Old grudges are, for me at least, the strongest. And I am most attached, among many others, to my grudge against Bill Ayers. But I thought that all happened a long time ago. Who would have believed a year ago, that Prof. Ayers, a guy who – in my view – was destructive and harmful forty years ago, could reappear as a "terrorist demon."

While it may be true that in his current life he is a useful citizen, when Ayers writes about the past, he is just as enraging, disingenuous, and manipulative as he ever was. In an op-ed article appearing in this past Saturday’s New York Times Ayers retains his old flair for self-promotion and misrepresentation. For example, he writes

In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices…

From this extremely lawyerly misrendering of events, one might think the townhouse explosion on Wast 11th Street which killed Teddy Gold, Diane Oughton and Terry Robbins had nothing with him. His role, one might erroneously conclude from this bizarre telling, only started after that explosion. I am tempted to apply to Mr. Ayers Mary McCarthy’s remark – everything he says is a lie including “and” and “the.” But that wouldn’t be fair. Some of what he says is true. The War in Vietnam was wrong, for example.

Check out Katha Pollitt's similar, but, of course, better expressed Ayers critique from The Nation

Many years ago, I was an SDS activist. I met Mr. Ayers a few times and was appalled by what I took to be his divisive, destructive efforts. He was a charismatic figure, cute as a button, smart and funny. In my memory, however, Mr. Ayers was most effective at disrupting the efforts of other activists. I have had long ties of friendship with a number of people who were swept up in Ayers’ mad bomber fantasies and respect the views and current work of a number of people who formerly had fallen under his spell.

In his current incarnation, Mr. Ayers justifies his adventure as follows:

Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.

In my judgment, Mr. Ayers’ statement, above, is deceptive in the extreme. The weather underground program was the product of a specific vision of society, an analysis of how social change occurs and strategic plan for effecting that change. According to my memory of their plan, the Weather Underground saw itself as cutting edge cadre-group leading the rest of us to their view of revolution & paradise.In my view, the vision was clouded, the analysis was not thought out and the strategic plan was premised on the idea of Mr. Ayers and his co-workers fooling and forcing the rest of us into paying attention to their antics.

Mr. Ayers wrote a book, Fugative Days about his antics which I think stinks. It misrepresents what he and others said and did to each other as well as to the rest of us. Borrow it from the Library. NYPL has three copies. In my view, a good assessment of this volume was written by ex-weather person Cathy Wilkerson in "Z" Magazine, a leftist journal of which I have been very fond. About Ayers’ book she wrote in part:

Fugitive Days is a cynical, superficial romp through struggles waged in the 1960s and 1970s to change our country’s unjust and inequitable institutions.

In my own view, Ms Wilkerson’s own memoir of that time is, by contrast to Mr. Ayers’, honest, thoughtful and accurate. Try reading hers. Its called Flying Too Close To The Sun .