PREP was an entirely different operation, a two-man think-tank and a traveling lecture team. Dick Flacks, who had run PREP for the last two years and had managed to get out a series of (very serious, very dull) PREP Newsletters on peace and foreign policy issues, had gone to Chicago to take up a job as assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, and his place was filled by Todd Gitlin and Paul Booth. These two—"the Bobbsey twins of peacenikdom," as someone called them—had just ended a summer of doing peace research with a Washington foundation and had managed to latch on to a rich Texas liberal named Joe Weingarten, who ran a World Institute for World Peace in Houston and who agreed to give PREP $7,500 on the understanding that they would promote his institute on campuses around the nation. There is no evidence that they ever did any successful promotion, but the money served to send the two of them on a variety of campus-speaking trips whose main effect was to organize chapters for SDS, and apparently Weingarten was none the wiser.”

Booth's specialty was what was called "conversion"—the study of how to get the economy from warfare. Spending to welfare spending without its collapsing in the process—and that fit in nicely with his essentially reformist politics. He pored over economics books, made speeches, wrote articles for little peace-oriented publications, and tried to be a one-man research department for the Boston ERAP project, which, unlike the others, had been involved in actual conversion work around defense industries in the Boston suburbs and had therefore been put under PREP direction by the September NC. Gitlin, meanwhile, concerned himself with the draft, and put out a long paper on that subject which PREP distributed in the fall. His initial visits to campuses in the fall suggested that this could be a major SDS weapon—"What grassroots soundings I've been able to make," he wrote in October, "leave me convinced that this can be a powerful organizing issue"*—but two months later he had come to see that "its potential was highly overrated"; Booth, traveling in the East, wrote him that there was absolutely no interest in the subject, even at Cornell, which was to be a major center of antidraft activity after the escalation of the war. Gitlin concluded that the effort was premature: Vietnam was not yet a reality to Americans, and the students were snug in their 2-S cocoons.

In addition to all the academicism, PREP did lay the groundwork for one successful action later on in the spring. Someone around Ann Arbor noticed in the paper that certain loans which U.S. banks had made to the government of South Africa after the Sharpeville massacre in 1960 were about to be renewed. Gitlin got interested. Working inductively from the premise that South Africa was bad, he slowly came to see how important were those bank loans in bolstering the government, and then to see how important U.S. investments were in general in supporting the regime; with Christopher Z. Hobson, a friend from Harvard, Gitlin looked into it a little and soon discovered which banks were involved in loans to South Africa, which American companies had accounts in those banks, and which corporations had additional ties to South Africa: when he laid it all out he found a surprising picture of the role of U.S. capitalism in the world. No one had expected this—there were no African experts around PREP, no economists, and no one who had had an imperialist analysis of American foreign policy. But when the entanglements were laid bare, the PREPers felt they had to do something, and something unusual. They decided that on March 19, two days before the fifth anniversary of Sharpeville, SDS would stage a protest in the form of a massive sit-in at the lower-Manhattan offices of the Chase Manhattan Bank, one of the prime movers in the loan agreements and a place where South Africa had regularly found a multimillion-lion-dollar friend.’ The sit-in was to involve civil disobedience and arrests were expected; in the words of Mike Davis—the son of a San Diego butcher, who later became the chief coordinator of the project—"Housing is being arranged by the New York City Police Department."*

PEP, the last of SDS's projects that year, was the bone that had been thrown to the MaxWilliams electoral-politics forces by the Pine Hill convention and reluctantly approved by the Philadelphia National Council. This was always a minority adventure within SDS ranks, and its famous slogan of "Part of the Way With LBJ," though often taken by outsiders to be a basic SDS position, was in fact the expression of a small group on what even then was considered the organization's "right wing."

In fact PEP represents SDS's first serious faction fight. The project was established largely because no one felt like denying the electoral-politics faction the right to do their own thing; "by that time," recalls Jim Williams, who became the PEP director, "it was clear that we had political differences with everybody and we didn't try to minimize that—we just said SDS has always been a multi-tendency organization and this is a tendency." But no one felt like giving it much of a chance, either. The PEP executive committee established by the National Council contained a full quota of those hostile to the whole thing—Garvy, Grizzard, Kissinger, Ross—and the project was launched with only $1,000 from SDS, unlike ERAP, which took $5,000 before it even got off the ground.

