IV. Apprenticeship with Foundation-Funded Terrorists: Ayers and Dohrn 141The terrorist is now a suitably blasé and laid-back professor of education (not a professor of
English, as Obama evasively described him in the Philadelphia debate with Hillary when George
Stephanopoulos asked him about Ayers), and a very influential professor at that. According to the
review in the New York Times, ‘Mr. Ayers is probably safe from prosecution anyway. A
spokeswoman for the Justice Department said there was a five-year statute of limitations on Federal
crimes except in cases of murder or when a person has been indicted.” Ayers might still be
vulnerable on the murder technicality, some might argue. Ayers’ transitional program to the
Weatherman communist utopia was summed up in classically Oedipal terms as follows: “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.” He is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at
Chicago. When questioned about his exhortation to homicide and terrorism, Ayers again retreats
into the postmodern briar patch: if I say terrorism, it’s just a metaphor, a piece of irony! Ayers
comments: “it’s been quoted so many times I’m beginning to think I did [say it],’ he sighed. “It was
a joke about the distribution of wealth.” (Dinita Smith, “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives; In a
Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life with the Weathermen,” New York Times, September
11, 2001) Too bad if you died.
Ayers’ consort is Bernardine Dohrn, the sado-masochistic heroine of new left Weatherman
terrorism who strutted as an elitist dominatrix in a leather mini-skirt on the stage of the SDS split
convention on Wabash in Chicago in June 1969, ready to rumble with the downscale pro-working
class nerds and Maoists of Milton Rosen’s Progressive Labor Party, a split-off from the CPUSA.
Bernardine was the MI-6 leather lady Diana Rigg of The Avengers – with a whip, she could have
started a brilliant career at such establishments as Dominique’s House of Pain. But Bernardine had
come from the left-communist circles around the National Lawyers’ Guild, deployed into SDS to
turn the organization towards lunatic purgative violence, the advocacy of race war in the US, and
speedy doom.
Ayers lived underground as a fugitive from the FBI from 1970 on. He disappeared from view
after his then wealthy elitist/terrorist girlfriend, Diana Oughton, along with Ted Gold from the Mad
Dog faction and the ultra-violent Terry Robbins, all died when their bomb factory, located in a posh
Greenwich Village townhouse, blew up because of their incompetent handling of explosives.^35
Between 1970 and 1974 the Weathermen took responsibility for 12 bombings, according to Ayers’
count, and also helped spring narcotics guru Timothy Leary from jail where he was serving time.
This last caper was a piece of crude political theater, and showed anybody with a brain that the
Weathermen were in fact police agents and that the CIA wanted Leary freed to further inundate the
world with LSD under the auspices of Project MK Ultra. Dohrn is now the director of the Legal
Clinic’s Children and Family Justice Center of Northwestern University. Their old friends Kathy
Boudin and David Gilbert, whose child they have raised, are serving prison terms for a 1981
robbery of a Brinks truck in Rockland County, N.Y., in which the Weathermen murdered four
people, including two policemen and two armed guards.^36 Gilbert is clearly hoping that a President
Obama would pardon him.
TERRORIST MÉNAGE À TROIS: AYERS, BERNARDINE, WARD CHURCHILL
Ayers, as the New York Times review concedes, was always suspect in SDS because he was the
son of a rich and powerful executive, and was suspected of having intelligence community links.
His father, Thomas Ayers, was, as we have seen, chairman and chief executive officer of
Commonwealth Edison of Chicago, chairman of Northwestern University and of the Chicago
Symphony. The little rich boy Bill Ayers attended Lake Forest Academy in Lake Forest, Ill., then