Spring 1968

"Monday, January 1. Breakfast in bed. Walk—E. Side." Bernardine Dohrn had a late breakfast, spent the afternoon walking through New York's Lower East Side, and then returned to her Greenwich Village apartment to prepare for a three-week journey to Great Britain.?

Bernardine Dohrn, twenty-five, was then assistant executive secretary of the National Lawyers Guild, an alliance of left-wing lawyers which for two decades had carried on legal defense for a variety of radical organizations, including the Communist Party, and was just then enjoying a new life as a center of legal advice and strategy for the New Left. Dohrn was herself a recent graduate of the University of Chicago Law School who had chosen not to take a bar examination and to concentrate instead on radical work; as she said later, plenty of other people could be lawyers but she could serve a better purpose directly involved in the Movement. She was a woman of undeniable attractiveness, of medium height, with long brown hair, vibrant brown eyes, sharp features, and an air of electric, nononsense energy about her. She was an activist, but not yet a militant; a radical, but not a socialist. In six months' time, after the events of this turbulent spring, she would become a major national officer of SDS, a self-described "communist," and the symbol of SDS's final turn toward revolution.

"Tuesday, January 2. London—Air India .... Monday, January 15 .... Quentin Hoare, New Left Review. LSE /ecture. Stop It meeting." It was a pleasure trip, this visit to Britain, but it would be the rare American leftist who could go to London and not take pains to meet English counterparts. For 1968 was a year of growing international consciousness for the American Movement, following on from the tentative contacts of the previous fall.

While Dohrn was in London, other Movement people were in Cuba, the first of many junkets to that island in the next few years. Carl Davidson, Todd Gitlin, Tom Hayden, and Dave Dellinger were among the delegates to the International Cultural Congress in January; the next month, accepting an invitation from the Cuban Federation of University Students, SDS sent twenty more visitors;" in March a contingent of thirty-three more SDSers was sent; and in the summer several other organized trips were made, one of which Dohrn had planned to join. A few SDSers also made journeys to Southeast Asia, including one visit to Hanoi on which Vernon Grizzard was among those negotiating for the release of additional American prisoners of war. Much was made of these trips, of course, by witch-hunters in the media—Drew Pearson, for instance, would claim in June that "after extensive research this column is able to report that there is an international student conspiracy"*—but at this point in fact only the most rudimentary contacts had been made, and most of what the international left knew about each other came from the world's press. Reports of the April uprising at Columbia University, for example, were greeted by French students with great enthusiasm, and accounts of the subsequent revolt by French students against the De Gaulle government proved an inspiration on many American campuses in May. Still, there is no question that the growing international consciousness of the young American left helped to turn it in a deliberately revolutionary direction.

"Friday, January 26. Rennie—lawyers meeting." The National Mobilization Committee, having at last done with peaceful marches, was planning an all-out demonstration in Chicago during the Democratic Party National Convention in August, and it had enticed Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden out of their 1967 doldrums to coordinate that effort. As part of their preparations they planned a legal defense committee and for this they turned to the National Lawyers Guild. Dohrn convened the meeting on the night of January 26, and she and NLG executive secretary Kenneth Cloke pledged that night to offer their support and at least a month of their time to laying the legal groundwork in Chicago; as it turned out, by August Bernardine Dohrn had other things entirely on her mind.

"Monday, January 29. Spock rally—8. 14th-8th & 9th Ave." The action of the Federal government in indicting five prominent friends of draft resistance—Dr. Benjamin Spock, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Michael Ferber, Mitchell Goodman, and Marcus Raskin—for conspiracy in "counseling, aiding, and abetting" young men to avoid and resist the Selective Service System was the first unmistakable signal that the left faced a serious threat of repression. The National Lawyers Guild was only one of many organizations which geared itself for the task of legal defense, and throughout the spring Dohrn would spend considerable time helping in the preparation of a variety of courtroom cases.

The stimulus for the government's campaign was the Pentagon demonstration, an event whose scope caught the Administration by surprise despite elaborate plans and extensive surveillance. In its wake agencies all over Washington began to move. The White House, with Lyndon Johnson making it known that he wanted "all aspects of civil disturbance matters" to receive "full attention," established a top-level Presidential team to coordinate government operations. The Department of Defense expanded its intelligence networkwithout, incidentally, the knowledge of the Attorney General, Ramsey Clark—until it had some one thousand agents filing reports for a massive two-volume compendium that recorded (and made available to state and local agencies) the names, pictures, locations, and political beliefs of upwards of eighteen thousand citizens; ROTC units were encouraged to enlist their student officers in additional surveillance of campus leftists. The Selective Service System issued a directive to local draft boards that students involved in draft resistance were to be immediately reclassified 1-A and, if possible, packed off to Vietnam.” (At the same time grand juries in at least six cities began handing down indictments against student draft-card burners and "We Won't Go" signers, and federal agents served subpoenas on students at more than two dozen campuses.) The FBI, which already had sixty-three hundred agents in the field—not including an unknown, but large, number of infiltrators—expanded its surveillance operations, openly visiting students and faculty members and successfully enlisting administration officials to spy on and submit reports about campus radicals. Both houses of Congress authorized special committee investigations of a variety of left organizations, including SDS, and in January President Johnson gave new life to the discredited Subversive Activities Control Board, which thereupon inaugurated a much-publicized investigation of the DuBois Clubs—a case of the blind chasing the halt if there ever was one.

