Walter Shapiro

My original introduction to Wendy was contrived. For the only time in my journalistic career, I pitched a story (a profile that ran in Time magazine) because I wanted to meet the article’s subject. Part of what originally intrigued me about Wendy was her Wall Street wunderkind brother, Bruce, with whom I had worked on our college newspaper, the Michigan Daily, during the late 1960s. I wondered how a wickedly funny off-Broadway playwright could boast an older brother who recently had been pictured on the cover of Fortune as the embodiment of the new takeover era in investment banking.

Wendy, as I learned, was transfixed by the enigma of her slightly older brother. He was the inspiration for her ambitious, but flawed, 2000 play “Old Money,” which tried to contrast the WASP, early 20th century New York wealthy with their turn-of-the-millennium counterparts. Bruce, though he never got caught up in the excesses of antiwar radicalism at the University of Michigan, also provided Wendy with her first window into both the idealism and the self-indulgent absurdity of the baby boomers’ attempt at revolution.

This how-did-we-get-from-then-until-now question was at the core of Wendy’s work. She was never political in a shrill impeach-Bush sense. “An American Daughter,” her only play set in Washington, was not about the perfidy of Republicans, but was instead loosely inspired by the collapse of Zoe Baird’s nomination for attorney general because she had failed to pay Social Security taxes for her nanny.

What fascinated Wendy was how people who had once held intense political beliefs (about feminism, about war, about civil rights) dealt with these withering husks of conviction as they grow older. An emblematic moment in “The Heidi Chronicles” comes when Heidi Holland, the flailing art-historian heroine, fails to get comfort from her erstwhile best friend who has moved from a feminist health collective in Montana to writing vacuous sitcoms in Hollywood. Years after she wrote that scene, I recall Wendy returning from a trip to Hollywood and giggling about a TV producer who actually wanted her to write a “three girls in a loft” sitcom that was almost identical to the one she ridiculed in “Heidi.”

Wendy’s plays always featured their share of sellouts — my favorite is the philandering college-professor husband in “An American Daughter,” whose fading reputation is based on a best-selling public-policy book called (please insert giggles) “Towards a Lesser Elite.” This pompous weakling was named Walter, a moniker chosen in my honor. When Wendy told me that — stressing that only the name had been lifted from real life — I truly felt I had been elevated to the Greater Elite.

In her final play, “Third,” presented last fall at Lincoln Center, Wendy came full circle and, in effect, revisited Heidi nearly 20 years later. Her heroine is Laurie Jameson, a mid-50s feminist English professor at a small college like Wesleyan, whose ideological rigidity (she boasts about creating “a hegemony-free classroom”) has left her walled off from much of life. In the final scene, Jameson says, in words that could well be an elegy for the ’60s, “I thought I could change the world, but all I did was change the English department.”

As I look back at these paragraphs that I have written with an ache in my heart, I hope that I am conveying a sense of the person, whom I (and literally what seems to be half of Manhattan) considered a dear friend. Memorializing the ever-quotable Wendy apart from her plays risks making her seem like the East Coast version of Larry David — and not someone who was transfixed by the big questions of her generation’s destiny. But focusing on the stage characters whose dialogue and back stories Wendy created fails to do justice to the playwright herself, the uncommon woman who periodically ran off to odd places like the Hanover Inn on the Dartmouth College campus to find the solitude to write.

In the end, so much of Wendy herself was fused with the alternative universe she created onstage. Wendy wrote “The Sisters Rosensweig” partly to imagine her older business-executive sister, Sandra, with a new, rich romantic life. (A few years later, at the start of the Wasserstein family’s real-life tragedies, Sandra died of cancer). “Third” featured octogenarian actor Charles Durning, in a mesmerizing performance, conveying the pathos of an elderly father who has lapsed into dementia. Wendy’s friends seeing the play knew how much this character mirrored the last years of her father, Morris. And now that I look back on “Third,” I suspect Wendy may have been channeling her own hopes when a woman professor announces that she has found true love — with a rabbi she met while they were sitting next to each other enduring chemotherapy drips.

With friends — especially those who keep their illnesses a secret — you never know when you are playing out a final scene. My last conversation with Wendy was in October as she sat at the back of the theater monitoring one of the final previews of “Third.” What stayed with me was not anything specific she said (though I did hear that laugh), but her happiness at simply being at the theater. It reminded me of long ago when Wendy confided that, as a single woman, one of the joys of having a play on Broadway is that you always have a place to go at night.

The title “Third” refers to both a seemingly preppy student with three Roman numerals after his last name and the expressed hope that we baby boomers would finally get it right in the last third of our lives. If only, if only, Wendy had been granted that final third.

After appearing on ABC’s “Good Morning America” last Friday, Ayers sat down for a 55-minute interview with Salon’s Washington bureau chief, Walter Shapiro. During the late 1960s at the University of Michigan, Shapiro knew Ayers as a “guy in the neighborhood.” The following interview, conducted in Shapiro’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, has been edited for length.

We had not seen each other in something like 39 years until you walked in. All through the 2008 campaign, I have been telling this story. I ran into you on South University Street in Ann Arbor maybe three or four days before the 1968 convention. And you asked me, “Are you going to Chicago?” And I said, “No, they’re going to nominate Hubert Humphrey.” And you replied, “You’ve got to be there. Great shit’s going to be happening in the streets.”

And you missed it.

Of course, I missed it.

The interesting thing about an event like that or Woodstock …

Which you missed.

Which I did miss, but in a funny way I felt like I was there. Chicago ’68 was a relatively small demonstration for its time, but I’ve talked to millions of people who claim they were there because it felt like we were all there. Everyone from our generation was there and was at Woodstock. Interestingly, 24 years from now, everyone will have been in Grant Park on Nov. 4, 2008, because it was another exciting moment when we came together.

