Thank you and thank you for coming, and thanks to Barnes and Noble for hosting this occasion. Hello, okay. One of the things about events like this, and I've done dozens in the last couple of months, is that they it's an important tradition and forum not only to allow people to speak, but to have some free exchange of ideas.So I urge you here, at this bookstore tonight, to buy something – not this book, necessarily. Buy something. Last book store I was in I bought this map of central Asia and you can tell when it was published because it's the official one, the flag version. But I'm serious, and I think it's important to support local book stores and to support stores that engage in public space and dialogue.
It's still not working? Well then come closer and pick a seat. Why are you guys in the back? What's the problem?
Here's what I thought I'd do. I'd read some things from the book and then engage in a conversation. If this is like events in recent weeks, the conversation will not only be about this book but will come to encompass current events, state of affairs, what's going on in the world. I think that's good because we need to have open public spaces, public dialogue, and this is a kind of an urgent, difficult time in America, and a time when we ought to be facing each other and talking to one another, and having to have that conversation go in any direction you want it to go in.
The book had the strange fate of being born on Sept. 10. and that was the first night that I was out on this book tour, and the event that night as I was in a public book store in Michigan, really had all the elements that really exceeded all my highest hopes for the book. That is, young people came, old people came, I read some things from the book and you really had a far-ranging discussion.
I had hoped that by telling the truth of one person journeying through that difficult decade, then others would tell the truth of other journeys. In fact in the spring of this year when revelations came out about Senator Kerrey, that that might be – and I know Bob Kerrey somewhat from work on school reform, and he is a good guy, but what he did in Vietnam, as you know, was not a good thing. And I had hoped then that that would open up some kind of discussion that would lead to some movement towards truth [and] reconciliation about a difficult time. The fact that it was quickly swept under the rug, that it was not the occasion for deeper discussion, was to me a bad thing. And a loss.
Still I hope that might happen with this. September 11 of course changed the equation dramatically. It seems to me unimportant for some people to discuss the issues that were alive in those days, and much more important for them to get on with what's happening now without even a glance toward history, and I think that's probably a mistake, but probably an understandable one. In any case, now we're two months later.
I do think that it's important that we have this conversation, I think that we need to explore the events of that time to get a grip on now. But I start by underlining one fact which I think has been widely misinterpreted. This book is called ‘Fugitive Days: A Memoir.' It's not called ‘Fugitive Days: A Manifesto," or a polemic, or a defense, or a lot of other things that have been the focus of the attention it's gotten.
My intention was to write a memoir. I take the basic definition of memoir to be trying to create something of the resident color or texture of a time, and then to narrate one person's journey through that time. It was meant to capture what it was like to be there then, not what it's like now.
We now know that the war in Vietnam, while it was terrible and bloody and atrocious, was a 10-year episode. It wasn't an infinite episode. It didn't go on forever. It started in 1965 and ended in 1975. But that's not what anyone knew in 1968, or 1969.
Then it was the war to end all wars. It was continuous war. And how does one behave in that kind of situation? We now know a lot that would be easy to smugly reinterpret. I wrote it as a story, I meant it as a story, and that's how I still think it's best understand.
I was fortunate to be raised by the sweetest, most loving mother in the world, and the first piece I'll read is about her.
(Ayers reads three excerpts, then fields questions.)
Q: Was the merchant marines a draft-deferred job?
A: No, it wasn't. I joined the merchant marines because I was running away from Michigan and I wanted to see the world and I thought, well, I hitch-hiked south, actually, in search of the civil rights movement and it was a big lull then, except for some people, but nothing was going on so I hitch-hiked up to Baton Rouge and signed on with the merchant marines and though that I'd see the world, have an adventure and write a novel about it. But there's nothing novelistic about the merchant marines for me. It was just sea-sickness and hard work. I hated it. It wasn't draft deferment. Yes, somebody over here has a hand up.
Q: I wonder if you could talk for a bit about your fugitive days.
A: About the days underground?
Q: Yes.
