Life around the National Office was all the more grating that fall because at the same time that it failed to satisfy the yearnings for a liberated society it also failed to provide the comforts of a bourgeois one. As in the summer, the twelve to fifteen office workers (there was a fairly rapid turnover, as "Movement life" took its toll) lived in a single large, and usually ill-kempt, $135-a-month apartment (which also served as the hotel for SDSers passing through), so that all of the abrasions of the day were carried home to be rubbed again at night.

Hours were erratic, but long, the concept of "weekend" forgotten; salaries were uniformly $12.50 a week, just enough to make ascetic living unpleasant and not enough to indulge in movies and records without feelings of guilt; responsibilities in the office were confused, with priorities established by the crisis of the moment and the arbitrary decisions of the National Secretary as to what project was most desperate. Sam Bennett, who lasted just two months as office manager, complained that fall:

"I was like a twentieth-century Alice: I had to shovel shit just as fast as I could only to keep my head above it."

All of this might have been borne—indeed similar discomforts had been borne in the past and were to be in the future—had there been recurring evidence that all the sacrifice and effort was having a visible effect either on the gathering forces against the war or on the course of the Movement in general and its capacity to change a nation so askew. But the evidence was sparse, for as SDS went into the new school year it was as bewildered in strategy as it was in organization.

Clearly the Vietnam war was the dominant issue in America, the dominant issue for the left.

Just as clearly, SDS still didn't know what to do about it. At the September National Council meeting, held at a park in Indiana on the September 7 weekend, an entire cacophony of strategies was put forward.

Some in the organization urged negotiations, others demanded immediate withdrawal, still others wanted an outright NLF victory. Some wanted to emphasize the moral horror of the war, others concentrated on its illegality, a number argued that it took funds away from domestic needs, and a few even then saw it as an example of "American imperialism."

Gitlin pressed for dramatic action by students, suggesting such things as sending American hostages to North Vietnamese targets so that U.S. planes would be afraid to bomb them and enlisting a mission of twenty-five to fifty people "to help rebuild a hospital or school destroyed by American bombings."*

Kissinger proposed an "International Student Strike" for later in the fall, during which students would boycott classes for a day or a week. Younger SDSers usually favored the idea of more marches and demonstrations, resisting the growing attitude that such tactics were fruitless and old-hat ("All right, you've been marching on Washington since 1957," one young SDSer complained, "but some of us have never even visited it, much less marched there.")

And still others wanted to escalate into civil disobedience such as stopping troop trains (which the Berkeley Vietnam Day Committee was actually to accomplish that October) or organizing soldiers to resist or desert (the Kissinger Kamikaze Plan again).

Many saw the draft as the natural antiwar tool since it struck at the very age group most receptive to radicalization, and they urged demonstrations against induction centers, mass registration for Conscientious Objector status, and even the establishment of a Movement Church to ordain as ministers anyone who wanted to escape the draft that way.

There was even a sizable minority, including ERAPers and other old guarders, who wanted to play down the whole concentration on Vietnam and to have the antiwar movement, as Booth and Lee Webb put it in a much-debated paper, "become a movement for domestic social change" by developing "independent and mass constituencies for democratic politics" out of "the immediate aspirations of the poor, welfare recipients, trade-unionists, students, and others."

All of these proposals were presented, workshops spent hours airing and attacking them, long debates raged about them for the entire weekend, tempers grew heated and friendships cooled, and at the end of it all SDS came flatly down in mid-air. The Kewadin spirit still prevailed. The NC decided that it would give grudging support to a third march on Washington, planned by the infant National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam for October 15 and 16, but it also went on record again as opposing mass demonstrations:

"We are for action that educates," the slogan went, "rather than action that demonstrates."

It authorized a limited program of building student antiwar sentiment through campus education and local protest action: "Deepening the campus constituency will be the first priority during the coming months"; it urged local chapters to adopt local strategies for action against the draft; and it dumped in the laps of the NO the job of preparing some kind of national draft-counseling proposal that would "mobilize opposition to the war among draft-age people"—but with the proviso that this would have to be submitted in a referendum to the membership for approval before any action was taken.

As it happened, it was the last of these that was to draw the greatest attention, though no one could have possibly foreseen that, given the state of the National Office. But by early October the National Office actually came up with a cautious, legal antidraft program focused on three "visible expressions of protest":°

1. The act of filing for CO is, in itself, a gesture of personal protest.
   

2. On the campus, attempts should be made to stop the school from turning over the class-rank information, to get professors to refuse to hand in grades, and to organize campus strikes aimed either at classes or exams. When recruiters appear on campus, they should be the focus of attention, challenged to debate, accused by picket signs of participation in war crimes.
   The same can be done at any time for ROTC officials, especially as part of a campaign to oust ROTC from the campus.
   

