A Little History
The New York Times has a shameful history of titanic moral failings. It was Walter Durante, the Moscow correspondent for the New York Times who ridiculed the Hearst newspapers for reporting that Joseph Stalin’s Communist regime had stripped Ukraine of its abundant crops, thereby condemning millions of Ukrainians to death by starvation in the “bread basket” of the Soviet Union. Stalin was in a snit because the fiercely independent Ukrainian farmers were resisting a forced demotion to collectivist serfdom; Stalin wanted to teach the kulaks a bitter lesson. Though Durante privately acknowledged that fifteen million Ukrainians had been starved to death, he was so eager to suck up to the planet’s bloodiest avatar of communism that he suppressed any mention of cannibalism among the starving Ukrainians in his dispatches to the Times.
In the end, millions of Ukrainians were dead, the New York Times had bestowed an undeserved respectability on a monstrous regime, and Walter Durante walked away with a Pulitzer Prize for his deceitful dispatches. Franklin Roosevelt used Durante’s whitewash as a cover to give the Soviet Union the diplomatic recognition it so eagerly coveted, even as most Western governments shunned the Soviet Empire.
Having done its best to boost the reputation of international socialism (the communists), the New York Times had a go at soft-pedaling the crimes of National Socialism (the Nazis). During the six years of the war in Europe, 1939-1945, the Times printed 24 thousand front-page stories; only 26 of those stories touched on the Holocaust. Of those 26 stories only six identified the Jews as targeted victims; all the other stories referred to Hitler’s victims as “refugees” or “persecuted minorities.”
The New York Times knew exactly what was happening to European Jews. To this day, the Times is owned by Jews of German descent. The Sulzbergers were close to the American Jewish community; they had access to intimate details of the burgeoning Holocaust. And yet, the Times made a habit of mentioning the Final Solution only in short blurbs, spaced days apart and relegated to obscure locations deep inside the paper. In essence, the Times had assembled a frightening mosaic image of the European genocide, but chose show Americans only one small mosaic tile at a time. No wonder American readers of the New York Times were shocked by the Holocaust after the war’s end. There was no way they could have comprehended the scope of the Holocaust from the fragmented and tepid coverage that the Times had dribbled out. Because of its prestige, the New York Times set the tone of general apathy about the Holocaust during the war, to the bitter frustration of Jewish groups that were struggling to arouse public indignation.
So, the New York Times has a checkered past of intentional under reporting, of deliberate falsification of the historical record, and of ideological myopia. The moral character of today’s New York Times is set by Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., a plump metrosexual baby boomer who has transformed his inheritance into a “life styles” newspaper in his own image. For Arthur, Jr., memories of the ‘60s retain the warm patina of his unclouded commitment to all things leaning leftward. Back then, Arthur was arrested more than once at antiwar demonstrations. He was an unapologetic supporter of the Vietnamese communists. In their book The Trust, two former New York Times journalists, Alex S. Jones and Susan Tifft, recall how Arthur’s perplexed father queried him after one of his arrests: “If a young American soldier comes upon a young North Vietnamese soldier, which one do you want to see get shot?” Without blinking the younger Sulzberger replied, “I would want to see the American get shot.”
This is the same Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. who welcomed the ruminations Barack Obama to the Op- Ed page of the Times, but refused to print anything by presidential candidate John McCain. More recently, Arthur lent twenty-one column inches on his Op-Ed page to the communist ideologue and former bomb crafter William Ayers, and once again the Times became a soap box for a self-serving liar dispensing false history.
Just Another Jerk
Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. found a soul mate in William Ayers. The December sixth ‘08 issue of the New York Times showcased an Op Ed screed by William Ayers that ran down the left side of the page like a densely-woven ribbon of lies. It was capped with the deceptive title “The Real Bill Ayers”; it under-identified Mr. Ayers as a “professor of education” and the author of Fugitive Days.
Mr. Ayers was far more forthcoming in his seminal 1974 manifesto Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism in which he totally identified himself with the goals of Soviet imperialism. In plain English, Bill Ayers described his band of spoiled-brat revolutionary wannabees, the Weather Underground, this way: “We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more then four years. We are deeply affected by the historic events of our time in the struggle against U.S. imperialism.
