After introducing a few more key players—in particular, the Wie- boldt Foundation’s Anne and Stanley Hallett—the story of the joint rise of Bill Ayers and Barack Obama within Chicago’s foundation world can commence in earnest. To aid in our investigation of Obama’s foundation world, I will draw on nearly complete collections of the hard-to-find Woods Fund and Wieboldt Foundation annual reports for the period in question.
The three foundations we’ll be looking at—Woods, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and Wieboldt—share a common commitment to supporting community organizing. Because of community organizing’s radicalism—and especially because of its confrontational tactics—very few foundations, even liberal ones, have been willing to devote significant resources to the profession.32 Woods, CAC, and Wieboldt were the great exceptions. In planning and personnel, Woods, CAC, and Wieboldt overlapped, and Obama was at the very center of their alliance.
Let’s begin with the Wieboldt Foundation. To the best of my knowledge, it has never been reported that Obama’s early community organizing work was supported, not only by the Woods Fund and the Campaign for Human Development, but also by the Wieboldt Foundation. Obama’s Developing Communities Project received grants from Wieboldt in 1987 and 1988, and Wieboldt also supported the Gamaliel Foundation, where Obama served as a trainer.33 That financial support tied Obama more deeply to a radical network that Ayers would soon join.
The key figure here is Anne Hallett, who was Wieboldt’s execu- tive director in 1987, when it began supporting Obama. Along with Obama colleague, Midwest Academy official, and Woods Fund program director Ken Rolling, Hallett was the largest funder of community organizing in Chicago. Hallet and Ayers went on to co-found the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Obama headed, and where Ken Rolling served as executive director. In other words, Obama, Ayers, Rolling, and Hallett formed a closely allied group, working together in a variety of positions at a series of foundations. Hallett, for example, once described her relationship to Ayers as “joined at the hip.”34 Most important, Obama, Ayers, Rolling, and Hallett were deeply a part of Chicago’s socialist world.
Anne Hallett’s husband, Stanley Hallett, was a powerful figure at Wieboldt, and likely played a role in elevating her to the position of executive director. Stanley Hallett was a longtime Wieboldt board member and simultaneously served as Wieboldt’s executive vice president.35 Although he remained a lifetime “member” of the foundation, Stanley Hallett resigned from the board of directors in 1985, perhaps to avoid a conflict of interest when, in 1986, his wife, Anne, a community organizer with a special interest in education, was appointed Wieboldt’s executive director and secretary.36
Stanley Hallett, who died in 1998, was a fascinating, influential, and somewhat mysterious character on Chicago’s political scene. A 1998 profile of Hallett in the Chicago Reader highlights his insistence on staying out of the limelight.37 Hallett helped found the Chicago bank that served as a model for the Community Reinvestment Act, the law that compels banks to write risky subprime mortgages. Hallett also served on the board of the Woodstock Institute, the Chicago think tank behind much of the agitation for government-enforced subprime lending.38 Obama, by the way, worked closely with the Woodstock Institute during his time in the Illinois State Senate.39
Stanley Hallett was a longtime supporter of Alinskyite community organizing. He helped found the Center for Urban Affairs at Northwestern University and worked closely there with his younger colleagues, John McKnight and John Kretzmann, longtime associates of Barack and Michelle Obama, and closely tied to the Midwest Academy as well. Obama studied the writings of Kretzmann and McKnight, which embodied the socialist organizing strategy of the era.40 Essentially, Kretzmann and McKnight saw the Community Reinvestment Act as a prototype for a far broader program of constraints imposed on businesses by a partnership of government and grassroots community groups. So, again, we’re looking at a densely packed network of leftists tied to the Wieboldt Foundation, with multiple connections to Obama.
