William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn – Friends of Barack Obama By
John Howard , October 7, 2008
I am a child of the ‘60s. I grew up with the radical twaddle of people like Tom Hayden (the Ted Baxter of the radical Left), and Romper Room Revolutionaries William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the Mao and Jiang Qing of adolescent radicalism. It was an overheated time made worse by nursery school traitors. It was a time during which the most pampered generation in the history of mankind went into an extended tantrum, punctuated only by the indulgent sighs of their misguided and clueless parents who still apparently thought the destructive impulses of their little darlings were somehow cute. Bill Ayers’ father, the late Thomas G. Ayers, Commonwealth Edison Chairman, Chicago grandee and symbol of muscular capitalism comes to mind. (Does anyone really believe that Ayers and Dohrn, wanted by the FBI, lived without family help and contact for 11 years “underground” in Chicago, the town his prominent father and powerful friends helped run and which has been described as having the distinction of being the only completely corrupt city in the nation? Please.)
But Ayers and Dohrn demonstrated that low grade, child radicals, too, could be dangerous. Their simple minded nihilism was exceeded only by their almost complete ineptitude. But it is important to recall who they were and to know who they are because not only do they still exist and spread their poison, their very relationship to a national candidate for President should chill every thinking citizen.
An outgrowth of an earlier Leftist organization, the Students for a Democratic Society, was established in 1960 with a manifesto that represented a break with the traditional non-Communist Left. With Tom Hayden at its helm, it is unsurprising that it started as a shallow, self-dramatizing collection of students fresh from panty raids and looking for something more interesting to do. As the turmoil of the ‘60s continued to ferment, it became more and more strident, inflexible and radical in its project.
After an internecine war in 1969, it split into different groups, among which was the Weathermen, a would-be domestic terrorist organization with little apparent purpose except to engage in violent acts in service of the national tantrum and of a badly articulated, simplistic ideology with little grounding in anything other than the romantic fantasy that they were somehow aiding “the Revolution.” The preening self-regard of its leaders was breathtaking.
Its primary activity was the issuance of dramatic “communiqués” from the underground in a grotesque imitation of stilted Soviet-speak, like a bad ‘50s movie, threatening violent action in instant mayhem. Its first act was a riot called “Days of Rage,” not surprisingly in Chicago. With its usual flair, the Weathermen announced that its protest would be the largest ever, but with its usual ineptitude, only a few hundred showed up. They blew up a statue honoring policemen who had been killed or injured in earlier riots. (They blew it up again when it was rebuilt several years later.) They burned cars, shattered windows and attacked policemen, injuring 28.
Bernardine Dohrn, in an astonishing display of hubris, demonstrated her simple-mindedness and limited forensic gifts in her attempt to define their purpose: “We are building a communist organization to be part of the forces which build a revolutionary communist party to lead the working class to seize power and build socialism… We must further the study of Marxism-Leninism within the Weather Underground Organization. The struggle for Marxism-Leninism is the most significant development in our recent history. We discovered thru [sic] our own experiences what revolutionaries all over the world have found — that Marxism-Leninism is the science of revolution, the revolutionary ideology of the working class, our guide to the struggle.”
History has now shown us the merit of that project as even those who knew it best and preserved it longest have rejected the moronic and evil ideology that was Marxism-Leninism – but not Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Ayers.
Shortly after the Days of Rage riot, the Weathermen risibly “declared war” on the United States. The sheer pretentiousness of these junior Bolsheviks was vaguely laughable. But they were deadly serious. Dohrn constructed and planted an anti-personnel bomb containing heavy metal staples and metal projectiles on the window ledge of a police facility, killing one officer, Bryan V. McDonnell, and severely wounding and permanently blinding another, Robert Fogarty. Their families never recovered. Ayers laughingly and emphatically admitted his participation and Dohrn’s skill in placing the fatal bomb.
In 1970, the Weatherman attacked New York City policemen with bombs and firebombed the home of a New York judge presiding over the criminal trial of black thugs who had wrapped themselves in the mantle of radicalism; a favorite ruse of the time. They went on to plant bombs at the United States Capital, the New York City Police Department and the Pentagon, all the time issuing taunting communiqués suggesting more attacks were on the way. Had it not all been so lethal, it would have had all the earmarks of children playing war in the back yard. It is a shame it was not so benign.
Despite their later, self-serving statements that they really intended to harm only property, the evidence is clearly otherwise. In 1970, an explosion rocked Greenwich Village, destroying a beautiful, privately owned townhouse. The townhouse had been converted to a bomb factory and, demonstrating the ineptitude for which the Weathermen had become almost as legendary as their infantile communiqués, three of them blew themselves up while making bombs. It was a fitting end to the meaningless lives of Diana Oughton, Ted Gold and Terry Robbins, whose deaths stunned their colleagues but left the world a little cleaner. The fragmentation bombs they were making were intended for the murder of American soldiers at a dance at Fort Dix and for the destruction of a library at Columbia University.
