Bill Ayers talks back

The Obama campaign insisted that when you and your wife gave a coffee for Obama in 1995, he had no idea of your radical background, he just thought that you were a leading educator in Chicago.

I'm certain that's true.

Why are you certain that's true?

This morning I was on "Good Morning America." I got a phone call from a student an hour afterward saying, "I had no idea." I said, "You didn't notice the political campaign?"

The issue of my past in the Weather Underground or my past in the student movement has become so big in the last few months that people think it's a sign that I wear on my chest. That's not true. My students don't know this about me and it's not what I talk about. I talk about education, I talk about youth, I talk about social justice. These are all the issues that I write about and talk about all the time.

When "Fugitive Days" first came out [in 2001], I think it was surprising to most of my colleagues that I had this past. It's not that I hide it. It's just not that it's of immediate relevance to anybody. That was one of the things that Obama correctly was trying to say during the campaign. Why is this relevant? What relevance does this have? And what is interesting is that everyone went along with the idea that this connection was worth exploring. Until Colin Powell said no. I found that fascinating that this conservative Republican said, "Enough. What's the point of it?" It's clear that Obama has a mind of his own -- and he talks to people from a wide range of backgrounds and he decides for himself. But I never remember having a talk with Barack Obama that focuses on politics per se or my past per se. Why would I? What's the point of it?

Do you have a strong sense of what his views are on your subject -- education?

I don't have a strong sense of his views on education ... The only foundation that we were active in together was the Woods Fund in Chicago, which is a small foundation that is focused on supporting community organizing. Which is a grand tradition in this country. The Woods Fund in particular is interested in supporting democracy, interested in the participation of people in issues like job creation, housing, against predatory lending. Things like that. Those were the issues that we talked about in those board meetings. And the board included Republicans, conservatives, me. But we came to a consensus around the idea of supporting marginalized poor people in their efforts to get organized and get the things that they need and deserve.

During the campaign, how many clips did you see of people like Sarah Palin denouncing Bill Ayers, "the terrorist pal" of Barack Obama?

I'm not a big consumer of television, so I didn't see a lot. I also felt from the beginning that this is a cartoon character that's been cast up on the screen and I didn't feel personally implicated in that character. One of the delicious ironies of a campaign filled with ironies was that the McCain campaign tried to use me to bring Obama down -- and every time that he mentioned my name his poll numbers dropped. Again, I think that's a big credit to the American people. But I did see a few clips. I saw the clip where she [Palin] first talked about Barack Obama palling around with terrorists and the crowd shouted, "Kill him, kill him." That was sent to me by my kids.

I don't know if you remember the Two Minutes Hate in George Orwell's "1984"? In Two Minutes Hate, the party faithful gather in front of a television screen and the image of Emmanuel Goldstein is cast up on the screen and they work themselves into a frenzy of hatred and they begin to chant, "Kill him." That's how I felt. I felt a little bit like I was this character cast on the screen. It bore no relation to me. And yet it had a serious purpose and potentially serious consequences.

I was in New York when this was shown and my alderman from Chicago called -- worried -- and wanted to know how I was taking care of my safety. I was touched that she would do that.

Did you follow the right-wing blogger, I believe it was, who was totally convinced that you wrote Barack Obama's books?

I saw that because my oldest son, who is a writer, sent it to me. It was something that struck us as very, very funny. Barack Obama is a brilliant man, obviously. He is a talented and well-educated and erudite and articulate guy and he wrote two really brilliant and well-written memoirs. But somebody did a textual analysis that proved that the nautical images in "Fugitive Days" were similar to his work and I was the ghostwriter.

Ho Chi Minh also played a big role in Obama's "Dreams of My Father."

It's amazing where the paranoid mind can take you. I got an e-mail recently that said that Philip Lopate, who was my teacher at Bennington where I got my master's in fine arts, was the ghostwriter for "Fugitive Days." So now we have Philip writing my book and me writing Obama's book and it all seems quite preposterous.

Which seemed more unlikely a few decades ago: that you would be the most famous graduate of 1960s radicalism in America or that you would appear on "Good Morning America" along with a segment about a pregnant man?

I really wanted a segment about the two-headed monkey to follow. That's exactly how I think of most of the mainstream media. It's amazing when you think about that this broad and amazingly diverse and committed and passionate antiwar movement of 40 years ago gets reduced in the narrative put up by the Republican campaign to a single organization which was tiny and on the margins [the Weather Underground] and a single individual who was co-founder of that and a single sentence that individual said. The parallel to that is that the powerful black freedom movement gets reduced to a single preacher in a single church and a single phrase.

Martin Luther King?

No, I'm talking about the reduction of the civil rights movement to Jeremiah Wright. So the civil rights movement becomes Jeremiah Wright and the antiwar movement becomes me. It all seems entirely preposterous to me -- and I think that we should reject that.

You mention a single sentence about you. I have here a printout of what probably was the worst bit of book publicity in the history of American letters. It's the article about you that appeared on Sept. 11, 2001, in the New York Times. And the opening sentence is: "'I don't regret setting bombs,' Bill Ayers said. 'I feel we didn't do enough.'"

In the afterword to the new edition of "Fugitive Days" you write, "I'm nowadays often quoted as saying, 'I don't regret setting bombs. I wish we'd set more bombs. I don't think we did enough.' I never actually said that I 'set bombs' nor that I wish there were 'more bombs.'"

But the "I don't regret setting bombs" quote was the lead of the New York Times piece. Did the Times misquote you in 2001?

Yes. And the wonderful thing about "fact-checking," such as it is, is that the fact they check is their own misquote of what I said.

If you read the book, it is a book that is really full of regret and full of wonder about what went on. It's also a memoir and not a manifesto. What I did say and the theme of all the press coverage when "Fugitive Days" was first released in September 2001 was all based on this idea of "no regrets." Different magazines and journals said different things about it, but the fascination was that I wasn't sorry.

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