“Our intention is to disrupt the empire, to incapacitate it . . . to join in the world struggle, to attack from the inside.” This commie manifesto was dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan, the Jordanian gunman who assassinated Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
By his own admission, William Ayers was not some average Vietnam War protestor, he was a deeply committed anti-American communist partisan who yearned for a communist North Vietnamese victory. He wasn’t against the Vietnam War, he was against our side in that war. As he makes crystal clear in Prairie Fire, he had dozens of other grudges against America, quite apart from the far-away war, and he used these grudges to rationalize his ultimate goal: to inspire a violent mass uprising against our government and to pave the way for a communist “dictatorship of the proletariat,” to quote his words exactly. William Ayers and his co-conspirators bragged about their criminal acts, going so far as to itemize them in print. Ayers would be an aging convict today but for the fact that prosecutors gathered some of their most damning evidence without benefit of a warrant. When the case against him was dropped, Bill Ayers crowed, “What a country! Guilty as hell and free as a bird!”
William Ayers begins his Times Op Ed piece with the sentence, “In the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama.” He opined that “Secondary characters in the narrative included an African-American preacher with a fiery style, a Palestinian scholar and an ‘unrepentant domestic terrorist.’ Linking the candidate with these supposedly shadowy characters, and ferreting out every imagined secret tie and dark affiliation, became big news.”
Indeed it did, as it should have. We knew next to nothing about Barack Obama and a man is better understood by the company he chooses to keep. Mister Ayers then pouted about being cast in the “unrepentant terrorist” role, which he said made him uncomfortable. “Now that the election is over,” said Ayers, “I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve in this drama wasn’t me, not even close.”
Having cast himself as the aggrieved victim, Ayers begins his deception in earnest. “I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations.”
Ayers is trying to win the sympathy of all those graying boomers who share warm memories of anti-war piety and ducking the draft so some black kids could take their places in the call-up quota. Ayers is trying to fade his exceptional behaviors into the texture of more commonplace behaviors of the 1960s. Bill Ayers recalled that, “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 – the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious . . .”
Mr. Ayers is far too modest. The Weather Underground didn’t merely “take responsibility” for planting bombs, they crowed about it. If Bill Ayers never personally killed anyone it wasn’t for lack of trying. The March 1970 “accidental explosion” in the heart of New York City reduced an entire building to rubble when a Weatherman bomb crafter stupidly crossed the wrong wires and detonated sixty sticks of dynamite. The Weathermen were building a super-sized anti-personnel fragmentation weapon with a dynamite core packed inside thousands of steel nails. It was their intention to detonate this hideous device at a big dance for new recruits down at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Had they been more adept, Bill Ayers’ comrades would have killed, maimed, blinded, burned, deafened, mutilated and disfigured hundreds of patriotic young men and the young women they had invited to the dance. As it happened, the bomb killed Ted Gold, Terry Robbins and Bill Ayers’ girlfriend Diana Oughton. Did these deaths make Bill Ayers a more cautious and reflective human being? Not at all. The bomb-happy Weather Underground was on a roll.
Only weeks before they clumsily blew apart their Greenwich Village bomb factory, the same Weatherman faction did their best to incinerate a New York State Supreme Court justice and his family. On the night of February 21st, 1970, as the family slept, these arrogant children of privilege planted three gasoline-charged incendiary bombs around the judge’s house and under his car, in upper Manhattan. The blasts jolted the family awake – the judge, his wife and their nine-year-old son. The family remained inside the burning house for fear they would be killed as they fled. The family was saved by courageous neighbors. Daybreak revealed graffiti on their front walk: “Free the Panther 21 – the Viet Cong have won – kill the pigs.” That same night bombs were thrown at two recruiting stations in Brooklyn and at a police car in Manhattan. The Weather Underground targeted the Supreme Court justice because he was presiding at the trial of the “Panther 21,” members of the Black Panther Party who were implicated in a plot to bomb New York landmarks and department stores. The following November, eight months after their bomb factory mishap, a letter promising more bombings was sent to the Associated Press. It was signed by Bernardine Dohrn, who later became the wife of William Ayers.
