Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  Which is the point of this amazing novel. Knowing as much as may be humanly possible, and yet not enough to be absolutely sure, guarantees choice—free will’s wiggle room.

  I can’t be sure (of course!), but I think we meet Sissy again in Big as Life, before she had to hit the streets and sleep at night in empty day-care centers. We certainly meet Mae Boyle, before she married Cyril O’Connor, the only creature in her father’s house who isn’t dipped in bronze, a prim tormented child who worships the Virgin at her own wild altar of buttons, garlic, and pigeon feathers. And Artie and Louise put in an extended reappearance, not yet married but the parents of a child, on a Long Island sabbatical from the delirious city. Artie plays games at a seminar with Fermat’s Last Theorem, Euclid’s Fifth, Riemann’s Hypothesis, and the Parallel Postulate. Louise, in a garage, consulting her Audubon, dreams of Peaceable Kingdoms and does kinky things to an owl. Maureen looks on, eagle-eyed. While she clearly cares about them, she’s itchy to have her own say.

  After speaking in tongues of endings that are almost happy, in fables intended to remind us of Perrault and La Fontaine, Howard seizes her own stage. She will stick pins in Audubon, with his gun, violin, and dancing slippers. “I hardly call it a day,” said the American Woodsman, the son of a slave trader, “if I have not shot a hundred birds.” And in his journal: “Cuckoos, killed 5. Painted Buntings, killed 20.” This is another, darker parable, and she is made to wonder: Killing for art, for science, for greed, for the blood-drunk lazy crazy hell of it? It is also the self-consciousness of a great artist in her own forest—more love, violence, work, and songs.

  Bill Ayers’s Fugitive Days

  Every good hunter is uneasy in the depths of his conscience when faced with the death he is about to inflict on the enchanted animal. He does not have the final and firm conviction that his conduct is correct. But neither, it should be understood, is he certain of the opposite.

  —José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting

  MY BLOODTHIRSTY STAGE, the warrior phase of a developing manhood, lasted from age six until age twelve. At six, I was the first little boy on my block, in Washington, D.C., to have a Lone Ranger atomic bomb ring. You peeked in at a color photograph of the mushroom cloud. In fact, owing to a mixup of breakfast cereal box tops in Battle Creek, Michigan, I had four Lone Ranger atomic bomb rings, one for every other finger on both hands. I only wish I could have quoted Sanskrit.

  At age twelve, in 1952, I found myself wearing a WIN WITH KEFAUVER T-shirt in Joe McCarthy territory, at a hunting and fishing lodge in northern Wisconsin, when one of the black Labrador retrievers came back with a nose full of porcupine quills. Grim men in checkerboard motley took up arms in the forest primeval. I found the fierce porcupine, hiding up a tree. I shot it twice with a .22 rifle. It fell at my feet, not exactly a sweet kill. I can’t remember if we ate it. But no bird sang, and neither did a Hemingway.

  Robin Williams has since explained: “Kill a small animal, drink a lite beer.” My son, who was born so fortuitously in 1962, describes himself today as the first Berkeley antiwar protest, or a draft dodge. I tell you this so that you will know just who’s thinking out loud about Weatherman and the Days of Rage and the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion. In my opinion, they were all a bunch of Lone Ranger atomic bomb rings.

  Bill Ayers takes a different view. He was himself a street-fighting Weatherperson, a rock-and-roll Tupamaro, a social bandit out of Hobsbawm, like Rob Roy, Pancho Villa, Jesse James, and the Opportune Rain Sung Chiang. He was in love with another Weatherperson, Diana Oughton, a former Peace Corps Quaker who died making bombs on West Eleventh Street. He then married a third Weatherperson, Bernardine Dohrn, a University of Chicago law-school graduate feared by J. Edgar Hoover (“the most dangerous woman in America”) and American Rhapsodized by Joe Eszterhas (“our real babe in bandoliers”). And he’s foster father to the child of a fourth, Kathy Boudin, who remains in prison for the 1981 stickup of a Brinks truck that killed four people. How he got to American Berserk, carrying a poem by Ho Chi Minh in his pocket, tattooed on his neck with the rainbow-and-lightning logo, and playing with the sticks of dynamite they nicknamed “pickles,” is the subject of this unrepentant retrospection.

