writing and thinking about the education more formally and to say again in a democracy what is the requirement of teachers? what is teaching a democracy? i went on the idea of the fundamental thing is we have a moral commitment to think about our students and our world in a certain way is a and act on that thinking. ntinue 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 hospita >> 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. 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, and was drafted geographically before the lottery. now, there isn't a residence in west philadelphia or all philadelphia and bolt more in the -- baltimore in 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 knew naive ideological sentiments, so 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 o 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 killed, 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 an important difference. i think a patriot is somebody who wants their country to live up to its own ideals and to universal 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 a rejection of patriotism just as patriotism rejects nationalism. so i don't think that the antiwar movement was antipatriot rick, 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 set up in crawford, texas, and there was a peace encampment run by soldiers. it was the first encampment i'd ever been at run by soldiers. when they said lunch is at noon, they didn't mean 12:30 or 1:00, all the anarchists were starving 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, i think, made a joke the other day saying, you know, being pro-war was supporting the troops, and he said something to

the effect, yeah, i've never heard anybody say i love the bush administration. it's those damn troops i hate. it's 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 war all 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. >> what i'd like to know is if major daley 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 leader should do. one thing i think we should do is demille terrorize the public schools. i don't think we should create military academies, i don't think we should create jrotc. these are recruitment mills for the military, and the schools are a civilian, not a military

undertaking. i would do away with any remnants of abstinence-only education which i think is humiliating and disproven. you might know that texas, 96 percent of texas schools do abstinence-only education, it's got the third highest pregnancy rate in the country. it's a proven failure, it's ridiculous. we ought to have healthy and sane sex education. that would be a second thing. i would, 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 that 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 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 that the dumbing-down, the 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 assume -- 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 teachers. 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, said and chess saw? >> guest: you pronounced them wrong, but it was a good try. i have three grown boys. malik is the middle schoolteacher, he's 29 now, and chesa is my youngest son who just finished his first year of law school at yale -- >> host: he's also an author. >> guest: i'm sorry? >> host: he's also an author. >> guest: he's quite an author.

he's 28, i feel like a slouch whenever i'm around him, what the hell have i been up to? he's this summer in south africa clerking for a justice on the constitutional court of south africa. >> and his name is chess saw bow din? >> guest: we adopted him at 14 months. >> host: why? >> guest: because his parents were arrested and went to prison for life. his mother actually got out five years ago, and we're still hoping that his biological father will get out. but we raised him from 14 throughout, and he's an extraordinary kid. he's a kid who, you know, 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 she's gotten a master's 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 ackiers, 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. 1970 i was an officer of sds -- >> host: students for democratic society. >> guest: a major student antiwar organization, 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 underground in 1970. >> guest: that's right, and i was underground until 1981. >> host: what made you come out from underground?

>> guest: well, we had been underground for 11 years, and that was a long time. and 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 did you have -- >> guest: gosh, i can't even remember, but many. many, many. many places, many names. disguises are overrated. you know, i mean, 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, 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 during those 11 years? >> guest: oh, worked crummy jobs. worked off the books in restaurants, 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 uns ground with me, so i had contact with him. no, my parents wouldn't have known how to deal with, and i wouldn't have either. 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 important industrial leader in chicago, first thing he said to me after a long embrace was, you need a haircut. [laughter]

so, you know, dad, what the hell? 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 daley, and my attorney tried 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, you both you and bernadine dohrn. >> guest: yeah, and she'll be here in a moment, so she can

speak for herself. >> caller: i don't want to seem negative, but, you know, this is a public show, and you seem to be filly busting the public's comment by all your comments. bill, i think one thing that isn't being mentioned here was why we got in vietnam. i was 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 kennedy and asked him, you know, wanted to work with him to try and bring a peaceful solution after the french left. and i don't know why kennedy sent in the advisers, but then i'd also like you to discuss the situation with the gulf of tonkin. so i'd appreciate if you'd take up those issues. thank you very much. >> guest: what was the second one? >> host: gulf of tonkin. >> guest: oh, the gulf of

