Case File | Eyewitness History: Bill Ayers

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From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal.

So often when we talk about history, we're discussing it like it's something that only happened in a textbook.

The past is an entirely different world, separated from us by decades and even centuries, a reality we can only understand through the expertise of historians.

But the truth is that we're all living through history every day.

A headline from Today's News might be an exam question in just a few short years.

Knowing that, it makes you wonder what you might say to future generations if they sat down to find out about your life and what you'd asked people from the past about theirs.

Imagine the potency of that history lesson, hearing what it was like to live in a different reality than the one we know now.

Well, luckily for us, we don't have to imagine.

The podcast Eyewitness History brings you perspectives on events, scandals, wars and more from the people who live through it all.

Thanks to them, we can hear about what it was like to be part of The Weather Underground from one of its founding members, Bill Ayers.

They spoke with Bill about the birth of the Weathermen, the group's shift towards violence and his lifelong process of political awakening.

It's a fascinating discussion about the value of human life, the nature of protest and life after The Underground.

This is Eyewitness History.

What was it like to hear about the JFK assassination, or America's triumph over Hitler?

We're seeing Queen at Live Aid.

Our past is a collection of stories that bring us to now.

Welcome to the Eyewitness History Podcast, where we view history through the eyes of the people that watch the events that shaped our world.

Here's your host, Josh Cohen, and these are their stories.

Hello, listeners, thank you so much for joining me on the Eyewitness History Podcast.

Today we speak with someone whose name is Synonymous, with one of the most controversial and tumultuous periods in American history.

This episode, I sit down with Bill Ayers.

Bill Ayers was at the heart of the radical counterculture movement of the 1960s and the 1970s.

He was a founding member of The Weather Underground, a group that sought to challenge the status quo with acts that could be described as either civil disobedience or domestic terrorism, and whose exploits are etched into the annals of American history.

Their actions ignited fiery debates on the Vietnam War, civil rights and the very fabric of society itself.

Today, we delve into the past, exploring the tumultuous era of The Weather Underground and Bill Ayers' personal journey within it.

We will discuss the motivations, the controversies and the enduring legacy of this movement.

And now I give you Bill Ayers.

Okay, I'm here with Bill Ayers.

Bill, thanks for joining me, sir.

Well, happy to be here, Josh.

I want to discuss you, your exploits, shall we call them, The Weather Underground.

Before we do, please tell our listeners briefly who you are and what you do.

Well, I live in Chicago.

My name is Bill Ayers.

I live in Chicago.

I retired from the University of Illinois in Chicago almost 13 years ago.

I taught there for almost 30 years, but I retired when I was 65 years old.

I now am an adjunct professor at several colleges in the Chicago area.

I teach at Lake Forest College where I teach courses in education.

I teach at DePaul University where I teach courses in ethics and philosophy.

I teach at the University of Chicago.

I just came back from the U of C where I teach oral history.

I teach at Stateville Prison where I teach memoir writing.

What's interesting about that line up of colleges and classes is I teach some students who are in their late teens, 18, 19 years old, and who come from tremendous wealth.

Then I teach people as old as 65, 70, who grew up poor and are suffering the reality of living in a cage.

I have the full range of, a very broad range of students.

I'm the kind of teacher who draws me to teaching.

Why I love teaching is that I love learning from my students.

Imagine in a day going from the University of Chicago, where my students are, some of them are South Asian, some East Asian, some European, and they are very wealthy kids, very smart kids, lovely kids.

Then I go to Stateville Prison, where my students are all in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, also lovely people, also people I can learn from.

So I just have a very rich teaching life, and I started teaching when I was 20 years old, and I have really been blessed to be in the exciting company of students, often young people, but whether you're young or not, being in the company of students has been a life raft for me through my whole life.

Wow, that's wonderful, Bill.

Thank you, I appreciate it.

Winding the clock back then, I'd love to know when it was that you first became politically aware and socially conscious, let's say.

You know, I mean, I think political awareness and social consciousness, it hits a wide spectrum.

Sure.

I became politically aware, I think it was this morning, but then we could go back a ways and say, I will tell you a little bit about my background, Josh.

I grew up in Chicago, in the suburbs of Chicago.

I grew up in comfort, in wealth.

My father was the chairman of Commonwealth Edison, which is the electric monopoly in Chicago.

I was the middle of five kids in a raucous, wonderful, loving family.

I'm still close to all my family members.

I went off to prep school.

I was sent away to boarding school when I was 16 for my junior and senior years in high school.

The reason was, I was a juvenile delinquent by the standards of the Chicago suburbs in the 50s.

That is to say, I smoked cigarettes, shot pool, and cursed.

I wasn't that dangerous, but it was a little bit...

And I wasn't getting good grades.

I was a terrible student.

So my parents felt it was in everyone's interest if I went away.

And I didn't object at all because my girlfriend was going away to college.

She was two years older than me.

And so I thought, what the hell?

It's the equivalent of college.

So I went away to prep school, went to a tiny boarding school in a northern suburb of Chicago called Lake Forest Academy.

All boys.

My graduating class was 39 kids.

And it was very cloistered.

We were living behind the hedges in the kind of sleeping, we were sleeping the deep American sleep of denial.

And there we were.

And then in 1963, I graduated high school, and I went off to the University of Michigan.

And it was like an electric shock.

It was like my eyes were opened all of a sudden.

I couldn't sleep for two years.

I mean, there was so much going on.

And so coming from this small cloistered, quiet, you know, little cage, I suddenly found myself in the wide, wide world.

And I saw that the world was in flames.

And I got swept up in the civil rights movement very quickly, and from that into the anti-war movement.

So political consciousness, you know, it's hard to say because that's something that doesn't exactly come to you like a lightning bolt.

I'll give you an example in my little prep school.

I was again a little bit of a weird person, but everyone was there was weird.

Everyone was, I used to call it a juvenile detention center for rich kids.

You know, I mean, Igor Stravinsky IV was there, Oscar III was there.

I mean, it was insane.

