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Bill Ayers' terrorist associate Mark Rudd said on Wednesday that News Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch paid him $50,000 ($25,000 in advance and $25,000 on completion) to write his memoir about his days as a member of the Weather Underground. But "Fifteen percent went to my agent and the rest went up my nose for coke."

One of the members of Murdoch's board is Professor Viet Dinh, a former Bush counter-terrorism official who had fled Vietnam as a child when Rudd's communist comrades took over South Vietnam in the wake of the U.S. military withdrawal.

In his talk, Rudd made it clear that his communist ideology had not changed and reiterated his support for Communist Vietnam and Communist Cuba.

Some members of the small audience at Cal State East Bay in Hayward, California, did not think Rudd, who appeared rumpled and disheveled, was joking about his cocaine reference. The bizarre talk, which was interrupted by barbed questions about Rudd's terrorist past, concluded with Rudd professing his devotion to non-violence, truth and love.

During a previous appearance in Berkeley, California, at a left-wing bookstore, Rudd had declared that the election of Barack Obama was a major "advance" and provides an "opening" for the far-left to continue making gains. Rudd serves on the board, with Ayers and his wife, fellow terrorist Bernardine Dohrn, of the "Movement for a Democratic Society," which hopes to resurrect a "new SDS" on the college campuses. The SDS was the predecessor of the Weathermen and the Weather Underground.

Ayers is now a professor at the University of Illinois and Dohrn teaches law at Northwestern University. Rudd said that he had been teaching math at a community college in New Mexico but will be returning to teach social activism.

Because of the presence at Cal State East Bay of about 10 critics of Rudd, including this columnist, who passed out fliers about his involvement in a group that killed at least four police officers, university officials ordered seven members of the campus police to stand by. Two police were actually in the room, which was in the university library, and others were posted outside. But they never had to intervene. In fact, the police seemed disgusted they had to be there to protect someone who had specialized in calling police "pigs" and whose organization bombed police stations and killed police officers.

Rudd is not the only terrorist on a speaking tour. His comrade Bill Ayers is scheduled to be at Brandeis University in Massachusetts on April 30.

Michael Graham, the Boston-based talk show host who led the opposition to Ayers' scheduled appearance at Boston College, is spearheading criticism of the Brandeis event. The Boston College appearance was cancelled after Graham highlighted the involvement of Katherine Anne Power and Susan Saxe, two members of a Weather Underground spin-off group, in the murder of Boston Police Officer Walter Schroeder. Power and Saxe had attended Brandeis.

Rudd had been invited to Cal State by History Professor Henry Reichman, who was part of the protests that Rudd led in 1968, after visiting Castro's Cuba, which shut down Columbia University. It was after this that Rudd went "underground" as a fugitive with Ayers and Dohrn.

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