Who were these people? Children of privilege whose nihilistic, radical project was intended to destroy this nation. They were, and are, at root, evil. Commenting on the Charles Manson murders, Ms. Dohrn told her “collective:” "Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in their bellies. Wild!" “Dig it”, indeed. The “belly” she was referring to contained Sharon Tate’s unborn child. What kind of perverted monster could find pleasure in the thought that a woman eight and one half months pregnant, on the eve of delivery, was killed and mutilated with a fork left sticking out of the unborn infant inher abdomen? That is the measure of Bernardine Dohrn and her consort, Bill Ayers, who attempted to suggest she was “kidding” when she made the statement. It is hard to imagine any context in which the “joke” would be comprehensible to anyone who is not unhinged by radical ideology. No, she wasn’t kidding. Anyone who could wantonly murder police officers with a bomb that shredded them like lettuce has no soul and could not be moved by the Manson Family’s savagery.
And so it goes to this day. Dohrn’s latest ravings are of a piece with those of her past. In the July/August 2003 issue of the Monthly Review, she descended, yet again, into the pit of radicalism from which she never really emerged ranting about “American imperialism.” Fulminating about law enforcement and the reasonable effort by our government to keep its citizens, even those as unworthy and unthinkable as Bernardine Dohrn, safe. Gibbering about American “oppression.” Biting, yet again, the hand that protects her.
Some things are not forgivable. There are some things for which one cannot atone. Treason is one. Betrayal of one’s country is another. Wanton murder, still another. But apparently there is forgiveness in Chicago. No one has ever accused the present Mayor Daley of an overabundance of grey matter. But he told the New York Times that he finds value in Ayers and Dohrn. He says Ayers “has done a lot of good in this city and nationally.” “People make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life.” Mistakes? Deliberate, cold blooded murder is a “mistake?” Conspiracy to murder soldiers is a “mistake?” Mocking the murder and mutilation of an expectant mother on the verge of giving birth is a “mistake?”
When Dohrn emerged from the miasma, she was offered a job at Sidley Austin, one of Chicago’s most prestigious law firms, even though she was denied a law license by the State of Illinois. The managing partner, Howard Trienans, a friend of Mr. Ayers’ father, thought she would make a fine addition to the firm. In the sort of dismissive sarcasm so favored by those who are not used to being contradicted, he said “She didn’t get her law license because she is stubborn. She wouldn’t say she was sorry.” She didn’t say she was sorry, Mr. Trienans, because she isn’t. What more need be said? One wonders how understanding he might have been had one of her targets been Sidley Austin for representing the monopolistic AT&T, his most lucrative client.
Her fatuous narcissism continues to this day in her writings and defiant view that this nation that has brought freedom to the greatest number; this nation that is a beacon of hope to people throughout the world; this nation that nurtured the idea of liberty when there were none other to protect it from those to whom Ayers and Dohrn paid their fealty, is the major source of evil on the globe.
It would be easy to dismiss Ayers and Dohrn as toothless relics of a forgotten age; witless simpletons reduced to legal clinics and the academy. But they are not sorry. And they still spread their poison. And they still have influence.
Obama’s views on foreign policy did not happen in a vacuum. His disdain for the idea of American exceptionalism comes from the dangerous world view of the milieu from which he so recently emerged. His view of the military, America’s history and his opposition to war come from the environment in which he has immersed himself for these past 20 years; an environment sharply defined by Ayers, Dohrn and their allies and protectors. The New York Times would have us believe Obama and the Ayers hardly knew each other. Yet the exalted Mayor Daley knows them well in the hothouse of Chicago politics, and says so. Is it even remotely likely that an obscure state senator who lived three blocks from Dohrn and Ayers and was first introduced politically at their home does not? It hardly matters, though. They are cut from the same cloth.
Knowing who Ayers and Dohrn were and are, we must ask ourselves: what sort of people would embrace them? What kind of people would excuse their acts and, more importantly, why? What decent person would welcome them into civil society? What does it say for a public official that he does not condemn them outright? What does it say of a public official that he would accept any help they might offer? That he is ignorant of history? That he is young? That he is naïve? Or is it because, when linked to others of his associations, he may sympathize with their twisted radicalism?
Family Security Matters Contributing Editor John W. Howard is a lawyer, specializing in corporate and business litigation who also founded a non-profit, public interest law firm specializing in First, Second and Tenth Amendment issues. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
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