Were you there in Grant Park for Obama?

I was there for hours and I couldn’t leave and I’ll tell you why. I’ve been in larger crowds of people before, but I’ve never been in a crowd that large where there was no edge of anger, there was nothing that people were trying to push against, no one was drunk, there was no gluttony. It was simply a gathering of pure joy. Something that would have seemed unimaginable just a couple of years before was now inevitable and unforgettable. Everyone wanted to be there. And the sense of unity and the sense of hope was really palpable and lovely.

So I take it you voted for Barack Obama.

Of course, what were the choices? I voted for Obama and I was delighted that he’s been elected. And, of course, we have to embrace the moment. It was a moment when the American people overwhelmingly rejected the politics of fear, the politics of war and militarization, paranoia and the acceptance of the shredding of our constitutional rights. It was a sense of “let’s move beyond that.” And so, of course, I wanted to be a part of that, and we need to embrace that. I also think — and this is where we need to move in the future — that we cannot believe that presidents save us. They cannot save our lives. We have to do for ourselves the important work of transformation, the important work of reframing the last eight years, the last several decades, into something more hopeful.

Let’s come back to Obama. I’m curious. How many conversations have you had with him over the years? Fifteen? Twenty?

A dozen or 15 perhaps. There was a big thing made this morning [on "Good Morning America"] that I was coming out of my silence. Nothing could be further from the truth. I haven’t been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I’m not silent.

But I e-mailed you during the campaign and asked, “Do you want to talk about this?” And you said, “Thanks, great to hear from you, but not at this time.”

Well, what I didn’t want to comment on was the political campaign. I didn’t want to enter into that. The reason is simple: I thought that I was being used as a prop in a very dishonest narrative — and I didn’t want to be part of the narrative and I couldn’t find a way to interrupt it. Anything that I said was going to feed that narrative. So I felt that part of this was the demonization of me — certainly that I’m some kind of toxic agent that has to be feared.

The second thing, and perhaps more important, is that I was being used to try to bring down this promising new leader by the old tactic of guilt by association. The idea that somehow — and this is deep in the American political culture — that if two people share a bus downtown, have a cup of coffee, have several conversations, that somehow means that they share an outlook, a perspective, responsibility for one another’s behavior. And I reject that. That guilt by association is wrong and we shouldn’t buy into it.

Do you feel diminished by Obama repeatedly referring to you throughout the campaign as just some “guy from the neighborhood”?

Not in the least; I am a guy from the neighborhood. And I’m proud of it … And the neighborhood being Hyde Park, which is a very close-knit, very friendly, very politically diverse, very racially diverse. You have all kinds of poles there. You have [conservative] Judge Richard Posner on one pole and Louis Farrakhan on the other. And everything in between. It’s an interesting neighborhood, a college town [the University of Chicago]. It’s close-knit. It’s kind of like Wasilla, Alaska, except that it’s different.

What have your impressions been of Obama over the years?

I met him sometime in the mid-1990s and, as I said, I know him about as well as thousands and thousands of other people do. And like millions of other people, I wish I knew him a lot better now. My impression of him from the start was that this was the smartest person who walks into any room he walks into. An incredibly bright, an incredibly quick person. A compassionate, kind person. And everyone who knew him thought that he was politically ambitious. For the first two years, I thought, his ambition is so huge that he wants to be mayor of Chicago. And that’s where my imagination ran out of steam, apparently, because clearly he had his sights on something else and I’m delighted for him and for the country and the world that he was able to accomplish this.

The Obama campaign insisted that when you and your wife gave a coffee for Obama in 1995, he had no idea of your radical background, he just thought that you were a leading educator in Chicago.

I’m certain that’s true.

Why are you certain that’s true?

This morning I was on “Good Morning America.” I got a phone call from a student an hour afterward saying, “I had no idea.” I said, “You didn’t notice the political campaign?”

The issue of my past in the Weather Underground or my past in the student movement has become so big in the last few months that people think it’s a sign that I wear on my chest. That’s not true. My students don’t know this about me and it’s not what I talk about. I talk about education, I talk about youth, I talk about social justice. These are all the issues that I write about and talk about all the time.

When “Fugitive Days” first came out [in 2001], I think it was surprising to most of my colleagues that I had this past. It’s not that I hide it. It’s just not that it’s of immediate relevance to anybody. That was one of the things that Obama correctly was trying to say during the campaign. Why is this relevant? What relevance does this have? And what is interesting is that everyone went along with the idea that this connection was worth exploring. Until Colin Powell said no. I found that fascinating that this conservative Republican said, “Enough. What’s the point of it?” It’s clear that Obama has a mind of his own — and he talks to people from a wide range of backgrounds and he decides for himself. But I never remember having a talk with Barack Obama that focuses on politics per se or my past per se. Why would I? What’s the point of it?

Do you have a strong sense of what his views are on your subject — education?

I don’t have a strong sense of his views on education … The only foundation that we were active in together was the Woods Fund in Chicago, which is a small foundation that is focused on supporting community organizing. Which is a grand tradition in this country. The Woods Fund in particular is interested in supporting democracy, interested in the participation of people in issues like job creation, housing, against predatory lending. Things like that. Those were the issues that we talked about in those board meetings. And the board included Republicans, conservatives, me. But we came to a consensus around the idea of supporting marginalized poor people in their efforts to get organized and get the things that they need and deserve.

During the campaign, how many clips did you see of people like Sarah Palin denouncing Bill Ayers, “the terrorist pal” of Barack Obama?