A: Well, the first half of the book is the side years leading up to the explosion in Greenwich village and the death of Diana Oughton and Ted Gold and Terry Robbins, and then going underground. What I write about in the second half is the attempt to pull back from an abyss that we had self-created, and to find a way to, on the one hand resist what we saw as a growing repression inside the United States, and have an effective impact on the war. That's why I write about the creation of the culture of the underground.
Q: I'm interested in your comments about the civil rights fueling the anti-war movement because I think most people don't know. I can understand your feeling at the time, but a lot of people in the civil rights movement were also pacifists who had opposed the second world war, so that was the basis for a lot of the movement. Like Dave Dellinger.
A: Dellinger for sure, but basically, while that's true, the people I knew, most people in the Student Non-Violent Coordination Committee, James Forman came out of a communist background, not a pacifist background. He was older than most of the people in SNCC. Ella Baker came out of a furious left tradition in the trade unions, and so there were a range of people, but if you simply read what SNCC said in it's resist-the-draft statements in 1965, you see a very strong anti-colonial, anti-imperialist analysis filled with implications of the war in Vietnam in 1966.
The war in Vietnam is a kind of colonial war, and the language that they used links the colonialism going around the world as a metaphor that they even found too extreme.
So Bob Moses said, "I don't want to go halfway around the world to fight for the freedom that I don't enjoy here. I'm colonized here, they're colonized there, I have more in common with them then the people who are colonizing both of us.And you have King's statement, which [was] a tremendously militant and principled, not pacifist, statement, in a sense, anti-colonial statement.
I think that's part of it but what I meant was broader than that. What I meant was that the moral agenda of the country was being defined by the language of civil rights, and human rights. Not just one man, one vote, but I have a right to live my life. I have a right to determine this in the fruits of this society. That sense of social justice was in the air for young people. Not for all people, but I think that had a huge impact on shaping the anti-war movement.
Q: Would there be any changes in strategy that, knowing what you know now, you would have made?
A: Absolutely. But one of the reasons I don't in the book, as I say, is because it's a memoir. I've reread a lot of memoirs recently, including political memoirs. Like Homage to Caledonia, and This Boy's Life, and Angela's Ashes, and one of the things memoirs don't do is catalogue misbehaviors and then apologize for each one and say what the proper course was. I'd be hard-pressed to do that anyway, because in the writing of this a couple things happened. At one point I asked myself, "Is there anything more arrogant and narcissistic than writing a memoir?" And I actually couldn't think of anything but I pressed on. And for a while I thought I should try to write a history, and then felt inadequate to that.
So I interviewed my brother who was underground with me for 11 years, about his memory of certain events, and since he remembered those events so dramatically differently, I again decided, well, I don't want to do oral history. What I'll do is a memoir, a book that plays with questions of memory. When I look back to 1969 and 1970, which is arguably when the Weathermen went off the tracks, I actually can't... there are two things that I think are interesting.
If anyone has figured out in retrospect or prospect how one transforms a student movement into an adult movement. We didn't do it. And a lot of places either, successfully. And if you look at 1969, ‘70, there are a lot of things happening, and again. One thing that's happening is that 3 million people are being killed in Vietnam. A couple thousand people a day. The sense of urgency was very much there. The black movement, which had been the civil rights movement and became the black liberation movement, splintered and fractured.
And now we know that the leadership of the Black Panthers and SNCC were targeted for assassination. Now, it seems almost preposterous to say so, but it's true. And we know it's true, because it's come out in court records and lawsuits, the resolution of the Fred Hampton case. Fred Hampton lived one mile away from us, and the question was, what do we do?
Within SDS, a big student organization, there were many factions organizing and agitating and moving in different directions. So as I said a minute ago, some people decided to 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. I think it was tremendously complicated. I think we did a lot of things that were wrong, and certainly I have a lot of regrets for those things, like the death of my girlfriend and her close friends was a disaster. Certainly, flirting things 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.