Clearly, Professor Ayers’ characterization of his Weather Underground as a peace-loving group of idealists who placed “several small bombs in empty offices” is a knowing deception. His younger self was clearly enthralled by the pornography of violence. He had become the Dr. Strangelove of the Far Left – a rich brat who learned to stop worrying and love the bomb – any bomb. Trying to burn a slumbering family alive in their beds was clearly an act of attempted murder. William Ayers was the wing commander of a drunk-on-violence bomb group that was hell-bent on mass murder at a Fort Dix dance. The bomb he planted at the Pentagon very nearly killed a woman and her young daughter. Only dumb luck and a legal technicality have kept this jerk out of a prison cell or a gas chamber.
Twenty Weatherman bombings occurred between 1970 and 1975. Bernardine Dohrn had disparaged nonviolence as an “excuse for not struggling”; she had proclaimed, “I consider myself a revolutionary Communist.” After the Greenwich Village explosion, she and Bill Ayers spent the next eleven years eluding law enforcement.
Professor Ayers’ version of his Weather Underground days bears little resemblance to the historical record. He says in the Times, “The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even commonsense . . . We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments . . . and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life . . .”
Well, I ask you, is torching the home of a sleeping family just a “symbolic act of extreme vandalism”? Is detonating a monster fragmentation bomb at a crowded dance an attack on property, not people? Clearly, Bill Ayers is just an older, but no wiser, version of the devious jerk he was decades ago.
William Ayers then compounds his literary felony by telling us that “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 or injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.”
No, no, no . . . they weren’t engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately; they were discriminating bomb builders; they had a plan, a Big Idea, one of those Marxist visions of a radiant utopian future for us all. In any case, he didn’t want to stop the war, he was a self-described communist. He was hoping for a communist victory. And pleeeze don’t call torching houses in the dark of night or exploding bombs in crowded dance halls terrorism. That was just Billy’s “screaming response” to whatever was bugging him just then.
It takes an extraordinary sort of emotional detachment for William Ayers to say, “I never killed or injured anyone.” Perhaps he’s delusional. Under American law anyone who conspires in criminal behavior that results in the death of a human being is guilty of murder. It’s called felony murder. By virtue of this legal doctrine William Ayers ought to be in prison, and so too should that depraved wife of his, Bernardine Dohrn. They are certainly guilty of attempted murder.
The bombing of a San Francisco police station in February 1970 left one person dead and two people injured. William Ayers participated in planning this lethal bombing; Bernardine Dohrn participated in its execution.
The Weathermen had recruited a Vietnam veteran named Larry Grathwohl, who won their trust. Larry was an FBI mole. In 1974 he gave sworn testimony before a Senate subcommittee. From his testimony: “[William Ayers] cited as one of the real problems someone like Bernardine Dohrn had to plan, develop and carry out the bombing of the police station in San Francisco, and he specifically named her as the person that committed that act . . . He said that the bomb was placed on the window ledge and he described the kind of bomb that was used to the extent of saying what kind of shrapnel was used in it . . .”
Mr. Grathwohl also gave sworn testimony about the Weatherman bombing in Detroit, which he said was planned by William Ayers to maximize the number of people who would be killed or maimed.
“The only time I was ever instructed or we were ever instructed to place a bomb in a building at a time when there would be people in it was during the planning of the bombing at the Detroit Police Officers’ Association building and the 13th Precinct in Detroit, Michigan, at which time Bill said that we should plan our bombing to coincide with the time when there would be the most people in those buildings.”
Mr. Grathwohl alerted the police, who found Bill Ayers’ bomb hidden at the Police Officers’ Association. It was thirteen sticks of dynamite and a detonator. The ignition device, a burning cigarette, had failed to ignite the fuse on the detonator. If the cigarette had lit the fuse, you wouldn’t be reading this essay because Bill Ayers would have been executed for mass murder decades ago.
Bill Ayers says, “I cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today.” Certainly not now that he has tenure and a swanky manse in Hyde Park and the ear of our new president. Bill Ayers endeavors to lull us by pointing out that “. . . for the past 40 years, I’ve been teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life, and the need to realize that potential through education.” Really? What sort of education? Would a perceptive person call that education left wing indoctrination? Yup. That’s what his Chicago Annenberg Challenge was all about, but more about that in a moment.
