This is a very interesting interview, Thanks! ... having been a teenager at the time, I remember the news reports about the Weather Underground. I also remember all the protesting by everyone else I knew, including myself, as I watched my fellow male students being sent to Vietnam involuntarily. It was a terrible terrible time.

I was shocked and disturbed by McCain and Palin dragging Ayers tenuous relationship with Obama into the election, like it was some "evil" secret conspiracy that the two of them had. I personally think that McCain and Palin need to apologize to Ayers, Obama, and the American public about this misrepresentation and slander. What distresses me, is that Palin STILL is talking about Obama "palin' around with the terrorist Ayers" ... like it is somehow true that Obama has the same opinions as everyone he has ever met, and that Ayers is some out of control Domestic Terrorist and not a university professor.

I saw the documentary "The Weather Underground" and came out thinking that those kids were crazy, had no strategy, and veered perilously close to the kind of logic that extremists use to justify evil against innocents - an act of God or incompetence prevented that by having that one town house bomb, intended for a soldiers' dance, backfire on the bombmakers.

However, in this interview, Ayers vividly explains the general atmosphere of insanity at that time and explains how a group of kids could think that when compared with daily killings of thousands of innocents, their own property destruction didn't amount to a great shakes in terms of condemnable behavior.

If there's one thing the far left still has going for it, even today, it's the reminder that "presidents can't save us" and that it takes social movements to achieve social change. When Obama gets around to grievously disappointing the liberals, the far left will remember that democracy isn't just about finally managing to pull the lever for the right person.

An interesting interview with an interesting guy. Makes me want to read his book.

Why wasn't Ayres asked about the murders or killings as a result of the armed robberies and bombings?

Why was Ayers allowed to portray us a the horrid invaders of Vietnam, who did nothing but destroy women and children and farm animals? Doesn't he know what the NVA and VC did to the civilians of Hue? What about the decimation of the Montagnards and other minorities there by the VC and NVA? And, what of the boat people, many of whom died at sea, trying to escape from a brutal regime, and what about the human suffering in reeducation camps which followed our ignominious abandonment? What about the ensuing holocaust in neighboring Cambodia?

Hello, Stalin.com!

Why do you hate your own country so?

Barry and Billy A weren't close because they each say they were not close. Is that really enough evidence for you? Do you suspend all critical thought when these luminaries of the left speak? You know damned well what you would do if Mc Cain served on the same board and distributed tens of millions of dollars for a decade or so with someone who was a principal in a hate-filled right wing militia which killed people and bombed government buildings.

Full of self righteous spite and hypocracy, you give no credit to Mc Cain. He could have really hammered Obama on his 20 year association with Trinity United Church and it's demagogue pastor, but he did not. Had he, he might have won, but he did not want a victory which might have been tainted by cries of racism.

You guys do not recognize honor because you have no honor of your own.

You know, you really had to be there.

We tried everything we knew how to do, we rallied, we protested, there were accountants against the war, and truck drivers against the war, and hairdressers against the war, and still the government bombed vietnam and cambodia, and sprayed agent orange, destroying the people and the land of Vietnam (and our own soldiers).

There was a myth that veterans coming back were spat upon, but this was not something that anyone knew or or discussed at the time.

Veterans turned increasingly against the war, and the government that treated them in an incredible shoddy manner when they returned home.

The armed forces were in shambles, NOT due to the anti-war protesters, but due to the incredibly horrible treatment of people in the armed forces by the government.

Protesters got arrested in thousands, people poured blood over draft files, the Pentagon papers exposed the lies of the government and still the war went on....

It was a time of total desperation. I'm glad no one asked me to join the Weather Underground because I probably would have!

And no, I wouldn't have threatened or killed people, the goal of the Weather Underground was to show in no uncertain terms that we were at war -- not with Vietnam -- but with our own government.

You really had to be there to understand.

Susan McGee

Vietnam then seems much like Iraq now - yeah, awful things were going on there, but the U.S. invasions didn't fix them...and, rather, had the Americans also doing awful things. If we could invade and fix everything up, well then okay, I guess - we sort of did that, after a fashion, in Germany and Japan in WW2. Maybe we thought we were gonna do the same thing again... I fear for Afghanistan, which has mired down invaders for centuries, and I don't think we're going to do any better.

Huge props to both Ayers and Shapiro for this inverview. Its most important function is to clarify the absolute dissolution of sanity extant in the Republic in the late 1960s, the sense of desperation and total destruction of soul, the sort of breakdown that made possible not only the Weather Underground but also the notion that our war du jour could be resolved if we could but "bomb them back to the stone age."

Not many sane folks wew walking around back then, and Ayers makes a great case for an insanity defense for the radical left, as well as the radical center, which would, had it been possible, probably have had Ayers killed back then in the interest of ratcheting down the vibrating lunacy of the moment.

For decades I've tried to explain to those young enough (and fortunate enough) to have missed that part of our history, as well as those too mentally constipated or too naive to grasp the sense of coming apart that pervaded everything.

Sarah Palin's notion that Ayers was a "terrorist" cannot be accurate because Palin is too young, too naive and too historically illiterate to begin to have a clue as to what it was like to be living in the Apocalypse. Everyone was right, which means, of course, that most of us were wrong. Those of us fortunate enough to have survived the end of the world have had time to gain some perspective, to learn a little, and to apply that education to the most recent near-collapse into chaos and the subsequent triumph of sanity and faith over rage and destructiveness. At last we didn't lower ourselves to the level of the internal enemy, and because of that we have won the day, at least.

No one won the first time around, and I think Bill Ayers understands this now. I didn't much like him back then and I'm not sure I like him a lot more now, but I certainly do respect him for having accepted responsibility for his part in a dark blip on a black expanse of our history, and to have survived to enjoy the triump of sanity over hate this time around.

I also have greater respect for Walter Shapiro (who I've never disliked anyway), for having diverged with Ayers in 1968, which earns Walter sanity points to spare. To find myself typing those words surprises me, but it's true, and it hold true for anyone who was able to stay even halfway balanced during a time when our world was coming apart.

One hopes this article will help make clear to the public once and for all just how irrelevant to Barack Obama (and to anything going on now) Bill Ayers and the collective lost American mind of the late 1960s is; how irrelevant it all is to anything anymore, except, perhaps, as a cautionary tale about passing along "war stories" to young, impressionable minds. We don't need another Weather Underground. We don't need to live in the past anymore. This interview helps administer Last Rites to a time when nothing made any sense no one knew the score.