‘He Lied’ About Bill Ayers?

Summary

In a TV ad, McCain says Obama “lied” about his association with William Ayers, a former bomb-setting, anti-war radical from the 1960s and ’70s. We find McCain’s claim to be groundless. New details have recently come to light, but nothing Obama said previously has been shown to be false.

In a Web ad and in repeated attacks from the stump, McCain describes the two as associates, and Palin claims they “pal around” together. But so far as is known, their relationship was never very close. An Obama spokesman says they last saw each other in a chance encounter on the street more than a year ago.

McCain says in an Internet ad that the two “ran a radical ‘education’ foundation” in Chicago. But the supposedly “radical” group was supported by a Republican governor and included on its board prominent local civic leaders, including one former Nixon administration official who has given $1,500 to McCain’s campaign this year. Education Week says the group’s work “reflected mainstream thinking” among school reformers. The group was the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, started by a $49 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation, which was established by the publisher Walter Annenberg, a prominent Republican whose widow, Leonore, is a contributor to the McCain campaign.

(FactCheck.org, which is nonpartisan, also receives funding from the Annenberg Foundation. But we are in no way connected to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which finished its work long before we came into being in late 2003.)

For full details, please read on to our Analysis section.

Analysis

Sen. John McCain has dialed up his attacks on Sen. Barack Obama’s past association with former Weather Underground activist Bill Ayers. He released a 30-second TV spot Oct. 10 claiming Obama “lied” about Ayers. A day earlier he announced a 90-second Internet ad claiming that Obama and Ayers “ran a radical education foundation together” and suggesting Obama was being untruthful.

Groundless, False, Dubious

McCain-Palin Ad: “Ambition”

Announcer: Obama’s blind ambition. When convenient, he worked with terrorist Bill Ayers. When discovered, he lied.

Obama. Blind ambition. Bad judgment.Congressional liberals fought for risky sub-prime loans.

Congressional liberals fought against more regulation. Then, the housing market collapsed costing you billions.

In crisis, we need leadership, not bad judgment.

McCain: I’m John McCain and I approve this message.

We find McCain’s accusation that Obama “lied” to be groundless. It is true that recently released records show half a dozen or so more meetings between the two men than were previously known, but Obama never denied working with Ayers.

Other claims are seriously misleading. The education project described in the Web ad, far from being “radical,” had the support of the Republican governor and was run by a board that included prominent local leaders, including one Republican who has donated $1,500 to McCain’s campaign this year. The project is described by Education Week as reflecting “mainstream thinking” about school reform.

Despite the newly released records, there’s still no evidence of a deep or strong “friendship” with Ayers, a former radical anti-war protester whose actions in the 1960s and ’70s Obama has called “detestable” and “despicable.”

Even the description of Ayers as a “terrorist” is a matter of interpretation. Setting off bombs can fairly be described as terrorism even when they are intended to cause only property damage, which is what Ayers has admitted doing in his youth. But for nearly three decades since, Ayers has lived the relatively quiet life of an educator. It would be correct to call him a “former terrorist,” and an “unapologetic” one at that. But if McCain means the word “terrorist” to invoke images of 9/11, he’s being misleading; Ayers is no Osama bin Laden now, and never was.

‘Pal Around’

Palin, Oct. 5: Our opponents see America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who would bomb their own country.

She’s repeated the charge again and again at different campaign stops since then, citing the Times. What the Times article actually says, however, is this:  “[T]he two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers.” The Times says its review of documents and interviews with key players “suggest” that Obama “has played down his contacts with Ayers,” but describes their paths as having crossed “sporadically” since their first meeting in 1995.

And far from palling around with Ayers, the two haven’t spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Obama came to the Senate in January 2005, according to an Obama spokesman. He said the two last saw each other more than a year ago, when they accidentally met on the street in their Hyde Park neighborhood.

