In 1964, Carl Oglesby, a young copywriter for a Michigan-based
defense contractor, was asked by a local Democratic congressman to
draft a campaign paper on the Vietnam War. Oglesby's report argued
that the conflict was misplaced and unwinnable. He had little idea
that its subsequent publication would put him on a fast track to
becoming the president of the now-legendary protest movement
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In this book, Oglesby
shares the triumphs and tribulations of an organization that
burgeoned across America, only to collapse in the face of
surveillance by the U.S. government and infighting.
As an SDS leader, Oglesby spoke on the same platform as Coretta
Scott King and Benjamin Spock at the storied 1965 antiwar
demonstration in Washington, D.C. He traveled to war-ravaged
Vietnam and to the international war crimes tribunal in
Scandinavia, where he met with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de
Beauvoir. He helped initiate the Venceremos Brigade, which
dispatched thousands of American students to bring in the Cuban
sugar harvest. He reluctantly participated in the protest outside
the 1968 Democratic National Convention and was a witness for the
defense at the trial of the Chicago Seven the following year.
Eventually, after extensive battles with those in SDS who saw its
future more as a vanguard guerrilla group than as an open mass
movement, Oglesby was drummed out of the organization. Shortly
after, it collapsed when key members of its leadership quit to set
up the Weather Underground.
This beautifully written and elegiac memoir is rich in
contemporary echoes as America once again must come to terms with
an ill-conceived military adventure abroad. Carl Oglesby warns of
the destructive frustrations of a peace campaign unable to achieve
its goals. But above all, he captures the joyful liberation of
joining together to take a stand for what is right and just -- the
soaring and swooping of a protest movement in full flight, like
ravens in a storm.
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