2001 profile of "Bill Ayers, unrepentant former Weather Underground revolutionary"

2001 profile of "Bill Ayers, unrepentant former Weather Underground revolutionary"

By Mark Frauenfelder

Now that former Weather Undergrounder Bill Ayers is back in the news, this 2001 Slate profile of him is worth reading. He comes off as an extremely unsavory character.

Much of what Ayers self-interestedly leaves out of his book is more personally embarrassing than illegal. Ayers takes care not to dwell on his own Establishment credentials. (His father was chairman of the energy company Commonwealth Edison, a fact Ayers conveys only by writing, "My dad worked for Edison.") Ayers omits any discussion of his famous 1970 statement, "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at." He also omits any discussion of his wife Bernardine Dohrn's famous reaction to the Manson killings, as conveyed by journalist Peter Collier: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!" (In a 1993 Chicago Magazine profile, Dohrn claimed, implausibly, that she'd been trying to convey that "Americans love to read about violence.")