Q: Why do you think there ought not to be a sign next to you that says: ‘This man is a war criminal'? You are an unrepentant killer of innocents.
A: No, no.
(crowd): He never killed anybody!
Q: He failed! He's a failed terrorist!
A: Don't shout him down. Let him finish.
Q: And I don't understand how a group of nice, normal people can be standing here, and letting you get off jokes. If Osama bin Laden walked in here and said well, yeah, we did it, but here's why we did it ... it's horrifying to me, sir, that you can be here selling your books to these people and that this store will continue to sell it.
A: Well as I said, I don't think anybody had to buy my book, you can go buy a map of Afghanistan. But the fact is, you're wrong. The fact is that, here is the context in which we acted. And again, this is not a defense or a manifesto about that, but the fact is that there was an official policy of our government to create terrorism in Vietnam.
It was official policy. Whole areas were designated "free fire zones." Millions of people were murdered, innocent people, by our government. That was official policy. How you resisted that policy to me was a burning question, and it's still a good question.
For example if you saw ... Say you lived in Southern Afghanistan right now, and you knew that there was a group of people who had terrorism as their policy, and you could see them and they were close to you. You couldn't quite get to them, and you could try to stop them. Wouldn't you try to stop them? Of course you would in that context. The fact is that our government had a policy of terrorism and we were trying to stop the terrorism.
Q: Where was the bomb that your friends were going to ... that blew up your friends? Where was it going to be? Was it at the Pentagon?
(crowd laughs)
A: Well, you're right, and as you say ... In those three years there was something like 20,000 arsons and bombings against U.S. government targets in this country. Something like 20,000, and as far as I know one person was killed and, you know, that is unforgivable. There's no way to defend it, because he was an innocent person and he did nothing, so you're absolutely right but every day that that war went on, well, what was the right action to take? What did you do to stop it?
Q: I did nothing to stop it.
A: That's the problem. We have Bill Clinton, George Bush, Dick Cheney, all these guys did nothing and they supported it in their own words, but they did nothing to stop it.
Q: If it was wrong it was something to be stopped, but it wasn't wrong.
A: Okay, that's where you and I disagree.
Q: I remember that Abbie Hoffman had a book called "Steal this book." And in that book there were descriptions of how to build little bombs and things. It was the feeling of the age. It wasn't inspired to make bombs like, you know, at the World Trade Center, but there were small moments in this time in history to create dissension about something you didn't believe.
A: Well, of course, Abbie's book and Abbie's a great example, so am I, so are we, I mean the rhetoric was accepted. And yet I do think the central moral challenge, the central challenge to democracy, the central challenge to humanity in this country was an illegal, immoral war in Asia, and the struggle of African-Americans for human rights and liberties. Those were the things that confronted us. Today we have different problems confronting us, but every individual in every generation has the same challenge. How do you face the challenges of democracy that you find in front of you? And there are no formulas for easing into this.
Q: How did the north's action against the south after we withdrew from Vietnam, the fact that they killed more people than died on both sides of the war over the entire course of the war...
A: That's not true. Not true, not even close to true. Where did you read that? There was absolutely no massacre in the south, it's just not true. It might be part of the Young Americans for Freedom doctrine, but it's absolutely not true.
The interesting thing is, go to Vietnam now. What is it we were fighting for? To prevent what? Because in Vietnam, especially in the south but all over Vietnam, there's an entrepreneurial spirit, it couldn't be more capitalist on the ground. It's just not what you imagine at all. Not even close.
Q: But that happened in Cambodia.
A: Cambodia is a great example of the way in which the United States widening the war created more death and destruction and we conveniently walked away from it and pretended we didn't create it, but we did create it.
Q: I agree that it was it wrong and that it did destabilize the government, and I would just like to say one thing about that "burning question." The answer is, in this country, we vote them out of office.
A: Right.
Q: That's what we do in this country. 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. I don't say that only the Richard Nixons were in office, but your tactics made it harder for those who wanted to make the change democratic, because that is the answer to the question you pose. The answer is, we vote them out of office.
