Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn at Obama Center Opening
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Bernardine Dohrn (L) and Bill Ayers take in the Obama Presidential Center's grand opening on Thursday, June 18, 2026. Photo: Justin Kaufmann/Axios
Among the star-studded crowd at last Thursday's opening of the Obama Presidential Center sat two guests who drew little attention but occupy a unique place in Barack Obama's political story.
The big picture: Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were part of Obama's Hyde Park political orbit in the 1990s and later became central figures in attacks against him during the 2008 presidential campaign.
- Now, seated in the third row, they watched the former president celebrate his legacy.
Catch up quick: Ayers and Dohrn became household names in the late 1960s during the anti-Vietnam War protest movement. They became leaders in the Weather Underground, which broke from peaceful anti-war protests and carried out a campaign of bombings targeting government buildings and other symbols of authority.
- After an accidental explosion in a Greenwich Village townhouse killed three Weather Underground members in 1970, Ayers and Dohrn went underground and became fugitives, landing on the FBI's most-wanted list.
- Charges against them were later dismissed because of government misconduct. The couple returned to Chicago and became fixtures in Hyde Park and both taught at UIC and Northwestern.
The intrigue: They were politically active, too. In 1995, they held a casual party at their house to introduce friends to "a skinny kid with a funny name" named Barack Obama.
- That was enough for Republican operatives to seize upon when Obama ran for president in 2008. They argued Obama had ties to a man they described as a former domestic terrorist, even though the support came nearly 30 years after the Weather Underground.
- The issue dominated several weeks of the 2008 campaign.
What they're saying: "The people who tried to say that Obama palled around with terrorists, that he had Palestinian friends, that he had a Black nationalist minister, none of that shit worked because he transcended it," Ayers told Axios.
Zoom out: Even though Ayers has always supported Obama, he didn't always agree with him.
- "We don't agree on policy. We don't agree on a lot of politics, but he is a person of deep intelligence and deep integrity, and let's celebrate that and get back in the trenches and fight for a world at peace with fairness for everybody."
The bottom line: Ayers said Democrats shouldn't look to Obama, Biden or Clinton for the party's next chapter. "This was a celebration of hope and aspiration," he said after Thursday's event.
- "The crisis that we're in demands that we go forward to something brand new."