And we were all a little quirky.

But one of my quirky things was that in my history slash philosophy class, we had to pick someone in history to write a portrait of.

And I picked Karl Marx, and it drove my history professor through the roof.

I remember saying in my paper, from each according to their ability to each according to their need, that sign is absolutely Christian.

And my master, my teacher was like, no, it doesn't.

That's not Christian.

But then I went to Ann Arbor, and the world was on fire.

The world was in flames, and I couldn't catch up fast enough.

So I went to every meeting.

I went to every movie.

I went to every lecture, and it was an intellectual bath, a social bath.

It was phenomenal.

And there were women too there, I mean, which, you know, was a small thing.

A small thing for an 18-year-old coming out of an all-men's prep school.

One interesting side note of the 39 kids I graduated with, I think six to eight of them ended up in Students for a Democratic Society.

So it was partly the times we were living in.

This is 1963, the civil rights movement is still rising.

Things are on the move and the Americans are about to make the fatal step into Southeast Asia, taking over the French colonial mission.

So that was a huge awakening.

But I guess also I would say, I'd say if you think of an awakening as a flash at a point, you can get stuck the next minute in a new kind of dogma, a new kind of ignorance.

So to me, that when I would jokingly said, my awakening was this morning, I wasn't entirely kidding.

I'm partly saying that you wake up and wake up and wake up.

And in fact, part of the rhythm of living, I think a moral life, but certainly living the life of an activist is that you have to open your eyes every day and every day anew.

You can't settle on the fact that you open your eyes once and the world suddenly made sense, and now you're going to be living in that constructed world for the next 50 or 80 years.

No, you have to kind of say to yourself, my job, if I want to be a moral person, if I want to be an ethical actor in the world, if I want to be an activist who makes a difference in the lives of people, if I want to do better, I have to open my eyes every day.

I have to wake up anew every day.

I have to kind of insist that I have to look deeper, look more.

And why is that?

Because we are all finite beings in an infinite and expanding universe.

It's not enough to say, oh, I got it.

You never get it.

You're just trying to get it more.

So I could tell you a couple of things that I learned in the last, I don't know, couple days, which I feel like, whoa, now I'm awake to that, where I wasn't before.

So that's consciousness I didn't have.

But if you don't live that way, then you can find yourself in a new dogma, a new orthodoxy, a new set of constraints on your mind all the time.

So my argument, I guess, would be this, Josh, that the rhythm of being an activist or a moral person is easy to say, but excruciatingly difficult to live.

And the rhythm is open your eyes, pay attention to the world as it swirls by you.

The world's not standing still either.

No, it isn't.

No, but neither is the world.

So the world's swirling by.

You have to open your eyes, pay attention.

Secondly, you have to be astonished.

You have to allow yourself to be astonished at the beauty, the ecstasy, the joy, the humanity in all directions, and equally astonished at the unnecessary suffering that human beings visit upon one another.

And astonished every time.

So as soon as you get used to, where you live, you don't have to get used to this, but where I live, as soon as you get used to seeing homeless children, you've gone off the tracks.

That should astonish you.

The fact that we have, within 20 miles of anywhere you are in this country, you're that far from a prison.

That should astonish you.

Every day, it should astonish you anew.

So you open your eyes, pay attention, you're astonished, then you have to act.

You have to do something.

And my students often say to me, the way you talk, it seems like I have to do everything.

No, I'm not saying do everything.

I'm saying do something.

You could always do something.

And people say, yeah, but it's just me.

I'm all by myself.

Okay, the something you could do is find one person to do it with.

You can find you can not be a me, you could become a we.

That's doing something.

And then the fourth thing you have to do, and this is where The Weather Underground certainly went off the tracks.

The fourth step in becoming a good activist or a moral person, in my mind, is rethink.

You have to question, you have to doubt if all the stuff you just did is all that good.

And so that's the rhythm.

And I could expand that in a million ways, but open your eyes and pay attention.

Be astonished at the good and the bad.

Act, doubt, repeat.

And that to me is what it means to be an activist.

And it's how I've tried to live my life from the time I was 18 years old.

And do you ever get there?

And my point really is you never get there.

It's a journey.

It's a journey.

And it's a journey within a certain framework.

That's what I'm kind of saying.

And I'm often go back to Samuel Beckett's wonderful Shrey's in, what was it called, Westward Ho or something like that, his play where he says, try, fail, try again, fail again, fail better.

That's a nice rhythm too.

Try, fail, try again, fail again, fail better.

So you want to keep learning and keep assuming that you're a learner.

You're not a teacher, you're a learner.

And the best teachers are learners, that's what they're doing.

So I said when we started how much I like teaching in these different institutions, but part of the reason I do is I'm learning things all the time.

My students are teaching me perspectives and bringing me different music that I never knew about and bringing me different experiences and different ways of looking at the world that I never thought of.

That's what's so exciting about being a teacher.

If you're alive to teaching, if you're reading from yellowing notes, a lecture about John Dewey, that's kind of b****.

But if on the other hand, you're creating an environment where everybody is asking deep questions all the time, you're going to be learning all the time and that's really what keeps me going.

That's a wonderful answer, Bill.

I really appreciate it and it's cleared a lot of ground for me too, but we'll get into, believe me, we'll get into Vietnam and SDS and the rest of it.

Perhaps I'll press on Bill asking you what were the Merchant Marines and how do they introduce you to Vietnam?

Well, I, as I say, I went away to Michigan.

The world opened up because I saw the world was what's bigger than the kind of safety and kind of illusion of Lake Forest Academy.

And I became an activist.

I was very involved in many, many things.

After I'd been in Michigan for a year and a half, I dropped out of school.

And I thought this school was kind of irrelevant to what I needed to do.

And I was impatient.

I was urging to do things.

And I went south, hoping to find a place that I could be involved in the Civil Rights Movement.

And the problem was, it's the middle of winter, and there was a great lull.

So I found myself in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

And I went down and signed up for the Merchant Marines.

And I became a merchant Marine.

