Word: weathermen
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...Clean Ayers? Claire Suddath's article "A Brief History Of: The Weathermen" might well have been written by the Obama campaign [Oct. 20]. It implied that Bill Ayers' terroristic activity was ancient history and that he reformed his ways long before his relationship with Obama. Quite the contrary: In 2001, Ayers said of his group's activities, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough." Not to report this salient fact was misleading and biased. Andy Horvath, Elverson, Pennsylvania...
...Your item on the weathermen was a masterpiece of misleading journalism. Imagine how different readers' takeaway from the article would be if you had included details such as these: Charges against Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn were indeed dropped, but only because of a procedural technicality. Ayers has publicly stated that he was guilty. By the time Obama met him, Ayers' days as a Weatherman were past, but his beliefs had not changed - indeed, he has openly reaffirmed them. And his work for public-school reform can be seen as an attempt to spread his radical beliefs throughout...
...founding Weathermen came from comfortable, highly-educated backgrounds and felt the need to escape their sheltered bourgeoisie life. They moved into collectives, practiced forced sexual rotation, took weapons training, and planned attacks on the wealthy and powerful. By October 1969, the group was ready for its first major attack: four "Days of Rage," in Chicago's affluent Gold Coast neighborhood. The Weatherman boasted that thousands of student warriors would flood city streets with violence and destruction, but only a few hundred people showed up. Six Weathermen were shot and 287 arrested. The riots were deemed a failure...
Subsequent bombings of government buildings, banks and police departments lead the FBI to declare the Weathermen a domestic terrorist group. Only one explosion - a pipe bomb placed on a San Francisco Police Department window ledge in February 1970 - resulted in death. It was never conclusively attributed to the group...
...March 6, 1970, several Weatherman gathered in the basement of a four-story Greenwich Village townhouse, preparing for an upcoming dynamite attack on an officer's dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Due to an improperly attached wire, the townhouse exploded. Three Weathermen were killed, including Ayers' then-girlfriend Diana Oughton. Over the next few months the rest of the organization went into hiding...