Bill Ayers Talks Obama, Nelson Mandela, and Toni Preckwinkle
He loves Cook County’s president, isn’t disappointed in POTUS, and would be happy to be a Supreme Court justice.
Bill Ayers is now 68 years old and retired after 20 years as a UIC education professor. He’s slight, intense, balding, wears two hearing aids and two earrings, and boasts, in an endearing, not irritating way, about his three sons and three grandchildren. He speaks lovingly of his wife, Bernardine Dohrn 72, now also retired; she as a professor at Northwestern University School of Law.
The two spent a decade in hiding, on the run from the law as members of the Weather Underground. The label “unrepentant domestic terrorist” does not fit the man, who grew up in Glen Ellyn, and now sits across from me at a coffee shop on Wells Street in Old Town. He suggested meeting me in my neighborhood rather than asking me to travel to his in Hyde Park.
Ayers has stressed over the years that no one was ever hurt, much less killed, by he or Dohrn. And yet he acknowledges having a role—direct or indirect is never clear—in planting bombs in government buildings, including the Pentagon, New York City Police Headquarters, and a Capitol building. ‘’Even though I didn’t actually bomb the Pentagon—we bombed it, in the sense that Weathermen organized it and claimed it,” as said to New York Times reporter Dinitia Smith, is a typical Ayers hedge.
I nursed a latte; he ate and drank nothing as our conversation spanned almost two hours. It took so long because he seldom liked my questions and insisted on