Encouraged by such top-level sanction, local agencies—state police, city Red Squads, university administrations—joined the game. Oakland officials, with testimony from two undercover agents who had joined the Stop the Draft Week campaign, drew up their own mini-Spock conspiracy charges against seven Oakland radicals for their part in the October demonstrations; even Iowa City got into the act with conspiracy charges against seven University of Iowa students (including local SDS activist Bruce Clark) for an anti-Dow demonstration in December. Police departments set up surveillance of known SDS centers on a number of campuses—usually making little secret of their presence—and encouraged right-minded students to report on their fellows; a student government representative at Penn State estimated in February that there were no fewer than two hundred student informers operating on his campus, some doing their own private wiretapping. Undoubtedly the Texas state police were not unique in their operations, only the most embarrassed, when it became known that one of their undercover men was elected to the presidency of the University of Texas SDS chapter.*

The response of the left to this high-level repression was initially disbelief, then uncertainty, and finally anger. By the time of the Spock indictments it was prepared for resistance. SDS immediately issued a call for demonstrations to be held across the country to show the strength of the left "in the face of this repression." John Fuerst, then traveling for SDS in Wisconsin, wrote an article for New Left Notes proclaiming proudly that "Dr. Benjamin Spock's crime has already been committed by thousands in the antiwar movement" and called for immediate defense not only of the five men but also "of the program they supported." The Spock rally in New York City was only one of many organized during January, and it was accompanied by renewed calls for draft resistance and a petition claiming equal guilt with the Spock defendants signed by no fewer than twenty-eight thousand individuals. Dozens of chapters organized marches and meetings, and a number, such as the New School chapter, immediately set up draft-counseling tables to carry on the Spock tradition in open defiance of the Justice Department.°

"Wednesday, January 31. 1:00 Rutgers, Students & Draft .... Brass Rail, Guild dinner." And, nine thousand miles away, the National Liberation Front began its Tet offensive, the decisive military turning point of the Vietnam war. The general SDS reaction was captured rather neatly in New Left Notes five days later by two Associated Press pictures, one showing American Marines marching in classic Hollywood style across a bridge into Hue, the next showing them moments later running back under NLF fire with shock and terror on their faces. It was the NO’s only comment on Tet.

"Saturday, February 10. SDS regional." Bernardine Dohrn slowly grew closer to the SDS people in New York during her year at the Lawyers Guild, and by the time of the February meeting of the New York region she was accorded a position as a leader, with New York SDSers Naomi Jaffe and Sue Shargell, of the workshop on women's liberation. It was a conference which, as it turned out, was symptomatic of all that was raging in the national organization just then.

In the first place, as the meeting tried to set plans for the April "Ten Days" action, the spectrum of political views that emerged was positively iridescent; SDS had always been marked by diversity, but now it looked as if it was actually plagued by it. There were those trying to work through third-party politics at the upcoming elections by supporting the Peace and Freedom Party, urging spring actions around canvassing and petitions. There were those who wanted to take student power to its logical extension by abandoning the sham of mere "student participation" and work instead for the outright takeover of universities by students. There were the Progressive Labor forces proposing, naturally, a worker-student alliance and campus actions built around support for local strikes, agitation against a proposed transit-fare increase, and development of a summer work-in program.

There were the cultural radicals, pushing a "spring offensive" at the Museum of Modern Art to reveal "where the museum directors and patrons get their money (Venezuelan oil. South African gold)." There were the imaginative street-action people, loosely grouped around a new Lower East Side collective called the Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers,- who were organizing a scheme to hold "a procession up 5th Avenue with everyone carrying their own garbage" and dumping it on the plaza at Lincoln Center. There were various groups emphasizing high-school organizing, draft resistance, women's liberation, alternate media, and practically every other cause in the left pantheon of the time. And there were those, emergent now in full array after the metamorphosis of the fall, who saw themselves as revolutionaries—not bomb planters or barricade fighters, or not yet, but people who had come to have a "revolutionary consciousness" and were putting that together with serious attempts to think about how to transform American society inside-out. For them the practice of resistance led inexorably to the building of a revolution; in the words of the SDS regional newsletter. Firebomb:

An organization like ours takes a major step forward when it finally comes to understand that it is involved in a struggle against an enemy and takes major steps toward confronting that enemy head-on. A serious organization consciously seeking to develop a revolutionary practice creates a life-or-death dynamic within the society it is trying to destroy and recreate.

