Entries associated with the tag "Bill Ayers":

This week in Hot Type I'm discussing Deborah Nelson’s The War Behind Me, a new book about atrocities committed by American soldiers in Vietnam and documented in archives that for two decades the army kept secret. 

One of the intriguing characters Nelson came across in the archives was “Concerned Sgt,” a whistle-blower who after My Lai began writing anonymous letters to army brass. “I am a US GI now in Germany, and I worry a lot about Vietnam, and the wrong we are doing there to the Vietnamese people, and to Gis like myself,” said the first of his three letters. “I know I have information about things as bad as My Lay [sic], and I don’t want to tell my congressman for fear I will hurt the Army. ”Concerned Sgt" reminded me of the anonymous cop who in 1989 wrote three letters to the People’s Law Office with inside information about police commander Jon Burge. Unlike the army, the People’s Law Office seriously followed up.

But even though the Reader’s John Conroy brought police torture forcefully to Chicago’s attention with a series of articles that began in 1990 and continued for the next 17 years, the idea that Chicago police tortured suspects, many of them innocent, remained unabsorbed into Chicago’s civic understanding of itself. So it has gone with America and the unprocessed fact of American war crimes.

Yet we've known without knowing. Vietnam was the only war in American history whose heroes were its POWs – those hapless warriors whose positions were overrun, who got lost in the bush, or whose planes crashed. The careful deference that Barack Obama paid John McCain as an American hero hadn’t been enjoyed in earlier presidential campaigns by John Kerry, George McGovern, George H.W. Bush, or Bob Dole, all of them combat veterans. McCain wouldn't have been such a hero if he’d simply fought the war; instead, somewhat like the country itself, he became its hostage.

Three names kept coming to mind as I read The War Behind Me: Jon Burge, James Bond Stockdale, and Bill Ayers. Stockdale won a Medal of Honor for his conduct as a POW. But what had he done? He’d attempted suicide to keep a secret -- his knowledge, because he’d been in the air that night, that the Tonkin Gulf incident that led to the congressional resolution authorizing the war was a sham. Years later I wrote him about that. He replied, "Your insistent question, about why I did not notify the American people about the documentary inaccuracies behind the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (that is to say, the absence of an attack on the Maddox and Joy on the night of August 4th, 1964) seems to ignore the practicalities of what a person in my position could do." (The emphases are his.)  "I was on active duty, out of the country, a voice in the wilderness. There was no problem with my conscience. I had done the right thing. I had reported 'no boats' to my ship, and my ship had accurately forwarded my report to the right office in Washington, at the highest priority. It was received there 12 hours before the 'reprisal' at Vinh occurred.

"There are still people in Washington who put out government documents insisting that I (and dozens of other eye witnesses) are wrong -- and when pressed, hide behind 'highly classified, unavailable sources' -- all of which I know to be B.S. -- that prove that they were right after all. . . . There are some very big names who are fighting for their lifelong reputations over this one. . . . Insiders say there will not be a free flow of truth on this until the last of them are in their graves."

So there’s our war -- authorized under "false pretenses" (Stockdale's phrase) and fought with criminal perversity. Say what you will about the violent, obnoxious, and ineffectual Weathermen, they were a "resistance" with something to resist. Yet it’s Bill Ayers who's told that until he apologizes he isn’t entitled to the useful life he leads now. He moved on more successfully than the country did.

If you ever find yourself singing Chicago's praises to the folks who wish you'd come back home to Topeka, without actually believing a single word you hear yourself saying, then I have just the article for you. Salon's "Look Homeward, Obama," by Dan Conley, a former speechwriter for Mayor Daley, is as dewy-eyed a  portrait of our city as you'll find this side of a City Hall press release. Conley's larger point is that when Obama preaches the politics of consensus he should be taken seriously, because . . .

Because "anyone who doubts that a toxic political environment can be overcome should look to Chicago. Consensus has become more conspicuous than conflict. Deal-making is more important than showboating. In short, the city's politics has become post-partisan. It's a concept that should be familiar to anyone who has followed Obama's presidential bid."

