Fugitive Days: A Memoir (review)

At its last national convention in June 1969, the largest white radical student organization in US history, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), elected Bill Ayers one of its three national officers. Since the early 1960s SDS had been at the forefront of white student anti-war and anti-racism protests. At the time of Ayers’s election over 80,000 young people called themselves SDS members. Less than a year after his election, SDS had ceased to exist while Ayers himself had become a fugitive and a leader of the Weather Underground Organization (WUO). In March 1970 three Weatherman, including Ayers’s lover, Diana Oughton, and close friend, Terry Robbins, died when a bomb they were making accidentally detonated. Over the next several years the WUO would successfully bomb a variety of targets, including the United States Capitol and Pentagon, in opposition to the Vietnam war and to domestic racism. In Fugitive Days, Ayers, now a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, offers a memoir focused on the decade from 1965 to 1975. In recalling an important part of the tone and tenor of the times Fugitive Days provides a welcome addition to the literature of the period. Unfortunately, Ayers compromises his memoir’s full potential by glossing over or entirely forgetting some of his own most important policies and actions as a leader.

An engaging writer, Ayers is at his best in conveying a sense of what the mid-1960s felt like to a whole generation of college youth. He is particularly successful at bringing to life how the US war against Vietnam affected so many young people. Increasingly, Ayers’s generation came to see its own nation’s brutality. With a whole array of weapons—clean bombs, seismic bombs, cluster bombs, carpet bombs, napalm and phosphorous bombs, fragmentation bombs—the US wreaked its vengeance on Vietnam’s land and people for year after horrifying year. Young people, Ayers maintains, could only take so much of it in: the image of “a slim peasant boy, his torso pocked with tiny razor cuts from knees to shoulders, a thousand little rivulets of blood sucking his life out of him;” or the more famous image of the eleven year old girl running naked down the road, her face contorted in terror, the napalm still clinging to her, burning away at her flesh. And these images then magnified beyond comprehension: “Three million Vietnamese lives were extinguishedeach with a mother and a father, a distinct name, a mind and a body and a spirit...Each was ripped out of this world, a little red dampness staining the earth, drying up, fading, and gone” (pp.125–6).

Little’s the wonder that so many college youth acted with such urgency, and such desperation. Through his growing awareness of Vietnam and a sense of the burgeoning civil rights movement of the mid-60s, Ayers slowly entered the life of an activist. At Ann Arbor’s 1965 Teach-In against the Vietnam war, then SDS president Paul Potter asked the question that would decisively push Ayers to a full-time commitment: “How will you live your life so that it doesn’t make a mockery of your values?” Ayers, together with a significant part of his generation, attempted to place his life in a moral context. “You could not be a moral person with the means to act,” Ayers thought, “and stand stillTo stand still was to choose indifference. Indifference was the opposite of moral” (pp.61–3).

While Ayers effectively portrays the social environment and events which pushed him to activism, he undermines his account, ironically, by skipping lightly over many of those events in which he himself played a leading role. For example, Ayers passes in silence over the rise of Weatherman politics. He fails to mention that SDS’s final national convention elected him National Education Secretary. Indeed, Ayers skips directly from the Chicago demonstrations at the 1968 National Democratic Convention to that June 1969 SDS convention. But this was precisely the period in which...