he moved in with us for several months, and we story boarded a book. and i thought when we first decided to do this that we were going to do an illustrated version of "to teach." that would have been easy, i would have loved that. i had to learn from this young man that a graphic novel is not an illustrated book, it's an entirely different book. so -- and the reason is because it's the, you know, it's in the intersection of art and words that the thing comes to life. so we wrote an entirely new book in six months, and it's now going to be called -- it'll be out in early 2010, and it's called "to teach, the journey in comics." and i'm very, very excited about it because i think it's going to reach a different audience, and it's going to be, have a different kind of impact. but i think "to teach" is important, and the other one i would mention is "teaching toward freedom" which is my most

recent book about teaching, and the subtitle of that book is, i don't know, what's the subtitle of that book? >> host: you can see it better than i can. >> guest: moral commitment and ethical action in the classroom, and that's an attempt to fast forward from 15 years of writing and thinking about education more formally and to say, again, in a democracy what is the requirement of teachers? what is teaching in a democracy? and i land on the idea that the fundamental thing is that we have a moral commitment to think about our students, to think about our world in certain ways and then to act on that, on that thinking. >> host: if it's okay with you, mr. ayers, we had scheduled a break at this point, but if it's okay with you we'd like to continue to take more phone calls and questions from our audience. we'll take a short break in half an hour. you need to break? you go right ahead. you can leave, if anybody here in the audience needs to leave, that's okay to do. we're just going to continue to

take your calls here from chicago. ocala, florida. george, you're on the line, thanks for holding. >> caller: gentlemen. mr. ayers, with your writing and selling of books, are you incorporated? i have a couple questions, so maybe you want to take notes. now, i am a combat veteran of vietnam. i was medevaced through valley forge army hospital and separated there. given the recent authors of from generals of the nva, they said that after tet we had them beat because we eliminated one-third of their army. now, they also said it was people like you that made the war go on because they said that they would win it in the street. and i've got to ask you as a combat veteran, don't you realize that you gave aid and comfort to the enemy in the sense that, you know, they knew they could win it with people like you in the street? you were not for the troops, you were for the poor vietnamese.

now, you seem to be very liberal and as so seem to dismiss common sense and reasoning, and i'll say why. your analogy in the beginning was that poor black children do not know what a porch is. i come from west philadelphia. underprivileged, a lot poorer than a lot of blacks, as a matter of fact, and was drafted geographically before the lottery. now, there isn't a residence in west philadelphia or all philadelphia and baltimore and the northeast corridor all the way up through boston that doesn't have a porch. so, you know, you make an analogy that makes absolutely no sense. now, i have to ask you if you still believe in what you believe, aren't you kind of, like, stuck with an adolescent behavioral development problem? i mean, look at you, you're 65 years old with earrings in your ears, and you come off with these naive ideological

statements that have evidence to have failed all the way through ussr and china. i say to you, sir, that more bullets came at me and i was wounded not because of the nva as much because i was in a major siege for four days than through your efforts which increased the moral enemy's thinking. so that's my statement, sir. oh, one other thing. are you a communist? >> host: george, let's leave it there. lots to work with. bill ayers. >> guest: yeah. i mean, there's a lot to work with, that's true. i'm not incorporated. i do have earrings. i got 'em when i was 20, i'm reluctant to take them out. i don't know what that indicates. michael jordan has earrings, so, you know, it's not a gang symbol. the question, though, really the important central question, i think, is this question of whether the antiwar movement aided and abetted the enemy and

continued the war. and the question i guess i would ask back is what's the alternative? if a war is illegal, immoral, slaughtering innocents and as john kerry said to the u.s. senate when he came back from vietnam, we committed war crimes every day. not as a matter of choice, but as a matter of policy, and that was true. so what is the responsibility of citizenship? i might tell you that i think of myself as a patriot, but i don't think of myself as a nationalist, and i think there's around important difference. -- an important difference. i think a patriot is somebody who wants their country to live up to ideals of human rights and freedom and democracy and justice. a nationalist is somebody who says my country right or wrong, whatever it does doesn't matter. i think that's a horrible mistake. i think in many ways nationalism is rejection of patriottism. so i don't think that the antiwar movement was

