(Crossposted from The Field.)
In 1971, Bill Ayers was a 27-year-old member of the Weather Underground, a clandestine revolutionary organization mainly of young people opposed to the Vietnam War and the capitalist system. That year, the organization took credit for setting off a bomb in a US Capitol bathroom one night when the building was closed to the public.
In 1971, Chris Matthews was a 26-year-old US Capitol police officer, a member of the group of workers that could have been wounded or killed by the bomb (which upon explosion did damage to property but not people, as was the Weather Underground's goal)...
Matthews, host of MSNBC's Hardball, is reportedly considering a run for US Senate in Pennsylvania. In recent years, an interview with a man who Governor Palin and others have called "an unrepentant domestic terrorist," would have posed an opportunity for an aspiring politician and TV host to engage in the most rabid forms of demagoguery imaginable: a chance to grandstand and position himself, a la Joe McCarthy, as a crusading friend of law-and-order feeding red meat to fearful future constituents and declaring himself their protector.
This had to be a particularly strong temptation because Matthews, as a former Capitol police officer, could have yelled dramatically that the 1971 bombing was an attack and threat upon his life, that it was all about him, as has been in vogue in recent years where professional victimhood has been seen as a career move.
That Matthews did not go down that path in his recent interview with Ayers, that they instead had an intelligent and illuminating conversation on national television, is another sign of how much has already changed in the United States.
In most civilized countries, such a conversation between a former guerrilla insurgent and a former police officer would not have been delayed for 37 years. The process of national reconciliation would have taken place much sooner after the conflict. Former insurgents would have been lauded for running for public office or for entering academia or for otherwise choosing peaceful means to political participation. Former law enforcers and politicians would have heralded those moves as a sign of the country's maturity and improvement. But the United States has been abnormal on that scale ever since the McCarthyism of the fifties and sixties.
Here in Latin America - where blocked paths to electoral change in the era of military dictatorships of the sixties and seventies led to armed guerrilla movements in most countries - the former guerrillas are now senators and newspaper publishers and respected businessmen and hold public and private office high and low, with nary a suggestion that there is anything wrong or improper with it. (In some cases their original ideals are intact, in others they have turned from left to right or from anti-capitalist to capitalist, but the point is that both kinds are considered normal in a democracy.)
With his silence during a presidential campaign at which his name was turned into a national political football by so many members of the media and by Obama's political rivals, Ayers distinguished himself with dignity. He could have parlayed the newfound fame to personal benefit (or tried awkwardly, a la Rev. Wright, to do so). But Ayers had the smarts to know that in the context of an active presidential campaign the environment wasn't conducive to truth or even self-defense. So day after day he took the blows and brushed them off, quietly, patiently (a sign of a smart guerrilla strategist has long been that of knowing when to wait, to bide time on the mountain and wait for better conditions to come down to advance upon the city again).
Striking about Ayers' appearance on Hardball is his thoughtfulness, the intelligence of his political analysis, and the disarming yet substantive way that he answered some hard questions from Matthews. Both men dressed themselves in glory during that conversation and in doing so created a kind of lighthouse with which the rocky shoals and stormy waters of American political discourse can better be navigated. Both revealed themselves as men of maturity and seriousness that would be worthy and valued collaborators on any political project.
I saw in that nine-minute interview the America that school books and propaganda taught us had existed all along, but that only now has a fighting chance to be born.