PEP managed to raise an initial grant of some $1,300 from the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO, on the understanding that it would distribute IUD's anti-Goldwater literature, which it did—fifty-seven thousand pieces of it, too. It also managed to distribute forty-five hundred copies of four election papers of its own, one by LID Executive Secretary Tom Kahn, one by Williams, one by Max together with Doug Ireland, and one by Robb Burlage. At several of the chapters, especially around New York and Boston and at the big Midwestern state universities, there was considerable response, but all action remained on a local level and it was up to local chapters to decide whether to pass out these papers, campaign against Goldwater, or sit on their hands.

The PEP position wasn't naive, and was shared by many people in the country if not in the organization. The PEPers knew that Johnson was untrustworthy and highhanded, but they had three ulterior motives in supporting him: to "fight against Goldwater and the ultraright"; to push Johnson leftward and thus produce a real difference between the two parties, raising "the consciousness of the masses to a new level of political awareness"; and to try to keep the Democratic Party faithful to its party platform, "Superior to any passed by a major national party since the first New Deal." "Keeping the limitations of the Johnson program in mind," they wrote,

.. we nonetheless realize what a Goldwater victory would mean ... . Not only does the Goldwater program run precisely in the opposite direction from one which we would like to see pursued, but a Goldwater victory would, in fact, drastically alter the nature of political controversy in the country. No longer would the problem be one of how to further the detente with the Soviet Union, but rather how to achieve total victory over the atheistic-communistic menace. No longer would the question of the fight against poverty be open to consideration ... rather, the issue would be how to remove slackers from the relief rolls.

This was the position known as "Johnson With Eyes Open."

The opposition to PEP took many forms. An increasing number of people coming into the organization greeted it with stony indifference, having outgrown electoral politics along with puberty some years before. Many of the old-timers joined in what Lee Webb now calls "an irresponsible campaign of political assassination" against PEP: Kissinger, for example, put a homemade poster over his desk, in plain view of the PEPers, reading, "Support the War in Viet Nam—Register Voters for Johnson"; that fall, for the first time in the history of SDS, he put a lock on a correspondence file to keep the letters he was writing about PEP away from PEP eyes (to which Max and Williams naturally responded by secretly making a key and reading everything he said about them). And then there were a number of other people who enunciated a principled political line against PEP. Al and Barbara Haber, for example, argued that SDS should actively urge people not to vote:

To support Johnson is to support [his] move to the right and the deissuization of presidential politics. The larger his victory, the stronger will be his mandate to continue leadership of a moderate coalition in which the left has no place. The larger his victory, the more resoundingly will the middle have defeated the edges—Goldwater's edge and our edge, too. The larger his victory, the more resoundingly will our position be defeated: "Extremism in pursuit of liberty is no vice, moderation in defense of justice is no virtue."

It is a measure of the amount of opposition to the PEP politics that dozens of boxes of the "Part of the Way With LBJ" buttons, which were regularly pushed on the membership, remained unsold after November.

With the lopsided Johnson victory, PEP was left floundering: not only had its analysis of the great Goldwater threat been proven wrong, but it was now stuck with a dislikable man who had a mandate to do anything he pleased. Max and Williams tried to argue to the PEP executive committee that "the Johnson landslide had produced many new possibilities for radical-liberal coalitions and campaigns for new, radical legislation," but as Kissinger reported in the minutes of that committee, "the analysis was received by the committee without comment." PEP then offered a new program of trying to put student pressure on Congress to get it to pass improved welfare legislation, but that too gained nothing more than offhanded support. PEP, it seemed, was dead, and it only remained for the December National Council meeting in New York to bury it.

PEP came into the December NC with a two-point proposal, the first to continue research into and promotion of progressive legislation to be pushed through Congress, and the second to set up a voter-registration program in Cairo, Illinois (community projects then being a big thing for SDS). "Max and I," Williams recalls, "went down to a Spanish magic shop and bought us some charms and hoped that would see us through." It didn't: the NC ignored them. "It was terrible—a bloodletting," Williams says. First the elaborate legislative program was turned into a propaganda effort on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to get it seated in Congress in place of the regular Mississippi delegation (an idea that had been only a small part of PEP's original package); and then the Cairo project was taken away from them and given to ERAP, which two days later decided that it should be abandoned altogether. This was, as Paul Booth says, "the prime example of sectarianism in SDS. We destroyed them."

Max and Williams knew they were beaten, and they didn't bother to fight. "I just completely lost heart," Williams says, sadly.

