Authors: Bill Ayers
A favorite demonizing story about the Weathermen in 1969 held that we ate cats in the collectives. We were American dissidents, and like dissidents here and everywhere throughout history we were ignored, ridiculed, marginalized, beaten, and jailed (but not assassinated as were our Black dissident comrades—the legacy of white-skin privilege), all the while being deemed crazy by all the established powers. We were pretty goofy and weird in those days, it’s true—and I don’t claim to be completely free of traces of eccentric nuttiness today—but it was a weirdness I tried to honestly portray in
Fugitive Days
. I’ll say it here once and for all: we were often wrong or off base, but we never killed or ate a cat in the collectives. I’d heard the story so often from so many different people, not all of them hostile, that I began to wonder, and so I called a lot of comrades to be sure. No cat snacks, no cat-on-a-stick, and no cat barbecue that anyone would admit to. But the cat story endured, and packed a little power—they eat cats for God’s sake; what could they possibly think or say or advocate that’s sane? Try to provide evidence of nonindulgence in the cat feast, or to prove you don’t even like the taste of cat, and the trap tightens: I sounded like a complete idiot flailing with shadows.
Todd Gitlin, a sociologist at Columbia University and an early president of SDS, was a steady and consistent critic. Todd seemed to be the first name in every reporter’s Rolodex or computer file for all things sixties, and he popped up in every story of a notable anniversary, every reference comparing current events with the olden days, and every obituary of a prominent character from the movement—and that right there could provide a strong motive to stay alive, just to keep any remembrances Todd-free. I borrowed an irreverent idea from my teacher Philip Lopate, who had written about a certain commodifying of Holocaust literature into “The Holocaust, Inc.,” and began to think of Todd in his later incarnation as the unofficial, self-appointed CEO of a small business that might be called “The Sixties, Inc.” His steady string of op-eds and articles and books and appearances in the press read like the work of a scrivener defending the enterprise’s most profitable “patents.”
Whenever I ran into Todd on the street near Columbia we exchanged friendly greetings—we’d known each other since the early days in Ann Arbor—but little more. I made Todd uncomfortable in part I think because my existence challenged a revisionist theory he promoted wildly that “the sixties” was a bifurcated decade: the early or “good sixties” all participatory democracy and sacrifice and the beloved community, the later “bad sixties” all stormy Weather and nationalist Black Panthers and revolution. I was—along with Ralph Featherstone and Stokely Carmichael and Kathy Boudin and Dottie Zellner and Tom Hayden and thousands more—part of both. I still embraced the beloved community, and I saw no necessary contradiction between that and movement-building or making a revolution.
Todd and I were both public people, and our politics were too well-known and too knitted into our identities to make for much easy banter—Todd, an insider in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, hosting fund-raisers for the likes of John Kerry and Wesley Clark; me, allergic to military men by nature and still searching for the revolution I knew we needed.
Bernardine and I did have one face-off in public with Todd, on a national radio show shortly after 9/11. The interview and conversation began cordially enough, with long stretches of agreement among the three of us about the horrors of war and the importance of dissent and opposition. But after several minutes, Todd disrupted the surface calm, saying, “We’re being overly polite and deferential here, and we’re acting as if our disagreements are cultural when in fact our differences were deeply political.” Yes, yes, we agreed quickly—let’s talk politics and let’s go deeper.
“Let me read you something that these two folks wrote in 1969 that they apparently believed at the time,” I recall Todd starting, “which is absolutely insane.” Bernardine and I exchanged a look. Oh, God, brace yourself, I thought. Our rhetoric, while very much of the time, was regularly off the rails. We each held our breath and waited, her eyes shining in anticipation as she sent me a telepathic message: What does Todd have in his back pocket? Eat the cats? Off the pigs? Kill your parents? Eat your parents? Eat the pigs? Todd read: “To a large extent the wealth of this country—certainly the wealth of Standard Oil and General Motors and Coca-Cola—already by right belongs to the people of the world.”
Yes, yes, go on. We still believe all that; get to the crazy part.
I was waiting for the other shoe to drop when he said, “You see what I mean? This is absolute political madness.”
“Wait, wait! That’s all you’ve got?” Bernardine relaxed with an amused smile and asked Todd calmly what part of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism he didn’t understand.
