Bernardine Dohrn

Bernardine Rae Dohrn (born January 12, 1942) is an American former leader of the 1969–1980 radical leftist organization Weather Underground. She is an Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law and the Director of Northwestern's Children and Family Justice Center.

Personal life

Bernardine Dohrn was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1942 and grew up in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin. Her father, Bernard Ohrnstein, changed the surname to Dohrn when Bernandine was in high school.. Her father was Jewish and mother was Christian Scientist with a Swedish background.She graduated from Whitefish Bay High School where she was a cheerleader . She attended Miami University for one year, then transferred to the University of Chicago, where she graduated with honors with a B.A. in Political Science in 1963, and with a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School in 1967. She moved to New York to work for the National Lawyers Guild in 1967.

Early radical history

Dohrn became one of the leaders of the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), a radical wing of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), in the late 1960s. The ninth annual national SDS conference was held in Chicago in June 18-22, 1969, and the SDS collapsed in an RYM-led upheaval. In July 1969, Dohrn, Eleanor Raskin, Dianne Donghi, Peter Clapp, David Millstone and Diana Oughton, all representing "Weatherman", as Dohrn's faction was now called, traveled to Cuba and met with representatives of the North Vietnamese and Cuban governments.

Dohrn has been criticized for a comment she made about the recent Charles Manson led Tate-LaBianca murders in a speech during the December 1969 "War Council" meeting organized by the Weathermen and attended by about 400 people in Flint, Michigan: "Dig it! First they killed those pigs and then they put a fork in their bellies. Wild!" Dohrn also charged that her fellow left-wingers showed themselves to be scared "honkies" for not burning down Chicago when Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was killed, and urged her audience to arm themselves and be "a fighting force alongside the blacks." Dohrn's husband, Bill Ayers has written that Dohrn was being ironic when she made the statement:

I didn’t hear that exactly, but words that were close enough I guess. Her speech was focused on the murder just days earlier of our friend Fred Hampton, the Black Panther leader [...] She linked Fred’s murder to the murders of other Panthers around the country, to the assassinations of Malcolm X and Patrice Lumumba, the CIA attempts on Fidel's life, and then to the ongoing terror in Viet Nam. "This is the state of the world," she cried. "This is what screams out for our attention and our response. And what do we find in our newspapers? A sick fascination with a story that has it all: a racist psycho, a killer cult, and a chorus line of Hollywood bodies. Dig it! ..."

Ayers wrote in 2008 that he always thought Dohrn's controversial statement was uttered to make a political point, "agitated and inflamed and full of rhetorical overkill, and partly as a joke, stupid perhaps, tasteless, but a joke nonetheless", and similar, he said, to jokes about Charles Manson that were being made by Hunter S. Thompson and Richard Pryor. Ayers said he had been present at interviews with reporters in which Dohrn had tried to put her statement in context, but the reporters had ignored her explanation.

In 2001, David Horowitz, a former radical turned conservative, contested Dohrn's and Ayers' contention that she was not serious. She at least appeared that way to others, he wrote: "In 1980, I taped interviews with thirty members of the Weather Underground who were present at the Flint War Council, including most of its leadership. Not one of them thought Dohrn was anything but deadly serious."

Later radical history

While Dohrn led the Weathermen, the organization conducted a series of bombings against the U.S. government and symbols of authority in the early 1970s, bombing federal buildings and police stations. Dohrn was a principal signatory on the group's "Declaration of a State of War" in 1970 that formally declared "war" on the U.S. Government, and completed the group's transformation from political advocacy to violent action. Dohrn also co-wrote and published the subversive manifesto Prairie Fire in 1974, and participated in the covertly-filmed Underground in 1976.

The Weathermen and Weather Underground were suspected in various bombings — police cars, the National Guard Association building, the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon, and took credit for a number of them. Dohrn allegedly participated in many of the group's revolutionary activities.

In the two months before the March 6, 1970, Greenwich Village townhouse explosion in which three members of the group were killed as a bomb was being constructed, all members of Weatherman went underground. At about the same time, the group changed its name to Weather Underground.

Dohrn has said that despite her sometimes inflammatory language, she never approved of violence and asserted that the Weatherman organization didn't favor it. Asked in an interview published in 1995, "Did you come to the conclusion that violence ws the way to go?", she replied in part, "I never thought violence was a good thing in a strategic sense. [...] We were trying to find ways to act that were nonviolent but more militant. [...] [A]ctually our behavior was temperate and restrained. Ours was a very decentralized and anarchistic movement, but with one or two exceptions; for over a decade, the militancy remained symbolic. [...] Millions of people chanted 'Off the pig,' but that didn't mean they were going to go out nad shoot a policeman in the head. The language was inflammatory on both sides, but the reality stayed in the realm of protest. I reject the notion that we were violent." Asked about bombings in the same interview, Dohrn said, "We only did a couple, and they were carefully done. They involved property and were not meant to harm anybody."