It was a great disappointment ... very traumatic for me. For a while after that I felt like a Cuban exile sitting at a table drinking coffee and waiting for the regime that kicked him out to collapse so that he can go back in; and then at one point you realize that it's not going to happen, and then you don't know what to do.

Max is more detached: "We failed to see the youth culture that was coming up then, kids who were into drugs and the new culture and who felt they were past electoral politics—we were trying to show what was wrong with Congress and they already felt Congress was irrelevant to them." Williams looked around for a job, and in February joined the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Washington (where he later started a short-lived SDS chapter with SNCCer Phil Hutchings); Max, in an irony so perfect that it is no longer ironic, joined the working staff of the LID—by now they finally realized the identity of their politics—though he would continue for several years more to be a participant in SDS affairs. The February 23, 1965 worklist mailing carried the PEP epitaph, a note from Max:

Regretfully we announce that the Political Education Project is closing operations .... Of course Jim and I feel that an operation like PEP should be a major priority in an organization like SDS. Perhaps some of the funds now being used to build up large full-time community-work staffs could better be employed in research and education on the campus level. Unfortunately the organization has set its priorities in another way.

It would be less than frank not to mention another consideration that was in the back of our minds when we decided to close the projects .... For the most part there has been foaming at the mouth and cries of "sell out" whenever the words "New Coalition" [i.e., realignment] have been used. As a substitute for real debate, notions about plots against the organization and plots to organize a faction for the Convention have been circulated.

Let us hope that now with PEP dissolved and its staff scattered, there will be no further excuses for the lack of open and legitimate political differences in SDS, and that those who have dealt with the situation as a factional one will now be forced to come out and argue a real political position.

Needless to say, both Jim and I remain committed to SDS .... We should like to thank those friends who have stood by PEP during this fruitful, but often trying, experiment in organizational diversity.

This December meeting showed more than dissatisfaction over the Johnson election and electoral reformism. Max and Williams were victims of a new strain that was coming into SDS, produced by the cross-fertilization of two groups. The first was the older people, such as the ERAPers who had discovered a new approach to parliamentary democracy in their project meetings, plus a number of white SNCCers distraught by the Atlantic City compromise who turned to a superasceticism so apolitical that they were regarded as being drugged on a "freedom high"; the second was the younger college and high school people, also increasingly apolitical in traditional terms, members of an evermore-alienated generation who had made their first appearance at the 1964 convention and who, it turned out, were little inclined to step-by-step arguments and structured political debates and were much given to such expressions as, "I feel alienated from this meeting."®

It was one of Hayden's shrewd and apparently accidental political perceptions that he felt the alliance between these two groups, and he used the December meeting to express the new ghetto-hardened perceptions of the former while impressing them on the political tabula rasa of the latter. He would stand up in the middle of a heated argument, say something to the effect of "What if we were to stay here for six years and not come to a decision?" and sit down, effectively sending the existential young women from the suburbs into a tizzy and drawing agreeing nods from the workshirted young men. '"Suppose parliamentary democracy," he would say, "were a contrivance of nineteenth-century imperialism and merely a tool of enslavement?" Or, "Suppose we rush through the debate and 'decide' to do something by a vote of 36 to 33. Will we really have decided anything?" Williams, not unnaturally bitter at this point, remembers this as Hayden's "What-if-I-werea-plum?" phase, and many of the NC delegates regarded this behavior as ill-mannered at best and anti-intellectual at worst, and a few passed it off as gut existentialism. But it was much more than that: it was the attempt to enunciate a politics on the other side of the parliamentary forms handed down from another era, to see if there was a way of carrying on the business of society without all the trappings of the society of business. Hayden saw that SDS was caught in the bind of trying to create a new world with the tools of the old.?

That was what lay behind the debate between Hayden and Ray Brown which was one of the high points of the NC. Brown, author of the "crisis economy" paper that had helped push SDS into ERAP and projects with the unemployed poor, was there to give another speech on the direction of the economy, only this time he urged SDS to get into organizing the working poor. It was too much for Hayden. He got up and took Brown to task for his trotting out of theories about whom to organize. Look, he said in effect, we took your advice the last time and went into the ghettos—your theories turned out to be all wrong but we did it anyway and it turned out to be the right thing, an important thing for SDS and for those of us in the communities. And look: nobody could have given an analysis to Bob Moses proving that he ought to be organizing poor blacks in the most backward parts of Mississippi, but he did it anyway and that turned out to be the right thing. Theories don't mean a thing, there is no theoretical basis for doing what we're doing, and anyone who tries to tell you that there is is full of shit. We're beyond traditional theoretical premises. We're into something new.

