Public Enemy (16 page)

After 9/11 the attacks on Stanley ramped up: he was targeted as a destructive leech on the American way of life and told by commentators and pundits and politicians alike to apologize for his postmodern devil work of forty years. Of course he was not alone:
The Boondocks
, Aaron McGruder, and Bill Maher came under steady attack, too, and Susan Sontag and Edward Said were told to shut up, give up their jobs, and, by implication, retreat to their caves with their terrorist soul mates. I was getting pummeled publicly and pretty badly as well. The threats and hate were at a disturbing fever pitch when I got an early morning phone call from Edward Said: “Of course it’s painful for you personally, but cringing and going quiet is the worst thing you could do at this moment. Your kids are watching you and your students too and a lot of others. Don’t let them down.” I was electrified and energized by that five-minute talk and heartened to be in the company of all the other targets. It dawned on me that when the White House noisily attacked Said or Sontag or Maher, the real audience was not those individuals, but a larger collective of listeners and onlookers: if they could silence people like them, what chance do the rest of us have?

Whenever I ran into Stanley Fish on campus in those days, we would compare notes on the latest attacks on each of us. I was happy when it was him and not me getting publicly flogged on the front pages and the nightly news, and I urged him to keep writing op-eds so that I might fade into happy professorial obscurity. He chuckled and asked me if he could edit my next op-ed so that the attackers’ sights would refocus on me. One day, looking amused and clearly having given the matter some thought, he stopped me on the way to class: “Why don’t we call a joint press conference at UIC,” he said. “Each of us can denounce our sordid pasts and our life’s work. You can defend me and I’ll defend you, but each of us will insist on breast-beating and full confessions.” I laughed as he imagined matching headlines: “Ayers issues a full apology for everything he ever did or thought—more required” and “Fish ironically announces the death of postmodernism—millions cheer.”

The
New York
Times
began publishing a special section about the terrorist attacks and their aftermath entitled “A Nation Challenged,” and I was quickly captivated by a feature within it called “Portraits of Grief,” small sketches of individuals who had perished in the disaster. I read every word, and when I brought the first issue to class, two other students had had the same idea, and so we passed the sections around and read a few aloud. It felt more real, more connected, and finally more painful as well to have a glimpse into the specifics of a single lost life—“Outspoken and Maternal,” “Committed to His Daughter,” “A Poet of Bensonhurst,” “Helpful Was Her Only Gear,” “‘The Rock’ of Ladder 3”—than was possible in the aggregate. A snapshot of George Llanes or John White or Margaret Mattic illustrated the extent of the tragedy more fully, I thought, than the recounting of large numbers ever could. The vastness of the heartbreak was in the tiniest details of each individual life.

This became a class ritual for the whole semester—reading every word, imagining a specific life, discussing a portrait in depth each week, and connecting as individuals.

The ritual had something of the feel of the sacrament Bernardine and I tried to attend every year at Fort Benning, Georgia. Now in its thirty-fifth year, the demonstration targets the School of the Americas at Fort Benning as an accessory to murder, war crimes and crimes against humanity, torture, and genocide. The school trained practically every thug in a uniform across Latin America for decades, and we gathered under the banner of peace and justice, led by a Jesuit priest, Maryknoll nuns, and the Catholic Worker community to bear witness and to object: Not in Our Name.

In the beginning, demonstrators were met with hostility, harassment, and even acts of violence. But in recent years, the community has seen at least some advantages to a weekend when tens of thousands of peaceniks flock to town. The motel we stayed in last year had two messages side by side on its marquee: We Support Our Troops! Welcome SOA Demonstrators!

