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 
Jack,
The bombs American planted on the country of Vietnam—the entire country, we weren’t defending the South, but bombing the crap out of it— are the real crime. We did not belong in Vietnam; the entire effort was a criminal assault and U.S. leaders responsible should have been prosecuted for war crimes.
And before you attack me and atribute outrageous and ridiculous associations and beliefs to me—I categorically reject them all, and your distasteful tone in your writing.
People,
please,
open your eyes.
Then tell me,
where is this freedom? (especially when you think it “anti-american” for someone to FREEly express their thoughts)
How is our current system not bound to fail as all past systems have?
Why sell your soul to it when it will change?
Also, how did this country come into existance?
Even my cheap public school education taught me that it was through revolution of some sort. “Democracy” rose after the fall of “monarchy.” Capitalism rose out of the ashes of feudalism. Something will rise out of both “democracy” and capitalism in the future, and from the current state of both these systems I doubt it will be too long( no, in no way am I a communist, I do not think that is what will come next, or what should come next.)
I’m not a terrorist. Nor or any others who want change. If I am a terrorist, if Bill Ayers is a terrorist, MLK a terrorist, or any other person who simply wanted to better this country and world, then your beloved founding fathers would be considered terrorists as well.
That’s all.
PS; Jack – this government you love plants bombs every day, I would bet every hour. Oh, they planted quite a few back in the 70’s as well. The point is, Bill doesn’t plant bombs now, but this government does. They also have the intent of killing people. The Weathermen didn’t have that intent.
Jack,
You came to this blog with your mind made up. There is nothing that Mr Ayers could have written which would have convinced you that he is not the evil personified which you believe him to be. What is the source of your certainty? Have you studied the Weather Underground? Are you familiar with the decades of work that he has done since then? Do you have personal experience of the man or his actions?
Your comment of 1:59pm, April 23, implies that there is no acceptable moral reason for violence (since we should not respect or listen to a man who planted bombs in the 70s). On the other hand, your criticism of him for opposing the Vietnam War suggests that you think that that conflict was justified. Consider the possibility for a moment that both his violence and that of America’s military were justified (or both unjustified).
I look forward to your response.
Mr. Ayers, here’s a very simple question:
Do you regret using violence (or supporting the use of violence) in opposition to the War in Vietnam?
What are you talking about? We, the USA, makes mistakes, we have, and always will. You sir, are a hypocrite. A lousy terrorist criminal who hides behind education. One who did not even have the GUTS to stand up. Like a little coward you run and hide. You are scum. Hope you burn in hell.
Thank you, Mr. Ayers, for proving that conception is possible via the nether orifice. I don’t blame you for the man you are but your father and mother are not to be excused.
The ramblings of Mr. Ayers are just additional proof that even a pinhead like him can acquire an advanced degree…
I was in college in the ’60’s and saw some of these folks up close and it always struck me as interesting that many, like Bill Ayers, were the children of privilege. Who else had the free time and funds to play at being revolutionaries? I was too busy going to school, studying and working for such nonsense.
He apparently still holds the same faux-revolutionary, 1960’s-era, fuzzy-headed views.
Go figure…
I’m glad to hear your side of the story, Mr. Ayers, just as I’m glad that Rev. Jeremiah Wright is being interviewed by Bill Moyers on PBS this Friday night. I’m totally amazed by the unresolved emotional issues still holding over from the 60’s and 70’s, but I feel it is good that they are brought to light again. We have another chance to make things right, yes?
(pssst . . . maybe clean up the line breaks in this post of yours. plz.)
Liberal morons,
Marxism is dead. Your “boy”, the Commie terrorist Ayers, would kill you and any other American for the death sentence that is Marxism, and wouldn’t bat an eye to do it. He wanted to do it before, and never was sorry for his terrorist actions. He belongs with the whore Diana Oughton (his squeeze at the time). By a quirk of fate, he is a “professor” at a state-run university, with a salary paid by my taxes. Because he is an unrepentant America-hating terrorist, my tax dollars would be better spent supporting his sorry ass in prison.
John Whitelaw, do you have the same respect for Al Capone as you do for the Commie terrorist? After all, Capone opened up soup kitchens for the poor, and was instrumental in getting milk dated so that it wouldn’t be spoiled before it was sold. Does that make Capone a “champion” of the false notion of “social justice”? Or would you still consider Capone as nothing more than the murderous thug he was, doing these kinds of things to get good PR? As far as I’m concerned, that’s what Ayers is; an America-hating murderous Communist thug trying to get good PR to cover up for his past terrorism, criminal acts he has never apologized for.
Mr Ayers
Your justification is self-serving and disingenuous. You object to others drawing attention to a narrative that you authored. Your deeds, your words mark you as a terrorist and a coward. It is because of the clemency of the American people and the protections of the U.S. Constitution (that you worked to subvert through acts of criminal violence) that you are at liberty to profess your wicked, hateful ideology. This is ironic and a rare, genuine example of a communist maximizing the contradictions of bourgeois society.