And it was really a very, it was really, I was just a young man kind of looking for purpose in my life.

And the Merchant Marines wasn't going to answer that purpose, but it was something I did.

So I joined the Merchant Marines.

I was on a ship that went from Baton Rouge to Athens, Greece, Souda, Greece, the port of Athens.

And we were bringing grain in the, we were bringing wheat from the Midwest of the United States to Europe.

And it was still part of the kind of post-World War II, you know, program of rebuilding Europe.

And I was in Athens one morning.

I was in Constitution Square, and I'd gotten a cup of coffee with a couple of friends.

And I picked up the International Herald Tribune, which was the paper that the US put all over the place.

And it was the first time I saw the word Vietnam.

And it was about the buildup.

This must be the spring of 1965.

It was about the buildup of US troops in Vietnam.

I didn't know anything about it.

I was completely ignorant.

I mean, as Americans tend to be, I mean, now we all know the name Vietnam, but in 1964, nobody had ever heard of it.

It's like John Stewart once said on Comedy Central, he said, own war, it allows Americans to learn geography.

You don't know where the hell we are in the world unless somehow a war breaks out.

I mean, in fact, even to this day, if you ask a group of high school students or college students to draw a freehand sketch of the Middle East with all the major countries or a freehand sketch of Afghanistan or a freehand sketch of anything, can't do it because we don't know geography.

And it's often, foreigners often say to us, Americans don't know where they are or who they are.

They don't know history and they don't know geography.

We think we're the center of the universe.

We think that our history is the important history, but we have no idea.

I used to ask students, what percentage of the world's population is North American?

And the answers range from 10% to 50%.

There's 4%.

But we feel that important, and so it's kind of a natural thing.

But in any case, I heard about Vietnam.

I came back to the United States.

I went back to Ann Arbor.

I hooked up with some friends of mine.

We're beginning to question whether we should be in Vietnam.

I went to a meeting and that fall, the fall of 1965, I learned so much so fast that it's kind of head spinning.

Somebody put up a sign in the center of campus, what was called the diag and the fishbowl.

Put up a big sign because there's a Marine recruiter in the fishbowl.

And this guy who I still know, named Stan Maydell, put up a sign that's quoted from the Nuremberg trials about individual responsibility for war crimes.

And Stan had put an arrow pointing to the Marine recruiter and a big sign that said this man is a war criminal.

Well, now, this caused pandemonium on the campus, you can imagine.

And my younger brother, my brother was a freshman, and I was a sophomore, but I was just returning to school.

We got involved in discussions leading up to a teach-in.

The first teach-in happened in October 1965.

We got into discussions that went raging all morning, all afternoon, all evening in the fishbowl around the question of whether this man was a war criminal, what's going on in Vietnam.

And we picked up a little sheet called 100 Questions and 100 Answers About Vietnam.

And we learned so much.

I think the first thing I said was Ho Chi Minh said, if Ho Chi Minh had stood for election and it hadn't been overruled, he would have won 80% of the vote in Vietnam in 1954.

So it was just little factoids like that.

And my brother and I were deep involved in these discussions, both coming from apolitical backgrounds, trying to catch up, trying to understand.

And I remember we heard two people say to each other, don't talk to those guys, meaning us.

They'd memorize the fact sheet and they're just repeating what's on the fact sheet.

But God, do I sound that good?

That's so great.

But we were learning and by the end of that month, by the middle of the month, by the end of that week, I had decided that I was going to be arrested in a direct action non-violent sit-in at the draft board in Ann Arbor.

The draft board was, for those who don't know, was the selective service system by which men were recruited, not recruited, required.

Conscripted.

Yeah, conscripted to fight in the war or to get a deferment.

We decided we were going to go down there and try to destroy some files and exercise a very militant but non-violent attack on the draft board.

So, my brother and I had discussed it.

He decided not to get arrested.

He had the harder job.

He had explained to my parents what had happened, but I decided to get arrested.

It was the first time I was arrested, October 15th, 1965, and that was the beginning.

But there again, Josh, you talk about when did you start to develop political consciousness.

There's nothing like being in jail to develop political consciousness.

I mean, here you are in Ann Arbor, this cushy, liberal, privileged place in Eastern Michigan.

It's a university town.

It thinks highly of itself, and it's designated an all-American city, and you're in the all-American city's jail.

You learn a lot from the people who are in there.

But I often think, it's partly a metaphor, because actually you learn a ton about the United States.

If you go abroad and look back, which I did as a merchant marine, then you learn a ton if you are living at the bottom of society, not in the cushy middle, not where everybody thinks they know everything.

But go to live, as I did later, go to live in the segregated black ghetto of Cleveland.

Go to live in the Appalachian community of Detroit.

You learn a lot that you didn't know, you had no idea.

And I think that's true today.

If you really, people, everyone who's listening to this has an opinion about the refugees coming from Latin America, go live in a refugee camp.

See where you learn.

Because you could have an opinion based on the comfort of your own life, but you're not seeing what other people are seeing.

And it's important as a thinking being, as a thinking, caring being, that we figure out what other people see, what they think.

And I think that's something that I was very, very fortunate as a young man to have the opportunity to do.

Yeah, absolutely, Bill.

Thank you.

I think it's high time I ask you directly, what was The Weatherman and what led you to create it?

Well, The Weather Underground, The Weatherman was a faction of Students for a Democratic Society.

SDS was the largest student organization, political radical student organization, really in the history of the country.

It was a very large organization.

It had gotten its start as part of the civil rights movement, students on campuses.

It really was based in elite universities initially, and then it spread all over the country to working class colleges and to high schools.

But it was founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I happened to be.

But it had a big base at Columbia University, at Harvard, at Yale, at Berkeley.

And it was this huge student organization.

And I got involved in it right then in 1965.

And by 1968, I was the leader of the local chapter.

And we were focused on two things, really.

One was racial injustice, white supremacy, racism.

And the second was war, particularly the war in Vietnam.

