On May 21, 1970, a young lawyer named Bernardine Dohrn issued the first official communiqué from the Weatherman Underground. It was, she prefaced, “a declaration of a state of war.” She and her compatriots were preparing to “lead white kids into armed revolution” against America’s racism, economic injustice and imperial violence. In a few months, she would become one of the few women ever placed on the F.B.I. Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List. She was 28 years old. J. Edgar Hoover himself would pronounce her “the most dangerous woman in America.”
In the coming years, the group orchestrated bombings of the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, the U.S. State Department and dozens more. While living as a fugitive from the federal government, Bernardine secretly had two children with a fellow Weather Underground leader, Bill Ayers. The most dangerous woman in America, it turned out, was a mother.
Now in his 40s, Zayd Ayers Dohrn — Bernardine’s oldest son — has written an account of his parents’ activist careers: “Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground.” The book is a history of the Weather Underground, as it was eventually known, by way of a family history — an uneasy reckoning with the exciting, purposeful, terrifying and sometimes traumatizing childhood that his parents’ politics created for him.
Another Weather kid, the novelist Harriet Clark, has also published a book this spring. Clark is the daughter of Judith Clark, an Underground member who was sentenced to three consecutive terms of 25 years to life for her involvement in the botched 1981 robbery of a Brink’s truck. Her new novel, “The Hill,” follows the contours of her own childhood: the protagonist is Suzanna, whose mother has been incarcerated for her entire life. Suzanna orients her young life around the weekly trips to the prison (located on the hill of the title) where her mother has been sent to live forever. To this child, the extraordinary circumstances of incarceration are ordinary. “That great gatherings of women had been brought to live on the hill I took as the natural order,” Clark writes. “That women defected from this order was part of the order, and that we would never defect was also part of the order.”
Clark was only 11 months old when her mother participated in the Brink’s robbery; Ayers Dohrn was 5 when his mother spent several months in prison rather than inform on her friends and comrades. While different in tone, focus and genre, both books take up the question of the child whose sense of the “natural order” is shaped by a mother whose militancy conflicted with the demands of mothering. Ayers Dohrn and Clark grapple with their mothers’ decisions to place political conviction and a vision for a better future above the needs of their own young children. While both writers are unsparing in their portrayals of the painful, permanent consequences of those choices — of families and childhoods damaged by militant struggle — they refuse to condemn their mothers’ actions. Instead, Ayers Dohrn and Clark ask: How should the children of radicals appraise their inheritance? Ayers Dohrn quotes Angela Davis: “When one commits to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.” But whose lifetime?
Ayers Dohrn, a playwright, also explored his parents’ activist trajectories in a popular 2022 podcast, “Mother Country Radicals.” His new book extends that investigation. Ayers Dohrn compiles interviews with his parents and other surviving members of the group, and draws on what paper trail exists: Weather Underground publications and Black Liberation Army documents, court records, declassified F.B.I. memos and surveillance reports and newspaper articles from the time. The result is an archival project that cobbles together a history of the political formation (and dissolution) of the Weather Underground, its allies and the families that were made in its shadow.
Ayers Dohrn was raised to be a “freedom fighter.” Born in a safe house, he spent the first five years of his life underground, learning to spot undercover cops before he knew how to read. At 3, he learned to walk a “trajectory,” or a circuitous path that would lose a tail, and he knew that only calls made from pay phones were safe. Fears of the F.B.I. form his earliest memories. Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers always told their sons that, even though they had their children during their 11 years “underground,” they stopped illegal political activity when they became parents. He learns in his research, however, that one of their early family camping trips was actually a stakeout of a federal prison — the Black Liberation Army had asked his parents to gather information to help them break Assata Shakur out of prison. His father then participates in Shakur’s escape; his mother uses her day job to steal customer identities for the underground to use as aliases. Bernardine did not bring him along as a “beard” when scouting bombing runs, but he learns that she did do that with another Weather kid.
Ayers Dohrn devotes special attention to his enigmatic mother, whom he describes as the family’s “animating force.” While she is a fierce protector who reads him Maurice Sendak books before bed, she is also a “distant, icy and determined” person who seems “far removed from any traditionally feminine caregiving role, determined to sacrifice herself for the cause.” In her son’s rendering, Bernardine seems less like a mother than a goddess out of Greek myth. “She seemed to have created herself,” Ayers Dohrn writes, “rather than being molded, as we all are, by a mix of her genetics and formative years. … It was as if she’d been switched at birth, born a member of a different species.” He tells the story of a time when, after he finished college, Bernardine demands that the family move a willow tree from one spot in the yard to another — she wants its shade to fall differently — but the willow is too rooted to be excised. She insists, and her exasperated sons finally hack the tree nearly to death and shove it in the ground in the new spot, sure that they have killed it. The next year, the willow bursts back to life, as if she willed it, and eventually gives beautiful shade — seemingly a concession by nature to Bernardine’s relentlessness.
