The NO did make one attempt that fall to launch a national program. The VOICE chapter had proposed in September that SDS use the occasion of a visit to Washington by Mme.

Ngo Dinh Nhu, sister-in-law of Saigon tyrant Ngo Dinh Diem, for a demonstration against American involvement in Vietnam. September 1963. Gitlin heartily approved and invited the Student Peace Union, then reeling under factional disputes and the detente of the previous August's test-ban treaty but still the likeliest student group to care about the war, to join with SDS in staging the demonstration; the SPU, in need of a cause, readily agreed.

Together they issued a call which was quite surprisingly prescient in its demands for United States withdrawal and its attack on the puppet regime, the use of chemical warfare, and the waste of American money.

But SDS couldn't rally its forces. Many of the older members felt that foreign affairs of any kind were essentially too remote from the basic interests of students, and this one especially so. Students, they argued, really care only about domestic issues, things like ghettos, the jobless, and organizing the poor. Gitlin, though helpful in planning a local demonstration in Ann Arbor, was unable to put together a national action; Booth, also interested, couldn't even get his friends at Swarthmore to go along; Webb had little interest 'n the subject. Eventually SDS had to give the real work of organizing the main demonstration over to the SPU and to concentrate instead on getting out some people for local protests.

The demonstration was held in Washington on October 18 and in the event, SDS did make it presence felt. Booth went down from Swarthmore to give a speech at a nighttime rally ("The Vietnamese have paid heavily for our folly .... This great nation [must] harness its human resources in behalf of causes which are just"*), and two SDSers, Douglas Ireland and Ed Knappman, were arrested along with five other demonstrators for picketing in front of the Washington Press Club, where Mme. Nhu had been invited to speak. At a few campuses around the country joint SDS-SPU demonstrations were held: 400 attended a rally at Michigan, 400 more demonstrated at Wisconsin, 170 people at the University of Texas signed a petition calling for the end of United States aid to Saigon, 50 students picketed in downtown Detroit (one with a sign reading, DOWN WITH THE NHU FRONTIER), and 35 picketed a speech by Mme. Nhu at Howard University, This is not insignificant, given the date; but most of this was done without any real push from the upper levels of the SDS organization, and what might have been a dramatic political event was instead a backpage oddity.

As the ERAP blitz took over more and more of SDS's attention after the December National Council meeting and the whole balance of the organization shifted to ERAP headquarters in Ann Arbor, the organizational crisis in New York became worse. The December meeting tried to stave it off by halting Max's field trips and putting him into the NO full time, but Max found the job more and more burdensome as Webb was occupied elsewhere and political differences with McKelvey grew daily (McKelvey, after all, was calling himself a Maoist, while Max was working with reform Democrats). The December meeting had also decided that the NO should move out of the LID building to new quarters a few blocks down the street at 119 Fifth Avenue, making manifest the growing division between the two organizations which, though patched over successfully now for a year and a half, was still very real and still very acutely felt by the younger half; this meant lost files, delays, and more chaos than usual.

Doug Ireland, another of Burlage's protégés, was brought onto the staff in February to restore some order, and he even came with enough money for his first three months' salary; but, though talented, he was both very young and very sickly, and that didn't help much either. The last straw was provided by the Selective Service System, which informed Lee Webb in April that he would be granted Conscientious Secretary didn't qualify. (Or perhaps that wasn't the last straw. Shortly thereafter it was discovered that there were mice in the new Office.)

As the fall term began, the first and unmistakable crisis was one of leadership. Todd Gitlin, who was taking over the sizable presidential shoes of Haber and Hayden, had at that point neither the depth nor breadth to fill them. Gitlin, tall, light curly hair, glasses, and an air of angst about him, was unquestionably bright and earnest, but he was a bookish sort both by background and by training—his parents were New York City schoolteachers and his world until then had been essentially confined to the Bronx High School of Science (where he was valedictorian) and Harvard University; the challenge of leading an organization that needed to stamp itself vigorously on the campus world was somewhat beyond him. He was, moreover, registered as a graduate student in political science at the University of Michigan (on a scholarship), and though this put him in touch with one of SDS's most active centers (including Hayden, Haber, Davis, Potter, and the McEldowneys, plus the VOICE chapter, still the largest), it also tended to cut him off from both the National Office in New York and the other, less attractive, chapters. Then, too, he was only twenty, had been a member of SDS for less than a year, and was without much political experience; as he remembers it, "I was out of it for a long time. I had become President under such peculiar auspices, you know. I was bewildered. All of my anticipations were right: I wasn't prepared to be President."”