But in the second place, these budding revolutionaries ran. head-on into another group of "revolutionaries," the class warriors from Progressive Labor. The New York regional meeting was the occasion for the first open move by the Progressive Labor forces against SDS, and it coincided with the first open declaration of war between the PL and the national leadership. Progressive Labor, strong in New York, had become increasingly dismayed by the trend of the Regional Office toward resistance, and took the occasion of the regional meeting to assail it bitterly for such "adventurist" tactics as the Rusk demonstration in November and a botched-up march on the Whitehall induction center in December; then, tapping the RO at its weakest point and taking advantage of its acknowledged failure in recent months to service the surrounding chapters adequately, PL proposed the establishment of a "regional NAC," an administrative committee elected from SDSers at large to oversee the operations of the New York office. The RO stalwarts—chief among whom were Steve Halliwell, David Gilbert, Naomi Jaffe, Jeff Jones, Marge Piercy, and Ted Gold—were caught flatfooted; PL, led by Jeff Gordon, Richard Rhoads, and Charlotte and Gordon Fischer, and with heavy support from the chapters at Brooklyn College, City College, Fordham, and Rutgers, pressed its advantage and was able to push through the reorganization scheme before the RO people knew quite what was happening. In the subsequent election to the committee, PL lodged four of its members, the RO sat three, and the remaining three were people of indeterminate politics who could be counted on to side with PL from time to time. It was a clear victory for Progressive Labor and a foretoken of troubles to come.

And the national leadership, just at that moment, was in the middle of a tussle with PL in the pages of New Left Notes. On the front-page of the February 12 issue appeared an article by three New England SDSers and PL sympathizers (including Alan Spector, who would go on to be a PL-SDS leader after the 1969 split) which took the NO to task for everything from lying about the results of the December National Council meeting, to supporting window breaking in preference to worker-student alliances, to running SDS with a dictatorial "topdown" approach. Carl Davidson answered for the NO people with an eight-column blast accusing the three of taking stands "uninformed at best, deliberately misleading at worst," lifting statements out of context, mounting "Unwarranted and misleading" attacks, and making distortions so great that they "can only be a deliberate attempt to mislead, or a sign of stupidity." This was the first public signal of open warfare between PL and others in SDS, and a signal that the spirit of compromise and consensus so common in the early days of SDS was finally dead.

"Monday, February 19. 7:30 Radical law students .... Wednesday, February 21. Yale Law School .... Friday, March 1. 4:00 Ken—me, NYU Law School ... . Saturday, March 2. 9:30 Law Student Conf." Part of the work of the Lawyers Guild for the 1967-1968 school year was to try to get law-school students to work in draft resistance, both as counselors with some legal knowledge and as resisters themselves; the main brunt of the job fell to Dohrn, and much of the early spring was spent giving speeches and organizing committees in various Eastern law schools. Her impact was immediate. "She was an overwhelming personality," says a man who worked with her then:

First of all there was her sex appeal. She had the most amazing legs—every draft resister on the East Coast knew those legs. People would come from miles around just to see her. But she was regarded as a good "political person" at a time when other women in the movement weren't given any responsibility at all. Students really turned on to her. She did a good job.

"Saturday, March 9. Rod. in Prof. Conf., Boston." The Radicals in the Professions Conference held in Cambridge that spring was one of several still pursuing the question of what Movement "alumni" were to do with their lives. There were moves to establish a local Movement for a Democratic Society in New York, Cleveland, New Orleans, and Springfield, Massachusetts (Bob Gottlieb and Marge Piercy set forth a lively rationale for the MDS at the Cambridge meeting). There was continual pressure for using graduates for community organizing among the poor whites—really, a new and more knowledgeable ERAP—following the example of the new National Community Union, in Chicago and several independent efforts on the West Coast (where Mike Klonsky, Steve Hamilton, and Bob Avakian were among those trying this approach). There was an expansion of GI organizing and Movement veterans were involved in Resistance Inside the Army (RITA), the "coffee-house movement" establishing off-base centers to attract young soldiers, and various propagandizing efforts in army-base towns. There was media action aplenty, the start of dozens of new newspapers, the production of the first half-dozen films by the Newsreel people in New York, and even the beginnings of a "Radio Free People" to start Movement radio stations and circulate tapes relating to radical politics. There was a spurt of interest in street theater, or guerrilla theater, with at least three dozen "RATs" (Radical Acting Troupes) springing up across the country.