antipatriotic, and i don't think -- and this idea that we were against the troops is absolutely wrong. the troops were the center of the antivietnam war effort and interestingly, the troops are the center of the anti-iraq effort right now. i went down to the encampment early on that cindy sheehan started up in crawford, texas, and there was a peace encampment run by soldiers. it was the first peace encampment i'd ever been at run by soldiers so when they said lunch was at noon, they didn't mean 12:30 or 1:00, all the anarchists were strarving because they didn't get there on time. it was amusing, but it was also true that the people who understand war are the people who went there and found the horror of it. you know, michael in a song says those who make wars never fight them, those who fight wars never like them, and i think that's largely true. so i never felt that i was

against the troops, but i'm against the war. bill maher made a joke the other day saying being pro-war was supporting the troops and he said, yeah, i've never heard anybody say i love the bush administration, it's those damn troops i hate. it's just not true. those of us who are against war are against the policy that puts you, for example, in harm's way, gets you injured and defines your life for the next 40 years. no, we should not be at warral over the world. we should not have 150 military bases all over the world. we should not be fighting war after war. we shouldn't be spending a trillion dollars a year which incidentally is half of the world's budget on armaments in war, and we spend half. the rest of the world spends another trillion. it's an outrage in this country that could be so great and should be so great.

>> host: we have another question from a member of our studio audience. please tell us your name and where you're from. >> thank you. my name is jim. i'm from chicago, the near west side, and, bill, i want to get back to education with a question. >> guest: thank you. >> and that is what i'd like to know is if mayor daly instead of choosing mr. herber as our superintendent of schools had chosen bill ayers in that position, what kind of initiatives, what kind of policies would you have really administered and promoted to reach the kind of goal you have of teaching children, teaching people to be effective in a democracy? >> guest: wow. that's a great and challenging question. i think that, you know, i can think of, i could probably think of a top ten really quick off the top of my head of what i think the leaders should do. one thing i think we should do is i think we should demille

terrorize the public schools. i don't think we should create military acadmies, these are recruitment mills for the military, and the schools are a civilian, not a military undertaking, so that would be one thing i would do. i would do away with any remnants of abstinence-only education. texas 96 percent of texas schools do abstinence-only education. it's got the third highest teen pregnancy rate in the country. it's a proven failure, it's ridiculous. we ought to have healthy and sane sex education for kids, that would be a second thing. i would rebuild the educational infrastructure if i had the resources and, frankly, i think arne duncan does have the resources, and i think this is something we ought to see so that schools like austin on the south and west side should look more like palaces of learning and less like 19th century fract

ris or -- factories or prisons. i think that's something that should be invested in. the main thing i would do is invest in teachers. i think the dumbing down kind of hammering teachers into cogs in a bureaucracy, treating teachers as if they are mid-level bureaucrats in a business kind of machine is a huge mistake. i want my kids, i want my grandkids now to have in the classroom an intellectually-curious, you know, ethically-grounded, well-paid, well-rested teacher at the center of their lives. i think that -- if we don't invest in that, we lose the stability of the teaching core, people staying in it for 10, 20, 30 years, we lose the kind of accumulated wisdom that comes, the kind of institutional memory as well as accumulated wisdom that comes from that, so investing in teachers is huge, and treating teachers like professionals.

that is, they need to have the wherewithal, the structures and the support to meet with one another, to face one another around a conference table and to consider the content and conduct of the enterprise. teaching, curriculum, assessment, that should be in the hands of teach efers. so i want to invest in teachers. i don't think we should invest in layers of supervision to watch teachers, i think we should invest in teachers. i think what chicago did in 1987 of bringing the schools closer to the parents and the communities was a wise move. i think much of that has been stripped away. we should get back to that. so those are a few initiatives that i would take off the top of my head. >> thank you. >> guest: thank you. >> host: who are malik, zade and chesa? >> guest: good try. malik is the middle

