Bill Ayers' suburban ties

Today, he's a topic of debate in the presidential campaign. But Bill Ayers started out as a smart kid from a wealthy Glen Ellyn family.

His father was a CEO of ComEd, and he lived a "privileged" suburban life while a student at Glenbard West High School and Lake Forest Academy.

"I grew up in a ghetto. A ghetto of privilege," he said during an interview at Harper College in 2006. "My parents didn't know a single person who opposed the war in Vietnam."

Ayers would go on to be a radical anti-war protester, and in the 1960s, helped form the group, The Weathermen (later known as the Weather Underground). To protest the Vietnam War and what they saw as the racist, corrupt men running the government, Ayers and his group resorted to violence. It began in 1969, with a window smashing spree on Chicago's Gold Coast known as "Days of Rage," and escalated to planting bombs in government buildings.

When Ayers ended up on the FBI's Most Wanted list in 1970, Ayers and other Weathermen members went "underground." Ayers didn't resurface again until 1980.

The story is told in an Academy Award-nominated documentary film by Chicagoan Bill Siegel, "The Weather Underground."

Both Ayers and his wife, fellow Weather Underground member Bernardine Dohrn, have since become esteemed professors, authors and activists for a wide range of causes both locally and globally.

"I can't imagine doing now what we did then," Dohrn said in the 2006 interview.

Ayers is laying low and declining media interviews, as his connection to Barack Obama is now under scrutiny.