When Barack Obama decided to run for the Illinois state senate, William Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, hosted a gathering in their home to introduce Obama to their friends. The two men became friendly while working together on an education project and serving on the Woods Foundation board in Chicago. It evidently did not trouble Obama that Ayers and Dohrn were founding leaders of the Weathermen, a radical group that bombed numerous buildings, including the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, or that Dohrn spent several years on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted Fugitives list.
At the “war council” meeting Ayers and Dohrn convened in 1969 to plan attacks on the United States, Dohrn spoke appreciatively of the Manson family’s recent murders of Sharon Tate and her friends. “Dig it,” Dohrn shouted. “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them.” Referring to the killers stabbing Tate’s abdomen that held the son she was only days from delivering, Dohrn said, “They even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!”
