Notes on an Interview After 9/11 with Bill Ayers -- the Weatherman who Tried to Blow up the Pentagon and who the Right Wants to Make Barack Obama's Best Friend

I found myself, despite a deep aversion to bombing innocents, in favor of military action against the Taliban in Afghanistan because of their providing sanctuary to Al Queda. There were listeners in Berkeley especially who would have liked me tarred and feathered for what I admitted on air and against NPR notions of hiding bias as my sense of the need for military action in Afghanistan. I had been a strong protestor of the war in Vietnam and I was opposed to invading Iraq and remain opposed to the war there. So that personal history and interviewing Bill Ayers, now trumped up by the right as a close pal and fellow political traveller of Obama's, is the context of the excerpt below. I believe, as with Reverend Wright, that Obama in those early, formative Chicago-based years was making contacts on the left of people who would give him stronger street credibility and help him become the politician he was destined to become. Sean Hannity and his ilk can link Obama with Ayers but I think Ayers remains, as I portray him, an ideologue and America hater, while Obama is neither.

The following excerpt is from my book, Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life:

I got support on air for my hawkish views on Afghanistan from other old lefties who came on as guests -- Todd Gitlin, Christopher Hitchens and Sebastian Junger. They all saw the necessity of the US war in Afghanistan even if, like me, they deplored innocent casualties that resulted from aerial bombings. Junger had been in Kabul when it was liberated, and he said Americans needed to know about the rejoicing and elation among Afghans, how they were shouting "America. America" like hosannas. It is just what many Bushites and Neocons expected and foolishly hoped would occur in Iraq.

I hit a nerve with some in my listening audience by putting on former SDS Weatherman Bill

Ayers. He had been scheduled a month before to be on soon after 9-11 to discuss his memoir,

which included a chapter about how he and his band of radical Sixties bombers tried to blow up

the Pentagon. Emotions were still raw, and I knew many listeners would be upset simply hearing

Ayers, and many indeed were; he spouted angry anti-American rhetoric even as he condemned

the Al Queda attacks and "the fascism of the Taliban and Muslim fanatics." I felt justified in

putting him on air, despite the timing, because I wanted listeners to hear how a one-time home-

grown terrorist thinks. I also asked him off air if his Weatherwoman wife, Bernadine Dohrn, had

really praised the Manson clan for butchering the poor LaBiancas, whom she allegedly called

"bourgeois pigs." He denied she had ever said it, or anything like it, but somehow I didn't

believe him. At one point in the interview, I told him that I, too, had been against the Vietnam

war, but never saw the necessity for building bombs and that, as a working-class kid, I resented

that he and his semi-affluent Weather Underground thugs presumed to speak for working class

youth. He said, with a touch of whimsy, "You probably would have turned me in," and I

responded, "Maybe so." Ayres was still an ideologue. Still a fanatic. And it was ideologues and

fanatics like him who had turned me off years before when, as a Vietnam War protestor, I felt

soiled by their arrogance and rigidity. Ayres and his wife, and the other would-be soldiers of the

left, hijacked the protest movement against the Vietnam War transforming peaceful

mobilizations into glass shatterings, bomb-making chaos. Now religious Muslim ideological

fanatics, who bowed toward Mecca, were trying to kill us, longing to do greater harm to western

civilization than even what the Nazis did to European Jewry.