Fugitive days
Approximately a year ago, Nebraskans became caught up in the Professor Bill Ayers controversy. Prairie Fire does not shy away from controversial issues or personalities; however, the passage of time always seems to bring greater perspective and wisdom. Accordingly, Jack Bewley’s essay in this month’s issue will be followed by Professor Miles Bryant’s essay setting forth the academic freedom issues at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Why war? Why at this late date, with all we know about history and science and logic and the human psyche, with all the art and wisdom and charity mankind has generated, do we still slaughter one another over imaginary lines on the ground and made-up titles and claims and labels of dubious authenticity? Forty years ago this spring as I left college, Americans by the thousands were fighting and dying in Asia for no comprehensible reason and thousands more—myself included—were engaged in a struggle here at home to halt that war and tarnish forever the concept of war. Naive and idealistic, we expected—if not the Age of Aquarius—at least a more reasoned and reasonable approach to international relations. That has not come to pass. This fact was brought home to me recently when a scheduled talk by William Ayers before the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Education was cancelled amidst great hue and cry. Clearly, feelings that should have cooled long ago hadn’t. I decided to read Mr. Ayers’ memoir of the ’60s and ’70s and then contrast it with an opposing point of view, hoping to discover just where we are and why we have not come further on the road to peace.
A not-so-illuminating sidelight to last year’s presidential campaign was the re-emergence of anti-war activist William Ayers onto the national scene. In the 1960s, Ayers was a founding member of the Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). This splinter group was formed by those protesters who were frustrated with the limited effect marches and pamphlets were having on America’s attitude toward the Vietnam War. Convinced that a profoundly racist and militaristic culture could not be reformed from within, they advocated radical attacks on hallowed institutions and engaged in vandalism and sabotage. Mr. Ayers was indicted for his role in such activities and spent several years in hiding before turning himself in. Never tried for these crimes because the evidence against him was obtained illegally, he eventually wrote an account of his radicalization and underground experiences that was published by Beacon Press in 2001 under the title “Fugitive Days.” Unfortunately for Ayers and Beacon, the book was released on Sept. 11 and its publication was overshadowed by the swirl of events associated with that date. It did not sell particularly well and the reviews were unenthusiastic. Many of its author’s promotional appearances were either cancelled or held under heightened security.
The resurrection of William Ayers and his “terrorist” past occurred because he happened to be a neighbor and acquaintance of Barack Obama. This association was used by Mr. Obama’s opponents to call into question his suitability as a candidate for elective office, given his association with such a disreputable character. Bathed in the dehumanizing glare of the media blitz that accompanies a modern political campaign, Ayers was routinely and unashamedly propped up as a cardboard cutout of the devil. People who knew nothing about the Vietnam War or the anti-war movement it engendered here at home nevertheless knew that Bill Ayers was a monster. The renewed attention to its author moved Beacon Press to reissue “Fugitive Days” in paperback and invite a wider audience to judge for itself whether or not the aspersion was justified. Most critiques of the re-release have been as unkind as the original reviews. I opened the book hoping to find justification for a kinder notice. I was, for the most part, disappointed
This new edition contains an Afterword in which Ayers reminds us that the central motif of his book—and his life—was an outgrowth of a question posed by SDS president Paul Potter during his undergraduate days; “How will you live your life in a way that does not make a mockery of your values?” In this addendum, he also repeats and refines his argument that the Weather Underground’s attacks were upon property only and never took or threatened human lives. He contrasts this with the American bombing in Southeast Asia that killed thousands weekly for several years. Displaying some much-improved forensics and a more confident prose style, Ayers acknowledges his group’s youthful impatience but argues it was born of idealism. The relative crispness and lucidity of this postscript made me wish that its author had revised his entire text from a more contemporary and self-effacing point of view.