But the biggest alumni event of the spring was the establishment of the New University Conference at a meeting of some 350 academics in Chicago three weeks after the Radicals in the Professions conference in Cambridge. The list of sponsors suggests the heavy influence of SDS alumni—among them, Heather Tobis Booth, Jeremy Brecher, John Ehrenreich, Al Haber, Tom Hayden, Michael Klare, Jesse Lemisch, Kathy McAfee, Don McKelvey, Julie Nichamin, Lee Webb, and Michael Zweig—as does the fact that the keynote speakers were Dick Flacks and Staughton Lynd. Enthusiasm for a membership organization of Movement academics and intellectuals was considerable, and the foundations of it were laid that weekend, with Bob Ross selected as national director, Flacks, Mike Goldfield, and Dan Friedlander (a red-diaper alumnus of the University of Chicago SDS) elected to the steering committee, and offices set up in Chicago. Its program:

1. Organize local chapters across the nation to help overcome the isolation and impotence now afflicting campus-based radicals [and] to: define their political roles on and off campus; engage in mutual support and self-criticism concerning teaching and intellectual activity; create centers for radical initiative on the campus.

2. Encourage the formation of radical caucuses within professional disciplines and associations.

3. Organize so that we may eventually be prepared to defend campus radicals against politically motivated harassment and firings.

4. Aid in establishing a new magazine of analysis and research for the movement.

5. Form alliances with student activists seeking to expose and dislocate university collaboration in war research and social manipulation, and join with black and white radicals who are demanding that the universities become responsible to the needs of the black communities which surround them and from which they now seek protection, not insight.

Within months, the NUC would start making itself felt, primarily through various "radical caucuses" in the academic associations, and in the coming years it would prove to be a strong, if limited, force for the left among university faculties.

"Friday, March 22. 7:45 United. Chicago. SDS draft meeting .... Sunday, March 24. Mom & Dad." Bernardine Dohrn's parents lived in Chicago, where both of them had grown up, and whenever she came through town she made a point of seeing them.

Bernardine Dohrn was born in Chicago on January 12, 1942. Her mother, who had been working as a secretary, was of Swedish descent; her father, then Bernard Ohrnstein, was a Hungarian Jew who later changed the family name to facilitate his career as a credit manager, a bit of melting-pot Americana that Bernardine later viewed with considerable disgust. When she was eight the family, now including a younger sister, moved to Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, and there Bernardine spent a quite ordinary career in school, getting above-average grades, plowing into dozens of extracurricular activities, becoming editor of the high-school paper, joining Future Nurses, and the like. After graduating from high school in 1959 she spent two years at Miami University, in Ohio, but she developed rheumatic fever and transferred to the University of Chicago to be closer to home, her parents having moved back to the city; though eddies of the New Left were aswirl at the time, they apparently left her untouched, for there is no record of her as a student activist at either university. Dohrn graduated in 1963, a history major, and spent the next year getting an MA in history in the Chicago graduate school, but the liberal-arts world seemed increasingly remote and in the fall of 1964 she switched to law school, planning a career as a liberal do-gooding lawyer.

For the next few years, while still in law school, her life took on the attributes of many liberal activists before her: she worked one summer in an antipoverty program in New York, became a volunteer aid in an unsuccessful Congressional campaign, joined Martin Luther King's crusade to push integration in the Chicago suburbs, and gave her legal services on behalf of rent-strikers in Chicago ghettos. (It was during the latter struggle in 1966-1967 that she met the young organizers around the JOIN project, making allies and friends that would continue with her for the next several years.) The fundamental failures of all these high-hope projects must have soured the young law student gradually, for by the time of her graduation in June 1967 she had given up the idea of becoming a lawyer and working within the courts, and opted instead for a full-time life in the Movement. That fall she joined the National Lawyers Guild, at quite some remove from the liberal Democrat, not to mention the Future Nurse, she had once been.

"Monday, March 25, Rennie & Tom." The unexpectedly strong showing by Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire Presidential primary on March 12—and the subsequent entry of Robert Kennedy into the Presidential race—raised a new problem for the Mobilization staffers preparing for the Chicago convention. It now seemed likely that a large number of liberal youths, supporters of the Democratic challengers, would be coming to Chicago to lobby for their candidates, a gesture which might blunt the antielectoral message which the Mobilization, and with them the Yippies, were trying to put across. Dohrn had lunch with Davis and Hayden while she was in Chicago, discussing this problem and the continuing plans for legal work around the demonstrations.

The Mobilization was not the only one to whom McCarthy and Kennedy presented problems.

SDS people on the campuses noticed that suddenly there was talk about "one last chance for the system" and "a real way to end the war," all of their careful antielectoral radicalism seeming to fall on deaf ears. College students of many political descriptions rallied to McCarthy's gently fluttering banner, canvassing and campaigning, clamoring to join the election staffs, shaving and bathing themselves "Clean for Gene," and some SDSers—the younger ones, usually, and more single-issue—were among them. Things got so bad that at the April National Council meeting a number of chapter representatives would be talking with some anguish about the defections"! from radical ranks on the campus. The general SDS position, of course, was never in doubt, and there was not even the slightest hint of "Part of the way with EMcC" (or RFK); as a matter of fact, the SDS line had been expressed with some neatness earlier in the year in a fund-raising ad directed at liberals:

WHY BE A DISSENTING DEMOCRAT? SO WE CAN GO THROUGH IT ALL OVER AGAIN WITH BOBBY? SOME FOLKS NEVER LEARN. OTHERS DO—THEY BECOME DISGUSTED EX-DEMOCRATS ....