  Up to a point, Fugitive Days is the frazzled story of almost any white middle-class sixties activist in the civil-rights and antiwar movements, written with a speed-freak rush between sometimes embarrassing apostrophes to Mnemosyne—memory “is a delicate dance of desire and faith, a shadow of a shadow, an echo of a sigh,” when it isn’t “a twig cut from a tree and tossed like a toy from crest to trough” on a murky “wine-dark, opaque, unfathomable” sea, or the “ghosts and fears that haunt us, floating desires and falsifying dreams more powerful and more compelling than hard reality will ever be,” or “a mortuary,” a “mystification,” and maybe even “a motherfucker”—but true to the kids we were. At exactly that OK Corral point, however, when a movement devolved into a vanguard, when participatory democracy turned into a tantrum of the Leninist cadres, when Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry started looking like Don DeLillo’s alphabet killer cult, Bill Ayers blinks.

  Such swaddled beginnings: The middle child of well-heeled midwesterners—his “rising executive” father became CEO of Commonwealth Edison of Chicago—young Bill grew up in comfortably suburban Glen Ellyn, Illinois, playing football almost as soon as he could walk, catching crayfish and sticking frogs in the Du Page River, summering at YMCA camp or on Cape Cod, reading books like The Runaway Bunny and Catcher in the Rye, going to movies like The Flying Leathernecks, prepping at Lake Forest Academy, and, upon discovering in Ann Arbor that he was too small to cut the mustard on Michigan’s Big Ten football team, dropping out to play instead for social justice.

  Well, not immediately. He auditioned in Detroit for the Reverend Gabriel Star, who sent him to New Orleans, where Father Peter Paul Streeter couldn’t figure out what to do with him, so he signed up as a merchant seaman on a freighter to Piraeus full of “Food for Peace.” Rome was where he first read about Vietnam, in the International Herald Tribune. Back then to Ann Arbor and Students for a Democratic Society, being radicalized by his first bonfire, teach-in, sit-in, and jail time: “anarchists and street people, radicals and rockers.” Not to mention Diggers, Wobblies, dope, hair, and his first tattoo, the red star on the left shoulder. Like Bob Moses and Martin Luther King, Jr., he would be “a nonviolent direct action warrior, in the spirit of the civil rights struggle. I was about to personally disrupt this war, and I tingled all over.”

  What this meant, at age twenty in 1965, was teaching young children in a freedom school and learning from a local leader of Women’s Strike for Peace “the fine points of female orgasm.” By age twenty-one, he was director of the Ann Arbor school and setting up a similar one in Cleveland—food and lodging paid for by church groups and labor unions, two dollars a week spending money and an expanding agenda that included a rent strike committee and a health-care project—when he experienced his first urban riot: “The strange thing was to live in an atmosphere simultaneously terrifying and deeply energizing.” Alas, when Stokely Carmichael and Black Power came along, “I had to get out of the way”—which meant leaving both Cleveland and Jackie, the young black woman with whom he was sleeping. But he had seen enough:

  Night after night, day after day, each majestic scene I witnessed was so terrible and unexpected that no city would ever again stand innocently fixed in my mind. Big buildings and wide streets, cement and steel were no longer permanent. They, too, were fragile and destructible. A torch, a bomb, a strong enough wind, and they, too, would come undone or get knocked down.

  So it was back to Ann Arbor, where he met Diana, just back herself from Guatemala. Not only could she worm dogs, can fruit, and drive a motorcycle, but she was as blond as Bill. About Bill, Diana wrote to her sister: “I’m afraid he’s going to be a boy forever—he’s got a Peter Pan complex, and no Wendy Girl in sight.” Together, they “wanted to teach the children, feed the hu
ngry, shelter the homeless, fight the power, and end the war.” And yet, as the war worsened, so did their behavior. If Diana began to identify with Simone Weil, longing to parachute behind enemy lines, even cutting her long hair, Bill seemed to channel the “By Any Means Necessary” Malcolm X poster on the wall above their bed. In Washington for the 1967 demonstration, he told TV reporter Peter Jennings, who had paid for the steak he ate: “I’m not so much against the war as I am for a Vietnamese victory. I’m not so much for peace as for a U.S. defeat.” Even before the assassinations of Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, the Mexico City Olympics or the Chicago Democratic Convention, “everything seemed urgent now, everything was accelerating…. It fell to us—and we were just kids—to save the world.”