Lee Webb, the new National Secretary, who, like Gitlin, had been recruited and pushed for national office by Robb Burlage, proved equally uncomfortable in his new job. The son of working-class New England parents, he had spent his winters in schools—Andover, then Boston University, both on scholarships—and his summers as a laborer, and had never worked in an office before in his life: the routine it demanded chafed, and he kept feeling that he ought to be out doing something with his life instead. He quickly discovered in the summer after his election that he had nothing politically in common with either Steve Max or Don McKelvey, with whom he had to work in the NO, and that much of what Burlage had told him about the size and activity of the organization was exaggerated: "That fall there were three or four SDS chapters, functioning chapters, and maybe five more paper chapters—which surprised me, because I'd heard that there were twenty or thirty." He says simply, "I was very, very bitter."

So Webb started traveling around the campuses, leaving the office routine behind, and very soon found the campaign of the Swarthmore people in the Chester ghettos a convenient excuse to stay away from New York. The trouble was that there was no one to take up the slack in the NO, and an already rigid office became inefficient as well. Ginger Ryan, who had been hired as a part-time assistant to keep some of the NO moving, wrote plaintively in one letter that October: "Our checking account gets smaller, smaller; none of the typewriters really work; where does money come from?"

In October the official ranks show 610 members, presumably paid up, in thirty-three states from Alaska to Georgia and five foreign countries, and at ninety-nine United States institutions, from Harvard to St. Cloud State College in Minnesota. Nineteen of them have enough members on paper to qualify as chapters (that is, five or more paid-up members of national SDS), but only the largest—Michigan (123), Vassar (26), CCNY (18), Harvard/ Radcliffe (17), Swarthmore (17), and Illinois (14)—have anything resembling a continuing program. Some other unofficial chapters, which had only a few national members, however—Hunter, Johns Hopkins, Oberlin, Rhode Island, Texas, Wayne State—among them managed to get a variety of activities started at their campuses without paying much attention to who was in SDS and who wasn't.

All of this was of course compounded by the fact that there wasn't any money. By the end of 1963 the LID was almost $8000 in debt, $5,000 of which was incurred in the previous twelve months, when it had an income of $35,106 and expenditures of $40,477; it was meeting its SDS obligations, which it reckoned at about $4,000 a year, only fitfully. SDS itself managed to limp along piling up debts slowly enough to forestall utter bankruptcy; through the bulk of the school year it was getting in around $600 a month from dues and contributions, and spending roughly $100 more—and every so often a generous donation would enable it to keep its head above water. Still, by late April, after the Fire Department inspectors ordered SDS to buy an extinguisher for the new office, Max confessed, "We can't afford it."° And everyone in the NO was still living at a subsistence level—McKelvey on $28 a week, Max on whatever could be spared or borrowed—a fact which Max made a special point of trying to keep the ERAP people from forgetting; as he wrote wryly to Gitlin, "Think about dough for the office; as Mao says, 'If ghetto agitation means cadre starvation, in the long run the people suffer.’ "

In March 1964 a conference of leading leftist student groups was held at Yale University to discuss what action could be taken against the war in Vietnam. A few SDSers participated, unofficially. The conference decided to hold a mass antiwar demonstration in May and to establish a national executive committee to make the arrangements. The majority of the members on the committee were members of the Progressive Labor Movement, a number of them unacknowledged. On May 2, 1964, 1000 students in New York City marched to the United Nations and heard speeches denouncing United States imperialism and the Saigon regime, while other meetings in Boston, San Francisco, and Madison similarly drew students into antiwar protests. Under the guidance of Progressive Labor, a student group named after those protests and called the May 2nd Movement (M2M) was then formed to focus student energy against the Vietnam war in particular and American imperialism in general.

Its chairman was Haverford student Russell Stetler, who had been a member of SDS member who had led a group of students to Cuba the previous summer and was planning a second student visit for this summer.

In a conference from April 15 to 18, 1964, the Progressive Labor Movement officially formed itself into the Progressive Labor Party. It claimed a membership of six hundred or so, but the number was not important. The open, hard militancy of the group, their free acknowledgment that they were communists, their heavy emphasis on organizing "Afro-American" workers in the ghettos, their bold student trips to Cuba in defiance of the government and their finger-giving attitude to HUAC upon their return, their imaginative analysis of the war in Vietnam as consistent with an American "imperialism"—these things made it noticed, and attractive, on the college campuses.