schoolteacher, he's 29 now, and chesa is my youngest son and has just finished his first year at yale -- >> host: he's also an author. >> guest: i'm sorry? >> host: he's also an author. >> guest: three books, i feel like a slouch around him. he's this summer in south africa clerking for a justice on the constitutional court. >> host: and his name is chesa boudin. >> guest: good try. we adopted him at 14 months. >> host: why? >> guest: because his parents were arrested and went to prison for life. his mother got out five years ago, and we're still hoping that his buy logical father -- biological father will get out. he's an extraordinary kid, and he's a kid who, you know, who came to us with many problems and was slow to kind of do a lot of things, slow to read. he didn't read until the third

grade. now he just finished his first year of law school, so no first grade teacher should make heavy judgments about kids. but he had a complicated life history and had a lot to overcome in order to gear into learning and participating fully. but he's a great, great kid as they all are. >> host: are you in regular contact with his mother, kathy? his biological mother? >> guest: oh, absolutely. she's part of our family, very much so. she got out of prison, as i say, five years ago or so. since she got out of prison, i guess this is genetic, she's gotten a masters degree, a doctorate, works two or three jobs, just got a -- is writing a book. an extraordinarily talented person and did 22 years in prison for a terrible crime, served her sentence, did her, did what was required of her and now she's out and being a productive citizen.

>> host: and his father? >> guest: yeah, david gilbert. he's in prison up near the canadian border, and the name of the prison just escaped me. i saw him a couple of weeks ago, and i hope he can get out too. >> host: where did the names come from? >> guest: zade was named after a black panther, malik was named after malcolm x. those are arabic names. >> host: if you would, bill ayers, walk us through the year 1970 for you. >> guest: 1970. you mean the year -- i'm trying to remember. 1968, '69, '70, oh, of course. i was an officer of sds -- >> host: students for democratic society. >> guest: major student antiwar operation, and in march of 1970 there was a terrible explosion at the townhouse, at a townhouse in greenwich village in new

york. my girlfriend at the time was killed two, of my friends were killed, and the rest of us went underground. >> host: you went understood ground in 1970? >> guest: yes, until 1981. >> host: what made you come out? >> guest: the war had ended, and the war was the real defining reason that we had gone underground. we now had two kids, and it seemed a lot of effort and a lot of energy to -- and, frankly, you know, unable to do the kind of political work that we would have liked to have done, so we determined that it was probably time to, to make our peace with the law and to take whatever consequences were there and to come above ground, so we did. >> host: how many places did you live and how many names -- >> guest: gosh, i can't even remember, but many. many, many. many places, many names. >> host: disguises? >> guest: disguises are

overrated. you know, it's more, i mean, there's not much you can do. i mean, i didn't have plastic surgery. i had, you know, i had long hair, and but everybody had long hair, so it was no big thing. it was mainly staying away from places like your childhood home that allowed you to survive. and the other thing is, again, it's hard to put it in today's context, but there was an entire youth movement, an entire youth community that we moved fairly easily in. people recognized me every week and no one turned me in because why would they? what was the point of that? >> host: how did you fund yourself? >> guest: oh, worked crummy jobs, worked off the books in restaurants and picked fruit in california and worked on the water front. >> host: did you have any contact with your family? >> guest: no. >> host: none? >> guest: well, my brother was underground with me, so i had contact with him, but, no, my parents wouldn't have known how to keel with it, and i wouldn't have either. and when we came back, of course, you know, the wonderful

thing about, you know, family bonds is the first thing my father said to me, again, this kind of, you know, important industrial leader in chicago first thing he said to me after a long embrace was you need a haircut. so, you know, dad, what the hell? [laughter] but that was on his mind. >> host: what was that last, the day you decided to come out from underground like? where were you, what happened? >> guest: we were living in new york, we had two small kids, i was teaching, i was working at a day care center, and we decided we had to do it, and we came back to chicago with our lawyer and stayed with my younger brother for a night and then walked ourselves into 26th and california which is where the cook county court is. >> host: did you alert them ahead of time? >> guest: my lawyer did. the state's attorney at the time was richard daily, and my attorney contacted him to make a deal, and he wouldn't make a deal, so we just hurled

ourselves at the mercy of the court. >> host: you being both you and bernardine dohrn. >> guest: yeah, and bear far den will be here in a minute, and she can speak for herself as she always does. >> host: go ahead with your question for bill ayers. >> caller: i don't want to seem negative, but you seem to be fill busting the public's comments by all your comments. bill, i think one thing that isn't being mentioned here is why vietnam? i was, i was in marching in the peace marchs in washington, and we used to call it the rockefeller war, that we were in there to protect rockefeller's chase manhattan bank. and i heard tell that the ho chi minh went to ken -- kennedy and asked him, you know, wanted to work with him to try to bring a peaceful solution after the french left.