3. Demonstrations can be planned to expose or protest the nature and practices of the local draft boards.

These proposals were accompanied by a series of admonitions that draft organizing be continually related to "the broad context of the war in Vietnam" and "the undemocratic nature of our society," and by a caution that, though "filing for CO is strictly legal, unlike ‘draft refusal,' " the government might see it as an obstruction of the draft and try to punish its instigators with five years in jail and a $10,000 fine.

The package was just being made ready to be sent out to the membership for its vote, when a strange thing happened. SDS became a national villain.

By October, after eight long months, the antiwar movement finally touched a nerve in the body of the Establishment. The plans for the October 15-16 demonstrations had received considerable publicity in the early fall, the media having now dropped the attitude of amused scorn with which they treated the April SDS march and come around to the idea that there was a real protest movement afoot, and peopled by more than just a few crazy kids. The new movement against the draft, small though it was, became a particular delight of the newspapers, and CBS News ran regular reports of anti-draft actions on its evening news program.

In response the Administration and its allies were pressured into belittling the protesters and raising questions about their loyalty and patriotism. On October 13, two days before the planned demonstrations, Senator Thomas Dodd, an old line anti-Communist whose Senate Internal Security Committee had been looking into the antiwar protests, released a report asserting:

The control of the anti-Vietnam movement has clearly passed from the hands of the moderate elements, who may have controlled it at one time, into the hands of Communists and extremist elements who are openly sympathetic to the Viet Cong and openly hostile to the United States ... . This is particularly true of the national Vietnam protest movement scheduled for October 15-16.°

On the same day elder statesman Dwight Eisenhower let it be known that he was "distressed and alarmed" by the antiwar movement and by the evident "moral deterioration" of America's youth.

And, because its reputation as the chief antiwar foe not only preceded but positively outran its actual workings, SDS was made into the prime target. On Thursday, October 14, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, the syndicated columnists whose two most important outlets then were the Herald Tribune and the Washington Post, accused SDS of nothing less than treason.

SDS, the columnists reported darkly, was mounting a major campaign to get American men to resist and evade the draft—"draft-dodging," they called it—and had even drawn up a "master plan" designed to "sabotage the war effort." This campaign, they said, "cannot be lightly passed off as an exuberant, youthful exercise of the right to dissent. It is a calculated effort to illegally undermine high national policy adopted by President Johnson and confirmed by Congress."

Mississippi's John Stennis rose in the Senate the next morning to add his denunciation of SDS and bare its dangerous plans. "Workshops are being held by the Students for a Democratic Society," he said, "to devise ways to disrupt the necessary and normal operation of the draft system." Not only that, but they're planning to get people to file for CO status.

"The purpose of this action is to jam the draft boards and to cause the Government to spend thousands of dollars in investigations and paperwork." This "deplorable and shameful activity," he went on, his anger mounting, makes it "imperative" for the government "to immediately move to jerk this movement up by the roots and grind it to bits before it has the opportunity to spread further."

Now the SDSers in Chicago were somewhat perplexed. The "master plan" so sinister to Evans and Novak was in fact a mélange of proposals taken at random from the August issue of SDS's National Vietnam Newsletter—all of which had been specifically rejected by the September National Council. As to "workshops," this may have been a reference to one of the chaotic meetings at the NC, but the only place SDS was doing anything like that was in Los Angeles, where Mike Davis and some other SDSers had participated in weekly meetings with fifteen or twenty students who were trying to work out ways to spread draft information on local campuses.

But in the face of such charges. Booth and the National Administrative Committee figured the best thing to do would be to get the real story out, and when a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times came around after the Evans-Novak column they gave him copies of the actual referendum proposal. Much to their surprise, the Sun-Times splashed it across its front-page on Friday, with the headline, "US-Wide Drive to Beat Draft Is Organized Here," UPI picked up the story for its wires, and a hungry press pounced upon it just as the weekend demonstrations were getting under way.

And on Saturday Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach got into the act. At a Chicago press conference he announced that the government felt that anti-draft activity "begins to move in the direction of treason" and it was watching the movement with great care: "There are some Communists in it and we may have to investigate. We may very well have some prosecutions." The Justice Department, he added, "has uncovered some persons working for the Students for a Democratic Society" who are possible Communists, and the student group was "one of many" organizations under examination.