You can make a contribution to building a new America (rather than propping up the old one) by supporting Students for a Democratic Society. SDS works to change the system, not the personalities.

(The clincher in the ad was, incidentally, a dotted-line box for donations beginning, "I noticed your office is in the slums of Chicago, not Beverly Hills. Here is my check.")

"Tuesday, March 26. Women's grp." Since the first of the year Bernardine Dohrn had been meeting with various women in informal sessions, part of a growing movement of small women's groups which were getting together now all over the country; the SDS National Office estimated that thirty-five such groups had been formed by the end of the spring. She also achieved a certain reputation among these groups with the publication of a paper, written with Naomi Jaffe, which was one of the earliest attempts to see women's liberation in terms of imperialism and exploitation. Reprinted in New Left Notes in March, it was Dohrn's introduction to the membership of SDS.

"Thursday, March 28. Drive to Lexington ... . Friday, March 29. NC—Lexington, Ky. " The Lexington National Council meeting was the first major SDS gathering that Bernardine Dohrn is known to have attended. It was the largest NC to date, a reflection of SDS's continued stature, with 102 official delegates and as many as 350 observers. The weekend session began with a collection of a meager $200 from the delegates—nothing like the orgies of the past—and pledges of additional money from nine chapters, plus promises from Carl Davidson to donate a dollar bill on behalf of the National Office staff and from the University of Maine chapter to send along a hundred pounds of potatoes to the NO; but, just to be sure, the NC added on an additional chapter tax to the unsuccessful one it had imposed the year before, a move which was acknowledged to be more in hope than in anticipation. Nineteen new chapters were admitted, bringing the number of recognized chapters to around 280 (the NO was claiming 300 at the time??).” What was particularly striking about the new additions was that so many represented a constituency previously untouched—Louisiana State, Danville (Illinois) Junior College—and areas previously unpenetrated—Parsons College of Fairfield, Iowa, Bradley University of Peoria, Illinois; and while the growth of membership may have been encouraging, the obvious chasm between the likely political level of these chapters and that of the national leadership suggested trouble unless the most careful steps were taken. It is not likely that those SDS veterans developing their "revolutionary consciousness" would have much identification with the problems of the Parsons College chapter, or that many delegates from church-run Defiance College would have much in common with the heavies from the Motherfucker collective."

It would be logical to think that the Lexington meeting was devoted to putting the finishing touches on the "Ten Days" campaign that had so exercised the delegates to the previous NC and which had been set as the organization's top priority for the spring. Alas, it is logic that reckons without the vagaries of SDS politics. Between the two NCs, much had happened.

The Student Mobilization Committee—the younger branch of the National Mobilization Committee which was pretty well dominated by youthful proto-Trotskyists associated with the Socialist Workers Party and other assorted left-liberals—had effectively coopted the student strike idea, planning a nation-wide walkout for April 26, while SDS was still trying to figure out just what it was going to do during those April days. Then, too, there was a certain amount of resentment still smoldering about the way the idea had been thrust on the organization by the NO, and Progressive Labor did what it could to fan those embers on the chapter level with talk about "top-down organizing," "manipulation," and the like. And the NO, waiting for feedback from the chapters and regions so that it would not be accused of manipulating the campaign, made little effort to instigate action where none was visible and even less effort to coordinate action where it was planned. The result was that by the time of the Lexington meeting, SDS was in poor shape to give any direction to the April actions, and the delegates realized it. Whatever local demonstrations had been conceived were already planned and organized for, and there seemed little point at this juncture to try to reestablish any national program; the Ten Days, therefore, was hardly mentioned at all.

Instead, in line with the leadership's new sense of revolutionary possibilities and its swing away from students, the NC involved itself with issues concentrating on other constituencies: the poor, the working class, GIs, even high-school students. But above all, blacks.