It was a profound statement. Hayden was trying to warn SDS that if it was serious about changing the system it would have to abandon old theoretical approaches and worn-out techniques which that system had created for its own purposes, and try to evolve theories and techniques of its own: you don't try to kill a bee by piercing him with your stinger. The institutions, organizations, rules, theories and all the other taken-for-granted paraphernalia of twentieth-century America are not immutable and ordained, the inevitable products of human nature—they are the result of a particular social and economic system, and they are thereby tainted. One cannot use these products without the taint coming off on one's hands.

There must be other ways to operate.

But SDS did not respond. Many were angered by the implicit arrogance in Hayden's remarks—after all, he didn't have any more answers than anyone else—and few saw the implications of what he was getting at; worse, Hayden himself was apparently not yet ready to do the hard work of pushing it across to the others. Creating a new organization, a new form of organization, in the midst of a society without models for it, without even the habits of thinking about it, was more than SDS could manage. Perhaps its ending would have been different if it could have.

The May 2nd Movement on November 7, 1964, renewed its dormant campaign to get male college and high-school students to sign a pledge stating that they would not fight in the war in Vietnam. Although a majority of the M2M steering committee were members of the Progressive Labor Party, which had advanced a clear imperialist explanation for the war, the M2M pledge itself did not incorporate such an analysis, and indeed was staunchly patriotic:

WE THE UNDERSIGNED,

ARE YOUNG AMERICANS OF DRAFT AGE. We understand our obligations to

defend our country and to serve in the armed forces but we object to being

asked to support the war in South Vietnam. Believing that United States

participation in that war is for the suppression of the Vietnamese struggle for

national independence, we see no justification for our involvement. We agree

with Senator Wayne Morse, who said on the floor of the Senate on March

4,1964, regarding South Vietnam, that "We should never have gone in. We

should never have stayed in. We should get out."

BELIEVING THAT WE SHOULD NOT BE ASKED TO FIGHT AGAINST THE

PEOPLE OF VIETNAM, WE HEREWITH STATE OUR REFUSAL TO DO SO.

Even so, the pledge was regarded by many at the time as too extreme, and M2M, with fewer than two hundred members, was still too small to push it successfully at more than a few colleges. This was, however, the first of the "We Won't Go" statements and a precursor of the draft-refusal movement of later years.

The existence of the three SDS projects in the fall of 1964, however varied their success, was a sign that SDS was searching and experimenting, somehow organizationally aware of the flow of a new student mood without being able to find just the right channel for it, neither the romantic Narodnikism of ERAP nor the electoral legitimacy of PEP nor the analytical adventures of PREP somewhere in between. And because it was groping, it kept growing. Membership increased steadily to 1,200 dues-payers by October, and then by December to 1,365 people at 41 chapters and 37 states, the District of Columbia, and overseas. Jeremy Brecher, the Regional Organizer for the Northwest, remembers that the SDS reputation had penetrated even into smaller colleges in his area: "They'd all heard about SDS and they were all really interested—no matter what little they had heard about it. SDS was the place to go."

And then, virtually out of the blue, SDS was blessed with its largest donation ever. Gitlin, working through Boston area contacts, had managed after several months to talk millionheiress Anne Farnsworth into a donation of $25,000 to SDS that October (much of it intended for PREP, but in the event used by the organization as a whole, almost $10,000 going to ERAP). It was such a heady sum it caused the usually stolid Kissinger to draw up that November a budget for the next eight months of no less than $66,000, ten times anything SDS had ever conceived of spending before. It also caused a few ruffled feathers, since it was mostly Kissinger and the in-group who decided how the $25,000 would be allocated, much to the displeasure of those who were not included in either the consultation or the distribution; and the Boston PREP people, who knew nothing about the money until it was in hand, were understandably peeved that their own sources of fund raising had been tapped without their knowledge. Still, $25,000 went a long way toward making everyone amenable. ?”

Members, money—but the real measure of SDS's success was that it kept alive to its era.

Because of that, it became the beneficiary of one of the most far-reaching events of this decade, the initial battle of the student rebellion.