i don't know why kennedy sent in the advisers then i'd also like to you to discuss the gulf of tonkin. >> guest: what was the second? >> host: gulf of tonkin. >> guest: well, that was the manufactured incident that gave kind of the justification for going into vietnam. it never happened, but in the american media and the american government put forward this idea that we had been attacked on the high seas. it's a bit of a stretch if you think about it. if you think about the ways wars are justified, you know, the sinks of the main and the gulf of tonkin and saad dam hussein has weapons of maas destruction, really where are we threatened? it's true that 9/11 happened, did not happen because of iraq, did not happen because a government attacked us, it was a, you know, very determined group of individuals and a horrible, horrible thing. but the gulf of tonkin became the justification for what ultimately was the death of

three million people. so we have to be very skeptical. one of the callers earlier said the government lied. well, there's a cautionary tale. all governments lie. that's one of the things they do consistently, so it's not just the united states' government. it's russia, they lie, china lies, and one of the things that marks a government or administration when it's moving into high propaganda is when it lies and knows that you know it's lying, but it does it anyway. so when the chinese said after tiananmen these were outside foreign agents and they sat up there and said it consistently with a straight face, they said it as recently as last week. it's a lie, everybody knows it's a lie, but they say it, and what's the message? we can say it. so when colin powell shows you the pictures of the weapons of mass destruction and must know that anybody with a computer is going to figure out that this is silliness and that it's a lie, but you know what? we can lie. you're frightened, you're sheep,

we will treat you as passive and unimportant, and so we're going to lie to you. that, you know, i think you're absolutely right. never heard the history about ho chi minh contacting senator kennedy. it might have happened, but never heard of it. >> host: michael kingsley in time magazine last year wrote this. i don't know if you've seen it -- >> guest: no. i don't read the stuff. >> host: the underground wanted the vietnam war to go on. they wanted the killing and dying to continue and spread along with anarchy, dope, and free sex. >> guest: not true, not true. there's nothing true about that. >> host: what do you read on a regular basis? >> guest: i read books a lot, and i believe in the power of books to change our lives. i was thinking this morning when walking through the book fair, you know, that there's that wonderful book that everyone should read and reread by ray

bradbury, fahrenheit 451 because one of the things -- you remember the book. it's about the, you know, the burning of books and the job of the fire department is to go to homes that have books and burn them. and the fire chief, chief beatty, explains that the problem with books is they offer complexity, that people would be happier if there were nothing complex. if we just saw things simply, we would be happier, and there's truth to that. you know, it's often said that, you know, that the unexamined life is not worth living, but what's not usually added is the examined life can be full of pain and sorrow and misery. but, yes, complexity, books, that's what -- but if you're asking periodicals, i read the nation every week and rail against it -- >> host: and rail against it? >> guest: oh, of course. and i read the new yorker regularly and rail against it. and then i get up every morning and read "the new york times" to

great mockery of my children. they say, why do you read that crap? i say, no, no, no, i have to read "the new york times." how could you be informed? and they say, you must be kidding, and then they'll say something snide, judith miller. she, as you might remember, is "the new york times" reporter who laid out the prim roads path into war in iraq. and i say, yeah, but there's stuff there that i need to know. and they say what, and my oldest son will always say, you know, if you spent that hour a day reading a novel, you'd be much more educated than reading "the new york times." but frankly, i'm not giving it up, i've got to have it in print, and he says, no, it's all going to be gone in a year. oh, no, please. so i read the times every morning. >> host: i want to go back to the nation. >> guest: i gave up the tribune, incidentally, and it was with great regret, but it's unreadable. [laughter] it is. and i find it unreadable, and i think it'll be gone, also, in