  You already know more than you want to about Chicago 1968. But Ayers makes clear the determination of the student radicals, wearing red headbands, carrying backpacks with Vaseline and goggles to protect them against tear gas, hammers to smash windows, slingshots, blackjacks, cherry bombs, and marbles (to scatter any cavalry charge), to bring down capitalism, racism, and imperialism by kicking butt. After which “smoke and rage,” there was “fear, then naked panic,” and, finally, “sheer joy and wild relief to be there cherishing every lovely blow.” For those in need of an epiphany:

  The serpent of rage was loosed in the wide world, and it sank its passionate fangs deep into our inflamed hearts, power and corruption lying in the tall grass side by side along the pathway of wrath.

  Uncontrollable rage—fierce frenzy of fire and lava, blowing off the mountaintop, coursing headlong, in an onslaught of unstoppable chaos—choking rivers, overwhelming the living things in its disastrous path, consuming to exhaustion.

  Purifying fury, white-hot and cutting laserlike through illusion, burning a fine, straight tunnel to the very soul of things, illuminating anger, passionate and perceptive, eliminating all distraction and doubt, our burning shining pinpoint of lucid, absolute certainty at last.

  This doesn’t sound to me much like Bob Moses, Grace Paley, Allen Ginsberg, or Joan Baez. It sounds more like Big Ten football.

  The sky was blue and the whips were black.

  —Isaac Babel

  Nor, trust me, do you really want to hear about the takeover of SDS by its Maoist faction, Progressive Labor, which scowled upon the “revisionism” of the North Vietnamese. It wasn’t necessary to be a member of any wing of the Revolutionary Youth Movement, all of them waving their Little Red Books, to want to secede in 1969 from a lunatic state of mind. But Ayers and his buddies took up citizenship in a system almost equally delusional—with its rhetoric of “wargasms” and “an American Red Army,” its ideology of pothead group sex and rubbishy machismo, and its dorky four-fingered fork salute. They brought the war home by invading high schools, trashing supermarkets, going to kung fu movies, hassling autoworkers on a beach, passing out leaftlets at a Hells’ Angels rally, burning an effigy of Henry Ford III at a Davis Cup tennis match, springing Timothy Leary from prison, accusing each other of reading poems or eating ice cream, blowing up police statues and themselves.

  Diana had to be identified from the print on a severed fingertip.

  Ayers might have told us why, looking back, he now thinks so many smart kids shape-shifted their shamanic selves from Dr. King to Dr. Strangelove, or Baader-Meinhofs and the Red Brigades. There is even reason to suspect that he knows things about himself he’d prefer to blame on Harry Truman and Hiroshima than to analyze out loud. For instance, even before he read Dickens, Twain and Hemingway, Ellison and Kerouac, Rousseau, Thoreau and Marx, even before his favorite films turned out to be Bonnie and Clyde and The Battle of Algiers, he seems to have had a crush on boom-boom. The Fourth of July was his favorite holiday because of cherry bombs—“and the rocket’s red glare.” At age fourteen, hanging with the neighborhood pool sharks and bumper tags, he proved himself an honorary “Italian” by keeping silent after he was accidentally set on fire by an exploding zip gun/pipe bomb, whose ingenious construction from match heads, firecracker fuses, threaded bolts, cotton wadding, and ball bearings he lovingly describes. To pass the time at Lake Forest Academy, overprivileged preppies “trapped small animals in the woods and blew them up with candle bombs late at night.” As early as p.21 of Fugitive Days, young Bill has already asked a poignant question:

  Could there ever be a really good bomb? It could not be built to hurt or kill. Maybe it could extract minerals from the ground. Maybe it could knock over an abandoned building, or maybe the Pentagon after everyone goes home. Simple earth-works, performance art, everyone standing back. Bombs away.