Ayers Dohrn openly admires his mother’s passionate devotion to causes (Black liberation, anticapitalism and antiwar activism) that she could have easily ignored. “I loved her,” he writes. “I admired her. I wanted to be like her.” Yet he also, with the tentativeness of a loving child, explores how her aptitude for self-sacrifice might have compromised her parenting. When Ayers Dohrn is around 5, Bernardine and Bill assume responsibility for Chesa, the toddler son of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, Weather Underground members who were caught assisting the same Brink’s truck robbery that sent Judith Clark to prison. Only 14 months old and still nursing when his mother disappears, Chesa is traumatized. His distress is intense, and he begins having seizures; his entrance into the family is chaotic and confusing for the other children. Amid this devastation, Bernardine is incarcerated for seven months for refusing to cooperate and testify against her fellow revolutionaries.
This registers to young Ayers Dohrn as abandonment. In the letters she writes her son from prison, Bernardine explains to her 5-year-old that she is away because she has chosen not to betray her cause. “Lots of times here I cry because I miss you so much and not being free is a horrible thing,” she writes. “But you know that what the government is trying to make me do is unfair. I can’t tell them about my friends because this government is only good to rich people, and they might hurt someone if I talk to them.” Young Ayers Dohrn is left “sick with grief and loneliness,” so distraught that he begins wetting the bed.
The 5-year old’s helplessness and vulnerability are absolute. He cannot understand what his mother is saying to him about the government or its treatment of rich people — he barely has a grasp on what “rich people” are. He cannot quite understand why his mother would choose her comrades over him. A male friend who steps in to be the boys’ “Mary Poppins” during Bernardine’s months away serves as the voice of protective outrage here. In an interview with Ayers Dohrn he admits that he was horrified that Chesa’s parents ever risked being separated from him. “I would never have left him, for anything. Ever!” he says. “I would never have that deep of a conviction of anything.” Bernardine, of course, did have that conviction.
And yet, in the letters, we also see a mother who is trying to pay her son a kind of respect — to connect with him, to explain herself to him, to help him see the wider world he is only one part of and to connect him to a notion of care that’s bigger than the link between one parent and one child. Her trust that he will be OK without her, that others in the network can fill the void she’s leaving, is suggesting to him an expanded definition of family and community. In refusing to betray a cause, she is offering her son a broader kind of fidelity — the unbending refusal to accept the world he was born into, the unbending determination to insist it change for the better.
Where Ayers Dohrn’s writing about his childhood is direct, searching, confessional, Clark’s sensibility is poetic and restrained. The novel is a peculiar and beautiful bildungsroman, following Suzanna from her earliest memories into the beginning of her adulthood, though her life is characterized less by maturation or metamorphosis than by what does not (and can never) change: her relationship to “the hill.” Clark’s characterization of the prison where Suzanna’s mother lives has the quality of a fairy tale. “As I climbed,” Suzanna thinks, “I imagined my silhouette upon the summit and saw my shape, a hero’s shape, my climb, a hero’s journey. All around me were women saving up for other lives, but I’d been saved for this life.” Suzanna is quiet, disinclined to show the people around her what she is thinking or feeling. She seems set apart from other children, awkwardly straddling worlds — as if the realest part of her life is the part that happens on the hill, the one place where she is a child with a mother.
Off the hill, Suzanna is raised by her grandparents, but when her grandfather dies, she is alone with her erratic grandmother. While Suzanna’s mother is gentle and affectionate during their visits, Suzanna’s grandmother is caustic and doctrinaire. Her condemnation of Suzanna’s mother is unyielding, absolute. She has vowed never to step foot on the hill. “There was a moment when you were a baby and your mother was holding you,” she tells Suzanna, invoking the day her mother was arrested for driving that getaway car. “You were asleep or awake but she held you and looked at you and then she put you down and left you forever. That’s the moment you need to know.”
But Suzanna decides that there are other moments she needs to know too. The central gesture of Suzanna’s life is of return. She goes back to her mother, week after week, at first with her grandfather, later with a nun chaperone and finally, as she becomes a teenager, alone. Told that her mother left her forever, Suzanna’s choice is to stay, to imagine no future without the hill. “This was a feat I saw nowhere applauded and this was the challenge I set now for myself,” she says. “However heralded the leavers, I would become a great stayer, every descent twinned with an ascent, a life of perpetual return. … Call this the call to adventure or call it what it was: choosing the life I had, which strikes me still as wise a choice as any.”