I’m not a big consumer of television, so I didn’t see a lot. I also felt from the beginning that this is a cartoon character that’s been cast up on the screen and I didn’t feel personally implicated in that character. One of the delicious ironies of a campaign filled with ironies was that the McCain campaign tried to use me to bring Obama down — and every time that he mentioned my name his poll numbers dropped. Again, I think that’s a big credit to the American people. But I did see a few clips. I saw the clip where she [Palin] first talked about Barack Obama palling around with terrorists and the crowd shouted, “Kill him, kill him.” That was sent to me by my kids.

I don’t know if you remember the Two Minutes Hate in George Orwell’s “1984″? In Two Minutes Hate, the party faithful gather in front of a television screen and the image of Emmanuel Goldstein is cast up on the screen and they work themselves into a frenzy of hatred and they begin to chant, “Kill him.” That’s how I felt. I felt a little bit like I was this character cast on the screen. It bore no relation to me. And yet it had a serious purpose and potentially serious consequences.

I was in New York when this was shown and my alderman from Chicago called — worried — and wanted to know how I was taking care of my safety. I was touched that she would do that.

Did you follow the right-wing blogger, I believe it was, who was totally convinced that you wrote Barack Obama’s books?

I saw that because my oldest son, who is a writer, sent it to me. It was something that struck us as very, very funny. Barack Obama is a brilliant man, obviously. He is a talented and well-educated and erudite and articulate guy and he wrote two really brilliant and well-written memoirs. But somebody did a textual analysis that proved that the nautical images in “Fugitive Days” were similar to his work and I was the ghostwriter.

Ho Chi Minh also played a big role in Obama’s “Dreams of My Father.”

It’s amazing where the paranoid mind can take you. I got an e-mail recently that said that Philip Lopate, who was my teacher at Bennington where I got my master’s in fine arts, was the ghostwriter for “Fugitive Days.” So now we have Philip writing my book and me writing Obama’s book and it all seems quite preposterous.

Which seemed more unlikely a few decades ago: that you would be the most famous graduate of 1960s radicalism in America or that you would appear on “Good Morning America” along with a segment about a pregnant man?

I really wanted a segment about the two-headed monkey to follow. That’s exactly how I think of most of the mainstream media. It’s amazing when you think about that this broad and amazingly diverse and committed and passionate antiwar movement of 40 years ago gets reduced in the narrative put up by the Republican campaign to a single organization which was tiny and on the margins [the Weather Underground] and a single individual who was co-founder of that and a single sentence that individual said. The parallel to that is that the powerful black freedom movement gets reduced to a single preacher in a single church and a single phrase.

Martin Luther King?

No, I’m talking about the reduction of the civil rights movement to Jeremiah Wright. So the civil rights movement becomes Jeremiah Wright and the antiwar movement becomes me. It all seems entirely preposterous to me — and I think that we should reject that.

You mention a single sentence about you. I have here a printout of what probably was the worst bit of book publicity in the history of American letters. It’s the article about you that appeared on Sept. 11, 2001, in the New York Times. And the opening sentence is: “‘I don’t regret setting bombs,’ Bill Ayers said. ‘I feel we didn’t do enough.’”

In the afterword to the new edition of “Fugitive Days” you write, “I’m nowadays often quoted as saying, ‘I don’t regret setting bombs. I wish we’d set more bombs. I don’t think we did enough.’ I never actually said that I ‘set bombs’ nor that I wish there were ‘more bombs.’”

But the “I don’t regret setting bombs” quote was the lead of the New York Times piece. Did the Times misquote you in 2001?

Yes. And the wonderful thing about “fact-checking,” such as it is, is that the fact they check is their own misquote of what I said.

If you read the book, it is a book that is really full of regret and full of wonder about what went on. It’s also a memoir and not a manifesto. What I did say and the theme of all the press coverage when “Fugitive Days” was first released in September 2001 was all based on this idea of “no regrets.” Different magazines and journals said different things about it, but the fascination was that I wasn’t sorry.

The New York Times headline on the morning of Sept. 11 was “No Regrets for a Love of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life with the Weathermen.”

That headline “No Regrets” was also the headline of the Chicago magazine article a week earlier and it was the headline of several articles. And remember all these interviews were done before 9/11. What I have said continually, and I still say, that while I regret many things (you can’t be 63 years old and not have many, many regrets), what I don’t regret is opposing the war in Vietnam. A murderous, violent, terrorist war against an entire population. I don’t regret resisting that war with every ounce of my being.

Now having said that, that’s not a tactical statement. That’s a sense of both hope and despair and rethinking. In 1965, I was first arrested in Ann Arbor for opposing the war in Vietnam. And at that time, something like 60 to 75 percent of Americans supported the war in Vietnam. Three years later, in 1968, something like 65 percent of Americans opposed the war. A lot of things happened in those three years. But by 1968, when we really had won the argument about Vietnam, we thought that the war would really come to an end. Especially when Lyndon Johnson announced that he would step down.

I wrote the front-page editorial in the extra edition of the Michigan Daily that came out on April 1, 1968, after the most amazing presidential speech of my lifetime.

It absolutely blew me away. I was watching in my little apartment. We poured out of our house, as did hundreds of other students, we swirled around the campus and landed on Robben Fleming’s front yard.

The president of the University of Michigan.

What I remember so clearly from that night was that there were maybe a thousand of us in his front yard. And he came out with a bullhorn. I had a bullhorn and we had a bit of a discussion. I think I was entirely inarticulate and cursing. But what he said that night, “Congratulations. You won a great victory. Now the war will end.” And what I remember was this great feeling that we had brought about this phenomenal substantive change. And that peace would come. Four days later, King was dead. Two months later Kennedy was dead. And a few months after that, Henry Kissinger emerged with a secret plan to extend the war. And, at that point, the question that pressed itself on us, was how do you end this war?

