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Weather Underground took couple on a strange journey
Documentary on activists being shown at Sundance
By DUANE DUDEK
Journal Sentinel film critic
Last Updated: Jan. 22, 2003
Park City, Utah - The 1960s and 1970s were a long strange trip, but few had a stranger ride than Bernardine Dohrn. It took her from Whitefish Bay High School to the radical anti-Vietnam war group the Weathermen, whose efforts to violently overthrow the United States landed her on the FBI's most-wanted list.
Dohrn, now 61, and her fellow traveler and husband, Bill Ayers, 58, looked like any other casually fashionable couple here to ski: He had a cell-phone headset planted in his ear, she drank a Starbucks coffee. The red star on his fleece vest was the only physical evidence linking them to their younger selves, chronicled in the documentary "The Weather Underground" being shown at the Sundance Film Festival.
The couple spent the 1970s planting bombs and hiding from the law, and Ayers' book about their experiences, "Fugitive Days," is now in paperback.
You could pass them on the street without looking at them twice. But while their rhetoric is now tempered, they are no less politically passionate.
In an interview about the film, her life and the issues of the day, Dohrn said she believes that just as with the Vietnam War, the likely war with Iraq has placed us at "a perilous moment."
"Saddam is a bad guy and doesn't represent anything good in this world, (but) one could predict that no good will come of this war and be accurate," she said. "I think the consequences for our children's future are not good, and we'll make enemies of millions of children who will grow up hating us."
The government has an obligation "to defend itself and protect its people" following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, "and there's nothing good to say about al-Qaida or the people who attacked us here," she said. But, she added, "nothing about this war is going to make us safer."
A more appropriate response to terrorism, she said, would be "not an endless war without borders" but acting under "the banner of the international law and crimes against humanity."
Not terrorists themselves
Despite their bombings, the Weather Underground was not a terrorist group, Dohrn insisted.
"We rejected terrorism. We were careful not to hurt anybody," she said. "We were in the middle of a very violent time. The U.S. was killing 2,000 people a day in three countries in Indochina, and throwing American lives into the breach. So our acts of resistance were tiny and symbolic."
Yet she believes the cumulative effects of student protests helped end the war and topple President Nixon. She and Ayers watched Nixon's resignation speech while they were underground, and they "thought it was a huge victory. He was impeached and brought down by Vietnam. We call it Watergate, but the reality was that it was really a condemnation for the expansion of the war."
Dohrn's road to radicalism had simple beginnings. Her parents "voted Republican their whole lives and voted four times" for Sen. Joe McCarthy. But "they were not ideological Republicans," she said, "they were middle Americans."
She had a very sheltered life, and "didn't learn about World War II until I went to college. My father ran away from being Jewish and changed his name. I knew very little about the world."
The civil rights movement "had a huge impact" on her social conscience and led to her radicalism. She became the public face of the Students for a Democratic Society, and her parents, who had left Wisconsin by then, "did have a hard time" with her notoriety.
Her father died a few years ago, and her 91-year-old mother, who suffers from Alzheimer's, lives with her and Ayers in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. After surrendering to authorities in 1980, Dohrn spent nine months in jail for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury. Ayers served just a few days.
Afterward, said Dohrn, the project "I threw myself into most wholeheartedly was raising my kids." The couple have two sons of their own and are raising a third, the son of radical Kathy Boudin, who is in jail for the robbery of a Brinks truck and the shooting death of a security guard.
Dohrn runs a juvenile justice program at Northwestern University; Ayers is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. They get stopped at airports, like the rest of us - a ritual Ayers called the "theater of security" - but they are no longer under surveillance.
"We're too old," said Dohrn. "We're not a threat."
E-mail Duane Dudek at [email protected]
Weather Underground took couple on a strange journey
Documentary on activists being shown at Sundance
By DUANE DUDEK
Journal Sentinel film critic
Last Updated: Jan. 22, 2003
Park City, Utah - The 1960s and 1970s were a long strange trip, but few had a stranger ride than Bernardine Dohrn. It took her from Whitefish Bay High School to the radical anti-Vietnam war group the Weathermen, whose efforts to violently overthrow the United States landed her on the FBI's most-wanted list.
Dohrn, now 61, and her fellow traveler and husband, Bill Ayers, 58, looked like any other casually fashionable couple here to ski: He had a cell-phone headset planted in his ear, she drank a Starbucks coffee. The red star on his fleece vest was the only physical evidence linking them to their younger selves, chronicled in the documentary "The Weather Underground" being shown at the Sundance Film Festival.
The couple spent the 1970s planting bombs and hiding from the law, and Ayers' book about their experiences, "Fugitive Days," is now in paperback.
You could pass them on the street without looking at them twice. But while their rhetoric is now tempered, they are no less politically passionate.
In an interview about the film, her life and the issues of the day, Dohrn said she believes that just as with the Vietnam War, the likely war with Iraq has placed us at "a perilous moment."
"Saddam is a bad guy and doesn't represent anything good in this world, (but) one could predict that no good will come of this war and be accurate," she said. "I think the consequences for our children's future are not good, and we'll make enemies of millions of children who will grow up hating us."
The government has an obligation "to defend itself and protect its people" following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, "and there's nothing good to say about al-Qaida or the people who attacked us here," she said. But, she added, "nothing about this war is going to make us safer."
A more appropriate response to terrorism, she said, would be "not an endless war without borders" but acting under "the banner of the international law and crimes against humanity."
Not terrorists themselves
Despite their bombings, the Weather Underground was not a terrorist group, Dohrn insisted.
"We rejected terrorism. We were careful not to hurt anybody," she said. "We were in the middle of a very violent time. The U.S. was killing 2,000 people a day in three countries in Indochina, and throwing American lives into the breach. So our acts of resistance were tiny and symbolic."
Yet she believes the cumulative effects of student protests helped end the war and topple President Nixon. She and Ayers watched Nixon's resignation speech while they were underground, and they "thought it was a huge victory. He was impeached and brought down by Vietnam. We call it Watergate, but the reality was that it was really a condemnation for the expansion of the war."
Dohrn's road to radicalism had simple beginnings. Her parents "voted Republican their whole lives and voted four times" for Sen. Joe McCarthy. But "they were not ideological Republicans," she said, "they were middle Americans."
She had a very sheltered life, and "didn't learn about World War II until I went to college. My father ran away from being Jewish and changed his name. I knew very little about the world."
The civil rights movement "had a huge impact" on her social conscience and led to her radicalism. She became the public face of the Students for a Democratic Society, and her parents, who had left Wisconsin by then, "did have a hard time" with her notoriety.
Her father died a few years ago, and her 91-year-old mother, who suffers from Alzheimer's, lives with her and Ayers in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. After surrendering to authorities in 1980, Dohrn spent nine months in jail for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury. Ayers served just a few days.
Afterward, said Dohrn, the project "I threw myself into most wholeheartedly was raising my kids." The couple have two sons of their own and are raising a third, the son of radical Kathy Boudin, who is in jail for the robbery of a Brinks truck and the shooting death of a security guard.
Dohrn runs a juvenile justice program at Northwestern University; Ayers is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. They get stopped at airports, like the rest of us - a ritual Ayers called the "theater of security" - but they are no longer under surveillance.
"We're too old," said Dohrn. "We're not a threat."
E-mail Duane Dudek at [email protected]
