Our country’s long fascination with the Weather Underground—the terrorist group that came out of the New Left radical group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)—evidently continues. Hollywood has been obsessed. In 1988 Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty—whose lead characters were based on the WU leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn—earned Naomi Foner an Oscar nomination for best screenplay. Then in 2012, director Robert Redford directed and acted in The Company You Keep. In press tours, Redford described the real WU as only a passionate anti-Vietnam war group. Finally, 2025’s Academy Award for best feature film went to One Battle After Another, which depicts the remnants of a WU-type group, and whose title was taken from an actual WU “communique” issued by Bernardine Dohrn to its members.
Bill Ayers published his first memoir, Fugitive Days, on September 11, 2001. What timing. A book he ended by writing that he was “guilty as hell, free as a bird,” and that “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough,” quickly sank into oblivion. So he wrote a second memoir in 2013, Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident, which received rave blurbs from all the usual suspects such as Angela Davis.
Now, we have an honest and moving memoir by the couple’s son, Zayd Ayers Dohrn, in which he offers serious criticism of his parents’ dedication to radical terrorism, and a reflective, passionate, and beautifully written account of what it was like to grow up always running from the law. The heart of the book is his attempt to uncover the mindset of his parents, challenging their and his own views of these years dedicated to revolution. He succeeds in recounting how they felt as they took many steps committed to violent revolution when they were underground.
Ayers Dohrn is merciless, and he does not shy away from taking on his parents’ way of life and their being trapped in a dangerous ideology. It was an ideology that led his mother to believe “there’s no way to be committed to nonviolence.” Her rationale was that she was living “in the middle of the most violent society history has ever created.”
With such a view of the world, Bernardine Dohrn became a major figure who, while a member of SDS, led the group to split. Her followers—”the action faction”—tore apart the organization and transformed it into a body of self-proclaimed communist revolutionaries. No longer would they abide by the democratic dreams depicted in the famous SDS Port Huron Statement. In its place, she, Ayers, and their comrades sought to create a tight revolutionary action organization. They glorified Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s strategy to gain power in Cuba by fomenting a revolution, a template they hoped to emulate in America by becoming “the monster who lived in the belly of the beast.” A monster, Ayers Dohrn later in the book writes, whose success elsewhere on the globe “led to repressive regimes.” One will not find in this account any fantasies about the great success of many of these other regimes created by Marxist-Leninist fighters.
Like other self-proclaimed white American revolutionaries, Bernardine Dohrn saw Castro’s Cuba as the new shining light for the American Left, just as her predecessors in the 1920s and ’30s viewed the Soviet Union—a template for how to gain power in America. Cuba became, as Ayers Dohrn writes, “the model and inspiration for all would-be revolutionists at the time.” Listening to the actual Cuban communists in Havana, Bernardine Dohrn scribbled in her notebook: “Aim of revolution is to take power from reactionaries and give to people.” Meeting also with Vietnamese communists in Cuba, she was urged to “wage armed struggle as soon as possible and become the vanguard … of the revolution.”
Somehow, it did not occur to her that the vast and democratic American nation was not a small mountain country led by a left-wing version of the Latin-American caudillo. “That experience in Fidel’s Cuba,” Ayers Dohrn writes, “made it feel that revolution was within the realm of the possible.” That trip, his mother said, “made me a full-time revolutionary.”
How, Ayers Dohrn asks, can American individuals transform from being critical, thinking humans and regular citizen-activists and suddenly become “tougher and more militant,” necessary to “prepare for the coming revolutionary struggle?” The answer his parents took was to engage in emulating the Chinese Communist method of so-called self-criticism. That meant adopting classic Maoist “struggle sessions” to rid themselves of “bourgeois” and “counterrevolutionary ideology.” What sounded to Ayers Dohrn like “anti-intellectualism and authoritarian groupthink,” to the WU was “an urgent and necessary crash course in how to cleanse themselves of their own counter-revolutionary ideas.”
The WU cadre would hold meetings of 20 to 40 members who engaged in a struggle session. Each would be asked in turn to condemn their own failed bourgeois practices that did not “advance the revolution.” Friends and comrades would go around condemning everything rotten and bourgeois among themselves. The assembled group would then atone for their alleged sins. All the personal things one cherished had to be crushed so that they could abandon petty concerns and commit totally to the revolution. Did you go to the movies, when you could have spent those few hours taking on another revolutionary task?
