Ayers: Obama was 'family friend'
New afterword to 2001 book, Ayers describes Barack Obama as 'family friend'
In a new afterword to his 2001 book, Bill Ayers, former leader of the 1960s radical group Weather Underground, describes President-elect Barack Obama as a “family friend” and denies he wished his group had set off more bombs in the 1960s.
Ayers, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, adds few new details about his relationship with Obama in the afterword to Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-War Activist. The book is being reissued this month.
(Chris Sweda/Sun-Times)
“We had served together on the board of a foundation, knew one another as neighbors and family friends, held an initial fund-raiser at my house, where I’d made a small donation to his earliest political campaign,” he writes.
But right-wing commentators tried to use those connections to smear Obama, he says.
“Obama’s political rivals and enemies apparently saw an opportunity to deepen a dishonest narrative about him, that he is somehow un-American, alien, linked to radical ideas, a closet terrorist, a sympathizer with extremism,” Ayers wrote.
Ayers was the purported “terrorist” Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was referring to when she claimed that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.”
At a presidential debate, Obama described Ayers as engaging in “despicable acts with a radical domestic group,’’ adding that he “roundly condemned those acts."
He has also said that Ayers is “not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis.”
The Weather Underground claimed responsibility for about a dozen bombings in the late 1960s, with targets including the Pentagon and Capitol. The group¹s casualties included three of its own members killed while making a bomb in New York City in 1970. In 1981, two police officers and a security guard were killed when other members of the group committed an armed robbery.
Ayers defends his role in the group.
“I killed no one, and I harmed no one, and I didn’t regret for a minute resisting the murderous assault on [Vietnam] with every ounce of my being,” Ayers writes.
He denies a quote attributed to him in 2001: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I wish we’d set more bombs. I don’t think we did enough.” The quote was widely republished during the presidential campaign.
Ayers writes, “I never actually said that I ‘set bombs,’ nor that I wished there were ‘more bombs.’ ”
With the 1960s over, his more radical days are behind him, he writes. Nowadays, “I go about my business, hang out with my wife and our kids and grandchildren, take care of the elders, go to work, teach, and write,” the afterword states. “I also organize and participate in the never-ending effort to build a powerful movement for peace and social justice.”
Ayers wrote the new afterword on July 8, 2008, a day when he writes he saw a 1960s-style bumper sticker “all tie-dyed and psychedelic,” and heard “Give Peace a Chance” on the radio. He begins the afterword with a quote from Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”: “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds.’’
It’s “[d]eja vu all over again,” Ayers writes.
Ayers is scheduled to appear for a live interview Friday on ABC's “Good Morning America.’’