Professor Ayers continued: “The dishonesty of the narrative about Mr. Obama during the campaign went a step further with its assumption that if you can place two people in the same room at the same time, or if you can show that they held a conversation, shared a cup of coffee, took the bus downtown together or had any of a thousand other associations, then you have demonstrated that they share ideas, policies, outlook, influences and, especially, responsibility for each other’s behavior. There is a long and sad history of guilt by association in our political culture, and at crucial times we’ve been unable to rise above it.”
But what if it was more than a shared cup of coffee, a conversation or a bus trip downtown? What if it was an intimate collaboration that continued for years, a collaboration dedicated to achieving shared objectives?
William Ayers does his best to make his relationship with Barack Obama seem cordial and casual: “President-elect Obama and I sat on a board together; we lived in the same diverse and yet close-knit community; we sometimes passed in the bookstore. We didn’t pal around, and I had nothing to do with his positions. I knew him as well as thousands of others did, and like millions of others, I wish I knew him better.”
Barack Obama’s characterization of their relationship is similar; he dismisses Ayers as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” It’s all a lie. Both Ayers and Obama are trying to blind us with fairy dust.
The Archives
The archives of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge are stashed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois in Chicago. These documents tell a very different story.
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge is yet another invention of Weather Underground founder William Ayers. Barack Obama led this organization from 1995 until 1999 and he remained on its board until 2001. Working with Ayers at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge is Barack Obama’s only real executive experience and yet he makes no mention of it in either of the memoirs that bear his name. During Barack’s tenure with the CAC, he and Bill Ayers funneled over one hundred million dollars to radical education activists and “community organizers.”
Bill Ayers floated the cover story that his foundation existed to improve Chicago’s public schools; the foundation was bankrolled by an education initiative of Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In truth, Ayers and Obama shared a radical agenda. The Annenberg archives includes the recorded minutes of the Collaborative board and a history of which groups the foundation funded and which groups were turned away. The archives makes clear and certain that Ayers and Obama collaborated closely to advance their shared political agenda.
First of all, the Obama campaign lied when it asserted that Bill Ayers played no role in recruiting Barack Obama to the Annenberg Challenge. No one could have installed Obama as chairman of the foundation without the approval of the foundation’s founder, William Ayers. Mr. Ayers was one of five people who chose the first Annenberg board members in 1994. At about the time he was inventing the CAC, Mr. Ayers told Ron Chepesiuk, author of Sixties Radicals, that “I’m a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist.”
As would befit a communist radical, Bill Ayers was more intent on inspiring radical fervor in students and parents than he was in raising reading and math proficiency. In his book Teaching the Personal and the Political Mr. Ayers was plain spoken about his belief that teachers should be political agitators. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created to make Bill Ayers’ radicalism manifest.
The way Bill Ayers set up the funding process, no school was funded directly. To receive funding, schools were required to affiliate themselves with far-left groups, such as ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which was most recently in the headlines for its participation in rampant voter-registration fraud for the benefit of Barack Obama. Schools that submitted proposals to improve academic standards were routinely brushed aside in favor of groups promoting far-left community organizing and political agitation. A review of the Annenberg archives demonstrates that those groups that emphasized political consciousness raising, bilingualism and Afrocentricity were showered with favoritism by the Annenberg board, groups such as the South Shore African Village Collective and the Dual Language Exchange. An in-depth study by the CAC of its own effectiveness at raising the academic scores of Chicago public school children revealed no improvement whatsoever. That’s a lot of nothing for one hundred million dollars.
A Chicago Annenberg Challenge project that coached parents on how to advocate more effectively on behalf of their children was exposed as nothing more than a pipeline to bankroll Barack’s former base of agitation, the Developing Communities Project, which groomed Chicago residents to the Marxist critique of social struggle that Barack had learned from the notorious Saul Alinsky.
It was Barack Obama himself who convened a joint meeting of his board and the Collaborative to quash concerns of board member Arnold Weber that school principals might view Barack’s radicalized parents “as a political threat.”
All this time Bill Ayers was functioning as an unofficial, off-the-record, member of the board that Obama chaired. The Ayers/Obama collaboration was always tight, with Ayers sitting on Obama’s governance committee and Ayers making presentations to Obama’s board and Obama representing his board to Ayers’ Collaborative and the two of them arm-in-arm weaving together all the CAC bylaws. These two guys were totally wrapped around one another.
