Bill Ayers talks back

Sarah Palin called him a terrorist, Barack Obama called him an acquaintance. A Salon editor who knew Ayers back when talks to the ex-Weather Underground member turned Republican talking point.

Editor's note: Watch video of this interview here.

By Walter Shapiro

Read more: Terrorism, Chicago, Politics, Vietnam, News, Walter Shapiro, Barack Obama, 2008 election

Nov. 17, 2008 | NEW YORK -- Proving yet again that there are indeed second and even third acts in American lives, Bill Ayers had transformed himself over a quarter of a century from an on-the-run-from-the-law member of the Weather Underground to a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. But because of a single event -- a 1995 coffee that he and his wife gave for fledgling state Senate candidate Barack Obama -- Ayers again found himself in the cross hairs of history.

John McCain targeted his rival's associations with radicals like Ayers, and Sarah Palin hyperbolically accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists." Ayers rebuffed interview requests throughout the campaign, but has dropped his reticence with the republication of his 2001 book, "Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Antiwar Activist."

After appearing on ABC's "Good Morning America" last Friday, Ayers sat down for a 55-minute interview with Salon's Washington bureau chief, Walter Shapiro. During the late 1960s at the University of Michigan, Shapiro knew Ayers as a "guy in the neighborhood." The following interview, conducted in Shapiro's apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, has been edited for length.

We had not seen each other in something like 39 years until you walked in. All through the 2008 campaign, I have been telling this story. I ran into you on South University Street in Ann Arbor maybe three or four days before the 1968 convention. And you asked me, "Are you going to Chicago?" And I said, "No, they're going to nominate Hubert Humphrey." And you replied, "You've got to be there. Great shit's going to be happening in the streets."

And you missed it.

Of course, I missed it.

The interesting thing about an event like that or Woodstock ...

Which you missed.

Which I did miss, but in a funny way I felt like I was there. Chicago '68 was a relatively small demonstration for its time, but I've talked to millions of people who claim they were there because it felt like we were all there. Everyone from our generation was there and was at Woodstock. Interestingly, 24 years from now, everyone will have been in Grant Park on Nov. 4, 2008, because it was another exciting moment when we came together.

Were you there in Grant Park for Obama?

I was there for hours and I couldn't leave and I'll tell you why. I've been in larger crowds of people before, but I've never been in a crowd that large where there was no edge of anger, there was nothing that people were trying to push against, no one was drunk, there was no gluttony. It was simply a gathering of pure joy. Something that would have seemed unimaginable just a couple of years before was now inevitable and unforgettable. Everyone wanted to be there. And the sense of unity and the sense of hope was really palpable and lovely.

So I take it you voted for Barack Obama.

Of course, what were the choices? I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he's been elected. And, of course, we have to embrace the moment. It was a moment when the American people overwhelmingly rejected the politics of fear, the politics of war and militarization, paranoia and the acceptance of the shredding of our constitutional rights. It was a sense of "let's move beyond that." And so, of course, I wanted to be a part of that, and we need to embrace that. I also think -- and this is where we need to move in the future -- that we cannot believe that presidents save us. They cannot save our lives. We have to do for ourselves the important work of transformation, the important work of reframing the last eight years, the last several decades, into something more hopeful.

Let's come back to Obama. I'm curious. How many conversations have you had with him over the years? Fifteen? Twenty?

A dozen or 15 perhaps. There was a big thing made this morning [on "Good Morning America"] that I was coming out of my silence. Nothing could be further from the truth. I haven't been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I'm not silent.

But I e-mailed you during the campaign and asked, "Do you want to talk about this?" And you said, "Thanks, great to hear from you, but not at this time."

Well, what I didn't want to comment on was the political campaign. I didn't want to enter into that. The reason is simple: I thought that I was being used as a prop in a very dishonest narrative -- and I didn't want to be part of the narrative and I couldn't find a way to interrupt it. Anything that I said was going to feed that narrative. So I felt that part of this was the demonization of me -- certainly that I'm some kind of toxic agent that has to be feared.

The second thing, and perhaps more important, is that I was being used to try to bring down this promising new leader by the old tactic of guilt by association. The idea that somehow -- and this is deep in the American political culture -- that if two people share a bus downtown, have a cup of coffee, have several conversations, that somehow means that they share an outlook, a perspective, responsibility for one another's behavior. And I reject that. That guilt by association is wrong and we shouldn't buy into it.

Do you feel diminished by Obama repeatedly referring to you throughout the campaign as just some "guy from the neighborhood"?

Not in the least; I am a guy from the neighborhood. And I'm proud of it ... And the neighborhood being Hyde Park, which is a very close-knit, very friendly, very politically diverse, very racially diverse. You have all kinds of poles there. You have [conservative] Judge Richard Posner on one pole and Louis Farrakhan on the other. And everything in between. It's an interesting neighborhood, a college town [the University of Chicago]. It's close-knit. It's kind of like Wasilla, Alaska, except that it's different.

What have your impressions been of Obama over the years?

I met him sometime in the mid-1990s and, as I said, I know him about as well as thousands and thousands of other people do. And like millions of other people, I wish I knew him a lot better now. My impression of him from the start was that this was the smartest person who walks into any room he walks into. An incredibly bright, an incredibly quick person. A compassionate, kind person. And everyone who knew him thought that he was politically ambitious. For the first two years, I thought, his ambition is so huge that he wants to be mayor of Chicago. And that's where my imagination ran out of steam, apparently, because clearly he had his sights on something else and I'm delighted for him and for the country and the world that he was able to accomplish this.

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