Former radical activist Bernardine Dohrn and her companion William Ayers leave court in Chicago on Jan. 14, 1981. Dohrn received a $1,500 fine and three years probation for her role in the 'Days of Rage' disturbance in Chicago in 1969.
"AP Photo"
In this upcomming series, The Storie the Liberal Media Wouldn't Tell. We will investigate the shady past of our President Barrack Obama. No sugar coating no thrill up our legs, just the raw facts. This first of the series is his Political introduction by his admitted freind Ayres. The next in the series will be Baracks connection with The Reverend Wright.
In 1995, State Senator Alice Palmer introduced her chosen successor, Barack Obama, to a few of the district’s influential liberals at the home of two well known figures on the local left: William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
While Ayers and Dohrn may be thought of in Hyde Park as local activists, they’re better known nationally as two of the most notorious — and unrepentant — figures from the violent fringe of the 1960s anti-war movement.
Now, as Obama runs for re-election, what two guests recall as an unremarkable gathering on the road to a minor elected office stands as a symbol of how swiftly he has risen from a man in the Hyde Park left to the President of the United States.
“I can remember being one of a small group of people who came to Bill Ayers’ house to learn that Alice Palmer was stepping down from the senate and running for Congress,” said Dr. Quentin Young, a prominent Chicago physician and advocate for single-payer health care, of the informal gathering at the home of Ayers and his wife, Dohrn. “[Palmer] identified [Obama] as her successor.”
Obama and Palmer “were both there,” he said.
Obama’s connections to Ayers and Dorhn have been noted in some fleeting news coverage in the past. But the visit by Obama to their home — part of a campaign courtship — reflects more extensive interaction than has been previously reported.
Neither Ayers nor the Obama campaign would describe the relationship between the two men. Dr. Young described Obama and Ayers as “friends,” but there’s no evidence their relationship is more than the casual friendship of two men who occupy overlapping Chicago political circles and who served together on the board of a Chicago foundation.*
But Obama’s relationship with Ayers is an especially vivid milepost on his rise, in record time, from a local official who unabashedly reflected a very liberal district to the leader of national movement based largely on the claim that he can transcend ideological divides.
In one sense, Obama’s journey toward the cultural and political center is not unusual among national politicians. But its velocity is.
Politicians of an earlier generation had their own relationships with figures now far to their left. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for instance, interned at a radical San Francisco law firm while in law school.
On the other side of the political spectrum, many in the generation before hers shifted dramatically on civil rights. John McCain voted against creating a holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr. and later called that a mistake.
The relationship with Ayers gives context to his recent past in Hyde Park politics. It’s milieu in which a former violent radical was a stalwart of the local scene, not especially controversial.
It’s also a scene whose liberal ideological features — while taken for granted by the Chicago press corps that knows Obama best — provides a jarring contrast with Obama’s current, anti-ideological stance. This contrast between past and present — not least the Ayers connection — is virtually certain to be a subject Republican operatives will warm to if Obama is the Democratic nominee.
The tension between the present and recent Chicago past is also evident in some of his positions on major national issues. Many national politicians, including Clinton, have moved toward the center over time. But Obama’s transitions are still quite fresh.
A questionnaire from his 1996 campaign indicated more blanket opposition to the death penalty, and support of abortion rights, than he currently espouses. He spoke in support of single-payer health care as recently as 2003.
Like many of the most extreme figures from the 1960s Ayers and Dohrn are ambiguous figures in American life.
They disappeared in 1970, after a bomb — designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse, and turned themselves into authorities in 1980. They were never prosecuted for their involvement with the 25 bombings the Weather Underground claimed; charges were dropped because of improper FBI surveillance.
Both have written and spoken at length about their pasts, and today he is an advocate for progressive education and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she’s an associate professor of law at Northwestern University.
But — unlike some other fringe figures of the era — they’re also flatly unrepentant about the bombings they committed in the name of ending the war, defending them on the grounds that they killed no one, except, accidentally, their own members.
Dohrn, however, was jailed for less than a year for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating other Weather Underground members’ robbery of a Brinks truck, in which a guard and two New York State Troopers were killed.
“I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough,” Ayers told the New York Times in 2001.