After two days of workshops and strategy sessions, concerts and connections, the peace forces mobilized on the main street of town, arm in arm, twenty abreast, and, as a lone singer on the stage sang the name of a single person killed as a result of the bad work of the SOA, the thousands sang back to her, “Presente,” and we would advance one step: “Jose Lopez, twenty-six years old.” “Presente.” Step. “Haydee Cruz, fourteen years old.” “Presente.” Step. We wanted to acknowledge each specific life lost, and we wanted to remember that each person had a mother and a father, someone who loved or cared for them, some hopes and dreams and aspirations not yet fulfilled. We wanted to place blame, and we wanted to atone. The desolate tone, the relentless rhythm, and the persistent echo were mesmerizing. It was transcendent.

The
Times
’ “Portraits of Grief” aroused a shared impulse and had a transcendence of its own. It felt just as necessary, just as urgent, to share the mourning with everyone in reach and to perform this simple act of Kaddish.

Over time, the sketches began to merge and collapse into one another, and the homogenizing began to seem artificial and stylized—no one was a drug addict or a drunk, a crummy partner or a cheat, and everyone was a hero in life as well as in their shared victimhood. I thought of Lenny Bruce’s savage bit about the caption of a
Life
magazine photo of the Kennedy assassination that claimed the First Lady was clamoring onto the trunk of the speeding limousine in order to get help. Not at all, said Bruce. She was trying to get the hell out of there just like anyone else would.

Still, I read on, compelled to continue.

“But,” said Nikki late in the term, “the lists are also incomplete.” Some portraits were missing. She evoked the catastrophes of ethnic cleansing in Cyprus, the invasion and occupation of 1974—all open sores and part of a living memory. “There is no monopoly on suffering.” True, true. I kept on, nonetheless, reading every word.

And then a terrible shock: on December 31, in a long list of the known dead that ran above the portraits, was the name Joe Trombino, the guard who had been so severely injured two decades before in the infamous Brinks robbery.

Somewhere along the way I got a bad cold that turned into a persistent and disabling cough. When I went to my Chinese doctor for herbs and needles, she said decisively in her cheery and colorful metaphoric language: “Ah, lungs . . . grief!”

Indeed.

It was inevitable, I suppose, given the odd public moment that emerged with such chaotic force, that the professor, although nowhere on the syllabus, would become a subject of the class, and soon enough I was part of the substance being picked over and examined and debated in seminar. In week one, a student asked me to sign
Fugitive Days
for him, and by the second week everyone had a copy in their gym bags and backpacks. Several students had seen the
New York
Times
account of the book, and those who hadn’t were quickly brought up to speed by their classmates.

As for the
Times
piece about the book, which had run on September 11, I’d expected nothing nice. Janet Malcolm had long ago starkly portrayed reporters as seductive betrayers locked in an uncomfortable but firm embrace with their subjects, who will inevitably be wooed and then jilted, and Stanley Fish had pointed out in a
New York Times
op-ed that this kind of reporting “can only be unauthentic, can only get it wrong, can only lie” because writers of these fictions will necessarily “substitute their own story for the story of their announced subject.” I knew that talking to the
Times
was a bargain with the devil, but what the hell? I’d give them a story, they’d do whatever they do, clouded of course with that irritating superior air of comprehensive examination and considered judgment, and whatever it was, it would help publicize the book, which seemed at the time a reasonable transaction to me—if not to Bernardine—and well worth the hassle.

I’d met the
Times
reporter, Dinitia Smith, almost two decades before, when she approached me on a Manhattan street corner as I waited for our children to be dropped off from summer day camp. She proposed then that we collaborate on the story of the Weather Underground, but I declined, saying that I didn’t have the time or distance to tell that story yet, and doubted in any case that I would want a collaborator. Back in July, when she’d interviewed Bernardine and me in our home in Chicago, Smith proved to be a particularly resolute interrogator: she insisted on confidentiality and an exclusive interview; she embodied both the good cop and the bad cop, cajoling and flattering one moment, threatening in the next; and she relentlessly invoked the authoritative power of the
Times
to make or break the book, implying a kind of collaboration—“Remember, don’t talk to anyone else until my piece runs”—and inviting dependency. In spite of everything, I liked her.