A: I'm not going to disagree with you except to say we did vote, the American people did vote, three times, to end the war. We voted for Johnson because Goldwater had his trigger on the finger [sic], so that was one time where we had the opportunity and it escalated. And then we voted for Nixon as the anti-war candidate, and he also escalated it.
It would be a big stretch to say that the left brought McGovern down.
Q: There was something you touched on briefly in your introduction that I hope you can elaborate on. You said that there are certain lessons that we learned from the Vietnam error that we can use in the current situation. I'd be interested if you could talk about that.
A: One is that, as a country, we tend to be unaware of the rest of the world. And one of the lessons is that we should wake up to the world. For example, after September 11 I went to my class and I asked them to draw a freehand sketch of central Asia. And they couldn't and I couldn't. And now I can, and I hope that you can, because if you've been reading the papers you could draw a freehand sketch of central Asia, but I bet you couldn't on Sep. 10.
I asked my students for many years to draw a sketch of Panama or Grenada, when we were involved there, and it's almost impossible for them to do that. I asked them, what percentage of the world's population lives in the United States, and over the years their guesses have ranged from 10 percent to 30 percent. And the answer is that it's less than 5 percent. And I've asked and wondered for two decades, for three decades really, how long can the situation exist where less than five percent of the world's people consume over half the world's goods, and what are we really to do to defend that injustice?
And I think that that's one of the lessons, that we should be wide awake and engaged in the world. Not as the hollow-sounding "World's only superpower," which sounds hollow after September 11, but as a nation among nations, as one among many, not as the one and only. So that, I think, is an important lesson.
Q: In December of 1968, 5000 people were massacred by the Vietcong. You say in your statement that you released on November 9 that you "never intended to kill or injure anyone, and never did." Yet in your book you state that, when you bombed the Pentagon, you blew up a bathroom and "quite by accident, water pumps blew and flooded the computers, for a time disrupting the air war." Now, in those four little words "disrupting the air war," there's a shade of American troops being imperiled. Now it's arguable that you were fighting for the Vietcong regime which, like the Taliban, considers man the property of the state. So, when you tell the New York Times "I don't regret setting bombs, I regret not setting more," it's hard to reconcile that with being a condemnation of terrorism.
A: What I said to the New York Times was, given that 2000 people were dying a day, given that there was official policy of terror, that we acted in a very restrained way. And I still actually believe that. Since you raised the New York Times, let me read one quick thing from the book...
There's a certain eloquence of bombs from a distance, a poetry and a passion.
The rhythm of B-52s dropping bombs over Vietnam, the deceptive calm at 40,000 feet as doors open...
That was reported in the New York Times as me saying "there's an eloquence to bombs." That's the exact opposite of what I said. Similarly, I've been quoted as saying: "Guilty as hell, free as a bird. It's a great country." That was in the Tribune. What I said was "Among my sins at the time, pride and loftiness, a twinkling line at the time, guilty as hell, free as a bird."
There's a twisting of logic that's going on. We have responsibility for our country and our government, and this was being done in our name. The slaughter of innocents was being done in our name as official policy. And we should have taken it personally, and some of us did. We stopped it, and I think it was good that it stopped. So we did stop.
Q: Last week I had the chance to read a Village Voice that was written around the time of the '68 convention, and when you say that you're romanticizing part of it, the fear and the astonishment of what was going on here, in Chicago, was also, you were shocked in some ways at what was going on to the innocent, democratic people who just wanted to demonstrate an opinion.
A: Yeah, the other thing you bring to mind is that there's a way that America always wants to insist upon its innocence, that we're always innocent of any kind of tilt towards violence. We're not a violent people. We're a good people.
But the fact is that the innocence is what becomes in the end so unbelievably frustrating. We are a country and a culture that is built on violence and we practice it all over the world.
The fact that we pretend that we don't know anything about it is absurd, and in those days at that time the violence that was raining down every day was apparent to all of us. We were asked to witness this terror and we were asked to succeed, and if we didn't succeed we were un-American.
