During 2008’s presidential campaign, when Sarah Palin accused Barack Obama of “palling around with domestic terrorists,” she was referring to the parents of Zayd Ayers Dohrn, author of “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground” (Norton). In 1970, Bernardine Dohrn became only the fourth woman ever placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. Her partner, Bill Ayers, was also on the run from authorities for crimes against the state. Both belonged to the Weatherman zealots who sought to “bring the war home” with a violent offensive of street fighting, bombing and bank robbing. Their son Zayd — an award-winning playwright and professor of writing for the screen and stage at Northwestern University — has recounted in book form (assisted by 7,833 pages of newly declassified, Freedom of Information Act-obtained files) what it was like growing up in the clandestine Weather Underground. He paints a nuanced, compelling portrait of his mother, one of the New Left’s most iconic figures, co-founder of the Weathermen, whose name was derived from Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” What made these urban guerrillas, sometimes literally wielding ticking time bombs, tick? In his book, Zayd comes clean about being raised by parents for whom “the family business” was overthrowing the government. The intimate memoir finds Zayd candidly discussing a childhood where parents placed a higher priority on helping the Black Liberation Army bust a political prisoner out of prison or pull a heist than on rearing and protecting children. Considering the toll it took on toddlers, with imprisonments, deaths and exiles, was their armed resistance worth it? Were they freedom fighters — or fanatics?
I put the question to Ayers Dohrn in an interview conducted via Zoom at his cabin in a Northern California commune. Truthdig: Let’s start with your family. Tell us about them. Zayd Ayers Dohrn: My parents, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, were activists in the ’60s who joined Students for a Democratic Society. My mother was actually elected one of three national SDS leaders in ’68, ’69. She then led a famous split of SDS in 1969 at their convention in Chicago, where SDS was divided about what to do next. Her group, the “Action Faction” or “Revolutionary Youth Movement,” wanted to make sure the white student antiwar movement allied themselves closely with the Black Panther Party and the Black liberation movement. And they looked to guerrillas overseas for inspiration about building a revolutionary movement in America.
Bernardine’s walkout led to the founding of the Weathermen, the most radical, action-oriented offshoot of SDS. They then created a big demonstration called the Days of Rage in 1969 in Chicago [with street fighting against police]. They then went underground and became the Weather Underground and spent 10 years as fugitives, on the run from the FBI. My mother declared war on the U.S. government and was put on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. They were famous anti-government outlaws and activists who came out of the peace movement of the ’60s. But in the ’70s, they became the face of violent resistance to the Vietnam War and the government’s racist campaign of violence against Black leaders in America. What do you think caused your white middle-class parents to take such extreme actions? My mother started out as a pretty run-of-the-mill, conventional white liberal activist. She was in law school at the University of Chicago, she volunteered as a legal adviser during Dr. [Martin Luther] King’s rent strike in Chicago in the ’60s. At first, like many young idealistic students, she wanted to make the world a better place. She had some legal training and wanted to be useful. But then King was murdered, and for lots of people, including my mother, that felt like they had tried the peaceful approach and not only hadn’t it worked, but it was met with white supremacist lethal violence from the Klan, police and vigilantes. Not just Dr. King, but Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney and Emmett Till. “My mother was a natural born leader.” Then, she joined SDS and was still committed to a democratic process and organizing against the war and racism. When she was leader of SDS she joined [Black Panther] Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition of activist groups, trying to be white allies for Black liberation. But then, Fred Hampton was murdered in cold blood by the Chicago police and FBI. Those twin killings — there was a sense among white activists, they were trying to help, to follow and play by the rules and protest with democratic action, and they were met over and over again by lethal violence against Black leaders. That drove some of them, including her, to say: “We have to be doing more. We have to put our own lives on the line and fight harder. Because our white skin privilege shields us from some of the violence being inflicted on our Black comrades.” You portray Bernardine with candor. As Weathermen leader, she led faction fights, expelled other activists. She comes across as undemocratic and very bossy. [Laughs.] She is bossy. She’s stubborn, willful and committed. My mother was a natural born leader. You say that she doesn’t come across as the most “democratic” — there’s truth to that. She was a very “my-way-or-the-highway” type of leader and her politics were very much “we have to be doing this” — fighting radically against the U.S. government. And anybody who doesn’t do that isn’t measuring up. She wasn’t a consensus builder; in fact, she was leading the radical edge of that movement [who] felt her role wasn’t to build consensus but lead a radical vanguard of revolutionary struggle. In an interview, Bernardine confessed the police/FBI murder of Hampton “really drove us quite crazy. Drove me quite crazy.” We think post traumatic stress disorder is suffered by soldiers due to combat or by car accident victims. Did the Weathermen suffer from a type of PTSD caused by the government’s excessive repressive brutality? That’s interesting. Of course, my mother would reject the diagnostic psychological terminology, but absolutely, they felt the violence they were witnessing was pushing them towards more and more violent responses. In retrospect, many of them do feel that they were driven temporarily crazy — crazy might be a hyperbolic way of saying it. They feel that the violence of their society drove them to a kind of intense radicalism they didn’t recognize in themselves.