The First Battle of Berkeley began on September 14, 1964, with an announcement from the administration of the University of California at Berkeley that organizing and soliciting funds for off-campus political action would henceforth be banned from the campus at the usual areas. It ended—as much as such things ever end—three months and twenty days later on January 3,1965, with an announcement from the same administration that organizing and soliciting funds for off-campus political action would henceforth be permitted on campus at the usual areas. In the interim, students carried confrontation with authority to the point of spontaneously surrounding a police car for thirty-two hours to prevent the young man inside from being taken to jail;* the sit-in tactic was successfully transferred from Southern lunch-counters and Northern businesses to the halls of ivy on three separate occasions, first with 200 students, then with 400, and finally with 1,000; the police were called in, for perhaps the first time ever at a major university campus, to arrest, with proven brutality, 814 students who had been engaged in a sit-in; undergraduates, joined by graduate students and a portion of the faculty, declared a successful strike of classes that went on for five days, the first time that tactic had been used at a single university; the university president, Clark Kerr (who had been a member of SLID—SDS's predecessor—in his youth), a man nationally famed as the champion of the super-efficient, technologically-perfected "multiversity," stumbled along from "non-negotiable demands" (a phrase he seems to have been the first to inject at Berkeley, and thus into college life) to redbaiting to amelioration, and finally confessed, "We fumbled, we floundered, and the worst thing is I still don't know how we should have handled it"; and the chancellor of the university was forced out and a new, more lenient man put in his place. Here, ab ovo, were all the elements of student protest that were to become familiar at so many campuses in the next six years: the sit-ins, strikes, police, nonstudents, arrests, mimeographed resolutions, bullhorns, committees, broken friendships, resignations, TV cameras, headlines. Here was the university administration which moves from blunder to blunder, with the trustees right behind, all the while complaining with bewilderment that communications have broken down and "normal channels" have not been followed here was the uncertain and essentially ostrichlike faculty which initially acts as if it is discovering the students as people for the first time and then reluctantly decides that they have a point and finally sides with them; here was the studentry which is mobilized by administration mistakes, is then sustained by a small core of energetic, charismatic, disorganized, inefficient, joyful, impassioned, and sometimes brilliant leaders, and ultimately becomes politicized in large numbers by watching the brutality of the police, the venality of the press, the superficiality of the faculty, and the immorality of the administration.

Berkeley had it all. And had it, moreover, in extremes: there, at the central campus of the largest and perhaps best university system in the country, was the most direct confrontation ever seen in an American educational institution up to that time, with the most police, the most arrests, the most students out on strike at a single campus, and the most publicity. Sproul Plaza was Fort Sumter, and this was the first shot fired in the war between Movement and University.

But what was it, really, all about? Ostensibly the issue was "free speech" and it was the ad hoc Free Speech Movement (FSM) which directed most of the action. But though there were unquestionable angers and passions aroused over the administration's limitations on political activity on campus, they could not by themselves have produced such a sustained confrontation, for the limitations were in fact quite minor, hardly distinguishable from other administrative clamps on political activity in the previous five years, easily capable of circumvention by those who cared, and an inconvenience to only a tiny percentage of the twenty-seven thousand students (and maybe three thousand nonstudents) on the campus.

Nor was the issue really the size and impersonality of the multiversity, although that explanation was by all odds the most popular, put forth by academic pundits, newspaper columnists, students at other universities, and, ultimately, as if to suggest how wrong it was, by Ronald Reagan himself This was the explanation which fit most readily into the liberal consciousness of the nation, for it conceded a problem, but a problem small enough to be admitted without a dislocation of one's political psyche and for which a variety of possible solutions could be imagined without a major reordering of society. And in fact it was to academic patching and pasting that many people at universities now turned, in order to "avoid a Berkeley" on their campuses. But though the deadening largeness of the major universities certainly did nothing to resolve the students’ inner turmoil, and often helped to keep it alive by providing others among the mass who shared it, it was neither the cause for nor the sustenance of the protest. Most students /iked the education they were getting (after a careful survey that fall, Berkeley sociologist Robert Somers concluded that "our data do not suggest that dissatisfaction with the educational process played any role at all"), a remarkably high percentage of the active protesters were transfer students who had come to Berkeley explicitly seeking this kind of mass education (perhaps as many as 49 percent of the FSM people were transfers, according to a study by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Higher Education), and demands for curricular change appear with only the slightest frequency in FSM statements during this period.