A few months later, at the September National Council meeting, SDSers officially took note of the new Progressive Labor Party with some amusement: "a strange and wonderful phenomenon," they called it.

And yet, ultimately neither the weaknesses of the leadership nor the inefficiencies of the National Office really seemed to matter that much. For there was now, more than ever before, a considerable strength in the chapters themselves. It was a time of heightened interest on the campuses, and most SDS people, not the types to sit around waiting for the NO to do their organizing for them, went out and did their own recruiting, wrote their own pamphlets, sent their own releases to the student paper, planned their own campus activities. In fact, chapters seemed to be growing all by themselves: at Reed, at Oklahoma, Northeastern, Kansas, Chicago, and even—tough territory for a latecomer to crack—at Berkeley. By April Max was saying, with some wonderment, "Chapters are forming so fast it's getting hard to keep up with it," and by the end of the 1963-64 school year there were twenty-nine honest-to-goodness chapters, the membership had grown to almost a thousand, and the regular mailing list had fifteen hundred names. All proof that forceful energies in the organization were flowing from the bottom up.

What is at work, obviously, is the growing leftward spirit of the studentry, of which SDS, by its past as much as its present, is a beneficiary. Not by accident, during this same year there are also formed, in addition to the anti-war M2M, the PL-run Student Committee for Travel to Cuba, the reformist- and Communist Party-oriented W. E. B. DuBois Clubs, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, the Southern Student Organizing Committee (which will become affiliated with SDS), and the groups involved in Mississippi Summer. Amid all this SDS attracts because it is an established organization, it is a white outfit at a time of a growing black-power trend in SNCC, and it is (in both style and theory) part of the New Left and therefore free of the "ideological hangups" of M2M and the DuBois Clubs.

It takes no very special perception to discover the reasons for this leftward swing. In September 1963 four little black girls were blown to pieces in a dynamite blast of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, signaling the utter unregeneracy of the South. In November John Kennedy, in whom many had placed lingering hopes in spite of themselves, was assassinated, and his alleged assassin was himself murdered: bloody and violent symbols of a bloody and violent country. He was followed into office by Lyndon Johnson, acknowledged by even his admirers to be the most glaring example of back-scratching, wheeler-dealing, arm-twisting corrupt Senate politics, and a rather boorish and ill-spoken Texas to boot. The aftermath of the Kennedy death produced a ream of different explanations, none of them terribly flattering to the Establishment and the most convincing of which suggested the complicity of the CIA, the Dallas police force, and Lyndon Johnson himself. The Vietnam maw had drawn to it enough soldiers—16,000 by mid-1964to make it a national issue (Goldwater wants to send more, with nuclear warheads, Johnson promises that American boys won't fight an Asian war) and a depressing example of American adventurism, at the very least. The hopes of Mississippi Summer—and the dreams of peaceful change—were riddled in June 1964 by the blatant murders of SNCC workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner by law officers who clearly would never be punished. And then in Atlantic City, where the Democrats met in convention in August, the SNCC-inspired Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which expected to replace the racist official party delegation, was refused its seats and offered the "compromise" of sitting two at-large delegates instead; this compromise was made all the more distasteful by the fact that many of the most helpful supporters of the MFDP within the liberal community—people like the ADA's Joseph Rauh, upcoming politico Al Lowenstein, Martin Luther King, and LIDers Bayard Rustin and Tom Kahn—all urged its acceptance.

The wonder, really, is that more students didn't turn leftward sooner.

Now SDS itself at this point—mid-1964—was in certain ways not terribly far left. It did not have the imperialist analysis or the specifically anticapitalist stance of groups like M2M and the Young Socialist Alliance (the youth group of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party). It was not willing to declare itself socialist, though it had a number of people who thought of themselves that way and that was the clear if unstated implication of parts of both The Port Huron Statement and America and the New Era. (In May, Jim Williams complained, "In SDS .. socialism is still 'the forbidden word.' Why is this when most of its leaders are socialists?

Whom are we trying to fool?"’) It was not even ready yet to give up its basic sense that the institutions of the country, though their imperfections were glaring, were capable of reform, provided the citizens worked long and hard enough to bring that about. What SDS did have, however, was an analysis more in keeping with its time—the sense of making connections, of participatory democracy, of new insurgencies, of living one's life so that it did not contradict one's beliefs—that spoke to the student activists far better than the apparently discredited doctrines of the thirties. It had a sense of moral politics, of direct action, of putting bodies on the line, that made it more of an authentically left organization than the Communists with their popular-front politics, or the Progressive Laborites with their sectarian zeal.

