1 Boring Old Man

Former ’60s Radical Is Now Considered Mainstream in Chicago

In the 1960s, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn saw themselves as urban guerrillas who just might be able to overthrow the U.S. government and force an end to the Vietnam War. They were members of the Weather Underground, a radical offshoot of the antiwar movement, who went into hiding for a decade after a bomb accidentally exploded, killing three members of the group.

Nearly 30 years after surrendering to police, Ayers and Dohrn, both in their 60s, are tenured university professors whose work on school reform and juvenile justice have won them bipartisan respect. Ayers is an informal adviser to Mayor Richard M. Daley and has been awarded more than $50 million in charitable grants for his promotion of small schools as a solution to a crisis in education. Dohrn lectures widely on children’s law and serves on a variety of boards and committees. Together, they have raised three boys in the intellectual haven of Hyde Park, where Sen. Barack Obama is a neighbor.

For months, their connection to the Democratic presidential candidate — they hosted a gathering for him in 1995 when he first ran for the state Senate and later contributed $200 to his reelection campaign — has been a source of growing anger among conservatives. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign picked up on the connection to suggest skeletons in Obama’s closet…

Back then, it wasn’t like it sounds when people talk about it now. Before the late 60’s, the widespread protests in America were under the sway of Martin Luther King’s version of Gandhi’s movement in India. Sure there was violence – the beatings of the Freedom Riders, the bombing of the 16th Street Church, the killed Civil Rights workers, the assasination of Medger Evers – but it was from the other side. Even the antiwar protests were only rowdy. But with Martin Luther King’s assasination, Robert Kennedy’s assasination, the Democratic Convention of 1968, the Kent State Massacre, the Black Panthers, etc, things went to hell in a handbasket. The Weathermen were just one of the groups advocating Revolution. They did what a lot of us only thought about, but we did think about it. No one was listening to us – no one that mattered.

Most of us still played it straight. I was drafted into the Air Force and spent the early 1970’s in England. It was an easy decision being a doctor. Doctors don’t fight, no matter where they are sent. It would’ve been hard to go to Viet Nam in 1971, but I didn’t have to face that dilemma. But what to do about Viet Nam was a major determinant in the life course of everyone I knew. Back then it was just every guy, but our wives and girlfriends were involved too. But we didn’t all think of the Weathermen as crazy. They were just the loud voices of a collective chorus – the too loud voice. I’m actually glad that all of this came up because I’ve always wondered whatever came of them – the people who were captured in the tumult of those times.

It’s a wonderful irony that Weatherman William Ayres is an advisor to the younger Mayor Daley, son of the man who attacked the Yippies of the 1968 Convention to chants of "the whole world is watching." The Weathermen didn’t quite make it to Robin Hood status, but they were close [Bombs don’t exactly fit the Sherwood Forest metaphor]. I’m actually glad to hear that Barak Obama has a connection to the people from our times in the sixties. I think a lot about those times with this Iraq War – wondering, like a lot of people, why the antiwar movement hasn’t achieved the heights it reached in those days. I kind of think I know the answer, but it’s hard to put into words.

The America of my parents was a different place. The first half of the 20th Century was a real bitch of a time to be alive. There was a huge Immigration, World War I, the Depression, then World War II. It’s hard to imagine living then. All of life was determined by great global events. The 50’s, my adolescence, were the quiet years. We just sat around having life, oblivious to the constant threat of thermonuclear annihilation. The evil in the world was clear – Commies – who were after us. But we were strong. Everyone had someone on the block who had memorabilia from "The War." So the Civil Rights Movement and the Viet Nam War woke a lot of us from our Rhythm and Blues Torpor, the Donna Reed Show. There were things wrong here too. It was disillusioning to say the least. Segregation, under a microscope, was an atrocity. Viet Nam was equally horrid.

I think we felt lied to. The "good guys" weren’t very good after all and we were going to fix things, wake our parents up from their deep sleep – little caring about their trials through the first part of the century. In the explosion that followed, our movements went just as sour as the people we were fighting against. All of us lost our illusions and our focus back then. Now, with an Administration that’s worse than any before them, even worse than Nixon, our illusions are already gone. We just want the problems to go away. It’s hard to think that five years ago a lot of us put flag stickers on our cars and dreamed of World War II glory, and now we realize that we were betrayed at a level that is still only dimly known.