From the WSJ Opinion Archives
SPEAKING VOLUMES
An Evening With Bill Ayers
Barnes & Noble hosts an erstwhile terrorist.
EVANSTON, Ill.--Opponents of terrorism are a potentially dangerous group, to judge from the high security at the Barnes & Noble bookstore here for a book signing last night with unrepentant terrorist-cum-author Bill Ayers. Mr. Ayers was promoting his book, "Fugitive Days," a memoir of his time in the Weather Underground. Uniformed police stood at the door starting more than an hour before the event, and plainclothes security milled about, conspicuously failing to blend in with the crowd.
Why? The store had received no threats, regional community relations manager Sarah DiFrancesco told me. In fact, she said, the calls the store received about the event ran about equally for and against it. The high security was simply a normal precaution for "an event of this nature."
Another precaution the store took was not telling too many people about the event. Barnes & Noble's New York-based spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating issued a statement earlier this week painting her company as a fearless champion of free speech. Yet while the week's other book signings in Evanston are prominently advertised in the store window, "Fugitive Days" was nowhere to be seen in a display of the books being promoted this week.
Indeed, the only indication of the Ayers event was a notice in the store's newsletter, which calls the Weather Underground a "1960's political activist group." Going just by that description, one might conclude that the Weathermen carried signs, held sit-ins and raised money for candidates. In fact, they placed bombs at government institutions, including the Pentagon.
The event was a fairly small affair, though well-attended given the muted publicity. Despite a noticeable minority who had come to challenge Mr. Ayers, it's a fair bet that a sizable portion of the audience were subscribers to The Nation; they nodded approvingly at his most preposterous pronouncements, including his suggestion that CNN has a right-wing slant and the BBC is more objective.
Listening to Mr. Ayers is fascinating and sickening; he personifies the moral bankruptcy of the far left. He said of the antiwar socialists of the '60s that "there were many factions organizing and agitating and moving in different directions. Some people decided to go join the industrial working class and organize there, some people joined the Democratic Party, other people tried other things, and the question that I still can't answer is, who did the right thing? I don't know."
The moral laxity is breathtaking: Union organization, voting, setting bombs--as long as you opposed the Vietnam War, what's the difference?
"We did many things that were wrong; I have a lot of regrets for many of the things that happened," he said. Does he regret siding with a brutal communist regime against America? "Certainly, the death of the three, my girlfriend and two other close, close friends, was a disaster." In other words, he regrets that his friends accidentally died while building a bomb, not that they were building a bomb in the first place.
Mr. Ayers continues: "Certainly flirting with the idea of terrorism was off the tracks and a mistake. The fact that we never executed that flirtation is important and significant and I think conveniently forgotten, but we never did." In fact, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts did set off a bomb at the Pentagon. In his book, he writes: "It turns out that we blew up a bathroom and, quite by accident, water plunged below and knocked out their computers for a time, disrupting the air war and sending me into deepening shades of delight." In those four little words, "disrupting the air war," there is the dark prospect of American soldiers in jeopardy.
Later in the talk, Mr. Ayers declared: "The fact is that there was an official policy of our government to create terrorism in Vietnam. . . . How you resisted that policy was a burning question, and is still a good question."
So, to recap: The Weathermen weren't terrorists, but the U.S. Marines were. Even if we accept this perverse semantic equation, the position of the Weathermen's apologists is still remarkable.
One audience member said later of Mr. Ayers's "burning question": "The answer is, in this country, we vote [those pursuing a policy we don't like] out of office. . . . I personally spent all of 1972 working all day and all night to elect George McGovern, and I will tell you that your tactics made it harder to vote the Richard Nixons out of office."
Even if you don't lament having been deprived of a McGovern presidency, it's hard to say anything nice about a man who to this day doesn't understand what was wrong with engaging in terrorism. Maybe Mr. Ayers will never learn. But after Sept. 11, Barnes & Noble should have known better than to give him a forum.
Mr. Tabin is an Evanston-based freelance writer.