No, the basic source of the Berkeley protest was more involved than the desire for political activity or a restructured university, and more difficult to admit and deal with. It was of course, aS we have seen underlying the whole impetus to student protest, the desire of young people to say something, to do something about the American society they lived in, the society that made them feel useless, exploited, guilty, patemalized, and consumerized, that allowed monstrous ills to be perpetuated. The Berkeley students were aware of the connection between their actions and the society at large right from the beginning. Political activity there for the last year had centered on civil-rights protests at Bay Area businesses (resulting in more than thirteen hundred arrests since November 1963), these protests had upset the right-wingers in the California establishment, and it was pressure from these right-wingers (chiefly William Knowland and his Oakland Tribune) that had forced the administration to clamp down on political activity in the first place. Once the battle had begun, the university was seen largely as a substitute for the society in which it functioned, and the students demanded of it the same humanity and justice they had demanded of the politicians of Mississippi, the bus stations of Alabama, the businessmen of San Franciscoonly they expected more from the university than they did from most other institutions because of its own claims. During the course of the fight it was discovered that the university did not live up to its claims, but, more than that, neither did the police, the press, and the public, the very personifications of the society: the university proved not to be the home of fair and dispassionate reasoning, the regents showed themselves not to be wise statesmen above pettiness and vindictiveness, the press turned out not to be an unbiased and objective seeker after truth, the police proved not to be efficient agents of justice and servants of the people, and the public at large turned out not to be open to reason, to be willing to listen to another side of a story, to harbor sympathy. If anything, the society seemed to behave with savageness or callousness or duplicity. For the young men and women of Berkeley, this was innocence lost: tested, the society flunked. John R. Seeley, a sociology professor who was a sympathetic observer of the Berkeley events, captured this exactly:

For what is now struck at is no longer this or that aspect of the University of California at Berkeley, or even the whole nine-campus monstrosity called the University of California. It is not even any longer the American University, but the American way of life. And not at its periphery but at its core. The students who wore placards saying "Do not bend, fold, spindle or mutilate," or "I am not the property of the Regents of the University of California," though they then thought themselves fighting a local and institutional battle, set in motion

a train of thought, feeling, resolution and action that now addresses itself to the nation and the nation's basic orientation to itself and the world. The managerial society is being asked moral questions, and, failing credible answers is beginning to be choked of what is indispensable for its operation: the precursor of loyalty, the belief that, in general the society is right, or not wrong, or not seriously wrong, or not criminally wrong; and no longer in respect to an issue but in its fundamental form and character.

Berkeley 1964 was the first overt expression of this absolutely transcendental issue. And this is why there was such a reaction to it, with constant sensationalistic newspaper and television coverage, an immediate spate of literally dozens of articles in the periodicals, interminable academic studies, surveys, theses, and at least four books. Somewhere in its depths, the nation knew that Berkeley was more than an enlarged panty raid, was speaking, albeit haltingly, to something profound. The priests of the media ballyhooed Berkeley even as they condemned it, because it expressed their own liberal uncertainties about the new order which the nation found itself on the brink of, a new order which Clark Kerr himself had described as one where "the federal agencies will exercise increasingly specific controls and .. greater external restraint will be imposed in most situations." The professors promoted Berkeley, not solely in the belief that it would promote them, because it was expressing truths about the nature of the academy and the kind of worldly thing it had become, which they had known for a long time but had not wanted to acknowledge.

It was not that anything so very wild had gone on (certainly nothing by the standards of a few years later): no deaths or major injuries, no bombs or fires, no serious damage to property (aside from the police car, which was used as a speaker's platform), no widespread violence (except for the police), not even a sustained picket line or strike. It was not even that this was the first major political disturbance on a university campus for thirty years, for there had been precursors of a smaller order at many universities and several at Berkeley itself. This relatively small event was made immense rather because Berkeley had been thought to be the triumph of the American dream, a public university acknowledged to be perhaps the finest in the country, the perfect post-ideological mixture of government, private industry, academia, computers, managerial skills, brains, and money—and the whole thing was being called into question. The young, upon whom the future of course would depend, were being given the American dream—and they didn't want it. More: they attacked it, with an innate challenge that reverberated through the entire society, striking at the premises and beliefs upon which it was founded. The Berkeley confrontation was a signal that a new generation had been born. America did not like what it had spawned.