There were several strains running together to form the new feeling that the cause of black America should become a central concern for SDS. Black students, now lured to major white universities in increasing numbers and beginning to form themselves into separate black student organizations, were thought to be ready to move on the campuses and in need of supportive allies. The Kerner Report announced its unequivocal conclusion that "white racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II." Repression of black radicals had been stepped up, with the multiple arrests of SNCC's H. Rap Brown, the jailing of LeRoi Jones in Newark, the railroading of Texas State students on riot charges, and above all the brutal, unprovoked murder of three black students at South Carolina State College by South Carolina state police just two months before. White radicals came to feel that they might be next on the repression lists—as SNCC's James Forman told SDSers, "All the equipment the city police forces around this country say they are buying to use against us, the blacks, can and will be used against white antiwar demonstrators." There was the inevitable element of guilt—for white racism in general, for being white, middle-class, privileged students in particular which had been expressed steadily in issues of New Left Notes condemning "white racism," "white supremacy," "white chauvinism inside the Movement," and "white-skin privilege." And many SDSers had the sense, after three summers of ghetto rebellion, that black Americans were on the brink of a real insurrection, perhaps a revolution, and those who were serious about revolution should be standing at their sides.

The new shift of focus was expressed for the NC in a moving and persuasive speech by Carl Oglesby, who told the young delegates that the job of SDS now was to turn from the issue of war to that of racism. Radicals have done all they can now toward ending the war, he suggested, and adventures like the Chicago convention demonstration or schemes for involving working-class communities around the draft were not really going to help much.

Radicals now should turn to the questions of black liberation and white racism, fighting not only for the sake of the oppressed blacks but also because this struck a blow at one of the pillars of the system. The ghetto, in short, should replace the campus or the induction center or the factory as the locus of SDS's organizing activity.

The delegates responded. In a proposal adopted almost unanimously, SDS went on record as giving top priority to support for "the black struggle for liberation”:

We feel that we have to respond to the black struggle for survival because it is a struggle against imperialism and against a racist culture which we also are fighting .... We must give visibility to the black struggle for liberation ... .

We must make the State pay as high a price as possible for genocide. Part of this price is the presence of a white constituency in the coming rebellions ... . We must institute programs of internal education on racism, the history of the black people in this country, and the history of the black liberation movement ... . We should give physical and financial aid to those black people now the object of State repression.

And, specifically for expiation:

We have a special responsibility to fight racism among our own white population .... We recognize that racism insinuates itself into both our personal and political attitudes. We are determined to fight it in our personal lives as we fight all the aspects of a racist culture that the system attempts to inject into us.

Ultimately, "We must see our job as one of moving the white population into a position of rebellion which joins the black struggle for liberation to make the American revolution."

Thus began a fateful process for SDS. Staughton Lynd saw it a year later as the start of "a politics of guilt": "During the last year SDS has been reverting to the very politics of middleclass self-flagellation which it charges to the Resistance; that is, that since the spring of 1968 National Council meeting SDS has asked white people again to play the role of auxiliaries to other peoples' radicalism."!° Similarly Greg Calvert, to whom the reversion to "fighting someone else's battles" seemed a serious setback for SDS, responded:

The reorientation of SDS in that spring of 1968 was to drop the draft resistance and resistance themology almost entirely, and to revert to, "We got to support the black movement, racism is our issue. Anti-racism is the radical position."

What you do to a white man in today's society when you tell him he's got to fight the anti-racism struggle is give him a struggle that doesn't have any outside to it. I do not want to deny that racism is a problem, as male chauvinism is a problem inside of us. But I wish to insist that the only way we can finally fight against racism effectively is to be fighting our battles for our own liberation, in alliance with black people fighting their struggle for their own liberation.

In a sense, this was a "politics of guilt," but it was also more than that, a politics (however imperfectly realized or expressed) of revolution. Calvert was right in seeing the decline of resistance, for what was coming in its place was a feeling that the battle had to be escalated beyond bodies-on-the-line to something more meaningful still, more capable of exerting real power upon the land. For this allies seemed to be necessary, and especially black allies, those who already seemed to be on the road to revolution. As Carl Davidson was to analyze it:

Put simply, SDS saw that the student movement could go in one of two directions from "where they are at." They could focus on limited on-campus issues "about their lives" and go in the direction of "student power." Or they could raise those issues about their lives that led them to form alliances with other oppressed constituencies beyond the campus, a direction leading to the growth of revolutionary class consciousness .... Calvert believes that [SDS's] approach to the problem of racism is the politics of guilt. Most of SDS believes that this is the cutting edge, the dividing line that separates revolutionary practice from reformist and reactionary practice in this country.

It was a turn that displeased a number in SDS. Calvert left the Lexington NC with a sense of dismay, and it turned to bitterness in the succeeding weeks as the NO plunged into what Calvert saw as an attempt "to grind out an elaborate analysis of racism, couched in the most abstruse and dogmatic language so that the line would be right at its national convention in June."’” (He also raised violent objections in the NO to the reprinting of a James Forman speech titled "Liberation Will Come From a Black Thing," calling it "wrong" and "obscene" for its implied slighting of white resistance.) By the end of the spring Calvert had become thoroughly disenchanted with the new politics, gave up on SDS entirely and retired to the comparative placidity of Austin, Texas. Behind him he left an organization ready for a new thrust.

The Lexington NC adjourned on Sunday afternoon, March 31, and the delegates returned home. That night American politics took a dramatic turn.

