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The New York Times

Published: October 4, 2008

CHICAGO - At a tumultuous meeting of anti-Vietnam War militants at the Chicago Coliseum in 1969, Bill Ayers helped found the radical Weathermen, launching a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol.

Twenty-six years later, at a luncheon meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper, Barack Obama met Ayers, by then an education professor. Their paths have crossed sporadically since then, at a coffee Ayers hosted for Obama's first run for office, on the schools project and a charitable board, and in casual encounters as Hyde Park neighbors.

Their relationship has become a touchstone for opponents of Obama, the Democratic senator, in his bid for the presidency. Video clips on YouTube, including a new advertisement broadcast Friday, juxtapose Obama's face with the young Ayers or grainy shots of the bombings. In a televised interview last spring, Sen. John McCain, Obama's Republican rival, asked: "How can you countenance someone who was engaged in bombings that could have or did kill innocent people?"

Recently, conservative critics who accuse Obama of a stealth radical agenda have asserted that he has misleadingly minimized his relationship with Ayers, whom the candidate has dismissed as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood" and "somebody who worked on education issues in Chicago that I know."

A review of records of the schools project and interviews with a dozen people who know both men, suggest that Obama, 47, has played down his contacts with Ayers, 63. However, the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Ayers, whom he has called "somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8."

Obama campaign aides said the Ayers relationship had been greatly exaggerated by opponents to smear the candidate.

"The suggestion that Ayers was a political adviser to Obama or someone who shaped his political views is patently false," said Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman. LaBolt said the men first met in 1995 through the education project, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, and have encountered each other occasionally in public life or in the neighborhood.

He said they have not spoken by phone or exchanged e-mail messages since Obama began serving in the U.S. Senate in January 2005 and last met more than a year ago when they bumped into each other on a Hyde Park street.

In the stark presentation of a 30-second advertisement or a television clip, Obama's connections with a man who once bombed buildings and who is unapologetic about it may seem puzzling. In Chicago, Ayers has been largely rehabilitated.

Federal riot and bombing conspiracy charges against him were dropped in 1974 because of illegal wiretaps and other prosecutorial misconduct, and he was welcomed back after years in hiding by his large and prominent family.

His father, Thomas G. Ayers, was chief executive of Commonwealth Edison, the local power company.

Since earning a doctorate in education at Columbia in 1987, Ayers has been a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, author or editor of 15 books, and an advocate of school reform.

"He's done a lot of good in this city and nationally," Mayor Richard Daley said, explaining he has long consulted Ayers on school issues.

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