The book leads off by reminding us that it is only one person’s recollection of events and that other versions exist. Ayers acknowledges a certain amount of “covering over of facts” and “blurring of details,” and implies that remaining legal issues necessitate this tactic. He states that this is not a purely factual account but insists it “feels entirely honest to me.” Further complicating matters, Ayers says he has a notoriously poor memory. To begin a memoir by admitting that you can’t remember much seems like a peculiar strategy. To do so after allowing that you aren’t even trying to get it exactly right—that you are seeking some sort of impressionistic truth—seems downright perverse. The free-flowing litany of exploits and impressions that follows these caveats feels ultra-personal and subjective rather than historical. A reader without a good bit of knowledge or recollection of these events will probably not be intrigued and may lose interest from time to time.
Early portions of the book feature glimpses of the Ayers family’s stable, serene existence in suburban Chicago in the 1950s. These scenes are apparently intended to establish the author’s all-American background, but they strike me as eerily disconnected from the rest of this memoir. We follow young Bill and childhood friends as they discover the awesome power and grandeur of fireworks. The obviousness of this foreshadowing undermines the intended effect and seems disingenuous. At the book’s end, Ayers returns to the topic of his family, hoping to touch us with descriptions of his children, accounts of his mother’s death and of his rapprochement with his father. But he fails to address in any depth the agony his transient underground years must have caused these parents. In this and several other instances, we detect a certain cold, strategic mind at work rather than the humanistic, life-affirming soul the anti-war movement supposedly stirred in him.
“Fugitive Days” was not undertaken primarily as a literary work, and so it is perhaps unfair to critique its author’s syntax as harshly as many reviewers have done. Still, it bears pointing out that some passages draw attention to themselves with their staleness and their rhetorical excesses. Here is Ayers’ reflecting on his first arrest for civil disobedience outside a draft board:
“I’d experienced as well a paradox: in the draft board and then in the county jail, surrounded and contained, I felt somehow unshackled. I became used to the peace and complete freedom that only the cage provides. I tingled with freedom, it danced around and through me, and in an odd way I wanted more.
“We had refused the world as we found it, and moving beyond dull passivity, launched ourselves as warriors of repair. The drama of living was suddenly unscripted, and we were improvising in a world no longer immutable, no longer finished or fixed. Our imaginations cracked things open, and the intensity was intoxicating. The rules themselves were all up for grabs, life could be anything at all, and we were preparing something new and, we thought dazzling. That’s why in prison a public space was born for me.”
Another troubling feature of this volume is the note of truculence that is sounded throughout. Mr. Ayers comes off not as a pacifist committed to the sanctity of human life but rather as a fierce partisan, ready—almost anxious—to shed blood for his cause. He is not just marching for a troop withdrawal. He and his cohorts lust for a Viet Cong rout that will humiliate the U.S. military. Because this war is wrong, everything American is wrong. Uncle Sam must die. Here the Weathermen prepare for the disruption of the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968:
“We wanted to bear witness, to put our bodies on the gears of the death machine, to stop a war and bring justice home. We wanted to intensify the action whenever possible. We would each wear a red headband and carry a small backpack with Vaseline and gloves and goggles to protect us from the anticipated tear gas, a first-aid kit, a hammer to break windows, marbles to scatter in front of any potential police cavalry charge, a bottle of water, and a sling-shot or homemade blackjack fashioned out of a length of hose with a four-ounce sinker jammed into one end and trussed up in electrical tape, strictly for self-protection. I also had an ample supply of cherry bombs and a lighter just in case they could be useful. We weren’t in Kansas anymore.”
This passage—and others like it—manage to capture the fury and frustration of a generation that saw there was no sensible justification for this war and yet no possibility of convincing our leaders of that fact because an irrational fear of communism had trumped all arguments. If truth could not stand up to entrenched power, the reasoning went, then fury was the only recourse. Unfortunately, the older, wiser Mr. Ayers does not step in at this point. Instead, he allows these passages to stand without the slightest trace of irony or recognition of the damage this ugly wrath eventually worked on principled opposition to the status quo. He should have acknowledged that this rage, though understandable, was counterproductive in that it did not hasten the end of the war and caused a backlash that deepened divisions within society that persist to this day.