  But Looking for Mr. Goodbomb will not entirely explain his memoir’s prurient interest in pressure-trigger, alarm clock, magnifying glass, and nipple time bombs, in Bangalore torpedoes and homemade grenades, in nitroglycerin, ammonium nitrate, mercury fulminate, chloride of azode, and dynamite, not to mention hat pins, brass knuckles, garrotes, and saps, or, even after the death of Diana, the training in the desert with high-powered rifles and nine-millimeter pistols. The once-upon-a-time “nonviolent direct action warrior” has become his very own free-fire zone:

  This bizarre and violent time, this ritual of combat, this surreal setting combined with ferocious demons vomited into the dark-eyed night, pursuing me now with anonymous, deadly hatred. I was sure of only one thing: whatever happened next, I was choosing with eyes wide open, and while I might be wrong or foolish, limited and inadequate, mine would not be the suffering of the hapless victim. I might be crushed, but I would never complain and I would never bring suit. Life’s tough, and I knew what was up. Get a helmet.

  This is the cuckoo sprung from the clock of a Sumer warrior-king, a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid psychology of masculine triumphalism. So it’s no surprise, just lousy timing, that on the very morning of the terror bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bill Ayers should be quoted, in a smirking interview in the New York Times, as saying of his Weather days: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Maybe he’s joshing again, as he assures the Times he must have been if he actually said in 1970, “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at.” (Intended, he now says, as “a joke about the distribution of wealth.”) His wife, Bernardine Dohrn, must likewise have been joking when she said in 1969, after the Manson gang murders: “Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach. Wild!” (Dohrn hastens to tell the Times that “we were mocking violence in America. Even in my most inflamed moment I never supported a racist mass murderer.”) And Jerry Rubin told me in 1977 that he had only been joking in 1968, after Robert Kennedy’s assassination, when he declared: “Sirhan Sirhan is a Yippie!”

  After the Village townhouse explosion, when all the Weather balloons went underground, they resolved to be more careful: “No one at that safe house in those white hot days wanted to surrender, and no one argued for surfacing or disbanding. No one even thought that we should turn away from violence on principle. There was, however, a consensus growing that our actions would be strongest as symbols, a kind of overheated storytelling.” So, while the last half of Fugitive Days is devoted mostly to the tradecraft of hiding from the FBI, mention is also made in passing of bombings of ROTC buildings, Selective Service offices, and the “corporate giants most clearly identified with U.S. aggression and expansion” like Standard Oil, United Fruit, Chase Manhattan, and IBM.

  Each, says Ayers, was “hugely magnified because of the symbolic nature of the target, the deliberate and judicious nature of the blow, and the synchronized public announcements suggesting the dreadful or exhilarating news that a homegrown guerrilla movement was afoot in America.” He insists that “I thought about the justification for each action…. [We] did our best to take care, to do no harm to persons and no more damage than we’d planned.” I’m sure that all the other kamika
zes of Kingdom Come say pretty much the same thing before they bomb another abortion clinic. Later, speaking of the Pentagon, Ayers tells us: “Because nothing justified their actions in our calculus, nothing could contradict the merit of ours.” We’ve heard this before, too, from everybody in Belfast, Sarajevo, and Beirut who has ever killed a child because his Higher Power told him to.

  Let’s leave it simple. Let’s valorize, instead of Weatherman, those who strung along with Gandhi on his Salt March to decolonize the Indian mind in 1930. And the Dutch doctors who refused, during the Nazi occupation, to screen for genetic “defects.” And the Danes who declined to build German ships, feed the German army, or honor the Nazi racial laws, while whisking away their Jewish fellow citizens to Sweden. And the Fisk students who desegregated Nashville’s downtown lunch counters in 1960 and thereby launched a second American revolution. And the Polish workers in Solidarity who occupied a shipyard in 1980, and, by insisting on their right to strike, began, without firing a single shot, the dismantling of the nonprofit police states of Eastern Europe. And those disenfranchised citizens of martial-law South Africa whose economic boycott spread from black townships to the conscience-stricken West, paralyzed the apartheid state, and led eventually to free elections. And those Chileans who ended Pinochet’s dictatorship with street festivals, protest songs, union activity, vigils by the mothers of the disappeared, and a surprise plebiscite. Not to forget the women of Manila who shamed the tanks of Marcos with a fusillade of yellow flowers, and the Chinese students in Tiananmen Square, or what Aung San Suu Kyi is apparently accomplishing under Rangoon house arrest.