The cats-for-snacks tale was small potatoes (an appetizer, so to speak) next to the notorious, persistent, and fictional story of Bernardine’s abiding love affair with Charles Manson. She was reported to have said in the middle of a speech at an SDS meeting in 1969 in Flint, Michigan, “Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in their bellies. Wild!”
I didn’t hear that exactly, but the words were close enough I guess. Her speech was focused on the murder just days earlier of our friend Fred Hampton, the Chicago Black Panther Party leader, a murder we were certain—although it would take decades to prove beyond a doubt—was part of a larger government plot, the Gestapo-like tactics of a repressive police force. Bernardine linked Fred’s murder to the murders of other Panthers around the country, to the assassinations of Malcolm X and Patrice Lumumba, the CIA attempts on Fidel’s life, and then to the ongoing made-in-the-USA terror in Viet Nam. “This is the state of the world,” she cried. “This is what screams out for our attention and response. And what do we get from the media? A sick fascination with a story that has it all: a racist psycho, a killer cult, and a chorus line of Hollywood bodies. Dig it!”
So I heard it partly as political talk, agitated and inflamed and full of rhetorical overkill, and partly as a joke—tasteless, perhaps, but a joke nonetheless. Hunter S. Thompson was making much more excessive, and funnier, jokes about the fascination with Charles Manson then, and so was Richard Pryor. I thought again about my protest outside State ville prison on the night the State of Illinois executed John Wayne Gacy and immediately saw the conspiracy and the connection: they eat cats, they love Charles Manson, and they’re in cahoots with John Wayne Gacy. Yes, yes, yes: “Unrepentant terrorist supports serial killer!!!” It fed a stuttering but established plot point, while piling on additional color and spice—one could envision Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy Jr., Bernardine, and me all settled in to our own little satanic psycho cell with the grilled cats.
Not only was it an apocryphal story, it was irrefutable—every attempt to explain, including possibly what I’ve just written, was held up to further ridicule as deeper dimensions and meanings were slipped into place and attached to the story. Elizabeth Kolbert of the
New Yorker
, for example, after a three-hour conversation, reached out and touched Bernardine’s arm and said, “I just have to ask you about the Manson quote. It’s my duty as a journalist.” Bernardine responded in full, explaining the context, the perverse humor of it, Fred’s murder, the savagery in Viet Nam, her own meaning-making, and her sense of its meaning to insiders and outsiders alike. She said pretty much what I wrote above, but it made no difference: Kolbert reported the received story intact without any mention of any part of their exchange. One of her colleagues at the
New Yorker
, Hendrik Hertzberg, looked over her piece. Since he’d been in the Trotskyite Left back in the day and was a popularizer of the Manson myth, perhaps it was him and not Kolbert who tacked on this added fiction: “The Manson murders were treated as an inspired political act.” Not true—not even close. A lie on every level. And we didn’t eat cats!
Two months later, Steve Neal, playing off Kolbert, wrote: “The Weathermen idolized killer Charles Manson and adopted a fork as their symbol.” What’s the use? By the end of the year a
Time
magazine essayist called me an “American terrorist” and, echoing the
Times
, said of me that “even today he finds ‘a certain eloquence to bombs.’” It was an endlessly repeating story, and the echo grew and grew as it bounced off the walls.
Two of my students started a project to count up the number of terrorist events in the modern world and tally them by category: religious group, political sect, individual, established government. Two others examined high school history textbooks and began a chart of the “good terrorists” in US history (Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, George Custer, Teddy Roosevelt, John McCain) and the “bad terrorists” (Geronimo, Joe Hill, Lolita Lebron, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Oscar Lopez, Reies Tijerina, Mabel Robinson and Robert Williams, the Earth Liberation Front, Weather), with the textbooks conflicted and the jury still out on John Brown and Harriet Tubman. One of my conservative students created on poster board a large and elaborate portrait of me crafted from torn newspaper clippings; diagonally across its front, he had taped a fat piece of yellow police tape and scrawled in thick black marker the words PUBLIC ENEMY! I think he was being ironic.
