57 RI Bar J., No. 4, Pg 33. Book Review: Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times As a Weatherman By Cathy Wilkerson.

• Author: Jerry Elmer, Esq.is a staff Attorney for the RI office of the Conservation Law

Rhode Island Bar Journal

Volume 57.

57 RI Bar J., No. 4, Pg 33.

Book Review: Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times As a Weatherman By Cathy Wilkerson

Rhode Island Bar Journal57 RI Bar J., No. 4, Pg .33 January/February 2009 Book Review: Flying Close to the Sun: My Life and Times As a Weatherman By Cathy WilkersonJerry Elmer, Esq.is a staff Attorney for the RI office of the Conservation Law Foundation and the author of Felon for Peace: The Memoir of a Vietnam-Era Draft Resister.

The bad-boy outlaw is an American archetype. Thus, Jesse James, Clyde Barrow, and John Dillinger are all American folk heroes. In reality, these men were murderous thugs. But a romantic aura hangs over them, and our culture mythologizes their exploits.

Our image of the outlaw-as-hero provides the cultural backdrop for, and contributes to the commercial success of, the current crop of retrospectives examining the Weather Underground, a violent faction of the 1960s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that went underground in 1969 and spent years bombing buildings to protest American imperialism. In 2002, Sam Green and Bill Siegel released a movie, The Weather Underground, skillfully blending archival film footage from the Vietnam era with contemporary interviews with leading Weather Underground figures, including Bernadine Dohrn, Mark Rudd, and Bill Ayers. The movie played in theatres nationwide, receiving generally favorable reviews from mainstream critics. Violence, at least when it is at a bit of a remove from us in geography and/or time, is romantic.

In August 2001, Ayers published Fugitive Days, his account of the Weather years. At 6:00 a.m. the following month, as I sat in my kitchen drinking my morning coffee, I came across an air-brushed, almost fawning review by Dinitia Smith of Fugitive Days on the front page of the Arts section of that day's New York Times. Under the headline, No Regrets For A Love of Explosives; A War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen, Smith wrote: "`Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon,' [Ayers] writes. . .He goes on to provide details about the manufacture of the bomb and how a woman he calls Anna placed the bomb in a restroom. No one was killed or injured, though damage was extensive."

Three hours after I read that article, two airplanes flew directly into New York's World Trade Center...