Former ‘60s Radical Weathers Post-Sept. 11 Critical Storm

He had a story to tell about the days when he preached revolution, when his face was on a “Wanted” poster, when he believed the way to stop a war was with violence--and bombs.

Bill Ayers had set out to talk about those times, detailed in his new memoir, “Fugitive Days.” But then the unspeakable happened: Terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

At a time when America is recovering from a violent assault, the former member of the radical Weather Underground has found that the reminiscences of one man’s war with his own country 30 years ago has generated hate mail and angry calls.

His tales of smashing windows, clashing with police and helping to plot bombings to protest the Vietnam War don’t sound quite the same as they did just weeks ago. Horrified by recent events, Ayers is pained to draw a distinction about those violent times.

“I’m not a terrorist,” he says. “We tried to sound a piercing alarm that was unruly, difficult and sometimes, probably wrong. . . . I describe what led some people in despair and anger to take some very extreme measures.

“There’s nothing in the book that attempts to defend or rationalize or preach or be a how-to. It’s a story of what this one boy did in a world of flames.”

Looking Back

“Fugitive Days” traces Ayers’ transformation from prep school rich kid to an antiwar outlaw who spent 10 years on the lam. His conclusion: He made some mistakes, said some outrageous things, but all in all, he is proud of his past.

“There’s a great desire to get us to apologize,” says Ayers, now a 56-year-old professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “There’s a great desire to paint people like us as insane or crazed or off our rockers.”

The truth is, he says, the war itself was crazy.

“We looked at an insane situation and tried to respond powerfully,” he says. “In that sense, I have no regrets.”

In “Fugitive Days,” Ayers tells how he lived in the shadows, changing his name and slipping from one safe house to another with his future wife, Bernardine Dohrn, a charismatic speaker and the face of the Weathermen. She was dubbed “la Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left” by the late FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, who put her on his 10 Most Wanted List.

Ayers’ story is a tell-some, rather than a tell-all book; places have been changed in many cases and names as well, presumably to protect the guilty.

But he writes of how the Weathermen planted dynamite in a Pentagon restroom in 1972. No one was hurt. And he says the group had a role--he’s vague on this--in psychedelic drug guru Timothy Leary’s escape from a California prison.

The group began life as the Weathermen faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); the name came from a Bob Dylan lyric: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

The Weathermen vowed to “bring the war home” with a 1969 “Days of Rage” protest in Chicago. Hundreds of young people, some wearing helmets and carrying steel pipes and chains, stormed through downtown and the fashionable Gold Coast, smashing hotel and store windows.

But their headline-grabbing taste for violence, which made some other war protesters nervous, backfired badly in 1970 when a bomb Weathermen were building in the basement of a Greenwich Village townhouse exploded by accident, killing three members, including Ayers’ girlfriend, Diana Oughton.

The bomb, Ayers writes, was packed with screws and nails and was intended for a nearby Army base. Had it been detonated, he admits, it would have done “some serious work beyond the blast, tearing through windows and walls and, yes, people too.”

It belied the group’s claims that its targets were buildings, not people. “We did go off track . . . and that was wrong,” Ayers now says.

But within months, the group--renamed the Weather Underground--was back in business, issuing a guerrilla-style communique, a “declaration of war,” signed by Dohrn and promising to strike at a symbol of “American injustice.” Before the storm was over, bombs had exploded at the U.S. Capitol in Washington and at New York City police headquarters.

Ayers says extreme times--the escalation of the war, bloody civil struggles--called for extreme measures. Others, though, denounce the Weathermen’s tactics.

“The bombings were acts of contempt directed against Americans, and arrogance directed toward the student movement,” says Todd Gitlin, a former SDS leader, now a New York University professor and author of “The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.”

“They were destructive in the name of abominable ideas,” Gitlin says of the group. “The claim they resorted to reckless means in the name of war is an insult to the tens of millions of people who hated the war as much as they did.”

For Ayers, being an outlaw was a world away from the privileged life he led as a son of Thomas Ayers, former chairman of Chicago’s Commonwealth Edison electric utility.

Ayers’ conversion began at the University of Michigan, where he joined the SDS and became a fixture at civil rights marches and antiwar rallies. “Our watchword was action,” he writes. “Go further, we said. Push the limits.”

And they did.

The fresh faces that had stared from school yearbooks only years earlier suddenly peered out of FBI wanted posters on post office walls across the nation. Ayers ripped them down any chance he could.

Once underground, Ayers and Dohrn quickly assumed aliases. He became Joe Brown; she was Rose Bridges. They lived in anonymous, sometimes seedy, places, avoiding radical havens such as San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury.

In his first year, Ayers writes, he collected eight sets of fake IDs, met 28 times with above-ground friends and was recognized a dozen times by people who kept silent.

Ayers had no contact with his parents during those years. In December 1980, when he and Dohrn surrendered, they already were the parents of two young sons. By then, the federal riot conspiracy charges that Ayers faced had been dropped because of improper government surveillance.

Thomas Ayers embraced the return of his “prodigal son” without recrimination.

“Bill was no way-out freak,” the 86-year-old Ayers says. “He just thought they were being lied to. I would tell him, ‘I don’t disagree with what you’re saying. But I disagree with how you’re going about it.’ ”

These days, the silver-flecked hair and beard are neatly trimmed. The huge, round glasses have given way to bifocal wire frames. He no longer walks around with Ho Chi Minh poetry in his pocket. But a ‘60s aura lingers.

Dohrn says her husband’s book, although not a history, puts that era in perspective.

“The ‘60s is a commodity,” she says. “It’s clothes and music, a set of things you can own. You see a lot of stuff that’s written where you wouldn’t think there’s a backdrop of body bags and killing of civilians and carpet bombings.”

Joining the Other Side

Ayers is now mainstream--an educator with distinguished professor status. He has written three books about education and has advised Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley on the subject of school reform.

Dohrn, a University of Chicago Law School graduate, is director of the Legal Clinic’s Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University.

They are the parents of Zayd, 24, named after a Black Panther, and Malik, 21, named for Malcolm X.

Ayers says he knows he was lucky he didn’t wind up in prison, lucky his life turned out so well. And he is not without remorse.

“I regret that we weren’t smarter,” he says. “I regret that we didn’t see the world in more complicated terms. But then again . . . you always have to act in an imperfect world, and we did and would again.”