the next year which is a shame. >> host: back to the nation. i think most people would consider it to be a liberal progressive, whatever tag you want to put on it magazine. why do you rail against it, and where do your politics fall a as opposed to the nation? >> guest: when i said i railed against it, i was partly being goofy. but the fact is i think it's very important, and i know that we're sitting in a room full of readers, and i think most of you would agree that as a reader it's your responsibility to object and to fight back. it's not your responsibility to read something and then drink it in as if it's the truth. so i find myself with the new yorker, with "the new york times" always with national public radio constantly and with the nation arguing against them. why? because i, you know, you've set something down in print, and it takes on the spirit of truth and orthodoxy, and i think that it's our responsibility -- all of us

as thinking people -- to fight against orthodoxy. you know what i mean by that, that there's a -- and, frankly, i don't think it's the orthodoxy of the repalin house -- republican house members that i have to worry about. in some sense their dog mattism is too obvious. it's the orthodoxy of the left, of the good people. when i talked earlier about education and i talked about the metaphor education equals business, that's orthodoxy. that's something that everyone genuflects in front of. i object, so i don't want to be in that camp. when you think about it, what do we accept as normal that 30 or 40 years from now another generation will say, really? you guys are crazy. and i want to object to the orthodoxy of common sense. so, yes, i find myself railing against the nation in a regular basis, "the new york times" every day, npr pretty much every day. not because i think i know

everything, but because i think you have to be in argument with in order to find out who you actually are. if you just take it and drink the kool-aid alongside of it, you're dead as a thinker and as a citizen. >> host: do you ever pick up the weekly standard or national review or something you know you're going to -- >> guest: i know i'm going to disagree with the new york times, that's the beautiful thing. i don't read those journals, but i read the financial times, "the wall street journal" sometimes, yeah. and i read books, i mean, i read a lot of books that i disagree with. >> host: jerry in tennessee, you're on with bill ayers. >> caller: before i get to my point, bill, you made a couple of statements, i'd just kind of like to cover them real quick. when you said texas was third n i guess, teen pregnancies? that's not really a surprise considering they're the largest state in the continental united states. i mean, it would have been a shock if it was, like, rye. [laughter]

>> guest: it's percentage wise. it's by percentage. >> host: jerry, do you have another comment? >> caller: yes. then he made the statement that senator kerry threw his medals away, senator kennedy proudly displays his medals in his office, and i just kind of find that -- the vietnam vets against the war, a lot of them were funded by the peoples coalition for peace and justice and the world peace, organization, and they were funded by the communist party. the records actually prove it, so i don't know why people won't -- i mean, the guys i'm sure, i know that war is hell, and they had all the rights in the world to protest the war, but they were being funded by the communist party. and in coming through the kgb. and al hubbard, he was one of the main spokesmen for the vietnam veterans against the war, and he was supposedly got injured in the war.

he was never, never in vietnam. he wasn't a pilot. he lied about the whole thing like senator kerry and his christmas in vietnam. he never -- i mean, christmas in cambodia when nixon was president. well, at the time he was allegedly in cambodia, johnson was still president. >> host: jerry, where are you going with that? what's your question or comment? would you like mr. ayers to respond to what you just said? >> caller: well, yes, but would he prefer an educational system like the leader of venezuela, hugo chavez? because i know you praised mr. chavez when you go down there, his educational system. would you like to see that here in america for the kids to denounce captain level and go -- capitalism and go more for a marxist type of education? and thank you -- >> host: bill ayers. sure. >> guest: i'll answer two of those questions or comments. on the question of the communist party funding the vietnam vets

against the war, i don't know about it, but it may be true. but it makes me actually -- i've never been a supporter of the communist party, but if they gave the vietnam vets money against the war, it makes me warmer towards them. it reminds me of a friend of ours who founded the highlander folks school at the end of his life when he was dying we sat down with him, and we were going over pictures from the civil rights movement. highlander was the center of the civil rights activity in the south, and it was a marvelous place, and miles was a real hero in american history. but we were going through some pictures, and we found a picture of a billboard that was very popular in the south in the '60s, and it was a picture of martin luther king at a young age sitting at a highlander workshop, and the banner said martin luther king at communist training school. and miles