And their rehabilitation in establishment circles, even in Hyde Park, has its limits.
Though he is a respected figure in liberal educational circles, Ayers wrote recently about how in 2006 he was informed he was persona non grata at a progressive educators’ conference in the summer of 2006.
“We cannot risk a simplistic and dubious association between progressive education and the violent aspects of your past,” he quoted the conference organizers, whom he described as friends, as writing to him.
But the couple has been embraced, by and large, in the liberal circles dominating Hyde Park politics.
“Bill Ayers is one of my heroes in life,” said Sam Ackerman, a longtime local activist. “I knew Tony Rezko, and he ain’t no Rezko.”
But others in Hyde Park, whose intellectual and political life revolves around the University of Chicago, view the couple with ambivalence. One must conclude that an intelligent well informed man such as Obama would know the radical views and actions and possibly murderous ways of such a man as Ayers. So YES! Barrack is Guilty by association. Obama was very exited about starting his National career in Professor Ayers’ home. It’s Chicago Politics thru and thru. Bill Ayers should not have been released from prison. He was allowed to indoctrinate our young college students with his communist ways.
A Breif History of Bill Ayers--
William Charles "Bill" Ayers
(born December 26, 1944)[1] is an American elementaryeducation theorist and a former leader in the movement that opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He is known for his 1960s activism as well as his current work in education reform, curriculum, and instruction. In 1969 he co-founded the Weather Underground, a self-described communistrevolutionary group[2] that conducted a campaign of bombing public buildings during the 1960s and 1970s, in response to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. He is a retired professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, formerly holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar.[3] During the 2008 US presidential campaign, a controversy arose over his contacts with candidate Barack Obama. He is married to Bernardine Dohrn, who was also a leader in the Weather organization.
Main article: Bill Ayers presidential election controversy
During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, a controversy arose regarding Ayers' contacts with then-candidate Barack Obama, a matter that had been public knowledge in Chicago for years.[61] After being raised by the British press[61][62][63] the connection was picked up by conservative blogs and newspapers in the United States. The matter was raised in a campaign debate by moderator George Stephanopoulos, and later became an issue for the John McCain presidential campaign. Investigations by The New York Times, CNN, and other news organizations concluded that Obama does not have a close Relationship with Ayers. In a new edition of his memoirs, Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-War-Activist, he added a new afterword describing the blogospheric characterization of their relationship as "neighbors and family friends" ("In 2008 there was a lot of chatter on the blogosphere about my relationship with Barack Obama: we had served together on the board of a foundation, knew one another as neighbors and family friends, held an initial fundraiser at my house, where I'd made a small donation to his earliest political campaign."). This was misleadingly characterized as his own claim by some.[67]
Personal life
Ayers is married to
Bernardine Dohrn, a fellow former leader of the Weather Underground. They have two adult children (including Zayd, who was featured in the book A Hope in the Unseen as the college friend of the main character Cedric Jennings) and shared legal guardianship of Chesa Boudin, son of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert. Boudin and Gilbert were former Weather Underground members who later joined the May 19 Communist Organization and were jailed for their roles in that group's Brinks robbery. Chesa Boudin went on to win a Rhodes scholarship.[83] Ayers and Dohrn currently live in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.
During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, a controversy arose regarding Ayers' contacts with then-candidate Barack Obama, a matter that had been public knowledge in Chicago for years. After being raised by the British press the connection was picked up by conservative blogs and newspapers in the United States. The matter was raised in a campaign debate by moderator George Stephanopoulos, and later became an issue for the John McCain presidential campaign. Investigations by The New York Times, CNN, and other news organizations concluded that Obama does not have a close relationship with Ayers. In an op-ed piece after the election, Ayers denied any close association with Obama, and castigated the Republican campaign for its use of guilt by association tactics. In a new edition of his memoirs, Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-War-Activist, he added a new afterword describing the blogospheric characterization of their relationship as "neighbors and family friends" ("In 2008 there was a lot of chatter on the blogosphere about my relationship with Barack Obama: we had served together on the board of a foundation, knew one another as neighbors and family friends, held an initial fundraiser at my house, where I'd made a small donation to his earliest political campaign."). This was misleadingly characterized as his own claim by some.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0208/8630.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground
