September 15, 2001
To The Editors—
In July of this year Dinitia Smith asked my publisher if she might interview me for the New York Times on my forthcoming book, Fugitive Days. From the start she questioned me sharply about bombings, and each time I referred her to my memoir where I discussed the culture of violence we all live with in America, my growing anger in the 1960’s about the structures of racism and the escalating war, and the complex, sometimes extreme and despairing choices I made in those terrible times.
Smith’s angle is captured in the Times headline: “No regrets for a love of explosives” (September 11, 2001). She and I spoke a lot about regrets, about loss, about attempts to account for one’s life. I never said I had any love for explosives, and anyone who knows me found that headline sensationalistic nonsense. I said I had a thousand regrets, but no regrets for opposing the war with every ounce of my strength. I told her that in light of the indiscriminate murder of millions of Vietnamese, we showed remarkable restraint, and that while we tried to sound a piercing alarm in those years, in fact we didn’t do enough to stop the war.
Smith writes of me: “Even today, he ‘finds a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance,’ he writes.” This fragment seems to support her “love affair with bombs” thesis, but it is the opposite of what I wrote:
We’ll bomb them into the Stone Age, an unhinged American politician had intoned, echoing a gung-ho, shoot-from-the-hip general… each describing an American policy rarely spoken so plainly. Boom. Boom. Boom. Poor Viet Nam. Almost four times the destructive power Florida… How could we understand it? How could we take it in? Most important, what should we do about it? Bombs away. There is a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance. The rhythm of B-52s dropping bombs over Viet Nam, a deceptive calm at 40,000 feet as the doors ease open and millennial eggs are delivered on the green canopy below, the relentless thud of indiscriminate destruction and death without pause on the ground. Nothing subtle or syncopated. Not a happy rhythm. Three million Vietnamese lives were extinguished. Dig up Florida and throw it into the ocean. Annihilate Chicago or London or Bonn. Three million—each with a mother and a father, a distinct name, a mind and a body and a spirit, someone who knew him well or cared for her or counted on her for something or was annoyed or burdened or irritated by him; each knew something of joy or sadness or beauty or pain. Each was ripped out of this world, a little red dampness staining the earth, drying up, fading, and gone. Bodies torn apart, blown away, smudged out, lost forever.
I wrote about Vietnamese lives as a personal American responsibility, then, and the hypocrisy of claiming an American innocence as we constructed and stoked an intricate and hideous chamber of death in Asia. Clearly I wrote and spoke about the export of violence and the government’s love affair with bombs. Just as clearly Dinitia Smith was interested in her journalistic angle and not the truth. This is not a question of being misunderstood or “taken out of context,” but of deliberate distortion.
Some readers apparently responded to her piece, published on the same day as the vicious terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, by associating my book with them. This is absurd. My memoir is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official policy. It begins literally in the shadow of Hiroshima and comes of age in the killing fields of Southeast Asia. My book criticizes the American obsession with a clean and distanced violence, and the culture of thoughtlessness and carelessness that results from it. We are now witnessing crimes against humanity in our own land on an unthinkable scale, and I fear that we might soon see innocent people in other parts of the world as well as in the U.S. dying and suffering in response.
All that we witnessed September 11—the awful carnage and pain, the heroism of ordinary people—may drive us mad with grief and anger, or it may open us to hope in new ways. Perhaps precisely because we have suffered we can embrace the suffering of others and gather the necessary wisdom to resist the impulse to lash out randomly. The lessons of the anti-war movements of the 1960s and 70s may be more urgent now than ever.
Bill Ayers Chicago, IL
Bill Ayers 
Hey Billy boy, unless I hear you condemn the agressive military actions of the communist North Vietnamese and the murder they inflicted on the people of the South, I can only say to you STFU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
No matter how hard you try to justify your evil actions, you will always be an asshole who happened to serve no time for his crimes.
Bill,
My support for you is unflinching. Those of us who really know your work, know you to care deeply about social justice and that you teach toward freedom. I am holding you and yours in my thoughts day by day.
Warmest regards,
Tamar
What a lousy America-hating communist terrorist you are, Ayers.
“My memoir is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official policy. It begins literally in the shadow of Hiroshima…”
Excuse me but do you even have a clue about what you are talking about? In a post the other day, you dared to call Sherman’s March to the Sea an “act of terrorism”. Do you actually understand what Sherman tried to accomplish? Do you have any idea how many lives were saved using the atom bomb to end the war?
By the way, I don’t know when you wrote the above letter, but I don’t see it anywhere on the New York Times site. As far as I know, you wrote it yesterday and put the 9/15/2001 date on it. In fact, the only “Letters to the Editor” piece from you in the New York Times dated 9/16/2001, and it was in reply to a completely different piece than the one you cite above (here’s the link). So I don’t believe you wrote what wrote above on 9/15/2001. Here’s what you said in the other “Letter”:
“To the Editor:
Re a Sept. 16 New York Times Magazine interview with me and your Sept. 11 Arts pages profile:
The barbarism unleashed against innocent human beings on Sept. 11 has in an instant transformed the complex landscape of American consciousness. I’m filled with horror and grief for those murdered and harmed, for their families and for all affected forever.
”Fugitive Days,” the memoir I’ve written about my participation in the Weather Underground and the antiwar movement and the events of 30 years ago, is now receiving attention in a radically changed context.
My book is a condemnation of terrorism in all its forms. We are witnessing crimes against humanity. The intent of my book was and is to understand, to tell the truth and to heal.