With such an explosive reaction from the country as a whole, universities everywhere could not help being affected. Many administrations and faculties moved to redress long-standing student grievances and extensive probing and poking went on at most of the better schools, breaking open the lid of an academic Pandora's box out of which were to fly an immense variety of schemes and committees and curricula over the next few years. Many institutions moved to promote more freedom for students in political activity, greater faculty involvement in student conduct and academic reform, more flexible machinery in the administration to anticipate and handle student complaints, a stronger student voice in academic and nonacademic affairs, various schemes to "restructure" the university, more power to both students and teachers, and so on. And at many places this first taste of power proved exhilarating indeed.

Even the most moderate of the students sensed that life would be different after Berkeley, that they would no longer be regarded as frivolous stadium-fillers and that their lives and learning were of some concern to the outside world. The more active students faculty and administration for this or that real or pretended cause; they tended to realize, too, that people would now pay attention to them as they never had before and hence came to regard publicity as an elemental lever in their tactics, using wire-service reporters and television cameramen with a self-interest that heretofore had belonged only to politicians and entertainers. Finally, the already-committed students, like those in SDS, discovered that Berkeley began a period in which whole new possibilities opened up for, in their words, the "politicization" and "radicalization" of American students, specifically around their own grievances as students at first, but with the possibility now of having them relate those grievances to the world beyond and then sharing in the radical vision.

SDS saw immediately that the Berkeley events would be important, even before the immense publicity that was accorded them. In the October Bulletin it ran a front-page article—dull to be sure, and totally unhortatory—outlining the events up through the abandonment of the police car, and a wire of support was sent to the FSM soon after its formation the same month. (Not that SDS had much support to give, except through its local Berkeley chapter, and that turned out to be a rather weak and marginal group of people whose allegiances were directed elsewhere; still, the chapter was officially recognized by the university and it did make its presence known during the troubles by running a table to sell buttons with the SDS slogan, "A Free University in a Free Society.") Kissinger especially saw the value of Berkeley in directing SDS's attention back to campus affairs and away from the provinciality of the projects, and he pushed it hard. He "spent a fortune in phone calls to Berkeley," he confessed, then wrote and rushed out a special mailing early in the morning of October 3: "So far as I know," he wrote to Potter, "we are the only ones to respond at a national level—we really beat everybody on it." He pressed Berkeley chapter president Eric Levine to keep sending more information—used for articles in the Bulletin through January—and he managed to raid the coffers for money to fly Levine and one of FSM's most astute strategists, Steve Weissman, into the December NC meeting to tell the story first-hand. (Weissman was sufficiently impressed with the kind of people he met there that he agreed after the meeting to become a West Coast organizer for SDS.)

Kissinger was right: Berkeley was important for SDS. On the immediate level, it caused a lot of students to start thinking, to become alert to their own lives, own grievances, own power, and they often started looking around for an organization like SDS from which to get support so that they could express those things. SDS tried to emphasize in its organizing that it was like FSM on a national scale—a militant student group enunciating and taking action about campus grievances with the university and the world beyond—and tried to show how FSMs could grow on almost any campus if students started with an existing radical group like SDS. No other group on the student left at this point had anything like the geographical stretch of SDS, and no other had a system of Regional Organizers as effective.

In spite of its comparatively small numbers (around thirteen hundred paid-up members) it was likely to have been heard of, likely to be nearby, to, and likely to have made contact with, students at any campus that wanted to take action; it was the natural organization to look toward. And in the months to come, as the Berkeley battle seeped into the awareness of students everywhere, SDS continued to draw the benefit. As Berkeley spurred the consciousness of the American student, so it spurred the growth of SDS.

But not even Berkeley would prove to be as decisive for SDS as the quite remote and then still modest war in Vietnam. A measure of the organization's alertness to the temper of its time—not to mention a certain simple luckiness—is that it kept alive to that issue, too.

At the end of 1964, 23,300 young American males were stationed in Vietnam through the courtesy of the U.S. Armed Forces. Their numbers were still comparatively small, technically they were there just to advise the South Vietnamese army, and they weren't really fighting a war since none had been declared—so most people back in their homeland tended to forget about them. The average man, the average college student, did not know where Vietnam was.

Actually, as we have seen, some antiwar sentiment began to surface among the student generation the previous year and had spread right along with the war: the Mme. Nhu picket in December 1963, the April 1964 meeting at Yale which launched the antiwar May 2nd Movement, the M2M spring demonstration and continuing marches through the summer, and in the fall the M2M "We Won't Go" petition. But even on the left this sentiment was never regarded with much importance, and M2M and like organizations remained small.