And we thought, we felt very strongly, we're 20 years old, but I thought and we all thought that we were going to be able to end, in some short order, certainly in our lifetimes, we were going to end white supremacy, not just segregation.

We were going to end racism as we had known it.

And we were also going to end not just this Vietnam War, but the cause of war.

And we really felt strongly that we were, not just optimism, but it was a kind of a spirit, you know, this is within reach, we can do this.

I think that's part of what, you know, that confidence, whether it was, you know, some of it was obviously false, but that confidence gave us a lot of impetus to do the things that we did.

So SDS was bubbling along.

As I said, I was arrested in 1965.

At that time, probably, this is worth noting actually, when I was arrested, I think 39 or 40 of us were arrested inside the draft board, two professors, couple of graduate students and the rest undergrads.

We were part of a demonstration of about 300 people, which was a big demonstration against the war.

We were surrounded by thousands of students who wanted us expelled from school.

So the idea, oh, it was popular, it was the 60s, everybody did it.

It's just not true.

That's the myth making of the 60s.

Revisionism.

Yeah, it's revisionism because, look, like any other social movement, we were a minority movement from the start.

But at that time in the country, probably 20% of people opposed the war.

Fast forward three years to 1968.

Now, not only does a supermajority in the world oppose the war, but a majority of Americans opposes the war.

What happened in those three years?

Well, one thing is, a lot of us students organized, went into working class communities, knocked on doors, held demonstrations, got arrested, picketed, wrote our congresspeople.

All the things you can think of to do.

That's one thing that happened in those three years.

A second, much more important thing that happened is it's the Black Freedom Movement, which was setting the moral agenda for the country, came out in large portions against the war.

Not everybody, mind you, not everybody, but Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, said, I won't go into the army.

He was the most famous world champ boxer ever, and he says, I won't go into the army.

I won't fight in the white man's army.

No Viet Cong ever called me the N-word.

Interesting that he put it that way, because Viet Cong is the N-word for Vietnamese, but okay, it's a terrible thing to say.

But you had that, and then you had the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the kids who were leading the bus, the interstate bus sit-ins and the lunch counter sit-ins, and they issued a statement saying, no black man should go 10,000 miles away to fight for so-called freedom he doesn't enjoy in Mississippi.

Wow, the country was shaking, and then Martin Luther King, starting very early, but famously on April 4th, 1967, gave his Beyond Vietnam speech at Worshide Church, in which he said, among other things, he said, my country is the greatest purveyor of violence on earth.

We need to find a way to get on the right side of the world revolution.

Suddenly, King is saying the war is immoral, illegal, and he lost a heck of a lot of his support for saying that, but it was a courageous, gutsy, wonderful thing to say.

So, the country was shook up, and then the third thing that, I mean, there are many things that happened, but to name a third phenomenon that happened, is kids started coming home from Vietnam and telling the truth.

When they told the truth about what they had done and what they were forced to do, what they had seen, the country was finished, exhausted.

By 1968, a majority of people opposed the war.

That's a pretty exciting thing to bring up.

They had their war movement in three years that had that kind of impact.

So the end of March 1968, Lyndon Johnson goes on national TV, gives an address and the end of it is, I'm not running for re-election.

Wow.

I mean, our minds were blown, my head exploded and we raced into the streets.

Those of us who'd spent a career, three years trying to end this war, being arrested multiple times, being beaten up by the police multiple times.

And suddenly, we won and we swirled out into the streets in Ann Arbor.

And this was true in Palo Alto and Berkeley and Cambridge.

But here we were running through the streets by about, I don't know, 10 or 11 o'clock that night.

We had about maybe a couple thousand people standing on the front lawn of the president of the University of Michigan, chanting and celebrating.

And Robin Fleming, who was the president, came out.

He had a bullhorn.

I had a bullhorn.

He was the president of the University of Michigan.

I was the president of SDS.

And we bullhorned back and forth with each other.

And he said, his message was, congratulations, you've won a great victory.

And now the war will end.

And he believed it.

And I believed it that night.

Five days later, King was dead.

A couple of months later, Bobby Kennedy was dead.

A couple of months later, it was clear that Henry Kissinger had come out of the sewer he was living in, which was called Harvard.

And he and Richard Nixon were not going to end the war.

They were going to expand the war.

So now what do you do?

What do you do?

You just not only spent three years building an anti-war movement, but you won.

You had won the moral argument.

You'd won the political argument.

And now instead of winning the end of the murder, you've actually just transferred to some other zone and it's still going to go on.

So here we have the picture of this, Josh.

It's 1968.

A majority of people are opposed to the war, and yet we can't stop the war.

We've tried everything we can think of.

Now there are more things to think of, but we certainly put our bodies on the line to stop the war.

And we convinced people, and yet it wasn't going to end.

It was going to expand into Laos, into Cambodia.

What do you do?

6,000 people a week are going to be murdered, and there's no end in sight.

Nobody can see what the end is.

Now we can look back on it all the 50 years later and say, okay, 3 million people were killed.

Not 30 million, not 300 million, 3 million were killed, and it was a 10-year war.

But when you were in the middle of it, who knew?

6,000 people a week are going to die, your government's going to kill them.

What should you do?

So in my birth family, I'm in the middle, as I said, of 5 kids, one of my brothers joined the Democratic Party and tried to build a peace wing.

One went to the communes of the Northeast.

One went to the factories of the Middle West.

One went to Canada and tried, you know, as part of the Great Migration.

He opened a home, actually, for deserters in Vancouver.

And two years into that, he decided he was ducking his responsibility.

He came back and joined the army in order to build a serviceman's union.

Talk about a kamikaze mission.

And he was court-martialed and he deserted.

So there are five choices right there.

Were any of them perfect?

Did any of them end the war?

No.

Were any of them insane?

I don't think so.

My choice, I didn't mention of the five, my choice was to help build what became known as The Weather Underground.

We had been a faction within SDS.

Now we were determined to build a clandestine network that could survive what we thought was an impending American fascism.

We thought that authoritarianism, fascism was upon us, meant that we had to survive it.

