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 
You should be in prison right now you terrorist piece of shit. Nothing you do will ever wipe the stain away from your life of what you did. You make me sick.
Because what this country is practicing is not “marxism”, Sarah Jane, which is a set of political ideas that are as far from anything being practiced in this country as capitalism is from democracy.
As for Jack, like all righties, he wants to ignore the devastation this country continues to inflict on poorer countries of the world, allegedly for their own good. It was recovery from one such war that led to the excesses of the North Vietnamese, and nothing Jack and his “Black Book of Communism” groupies can say will ever prove anything to the contrary. Their ideas remain locked in exactly where they were five hundred years ago, at the rosy dawn of their capitalist utopia. Kill and kill and kill is their final recourse, and then they wonder why the world can’t escape a basic law of political physics, that for every ignorant action, there is an equally opposite ignorant reaction. Let’s not even get to talking about the horrifying penury which capital insists on inflicting on all of the world’s poor, allegedly for their better character and productive development. No one who ever really knew destitution would lend any credibility to the sort of insanity that insists that it’s good for people. All poverty ever did for anyone was make us mean and self-centered. Jack is a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land, etc. His idealization of the South Vietnamese is ignorant of the actual history of that country, and stupid beyond measure.
As one son in a long line of veterans, I have had it with righties who carry on about communism or any other effort humanity has made to pull itself out from the mess and backwardness capitalism insists are so good for human character. I am even more tired of their war on the planet and all of humanity on behalf of the fucking dollar. If they went extinct tomorrow, no one would miss them. Their theory is lunacy, and almost anyone who’s paying three dollars a dozen for eggs in the last week knows what I’m talking about. According to the capitalist utopia, now that market dereg is handing them the most dynamic profit level they’ve seen in generations, prices should be going down. Instead they’re taking advantage, as always. Fuck those motherfuckers and the cabbage they rode in on.
As for Billy Ayers, he maybe did the wrong thing for the right reasons, and that’s the end of it so far as I’m concerned. Jack’s effort to hold him responsible for what the stalinists of North Vietnam did is nothing more than product out the back end of the bovine, and about half as smart.
“You see the height of hypocrisy in America when Hillary Clinton doesn’t reject…”
This isn’t about Hillary Clinton. The American people already know the hypocrisy of the Clintons, but Ayers is an Obama buddy.
“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.”
You know who was a great friend to the poor in Chicago? Someone who opened up soup kitchens and convinced the powers-that-be of the time to start putting dates on milk so that spoiled milk wouldn’t be sold to children. Guess who that was? None other than “Scarface” Al Capone. My comparison of a vicious, murderous gangster like Capone with a commie thug terrorist like Ayers is valid. I don’t get how people who believe in the false premise of so-called “social justice” somehow negates Ayers’ unrepentant criminality. Not only should Ayers be “persona-non-grata”, he should be in prison. Prison got Capone out of Chicago.
“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.”
Apparently you don’t know you are one of the dumbest either.
The divisiveness today about the US war in Vietnam seems more bitter than it was then. The hatred in some of the comments above shows we have a long ways to go toward healing the minds so wounded by decades of right wing propaganda.
Thank you for your work then and now. I didn’t do enough to help end it, and nothing I’ve been able to do since the executive branch’s declaration of a so-called War on Terror has been sufficient either. But I am heartened by the principled, honest work you do, and the bravery that allows you to stand up and speak out on historical and contemporary injustice.
My peers would agree. Mr. Ayers is one of the most compassionate and supportive professors we have encountered. Collaboratively, the class creates a strong learning environment designed around an enlightening, yet objective, curriculum. Versatile among all levels of schooling, we pedagogically challenge our own perceived notions of Education and learning. We are exposed to a diverse array of literature that we will continue to reflect upon and refer to for the rest of our lives, both scholastically and intimately. His uplifting spirit and composure amidst this nonsense is admirable. This can only be achieved through a lifetime of self-reflection and progressiveness. Regardless of the ignorant statements and construed misconceptions, I am confident that these flagrancies will not faze him.
Hey Adam, the “professor” you claim to admire PLANTED BOMBS IN THE 70’s!!!!!!!! WTF is wrong with you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Get your head out of your @ss!!!!
Mr. Ayers,
I read and appreciated this response to the NYT, but I am still curious… I saw nothing in that response that indicated remorse for any of the bombings (New York City Police Headquarters, US Capitol building , Pentagon). I understand your exasperation with the US policies during the Vietnam era, but I myself am exasperated by the misdirection in your response to the NYT.
Point blank: Do you regret setting those bombs? Do you think that violence was an approriate recourse in that specific place and time?
If you are so pro life Mr. Ayers, then I’d like to see you stand up for the truly innocent in our society and denounce Abortions. Oh, but you won’t you can’t. To you and the rest of the liberals out there killing unwanted babies is justified. Like population control. I guess you could say your “Green”
Adam, if Distinguished Professor Ayers was really interested “a strong learning environment”, he would not be censoring work by academics he doesn’t happen to fancy. I posted a comment in this thread earlier that referred to a piece written by this guy: http://www.iwp.edu/faculty/facultyID.22/profile.asp and Ayers refuses to let that comment of mine apppear in this thread. Never mind that my comment accuses Ayers of nothing and instead merely asks for a comment about what Dr Harmon wrote. Apparently Distinguished Professor Ayers is all for free speech for scholars… so long as he likes it.
In an age of fraying empire, it is not surprising at all that new and shrill forms of McCarthyism and fear mongering arise. Bill, thanks for your continued work and mature discourse in these times.