tonkin. well, the gulf of tonkin was the incident that kind of gave justification for going into vietnam. the american media and 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 sinking of the maine and the gulf of tonkin and saddam hussein has weapons of mass destruction, really where is the threat? where are we threatened? it's true that 9/11 happened. did not happen because of iraq, it 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 you know that it's lying, but it does it anyway. so when the chinese said after tiananmen, these were outside foreign agents, they said it 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 mass destruction and must know that anybody with a computer's 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. so 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, and i don't know if you have seen this -- >> guest: no, i don't read the stuff. >> host: for strategic and psychological reasons, 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. [laughter] >> 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 brad bury, fahrenheit 451, because one of the things -- you remember the book, it's about, you know, the burning of books and the fire department, 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. 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 the 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 like, let me just say one

thing: judith miller. she, as you might remember, is "the new york times" reporter who laid out the prim rose path to 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 informed than reading "the new york times." he says it's all going to be gone in a year. no, no, please, so i read the times every -- >> host: i want to go back to the nation. >> guest: i gave up the tribune, and it was with great regret, but it's unread blg. [laughter] it is. i think it'll be gone in the next year, which is a shame. >> host: back to the nation. i think most people will consider it to be a liberal, progressive whatever tag you want to put on, why do you rail

against it? >> guest: i didn't say i was, that i had politics as opposed to the nation. when i said i railed gepts it, i was partly being goofy. but the fact is that 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 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 republican house members that i have to worry about.

in some sense their dogmatism is too obvious. it's the orthodoxy 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 to be in that camp. and, you know, 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. >> do you ever pick up the

weekly standard or national review or something that you know you're going to disagree with or potentially disagree -- >> 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, i read "the wall street journal" sometimes, yeah. and i read books, i mean, i read a lot of books i disagree with. >> host: jerry in tennessee, thank you for holding. >> caller: yes, peter and bill, before i get to my point, bill, you made a couple statements, i'd just kind of like to cover them real quick. when you said texas was third in teen pregnancies, that's not really a surprise considering we're the largest state in the continental united states. it would have been a shock if it was, like, rhode island. >> guest: it's, 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 kerry has, he 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 people's coalition for -- oh, for peace and justice and the world peace organization. and they were funded by the communist party. i mean, we know that today. the records actually prove it, so i don't know why people won't, i mean, the guys, i'm sure they had -- i know that war's 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 this? 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, 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 capitalism and go more for a marxist type of education? and i'll -- thank you for -- >> host: bill ayers. >> guest: sure. 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 i'm -- it may be true. but it makes me actually, i've never been a supporter of the communist party of the usa, but if they gave the vietnam vets

money against the war, it makes me feel warmer towards them in an odd way. it reminds me of a friend of ours who founded the highlander folk school. at the end of his life when he was dying, we were going over pictures from the civil rights movement. highlander was the center of the civil rights movement in the south, and miles was a real hero in american history. 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 sitting at a highlander workshop, and the banner above the billboard said martin luther king at communist training school. and miles described -- we remembered the poster, we remembered it as a postcard, miles described taking a road trip with a group of young people to birmingham, alabama, to participate in a demonstration, and they saw one of these billboards on the

highway, and then they saw a second one, and miles was disgusted. but as the third one loomed up in the distance, one of the kids turned to miles and said that's the dumbest advertisement i've ever seen, it doesn't tell you who to call. so you'd think here was the white citizens council, the ku klux klan trying to discredit king, and all they were doing was promoting communism. that's the kind of feeling i had there. in terms of hugo chavez and what's going on in venezuela. there's a lot to say about what's interesting about it, and, you know, i was there several times. my son chess saw lived there and worked there, but i did find when i visited these, you know, venezuela's a place that has not had education for all, and it now does. and education in an interesting way, what i really admire about what they're trying to do is education goes from preschool through life. and so there are learning circles, literacy circles in communities, in