Why was Stanley Hallett so intent on avoiding publicity? Perhaps it had something to do with his political convictions. The January 1988 issue of New Ground, the newsletter of Chicago’s Democratic Socialists of America, contains the following notice under the heading, “Organizer’s Report”:
Our February meeting will be addressed by Dr. Stan Hallett of the Center for Urban and Policy Studies, Northwestern University. Dr. Hallett, who has just recently returned from Cuba where he had been hired by the Cuban government to work on urban renewal plans for Havana, will speak on the possibilities of neighborhood-based economic development within the constraints of a Communist regime.41
We’ve already seen that Hallett’s colleague at Northwestern, John McKnight, served as a consultant for the most left-leaning social planners in Sweden, and helped publish a magazine that touted the health-care systems of communist countries like Cuba and Nicaragua as models for the United States. McKnight recommended Obama for law school and worked closely with Barack and Michelle during Michelle’s time at Public Allies. It would appear that the cluster of leftist academics the Obamas were so closely tied to were running a consultancy service for international socialism.
Following Wieboldt’s lead, the Woods Charitable Fund turned itself into the second great source of foundation money for community organizing in Chicago—and one of only a handful of foundations friendly to Alinskyite organizing in the country. It’s common for family-run foundations to be pulled leftward after their creator’s demise, and the story of the Woods Fund is a classic example of a traditionally liberal family-run foundation being “captured” by leftist radicals. Obama was a major player in Woods’s radical faction, and appears to have brought Ayers onto the foundation’s board to strengthen his camp.
The Woods Charitable Fund was established in 1941 by Frank H. Woods, who made his money in coal. The foundation was largely run by the Woods family until 1980, when Frank H. Woods, Jr., one of the most involved family members, died. Up to then, the Woods Fund had focused on supporting the arts, and charities like the United Way, with a few civil rights groups thrown in. After Woods Jr.’s death, outside staffers and board members were recruited, including former Midwest Academy administrator Ken Rolling. Rolling and his colleagues promptly began to pull the foundation leftward.42
Throughout the eighties, the Woods Fund provided extensive financial support to nearly every radical group that mattered to Obama. The socialist-tinged connections and interconnections are dizzying. (No need to master every detail. Just get the feel of it.) We learned in Chapter Five, for example, that Ken Rolling personally hosted a top neighborhood organizer for Nicaragua’s Marxist Sandinista regime during a visit to the Midwest Academy Retreat of 1985. During the same period, Rolling was funding ACORN’s “homesteading” program—a campaign of illegal housing seizures, seen by ACORN’s leaders as a way of undermining the very concept of private property.43 UNO of Chicago—the radical Hispanic counterpart to ACORN—also received extensive financial support from Woods under Rolling.44 Obama mentors and UNO of Chicago founders Greg Galluzzo and Mary Gonzales (closely tied to the crypto-socialist Midwest Academy) were highly favored by Academy alumnus Rolling. Not only was their work at UNO of Chicago supported, Woods also funded the couple’s more ambitious regional organizing consultancy, the Gamaliel Foundation (to which Obama remained close right through his time in the U.S. Senate).45
Rolling also funded the Midwest Academy directly.46 There was Woods money for the Health and Medicine Policy Research Group as well.47 This was the organization, co-founded by radical Obama mentors Quentin Young and John McKnight, that held up the health-care systems of Cuba and Nicaragua as models for America. As we’ve seen, McKnight and his colleague John Kretzmann were closely tied to the Midwest Academy and to both Barack and Michelle Obama, and to the Gamaliel Foundation as well. Kretzmann and McKnight crafted their socialist-friendly community organizing theories at Northwestern University’s Center for Urban Affairs & Policy Research, which we saw above was founded by Stanley Hallett, who worked for the Cuban government helping to plan the development of Havana. Hallett’s center for urban affairs received regular support from Rolling at Woods.
Increasingly, then, the Woods Fund had been commandeered as a funding source by Chicago’s—and Obama’s—tightly interconnected socialist network. As a “small c” communist who worked closely with many of these players during the Chicago school-reform battle (another campaign heavily supported by Rolling), Bill Ayers would someday be a perfect fit for the Woods Fund board.
In 1993, the battle between the conventionally liberal family faction and the radical organizers reached a climax. After “intensive debate,” the foundation broke in two.48 The Lincoln branch would continue to be called the Woods Charitable Fund and would keep on supporting the arts and conventional charities. The Chicago branch would now incorporate separately as the Woods Fund of Chicago, focused on support for community organizing. The foundation’s endowment was divided, with Chicago taking 70 percent.49 For the pro-community- organizing faction in Chicago, there was still work to be done. It would take years before virtually all the Chicago money was funneled to Obama’s organizer allies. Nonetheless, with the formal creation of two separate foundations, Ken Rolling and his fellow radicals had effectively won. For all practical purposes, the Woods family’s money had been captured.