Though it seems that Katzenbach himself was trying to be judicious and careful, and never once accused SDS of specific wrongdoing, others at the press conference were not so circumspect. One, Northern Illinois Attorney General Edward V. Hanrahan, stated flatly that SDS was guilty of "treasonous activity" and declared that his staff had already begun a full-scale investigation. This was all the press needed: the stories went out with the clear implication that SDS was a subversive organization.

To top it all off, the weekend demonstrations were a surprising success. Upwards of one hundred thousand people took part—the National Guardian reported eighty thousand, a Playboy article estimated "nearly 100,000"—in more than ninety cities, the largest marches being in New York, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, New Haven, Cleveland, Detroit, Seattle, and Los Angeles.

At least fifty SDS chapters participated, mobilizing people for the city marches and organizing demonstrations on many campuses—including a march on a chemical and biological warfare center at Fort Bragg by the University of North Carolina SDS, a death march on the state capital by the University of Texas chapter, a teach-in by the fledgling Arizona State chapter, an Assembly of Unrepresented People in Toronto by Buffalo SDS, and, in the first action of its kind, a sit-in at the Ann Arbor draft board led by the VOICE chapter, in which thirty-eight people, including VOICE chairman Eric Chester and a young Michigan student named Bill Ayers, were arrested.

(This last demonstration got national publicity and became a cause célébre over the next few months when the local Michigan draft director thought up the idea of punishing the men by reclassifying them from 2-S to 1A, so as to put them, in General Lewis Hershey's words, on "the belt that runs toward the induction station.")

Also over the weekend, David Miller, a twenty-two-year-old Catholic pacifist, became the first person to burn his draft card in defiance of the new federal law.® This was the largest antiwar demonstration to date and a clear signal that the protest movement was real, and growing larger daily. That provided little comfort in Washington.

On Monday the Senate floor was awash with angry patriots; Thomas Kuchel, Mike Mansfield, Spessard Holland, Richard Russell, Leverett Saltonstall, William Proxmire, Frank Lausche, and Everett Dirksen all rushed to denounce the demonstrators, war protesters, and "draft-dodgers" en masse. The New York Times's Washington columnist James Reston allowed as how the protesters were damaging the country and "not promoting peace but postponing it." And Johnson himself, hinting broadly at "investigations," let it be known that he was "worried" that "even well-meaning demonstrators can become the victims of Communist aggression."

In the following week, SDS hardly knew what to make of its new-found fame. On the one hand, all the publicity had certainly put the organization on the map, and membership soared.

A special SDS Bulletin noted: "Our Harvard organizer reports that he walked into Harvard Yard with 30 membership cards and had to go back for more 1/2 hour later .... He wasn't lying. We just got 50 new membership cards from him special delivery."

Students in the Chicago area poured into the National Office to sign membership cards, one of them saying, "If you are going to be red-baited, I want to be on the list."

In all, one thousand new two-dollar national memberships were received, pushing the total national membership over four thousand; the membership in individual chapters during this same period was thought to have doubled—the chapters in general kept only haphazard records of local members and the NO none at all, so it is impossible to tell—and SDS spokesmen now claimed a total of ten thousand local followers.

On the other hand, SDS was hardly able to capitalize on all the attention. After all, there wasn't any draft program, just a proposal that had been sent out to the members only that week and whose approval or disapproval would take weeks more to determine; and in any case no one in SDS had ever intended draft action to take top priority in the fall program.

There wasn't even any official SDS position or program on the war itself. Furthermore, though being red-baited seemed to attract some college youths to the organization, it clearly disturbed and repelled many others—not to mention their parents, college administrators, and local patriotic types (in Nashville, for example, anti-SDS pressure grew so strong that Tennessee State SDSers had to close up shop), and some of the old guard wanted to squelch the "draft-dodging" image for fear that it might smear the whole antiwar effort.

The NO tried to deal with the scores of press and television people who were traipsing up the creaking steps at Sixty-third Street by downplaying the draft and talking as best they could on the larger issue of the war, but there wasn't any document or statement or resolution they could point to and in the confusion the media continued to concentrate most on the draft proposal, generating the general impression that SDS was full of traitors. The consensus grew around the office that something had to be done, as Booth said, "to take the heat off."?°

Booth and Oglesby decided that the best thing would be to draw up a statement which would make SDS's noble intentions clear once and for all, and drop it in the laps of the press. They therefore arranged for a full-scale press conference in the Grand Ballroom of the National Press Club in Washington. They flew to the capital on Tuesday, and Booth worked arduously all through the night refining the statement, with help from Art Waskow and Jeremy Brecher, old-guard SDSers at the Institute for Policy Studies there, and Paul Cowan, a Harvard SDSer who happened to be in town; a few other friends of Booth's were consulted by telephone, but little was done to sound out anything like an SDS consensus.