"Sunday, March 31. Pikeville. Flowers—porch .... Johnson speech." The withdrawal of Lyndon Johnson from the Presidential race and the concomitant start of peace negotiations with the National Liberation Front was regarded, at least at the instant, as a signal victory for the American left and the antiwar forces it had unleashed during the last three years.

The student left was jubilant, and at many colleges there were victory parties in the dormitories, impromptu marches on the campus, celebrations in the halls. "We knew, at least our analysis was, that getting rid of Johnson didn't make that much difference," one SDSer said later. "But just the thought that we wouldn't have to see that awful face any more and hear those continual lies in that syrupy backwoods drawl, and thinking we all had something to do with that, well that was enough to give us an incredible high that night. I'll never forget it."

"Wednesday, April 3. Resistance." For much of the spring Bernardine Dohrn had been occupied with draft resistance, and like many had looked forward with enthusiasm to the April Resistance meeting and the third round of draft-card turn-ins. The Johnson speech changed things, very neatly deflating the war as an issue and the draft as an organizing tool. As the New York Resistance people analyzed the subsequent events in their own obituary a year later,

Resistance in larger cities began to lose steam. We had been successful in helping to move the middle class significantly: McCarthy and Kennedy entered the presidential race, the government was pushed into negotiations and Johnson was forced to step down. But it was precisely these events which pulled the political rug out from under us .... We had reached the point of "diminishing returns"—increasing the number of draft resisters would do little or nothing to move people. Also, the "repressive tolerance" of the government and the selectivity with which it prosecuted resistors helped destroy the psychological momentum of noncooperation. The drama was taken out of it, and the media lost interest. While at one time, turning in one's draft card was the only example of a politics of risk, in the past year other groups have offered tactics that also involved risk—"streetfighting," campus confrontation, etc. People no longer felt a need for noncooperation as a means of personal radicalization.’

Draft resistance, in short, died a single-issue death. Despite the considerable efforts throughout 1967 of SDS leaders and others who saw the connections and emphasized the politics, it was never to overcome its primary character as a moral instrument of protest to the Vietnam war.

SDS's own draft programs, though kept alive, likewise began to wither at about this time.

Campus support never materialized after April, especially when it became clear that few students were actually being drafted; the Selective Service System after two years had finally learned a lesson and was calling up less than 20 percent of the college population depending for most of its fodder on strata of the society that were less inclined to make a fuss about it.'? Off-campus draft work ran up against other harsh realities: most high-school kids did not regard the draft as a pressing issue in their lives, a sizable minority either had no aversion to the draft or actually welcomed it as an escape, draft-card burning and resistance in working communities was regarded as faintly cowardly and decidedly unpatriotic, and the unfortunately feeble alternatives of jail, underground, or exile stirred little enthusiasm among most potential recruits. Gradually the frustrations of un-success and the pressures from an unamiable society (jails, police, landlords, parents) left the draft resisters beaten and bitter, and most moved on to other tasks—and not a few came to decide that what was really necessary in this society was not the abolition of the draft but the abolition of the system.

Yet the Johnson withdrawal was proof at the same time of how much the draft-resistance movement and the SDS efforts had accomplished, and its successes should not go unrecorded. It is impossible to estimate how many men actually refused induction, burned or turned in their draft cards, or refused to register for the draft, but the figure is clearly in the tens of thousands, and perhaps as many as a million.” This obviously had an impact on the entire student generation, and the liberal community in general, as Walter Lippmann wrote (just a week, incidentally, before the President's announcement):

The President is confronted with the resistance, open or passive, of the whole military generation, their teachers, their friends, their families. The attempt to fight a distant war by conscription is producing a demoralization which threatens the very security of the nation.”

It also led to a turnabout in public thinking on the draft, so that by the middle of 1968 pollster Louis Harris figured that 36 percent of the public was against the system, a figure that would continue to rise as the war went on; so pervasive did the antidraft attitude become that even Richard Nixon announced his support for a draft overhaul, and the Congress of the United States showed so little support that it actually refused to renew the draft authority for a time in the middle of 1971. Few in Washington now doubt that there will be a thorough overhaul, or quite possibly the abolition, of the draft within the next decade.

"Thursday, April 4 ..... Law student meeting. King shot. Times Square." The assassination of Martin Luther King at a motel in Memphis, Tennessee, was a propelling moment for radicals both black and white: it seemed a signal, as if one were needed, that the old ways were finished, that whatever romance lingered from the civil-rights days was dispelled, that the time had come for more than nonviolence, more than working with the system, more than moral witness.