This is where we probably part company. One of the reasons, in my view, that Nixon got away with pursuing the war was that, in part, the violence of the Weather Underground — and some of the other extreme parts of the antiwar movement — discredited the overall antiwar movement. And that led to a further polarization of American life, which led to the first round of demonology involving yourself.

I don’t see it that way. You could be partly right. I don’t know how to make those cause-and-effect relationships. I would posit a different explanation. I think what happened was cynical and thought through and it was deliberate. And I think what happened was that the Nixon administration determined that they could keep the war going without a domestic upheaval that they couldn’t handle. So they stopped bringing dead soldiers home. So they made it an air war and a sea war that was no longer a ground war. So they withdrew troops and they punished Vietnam and pounded it into the ground. When I say it was a war of terror, that is not idle talk. There were entire areas of Vietnam that were designated free fire zones. If you were a pilot and had leftover ordinance, you could just drop it in those villages and they did. So a couple of thousand people every month were dying, innocent people …

It was a crime against humanity on an enormous scale. We were trying to end it. In the six years that the Weather Underground existed, we did everything we could to end it. We never hurt or killed anyone — by design. We didn’t want to. Was it risky, were we a little nuts, were we a little off the track? Yes. Did we cross lines of legality and propriety and common sense? I think we did. On the other hand, I don’t think we were the cause of any kind of reaction. I think we were a small part of an upheaval against war and against killing.

How many of the Weather Underground bombings did you personally know about?

I can’t even remember. But I wouldn’t say if I could.

Why not? It was 40 years ago.

There are certain things, as I say in the memoir, that are not worth saying since you implicate other people.

My book is, in many ways, a discussion of all of those events, all those times and happenings. But I don’t go into detail about stuff because partly I don’t remember it … I think the book is worth reading now. But it has to be read as a memoir, not a manifesto. See what brought this kid, from this background, into this historic moment and see the choices that he made. I don’t defend those choices in the book. I describe them. I explain them. And I think it’s understandable. It’s not an advocacy book or a defensive book.

Having read it, I came to the conclusion that the sex was better than the revolution.

It was the sexual revolution.

Judging from your silence, I’m not going to get any more from you on that. But there is a larger question about this period, which was when the Weather Underground was making bombs and taking credit for bombings. As you explain in the book, none of you were getting any sleep, you were all living on amphetamines and you were all constantly talking to each other in revolutionary jargon. In hindsight, how crazy were you then?

I think we were off the tracks, definitely. And I think we were jacking ourselves to do something that was unthinkable and that none of us could ever imagine ourselves getting into. We were driven, I think, by a combination of hope and despair. And in one chapter, I imagine two groups of Americans. One slightly off the tracks and despairing of how to end this war and penetrating the Pentagon and putting a small charge in a bathroom that disables an Air Force computer. An act of extreme vandalism, but hard to call, in my view, terrorism.

Meanwhile, another group of Americans — also despairing, also off the tracks — walks into a Vietnamese village and kills everyone there. Children, women, old men. They kill every living thing, even livestock, and burn the place to the ground.

And the question is, What is terrorism? And what is violence?

In the book you also state that a phone call was made to the Pentagon a half-hour in advance warning them to evacuate that part of the building. But reading this entire passage — and remembering the era — what baffles me is how could you possibly ever believe that doing things like this would be an effective way to getting what you wanted?

What we thought we were doing was to raise a screaming alarm — to try to wake up anybody who was still sleepwalking to the reality of what was going on in our name. Frankly, I look back at it, and I don’t claim or claim in the book, any particular heroism or status as leaders in any sense. What I do try to point out is that 1968 comes and the war is massively unpopular and our democracy can’t grapple with that. It can’t end the war somehow. And those of us who are committed to ending the war did many, many different things. Some went to Europe and Africa to get away from the madness. Some went to the communes of Vermont and California to start an alternative life. Some went into the factories of the Northeast to organize the workers. My younger brother actually enlisted in the Army and tried to build a serviceman’s union. You talk about nuts. Was that nuts? It was admirable and a little unrealistic.

And a small group of us decided that we wanted to survive what we thought was an impending American fascism. We saw this in the murders of black leaders close to us. The murder of Fred Hampton [of the Black Panthers] had a huge impact on us. We wanted to survive that — and make the making of the war painful for the war makers. So, looking back, it was hard for me to say that anybody had a purchase on the right thing to do …

History is always lived looking forward not backward. What are we doing now to end two unpopular wars? Two wars without end. What are we doing? And I would argue that we’re not doing enough, those of us who see the war as illegal, immoral, unwinnable. What are we doing to stop it?

One of the puzzling things during this campaign is that your wife totally disappeared from the narrative. Even though Bernadine Dohrn was certainly J. Edgar Hoover’s favorite Weatherperson. And she certainly had a VIP role on the “Most Wanted” list. And her short skirts are still memorable to those of us from that era. But she disappeared from the narrative. Do you have any theories why?

I have no theory. Maybe it’s sexism. I have no idea why. But there’s no doubt that what you say is true: Bernadine Dohrn was the leader of the Weather Underground. She is my partner of 40 years. Mother of our children. And grandmother of our grandchildren. She’s an extraordinarily talented and brilliant woman. She was on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list. And, as you say, J. Edgar Hoover allowed his insanity to be based on whatever fantasies he had about her as a threat to America. He called her at one point “La Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left.” I told her that she should put that at the top of her [curriculum] vita because what a recommendation.

