Telling my side of the story

William Ayers

a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of "Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist"

In the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here's why.

Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama's campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: "What do we really know about this man?"

Secondary characters in the narrative included an African American preacher with a fiery style, a Palestinian scholar, and an "unrepentant domestic terrorist." Linking the candidate with these supposedly shadowy characters, and ferreting out every imagined secret tie and dark affiliation, became big news.

I was cast in the "unrepentant terrorist" role. In the pre-election excitement, I saw no path to a rational discussion during the campaign and turned away whenever the microphones were thrust into my face. Now that the election is over, I can offer the facts:

I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil-rights movement in the mid-1960s, and I later resisted the draft and was arrested several times in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society.

In 1970, I cofounded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices - the ones placed at the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol were perhaps the most notorious - as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.

The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety, and perhaps even of common sense. Our political effectiveness can be debated. It did carry out dramatic symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the war in Vietnam.

Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.

I cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today. And for the last 40 years, I've been teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life, and the need to realize that potential through education.

I have regrets, of course. No one can reach my age with his eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long.

The antiwar movement, in all its commitment, its deep roots in the black freedom movement, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.

We wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at induction centers and surrounded the Pentagon. Yet we were inadequate to end the killing of 3 million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans during a 10-year war.

The dishonesty of the narrative about Obama during the campaign assumed that if you can place two people in the same room at the same time, or if you can show that they held a conversation, shared a cup of coffee, took the bus downtown together, or had any of a thousand other associations, then you have demonstrated that they share ideas, policies, outlook, influences, and, especially, responsibility for each other's behavior. There is a long and sad history of guilt by association in our political culture, and at crucial times we've been unable to rise above it.

Obama and I sat on a board together; we lived in the same diverse and yet close-knit community; we sometimes passed in the bookstore. We didn't pal around, and I had nothing whatsoever to do with his platforms or positions. I knew him as well as thousands of others did.

Demonization, guilt by association, and the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time. Let's hope they never will again. And let's hope we might now assert that in our wildly diverse society, talking and listening to the widest range of people is not a sin, but a virtue.

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