BILL AYERS
Chicago, Sept. 14, 2001″
All you are doing is hawking your book after the 9/11 terrorist attack. That adds the word “hypocrite” to the communist terrorist.
Thanks for writing that. The New York Times misused the power of one headline and one opening sentence, and the reverberations continue today. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword, even when wielded by someone like Dinitia Smith. Let’s hope the pens of other are even stronger.
btw – is there a statute of limitations on the NYT issuing a retraction and/or apology? Just asking….
Hey Tamarika,
Apparently your buddy Billy Ayers doesn’t give a shit about the lack of personal freedoms suffered by the people of what was South Vietnam not to mention the murder and re-education camps set up by the communists. Wake up, you dolt!!
Dear Mr. Ayers,
Thank you for posting this. I respect your courage in opening yourself up to the usual anonymous bashing.
We bomb masses of civilians to save OURSELVES. What we mean when we say we must use war to stop war is that we, our children, our mother and father, our dog deserve to live but they and theirs don’t.
A few posters here justify killing masses of people to save masses of other people and give them “freedom.” In this scenario, mass murder is actually an act of compassion. At least the hijackers proclaimed no such lofty purpose.
I had hoped that if there were anything good to come out of the horror of 9/11, it would be that for once, America could begin to imagine what it is like, viscerally, to be blown up. In great numbers. Suddenly. Out of the blue. As is always the case, death is not instantaneous. And the suffering of survivors is another toll, not necessarily a better fate.
Whether Islamic hijackers bring you your 9/11 morning because they hate you, or the United States brings it in order to save you, your suffering is the same. From a civilian standpoint, none of us who have always lived in America can fully imagine a 9/11 morning multiplied by thousands and thousands of WTC explosions, going on day and night, for five years. We can not imagine that world. Or the added horrors when water supplies, hospitals, whole infrastructures are destroyed, the environment is poisoned, and we watch another million or so of our own die, or worse, from that. It is also probably no comfort to be be raped and murdered and watch your elderly grandfather be shot by those who are trying to bring you freedom.
If you can even begin to imagine the condition of war for masses of civilians, you would probably conclude that no reason is sufficient for it.
Now if you believe that these OTHER civilian are not as HUMAN as we are… that’ll make it work.
If I could have not been born, my own beloved child not born, in order that Hiroshima and Nagasaki not be bombed, I would make that happen. I do not think that all the war, the destruction of this earth and its wildlife, the endless cruelty to each other, the abuse of animals and children and old people–all this “humanity” –was worth bringing into existence at the cost of wreaking nuclear holocaust on Japan. And next time we have to stop war by dropping the atom bomb, I would rather take a cyanide pill, thank you.
To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Ayers is not responsible for the death of one civilian. He has paid his dues, is still paying them as evidenced here.
He and his wife have lived a life of service to others. They have more than “made up” for the past. They are educators, in the business of saving children, of bettering their lives so they can grow up and better the world. They take this mission on actively and pass it to others.
By the way, did most Vietnamese–the ones who survived and were not too sick or psychologically damaged to enjoy it–get that “personal freedom?” They got the communists. And they got their destroyed land. We lost over 58,200 young people and got agent orange. Let’s not go into the wounded, the paralyzed, the amputated, the mentally altered for life…. and their children. War is not one morning in one’s life. It goes on and on.
If you can justify this, fine. But if you can, you have no right to shake your finger at Mr. Ayers.
Virginia Elliott
“The
lessons of the anti-war movements of the 1960s and 70s may be more
urgent now than ever”
Right!
And the lesson was that arrogant uneducated privileged narcissists whose knowledge consists of one-liners can yet have enormous effects on a population that is asleep.
How many millions of East Asians are dead because you, your gaggle of demented twits, the media, and leftist congressmen pulled us out of Nam, allowing Pol Pot to come in.
Anyone who was around at the time, Willy, knows the story.
Keep it up.
The more bullshit you pump out, the more the new media will reveal about you.
One day the bill will come due.
jack, you can’t possibly think bill doesn’t care about the deaths of the south vietnamese after writing so eloquently on the loss of a single life. this is a guy who dedicated much of his life to trying to END violence, which i’m sure is more than you have personally attempted. and if you are claiming that killing people isn’t justified for saving lives, than why is your vitriol directed at bill exclusively? what about the american government which has murdered OVER 1,000,000 people in iraq in the last ten years in the name of “peace” and “democracy”.
hypocrisy is a necessary step on the path of self-improvement, just try to get to the next step, please.
Nice try Jimmie, but Billy seems to have a very hard time condemning any violent or aggressive actions initiated by a Marxist government anywhere at any time.
Oh BTW, if you bud Saddam had just adhered to the 16 UN resolutions, there would not have been an Operation Iraqi Freedom. Got it, Jimmie?????
Jack, why don’t we start condemning the Marxism right here in America and our country’s own aggressive actions?
You see the height of hypocrisy in America when Hillary Clinton doesn’t reject and denounce an endorsement from OJ Simpson, while asking Obama to reject an unsought endorsement from Farakhan – a man whom her supporter, Gov. Ed Rendel showered with probably the most eloquent praise yet. Or when Hillary says she believes in redemption of people, referring specifically to her acceptance of a Richard Mellon Scaiffe’s endorsement, but somehow implies that Ayers should be a persona-non-grata, despite his work on anti-poverty, social justice, urban educational reform, Early Childhood Education and helping children in trouble with the law.
This country has the smartest and the dumbest people on earth. And some of you commenting on this blog are among the dumbest. You just don’t know it.