We didn't want to spend the next 10 years in courtrooms raising money for lawyers.

We decided we would go underground.

We could create an infrastructure that could help other people.

And we would take the war to the war makers.

So The Weather Underground famously, over the, I guess, five years of its existence.

Yeah, about five years.

I was underground for 11 years, went by the FBI.

My wife, Bernadette, was on the 10 most wanted list of the FBI.

And the reason was we were an organization that was, we were wanted for different demonstrations and different actions we've been involved in.

But we decided we were going to survive that, we were going to take the war to the war makers.

So in those years, The Weather Underground famously took credit for bombing the Pentagon and putting a bomb in the Pentagon, for putting a bomb in the US Capitol, for putting a bomb in New York Police Headquarters, and many, many other things, for breaking Timothy Leary out of prison.

So we did, we were responsible, we took responsibility for many things.

Importantly, when The Weather Underground burst out of the scene, three of our people, including my girlfriend and my best friend, were killed in an explosion in New York City.

But from that moment on, we never hurt a human being in all the actions that we took.

And we never considered ourselves terrorists.

We certainly were doing property destruction in a major way.

I kind of look back at it, think of it as, you know, as armed propaganda or another way of saying it is, you know, is kind of political destruction.

I don't know.

We hurt property.

We didn't hurt people.

And that was quite intentional.

And everyone knew that that's what we were doing.

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You partially answered it already, I think, but I suspect there might be a bit more to flesh out.

In your view, what role did violence play in The Weather Underground?

Well, you know, it's a funny thing, violence, because I think that people use the word violence in a very selective way.

So, well, I was always asked, why did you turn to violence?

John McCain was never asked why he turned to violence, but John McCain actually dropped bombs on civilian populations in Vietnam.

That's terror.

That's real terror.

And what I did was a pea shooter by comparison.

The same night that we bombed the Pentagon, a group of US soldiers marched into My Lai in Vietnam and slaughtered women, children and old people.

And yet, we're the violent ones when we didn't hurt a fly, but we actually did destroy property.

In fact, that night, we destroyed a computer that was managing the air war over Vietnam.

We felt terrific about it.

We didn't feel guilty or bad about it.

So violence is a tricky thing to talk about.

Let me try a couple of different angles to talk about it.

One, that violence isn't always what you see.

There's a lot of kinds of violence you don't see.

A kid in Guatemala dying of smallpox, that's a violent death quietly executed.

Living on the streets in the United States, which increasing numbers of people and families do live on the streets, that shortens your lifespan by 15 years on average.

That's violence.

It's a kind of violence.

Bad hospitals, bad, are a kind of violence.

So when I think about, let's just take one example from American history, which is what your interest is.

If you looked at the times of slavery and you went to Thomas Jefferson's plantation, Monticello, you wouldn't have seen people striking other people with an axe or with a whip.

You wouldn't have seen that.

You would have seen an orderly, kind of normal kind of running of a farm, right?

Except that it was the most violent institution in the history of our country.

Violent to the nth degree.

And Thomas Jefferson, this is one of those complicated things.

Can you hold in your mind two very compelling opposite ideas?

Thomas Jefferson, one of the greatest thinkers about democracy and about fairness and about freedom, also owned human beings and was that institution held together by mutual care?

No, it was held together by violence.

So slavery was violence congealed and organized and institutionalized.

And when somebody rose up against it, Nat Turner or Denmark Vesey or Toussaint Louverture, they were the violent ones.

And that just strikes me as completely preposterous.

So here we are as a country killing 6,000 people a week.

And it's a genocide, a war.

And one of the things that just always returns to me is there were whole swaths of the country.

They were called enemy territory.

Everyone in there was an enemy.

So it didn't matter if you were a little kid riding a bicycle or an old man walking with a cane.

You were the enemy because you were a criminal because you were in a criminal part of the country, designated criminal by US imperialism.

So how do you figure that we who tried to stop that genocide of war by destroying property and issuing a screaming cry against genocide, how are we the violent ones?

We were rising up against violence.

I understand it was different than sitting in a draft board.

It was different, but the difference, the scale is so disproportionate that I can't quite embrace the idea that we turned to violence.

That's one thing.

Second thing is that violence against property has to be distinguished from other kinds of violence.

So in that very first sit-in I was in, we destroyed property.

Were we violent?

Everybody said we were non-violent at that time.

That was a non-violent direct action.

Sometimes we were militant, but it wasn't violent.

When we went to Chicago in 68, and the police beat us up and took us to jail, were we the violent ones?

One of the things that the Democratic Convention of 68, one of the things we were determined to do was to show the violence of the system on the international television.

And, you know, it was a great example of street theater.

Martin Luther King was called a violent outsider again and again in the Chicago Papers because he provoked violence.

Was the Selma Bridge is a great example.

They provoked the police to do that.

They didn't have to walk across the bridge.

Why did they do that?

Well, because they're violent terrorists.

But no, not true.

They were determined social justice warriors trying to show you what you couldn't see in the normal day-to-day functioning of the system.

You couldn't see how violent it really was.

So slavery, I mean, nobody came here voluntarily.

Nobody got on a boat and said, jeez, I'd love to immigrate to the United States.

They were brought here in chains, and they were held in captivity with whips and guns.

And that's the nature of slavery.

We live in a violent country to this day.

What Martin Luther King said then, the most violent country in the world is truer today than it was then.

Now, are we the only bad actor in the world?

No, far from it.

But on the other hand, we are not, as Joe Biden called us the other day, the exceptional nation, the indispensable nation.

That is just destructive language that's doomed to put us in a situation where we are fighting against the rest of the world, not trying to live in harmony, but trying to dominate.

That's always a mistake and we are going to pay for it.

We are paying for it.

Yes, yes.

So much there and so many different directions I could take it.

I suppose as something that certainly is occurring to me as you're talking, and I have a feeling will be in the minds of our listeners as well.

Obviously, these attacks took planning, of course.

