A friend of mine tells the story of the time her brother accompanied her and her family on a trip to Israel. Her brother, an olive-skinned guy who was not Jewish and who had chemical residue on his hands from working in the automotive industry, was aggressively questioned by El Al security in New York for a long time before being allowed to board his flight. Things escalated, she recalled, because he was unmarried and had no children. It is not that all single people are potential terrorists, but terrorists are generally less likely to have spouses and families.
With good reason. In a piece last week in The New Yorker, Zayd Ayers Dohrn, the son of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, describes what it was like to grow up with domestic terrorists as parents.
Zayd’s parents were part of the Weather Underground group that protested the Vietnam War with bombings. For a time, Bernardine Dohrn was on the government’s “most wanted” list, and J. Edgar Hoover once called her “The most dangerous woman in America.”
Amid planting bombs and helping criminals escape from prison, Bernadine Dohrn decided she wanted a baby. In retrospect, she thinks the impetus might have been turning 30. Zayd was born in a “safe house” in 1977 with a midwife supervising.
“According to my parents,” he writes, “by the time I was three I had learned to recognize plainclothes cops and F.B.I. agents in a crowd. …They taught me never to use landlines that could be traced — we carried rolls of dimes in our pockets and made our calls from pay phones. I learned to speak in code. … When I was four, I learned to walk a ‘trajectory,’ the complicated mix of turns and switchbacks we used to lose a tail.”
It all seemed like a game to him at the time and he felt certain that his parents would always protect him. “But, like most origin stories,” he writes, “I now know that ours was mostly a myth.”
As an adult, Dorhn has a lot of questions. Perhaps the most important is this: Why would you even have children when you’re living as fugitives from the law and could end up hurt or killed or in prison at any moment?
When he finds out that his father had used a family camping trip to case a prison in order to plan the escape of a member of the Black Liberation Army, Dohrn (who now has young children of his own) asks, “You were a father. … Didn’t you think about that? About the risks you were taking?”
Ayers responds with his own self-aggrandizing question: “How do you take responsibility for yourself and your family, and at the same time take some responsibility for the larger world?”
Chesa Boudin, who was adopted by Dohrn’s parents when his own parents were sent to prison for their violent activities, said of his experience, “I was still breast-feeding when they were arrested (for their role in the Brinks robbery). Later, I would say to them, ‘Why did you both have to go? ... It only takes one person to drive a car.’”
The truth is that these parents are the exception.
If you want to know why most radical movements discourage the formation of nuclear families, it’s because they don’t want their adherents to put anything above the cause. In 2020, Black Lives Matter included this on its website: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.” (After criticism, this language was later removed.)
The same was true of Marxism. If you were going to have children, they would be reared in a collective, because the attachment to one’s spouse and children might make you prioritize them over the interests of the community.
When Dorhn and Ayers decided to turn themselves in to the FBI, it was not because they were about to be caught, or even really that they had regrets about what they had done. By that point, Zayd had a younger brother. And the parents decided that it was simply not practical to live a life on the run with a family of four.
Rather than embracing his parents as heroes — as much of the culture has continued to do for a half-century after charges against them were dismissed because of government misconduct — Dohrn is not shy about criticizing them.
“All of us kids who grew up in the underground know that feeling — of being unwilling casualties of our parents’ war. None of us decided to follow in our parents’ violent footsteps,” he wrote.
Though Dohrn tries to find things he admires about his parents’ dedication, he concludes, “we all had to live with the knowledge that their radical choices had costs not just for us but for the other families who were hurt, the other kids who had to grow up without their parents.”
This is how decent human beings think.