Moreover, throughout the spring SDS made itself felt on the campuses in concrete ways. Its Bulletin, several dozen mimeographed pages giving news of student activities and reports of chapter goings-on, was appearing now practically every month and reaching a primary audience of more than two thousand. The literature list, probably the biggest of any student organization and as sizable as any political group's, had grown to no fewer than ninety-two papers and pamphlets (forty-nine by SDSers) on every conceivable social or political issue, and the distribution of these writings by SDS chapters, by other political clubs, even by teachers who assigned them to their classes, spread the organization's reputation. Gitlin began to grow into his job as the months went on—he was "totally transformed," Flacks noted in February—and began traveling, speaking, making contacts, visiting chapters; in fact, as one SDSer is supposed to have put it, commenting on Gitlin's renewed activity on the campuses and Hayden's in ERAP, "Tom and Todd wait for no man." And a certain aura of solidity and fashion accrued to the organization with increased support from respected adults, such as the form letter which Harold Taylor and David Riesman sent out to academic and liberal circles on May 1 with phrases like "SDS ... . is one of the important and productive student groups" and "We respect the seriousness and quality of their political analysis."

And at the campus level, SDS chapters and individuals worked to make themselves felt.

Often SDSers would join with ongoing single-issue groups in support of particular actions relating to race, peace, elections, poverty, unions, indeed almost any cause, liberal or not.

One especially popular cause of the time was the fight against bans on left-wing speakers on college campuses, those relics from McCarthy days still in force at a remarkable number of universities, particularly the state-supported ones; by the simple act of inviting a Communist to speak, SDS chapters could bring to campus attention a span of important issues having to do with free speech, university authoritarianism, the university's relation to political forces in the state, anti-Communism and the Cold War, and the nature of the American political system. SDSers used all kinds of recruiting and educational tools, one of the best proving to be debates with right-wingers, usually members of the Young Americans for Freedom who appeared with increasing frequency on the college scene, and who, one SDSer reported, "are usually the best recruiters to our cause."® Chapters also frequently established study groups to do research on local problems like housing, discrimination, and poverty, and held meetings and seminars and discussion groups to try to get the growing numbers of disaffected students to make connections between national events, to put across the SDS vision, and ultimately to radicalize them.

All this produced a new strength in SDS that, for some, was almost euphoric. Dick Flacks, not normally given to elation, wrote that spring:

We are in a new state ... . It is tremendously exciting—one sign of it is that no one person can actually keep up with everything which is going on ... another sign is the extent to which people are willing to commit themselves and the number and quality of the people who are attracted.

"The times they are a-changing" and we are a part of it.° SDS's campus resurgence was assisted around the same time by the happy accident of selecting, for the first time, a National Secretary of surpassing organizational talents. After Webb's departure in March, Steve Max filled in as Acting National Secretary, but, as suggested, with something less than total success; the top people began looking everywhere for someone to replace him. At the April NC, they found Charles Clark Kissinger.

Clark Kissinger had been a student at Shimer College, in Illinois, transferred to the University of Chicago, where he majored in math and was active in starting the campus political party there, and after graduation in 1960 went on to work for an M.A. at Wisconsin, where he first joined SDS. When tapped for National Secretary, a job of limitless hours for the return of $75 a week, he was twenty-four, married, had a From the sublime to the ridiculous.

Kissinger—high forehead, thin face, short-cropped hair, regular features—looked like a smooth and efficient administrator; he was. He kept the National Office intact during its most arduous year, and (with the considerable help of a new Assistant National Secretary, Helen Garvy) he got the letters out, the literature mailed, the books balanced, the files sorted, and the typewriters working, all at the same time. Arriving in New York in June, the first thing he did was empty out the office of so much trash that he had to pay $5 to have it carted away. He then got in two new file cabinets and had the floor swept; the next month he promoted a sickly second-hand air conditioner, some new chairs, and—the embourgeoisification is complete—a water fountain. He got new letterheads and membership cards printed up, and had a stamp made, the first SDS ever had, reading FILE COPY DO NOT REMOVE STUDENTS FOR A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY. He initiated regular weekly mailings of two or three single-spaced pages to the hundred or so key people on the worklist, wrote them, and saw that they were sent out. He kept the bank account in order to the penny, instituted a new system of unified account-keeping for all the parts of the organization, and imported the extraordinary concept, heretofore unheard of around SDS, of "double-entry bookkeeping."