Here’s where Obama came in. Directly and indirectly, he had been supported by Woods for years. In 1992, for example, Rolling had directed a grant to Michelle Obama’s Midwest Academy–affiliated group, Public Allies.50 Now, in 1994, as the Woods Fund split in two, Obama was selected by Rolling’s faction to sit on the new Chicago entity’s board.51 As one of only five foundation directors, Obama wielded considerable influence from the start. In fact, Obama was quickly put in charge of a comprehensive review of, and report on, the Woods Fund’s support for community organizing.52 This report laid the groundwork for a major increase of financial support for Obama’s allies.
Obama and Ken Rolling worked together on the review process, aided by an advisory panel chaired by Obama. The advisory panel consisted of UNO of Chicago co-founder Mary Gonzales, Midwest Academy board member Jacky Grimshaw, former UNO of Chicago organizer Josh Hoyt, organizing theorist John Kretzmann, Jeremiah Wright’s close supporter Sokoni Karanja, and Chicago ACORN head Madeline Talbott.53
The report that emerged from Obama’s review of the Woods Fund’s community organizing program reveals him as the leading player in a good cop/bad cop game. Obama’s foundation job was to keep the money flowing to his controversial organizing cohorts by putting a respectable public face on a radical profession. Woods Fund support for Obama’s allies had an importance that went far beyond the money itself. The staged confrontations, intimidation tactics, and “civil disobedience” practiced by Alinskyite organizers tend to scare even liberal foundations away. As the Obama-supervised report puts it: “Some funders … are averse to confrontational tactics, and are loathe [sic] to support organizing for that reason. They essentially equate organizing with the embarrassment of their business and government associates.”54 As one of the few foundations to support community organizing for its own sake, Woods Fund money acted as a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, offering political cover to other foundations interested in funding the hard-left. Obama sought to capitalize on this effect, not only by increasing Woods support for organizers, but by distributing the Woods report to a national network of potential funders.55
Formally, the Woods Fund claimed to be “non-ideological.” According to the report: “This stance has enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government ‘establishments,’ without undue risk of being criticized for partisanship.”56 Yet, under Obama’s guiding hand, and in close coordination with Chicago ACORN head Madeline Talbott, Woods now more than doubled ACORN’s funding (just as ACORN’s campaign against Chicago’s banks was at its height).57 Since we know that ACORN volunteers served as the shock troops of Obama’s early political campaigns, that would seem to raise the specter of partisanship.58 It is at least possible, in other words, that Obama used his position at a supposedly non-partisan foundation to direct money to an allegedly non-partisan group, in pursuit of what were in fact nakedly partisan ends.
SECTION FOUR
The release of the Obama-supervised Woods Fund report on community organizing in April of 1995 brings us up to the edge of the Ayers controversy. While there’s good reason to believe that Ayers and Obama had known each other at least since 1988, no one now disputes that the two had numerous contacts beginning in 1995. In that critical year, Bill Ayers and Anne Hallett teamed up to create an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), whose board of directors Obama chaired. Later that year, Obama was introduced as the designated successor of State Senator Alice Palmer at a small gathering of Palmer’s supporters at the home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Throughout campaign 2008, and since, the Obama camp has labored to deny or downplay the obvious implication of these two episodes: that Barack Obama and Bill Ayers were close political allies. Yet a good deal of evidence suggests that the Ayers-Obama partnership was strong and long-standing, and that Obama has been trying to hide this fact for years.
In a sense, we’ve already learned the most important lesson of the Ayers controversy. Ayers himself was the tip of the iceberg—merely the most notorious figure in a much larger socialist network supported by Obama through his work at Chicago’s leftist foundations. Precisely because Ayers himself was so deeply enmeshed in that network, the Obama camp’s persistent denials in 2008 that Ayers had anything to do with Obama’s selection as CAC board chairman rang false.
