Bill Ayers
A lot of the controversy about Ayers in the years since 2000 comes from an interview that he gave to The New York Times. The reporter quoted him as saying "I don't regret setting bombs" and "I feel we didn't do enough". When asked if he would "do it all again," he said "I don't want to discount the possibility." Ayers questioned the interviewer's way of describing him in a "Letter to the Editor" on September 15 2001. In his letter, Ayers wrote: "This is not a question of being misunderstood or 'taken out of context', but of deliberate distortion." In the following years, Ayers has said that what he meant by saying that he had "no regrets" and "we didn't do enough" he was talking about their efforts to stop the US from fighting in the Vietnam War. He said these efforts were ". . . inadequate [as] the war dragged on for a decade." Ayers has repeatedly said that the two statements did not mean that he wished they had set more bombs.