Yeah, I don’t understand it either. That I got picked out to play this role and put on the stage. It was a role that I refuse to play. And it is a dishonest and inaccurate role.

Particularly since both you and she hosted the get-acquainted coffee for Barack Obama in 1995.

Really a non-event. But we were both there.

I think part of the reason that you became Barack Obama’s only terrorist pal was that it was so easy for television to put up on the screen the quote that you now say is a misquote from the New York Times with “Bill Ayers, 9/11/2001.”

It is hard for me to understand, though I take some heart from the fact that the Republican campaign had so little to say about the issues of the day that they went from Jeremiah Wright to Bill Ayers to [historian of the Middle East] Rashid Khalidi. And each one fell kind of flat for them and didn’t take them where they thought it would. And the sweet irony is that every time they shot at me, they hurt themselves. I think that’s a helpful sign…

Would you like to consult with Barack Obama on education?

I’d love to consult with him on any number of things. I doubt it’s going to happen. I think, like millions of other people, I could get in line and try to consult with him. But I don’t think it’s in the cards…

What’s your biggest hope for an Obama presidency?

Most of all, what I really hope is that we put an end to the era of 9/11, the era of fear and war — and that’s what I think most people hope. That spirit in Grant Park was that spirit of hope and that spirit of “yes, we can.” “Yes, we can put an end to this.” “Yes, we can reimagine the future.” I think it’s a time when we could redefine what are we basing our foreign policy on, what are we basing our education policy on. I think this election is automatically a historic moment. It automatically restores a certain amount of goodwill in the world. I hope he uses it. I hope he closes Guantánamo immediately. I hope he withdraws from Iraq immediately. But those hopes aren’t idle. They are built on building an irresistible social movement to see that those things happen…

One of the delicious ironies of being in Grant Park on Nov. 4, 2008, was that I was weeping for a lot of reasons. But one of them was that I couldn’t help remembering 40 years earlier I was beaten bloody in that same park. And there’s something sweet about 40 years later, something unimaginable happening…

We [Ayers and Dohrn] got there around 10:00. We were so glad that we had because it was a moment that we wanted to share. We didn’t want to be by ourselves. It was just too sweet. It felt like a page of history was being turned. And, of course, there are going to be challenges, obstacles, setbacks, disappointments, reversals up ahead. But who doesn’t want to savor that? Who doesn’t want to wish this young man and his beautiful young family all the best in the world because it’s their moment. We invest a lot of hope in them. Let’s not lose hope in ourselves. But let’s wish them all the best.

What we do know so far is that a Clinton pedigree appears to be a major asset. Not only did Obama’s incoming chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, make his bones in the Clinton White House, but also all six transition team leaders for the departments of State, Defense and Treasury served in the prior Democratic administration. Bill Galston, who was a senior domestic advisor to Clinton, points out, “One of the advantages that Obama has that Clinton did not have is a usable past. The Clinton transition went too far in excluding people with Jimmy Carter experience.”

Nowhere do things currently seem murkier than in matching names with top jobs in the foreign policy and national security arenas. The rumored front-runners for secretary of state have been two senators who have served with Obama and Joe Biden on the Foreign Relations Committee: almost-2004-president John Kerry and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, the Republican critic of the Iraq war. Kerry probably would have tapped Biden as his nominee for Foggy Bottom — and now the vice-president-elect presumably is trying to return the favor.

As for Hagel, Obama has long promised to give Republicans a prominent role on his foreign-policy team, saying in a Salon interview a year ago, “I think it is important for an administration to have strong, robust debates as long as everybody is on the same team … That’s part of the reason why I want some traditional Republicans to be involved in this process.” Hagel is certainly actively auditioning for the role of the Democrats’ favorite Republican, a position on the ideological grid once held by John McCain. It is not coincidental that Hagel has scheduled a major policy address in Washington next Tuesday titled, in slightly heavy-handed fashion, “Toward a Bi-Partisan Foreign Policy.”

Confusing everything is the persistent talk about retaining Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, virtually the only Bush Cabinet member likely to emerge from the current administration with his reputation intact. If Gates stays even for an interim period, it is hard to imagine that Obama would also give a major post to a Republican like Hagel unless the president-elect has a very idiosyncratic definition of “change.” But there are hints that Gates would only stay on his terms, which include the right to choose his deputies at the Pentagon. There is also the perplexing timing of a speech that Gates delivered in late October (at a time when all the portents pointed to an Obama presidency) calling for a new generation of nuclear weapons. If Gates wanted to ingratiate himself with the incoming Democrats, preaching the gospel of new and better nukes seems a strange way to go about it.

Richard Danzig, who was secretary of the Navy under Clinton and an ardent Obama supporter early in the race, is the most likely Democratic alternative to Gates. In fact, the Army Times reported Thursday that “high-level Defense officials” are preparing to hand over the keys to the Pentagon to Danzig. At times like this, specialty publications like the Army Times sometimes have better sources in their subject area than the major newspapers and broadcast networks.

Transition, of course, would not be transition without the Hillary Clinton rumor of the week. Steve Clemons, who directs the American strategy program at the New American Foundation, says there are hints that Clinton may be under consideration for the secretary of state post, stressing that she certainly passes the experience threshold. “It would be an unbelievably brilliant move by Obama if she would do it,” he says. The Washington Post’s transition column picked up the same vibrations Thursday and floated an item.

While this remains a long shot at best, tapping Clinton to replace Rice would do more than simply revive interest in Dick Morris’ off-the-wall 2005 book, “Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race.” If Obama were somehow to give the top Cabinet post to his rival for the 2008 Democratic nomination, it would be, well, Lincolnesque. In assembling a Cabinet, Lincoln practiced a politics of “malice towards none” by naming William Seward, once the favorite for the 1860 Republican nomination, as his secretary of state.