Here's my, and you mentioned I believe earlier that you deliberately set out to make sure you didn't take lives and it was just property destruction at play.

So here's my question, Bill.

How did you ensure that there wouldn't be any lives lost during, say, the Pentagon or think of your preferred example?

How was that insured?

I guess I would say, Josh, it wasn't insured.

We weren't very lucky.

I think that we were in a very dangerous territory.

And I guess I want to add before I answer your question, Ed.

I loathe violence.

I loathe it on a personal level.

I loathe it on an institutional level.

It frightens me.

I don't want to be involved in it.

It repels me, just like it repels most people.

But the one thing I'm not willing to do is to turn my eyes away from the violence that exists.

So I live in a city where a third of our budget goes to the police.

The police act in some neighborhoods as an occupying army.

They don't stop you with a tail light out and say, gee, you should go fix your tail light.

Let me see your license and your registration.

It goes from there and it escalates.

So we live in a city where when you see on the news a black kid running from a cop trying to stop him, there's a reason for that because he's seen what happens to other people.

It's happened to him.

So it's not, I'm unwilling to look away from that, even as I'm critical of the territory of getting close into a situation.

So you say, how did we insure?

We didn't insure.

We were lucky, but we worked hard at it.

And we worked hard in a couple of ways.

One is when we took an action, one of these illegal actions, let's say the Pentagon, we made sure that it happened A, in the middle of the night, B, in a place where there were no human beings in the middle of the night, and C, where we could give a warning far enough in advance and we could be credible enough that it was taken seriously.

And that's how it worked.

It was very funny dance because we got very good with the FBI in particular at believing each other when we had certain signature ways of calling in warnings and they believed us.

And that was good because it meant we weren't insuring it, but we were guarding against the possibility of hurting people, which we had determined after the townhouse killed our three comrades.

Yes.

With huge rectification and kind of rethinking.

And we said to ourselves, you know, we cannot give up.

We cannot back up and say, well, we're not going to fight the war.

We're not going to fight imperialism.

We have to keep going forward.

But we're not going to go forward as terrorists.

We're not going to visit, you know, fear and violence against human being, against ordinary folks who are going about their business.

Because that's what the government does, and that's who we're opposed to.

They do that in Vietnam.

They do that in Yemen.

They do that in Palestine.

We're not going to do that.

We're going to do something quite different.

And so we set off on that path.

Nothing was guaranteed.

It was quite risky.

And some would say, you know, you could say and make the argument that we were off the tracks, that what we did was not only illegal, but it was off the tracks and politically, you know, questionable.

You could make that case.

I will argue with you, but you could make the case.

But you can make the case that we were crazy or that we were the violent ones in that scenario.

In fact, I have often said, since we turned ourselves in in 1981, I guess, yeah, it was 81, I've often said, let's have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Yes.

I'm happy to stand on a stage with Henry Kissinger, Robert McNamara, John McCain, John Edwards, anybody you want.

I'll stand on the stage with all of them and say, this is what I did, this is what I'm sorry for.

And let me hear what you did and what you're sorry for.

And in that company, I'm happy to be criticized, to be self-critical, but we're not in that space.

Everybody's self-righteous.

Everybody thinks what they did was beautiful.

And so John McCain gets to come out of it a war hero.

How is that possible?

I accept the fact that he suffered.

I accept the fact that the harm that was done to him was unspeakable.

But I'm not willing to accept that him bombing civilians, why was he shot down over Hanoi?

What the hell was he doing flying a jet with weapons over Hanoi, dropping them on people?

That was not good and he never accepted, he never took responsibility for that.

So I'm not willing to reconcile with people who don't take responsibility.

You know, who else?

There's so many other people who were in the war, some of them good liberal people, you know, Bob Carey, you know, Bob Carey was on a mission when he was wounded.

He was on a mission in which they were sneaking into a village that was supposedly controlled by the Vietnamese communists.

And in order to sneak into the village, they slit the throats of two grandparents who were in a hut outside of the village.

Wow.

They did that and he did that.

He was a good liberal senator, but my God, I don't see how we can reconcile if we're not willing to face the truth of what was going on.

Now we have with the rise of really troglodyte, reactionary political forces.

Now what they want to argue is that Vietnam was the equivalent of the lost cause of the Confederacy.

They were stabbed in the back by liberal politicians.

That's just nothing like that happened.

They were given carte blanche to destroy the country and they lost.

But they can't ever come to terms with the fact that they lost and they can't come to terms honestly with why they were there.

It's very similar to the Confederacy in the late 19th century.

They lost the war, but they were damn determined to fight the war to explain the war, and that caused untold damage to this country, which is going on to this day, but certainly for the next 100 years, the country was hurt badly by the lies of the great lost cause and the honor of the Confederacy.

It was all nonsense, and we're living in that kind of place now.

To the extent that Vietnam is still a marker, you still have politicians saying, we would have won if it hadn't been for those liberal politicians, and that is just absolute nonsense.

There's no evidence of it, can't be proven, but there you are.

Yeah, yeah, I think I would feel as you do, Bill.

Well, like getting back to The Weather Underground, you had mentioned that you were, you know, you tried your ready best, but it was mostly, it was luck.

And you guys were quite lucky.

I mean, I did my best to research.

My understanding is the only time deaths were involved in The Weather Underground were those three unfortunate incidents in Greenwich Village.

Arthur and the Tom Reds killed themselves, and that was the only solidies in the whole history of The Weather Underground.

Yeah.

So I have two questions on that, if I may.

First off, I'm sorry for your loss.

I mean that.

And second, I was curious what the nature of that was, because my understanding, correct me by all means if I'm wrong, but my understanding is they were assembling a nail bomb.

Do I have that right?

I believe so, although I don't know more than you do.

I believe that they were putting together a bomb that did have, you know, anti-personnel aspects to it, and that would be unspeakably bad if that had happened.

And I don't know how the accident happened, but it happened in the basement of a townhouse that belonged to Kathy Wilkerson's parents.