Q: Just on something you were saying about America, about taking a stance of innocence, in terms of us as Americans taking responsibility for the actions of the government abroad. I was noticing that there's a flag over there just like the flags popping up everywhere, just like ‘God bless America.' I was discussing with friends my dislike of waving the flag and my choice not to display it, seeing that for me it means a whole lot more than just pride in American philosophy, and what your stance was on that and on the sort of resurgence of patriotism.
A: You know, I do think that after September 11, lots and lots of Americans spontaneously reached for the flag as an expression of collective community grief. The palette from which we get to choose is fairly narrow, and therefore people reach for the flag. But I also think that from day one, it was manipulated into a political agenda by powerful forces, and what we're witnessing now is something that was unthinkable even three or four months ago.
The imprecision of language is something I've been upset about. Everything's changed since September 11. Well, yes and no. Are the things you cared about Sep. 10 now completely gone? You don't care about let's say fair funding for schools, if that's what you cared for? You don't care about women's rights if women's rights was what you were fighting for? You don't care about the death penalty because everything [changed]?
The fact is everything has changed in some degrees [sic]. I was thinking today about the people who saw the devil in the flames of the WTC, and in a way the flames were a Rorschach. The right and the left saw vindication. Jerry Falwell said, ‘see, all those homosexuals and the ACLU and stuff, God's getting you for that.' And the left also had a muted kind of response but wanted to say see, ‘I told you. Don't arm those right-wing fundamentalist thugs, what are you thinking?'
What we've witnessed in the last two months, where at last now we've seen acts like the massive transfer of wealth from public to private hands was unthinkable in August. It was unthinkable to take that much money and take it from public hands and give it to the corporations with absolutely no caveats, benchmarks, like with Chrysler we had all these caveats. To give George Bush the power in the anti-terrorism act to do the things that were already happening.
While the rest of us had our heads in our hands weeping for a week, some guys were smart enough to sit down and write legislation, and they weren't messing around. I think Ashcroft didn't miss a minute's sleep, I don't think he shed a tear. His legislation was on the table a week later. So I think that's an interesting kind of phenomenon.
The right has felt a tremendous swelling of power and the great hope that it could achieve its wildest agenda items including that it could retell the story of Vietnam. Which has been unable to be retold in all these 30 years. But when I hear George Bush saying this is not like Vietnam, where the politicians overruled the generals. Phew, there's an old lie coming back to haunt us. And that's what I fear.
I took from day one Susan Sontag's admonition, "let's grieve together, let's get angry together, but let's not get stupid together," as a very hopeful way to think about this stuff. When George Bush says you're with us or with the terrorists, we should say, none of the above. Eighty percent of the people of the world are not with U.S. policy, are not with U.S. policy in that region. But they're not all terrorists.
Q: If you wanted to make an impact on the world, why did you become an academic?
A: One of the things that's difficult for all of us is how to live a life that's meaningful for you, in which you can make a difference in the world as you find it. Some of the challenges we faced 30 years ago are the same challenges we face now. The enduring stain of racism, enduring drive for global power, increasing disparity between rich and poor.
But there's something new, and that's the retreat from public education. A retreat materially, morally, turning our back on education as a solution to the problems we face, and combined with that: the embrace of criminal justice as a metaphor to solve society's problems.
(applause from some audience members)
That's why we're seeing the scuttling of public school budgets. I feel very privileged that I was a teacher before I joined SDS, and I've returned to teaching. I feel very lucky to be at one of the points at which the real challenge to democracy is taking place, which is the challenge to education.
Any more questions? [Ignores raised hands of conservatives.] Well, thank you.
(off mic)
I love those organized Northwestern conservatives. They're so pathetic.
Related stories from the Northwestern Chronicle
November 27: Shaking hands with a terrorist
November 27: Heston 'appalled' by Dohrn
November 8: Dohrn puts NU on front page
November 1: Dohrn must go, say NU law school alums
October 31: Hit where it hurts
October 19: She brought the war home
