The Trail: Bill Ayers Speaks By Peter Slevin

The Trail: Bill Ayers Speaks By Peter Slevin

November 4, 2008

CHICAGO -- In his first interview since he became an issue in the 2008 presidential campaign, Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground leader, said today that he had a distant relationship with Barack Obama and that Obama's opponents had turned him into "a cartoon character."

Ayers, now an education professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said he thought the accusation by Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin that Obama had been "palling around with terrorists" was absurd.

"Pal around together? What does that mean? Share a milkshake with two straws?" Ayers said. "I think my relationship with Obama was probably like thousands of others in Chicago. And, like millions and millions of others, I wish I knew him better."

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In the late-1960s, the Weather Underground, a radical offshoot of the antiwar movement, claimed responsibility for roughly a dozen bombings. Among the targets were the Pentagon, the Capitol, police stations, banks and courthouses. Beyond the three conspirators killed in the 1970s when a bomb exploded prematurely, no one was injured in a campaign described by one critic as "immensely bad ideas and dreadful tactics."

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