William Ayers is now a distinguished professor of Early Childhood Education and an oft-published advocate for scholastic equity. He has clearly contributed a great deal to his community and to the advancement of young people throughout the country. But he has not done himself or the pacifist cause any favors with his prickly manner and defensive posture toward any and all questions about his past. Living according to one’s values is an admirable goal. But living in society involves the acceptance of the adjudicating mechanism of the law whenever one individual’s values collide with another’s. After reading this book, I am not certain that its author would always acknowledge that fact.
My disappointment with several aspects of “Fugitive Days” led me to compare it with an autobiographical volume by a figure on the other side of the Vietnam debate: Robert McNamara’s 1995 memoir “In Retrospect” on the Times Books label of Random House. Like “Fugitive Days,” “In Retrospect” begins with a heartwarming account of its author’s childhood. He claims to remember a jubilant San Francisco celebrating the end of World War I, although he was only 2 years old. Once again we note what appears to be novelistic foreshadowing. McNamara then describes his determined rise from humble beginnings to Harvard, the presidency of Ford Motors and the Kennedy Cabinet. He includes particulars on his courtship, marriage and family, but seems focused primarily on his many virtues and accomplishments. By the time he gets around to discussing the American military build-up, the overthrow of Diem, the Tonkin Gulf, the air strikes against Hanoi and Cambodia and the strategic thrust of the war, McNamara is writing almost exclusively in the first person plural. This is noteworthy because the book was highly publicized as a confession of error concerning Vietnam, but by speaking collectively he seems to water down any personal responsibility for what the critics dubbed “McNamara’s War.”
Among those critics were protestors like Mr. Ayers and his fellow student radicals who were easily marginalized because of their belligerence. Tragically, a good many of these undergraduates had studied enough history to recognize the missteps we were making in Asia. They knew of the excesses of French colonialism in the region. They knew of our subversion of reunification elections in 1956. They knew we propped up the repressive Ngo Dinh Diem as long as we could and then deposed him in 1963, only to support a series of equally wretched tyrants for the duration of our occupation. Because of their audacious appearance and manner, however, “peace freaks” were easy to ignore. Unfortunately, the “establishment” opposition to the war was much sparser and quieter and easily tarred with the “radical” brush. Serious dissent arose only after the Tet Offensive and gathered momentum at a snail’s pace. Too many people perished needlessly.
It is revealing that the reaction to Ayers is still so much more vehement and visceral than the reaction to McNamara, even though history has proved the former correct and the latter mistaken. The criticism of Ayers’ book was fairly unanimous when it first appeared and the rerelease has not fared much better. The professor continues to draw waves of boos in spite of his considerable body of good works on the part of young people and his recognition as a leading Chicagoan. McNamara, on the other hand, after making a rather pale, self-serving and compromised mea culpa is regarded as something approaching an elder statesman. The criticisms of Ayers’ book are easy and manifold on its literary and factual merits, and McNamara’s is definitely the more readable and historically valuable document. But the fact remains that the Defense Secretary was mistaken and his mistakes were catastrophic, while Ayers’ critique of America’s blunders in Southeast Asia are essentially correct and his supposed terrorism resulted in no deaths or injuries save those of three compatriots.
It is apparent to me as a result of this comparison that Bill Ayers remains a pariah to the vast majority of Americans because he challenged traditional values, such as patriotism, and because he served as a symbol for a widespread effort on the part of a generation to remake an entire cultural ethos. That goal was immense and impossible and undertaken out of a collective arrogance that had to be offensive to the rest of society. Had McNamara and his confederates in the corridors of Washington power been able to see past appearances and assess the roots of the student protests, or had Ayers and his ilk been able to comprehend their elders’ understandable attachment to many traditional values, peace might have been achieved much sooner and many people might have been saved. Tragically, this was not to be. More tragic still is our continuing inability to view this issue and the contention it inspired from a reasonable distance and learn to take reconciliatory action.
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