And the parents were, I think, on a foreign holiday, and this group in New York took the place over and were planning to go to Fort Dix and put bombs in the fort that was training and sending people to Vietnam.

That's my understanding.

Okay, okay.

Understood.

I just wanted to make sure I didn't have any false assumptions in my head.

Well, I assume that what I read there is true about the Nails, but you know, we were a very decentralized, we weren't even The Weather Underground then, we were still part of an above ground organization, we were part of SDS, but we were building this clandestine organization, and we had little groups in New York, in Detroit, in San Francisco, in Boston, and they were kind of semi-autonomous and doing what they did, but we were unresolved on the question of what direction we were gonna go in.

We did not intend to all go underground, but then the townhouse happened, and we all went underground.

I don't think I would have gone underground if it hadn't happened the way it happened.

I think some, many of us were planning to just be part of the above ground mass movement, anti-war movement, kind of the militant wing of it, but that didn't happen because once the TANF happened, we all were facing either a lifetime of being in courtrooms, indicted on conspiracy charges and so on, or disappearing, and we chose to disappear.

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Yes.

Fascinating.

Thank you, Bill.

I am keeping an eye on our time.

I have a few questions left, if I may.

I'd love to talk about you.

You mentioned the Black Freedom Movement a little bit earlier.

I'd love to ask you what the relationship was between, of course, the Black Panthers and The Weather Underground, and perhaps as a corollary, I'd love to ask you what influence Fred Hampton had on the movement.

Well, two things.

One is, have you heard Zaid's podcast, Mother Country Radicals?

I started listening to it yesterday.

I can't say I've listened to a bunch, but I've started listening, yes.

This is an advertisement.

It's a good podcast.

It's not episodic.

It's 10 episodes.

It's a narrative.

And our oldest son, who's a playwright and a screenwriter, did a podcast where he talks about, partly memoristically, about being born underground.

And he delves into, in great depth, the relationship of the weather underground, not to the Black Panthers, to the Black Liberation Army, which was a split off of the Black Panthers.

And as you go forward in listening to this, Josh, you'll meet several people who were part of the BLA.

And we had a very close, close, close relationship with them.

We were comrades and we thought of ourselves as comrades.

Fred Ampton died at the age of 21.

He died shortly before we went underground.

And we had a very comradely relationship with Fred, which was also a relationship of, you know, struggle, unity, struggle.

For people who don't know, Fred was a charismatic kid who came out of the west side of Chicago and he was a leader of the Youth NAACP, a very fiery speaker, a very important figure in the transition of the Black Panther Party towards a more militant, you know, stance.

And he was shot and killed by the Chicago police in a raid.

He'd been drugged by an infiltrator.

He was in his bed asleep.

They killed him.

That was not proved until a few years later, but it was proven that Fred was set up and he was murdered in a joint operation by the federal government, the local police and the Illinois state attorney general.

And it ended up that after all the discovery and all the lawsuits and everything, that the Hampton family won a huge settlement with the government.

But if you were around at the time, which I was, I was right there, the way the news reported it is the way the news reports police shootings today.

You know, the local news station did a reenactment where they built a set, which was said to be the Hampton apartment.

And they showed that the Panthers were shooting the police and all this stuff.

None of it was true, but that was the narrative that went out into the public.

We knew it was nonsense because we were close enough to the situation.

But what was interesting is that one of the young lawyers from the People's Law Office, you couldn't even imagine this today, but one of the young lawyers went to the apartment right after the shootout, and it's not a shootout, it was an assassination, but it was called the shootout.

And he took the door off its hinges and hid it in a black church on the west side.

When the door was finally examined publicly, there were 42 shots into the front door and one shotgun blast out.

So it was just a narrative that they made up.

It's just like they always say in Chicago, when there's a police shooting, they always say, he saw a gun, and he was felt threatened.

And then it turns out in closer examination that pretty much those things are often made up.

Not always, but pretty much.

In Fred's case, he was assassinated.

He was somebody we admired greatly and still admire.

And the young people in Chicago today, who are part of Black Lives Matter, have kind of resurrected Fred.

And you can hear any meeting you go to in Chicago, you can hear some of Fred's early speeches, and you see pictures of Fred.

And he was a very, very important guy who was gunned down.

And his being murdered fit the pattern of what Jander Hoover, who was the head of the FBI, said at the time, we can't allow the rise of a black messiah.

And not only involved in the killing of Malcolm X and the killing of Martin Luther King, but the FBI was up to their neck in the killing of Fred Hampton.

And if you worry about the rise of a black messiah, Fred Hampton certainly fit the bill.

He was a terrific guy.

We didn't always see eye to eye.

We had offices a couple of blocks apart.

We did a lot of printing.

We had a huge printing press in our office that was given to us by Anna Louise Strong, who was an American Communist living in Beijing.

And she gave us a German press that we could do offset printing on, and a couple of us trained to be printers, and we always printed the Panther stuff.

So we were in close touch with Fred and very close to him.

But as I say, we didn't always agree on everything, but we were comrades.

Thank you.

Thank you, Bill.

It's so interesting that you mentioned printing, because I actually have a question on that momentarily.

But what does occur in your mind when you say hop on Wikipedia, right, and see The Weather Underground, you know, far left militant terrorist organization?

I've never done that, so I'll be a little later today.

You know, the larger question is, I mean, how do you deal with the cartoon character of yourself?

I mean, when I was swept up in the Obama campaign and held on Fox News as, you know, everything evil in America, how did I deal with that?

Well, there are a couple things.

One is I was pretty well equipped in the sense that my whole adult life has been partly being pilloried in the press and by the mainstream press and so on.

So it wasn't a completely new experience for me.

On the other hand, it was of a scale that I had never experienced before.

But I think this is true for, this is how I dealt with it and I think it's a good way for anybody to deal with it.

And that is that you have to, I mean, we all are concerned with how the world looks at us, but you can't be so concerned with it that you derive your identity from a press conference or what some politician says about you.

I feel very lucky.

I have three absolutely tremendous sons who are smart and wise, not all of them political activists, but all of them really good, decent people.