Dohrn has been suspected of involvement in a February 16, 1970, bombing of the Park Police Station in San Francisco, which kllled a police officer and partially blinded another, who was forced to retire on a disability. At the time, Dohrn was said to be living with a Weatherman cell in a houseboat in Sausalito, California, unnamed law enforcement sources later told KRON-TV. An investigation into the case was reopened in 1999, and a San Francisco grand jury looked into the incident, but no indictments followed, and no one was ever arrested for the bombing. An FBI informant, Larry Grathwohl, who successfully penetrated the organization from the late summer of 1969 until April 1970, later testified to a U.S. Senate subcommittee that Bill Ayers, then a high-ranking member of the organization and a member of its Central Committee (but not then Dohrn's husband), had said Dohrn constructed and planted the bomb. Grathwohl testified that Ayers had told him specifically where the bomb was placed (on a window ledge) and what kind of shrapnel was put in it. Grathwohl said Ayers was emphatic, leading Grathwohl to believe Ayers either was present at some point during the operation or had heard about it from someone who was there. In a book about his experiences published in 1976, Grathwohl wrote that Ayers, who had recently attended a meeting of the group's Central Committee, said Dohrn had planned the operation, made the bomb and placed it herself. In 2008, Grathwohl's testimony was quoted by David Freddoso in his book The Case Against Barack Obama. "Ayers and Dohrn escaped prosecution only because of government misconduct in collecting evidence against them", Freddoso wrote.

In late 1975, the Weather Underground put out an issue of a magazine, Osawatamie, which carried an article by Dohrn, "Our Class Struggle", described as a speech given to the organization's cadres on September 2 of that year. In the article, Dohrn clearly stated support for Communist ideology:

We are building a communist organization to be part of the forces which build a revolutionary communist party to lead the working class to seize power and build socialism. [...] We must further the study of Marxism-Leninism within the WUO [Weather Underground Organization]. The struggle for Marxism-Leninism is the most significant development in our recent history. [...] We discovered thru [sic] our own experiences what revolutionaries all over the world have found — that Marxism-Leninism is the science of revolution, the revolutionary ideology of the working class, our guide to the struggle [...]"

According to a 1974 FBI study of the group, Dohrn's article signaled a developing commitment to Marxism-Leninism that had not been clear in the groups previous statements, despite trips to Cuba by some members of the group before and after Weather Underground was formed, and contact with Vietnamese communists there.

While on the run from police, Dohrn married another Weatherman leader Bill Ayers, with whom she has two children. During the last years of their underground life, Dohrn and Ayers resided in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago, where they used the aliases Christine Louise Douglas and Anthony J. Lee.

A sketch of
Dohrn from 1970

In the late 1970s, the Weatherman group split into two factions — the "May 19 Coalition" and the "Prairie Fire Collective" — with Dohrn and Ayers in the latter. The Prairie Fire Collective favored coming out of hiding, with members facing the criminal charges against them, while the May 19 Coalition continued in hiding. A decisive factor in Dohrn's coming out of hiding were her concerns about her children.

The couple turned themselves in to authorities in 1980. While some charges relating to their activities with the Weathermen were dropped due to prosecutorial misconduct (see COINTELPRO), Dohrn pled guilty to charges of aggravated battery and bail jumping, receiving probation. She later served less than a year of jail time, after refusing to testify against ex-Weatherman Susan Rosenberg in an armed robbery case. Shortly after turning themselves in, Dohrn and Ayers became legal guardians of the son of former members of the Weather Underground, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, after they were convicted of murder for their roles in a 1981 armored car robbery.

Legal career

From 1984 to 1988, Dohrn was employed by the prestigious Chicago law firm Sidley Austin. She was hired by Howard Trienens, the head of the firm at that time and someone who knew Thomas G. Ayers, the father of Dohrn's husband. "We often hire friends," Trienens told a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. However, Dohrn's criminal record has prevented her from being admitted to either the New York or Illinois bar, according to The New York Times. "Dohrn didn't get a [law] license because she's stubborn," Trienens told the Chicago Tribune reporter in 2008. "She wouldn't say she's sorry."

In 1991, she was hired by Northwestern University in Chicago as an adjunct professor of law, with the title "Clinical Associate Professor of Law". Trienens said he did not get her that job, although he sat on the board of trustees of Northwestern, as did Dohrn's father-in-law, who was chairman of the board until 1986, when Trienens succeeded him in that position. Robert Bennett, dean of the law school, had hired Dohrn, according to Trienens. Because Dohrn was hired as an "adjunct", her appointment did not need to be approved by the faculty, and no vote on it was ever taken. When law school officials were asked whether or not the dean hired Dohrn or the board of trustees approved the hiring, the school issued a statement in response stating "While many would take issue with views Ms. Dohrn espoused during the 1960s, her career at the law school is an example of a person's ability to make a difference in the legal system."

Dohrn now serves on the board of numerous human rights committees and teaches comparative law. Since 2002, she has served as Visiting Law Faculty at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Her legal work has focused on reforming the much criticized juvenile court system in Chicago and on advocating for human rights at the international level. Dohrn is director and founder of the Children and Family Justice Center which supports the legal needs of adolescents and their families.

Articles by Dohrn

• Homeland Imperialism: Fear and Resistance, by Bernardine Dohrn - Monthly Review
• She Challenged the Rules, by Bernardine Dohrn - Monthly Review

External links

• Her biography at the Northwestern Law site, with a link to her CV
• Transcript of interview in 1996 with Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers
• PBS Article "The Weathermen Today"
• Mugshot From Chicago PD Files