Fugitive Days
by Bill Ayers
Beacon Press

Bill Ayers would seem to be the unluckiest author in bookdom these days.

"Fugitive Days," his memoir of being an unrepentant advocate of violence in the name of fighting injustice, was released days before the Sept. 11 airplane hijackings and bombings committed by, apparently, unrepentant advocates of violence in the name of fighting injustice. The morning of the attack, the New York Times ran a feature tied to Ayers' book headlined: "No Regrets for a Love of Explosives."

"I don't regret setting bombs," the Times quoted Ayers as saying about his days with the Weathermen, a radical and violent offshoot of the 1960s-era New Left group Students for a Democratic Society. "I feel we didn't do enough."

Oh, that doesn't look good.

The title itself is a misnomer. Ayers doesn't get to the actual fugitive part of his book until page 204 of 293 pages. And the payoff isn't great once he gets to the actual fugitive days, which is too bad, because that's where the book shows its greatest potential. The personal anecdotes of life on the lam can be striking in showing what mundanity is given up in a life on the run. "I wondered if I would ever eat a hot dog at Wrigley Field again," Ayers writes.

Ayers details his life from birth through an idyllic 1950s childhood and subsequent activist awakening at the University of Michigan in the 1960s, an awakening that, given his penchant for writing exquisite descriptions of the women he meets, seems to be as much about getting laid as getting justice.

This part of the story is necessary, but it shouldn't dominate the book. Most of the 1960s events Ayers chronicles, like the 1968 Democratic convention and the following year's "Days of Rage" uprising in Chicago, have been well-told elsewhere; he tells us the crowd chanted "The whole world is watching" to the Chicago police, as if no one had ever heard that before.

What is most interesting about Ayers is that he and other members of the Weathermen went underground in 1970, following the accidental bombing deaths of three of their members in a Greenwich Village townhouse. Ayers, and the others, re-emerged in 1981 after one Weatherman, Kathy Boudin, participated in a Brinks truck robbery attempt that ended with two cohorts shooting and killing two Nyack, N.Y., police officers. Interestingly, Ayers doesn't explain why the robbery led to his re-emergence, nor does he mention the cops killed, dismissing the episode as a "bloody robbery attempt."

Ayers begins the book with the sentence, "Memory is a motherfucker," which is a running theme about how memory can betray you, although it's possibly also a justification for leaving certain events out — such as almost everything that happened to Ayers between 1973 and 1981. What should be the climactic part of the book — Ayers' surrender to the FBI and his subsequent release because of government misconduct — gets tossed in like an afterthought. And his memory seems quite selective — Ayers remembers every pointless polemical argument within his group, but he forgets to mention that he advised the young to "kill all the rich people, break up their cars and apartments, bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's at."

The memory that haunts the book is the death of Ayers' girlfriend, Diana Oughton, in the 1970 blast. Because of his instant fugitive status after the explosion, Ayers couldn't take a close look at the townhouse, and he couldn't take time to mourn. Near the book's conclusion, he describes a recent visit to the Vietnam War memorial in which he writes her name in chalk on the sidewalk; seeing Oughton as much a casualty of Vietnam as any soldier, the action represents the collision of Ayers' politics and personal life. Her death is the one thing that has led him to question if he ever went too far in his politics.

In a line of influential women Ayers lists (his mother and current wife, former Weatherman Bernadine Dohrn), Oughton seemed to have the most influence on the person he became. It's very possible that this book was meant not to be so much a memoir, but therapy for Ayers in trying to come to terms with her death.

— Bob Cook (bobc@flakmag.com)