Public Enemy (30 page)

Back on the air he produced a copy of a page from
Prairie Fire
, the manifesto of the Underground, and suggested that I somehow supported Sirhan Sirhan. I said that that was ridiculous and stupid. He asked how well I’d actually known Barack Obama and I said, “I knew Barack Obama about as well as thousands of other people—I don’t believe we ever shared a milk shake with two straws; I mean, we weren’t that close—and like millions of others, I wish I knew him much better today.”

Among the laughable highlights from the lunacy tracking me through the presidential race was a photograph bouncing from blog to blog, conspiracy site to paranoid central—it was an early snapshot of Bernardine and me smiling arm in arm with the caption “Bill Ayers and Obama’s mother, ‘Ann Dunham’: Dreams from Which Father?” Dunham and Bernardine were both born in 1942, it’s true, and they were both beautiful and free-spirited women. For a dedicated few, the idea took hold—OMG! We were Barack’s parents, not his pals!

The story that I had secretly ghostwritten
Dreams from My Father
, Barack Obama’s beautifully constructed memoir had gone wild in a shadowy corner of the blogosphere. A bunch of cranks fed the fire at first, and soon enough more serious analysts signed on and spoke up about the vast, complex conspiracy that I was orchestrating, perhaps even dictating Obama’s thoughts. How could I ever prove the negative?

I was walking through Reagan National Airport when a mild-looking middle-aged woman approached me and asked if I were Bill Ayers. “I am,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Anne Leary,” she replied as we walked along.

“What do you do?”

“I’m a right-wing blogger,” she said without hesitation. “And I’d love to ask you one question.”

“Sure,” I said. “Shoot.”

“Did you write
Dreams from My Father
?” she asked, and I laughed out loud.

Here we go, I thought, and then—FLASH!—I had an inspiration. We stopped and I turned to face her. I asked her to please quote me exactly. “Of course I will,” she said.

“Yes, yes,” I said. “OK. I wrote
Dreams
, every word of it,” I said. “Are you getting this down, Anne? I met with Barack Obama maybe three or four times total on this project, and then I just made the whole thing up, ghostwrote the entire book. I doubt that he even proofed it. Now, if you can help me prove that I wrote it, I’ll split the royalties with you.”

She wrote furiously and smiled broadly. “Thank you! Thank you!” she repeated, shaking my hand. I thought I’d brought a little ray of sunshine into what I imagined must be a slightly dim and arid space, and I felt great.

Anne was true to her word. She posted the interview, and her obscure little site got tons of hits and lots of links, soaring upward on a big traffic-ranking site to number 3 and then number 2 and, finally, number 1! Wow! Anne was big time now in her murky little echo chamber, a real hero for finally getting confirmation on a story they all knew to be true but couldn’t prove—until now.

From hero to goat in a matter of days: first Jonah Goldberg, then
National Journal
and Rush Limbaugh, and finally the
Times
, which said that it sounded like “Ayers is jerking some chains.” The story suffered a sudden unanticipated reversal, and they began to bicker and dig a bit of a trough for themselves. If
they
said I wrote the book, that was an example of courageous and intrepid investigative journalism; if
I
said I wrote the book, that was just me being a goofball, while making asses out of them. The real story, as Rush saw it, was that I
did
write the book, but by admitting that I did, I was actually cleverly asserting that I
didn’t
write the book. Oh, what a tangled web I weave!

I thought the lunacy of authorship was dead and done when I met Jamie Weinstein, a young and eager reporter with the
Daily Caller
. After some harmless chatter, he said, “Listen, I know what you’re going to say, but I feel I need to ask you a question, and I’d appreciate an honest answer. Did you write
Dreams?
” I said I did. “No, that’s what I mean. I don’t want you to make that same joke; I want you to tell the truth—did you write it?” “I did.” “No!” Where would this ever end? I wondered.

I wrote to Jamie later and suggested that his insistence demonstrated an irony-challenged temperament. He disagreed: “If I was irony-challenged, I would have accepted your answer . . . at face value. . . . I thought the authorship conspiracy was similarly insane—until I came across Christopher Andersen’s portrait of Barack and Michelle’s marriage two weeks ago. Andersen is hardly a right-wing ideologue or conspiracy-monger.”

In fact, I’d never read Andersen’s book,
Barack and Michelle
, so I didn’t know if Jamie had it right, but apparently in it Andersen claims I had a major hand in writing
Dreams
. Jamie went on:

I responded that when an earnest and ambitious journalist is knocked for being “irony-challenged” and responds by denying the charge, that’s not a rebuttal. It’s proof. I’d never heard of the guy he kept referencing, never called him an ideologue or conspiracy theorist, had zero interest in the “inside story” of the Obama marriage and couldn’t possibly know his “sources,” but that I would think his reporting would take him to Andersen himself. I told Jamie that I was not the least bit agitated by his crazy question.

A self-described deep-thinking intellectual named Jack Cashill set out to prove—independent of my denials or affirmations—that I had indeed written
Dreams
. He sought real evidence through a close reading of texts and a brush with the Internet. He was the great brain who discovered, for example, those infamous maritime references and metaphors in both
Dreams
and
Fugitive Days
, a possible testament to my fraught time as a merchant marine. In any case, it was now clear that I had been the seafaring Odysseus to Obama’s father-hungry Telemachus, and
Dreams
the “record of a personal, interior journey—a boy’s search for his father.” I loved the reflection, and loved imagining my few months on the Atlantic as an epic tale of the human journey.