I don't think there's any question but that Richard M. Daley has run a more inclusive administration than his father, Richard J.,  and that the son's big insight was the recognition that most of his political opposition would go away as soon as he cut it in on the action. Conley aggregates personalities as disparate as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, and Bill Ayers, because they all measure up to what he seems to think is the only standard that matters in Chicago -- they all have something to offer. Ayers, for example, "has become an expert in public school reform. He wants to participate at the table and he brings something to that table, so he's taken seriously. . . . In Chicago, as long as you bring something to the table, people are willing (almost eager) to ignore the less flattering dimensions of your character."

And as for the screwed-over little guy who's the hero of 10,000 newspaper columns, Conley bathes his tormentors in as gentle a light as will ever find them: "Critics might also argue that leaving a seat at the table open -- and allowing a multitude of unelected leaders to emerge -- opens the door to corruption. Chicagoans would respond that the true naif is anyone who thinks that citizens who are inactive in politics -- who bring nothing to the table -- should share equally in the largesse of government. Politics does not reward passivity."

Conley came to town in the mid 90s, and he's got a shaky grasp of the history that set the stage he found when he got here. For instance, he suggests that Council Wars preceded the '83 primary between Byrne, Daley, and Washington. And today's docile City Council symbolizes restoration, not reform.  Conley writes: "In the same chamber that during the Council Wars featured endless parliamentary maneuvers and more than a few fistfights, policies are ratified in generally dull proceedings; details are usually ironed out internally before going public." Conley likes to think of this colorless secrecy as post-partisan; someone else might call it post-antiauthoritarian. Details are forever being quietly ironed out internally by Chicago's movers and shakers, who regard public knowledge of their intentions in pretty much the same way biologists regard the atmosphere of Jupiter -- as incompatible with life as we know it.

Conley's article has stirred up a lot of response at Salon, where plenty of his readers wonder what he's been smoking. Some don't recognize Conley's Chicago, some don't buy the idea that Obama was ever enough of a player in Chicago politics to warrant being discussed in that context. But others are Obama fans happy  to embrace Conley's premise, which he restates in conclusion: "What Obama promises is an America where politics is a good thing, where arguments on the merits are encouraged, where a seat is always open for anyone eager to sit at the table and contribute what they can."

An approving nod to the Sun-Times for finding it no big deal that Barack Obama is on friendly terms with Bill Ayers, even though, back in the day, Ayers was a Weatherman who "bombed the U.S. Capitol, a bathroom in the Pentagon, and even cased out the White House." The Sun-Times regrets that Ayers "remains sadly unreflective about his Weatherman days, as revealed in his memoir Fugitive Days. . . . But Ayers, it is also true to say, has since followed in the footsteps of the great Chicago social worker Jane Addams, crusading for education and juvenile justice reform. His 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court, has been praised for exposing how Cook County's juvenile justice system all but eliminates a child's chance for redemption."

Having gone so far as to compare Ayers to Jane Addams, the Sun-Times beat a swift retreat to a shrug. "Ayers," the editorial summed up, 'is nothing more than an aging lefty with a foolish past who is doing good."

I admired Fugitive Days for answering the $64 question, "What were they thinking?" To me, his refusal to disassociate himself from his old self made the book credible, though others wanted something more ashamed and repentant. At any rate, a few days after the book was published 9-11 happened. That same morning, the New York Times carried an interview with Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn that began with Ayers saying, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." The book was damned and disappeared.

Writing about William F. Buckley a few days ago, I quoted conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg scowling at the Obama-Ayers relationship. How come, Goldberg wondered, "being a radical means never having to say you're sorry"?

Is Ayers, for all his good works, unapologetic and unreflective?

I interviewed him when his book came out. "I gave up something precious--my own individual mind and heart," he told me then. "The distinction I'm making is that I don't think we should apologize for our extremism. I should apologize for a lot of other things."