The next morning a bleary-eyed Booth faced a jam-packed press room:

Students for a Democratic Society wishes to reiterate emphatically its intention to pursue its opposition to the war in Vietnam, undeterred by the diversionary tactics of the administration.

We feel that the war is immoral at its root, that it is fought alongside a regime with no claim to represent its people, and that it is foreclosing the hope of making America a decent and truly democratic society.

The commitment of SDS, and of the whole generation we represent, is clear: we are anxious to build villages; we refuse to burn them. We are anxious to help and to change our country; we refuse to destroy someone else's country. We are anxious to advance the cause of democracy; we do not believe that cause can be advanced by torture and terror.

We are fully prepared to volunteer for service to our country and to democracy. We volunteer to go into Watts to work with the people of Watts to rebuild that neighborhood to be the kind of place that the people of Watts want it to be—and when we say "rebuild," we mean socially as well as physically. We volunteer to help the Peace Corps learn, as we have been learning in the slums and in Mississippi, how to energize the hungry and desperate and defeated of the world to make the big decisions.

We volunteer to serve in hospitals and schools in the slums, in the Job Corps and VISTA, in the new Teachers Corps—and to do so in such a way as to strengthen democracy at its grassroots. And in order to make our volunteering possible, we propose to the President that all those Americans who seek so vigorously to build instead of burn be given their chance to do so. We propose that he test the young people of America: if they had a free choice, would they want to burn and torture in Vietnam or to build a democracy at home and overseas? There is only one way to make the choice real: let us see what happens if service to democracy is made grounds for exemption from the military draft.

I predict that almost every member of my generation would choose to build, not to burn; to teach, not to torture; to help, not to kill. And I am sure that the overwhelming majority of our brothers and cousins in the army in Vietnam, would make the same choice if they could—to serve and build, not kill and destroy ....

Until the President agrees to our proposal, we have only one choice: we do in conscience object, utterly and wholeheartedly, to this war; and we will encourage every member of our generation to object, and to file his objection through the Form 150 provided by the law for conscientious objection."

Thus was born what immediately came to be called the "Build, Not Burn" strategy. The wire services gave the statement extensive coverage, and most major papers carried stories.

Though, inevitably, the slants varied—the Chicago Tribune, for example, tagged the story "Oglesby Tells Johnson Protesters' Terms"—most reports played up the humanitarian, not to say Boy Scout, cast of the statement and its clear alternative-service patriotism, and it seemed that in the battle of the headlines, SDS had won: it was off the hook and the critics of the antiwar movement were for the moment disarmed. Booth was quick to claim that "good effects were reported" on many campuses (at Vassar, he reported, the statement was mimeographed and used as an organizing tool), that in Washington "it bolstered our allies and compounded the embarrassment of the Katzenbachs," and that it "received an extremely favorable audience among church people."

But in the process Booth, and those around him, had made two serious errors, both of which tended to discredit the National Secretary, and by extension the NO, in the eyes of many in the organization and on its fringes.

The first error was political.
In its attempt to dissociate SDS from the "draft-dodgers," the "Build, Not Burn" statement was actually more moderate than many in SDS would have liked. The National Office was bombarded: a number of chapters launched formal protests and hundreds of individuals wrote in to complain. They argued that the statement did not attack the draft itself as an inequitable and undemocratic institution, but simply urged an extension of it into other areas; that it did not urge (as some groups in Berkeley and New York were already doing) opposition to the draft by any means possible, including outright evasion; and that it did not make any of the necessary connections between the draft and the war, showing them both as inevitable products of the American military-industrial state.

The apologetic effect of it, especially, irritated many as being too defensive, too craven: Ken McEldowney and fifty others in the San Francisco region sent off a telegram:

TONE OF STATEMENT DEPLORABLE ... . READS LIKE COP-OUT TO KATZENBACH.

Elsewhere people like Greg Calvert, then at Iowa State but eventually to be Booth's successor, felt the statement, as Calvert was to put it, was "the greatest formula ever devised for selling out the radical movement and playing into the co-optive hands of the establishment."

And the May 2nd Movement from its own perspective said scornfully "This proposal creates illusions about the US government. It is as if the government has good agencies and bad agencies.

