The Washington Free Beacon has a cracker of a book review, in which Ronald Radosh reads the searching memoir of Zayd Ayers Dohrn. You’ll remember that paired last name: Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were prominent members of the Weather Underground. Both spent years as fugitives. Federal bombing and conspiracy charges against Ayers and other Weathermen were ultimately dropped because of prosecutorial misconduct and illegal FBI surveillance. Ayers served no prison time. Dohrn was once on the FBI’s most-wanted list. Later, she received probation on state charges related to the “Days of Rage” riots in Chicago in 1969, and she served about seven months in jail for contempt for refusing to testify before a grand jury about a Brink’s armored-car robbery (though she was never charged in that case). Ayers eventually became a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, and Dohrn, his partner, a professor at Northwestern.
Zayd Ayers Dohrn, however, is not a chip off the old block. Though his memoir is loving, it shows his parents fully, faults and all. Radosh writes:
The heart of the book is Ayers Dohrn’s account of his childhood. His own education by his father was an attempt by Bill to have his son learn from him that which he had absorbed over years. Ayers Dohrn refers to it as “indoctrination.” Bill taught him by age three how to spot police and FBI agents in a crowd, how to lose someone they feared might be watching them, and how to outwit them by learning necessary maneuvers. He saw it as a game that was “fun.” The most telling revelation is that the author, who sought reaffirmation of parental love, was told by his father that the one action that might make his son an outcast was if he became a racist — he was at that time a five-year-old! Dana Spiotta, who reviewed the book for the New York Times, wrote that “Bill and Bernardine may have failed as revolutionaries, but they succeeded, in their idiosyncratic way, as parents.” Spiotta evidently has a different idea of what good parenting is than most people.
Read the whole thing.