That Clark is working in fiction allows her to stage the conversation about Suzanna’s mother’s crime and its impacts in an elliptical, polyvocal way. We can both see the in-real-time internal perspective of the child, who wants simply to connect with her mother, and register (as the child cannot) the immensity of the toll her mother’s incarceration is taking on her psychology and development. The reader’s impulse to punish the imperfect mother, if it arises, becomes embodied complexly in the grandmother (herself an imperfect mother). And the imprisoned mother herself is shown mothering, week over week, loving and tending to her daughter steadily in every way she can manage. The work of deciding what the generations owe one another and how connection is forged after a breach is messy and long and spread over many perspectives.
At the novel’s core is an anticarceral logic: You do not simply throw away someone who has caused you harm, and you do not pretend that the attachment can be broken simply because it has been damaged. Clark’s choice — and Ayers Dohrn’s, too — is instead to write toward the mother who caused harm, to re-evaluate, to return. The offering being made to these mothers is the difficult work of ongoing integration. “Choose a new mountain, the world kept insisting,” Suzanna says, stubborn with love. “But this was my mountain. I didn’t want to leave it — I wanted only to go up and down.” Clark uses Albert Camus for her epigraph: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
As with Clark’s narrator, Ayers Dohrn’s decision to return to and re-engage with his mother’s story yields an unprecedented closeness between them. It results in a more rigorous and nuanced understanding of her choices. He comes to a kind of peace by recognizing that, to his mother, choosing revolution was loving her children. Bernardine could not be someone who fought for “our neighborhoods, our towns, our schools and our kids at the expense of everyone else,” he says. “Even if her own children wound up as collateral damage, her most profound commitments were not personal, but global.”
This is a radical idea, and a difficult one to live out. It runs counter to a strain of thinking rising in popularity in some corners of the right, voiced most succinctly by JD Vance in a January 2025 interview on Fox News that went viral: “There is this old school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.”
Plenty of Christians have argued with this interpretation of Scripture, but regardless: Vance’s parochial notion of care — one in which someone’s proximity to me determines the extent to which I should care about their well-being — is a seductively intuitive worldview. There’s an easy, retrograde story about motherhood at work in Vance’s politics too, one that plays to common assumptions about the acceptable behavior and temperament of a “good” mother. Violence can seem antithetical to nurture, unrestrained rage antithetical to tenderness, wild personal risk-taking antithetical to the obligations of a parent.
But it’s not a law of nature that extremism and motherhood are at odds, just as it’s not a law of nature that a mother’s highest obligation is to care for her children first and most. Judith Clark, Bernardine Dohrn, Kathy Boudin, the mother on the hill — their stories fascinate and unsettle because they ask us to look at what happens when women bring those polarized impulses into close range.
Maybe this is why Bernardine’s example has been back in the zeitgeist, most notably as one inspiration for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscars-sweeping film “One Battle After Another.” Its radical woman, Perfidia Beverly Hills, is a fierce, fanatical leader of a militant antigovernment cell called the French 75. Her rhetoric (and the title of the movie) is drawn from Bernardine’s network: “This is a declaration of war,” she says as she breaks immigrant detainees out of a camp in California. The film’s most arresting image — a still shot of it was chosen for the movie poster — is of Perfidia, massively pregnant, dressed in a black beanie, men’s army fatigue pants and a plaid shirt unbuttoned to expose her bump. Mouth open in a scream of ferocity verging on joy, she’s firing round after deafening round from a machine gun pressed tight up against her bare, full belly. The film accedes to the dissonance of the image: In the end, Perfidia’s militarism prevents her from parenting.
It’s telling that both Clark and Ayers Dohrn have written books that align against the self-oriented vision of love and care Vance proposes, and against the idea that a radical woman cannot parent, or parent well. They offer a messier truth: One can care for the world and one’s children — but maybe not perfectly, maybe not always equally or simultaneously. The books decline to extrapolate a moral or prescription from that truth.
It’s maybe no coincidence that both Bernardine Dohrn and Judith Clark had children who became writers. There’s an impulse toward storytelling in the aftermath of extremism or chaos, a desire to restore narrative order. Revolution is a contranym, Ayers Dohrn points out, or a word with two meanings that contradict each other. “Revolution: 1. a sudden, radical or complete change. 2. a progressive motion of a body around an axis so [it] returns to its initial position.” The work of revolution is the work of generations, and part of that work is untangling the story in time, figuring out how all the cycles fit together, what it all means.
He writes in an epilogue that his mother began losing her memory as he was working on the project. “When we talked about her history, our conversations started to become elliptical and spiraling, looping without clear signposts across eras and decades, and coming back around again.” This is both tragic and poetically appropriate: His writing is both an act of filial piety, sharing and thereby extending his mother’s work, and a “natural way to transform my inheritance.” The work of making sense of her revolution is now his.
Jordan Kisner is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of the essay collection “Thin Places.”
Source photograph for illustration above: Peter Dazeley/Getty Images.
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