I have a partner I've been with for 53 years.

I have a brother.

I have a couple of very close friends who have been my friends for 50 years.

And what I found myself doing when I was caught up in the kind of, they kind of created this cartoon character who had my name and my social security number.

So there was this avatar.

And I had to constantly remind myself and the people who I love helped remind me.

That's not you.

That's a cartoon character of you that they're kicking around.

And I think that's not a bad advice for everybody.

You can't believe what Twitter says about you.

I mean that literally.

I mean, I pay attention to that sh** myself.

But for normal people, high school kids, you know, don't believe it when they start picking on you and they start, you know, ghosting you and all this stuff.

Don't do it.

Actually know who loves you and know who you love and know who you trust and trust them.

So when I was caught up in this election frenzy, and for those who don't know, there was a moment during the first Obama election, when Obama was running against Hillary Clinton in the primary, and there was a debate and George Stephanopoulos asked Obama a couple of questions.

That night, I had my graduate students over at my house.

We had a potluck.

We were cleaning up the potluck and somebody turned on the TV, just as George Stephanopoulos said, but what about your friendship with Reverend Wright?

He's a black nationalist and blah, blah, blah.

And Obama handled that.

And then Stephanopoulos said, but what about Bill Ayers?

He's a friend of yours and he bombed the Pentagon and never apologized.

Well, my students fell on the floor.

They could not believe what they had just heard over the TV, sitting there with me.

One student looked at me and said, my God, that guy has the same name as you.

And one of the other students helpfully said, they're the same guy.

But, you know, from that moment, I was just caught in a swirl of media on my front porch and people try to get me to talk.

And luckily, my kids, my brother, my partner, all said, just stay quiet, just stay calm.

There's a madness going on, but you're not part of it.

And don't be part of it.

That was really helpful.

At one point, Bill O'Reilly, the Fox News host, wrote to me and said, I know you're talking to the media, but could you just answer one question?

What's your definition of terrorism?

And I wrote to my son, Zaid, and I said, I can answer this.

I want to answer this.

And Zaid said, dude, don't get on the roller coaster.

You can watch the roller coaster.

So I had good advice like that.

But it's also important to keep things in scale.

That cartoon character they were being the out of wasn't me.

Didn't believe what I believed, didn't do what I do.

So keep your head where your head belongs.

I'm a teacher.

That's mostly what I do.

I write.

I write about politics.

I write about teaching.

I am a parent and a grandparent.

Keep my head there and I'll be safer than if I go off some deep end, try to answer every lunatic thing that's said about me in the media or in the case of anyone listening to this, anything somebody says about you in your high school, about what little d*** you are.

Don't believe it and don't take the bait.

That's well said, Bill.

Thank you.

Gosh, I know we're running a little bit over.

I apologize for that.

I appreciate it.

I'll try and be brief.

I interviewed last year someone known to you.

We discussed a little bit before I hit record here, Thorne Dreier.

When I interviewed him, Bill, we were discussing how the underground press was broken up by a campaign waged by the FBI.

It's of course not quite that simple, but he intruded the term COINTELPRO.

Let's see, I think I'll just cue it up by asking you, please tell listeners about what COINTELPRO was and what it meant for the weather underground.

Yeah, COINTELPRO was a secret program started by the FBI and it was called the Counterintelligence Program.

And they were infiltrating peace groups, civil rights groups, left-wing groups, and trying to stir discontent and divisiveness in them.

And it was a very, very concerted program.

And you know, it's hard for people to, again, keep their minds focused on something.

And that is that, I mean, all governments lie.

All governments lie some of the time.

Some governments lie all the time.

But they all lie.

So when you see somebody like Admiral Clapper, head of the CIA, go before the Senate and insist that we don't tap phones, and then it comes out that they do tap all of our phones all the time.

And then he says, okay, well, we'll stop.

If you believe they stop, you're nuts.

You know, I mean, this is what they do.

This is part of how they stay in power is that they disrupt and disorganize people who are progressive, who are trying to make fundamental change.

So this is a reality.

So Corentel Pro was a program that led to, among other things, the assassination of Fred Hampton, splits within the Black Panther, within the Black Civil Rights Movement, within the Freedom Movement, within the Antho War Movement.

And this is part of what went on.

There's absolutely no question about it.

It's all documented.

Look it up, Corentel Pro.

And I guess it didn't have as much impact on The Weather Underground because we were underground.

You know.

You walked into that one.

Yeah, and we had blackout students for the democratic system, but it didn't actually.

When we went underground, we were a surprise to them and to ourselves.

And for a brief moment, I think J.

Edgar Hoover's most extravagant fantasies met our most extravagant fantasies, and we thought of ourselves as freedom fighters and a guerrilla army, and he thought of us that way too.

But the reality is that we were not infiltrated.

We were very, again, very fortunate on some level and very studious, very methodical on another level.

And we survived underground for 11 years.

My wife was on the 10 most wanted list, I think for six years.

She replaced Angela Davis on the 10 most wanted list.

She was, I think, the first person in memory who was taken off the 10 most wanted list without being arrested.

They got tired of having her on there.

She was too cute.

I think that people should know that their government acts like that.

And I think people intuitively know it.

But I think it's very worth knowing in detail.

Well, I tell you, Bill, I believe I've kept you long enough.

I really appreciate you being so sparing with your time.

Thank you for that.

I really enjoyed speaking with you, Bill.

Thanks for putting up with me and my questions.

Well, I enjoyed speaking with you.

And thank you for putting up with me and my answers.

Don't worry about it.

Excellent.

Excellent.

Bill, I will let you go, sir.

I really appreciate it.

I hope you have a great rest of the week, okay?

You too.

Thanks, Josh.

Thank you, sir.

You too.

Bye.

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Audio editing by Mohamed Shazi.

Sound design by Matthew Filler.

Music by Thrum.

This episode is written and researched by Joel Callan, managing producer, Emily Burke.

Executive producers are Joel Callan, William Simpson, and Lindsey Graham.