But, if history is any gauge, these Washington games of telephone invariably end up with the wrong number in picking a Cabinet. That is why it would be folly to completely dismiss other candidates for secretary of state such as New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (the Democratic Party’s version of “always a bridesmaid”) and former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (who was the only non-Chicagoan seriously considered for White House chief of staff).

Even when the press has the right names (after the appointments), it is easy to jump to the wrong conclusions about the power realities within the new administration. In mid-December 2000, the New York Times editorial page finally found something to like about the new team in Washington: “President-elect George W. Bush’s intention to name Colin Powell as secretary of state and Condoleezza Rice as national security adviser instantly enhances his coming administration. They are seasoned, thoughtful practitioners who will bring international stature and extensive knowledge to the Bush administration.”

Transitions are a tricky business even for Democrats. Bill Clinton misfired with a series of initial picks, from the disorganized Les Aspin at the Pentagon to the out-of-touch Lloyd Bentsen at Treasury to the inexperienced Mack McLarty as White House chief of staff. That is why the mantra of transition reporting — as beguiling as the name game invariably is — should be “trust but verify.”

As Valerie Jarrett, co-chair of Obama’s transition team, put it with deliberate blandness on “Meet the Press” Sunday: “I think one of the real strengths of Sen. Obama’s campaign and now President-elect Obama’s transition is that he really does like to think this through thoroughly and not telecast what he’s going to do until he’s ready to make a decision.”

No one wants to read articles titled “Entire Obama Administration Shrouded in Mist and Mystery.” So to accentuate the positive, we do have a pretty reliable handle as to who will be in the room with Obama (and presumably Joe Biden) when the major personnel decisions are made. There will be Jarrett, an African-American Chicago real estate entrepreneur who has been close friends to the president-elect and the incoming first lady for two decades; Pete Rouse, the press-shy former chief of staff for Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who performed the same role for a newly elected Illinois senator named Obama; the Chicago-born John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s former White House chief of staff, who stealthily organized the Obama transition during the fall campaign from his Washington perch at the Center for American Progress; David Axelrod, the Chicago-based political strategist, who was the inspiration behind both Obama’s up-from-nowhere 2004 Senate victory and his 2008 run for the Rose Garden; and incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, a sharp-elbowed veteran of the Clinton White House who was elected to Congress in 2002 (from Chicago, natch) with the help of Axelrod (double natch).

With all these Chicagoans (aside from Rouse) creating the Obama administration, it is time to drop the Second City urban inferiority complex. If there is an ideological orientation to this team, it seems to be Democratic centrism rather than full-throated liberalism. Bill Galston, a former top domestic advisor to Clinton now at the Brookings Institution, notes that Obama “has a great respect for expertise. His instinct is that in any field, gather the leading experts and go after them.” As Galston puts it, “This is not amateur hour — this is not crony time.” Paul Light, a professor of public service at New York University and an expert on governmental organization, said admiringly, “Obama is extremely well-prepared. There is a lot of talk coming out of the Bush administration about a seamless transition. But in many instances, the Obama people know as much about what is happening in the Cabinet agencies as the Bush people do.”

After a historic election, the press and the public are craving names — any names — to put flesh and flash on that vague entity known as the Obama administration. Even if Cabinet appointments have almost never been unveiled in November, there is a panting eagerness for personnel action in the face of the financial crisis. “So many reporters are saying that he has to name his Treasury secretary this week or next week, but you can’t do this without a decision-making process in place,” says political scientist Martha Kumar, who directs the White House Transition Project, an academic center designed to assist the president-elect and his team. Kumar points out that a White House counsel needs to be appointed, and presumably will soon do the vetting of Cabinet officials and formally establish ethics guidelines.

Presidential scholar Stephen Hess, a veteran of the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations, has just published “What Do We Do Now? A Workbook for the President-Elect.” Hess takes a bemused view of the media’s obsession with compiling lists of the purported front-runners for every government job this side of ambassador to Latvia, even if the names turn out mostly to be wrong. As Hess recalled, “Ed Meese, who ran transition for Reagan in 1980, came up with the Meese Rule: ‘People who know don’t talk and people who talk don’t know.’ That is as true now as it was then.” As a senior Obama advisor bluntly puts it, “Almost everything you read about transition is not accurate.”

Major news organizations, which have invested heavily in putting their reporters on the campaign planes, expect nonstop scoops about appointments even when those close to the personnel decisions have taken vows of silence. Having covered the 1992 Clinton campaign for Time, I recall with embarrassment sitting in my room at the Capital Hotel in Little Rock (where transition headquarters were located) waiting for someone — anyone — to call me back for a name-the-Cabinet story. With my deadline looming, political advisor Paul Began broke the radio silence to say that he had not talked to Clinton since Election Night and was totally out of the loop on appointments, but did mercifully pass along a few third-hand rumors. Out of this kind of chaff, I concocted a Cabinet story more notable for being done than being right.

There are, of course, occasional orchestrated leaks as a way to gauge how the Senate and important constituency groups might react to a potential controversial nominee. “What the Obama people have been trying to do in floating Larry Summers’ name for secretary of the Treasury is to gauge how upset his appointment will make the feminist community,” theorizes Paul Light. Other possible Cabinet nominees like Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano (for attorney general) have suddenly grown reticent about talking about their political future with longtime friends.