The fact is that there is no democracy to do alternate service for." Small wonder that many SDSers soon started to put forth a counter-slogan: "Build Not, Burn!"

The second error was procedural.
Booth had, in effect, set SDS officially on a course of urging young men to file for Conscientious Objector status as a means of protesting the war, without having the slightest organizational support or justification for doing so. The National Secretary was not supposed to set policy, least of all on a program that was still before the membership and in defiance of the September NC vote giving campus educational work priority over any draft scheme.

Shero, who all along had been a prime advocate of decentralization of SDS and a downgrading of the NO role, was particularly incensed, complaining bitterly about Booth's acting "unilaterally" to set policy for the entire organization; reporters, he said, should have simply been referred to local chapters which would tell them what was going on in any particular area, and the National Secretary could have stayed out of it completely. Others who resented reading in the papers about such a turnabout in national policy echoed Ken McEldowney's wry comment: "Participatory democracy begins at home."??

Resentment against Booth for what he said was simply fueled by resentment that he said it at all. The disaffection that this produced, not only toward the National Secretary himself but toward the basic notion of a political decision-making central officer, would last.

On October 18 the May 2nd Movement announced its own anti-draft program:

The opposition to the Vietnam Draft must be organized and political. One way is for people opposed to this draft ... to organize themselves into Anti-Draft Unions as the vehicle for draft opposition. These unions, as well as other groups, can

1. Demonstrate at the induction centers ....

2. Expose and oppose college administration cooperation with the draft ... .

No ROTC on campus, No military recruitment on campus, No war research projects, can be demands. Organize STRIKES if demands aren't met.

3. Go to High Schools with leaflets, street meetings, ADU [antidraft union] organizing, etc ... .

Such struggle cannot at this time prevent large numbers of young men from being forced into the Army. But it can bring many more people—particularly working class people—into the anti-war movement and thereby sharply increase the isolation of the government.

This same working-class rationale was reiterated by Jeff Gordon, the M2M leader, in an article in the M2M publication. Free Student, on November 27:

The key necessity for the peace movement is to broaden its base. If students remain isolated as the war goes on year after year they will be vulnerable to attack and discouragement. The erosion of rights and material conditions that the war necessarily entails provides the opportunity to involve other parts of the population, particularly workers. Recent strikes by thousands of defense workers give the lie to the idea that the war is in their interests .... We should oppose the draft in a way that all can participate. If we follow this up by organizationally approaching workers, as well as continuing our work on the campuses and in the communities, the movement will grow in size and in strength.*°

The issue of Communists in SDS, which the press and Senators made so much of during these October weeks—and which of course would continue to be an issue in the coming years—was not one which interested the SDSers themselves very much. It all seemed so irrelevant. True, the exclusion clause had been dropped, but that was more because there were no hordes of Communists asking to get in than because there were.

The Communist Party itself was seen as a joke, a tired collection of middle-aged irrelevants who hadn't any idea of what the New Left was all about and certainly no means of taking it over. Not that SDS was the kind of organization that could very readily be taken over, even if I anyone wanted to:

"They can't take us over because they can't find us" was the standard joke.

As to those with pro-Chinese or anti-Imperialistic politics—the Progressive Labor and M2M people, for example—they were certainly allowed into the ranks but no I one could figure out why they'd want to come if they had organizations of their own, and no one regarded their rather far-out ideas I as likely to catch on with the bulk of SDSers.

Carl Oglesby put the SDS stance best, in a speech to the National Guardian annual banquet that fall.

SDS does not screen, purge, or use loyalty pledges .... We judge behavior.

Those whose behavior runs athwart the deep SDS commitment to democracy just have no leverage over the democrats of SDS. And, in any case, SDS retains no detectives.

Further, it is hard to see how a group could be "taken over" unless it has handles of power that can be seized, some "central apparatus" that can enforce orders. SDS has no such apparatus—only a beleaguered hot-spot in Chicago—and it is a main hard point with us that it never shall.*°

Nonetheless, there were many elders, especially liberal elders, who viewed the issue of Communist infiltration with utmost seriousness. The New Republic, for example, editorialized at the end I of October:

In our judgment ... the Students for a Democratic Society do themselves and their aims a disservice by welcoming Communists in their ranks, and by making a virtue out of the indifference to the possibility of Communists becoming the dominant voice in their organization .... The SDS is "anxious to advance the cause of democracy." If they mean political democracy as we understand it, they will deal more realistically than they have with the fact of Communist participation.