Obama addressed Palin’s claim on Oct. 8, when questioned by ABC News’ Charlie Gibson:

Obama, Oct. 8: This is a guy who engaged in some despicable acts 40 years ago when I was eight years old. By the time I met him, 10 or 15 years ago, he was a college professor of education at the University of Illinois. … And the notion that somehow he has been involved in my campaign, that he is an adviser of mine, that … I’ve ‘palled around with a terrorist’, all these statements are made simply to try to score cheap political points.

Bill Ayers’ notoriety dates from the radical, anti-Vietnam War group he helped to start in 1969, splintering off from the activist Students for a Democratic Society. The members of the new group, the Weather Underground, favored shows of violence to further their cause. On March 6, 1970, though, three of them blew themselves up in a Greenwich Village townhouse during a bomb-making session gone badly awry. Ayers and his fellow Weathermen, as they were called, soon dropped out of sight.

Barack Obama, who was born Aug. 4, 1961, was 8 years old at the time.

The Weather Underground continued setting off bombs, including one in a men’s lavatory in the Capitol building in 1971 and another in a women’s restroom in the Pentagon in 1972. Nobody was killed, due to evacuation warnings the Weathermen sent out in advance.

After the Vietnam War ended, the group’s activities petered out. In 1980 Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, another member, surfaced and turned themselves in to police. Because of illegal federal wiretaps, pending charges against Ayers for allegedly inciting a riot and conspiring to bomb government sites had been dropped. Dohrn pleaded guilty to separate charges of aggravated battery and jumping bail; she was fined $1,500 and given three years’ probation. Ayers and Dohrn, who had had two children together while in hiding, married in 1982.

Several other Weather Underground alums, including Kathy Boudin, along with some members of a group calling itself the Black Liberation Army, were involved in a bungled 1981 robbery of a Brinks truck in Nanuet, N.Y., in which a security guard and two policemen were killed. Ayers and Dohrn have never been publicly tied to the incident, which took place after they had turned themselves in. Dohrn was jailed for seven months for refusing to provide a handwriting sample to the grand jury investigating it.

Dohrn is now a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago. Ayers is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Locally, Ayers’ radical past hasn’t been much of an issue. Chicago Sun-Times columnist Lynn Sweet wrote last spring that it “was no big deal, or any deal, to any local political reporters or to the editorial boards of the Sun-Times or [Chicago] Tribune.” Ayers was named a Chicago citizen of the year in 1997 for his efforts in the field of education.

In Chicago, Ayers is seen less as a “terrorist” and more as a prodigal son of the local establishment. His father was a prominent corporate executive and civic leader. Thomas G. Ayers was president and chief executive of Commonwealth Edison, the electric utility that lights Chicago and northern Illinois. There is a residence hall named for him at Northwestern University, where he was a trustee for 30 years. Bill’s brother John Ayers, according to Education Week, headed a school-reform group called the Leadership for Quality Education, which represented business leaders’ interest in schools. John is now a senior associate of the Chicago-based National Association of Charter School Authorizers.

Despite the fairly mainstream life he lives now, though, Bill Ayers’ image took a hit with an article that appeared in the New York Times on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Ayers was quoted in the lead paragraph as saying, ”I don’t regret setting bombs” and “I feel we didn’t do enough.” The interview had been conducted earlier, in connection with the publication of Ayers’ memoir of his years as a fugitive. But when the quotes appeared on the same day thousands died at the World Trade Center and elsewhere, they enraged his critics.

Ayers called the story a deliberate distortion of his views. In a response on his blog, Ayers wrote:

Ayers: My memoir is from start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official policy. …
I said I had a thousand regrets, but no regrets for opposing the war with every ounce of my strength.

That’s hardly an apology, referring as it does to the U.S. role in the Vietnam War as “terrorism.” Ayers has maintained a public silence since then, refusing all requests for interviews.

Even so, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had kind words for him recently:

Daley (New York Times, Oct. 3, 2008): He’s done a lot of good in this city and nationally. … This is 2008. People make mistakes. You judge a person by his whole life.