A presidential transition is a time of hope and heartbreak as the incoming president’s team allocates the ultimate prize in politics: high-prestige jobs that will burnish a résumé for a lifetime. Obama’s first week has been impressive, with hints of months of careful planning behind the scenes, as opposed to the make-it-up-as-we-go-along improvisation famously carried out by Bill Clinton. Transition is a grueling test for any incoming president, who after the rigors of a long campaign deserves a few weeks on a beach with his family. But with Wall Street in turmoil and America bogged down in two wars, these 10 remaining weeks until Inauguration will soon be recalled as the relaxing good old days for Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States.

But Tuesday night was a time of joy for Democrats and independents — a glorious affirmation of America’s capacity for rebirth as Obama rolled to an unequivocal victory over John McCain. With three states still undecided, Obama was guaranteed at least 349 electoral votes, winning a minimum of eight states carried by Bush in 2004 (Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Indiana, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico). The Democrats also picked up a minimum of five Senate seats, giving them a healthy (if not quite filibuster-proof) majority along with comfortable control of the House of Representatives.

In his outdoor victory speech before a rapturous crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park, Obama erased the memory of Joe the Plumber by invoking a more powerful symbol of America: 106-year-old Ann Nixon Cooper, a black woman who Tuesday went to the polls in Atlanta. Employing his rhetorical power that can uplift and instruct, Obama used her life to summon up more than a century of individual Americans triumphing over economic adversity, world wars and the legacy of segregation. At each crossroads of this national journey, Obama repeated his campaign’s refrain, “Yes we can.”

McCain in a gracious concession speech returned to the bipartisanship that has often marked his Senate career, doing away with the harsh tenor of the closing weeks of the campaign that he waged along with Sarah Palin. The Arizona senator expressed the hope that the nation “would find ways to come together to find the necessary compromises to bridge our differences.” While McCain seems poised personally to practice the politics of the olive branch, his defeat may have moved the GOP further to the right, by limiting its base on both the electoral map and in Congress to the Deep South, the rural Midwest and the underpopulated Rocky Mountain states.

For all the obsession with Obama’s racial makeup and alarmist theories about a hidden racist vote, it is quite possible that the 72-year-old McCain’s age was more of a political detriment. The unprecedented 25-year age gap between the two candidates gave fresh meaning to JFK’s 1961 inaugural declaration that “the torch has been passed to a new generation.”

Tuesday was the night that the 1960s — the divisive decade that defined American politics for 40 years — finally died. Obama first won his party’s nomination by defeating Hillary Clinton, the emblematic liberal baby boomer, in the primaries. And on Tuesday night he defeated McCain, who owes his political career to his suffering and bravery as a POW in Vietnam. The raucous Obama victory rally in Grant Park was the capstone of Democratic strength through unity. The riotous antiwar rallies in Grant Park during the 1968 convention and the brutality of the police truncheons accentuated the cultural fault lines in the Democratic Party that contributed to 28 years of GOP control of the White House, from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush.

It was poetic in a sense that McCain grimly awaited his electoral fate in the Barry Goldwater Suite at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel, the site of Goldwater’s 1964 concession speech. It was from the ashes of Goldwater’s defeat that the modern right-wing Republican machine rose like a phoenix. Instead of “the conscience of a conservative,” this was brass-knuckle politics that owed more to wedge issues — from crime (Nixon) to Swift boats (Bush) — than principle. But this was an election in which cries of “socialism” and the dread specter of that 1960s figure Bill Ayers failed to sway swing voters in the Midwest and traditonal Republican bulwarks like Virginia.

Every time the lease on the White House shifts party, the glib assumption is that America has changed. But this may have been the first election since 1964 when the Democrats could with justice imagine the world turned upside down. Yes, Jimmy Carter won the White House in 1976, but that was more a belated rejection of Nixon than a political sea change. It is now half-forgotten, but Bill Clinton owed a huge debt on Election Night 1992 to the presence of Ross Perot in the race. But as Obama declared victory shortly before midnight on the East Coast, he was poised to become only the third Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to win the White House with more than 50 percent of the vote.

The financial collapse and the looming deep recession may well have meant that McCain could not have won the election even if he chose Adam Smith as his running mate. In each of the three major states that destroyed McCain’s hopes of a last-minute reprieve from the electorate — Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida — more than half the voters said that they were “very worried about economic conditions.” (Most of the comparative optimists in the exit polls were merely “worried.”) Among the “very worried” voters, Obama won 63 percent in Pennsylvania, 60 percent in Ohio and 59 percent in Florida.

This was also the election when Karl Rove’s legacy of empowering the evangelical wing of the Republican Party may have permanently alienated upper-middle-class suburban voters from the GOP. Obama carried all four of the once reliably Republican suburban collar counties surrounding Philadelphia with a victory margin of nearly 200,00 votes. In Ohio, Obama ran up a 90,000-vote majority in Franklin County (Columbus and its close-in suburbs), turning what was until recently tossup country into a solidly blue part of the Democratic base. The Washington suburbs provided Obama with his victory margin in Virginia, a state that last went Democratic in 1964.

Obama’s triumph was also due to the largest, best-organized and most energetic grass-roots campaign in American political history. In Ohio, for example, 43 percent of the voters said in exit polls that they were personally contacted by the Obama campaign, compared with 36 percent who heard from the McCain campaign. The question did not distinguish between door knocking (the Obama specialty) and robo-calls (which the McCain camp heavily depended on). In hitherto reliably Republican Indiana, a state where Obama eked out a surprising 23,000-vote victory, the pattern was even more exaggerated. Even though the Democrats had last contested Indiana in 1964, 37 percent of voters in the exit poll said they had been contacted by the Obama campaign, compared with just 22 percent for McCain.