From the start, she had questioned me sharply about the bombings, and each time I referred back to
Fugitive Days
, in which I’d discussed the culture of violence so central to the American experience, my growing anger with the structures of racism and the escalating terrorist war, and the complex, sometimes extreme and despairing, sometimes inspired choices I made in those terrible times. She pressed on: “Well, when you bombed the Pentagon,” she began on three separate occasions, and each time I interrupted her and said, “But I didn’t bomb the Pentagon.” A running joke between my publisher and me began, “How should I plead when the Smith piece appears?” “Just confess,” she kidded. “It won’t hurt. Whatever she says, just smile and say, ‘I did it.’”

Smith didn’t disappoint, and her angle was captured perfectly in the headline: “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives.” Her piece quoted me as having said, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Did I actually say those words? I probably did, because something like it appears in the book—in what I hoped was a denser and more layered treatment, reminiscences about effectiveness, not tactics. I also said something close to it in 1998 to Connie Chung on a special report about 1968 and again on a MacNeil/Lehrer broadcast.

Smith and I had spoken a lot about regrets, about loss, about attempts to account for one’s life. I had said at one point that I had a thousand regrets, but no regrets for opposing the war with every ounce of my strength. I told her that in light of the indiscriminate murder of millions of Vietnamese, I still thought the Weathermen showed remarkable restraint, and that while we tried to sound a piercing alarm in those years, in fact we didn’t do enough to stop the war—no one did, and the evidence is clear: we didn’t stop it. We might have been smarter; we should have been more focused; we could have been more effective.

Bernardine had worried all along about whether the book was a good idea—she didn’t want her current work disrupted or derailed or put on hold because I was dredging up the deep past. Plus she knew, as few others do, the special rage reserved for well-known women of the Left—Angela Davis forever and Jane Fonda at a moment. Bernardine had held a uniquely prominent place in J. Edgar Hoover’s Rogue’s Gallery thirty years before—he saw her as public enemy number one and called her “the most dangerous woman in America” in 1970, reprising a phrase he’d attached to Jane Addams at the start of his career; later he said she was “La Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left,” drawing a neat comparison to the ardent leader of the resistance to fascism during the Spanish Civil War, an association Bernardine found flattering.

Bernardine had been the object of a low-key but persistent letter-writing campaign led by Charlton Heston to have her fired from Northwestern University long before
Fugitive Days
was published. Heston was the president of the National Rifle Association and a former president of the Screen Actors Guild, a Northwestern alum, and a major donor to the theater program. After 9/11, the campaign against Bernardine ramped up, and Heston told the student newspaper that he was shocked and appalled that “an unrepentant terrorist like her” was on the faculty of the law school and was the director of the Children and Family Justice Center. He said he would reconsider donating money to his alma mater and urged other alumni to join him in pressuring the administration to fire Bernardine.

There was a growing firestorm around
Fugitive Days
, too, in Chicago and beyond. Steve Neal of the
Chicago
Sun-Times
effectively took out his own little fatwa on me and Bernardine, demanding that we not be allowed to speak or teach anywhere any longer. Neal noted that the
New York
Times
article was published on 9/11 and claimed that I’d “made comments supporting the bombings on the morning of September 11.” Not true. He attacked as well anyone who’d endorsed the book, calling Studs Terkel “the village idiot.” Scott Turow told me later that it was the first time in his life he had received hate mail for reviewing someone else’s book favorably. The mood was turning ugly.

Isabel, one of my brilliant graduate students, brought in the Neal piece, and soon a class “smash-book,” a collection of reviews and commentary, was under way:

Commentator after commentator offered evidence of my screwball-ness, and insisted that anything I might say now should be discounted because of what I did then. I thought about Ralph Ellison writing in
The Invisible Man
: “These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth.” These white folks! As the fragments and phrases were echoed and repeated, reverberations bouncing around and around, any possibility of explaining, contextualizing, or reinterpreting narrowed and then disappeared.