It is a mark of Kissinger's shrewdness that as one of his initial tasks he took it upon himself to try to establish smoother relations with the LID, which despite its own mounting debts (more than $10,000 worth by mid-1964), was after all still paying almost $400 a month to keep SDS going. He wrote polite self-introductory letters to Board Chairman Nathaniel Minkoff and Student Activities Committee head Emanuel Muravchik, both of which promised closer cooperation and communication with the LID. In June he told Tom Kahn, the young YPSLite who had just become Executive Secretary in place of Vera Rony, that he was "definitely interested" in distributing Kahn's new pamphlet, "The Economics of Equality,” to SDS's full mailing list; in August he formally applied for admission to the LID, enclosing a membership check for $5. In drawing up the new SDS letterheads, he made sure that the phrase "The Student Department of the League for Industrial Democracy," actually appeared—this last had become a sore point with the LID since most of the literature going out of the office had somehow, Freudianly, forgotten to mention this relationship. Minkoff was snowed: "I should like to see," he tells Kissinger, "more of this spirit of affiliation and cooperation show."

But Kissinger was more than an automaton: he took the job in large part because he felt strongly that chapter organizing should be an essential balance in the organization to the ERAP emphasis and he saw an efficient NO as being important for this. As he said in his report to the membership:

Perhaps the central preoccupation of the National Staff this summer is with preparations for the fall. We are in the process of creating a chapter organizing manual and stockpiling literature for distribution to chapters on campuses during the first few weeks of the fall semester .... In general, our potential is enormous—we have only to make the effort to carry our analysis and program to the American student .... Our task is now avoiding the temptation to "take one generation of campus leadership and ... . run!" We must instead look toward building the campus base as the wellspring of our student movement.

Here, then, was the other side of the tension in SDS: the strength and movement of the chapters. Though there was no question that the dynamic of the year had been ERAP, there was activity too within the universities. Sometimes it took the form of university-reform projects—one of which, a tentative program called the United States University Reform Project (USURP) was in fact mandated by the December 1963 National Council but came to naught; and sometimes the form of simple chapter-building, which Max and McKelvey especially emphasized and the latter put eloquently in a memo to the membership in January:

We have a special position (which our analysis of society makes even more potentially effective) as people who can affect and attract college and university (and high school) students with two views in mind: the planting in their minds of seeds of doubt and thought which will bear fruit in their changing attitudes and actions with respect to social issues; the direction of an understandably smaller group of students towards active involvement in social change, after they graduate and throughout their lives. The actual work for social change [i.e., ERAP] must be subordinate to those two goals.

This tension will continue to grow—not just for the next few months but for the entire life of the organization. The reason is simple. The inescapable problem was that America had no left, and for the activist student generation the essential quandary was: Is the job of students to build that left, to shuck their student robes and go into the world, building allies where they can, taking their message to anyone who will listen before it all collapses; or, is it rather to build the student part of this left, assuming that somehow the remainder will get built by those elsewhere reacting to their own felt needs, to stay behind the ivy walls to coalesce those Who are known instead of presuming to proselytize those who are distant

Once aware, as the SDSers were by now, of how immense a task and yet how necessary to create that left, how wrenching then must be this question. Many, of whom the ERAPers are only part, felt that they must shoulder the whole burden themselves, that nobody gives a damn about students anyway—even if all the students were to lay down their books tomorrow, no one would notice—that the poor, or the working class, or the blacks (or all three) must be drawn in for any left to succeed, and if students don't do it, who will?

Others, including the growing number of still-collegiate SDSers, answered that students (and sympathetic professors) are and can be a new force in society, with their own power to effect changes simply by acting on their own needs, that when the time comes for a united left in the nation the students had better have gotten their own constituency—say, a student union?—together; and that if the left is ever to come it will move—it will explodefrom the campuses outward. The problem was made only more complicated by the fact of student transience, and the organizational transience of a student movement: those who have graduated, or dropped out, or forsaken higher education, and those who believed with Potter that the universities were handmaidens of the corrupt society, tended to feel that the campuses were too limited and that it was the wider left that must be created; those who were still in school, or heading there, or working in the academy, and those who believed with the Port Huronites that universities were centers for social insurgency, tended to feel that the ghettos and the factories were too impenetrable and that it was the student left that must be made.

Consciously or subliminally, it was this quite monumental question that SDSers wrestled with; haltingly and yet with youthful recklessness, it was this that SDS as an organization tried to answer.