As Todd Gitlin, a former ’60s leftist and a historian of the period, put it: “They planned on being terrorists. Then their bomb blew up and killed several of them and they thought better of it. They were failed terrorists.”

Ayers told me this week that he did not know about the nail bomb in advance — and condemned it afterward. I take him at his word. So why obfuscate in the Times? Editors cut the article, he protested — before conceding that his original version left it out, too.