. And for sure that changing consciousness was not going to happen because of the shock tactics of a small group of radicals.

The strategy and tactics of the Weathermen were really not radical, just out of touch; as a group they became caught in the centrifugal force of their own frustrated temper tantrum of protest. They also played into the hands of those prosecuting the war who tried to use the Weathermen’s violent protests to shift the public’s focus away from the violence of the war to the largely trumped up charge of "the violence of the antiwar movement."

Studs Terkle describes Ayers as one among a generation of dreamers who sought decency in an indecent world. He’s right. Ayers at least was not asleep to the reality of those officially brutal times. He owes no apology for the indignation and anger he felt at the wanton violence our government was carrying out then. As he reminds us in Fugitive Days, "intelligence gathering" as understood by the U.S. military in Vietnam could mean tying up five South Vietnamese men, taking them for a helicopter ride, and then nonchalantly pushing one of them out the door, to freefall to his death thousands of feet below. The other four would be asked then if they now had any information they wanted to share.

Let’s not forget that’s the kind of world Bill Ayers was protesting.

Fugitive Days: A Memoir, by Bill Ayers. Beacon Press (Boston, 2001), 304 pages, $24.

Mark Harris is a Chicago-based writer. Visit his Web site, A Writer’s Voice.

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