By identifying William Ayers as a “professor of education,” the New York Times is attempting to lull us into believing that William Ayers is a changed man, that he is no longer the arrogant communist punk who contrived for years to tear down America. The truth is that Bill Ayers is happy to tell anyone within earshot that he received his first teaching job while he was sitting in jail. He’s the same political desperado – older, wider, but no wiser – and just as eager to use propagandistic “education” to promote his radical left agenda. Billy the Kid Ayers believes that all teacher programs must serve as “sites of resistance” (his words) to our hideous American culture. All good leftists must “teach against oppression,” says Professor Ayers. Ayers’ left-leaning teacher-training programs were lavishly funded by the Obama-chaired Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
Clearly, when Bill Ayers, Barack Obama and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. of the New York Times join hands and whine that poor sweet Barack and darling Professor Bill are the hapless victims of a guilt-by-association smear campaign they are all trying to scam us. Bill & Barack were locked in an intimate embrace for years. In fact, the Barack Obama that millions of Americans think they know is largely a piece of political fiction written by Bill Ayers, and I do mean written.
Dreams from Bill Ayers
All the best evidence – historical and literary – points to Bill Ayers as the true author of Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father. This book is a virtual reflection of Bill Ayers’ Fugitive Days when analyzed for reading level, word count per line and literary allusions. The two books are literary twins, but neither book comes close to resembling any other memoir selected for comparison. Obama’s book is written in a high literary style, though Obama has not written anything so stylish before or since the release of Dreams. Obama has steadfastly stonewalled every request for samples of his writing for literary comparison.
After pocketing a $120,000 advance, Barack Obama was incapable of writing anything but junk despite a year-long effort. He even fled Chicago for his more-familiar Bali, in Indonesia, to help him compose his thoughts. It didn’t help. His disappointed publisher dumped him in disgust. After landing another $40,000 advance from another publisher Barack was still struggling . . . until he met veteran author William Ayers. After that, Obama’s book miraculously appeared within months – highly finished and a virtual echo of Ayers’ Fugitive Days, right down to its peculiar choice of adjectives and its nautical allusions. (Ayers had been a merchant seaman.) Before that, Obama’s total literary effort had consisted of two horrid little poems, one of them a trifle about apes stomping fruit in a cave. (For a more detailed analysis see Barack Obama: Famous & Unknown, in this series.)
So, in a very real sense Bill Ayers invented the Barack Obama that millions of Americans think they know. This means that Bill Ayers is in a prime position to embarrass Mister Obama if he should stray too far from Professor Ayers’ political agenda. There may be little chance of that, given their history of amicable and intimate collaboration.
The Grand Illusion
The documents in the Annenberg archive demonstrate that both Bill Ayers and Barack Obama are polished liars who have gone to considerable lengths to hoodwink us about their close spiritual bond. Professor Ayers, an impresario of political theater and a master wordsmith, stage crafted Barack Obama’s debut from Ayers’ own living room; he has fooled millions of readers into believing that Barack Obama is a “deep thinker.” It was all a splendid show filled with emotional uplift and talk about “hope.” None of Barack’s star-struck camp followers had any incentive to peek behind the curtain to see the real Obama: the affirmative-action student who got hundreds of unearned points on his entrance exam because his daddy had gone to Harvard. His daddy got in because he came to America from Kenya with a recommendation from Jomo Kenyatta, who needed some educated civil servants to run his country after the white folks went away.
While at Harvard, Barack won a popularity contest to become chairman of the Harvard Law Review. That was the high point of his Harvard days. He never wrote anything for the Harvard Law Review or any other law review. His total literary output consists of two lousy little poems. His memoirs were ghost-written by two different authors. He married Michelle Robinson, another affirmative-action beneficiary who got her big leg-up because her older brother had snagged an athletic scholarship to Princeton.
In the presidential election Barack Obama ran rings around a sluggish old war veteran and captured the highest office in the land. It was a triumph of showmanship over substance – a left-wing agitator who couldn’t have gotten a security clearance because of his personal history had been given the keys to the thermonuclear Cadillac.
Amazing. Obama’s ascendancy has been due, in no small part, to the invisible hand of William Ayers but the New York Times would have us believe that the two men were almost strangers. To quote Bill Ayers, “We sometimes passed in the bookstore.” It’s all a lie and an illusion.
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2009
January 3, 2009