McCain's got an ad, the GOP's got an ad, Palin has been all over Florida, into Pennsylvania and Ohio and out in Wisconsin, and now McCain is wading in without having said the 'A' word, as the desperate and flailing McCain campaign attempts to light up a manufactured October Surprise which was flash in the pan 60's radical memoir with the worst coincidental PR campaign timing in history.
Why is there such a terrific flap about an aging, toothless radical named Bill Ayers, and why does this seem to be such apparently fertile ground for McCain to attempt to go nuclear on Obama just as the Republican is reaching the nadir of his unfavorability (and worsening)? Why would anyone look twice at a man who has lived and become respectable decades after he was let free after FBI misconduct made him unable to be tried fairly for violent civil disobedience to stop the Vietnam War?
Continued over the fold:
There are two answers: a fundamentally distorted interview with Bill Ayers about his memoir published on 9-11-01 in the New York Times, and the publication of that profoundly prejudicial interview on 9-11, the morning of the day New York burned and terror came to America.
This diary reviews what was said, what got distorted, and what Bill Ayers says on his own blog, specifically his letter of strongly worded protest to the Times four days later, and what has become the favorite topic du jour of the McCain campaign as it desperately tries to ignore the Great Depression of 2008.
The interviewer, Dinitia Smith wrote the article on Ayers and his book after an intervew in July 2001, long before the 9-11 bombings, entitled 'No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen', which opens with a bang:
''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.'' Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings. And he still has the ebullient, ingratiating manner, the apparently intense interest in other people, that made him a charismatic figure in the radical student movement.
Sensational on any other day, unforgettable as a headline on this particular day, and according to Ayers himself, a rank distortion and misquote. In the interview, he has claimed since publication of the article and ever since, he maintains that Smith, whom he had referred to his memoir containing a lengthy and poetic passage describing the loss of millions of Vietnamese lives, was conflated as a quote in which Ayers regretted not setting more bombs:
In his letter to the Editor, published in the Times on 9-15-01, Ayers replies with more simplicity:
She and I spoke a lot about regrets, about loss, about attempts to account for one’s life. I never said I had any love for explosives, and anyone who knows me found that headline sensationalistic nonsense. I said I had a thousand regrets, but no regrets for opposing the war with every ounce of my strength. I told her that in light of the indiscriminate murder of millions of Vietnamese, we showed remarkable restraint, and that while we tried to sound a piercing alarm in those years, in fact we didn’t do enough to stop the war.
Wikipedia footnotes that Ayers 'never denied the quotes', and yet, in this letter he does deny the quotes. And so, by conflation of his memoir, in which he discusses how 'America was in love with bombs', Smith concludes that Ayers in that interview, and in his memoir, had maintained his love of bombs and his love for terror and violence.
Ayers quotes in his letter from Fugitive days, maintaining the opposite:
We’ll bomb them into the Stone Age, an unhinged American politician had intoned, echoing a gung-ho, shoot-from-the-hip general... each describing an American policy rarely spoken so plainly. Boom. Boom. Boom. Poor Viet Nam. Almost four times the destructive power Florida... How could we understand it? How could we take it in? Most important, what should we do about it? Bombs away.
Clearly Ayers is not advocating bombing Vietnam into the Stone Age, and in fact the book is a call to end terrorism at home and abroad.
But on 9-11, such nuances as right and wrong, past and future, looking back to a past with regret and failure at stopping the war being recharacterized as regretting bombs not dropped, eluded Dinita Smith, and has since eluded the light of day.
Ayers recently posted a non cartoon cartoon on his blog, clearly in hopes of finally getting through the basic point that he regrets not having stopped the war, and that the NYT got it wrong.
Link to ABC news copy of the cartoon here
One can hardly blame Americans for being unsympathetic to a 60's radical who despite his eschewing violence today, and despite his and his wife's apologies to those injured in the Days of Rage (he did issue written apologies, as did Bernadine Dohrn), he remains convinced that violence against property was justifiable against the crime against civilian populations he saw unfolding in Vietnam in the late 1960's. What we tend to forget today is the massive cost of that war in human life, 60,000 US troops dead or injured, uncounted Vietnamese casualties, which by Ayers' account was up to 3 million. By this measure, the Iraq war casualties are a drop in a very large bucket.
Please do not misunderstand the purpose of this diary. It is not to excuse William Ayers, or to serve as an apologia for his explanations or his own rationalizations. It is to deconstruct the tightly controlled message offered by the Republicans and by the McCain campaign: that Ayers met Barack Obama as a proudly unrepentant terrorist crowing his achievements in bombing while serving on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, when in fact the roots of the modern controversy over Ayers was in a cleverly fictionalized interview with the man with what he himself declares are errors and distortions. I have to ask the question - since he does not conceal the acts he committed, what possible reason would he have to quibble about the quotes in the NYT article? He did not have to give an interview for the New York Times: it was an idea of his publisher. He gave a second interview to the Chicago Tribune, as well as a later interview about the lessons of 9-11 in light of his own past, none of which repeated the canard that he regretted not setting more bombs. Considering all he has admitted, there is no reason not to take Ayers at his word that Smith had either grossly misunderstood him, or had some deep-seated need to sensationalize the story of the ex-fugitive, down to highlighting the Weatherman tattoo and the long hair, as if conjuring the radical within the now-middle aged school reformer as a kind of reverse-hero-worship.
In the following days, as McCain attempts to force the sound bytes of 'palling around with terrorists' and 'What don't we know about Bill Ayers?' it might help to keep Ayers in actual context - a man whose memoir of his violent past was serendipitously published the day before Al Qaeda struck New York City. We need to make sure that serendipity does not overshadow Barack Obama's incidental connections with Bill Ayers and give the Republicans a last straw to hang onto as their campaign goes down the drain along with the American economy.