This was an Election Night that brought with it few might-have-beens — though nothing in the returns suggested that the Sarah Palin pick resonated with anyone other than the GOP’s conservative base. John McCain was saddled with enough political troubles to rival Job — a historically unpopular president of his own party, an economy that brought back memories of 1932 and war without end in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Barack Obama earned his ticket to the Oval Office by running a technically near-flawless campaign, dominating three debates and picking a vice president, Joe Biden, worthy of the office. It was, of course, Ronald Reagan’s slogan, but as the sun comes up Wednesday on a land that has dramatically turned away from the Bush-Cheney years, it will feel for tens of millions like “morning in America.”

The McCain campaign in Ohio is much more heavily reliant on phone banking, as was the 2004 Bush campaign that eked out a keep-the-White House 120,000-vote victory here. As Kevin Dewine, the deputy chairman of the state Republican Party, put it, “Our ground game is not loud. It’s not flashy. We don’t brag. But we get it done.”

Neighboring Indiana, with 11 electoral votes, is this year’s most unlikely presidential battleground state — the Democrats have carried it exactly once since the 1930s. (The 1964 Lyndon Johnson landslide.) But the Obama campaign has been sending organizers into counties where, based on prior elections, Esperanto speakers outnumber Democrats. Brian Howey, the nonpartisan editor of Indiana’s leading political journal, predicted, “With all the polls showing the race here as too close to call, I’m going to say that Obama will pull it out, because he has a ground game and an intensity that Indiana has never seen.”

Ohio and Indiana — along with Virginia (13 electoral votes) and North Carolina (15) — are the early-bird, carried-by-Bush states that will determine whether political mavens will show up at work Wednesday morning bleary-eyed from fatigue (as in 2000 and 2004) or surprisingly well-rested. The polls close early (by 7:30 Eastern) in all four states. If one or certainly two of these states flip to Obama, John McCain’s next political worry will be his 2010 Senate reelection campaign.

Unless the reliability of the entire polling profession has gone the way of subprime mortgages, McCain is already facing his two-out, two-strikes, last-of-the-ninth moment. Three 2004 Bush states with a total of 21 electoral votes (Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico) are conceded to Obama by virtually all political analysts, though McCain or Palin made last-ditch appearances in all three on Monday. If, say, Ohio also turns blue, there is virtually no road map for McCain to get to 270 electoral votes, even if he somehow snags Pennsylvania (21 electoral votes), the 2004 John Kerry state that McCain is passionately contesting.

It is easy to get bogged down in statistical saturation on the eve of a presidential election. But there is also a rationale for interviewing voters and conducting semi-candid, late-night barroom conversations with political operatives in both parties. After four days of reporting in Ohio, I have found scant evidence that contradicts the statewide polls, which hand the lead to Obama in 18 of the 20 most recent surveys.

At Fiore’s bowling alley Saturday afternoon in the tiny Appalachian town of New Lexington, I heard enough derogatory references to McCain’s age to fuel a “Saturday Night Live” skit, with even a supporter of the 72-year-old senator calling him a “great, great grandfather.” Dewine’s most likely scenario for Ohio projects a close race that will end up entangled in the courts. “I think that John McCain will win the state late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning,” he said. “And then we will all wake up Wednesday morning to discover that [Democratic] Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner has figured out a way to take it away from us.”

Indiana — where the polls close at 6 p.m. but part of the state is on Central time — will probably be the first barometer state to report detailed returns. Television will breathlessly report the statewide numbers and the vague generalities from the exit polls (“Of those in Indiana who said the economy was the biggest issue… “). But what I will be scanning the Web for are returns from emblematic Indiana counties: Howard County (Kokomo) is a blue-collar Republican area — Bush received 64 percent of the vote here in 2004 — with both imperiled General Motors and Chrysler auto plants. If Obama cannot make major inroads there in the wake of the looming GM-Chrysler merger, it would suggest that the economic issue may have less than expected potency in the Midwest.

One of the most intriguing political trends in this decade is the growing blue Democratic tint in the suburbs. The reason Obama is favored in Virginia is because the Washington suburbs represent the fastest-growing part of the state. (A Republican pollster who has advised many campaigns in the state says, “I don’t see how McCain can win without Virginia.”) In similar fashion, McCain’s challenge in pulling off a blue-collar upset in Pennsylvania is the political transformation of the Philadelphia suburbs, which have trended Democratic in recent elections partly because affluent voters do not relate to the religiously based social conservatism of the 21st century GOP. The McCain formula for victory in Pennsylvania (where the polls close at 8 p.m.) depends on miraculously holding Obama to a 400,000-vote margin in Philadelphia and coming out of the suburbs fewer than 100,000 votes behind. What that means is that Obama would have to run behind Kerry’s totals (ha!) in both the city and its suburbs.

Upscale Midwestern suburbs have, for the most part, clung to their Republican roots. That is why I will be closely scrutinizing the Indiana returns from Hamilton County, just north of Indianapolis, where Obama has made a major organizing effort, despite Bush’s carrying the county by a 3-to-1 margin in 2004. An analogous barometer in Ohio is affluent Delaware County (suburban Columbus), where Bush romped home 2-to-1. If counties like these become competitive as the returns come in Tuesday night, it suggests that the GOP will have lost more electoral traction in the Midwest.

Speaking to a throng of 60,000 Democrats swarming over the grounds of the Ohio statehouse Sunday afternoon, Michelle Obama said with the fatigue evident in her words, “Two more days. I can’t believe it. I don’t know what else to tell you.” In truth, there is nothing more for the candidates, their spouses, their 30-second TV spots — let alone the pundits and the pollsters — to say. Tuesday — finally, after a two-year campaign — belongs to the voters.