Cashill found that Rashid Khalidi acknowledged me in his book
Resurrecting Empire
: “Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family’s dining room table to do some writing for the project.” Khalidi directed the University of Chicago’s Center for International Studies, and at a farewell dinner on the occasion of his departure for Columbia University, Barack Obama toasted him, thanking him and Mona for the many dinners they had shared, as well as for his “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.” But more important, Cashill pointed out, Khalidi didn’t need a table—a ha!—no, he needed a mentor, a role I apparently played with a wide range of Hyde Park intellectuals and radical writers.

And he discovered that near the end of my book
A Kind and Just Parent
, I described bicycling through the South Side and identified a few of my notable neighbors: Muhammad Ali, Minister Louis Farrakhan, the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and the writer Barack Obama. Cashill felt that the “writer” identification was forced and the listing of Obama as prominent utterly absurd at that point.

“The question is often asked why Obama associated with Ayers,” Cashill wrote on the website AmericanThinker.com. “The more appropriate question is why the powerful Ayers would associate with the then-obscure Obama . . . My suspicion is that Ayers saw the potential in Obama, and he chose to mold it.” Ah, the “powerful Ayers”—it sounded remarkably like the “powerful Oz!”

Here are three samples from his book
Deconstructing Obama
of Cashill’s skillful sleuthing on the question of narrative:

Empirical proof or crackpot confirmation, you decide, but this little exercise is pretty easy to apply almost anywhere, anytime.

Here, for example, is a line from
Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites
, by Tucker Carlson, the libertarian pundit: “Liberals have trouble believing that anyone who disagrees with them politically could be a decent person. Once they decide they like you, they assume you must be a liberal, too—in my case, a closet liberal.”

And here’s a sentence from
Ayers:
“Some liberals can’t help conflating intelligence, compassion, and decency with liberal politics. If you’re decent and compassionate they automatically assume you’re a liberal.”

OMG! I wrote Tucker Carlson’s book too!

When the Public Square, a tiny but wondrous program of the Illinois Humanities Council, organized an online auction to raise needed funds, Bernardine and I donated two items: choice seats at a Cubs game and an afternoon at beautiful Wrigley Field with an ardent and unruly fan—that would be Bernardine—and dinner for six, cooked by team Ayers-Dohrn. The Public Square was celebrating its tenth anniversary, and we’d been on its advisory board from the start. We’d already done the dinner thing two dozen times over the years—for a local baseball camp, a law students’ public interest group, immigrant rights organizing, and a lot of other worthy causes—and we’d typically raised a few hundred dollars. There were many more-attractive items on the Public Square auction list—Alex Kotlowitz was available to edit twenty pages of a nonfiction manuscript, Gordon Quinn to discuss documentary film projects over dinner, and Kevin Coval to write and spit an original poem for the highest bidder. But what the heck, we’d do what we could.

We paid little attention as the auction launched and then inched onward—a hundred dollars, two hundred, and then three—even when a right-wing blogger picked it up and began flogging the Illinois Humanities Council for “supporting terrorism” by giving taxpayer money to us. He was a little off on the concept since
we
were actually donating our money and services to
them
, not the other way around, but this was a rather typical turn for the fact-free, faith-based blogosphere, so onward and upward. No worries.

There was a little button on our dinner item that someone could select and “Buy Instantly” for $2,500, which seemed absurdly out of reach. But in early December the TV celebrity and self-described conservative bad boy, Tucker Carlson, hit the button, and we were his.

I loved it immediately. Carlson was a well-known libertarian political commentator whose signature style for many years was built around a bright bow-tie, a shock of chestnut hair, and an ability to noisily mock anything at hand. He was famously bounced from cohosting
Crossfire
on CNN after an angry on-air confrontation with Jon Stewart of
The Daily Show
. Carlson had criticized Stewart for asking softball questions in a political interview, and Stewart responded that his show was a comedy and added, “It’s interesting to hear you talk about my responsibility. . . . I didn’t realize that . . . the news organizations look to Comedy Central for their cues on integrity.” After Carlson told Stewart, “I think you’re more fun on your show,” Stewart replied: “You know what’s interesting though? You’re as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.” Carlson went on to found the conservative
Daily Caller
, and surely he had some frat-boy prank up his sleeve—his standard gesture a kind of smug and superior practical joke or an ad hominem put down—but so what? We’d just raised more money for the Public Square in one bid than anyone thought was possible from the entire auction. We won!

Right-wing blogs lit up, some writers tickled with Tucker’s entertaining sense of humor, others earnestly saluting his willingness to enter the den of dodgy enemies of the state and sit in close quarters, an unmistakable act of courage and daring in the service of “the cause.” But a few took a grimmer view: Don’t do it, Tucker, they pled, this will not only legitimize and humanize “two of America’s greatest traitors,” it will also take the sting out of the steady charge that Obama himself is suspect for the crime of knowing them.

Tucker Carlson got a letter from the IHC: “Congratulations,” it began, “You are the winning bidder for The Public Square’s 10th anniversary auction item: Dinner for six with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Thank you very much for your payment of $2500 for this item.”

The letter went on to offer ten potential dates for the dinner, and to note that “all auction items were donated to the IHC [which] makes no warranties or representations with respect to any item or service sold . . .” and that “views and opinions expressed by individuals attending the dinner do not reflect those of the Illinois Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, or the Illinois General Assembly.” I laughed out loud imagining the exhausted scrivener bent at his table copying out that carefully crafted, litigation-proof language—does it go far enough? How about the governor or the Joint Chiefs of Staff? But then, I’m no lawyer.