Academic

Tanenhaus' "Barack, Bill, and Me"

By propertyprof

This morning's Slate brings an important essay, "Barack, Bill, and Me" from my friend David Tanenhaus of UNLV's law school.  (You may recall David's op-ed in the Los Angeles Times in commemoration of Pat Tillman, which reminded us that the juvenile justice system gave him a second chance.) David--bravely, I have to say--talks about his relationship with Bernardine Dohrn and later Bill Ayers.

David explains the context in which he met them--and gives a sense of how Obama met them as well:

Obama first moved to Chicago in 1985, when he worked as a community organizer. But his career got on its current course when he returned to Hyde Park in 1991 to practice law and teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Four years later, he met Ayers at a lunchtime meeting about school reform.

As it happens, I was on the scene, too. In 1990, I began my graduate studies in the history department at the University of Chicago, focusing on the legal history of the city's juvenile-justice system. As I result, I was destined to spend many hours at the law school and eventually to meet Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn.

Part of the context is that by the time David met them, the counter-productive and destructive violence of the late 1960s and early 1970s was ancient history for those of us who were children when it happened.  As David writes, he hadn't heard of the Weathermen when he arrived in gradaute school.  "[W]hen I first met this couple, I had not heard of the Weathermen, let alone its militant offshoot, the Weather Underground, famous from 1970 to 1975 for advocating violent protest against the Vietnam War."   I don't want to give away the whole argument.  It's an important essay, which you'll want to read here.  I suspect we'll be hearing a lot about it, if the campaigns continue to focus on Ayers.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on October 10, 2008 (boomark / email).