We learned in Chapter Six that Ayers was working closely with ACORN in 1993. Chicago ACORN’s Madeline Talbott headed ACORN’s national education campaign. A 1993 memo from Talbott to the head organizers at all ACORN offices makes it clear that the real purpose of the schools campaign was to recruit parents to ACORN, with educational concerns playing a distant secondary role. Talbott worked closely with Ayers, whose ethnically themed “schools within schools” program offered ACORN a model for carving a mini-empire out of the Chicago public school system. Talbott’s plan was to attack the prestigious citywide system of “magnet” schools set up for students with higher test scores. By creating a furor of protest surrounding those schools, Talbott hoped to force the city to allow ACORN to set up a counter- system of Afro-centric “small schools” under its own control.59
Ayers’s Weatherman ideology, which he has never abandoned, views the seizure of schools by radical black community groups as the long-term key to building a movement for socialism in the United States. Obviously, Ayers and Talbott were made for each other. In 1994, Ayers brought Talbott into the working-group planning to create a Chicago education foundation with grant money from the wealthy conser- vative donor Walter Annenberg (another case of foundation money being captured by radicals).60 That same year, Talbott was working closely with Obama on the Woods Fund community-organizing advisory board, while Obama was busy channeling a massive increase in funding to ACORN. So a year before he became CAC board chairman, Obama was already effectively funding Ayers’s education work with ACORN.
That same year at Woods, Obama was also funding former Wieboldt director Anne Hallett’s Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform, the fiscal agent for which was Leadership for Quality Education, a group headed by Bill’s brother, John Ayers.61 We’ve seen that Hallett helped support Obama’s organizing work and served on the advisory board of Obama’s youth counseling program along with John Ayers in 1987. Sokoni Karanja, former Woods board member and prominent member of Jeremiah Wright’s congregation, was both close to Obama and a key member of Ayers’s education team.62 The cross-connections go on almost endlessly. In short, the year before Obama was chosen to head CAC, he was already well known to Ayers’s inner circle.
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was Bill Ayers’s brainchild, with Anne Hallett as his close (“joined at the hip”) partner. The foundation’s internal evaluations characterize its first year in particular as the period when CAC was “founder-led.”63 It is simply inconceivable that Obama could have been elevated to the chairmanship of a foundation created by Bill Ayers—at his moment of maximum power—without Ayers’s enthusiastic consent. Since CAC was funding Ayers’s pet projects and those of his closest allies, Ayers could hardly have been neutral about the man chosen to head the board, which was in charge of dispensing the money.
We now know that Ayers did in fact put Obama into the chairmanship of CAC’s board. Apparently drawing on an interview with Ayers himself, David Remnick’s recent biography of Obama states that “Ayers helped bring Obama onto the Annenberg board.”64 This extraordinary admission, made in passing and without comment by Remnick, flies in the face of the Obama campaign’s repeated denials in 2008 that Ayers had any role whatever in elevating Obama to the CAC chairmanship.
It’s important to emphasize that, at this point, President Obama’s credibility on the matter of his radical political past is virtually nil. We saw in Chapter Six that candidate Obama’s denial of any tie to ACORN beyond his role as the group’s lawyer in a single case was spectacularly false. Now we’ve learned that Obama worked closely with Chicago ACORN head Madeline Talbott at the Woods Fund and was the key figure on the Woods board advocating massive increases in money for community organizers—a huge portion of which went to ACORN. Since even Obama’s sympathetic biographer has now revealed (without comment or explanation) that the Obama campaign’s central contention about Ayers in 2008 was false, how can we now believe the president’s denials about his radical past?
We certainly can’t trust David Remnick’s account of the Ayers-Obama relationship. Remnick’s biography of Obama relies uncritically on his interview with Ayers, a man who’s confessed that his own memoirs bear, shall we say, a complicated and circuitous relationship to the truth.65 According to Remnick, Ayers claims to have hosted Obama’s political coming-out party strictly as a favor to State Senator Alice Palmer.66 Yet Palmer told CNN’s Drew Griffin in 2008 that she “in no way” organized the event.67 Ayers’s claim to Remnick that he wasn’t really “into” Obama because of the future president’s “moderation” is completely unconvincing.68 After all, it was at Ayers’s behest that Obama was put in charge of dispensing money to Chicago’s most radical activists. Obama’s conduct at CAC reveals him to have been a reliable supporter of Ayers’s most troubling projects and actions. It’s extraordinary, moreover, that Remnick’s biography has virtually nothing to say about Obama’s foundation work. Maybe that’s because it is impossible to tell the story of Obama’s foundation experience without facing up to the reality of the future president’s extensive partnership with Bill Ayers.