SDS itself was always leery of paying too much attention to any single issue, especially one in foreign affairs. The farthest the PREP executive committee would go that November was a four-pronged program to prepare a "kit of materials" on the "Viet Cong," to determine if anyone was interested in some kind of "declaration of conscience" (a la the French intellectuals on Algeria in 1958), possibly to organize a "small conference" on Vietnam, and to "prepare a contingency plan of action in case of Vietnamese crisis," unlikely as that seemed. But they did agree that Gitlin could raise the issue at the December NC to see if there was any sentiment elsewhere for further action.?”

Gitlin and Booth invited journalist I. F. Stone to the December meeting, and on the night of the twenty-ninth he presented a lucid history of how America had become involved in Southeast Asia and a ringing declaration of why it should get out. For many SDSers, the Vietnam issue suddenly acquired a certain stature, and so when Gitlin finally introduced the subject during the course of his report on PREP activities, there was a debate beyond anything that had been expected.

It is around five o'clock on the afternoon of December 30, 1964, in a stuffy meeting hall of the Cloakmakers' Union in lower Manhattan, that the discussion of Vietnam begins. Gitlin, who has just finished outlining the plans for the Chase Manhattan sit-in, now suggests that SDS write and circulate to the college campuses a declaration stating, "I will not be drafted until the United States gets out of Viet Nam" and then campaign to get students to sign it.

Jeff Shero, the Texas-area organizer, makes an alternate proposal: SDS should mount a campaign to raise medical supplies to send to the Viet Cong through the U.S. mails. Now the electoral-politics faction begins to get worried that things are going too far, that SDS will end up doing something too wild, too leftist, too pro-Communist. Jim Brook, an early SDSer and a friend of Max's from the early days, suggests that everyone stop for a while and think things over. The motion fails; the debate rages: Are we pro-Viet Cong, pro-North Vietnam? You can't get any antiwar support if you take a pro-Communist line. We must educate the campuses to the issues first, before we take any action. Let's give it all back to PREP to do. The war is taking lots of money away from poor people, now that's an issue. How can we support a corrupt regime?—and on and on. Dinner time is forgotten; those who care about such things duck out for sandwiches.

Finally, toward ten o'clock. Booth suggests and the meeting approves a two-minute limit on speeches for the rest of the evening, which in practice means no one can go on for much more than five minutes without a lot of catcalls. Gitlin valiantly tries to get back to his original antidraft petition. Brook, desperate now, and seeing that some kind of Vietnam action is going to be approved, counterposes the more modest idea of having SDS stage a protest march on Washington during the spring vacation (people had been marching on Washington for years, after all, and nothing very damaging can happen on a march). The idea seems attractive, and a number of people urge that it be done along with the petition.

A debate rages again. Many ERAPers and the more alienated of the younger members oppose a march as too tame; others argue that the whole thing has too much of a singleissue focus to it and is not radical enough; while Kissinger and a number of campusoriented people join with the PEP types in support of it because they see it as an effective way to organize among students and build up the organization on the campus level. Then, during a lull, a number of ERAPers leave the room. Kissinger, in the chair, calls for a vote on the march. It passes, with strong support from the chapter delegates, less enthusiasm from the NC members. The idea grows. Let's forget about the petition: that passes. Let's have the NO start organizing the march: that passes. A City College delegate, with a genius for ideological compromise, urges that the appeal be that "SDS advocates that the United States get out of Vietnam for the following reasons: a) war hurts the Vietnamese people; b) war hurts the American people; c) SDS is concerned about Vietnamese and American people": that passes. Steve Weissman, a lonely voice from the West, suggests that you can march and have a petition, too: that fails. Finally, at twelve-thirty A.M., David Smith moves for adjournment: that passes. ‘8

And so SDS found itself in antiwar politics long before there was any widespread interest, ahead of its time once again. Not that it anticipated that its march on Washington would be an overwhelming event—it would be, rather, one more example of SDS's multifacetedness, one more way to try to get its message across to the campuses. Not many could be expected to show up—maybe two thousand or so, that would be a good turnout, considering what M2M and others had been able to draw for similar events. Then in January, SDS got I.

F. Stone and Ernest Gruening (who with Wayne Morse was the only Senator at that point forthrightly against the war) to agree to address the marchers, and the American Friends Service Committee endorsed the march. That was promising enough to cause Paul Booth to write: "All expectations are that it will be a big thing."’? What he meant was that maybe three thousand people would show up.