It’s funny, the way you put it reminds me, I think it was Sen. McGovern, leader of the Democratic Party ’s antiwar wing, said after the [Weathermen’s] bombing of the U.S. Capitol and Pentagon: “Our Vietnam madness is responsible for the violence these activists are now carrying out.” He said something like, “It’s impossible for the kind of violence we’re inflicting in Vietnam to happen without the fundamental derangement of our own society.” That kind of derangement is what you’re getting at with the PTSD question and that was happening, the whole society to some extent was driven crazy by Vietnam, white supremacy, by the violence our country was and is steeped in. A government doing crazy things drove people crazy. [Laughs.] That’s right. You write that with “100,000”-plus members, SDS was America’s “largest student activist group” and was surveilled by the FBI. In 1969 at SDS’ National Convention in Chicago, Bernardine led a “walkout [that] split SDS in half” to pursue hard-line militancy. Action Faction co-founder Mark Rudd joined the walkout, but in your book he “called the fracturing of SDS ‘the single greatest mistake in my life. … I chose to scuttle America’s largest radical organization … for a fantasy of revolutionary urban guerrilla warfare.’” In retrospect, did the FBI manipulate them into dividing a growing antiwar mass movement to pursue a fractious, domestic terrorism strategy as part of a COINTELPRO covert operation? Yes and no. There’s no question the fracturing of the movement … that the FBI helped along the split of SDS and the Black Panthers. They were eager for these groups to be destroyed and did what they could to push that along. It’s also true factionalism is an age-old problem of the left — at least since the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Progressive and revolutionary movements have often fractured around these questions of how far should we go? How fast? How militant? How violent? The FBI quite smartly exploited existing pressure points and got very good at finding where these organizations were likely too liable to split. “Years of trying to protest the right way hadn’t worked.” I don’t agree with Rudd that the Weathermen singlehandedly scuttled the country’s largest peace movement. The entire 1960s, my mom spent all of her adult life in peaceful protest and democratic organizing. It didn’t feel like it was working: Nixon was getting reelected, the Vietnam War and violence against Black leaders was escalating. Years of trying to protest the right way hadn’t worked. That bred intense frustration and a sense “we have to do more and go further.” Those tensions were pulling SDS apart whether or not my mother led the walkout]. Like the Panthers, there were internal divides pulling at those organizations.