By ordinary standards, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was an expensive failure. Together Obama, as head of CAC’s money-dispensing board, and Ayers, as head of its policy-making “collaborative,” spent well over $100 million, with no discernible improvement in the test scores of low-performing schools. Tellingly, this judgment that CAC failed to improve educational performance in Chicago’s public schools was made by the foundation’s own evaluators.69
Can we attribute CAC’s failure to the sheer impossibility of improving inner-city schools? Not at all. During the same years CAC flourished, Chicago schools established clear standards, began high-stakes testing, ended social promotion, forced thousands of students to attend summer school to advance a grade, and put failing schools on probation. That pushed up test scores city-wide, “with no statistically significant differences in student achievement between Annenberg schools and demographically similar non-Annenberg schools.”70
Even so, by the standards of Ayers and Obama, CAC was a success. That’s because, in the eyes of Obama and his radical circle, CAC’s real purpose was to channel money to the enterprise of community organizing. In this it succeeded admirably. Instead of funding schools directly, CAC required schools to affiliate with “external partners,” which actually got the money. Proposals from prospective external partners committed to teaching traditional math and science skills were rejected. Community organizers like ACORN and Obama’s own Developing Communities Project got the money instead.71 Programs established by these groups focused more on political consciousness, Afro-centricity, and bilingualism than traditional education.72
Ayers’s “small schools” projects were perfect examples of the type. One of Ayers’s creations was a “peace school,” where students celebrated United Nations–themed events instead of traditional American holidays. As part of his rhetorical makeover, Ayers has soft-pedaled his overt anti-Americanism.73 The infamous 2001 picture of him standing on the American flag, published just as his Weatherman memoir was being released, was an imprudent, if revealing, exception.74 In his education work, Ayers inculcates loyalty to “the world” as a substitute for overt anti-Americanism. In his edited 1998 collection, Teaching for Social Justice, Ayers includes the story of a teacher who, instead of leading her students in the pledge of allegiance to the American flag, leads them in an alternative “pledge allegiance to the world.”75
Another of Ayers’s projects, Telpochcalli, was an Aztec-themed school that catered primarily to Mexican immigrants. Telpochcalli insisted on “full bilingualism” and its intense focus on Mexico’s language and culture made it controversial. Not only native English speakers but even some Spanish-speaking parents pulled their kids out for fear that children were learning English too slowly.76 Telpochcalli and some of Ayers’s other “schools within schools” were housed in a district where the local school council was controlled by UNO of Chicago—another connection to Obama’s radical network.77 As CAC’s board chairman, Obama was funding all of these projects.
Ayers’s partner in the small schools movement was Mike Klonsky, the ex-SDSer who led the faction of the Revolutionary Youth Movement from which Ayers and the Weathermen split off in 1969. Their old differences over the precise extent to which minorities would play leading roles in the revolution had been patched up—but not forgotten. Now, Ayers’s and Klonsky’s joint work promoting radical politics through ethnically themed schooling was a fulfillment of their sixties-vintage socialist theories.
Ayers’s education theories explicitly downplay achievement tests in favor of political activism.78 It’s hardly a surprise, then, that CAC failed to raise test scores. In Ayers’s eyes, schools should be “sites of resistance” to an oppressive system. The point, he says, is to “teach against oppression,” against America’s history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.79 If Obama was really too moderate for Ayers’s taste, why would the ex-Weatherman have trusted his young colleague to decide whether to fund projects guided by so controversial a theory of education?
