Bill Ayers's forthcoming memoir is self-serving and self-pitying

Fugitive Days and Ayers’ post-9/11 book tour were streaked with humility. Ayers had done something wrong, and he admitted it, but he did it for the right cause. Public Enemy, by contrast, is a memoir of score-settling, against a cast of extremely stupid (according to Ayers) critics. To hear Ayers tell it, since 2001 he’s been victimized and pilloried and misunderstand by a succession of idiots.

This time around, Ayers is humble only in a short recap of the post-9/11 interviews and when he’s reminding the reader that his wife and fellow Weatherman, Bernardine Dohrn, is completely amazing. In photos together, he looks like “her chauffer.”

In Public Enemy, Ayers sees a cynical campaign from reporters and right-wing bloggers to discredit him. “There was nothing in Fugitive Days that I hadn’t said out loud for thirty years,” he writes, and yet his enemies kept trying to nail him. None of them had the clarity to put his past in the proper context. He was trying to stop a war, remember? “I wondered where in all the noise there was any authentic call for a process of truth-telling about the war and the movement for peace and justice,” he writes, reflecting on the 2001 outrage-spasms. “Where was the proposal for an honest means to reconciliation and a sincere space of accountability[?]”