EEvery aspect of a family’s life will seem normal to its young children; Only with hindsight can what was unusual come into relief. Zaid Ayers Dohrn’s early years were spent on the run from the FBI; His parents were members of the revolutionary Weather Underground faction, a group dedicated to overthrowing the American government.
By the age of three his parents had trained him on how to recognize plainclothes officers on the street. He recalls, “It was a bit like playing a game – an adult version of dress-up or make-believe.” He has fond memories of long night-time drives between safe places. As well as fellow revolutionaries, his family faced countless undocumented migrant workers as well as gangsters, IRA members and abortion activists.
With his child’s perspective on life as a runaway, Dohrn tells us the story of the Weather Underground and his parents’ role in it. The group was founded in 1969 by student activists angered by atrocities against civilians during the Vietnam War. At first they called themselves the Weathermen, inspired by the Bob Dylan song (“You’ve got to know which way the wind blows”), until this was changed in response to the women being included.
Dohrn’s mother, Bernardine, was their leader, and she was also the boss in her family. Dohrn considered him an ideal. “I wanted to be like her,” he writes. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover was less enthusiastic, declaring her “the most dangerous woman in America.” Her image on the FBI’s wanted poster, looking young and tough in a biker jacket, became iconic – although she disliked the sexism behind the increased attention to her looks.
The Weather Underground wanted to highlight the brutal realities of the Vietnam War by bringing that conflict back to America. They organized several days of demonstrations and riots in Chicago in 1969, leading to pitched battles with police and over 250 arrests, injuring 23 officers and a large number of protesters – including six who were shot, although no one died. After a failed attempt to make a nailbomb in 1970, during which three members blew themselves up near the Greenwich Village townhouse they were using, the group abandoned direct attacks against people. But they continued their violent actions. After receiving warnings over the phone, they bombed the FBI headquarters, the Capitol, the State Department, and the Pentagon.
The damage was significant, but the US government was never in danger. The Weather Underground was small, lacking any mass movement to support it (although, passionately anti-racist, it aligned itself with the more broad-based Black Panther Party). Meanwhile, Dohrn’s parents faced a dilemma: how could they properly care for their children while trying to maintain the status quo? Bernardin’s love for his family was second only to his political commitment, which he had to maintain “even if his own children were injured as collateral damage”.
Amazingly, Dohrn’s parents got away with almost everything. His father, Bill Ayers, was never jailed, while Bernardine served only seven months in prison between 1982 and 1983. Perhaps even more surprising, Dohrn didn’t hold any of this against him. Rather than follow his parents into revolutionary politics, he became a playwright and screenwriter. His book is full of tidbits of counter-culture history: for example, Dohrn’s parents bailed out Timothy Leary from prison. Then there’s its compelling, episodic pace, which this book owes to as a podcast series, Mother Country Radicals. Where it surpasses the podcast is in the addition of Dohrn’s intimate narrative and reflections on his frontier childhood, including its intersection with the state of the nation – then, as now, caught in the conflict. Despite his abundance. Delivery charges may apply. In light politics, he draws parallels between his parents’ activism and Trigger for our own times when he declares: “We are in a new era of American authoritarianism and racial reckoning.”