Again and again, Obama came through for Ayers. CAC was restructured after its first year, due to ethical concerns. Under the initial arrangement, community activists at the Ayers-run collaborative were effectively recommending that the CAC board fund their own projects. So after the first year, all decisions on grants were made by the Obama-headed board alone. Ayers and Hallett were stripped of their ex-officio status as board members. Yet, while the apparent threat of self-dealing was removed, Obama kept the money flowing to Ayers and his inner circle for years. It was as if the restructuring had never happened.80
Internal evaluations attributed CAC’s failure to the board’s reluctance to de-fund community groups that had very little in the way of actual educational expertise (think ACORN).81 Yet we’ve seen that education was always secondary for these organizers, who were much more interested in recruiting parents to their groups than in raising kids’ test scores. Obama’s own “youth counseling program,” formulated back in 1987 with the help of the same people who went on to create CAC, focused on parental recruitment as well. When CAC’s one relatively conservative board member objected to the focus on organizing parents at the expense of education, Obama intervened to keep the money flowing.82
CAC’s internal post-mortem also fingered the hiring of an executive director with no real educational experience as a major source of the foundation’s failure.83 This was no mere oversight. Obama and Ayers hired Midwest Academy veteran Ken Rolling away from the Woods Fund to run CAC. Rolling had been a hidden force behind the Chicago school-reform movement. Rolling’s motivation had little to do with education. Instead he hoped to hand power and recruits to the city’s community organizers.84
CAC’s failure, therefore, had nothing to do with either bad luck or the inherent difficulty of the task, and everything to do with the shared desire of Obama and Ayers to funnel a very large pot of money to the city’s most radical community organizers. This was leftist political patronage, pure and simple. Ayers chose Obama for the job because he knew Obama could be trusted to support Chicago’s socialist network. After all, Obama was already doing the very same thing at the Woods Fund. As we’ll see, Obama eventually returned the favor and brought his trusted ally Ayers onto the Woods Fund Board.
Ayers’s old SDS associates from the SDS’s Revolutionary Youth Movement faction (before it split with the Weathermen) were very much a part of Obama’s world. As we’ve seen, Ayers worked closely on his small-schools projects with former RYM leader Mike Klonsky.85 Obama funded those projects for years. The former leadership of RYM, Klonsky, Carl Davidson, and Marilyn Katz, retained their socialist views and now belonged to the Committees of Correspondence—a Marxist group to the left of even the Democratic Socialists of America.86 Davidson worked closely with the New Party, which Obama joined for his 1995–96 state senate run.87 Davidson, Klonsky, and Marilyn Katz helped organize the October 2002 demonstration where Obama first went public with his opposition to the Iraq war.88
SECTION FIVE
Although Ayers would not join the Woods Fund board until 1999, long before that, under Obama’s sway, Woods began to direct money toward Ayers’s projects, and the projects of his wife and former Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn. In 1995, when Obama was already helping to fund Ayers’s education projects as CAC board chair, Woods directed major support to Ayers’s small schools workshop, and to Anne Hallett’s Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform.89 That was a major show of support from Obama, and a way of opening up a second stream of money for Ayers and Hallett should their CAC funding be shut off on grounds of self-dealing. Woods continued to support Ayers’s and Hallett’s education projects for years.90
In 1996, with Obama now vice chair of the Woods board, funding began to flow as well to Bernardine Dohrn’s Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law.91 So in the same year Obama won his first run for political office—with a campaign kicked off at Ayers’s and Dohrn’s home—Woods began funding the couple’s projects. For someone we’re now supposed to believe wasn’t really “into” a “moderate” like Obama, Ayers was making out pretty well.
There is nothing remotely moderate about Bernardine Dohrn’s understanding of the American legal system. In her 2009 memoir-polemic with Ayers, Race Course Against White Supremacy, Dohrn lays out a critique of American society straight out of the Weatherman worldview. For Dohrn, America’s justice system is simply a modern version of the “slave ship,” and our prison system a veritable political “gulag.”92 From Dohrn’s perspective, violence is less the fault of criminals than of America’s “structurally racist” society. Welfare reform laws and low-wage work—themselves forms of “state violence”—are the real crimes, says Dohrn. The implications of Dohrn’s writings are clear. Since Americans suffer from pervasive and structural “state violence,” mass violence against the state would be entirely justified. While Ayers and Dohrn had abandoned their terror tactics, you can see why they’ve refused to either apologize or rule out future terrorism. They still believe revolution is justified. It’s obvious as well that Ayers and Dohrn continue to see a minority-led rebellion against America’s prison system as the best long-term hope of sparking off a socialist revolution.