Leftist groups in general should work very hard to avoid those factional disputes. My mom and others bear some responsibility for SDS’ split, but I don’t believe if it wasn’t for the Weathermen, SDS was on the verge of ending the war. A decade of protest by an entire generation was being stymied politically, violently and militarily by the U.S. government, and the government’s own violence came back to haunt it with the Weathermen and Black Liberation Army underground. What was it like growing up on the lam, living with secrets? When I was a little kid it all felt strangely normal. Like most kids, even if their circumstances are quite strange, it’s all you’ve ever known. So, for me, growing up, most friends were children of outlaws, most adults I knew were fugitives, revolutionaries. At first, it felt quite normal, but as I grew up my parents taught me by [the age of] 4 to recognize undercover agents in a crowd, evade a tail, speak in code on the phone. It felt normal, but looking back there was something quite odd about our family circumstance, about being raised in an outlaw family. My parents never lied to me about any of it; they told me early on we were being chased by the FBI. Long before I knew what the FBI was, I was perfectly aware we were being pursued. There was something scary about it at times. But it was also really fun. My parents were child-centered; we spent lots of time driving around the country, playing games, learning to read, making up stories. You write about one instance where your parents put you in jeopardy during a purported camping trip that was really about casing a prison. My first camping trip was to Alderson, West Virginia, just half a mile away from Alderson Federal Prison, where Assata Shakur was held. I asked my father: “This can’t be a coincidence. What were we doing there?” He admitted that “camping trip” was an excuse to case this prison at the BLA’s request to figure out how to break Assata out of prison. That’s one of many incidents where parents exposed their families to possible legal consequences and harm. It’s something I’ve been wrestling with. As a kid, you’re looking for parents to show you that you’re the most important thing in the world to them. And there’s something disconcerting about the idea that their political cause might take precedence over your safety or comfort. As an adult I’ve come to see, first of all, any person dedicated to changing the world no matter what — whether it’s Dr. King or Malcolm X or Fred Hampton or my parents — all of their children were put at risk, suffered because of their parents’ beliefs. We don’t say, therefore, King shouldn’t have done what he did, because he put his children at risk. We say: “There are people who believe so strongly in a cause they’re willing to sacrifice their own personal safety and of their family in order to make positive change, to fight injustice.” I’ve come to realize for my parents, there was no contradiction between being parents and revolutionaries. It was one and the same, their goal was to make a better future for their children and their generation. We’re currently in another period of political violence. What do you think of Luigi Mangione? “For my parents, there was no contradiction between being parents and revolutionaries.” [Laughs.] Luigi Mangione was just one — like everybody from the Weather Underground to the Unabomber, he’s become a symbol of antiestablishment rage. I don’t think his particular act had much political coherence or efficacy. [Allegedly] killing an executive of a health insurance company isn’t going to change the healthcare industry. That being said, the reaction to Luigi Mangione is more interesting than his actual [purported] crime, an outpouring of populist rage and sense of him as a populist outlaw, like Bonnie and Clyde or John Dillinger. He symbolized an anger at the elites pervasive in America. How would you describe your own politics nowadays? I’m an artist, a writer, first and foremost. My politics would probably be considered radical, but different from my parents in the sense that I consider myself a radical in the mold of George Orwell or James Baldwin — people who tried to think radically, dig at the roots of things. The root of the word radical is “radix,” the [Latin] word meaning “root.” It means to interrogate the roots of the problem, not just deal with the symptoms. I try to be a radical public intellectual, interested in new, radical solutions to problems ailing our society. I’m not an activist or part of any political organization or party. But I consider my orientation to the world to be radical. Is political violence ever justified? Sure, it can be. Most of us, if we thought the cause was just enough and the injustice being fought was terrible enough, we could see our way to justifying violence. In fact, everyone justifies violence, in one situation or another. Very few of us would say the French Resistance or the Warsaw [Ghetto] uprising were unjustified. Violent resistance against Nazism seems like a no-brainer. For me, likewise, violent resistance against chattel slavery in America, like John Brown or Nat Turner, seem justifiable acts of violence against violence and brutality against Black people. It gets dicier when you’re talking about a semi-viable democratic society, like what we have today. … When democratic methods are suppressed, where justice and political change can’t be made at the ballot box, then sometimes violence is not only justified, it’s also necessary. How is your family today? My parents are in Chicago. They’re doing really well. They’re in their 80s, so they have their health concerns, and are retired now. Although my father is still active in terms of writing, hosting a podcast of conversations with other activists and still sits on boards, attends meetings, works on various activist causes. They’re grandparents to many grandchildren, parents to three sons, they’re busy family members and still together after all these years, which is quite astonishing. My brother [San Francisco’s ex-District Attorney Chesa Boudin] is really good, has two young sons, a beautiful family. He runs a legal clinic at Berkeley Law School fighting for criminal justice reform. We’re very close. America started with a very bloody revolution. What are your thoughts as America marks its 250th anniversary? It’s a cliché to say America is a great experiment. But there’s truth to it. The founding principles of this country was a moment of progress in the world, given the circumstances it came out of. But it required multiple new foundings over the years, especially the post-Civil War reimagining of the Constitution, amendments to try to create a more perfect union. There are great things about this country, about the possibility, the promise of democracy. There are many things to be changed about this country, especially in its treatment of women and people of color. The country will never be finished with its experiment until people are actually treated equally according to the Constitution.
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