It was indeed what Ayers Dohrn calls “cultlike reeducation.” In the last days of WU’s existence, the remnants of the group were taken over by a 65-year-old Maoist named Clayton Van Lydegraf. This “washed-out old Maoist” who looked like “the very picture of the downtrodden, long-suffering proletariat,” soon led the group to bend to his will and exhortations. And his no.1 target was none other than Bernardine Dohrn. Now this extremist fanatical leader of the WU found herself “denounced by former friends and comrades as a counter-revolutionary.” And to prove her commitment, she prepared another communique to the public and the remaining members, and, most shocking of all, “she agreed to denounce her friends, and herself.” In scattered files, her son found an audio recording she had made, calling herself a “token woman … who organized for white supremacist and chauvinist politics.” Bernardine Dohrn concluded by acknowledging she had “followed the classic path of white so-called revolutionaries who sold out the revolution.”
Now, so late in the game, she is mortified and embarrassed by what she had done. She tells her son, “I didn’t know what I thought. Or who I was.” Ayers Dohrn finds the WU’s collapse as “both surprising and depressingly inevitable.” As for his mother, she was expelled from the group and completely cut off from her friends, comrades, and allies. Once again, the would-be revolution devoured its own. Soon after, she became pregnant with Zayd, whom she named after a member of the Black Panther Party who had been killed by the police.
The heart of the book is Ayers Dohrn’s account of his childhood. His own education by his father was an attempt by Bill to have his son learn from him that which he had absorbed over years. Ayers Dohrn refers to it as “indoctrination.” Bill taught him by age three how to spot police and FBI agents in a crowd, how to lose someone they feared might be watching them, and how to outwit them by learning necessary maneuvers. He saw it as a game that was “fun.” The most telling revelation is that the author, who sought reaffirmation of parental love, was told by his father that the one action that might make his son an outcast was if he became a racist—he was at that time a five-year-old! Dana Spiotta, who reviewed the book for the New York Times, wrote that “Bill and Bernardine may have failed as revolutionaries, but they succeeded, in their idiosyncratic way, as parents.” Spiotta evidently has a different idea of what good parenting is than most people.
And most disturbing is his account of how his parents took actions that in a moment might have had a different ending, with both his parents being arrested, leaving him alone. That was the fate suffered by Harriet Clark, another child of the WU. Clark’s mother, Judith, told the babysitter she would return in about an hour. Instead, she was arrested after driving a getaway car during a shootout along with members of a WU offspring, the Black Liberation Army. For 40 years, Clark grew up seeing her mother only on prison visits.
Bill Ayers took the greatest risk when members of this same BLA (after the WU was all about disbanded) asked him to take one more act for the revolution—participating in the escape of imprisoned JoAnne Chesimard (aka Assata Shakur), who had been found guilty of killing a police officer. To avoid suspicion while driving a person who helped break her out of prison (possibly Chesimard herself) in a car used by the BLA as part of the operation, Ayers reasoned that if police saw a white man driving, they would let the car pass when they set up roadblocks asking suspicious drivers to pull over. Loyalty to the cause came first, above the well-being of his son. What, Ayers Dohrn wonders, would have happened to him had it not turned out that way?
The author developed his parents’ opposition to racism but, thankfully, departed from them and believed in standing “outside of the crowd, to insist on individual choice and responsibility.” Unlike his parents, he learned to avoid “the stupidity of the mob.” His parents supported their comrades’ attempt to build an antipersonnel bomb packed with roofing nails—even if it caused great harm to its would-be targets at a dance for recruits at the Fort Dix military base in New Jersey, it would make them feel what it was like for Vietnamese harmed by American bombs. Their rationale, which Ayers Dohrn calls “willing to kill to stop the killing,” is farcical. The bomb failed to go off, and yet, the New York WU cell considered themselves soldiers and “nearly became murderers.”
Read this exhilarating, candid, and moving memoir of a loving son’s attempt to make sense of what motivated his parents in what they thought was an age of revolution. It is the first memoir by a child of the revolutionary terrorist New Left to make an honest, poignant assessment.
Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground
by Zayd Ayers Dohrn
W.W. Norton & Company, 448 pp., $32.99
Ronald Radosh is a historian and author of many books, including a memoir, Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left.
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