This is the ideology that lay behind Dohrn’s juvenile justice projects, which Obama began funding in 1996. Dohrn’s picture was featured in a special profile at the head of the Woods Fund’s 1996 Annual Report.93 This was no fluke. A year after he began to fund Dohrn’s juvenile justice projects, Obama allied with Ayers in the fight against a new Illinois juvenile crime bill. This was clearly a new phase in what was to become an extended working relationship between Obama, Ayers, and Dohrn.
Once you piece together all the available information, it’s apparent that it was Obama who placed Ayers on the Woods Fund Board in 1999.94 After all, in 1999, Obama had served for five years as board chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a foundation created by Bill Ayers. Not only had Ayers and Dohrn launched Obama’s political career at their home, but Obama had worked closely with Ayers during the 1997–98 battle over the Illinois juvenile crime bill. Along with Obama at the state capital, Bernardine Dohrn’s Juvenile Justice Center at Northwestern University was probably the strongest public voice against that bill.95 Since Woods was channeling significant support to Dohrn’s center during the battle, it’s evident that Ayers, Dohrn, and Obama were strong political allies.96
Obama’s only year of service as Woods Fund board chair, moreover, was 1998.97 Presumably this is when Ayers was actually recruited to the board and when the groundwork for his 1999 appointment was laid. So Obama used his moment of maximum formal power at Woods to recruit Ayers to the board.
In the unlikely event that placing Ayers on the Woods Fund Board was actually someone else’s idea, it’s inconceivable that the board would have followed through without Obama’s enthusiastic agreement. After all, no one at Woods could have known Ayers better or worked with him longer than Obama. Whoever first suggested that Ayers join Woods, Obama’s approval would have been critical. But why beat around the bush? In the immortal words of Bob Dylan, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Ayers’s elevation to the Woods Fund Board was obviously Obama’s doing.
With Ayers on the Woods Fund board, Obama now had the ideal ally to push the foundation toward yet another increase in support for his community organizing allies. We’ve seen that, drawing on his Weatherman ideology, Ayers regards agitation around education, community organizing, and juvenile justice as the best way to build a movement for socialism in a non-revolutionary period. Now Ayers and Obama together helped usher in a new set of Woods policies, formally announced in the 2001 Woods Fund Annual Report.98 The new “strategic objectives” not only increased support for community organizing, but favored fewer—and larger—grants for a select set of favored groups. Among the main beneficiaries of this new largesse were ACORN, the Midwest Academy, and a variety of leftist advocates on juvenile justice issues.99
The new strategic objectives also emphasized coordinated efforts by leftist think tanks and radical community groups to influence legislation in Springfield. With Ayers’s help, in other words, Obama was now able to fund an expertly guided grassroots movement to help him with his legislative campaigns.
The 2001 Woods Fund annual report contains a long case study of an Obama-funded coalition at work. The report was co-authored by Joshua Hoyt, one of Obama’s old colleagues from UNO of Chicago.100 Hoyt proudly tells the story of how a foundation-funded grassroots coalition called United Power for Action and Justice was able to win a major expansion of health insurance in Illinois “in the midst of the worst state budget crisis in two generations.” Of course, the Illinois budget crisis has only worsened since then, advanced by exactly this sort of entitlement expansion.
One of the most interesting things about Hoyt’s report is its core tactical message: “A good cop/bad cop dichotomy can be useful.” United Power’s policy experts consciously worked to remain on friendly terms with legislators on all points of the political spectrum, yet worked behind the scenes to encourage the hardball Alinskyite confrontation tactics of their grassroots allies. Hoyt’s account teaches us an important lesson about Obama. The president is not a moderate. He is instead a classic Alinskyite “good cop.” Obama’s role is to provide a veneer of moderation to what is in fact a radical enterprise, all the while encouraging his tactically ruthless Alinskyite supporters. It took Bill Ayers more than thirty years to discover an organizing strategy that worked. With Obama’s help, he finally found one.
