By Robert Moran
Zayd Dorhn was five when his parents, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, leaders of the radical left-wing militant organisation the Weather Underground, turned themselves in to the FBI to end their decade on the lam. They’d made a deal with prosecutors in Chicago for a reduced prison sentence, but still had to make the cross-country trip from New York without being caught along the way or the deal was off.
“They were, understandably, very nervous,” recalls Dohrn, now 45 and a playwright and writing professor at Northwestern University. “I remember we stopped at a rest stop to get gas and food, and this older couple started talking to me. They thought I was a cute kid or whatever and they asked, ‘Where are you going?’ And I said, ‘We’re going to Chicago to turn ourselves into the FBI.’ My dad grabbed me and we ran back to the car. Even as a four-year-old, I knew the FBI was chasing us, but I didn’t know what the FBI was or why or what it meant.”
Dohrn tells his parents’ story, and that of the Weather Underground, in the remarkable new podcast Mother Country Radicals, charting the organisation’s years of political dissidence from 1969 to 1977 and the fallout after the movement fizzled. Named for a line from Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues (“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”), the group carried out a bombing campaign against US government buildings in the early ’70s in protest of American imperialism, as well as an audacious jailbreak of psychedelic figurehead Timothy Leary in 1970.
Zayd Dohrn’s podcast Mother Country Radicals delves into his childhood on the run with parents in the militant left-wing Weather Underground.
While it charts similar terrain to the acclaimed 2002 documentary The Weather Underground, the podcast floats on Dohrn’s intimate perspective of growing up with parents intent on dismantling what they saw as America’s rotten social order. Bernardine was a student activist whose opposition to the Vietnam War and anti-Black racism escalated to the point where she was placed on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list and labelled “the most dangerous woman in America” by J. Edgar Hoover. Bill was a preschool teacher turned revolutionary, who participated in bombings of the US Capitol building in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972.
As the couple’s first child, Dohrn was baptised into the cause. In the podcast’s second episode, he recalls lessons his dad taught him as a toddler in hiding about how to spot undercover cops. “If you see a white guy and a black guy together in an unmarked car in Harlem, definitely cops,” Dohrn relates. “If I noticed a car like that on our block, I was supposed to let my parents know right away.”
“It’s hard to believe, but I can’t remember a time before [my parents] were telling me those things,” Dohrn says. “At three, four years old, it all felt normal to me. Like any kid, you’re born into a situation and it’s hard to know how strange things are until you’re older and step outside of it.”
Alongside the anti-state activism were other countercultural shenanigans. One of the Weather Underground’s policies was “smashing monogamy”, a free love idea aimed at entrenching bonds between comrades by eschewing coupled-off members. Seeing your parents like that could be quite awkward for a child?
Dohrn laughs. “By the time I was six, my parents had mostly left that stuff behind. When we were underground, we were in a lot of places – hippie communes in the Pacific Northwest, safe houses in New York and Harlem – where there was a communal living thing, so I was aware of people living together in various combinations. But by the time I was conscious of it, we were a somewhat normal family. My parents were together, and they were raising us as a kind of nuclear family. It was only later when I looked back – and, of course, no kid likes to think of their parents in that sexualised way – that I was like, ‘Wow, my parents were into that?!’”
Dohn (centre), with his parents Bernardine and Bill and younger brother Malik while living underground.
In 1980, after they turned themselves in, Bernardine was imprisoned in the Manhattan Correctional Centre for several months, while Ayers got probation and avoided serving time, part of a deal they negotiated to allow one of them to take care of the kids: Zayd, his younger brother Malik, and their adopted brother Chesa Boudin. Boudin, a Rhodes Scholar and the outgoing District Attorney of San Francisco, is the son of former Weather Underground members Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, who were convicted of murder in the 1981 Brink’s robbery; Bernardine and Bill assumed guardianship of Chesa when he was 14-months old.
“I remember vividly going to visit my mum in jail and sneaking books in and things like that,” Dohrn recalls. “But my dad was always there, single parenting us for the time that she was locked up.”
Other aspects of life with militantly political parents seem comparatively quaint. In another episode, Dohrn mentions a Che Guevara poster that hung on his wall growing up – perhaps a common rite of passage in teenage bedrooms, but one with a stronger punch considering his legacy.
“It’s funny, in my family I was always the least political. Compared to most people I was probably very political, but, you know, compared to my family…” he laughs. “As a writer, I always felt like the odd man out. It’s not like I was against their politics, but I thought of myself as an artist first, and only secondarily as someone who was interested in politics. But [politics] was always there, as you can imagine. Growing up, the basic idea was to be out in the streets, protesting all the time, making your opinions known”.
Musings both personal and political swayed Dohrn into delving into his parents’ life for the podcast. At 80, Bernardine’s age made him realise he was potentially running out of time “to ask her all the questions I wanted to ask, and to put her voice on tape for whatever you want to call it – posterity, for my daughters, for the public – because I think she has important things to say,” says Dohrn.
As a listener, it’s easy to be struck by the current resonance of their story, the ugly cycle of history revisited. With a US government veering towards law and order authoritarianism since Trump and the post-George Floyd reckoning against police brutality and racist systems of oppression, it’s bewildering that so much of what the Weather Underground fought 50 years ago are the same issues sparking protests today.
Fiery excerpts of Bernardine and Bill and their fellow students protesting en masse against the Vietnam War to no avail also speak to ongoing debates about the limits of civil protest. In her “declaration of war” against the US in May 1970, delivered following the police murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, Bernardine said: “Tens of thousands have learned that protest and marches don’t do it. Revolutionary violence is the only way.” In the face of state-sanctioned indifference, one can almost understand the activist logic that led to Dohrn’s parents taking that radical next step.
“I’m glad you noticed that,” says Dohrn. “You see this today in America with gun violence, for example – all these young people protesting every time there’s a new school shooting, everybody writing letters to their congressmen, and still nothing changes. You can start to feel the frustration building up.”
Dohrn is clear he doesn’t condone his parents’ shift towards violence. “But I do think it’s important for us to understand where this kind of frustration comes from, and why people feel the need to escalate beyond peaceful protest.”
In a recent interview about the podcast, Dohrn said he hoped to show listeners the mistakes that his parents and their comrades made in the midst of their progressive efforts. Has he come to a greater understanding of the decisions they made?
“I do feel proud of them,” says Dohrn. “I mean, yes, the podcast talks a lot about the wrong turns and the self-righteousness. I think some of these progressive movements are prone to certain typical mistakes: infighting, denunciations of each other, a sense of ideological purity that leads to casting people out who don’t agree. All those things were mistakes.
“But there’s something amazing about people who, 50 years ago, wanted to stand up for Black liberation and stand against racism and white supremacy. I feel very proud of them, very impressed by that. I hope that if I had been alive in their time I could have been as clear-sighted as they were about that.”
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