Only Jr himself has said the two met in a Russian language class, Abercrombie has not mentioned the class! I have spent the better part of a week seaching for a single classmate from that 1960 class and haven’t found a single name or quote from anyone! Someone mentioned to me that perhaps students in a Russian language class became involved in clandestine operations and wouldn’t want to admit they had taken Russian during the height of the Cold War, but that excuse doesn’t wash considering UH had a foreign language requirement in order to graduate. Jr entered the media spotlight in 2004 when he spoke at the Dem Convention and yet not a single person has come forward to say they were in the same Russian language class that Ann and Sr took.
There are plenty of mysteries here, but I’m not sure how much we can conclude from classmates not coming forward from a 1960 Russian language class. I’m not senile, but I couldn’t tell you any of the names of people who were in class with me in college in the mid 1970’s (including Russian class). I attended a large university, and although I remember that some of the same students were in my language classes from semester to semester, I haven’t kept in touch, and couldn’t identify them today to save my life.
Not necessarily. Communism and the cold war were hot issues in those years, and the idea of a career in the foreign service, the CIA, etc., fueled the interest in Russian. Of course, enthusiasm tended to wane when faced with the actual difficulties of the language.
That said, the tale of Ann and Sr. meeting in a Russian language class is very likely just one more fictional embellishment.
I decided a while back that book was written with a form of "reverse research." Most authors research to make sure at least the broad outline of their remembrances are correct, but the Obama/Ayers duo did the opposite: they would include events and situations that could have occured in that time frame, but ones that were difficult, if not impossible, to trace. Ann's acceptance at UC (the center of Ayers' universe) comes to mind. Universities don't keep application records of non-attendees beyond a minimum number of years, so it was safe to write, 35 years later, that she was accepted there. Ditto the Russian language class meetings -- it could have happened, but getting the transcripts to prove it was highly unlikely.
And it wouldn't take more than one trip to either Kenya or Jakarta to discover the sorry state of their record-keeping. I read an article a while back on the Kenya National Archives in Nairobi -- a bodyguard is recommended. And insects eat school records in Jakarta, of course.
They did overstep on some things though, such as the job at Business International -- but the sockpuppets at the NYT were ever to the rescue, explaining how the book was "full of clever tricks — inventions for literary effect — simply the tricks that art trades in, and out of these tricks is supposed to come our realization of truth." Or, more honestly put, license to lie, with the full blessing of the literati.