Op-Ed Columns

I wondered how long it would be before the McCain campaign blew the whistle on Cousin Bill Ayers, revered in the family for carrying on our radical tradition, and lifting it to the level of celebrity terrorist. He makes us proud.

If you haven't been keeping up with the news, Bill Ayers in the 1970s was a founder of the Weather Underground that exploded bombs to protest the Vietnam War. He served on a board and had a fund-raiser for Barack Obama.

That moved Sarah Pallin to scold Obama for "palling around with terrorists." You betcha, she did. Bless her heart.

No terrorist worth his salt minds a little publicity. Why do you think Osama bin Laden is all the time sending out tapes of himself chiding the West and promising its destruction? We Ayerses revel in the publicity Sarah's giving us.

If you haven't felt your leg being pulled at this point, I had better explain that we never heard of William C. Ayers until the presidential campaign, and as far as I know, we are not related.

I did have a first cousin named Bill Ayers whose early life was spent in China. His dad, my father's brother, was Dr. Emmet Ayers, who followed the example of his father, Dr. T.W. Ayers, as a medical missionary in China.

Emmet's wife Pat told harrowing tales of being there during the Japanese invasion, before Pearl Harbor, and how during their escape Japanese troops plunged bayonets through their trunks to insure they weren't smuggling Chinese nationals.

Before they were forced to flee, a Japanese dive-bomber dropped a bomb in the middle of the compound's large vegetable garden. With quick, practical ingenuity, Pat told the servants to peel the shredded vegetables from the walls. That evening they enjoyed an enormous "tossed" salad.

After the war, Bill earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in Oriental History and Philosophy. We visited him in Cambridge, where to a teenager the stacks where he worked were a strange world of fragile, yellowed manuscripts and silent, yellowed scholars.

When we emerged from that creepy place, I remember commenting about his degree, "I guess there isn't too much competition in that field."

As I should have known, one employer who had a vital interest in his discipline was the U.S. government, which he served as a distinguished Foreign Service officer until he retired to his farm in New Hampshire.

During the Vietnam War, when the Chicago Bill Ayers was setting off bombs in protest, our Bill Ayers was at our embassy in Saigon, where another cousin visited him and where among Bill's jobs was interrogating captured Chinese in fluent Chinese dialects.

After Bill died, Josephine and I were in Taiwan, his last assignment, where he had been a high-ranking and fondly remembered officer of our quasi-embassy there. Was he a spook, CIA? Maybe, I don't know. What I do know is that our Bill Ayers was on opposite sides during the Vietnam years from the one currently in the news.

What about the other Bill Ayers, whom the McCain campaign has suggested may be a latter-day Svengali, who has planted a hypnotic spell in Obama's subconscious that would surface in radical White House behavior?

A good plot for a movie, but Manchurian Candidate has been done, twice.

Here's what we do know about the other Bill. He was a radical opponent of the Vietnam War, did set off explosives against buildings, which injured no one, and he was indicted but was never tried because of illegal wire tapping and other prosecutorial misconduct.

He went into hiding for a while and then was welcomed home by his prominent family. His father had served as president and CEO of Commonwealth Edison, the local power company. He earned a doctorate from Columbia in 1987 and became a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

There, he and Obama were brought together by a national educational reform effort funded by Walter Annenberg, the billionaire publisher and philanthropist, who had served as President Nixon's ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Ayers spearheaded with two others a citywide effort that won for Chicago $50 million of the Annenberg grant. Obama was asked to chair the distribution of the funds. Archives of the fund show that both men attended six board meetings together.

In 1995, Ayers was one of several who hosted a fund-raiser for Obama's first campaign for the state Senate. In 1997, Ayers was named Citizen of the Year in Chicago. The last known meeting between the two was last year when they ran into each other in the Hyde Park neighborhood where they live.

How close are they? The prosecutor in the case against Ayers told The New York Times, "It seemed manifestly unfair to tar him with this association. Sen. Obama had known Ayers during a period he was named Citizen of the Year in Chicago, not when he was committing those terrorist acts." That was when Obama was 8 years old.

The has-been terrorist is rehabilitated but unrepentant. As for us, like a politician we can say about our newfound celebrity: "We don't care what they say, as long as they get the name right." Ayers does spell his name right.