The truth about the extended political partnership between Ayers and Obama stands in sharp contrast to the president’s famous April 2008 campaign claim that Ayers was “just a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” By the summer of 2008, a number of bloggers had noticed the contradiction between Obama’s portrayal of his relationship with Ayers and publicly available information on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Obama and Ayers jointly headed. When my attempts in August of 2008 to examine the CAC records housed at the University of Illinois Chicago Library were blocked, the controversy exploded onto the public stage.
Although I had been repeatedly assured by UIC Library officials that I would be allowed to examine CAC records, just before I boarded my flight for Chicago, top library officials mysteriously intervened to bar access. They justified their decision by a series of evolving and inconsistent explanations. I then launched a public campaign at National Review Online to persuade UIC officials to allow access to the records.101 The university was deluged with emails and protests.
Based on reporting by the Chicago Tribune and Freedom of Information Act requests by myself and others, I was later able to provisionally reconstruct what had happened.102 Former CAC executive director Ken Rolling apparently intervened to deny me access to the records after being tipped off by an unidentified library official on the same day I contacted UIC, August 11, 2008. Rolling later claimed that he had called the library on his own that day, but it’s impossible to believe he would have spontaneously phoned to block access to the CAC records on the same day I asked to see them. Rolling appears to have offered a highly questionable series of legal claims as a way of building a case to completely withdraw the records from university control. The burgeoning public campaign to release the records soon doomed that move to failure.
By the time UIC relented and allowed me to see the CAC records, I entered the UIC Special Collections Reading Room with local and national media, as well as a phalanx of aides from both the Obama and McCain campaigns. But while Chicago media reported on the controversy, the national media remained virtually silent. A day after I began to look through the records, most of the reporters stopped searching the archives. Although the online conservative community had been in an uproar from the moment I was refused access to the records, the mainstream press was able to keep the CAC story largely out of the public eye.
Having turned up records of CAC board meetings attended jointly by Obama and Ayers, I was invited to appear on the radio with Chicago’s widely respected talk-show host Milt Rosenberg to present my findings and discuss the Obama-Ayers relationship. The Obama campaign turned down an offer to send a representative to debate me and instead launched an all-out campaign to bar me from the radio. Thousands of callers inundated the radio station demanding that my appearance be canceled, while an Obama campaign spokesman phoned the station to insist that I be barred.103 The radio station was housed in Chicago’s famous Tribune Tower, whose soaring lobby, the “Hall of Inscriptions,” is carved with stirring defenses of freedom of speech and the press: “‘Give me liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely according to my conscience, above all other liberties’—Milton.” I studied the inscriptions as I waited in the lobby.
The radio show was dominated by callers demanding that I be barred from speaking. All they knew about me was what they’d been told by the Obama campaign—that I was a “right-wing hatchet man,” a “smear merchant,” and a “slimy character assassin,” perpetrating one of the “most cynical and offensive smears ever launched against Barack.”104 Of course, this “smear”—that Bill Ayers worked directly with Barack Obama at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and had a role in appointing Obama to the board—has now been confirmed by myriad documents, and even by Obama’s sympathetic biographer, David Remnick.
A month later I reported the findings of my research in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece.105 After informing the Obama campaign of the gist of my argument and requesting a response, I published their statement in full, along with my rebuttal, at National Review Online.106 Ten days later, the New York Times took notice of the controversy, publishing a piece that acknowledged a working relationship between Obama and Ayers, but did everything possible to minimize its extent and significance.107 The article relied on the Obama campaign and Obama’s supporters in Chicago as sources, without quoting the views of critics like myself or the intrepid liberal blogger Steve Diamond, who did yeoman’s work detailing the Ayers-Obama relationship during the campaign.108 As a result, while many were up in arms about the Ayers affair, the broader public never heard both sides of the story. At least as important, the national press refused to report on the Obama campaign’s efforts to suppress the story itself.
In any case, as I’ve emphasized repeatedly, Bill Ayers was never anything more than an important clue to a much larger mystery. Ayers’s notoriety turned him into a particularly noticeable tear in the carefully woven fabric of Obama’s moderate image. A few more tugs and the cloak itself would unravel, revealing the socialist secret beneath. That is why the Ayers story had to be suppressed.