[Vision2020] The Weathermen tried to kill my family.

[No Weatherman]

John M. Murtagh
Fire in the Night
The Weathermen tried to kill my family.
30 April 2008
During the April 16 debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama,
moderator George Stephanopoulos brought up "a gentleman named William
Ayers," who "was part of the Weather Underground in the 1970s. They
bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other buildings. He's never
apologized for that." Stephanopoulos then asked Obama to explain his
relationship with Ayers. Obama's answer: "The notion that somehow as a
consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40
years ago, when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my
values, doesn't make much sense, George." Obama was indeed only eight
in early 1970. I was only nine then, the year Ayers's Weathermen tried
to murder me.

In February 1970, my father, a New York State Supreme Court justice,
was presiding over the trial of the so-called "Panther 21," members of
the Black Panther Party indicted in a plot to bomb New York landmarks
and department stores. Early on the morning of February 21, as my
family slept, three gasoline-filled firebombs exploded at our home on
the northern tip of Manhattan, two at the front door and the third
tucked neatly under the gas tank of the family car. (Today, of course,
we'd call that a car bomb.) A neighbor heard the first two blasts and,
with the remains of a snowman I had built a few days earlier, managed
to douse the flames beneath the car. That was an act whose courage I
fully appreciated only as an adult, an act that doubtless saved
multiple lives that night.

I still recall, as though it were a dream, thinking that someone was
lifting and dropping my bed as the explosions jolted me awake, and I
remember my mother's pulling me from the tangle of sheets and running
to the kitchen where my father stood. Through the large windows
overlooking the yard, all we could see was the bright glow of flames
below. We didn't leave our burning house for fear of who might be
waiting outside. The same night, bombs were thrown at a police car in
Manhattan and two military recruiting stations in Brooklyn. Sunlight,
the next morning, revealed three sentences of blood-red graffiti on
our sidewalk: FREE THE PANTHER 21; THE VIET CONG HAVE WON; KILL THE
PIGS.

For the next 18 months, I went to school in an unmarked police car. My
mother, a schoolteacher, had plainclothes detectives waiting in the
faculty lounge all day. My brother saved a few bucks because he didn't
have to rent a limo for the senior prom: the NYPD did the driving. We
all made the best of the odd new life that had been thrust upon us,
but for years, the sound of a fire truck's siren made my stomach knot
and my heart race. In many ways, the enormity of the attempt to kill
my entire family didn't fully hit me until years later, when, a father
myself, I was tucking my own nine-year-old John Murtagh into bed.

Though no one was ever caught or tried for the attempt on my family's
life, there was never any doubt who was behind it. Only a few weeks
after the attack, the New York contingent of the Weathermen blew
themselves up making more bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse. The
same cell had bombed my house, writes Ron Jacobs in The Way the Wind
Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. And in late November that
year, a letter to the Associated Press signed by Bernardine Dohrn,
Ayers's wife, promised more bombings.

As the association between Obama and Ayers came to light, it would
have helped the senator a little if his friend had at least shown some
remorse. But listen to Ayers interviewed in the New York Times on
September 11, 2001, of all days: "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel
we didn't do enough." Translation: "We meant to kill that judge and
his family, not just damage the porch." When asked by the Times if he
would do it all again, Ayers responded: "I don't want to discount the
possibility."

Though never a supporter of Obama, I admired him for a time for his
ability to engage our imaginations, and especially for his ability to
inspire the young once again to embrace the political system. Yet his
myopia in the last few months has cast a new light on his "politics of
change." Nobody should hold the junior senator from Illinois
responsible for his friends' and supporters' violent terrorist acts.
But it is fair to hold him responsible for a startling lack of
judgment in his choice of mentors, associates, and friends, and for
showing a callous disregard for the lives they damaged and the hatred
they have demonstrated for this country. It is fair, too, to ask what
those choices say about Obama's own beliefs, his philosophy, and the
direction he would take our nation.

At the conclusion of his 2001 Times interview, Ayers said of his
upbringing and subsequent radicalization: "I was a child of privilege
and I woke up to a world on fire."

Funny thing, Bill: one night, so did I.

John M. Murtagh is a practicing attorney, an adjunct professor of
public policy at the Fordham University College of Liberal Studies,
and a member of the city council in Yonkers, New York, where he
resides with his wife and two sons.
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0430jm.html