It was late, and Bernardine and I were ready for bed. We found ourselves instead in the Press Room at the Sundance Film Festival, facing journalists, critics, editors, and columnists in a series of radio interviews, TV spots, and brief Q and A dialogues. Minutes before
The Weather Underground
documentary had screened for the first time to a warm response—this was Park City, Utah, after all, on the eve of the unpopular US invasion and occupation of Iraq—and a thumbs-up and a wink from Robert Redford, who was sitting near the front of the theater. The two young filmmakers who’d midwifed the project for years, Bill Siegel and Sam Green, were rapturous, a tidal wave of relief sweeping through them, cleansing and joyful and over the moon. Their baby was finally born, and all the labor, sweat, and tears seemed worth it after all. But ambitions were now expanding and expectations naturally rising; getting into Sundance was great news and reward enough a few months before, but now a commercial release, financing for their next project, maybe an Academy Award loomed on the horizon. The sky’s the limit! Bill and Sam had invited us to join them and their families and crew at Sundance, and now they looked to be on the far side of giddy—happy-exhausted, adrenaline-fueled, and bouncing blissfully off the walls.
A young entertainment reporter for the
Los Angeles Times
asked Bernardine and me a couple of questions about our lives and experiences underground: How had we stayed together for over three decades with all the chaos and madness in our lives, and did we really think a revolution was possible in America? Then she said, “You seem so everyday normal, and I wonder why you didn’t follow the nonviolent path of King and Gandhi and Mandela.” We were always asked about violence, an obvious and essential question when it came to anything Weather, but her question had an interesting twist. “Mandela?” Bernardine and I asked in unison. “Yes,” she repeated, “King and Gandhi and Mandela.”
“Do you know why Nelson Mandela was in prison for twenty-seven years?” Bernardine asked.
“Well, for opposing apartheid,” she replied.
“Yes, that’s true,” Bernardine said, “and for organizing and leading an army—armed struggle, sabotage, the whole difficult deal. If you’re really interested, you ought to read his 1964 statement from the dock at the opening of the defense case in the Rivonia Trial, where he admitted and defended all of it.”
“I will,” she said.
It made sense to put Nelson Mandela in the front lines of some imaginary League of Justice Heroes—his struggle for freedom throughout his life was exemplary, righteous, brave, and laudable. And because he had achieved hero status by then inside the United States, it made some sense to conflate his work with others and to imagine him as a nonviolent saint. For Americans, the world becomes less messy if we don’t have to think too hard about complex choices and if our heroes are all good and without contradiction.
At his trial, where he stood as first accused in a vast conspiracy against the state, Mandela reviewed his biography and the dreadful situation for Blacks in his homeland and quickly claimed to have been one of the main organizers of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing in the fight against apartheid. He argued that years of nonviolent struggle had brought nothing but greater repression and exploitation, and that the people demanded they answer violence with violence and develop new channels toward liberation. The apartheid state never missed the opportunity to call Mandela and the ANC “terrorists,” even though the Rivonia trial made it crystal clear that “the violence which we chose to adopt was not terrorism.” Mandela made the case for choosing sabotage on government buildings and other symbols of apartheid as a way to inspire people without injuring or killing anyone. And he freely admitted his attraction to building a classless society, influenced, he said, by reading Marx and from admiring the structures and organization of early African societies, in which there were no rich or poor and there was no exploitation. The Rivonia speech was required reading for us in the late 1960s, and I had several passages memorized.
The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. admired the ideal of a classless society too, and while the mythological King led a boycott, had a dream, won a Nobel, ended racism, and made us all better people, the real King was a spirit-based, pro-democracy activist and a deep analytical thinker, a loving pastor, and an angry pilgrim on a quest for social justice in his time. He evolved and became more radical with every campaign he led, every resistance he encountered, and every step he took. When his journey and his mission led him to link racial justice to economic justice and global justice, he called for an end to the three great evils—racism, militarism, and materialism. He urged activists and creative dissenters to call the nation to a greater expression of humanness, echoing the blunt-talking Fannie Lou Hamer, leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. When Hamer had been asked if she wanted full equality with the white man, she said that she didn’t want to go that low but sought instead a real democracy and a rebirth of freedom that would lift a newly enlightened America out of the morass in which it was stuck.