The ghettos exploded. As many "civil disorders" took place in the twenty-five days after King's death as in all of the previous year, with more arrests and more injuries. "Violence in varying degrees, ranging from minor disturbances to major riots, erupted in more than 100 cities," according to the ever-watchful J. Edgar Hoover. "The April outbreaks and the subsequent disorders resulted in more than 60 deaths, injuries to thousands of persons, and millions of dollars in property damage." Federal troops were called into Wilmington, Delaware, Baltimore, Chicago, and the nation's capital; in this single month more National Guardsmen (35,000) and more federal troops (23,700) were called into action than had been called in all of 1967, and that had been an eventful year. The usually phlegmatic Jerome Skolnik, in his report to the National Violence Commission, determined: "Never before in this country has such a massive military response been mounted against racial disorder."

SDS regarded the assassination as simply confirmation of the Lexington message, blatant evidence of the need to act against a system bent on genocide, and the NO issued an immediate summons for "a strong response from the radical community." It came. Some two dozen black colleges and universities and more than a hundred white institutions mounted protests led by SDS chapters in many places. SDS mounted or participated in demonstrations in several major cities: Rennie Davis, Clark Kissinger, Noel Ignatin, and others organized marches in Chicago; SDS chapters and Resistance workers led a massive rally in Boston; regional SDS people in Washington, D.C. picketed the White House until dispersed by club-wielding police; Detroit radicals, many from Wayne State SDS, held a memorial demonstration; and in New York a conglomerate of militants turned up in Times Square, treating the city to its first mild display of what was to be called "trashing" (window breaking, trash-can spilling, windshield smashing). Bernardine Dohrn was there. A friend remembers that night, when she first heard of King's death:

She was really stunned. I must admit that I was fairly jaded by then, and I remember saying that with King dead, the Panthers and the other militants would have a clear field to lead the revolution. But Bernardine was sincerely moved, and she began to cry. She cried for a while and she talked about Chicago, when she had worked with King. She said she hadn't always agreed with him, but she responded to him as a human being. Then she went home and changed her clothes. I'll never forget that—she said she was changing into her riot clothes: pants. We went up to Times Square, and there was a demonstration going on of pissed-off black kids and white radicals. We started ripping signs and getting really out of hand and then some kids trashed a jewelry store. Bernardine really dug it. She was still crying, but afterward we had a long talk about urban guerrilla warfare and what had to be done nowby any means necessary.

By any means necessary. Bernardine Dohrn was not the only person in the spring of 1968 led to the conclusion, finally, that violent measures would be necessary in the struggle of the American left. These months mark the emergence of political violence on a significant scale across the country.

Violence, the social scientists have determined, has been a hallmark of twentieth-century America, and it has been a formative preoccupation with those who grew up during the period marked by Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Southern terrorism, Vietnam, assassinations, urban rebellions, police riots, and governmental repression. Kenneth Keniston found that his Vietnam Summer interviewees were immersed in violence from earliest childhood: "In the lives of these young radicals, as in much of their generation, the threats of inner and outer violence are fused, each exciting the other" to the point where "the issue of violence is to this generation what the issue of sex was to the Victorian world"; another survey of SDSers in 1966 found a "special way in which they have experienced violence, both directly and vicariously" and determined that "this special and intense preoccupation seems to be a necessary element in comprehending the predominance of violent dystopian futures [projected in essays] among SDS youth."

But originated violence characterized none of the early activists; they were all victims.

Hayden, Potter, and others beaten in the South, Gitlin, Grizzard, Booth, and countless others jailed for civil-rights demonstrations, ERAPers harassed and arrested by local police and vigilantes, antiwar marchers beaten and gassed, students at Berkeley, in several black schools, and elsewhere clubbed, kicked, shot at, and arrested by police. Even with the rise of resistance, in the previous fall offensive violence was characteristic only of the Stop the Draft Week and Rusk demonstrations, and then limited to minor property damage and bottle throwing; the students at the Pentagon, at Wisconsin, Indiana, Brooklyn, Oberlin, San Jose State, and the rest were initially victims of police charges. Mace, and tear gas.

But resistance taught certain lessons. It showed that police when given the chance know little restraint in exercising the brutality of their profession on unarmed and defenseless students, that the government would move with all the powers in its arsenal to jail, induct, spy upon, harass, and pressure youthful activists, and that even universities were willing to resort to force to protect their private property from demonstrators. It showed that the forces running the society, the university as much as the government, were powerful, not to say ruthless, and that the press and the public in general supported their exercise of both power and ruthlessness. In a simple phrase, resistance exposed the nature of, and erased the legitimacy from, the major institutions of the society.

But resistance also showed that at least a minority of the people could be made to act, and act vigorously, in pursuit of their goals; that there was energy to be tapped among the young and discontented; that people in situations of confrontation will make rapid and consequential choices, taking a swift lesson in the making of connections when a police club hits them on the head in defense of a Dow recruiter and his university hosts. It showed that other people, heretofore quiescent—moderates, liberals, faculty members, families, sympathetic members of the public—can be prodded into various forms of action and support, forced to draw lines and take sides, and occasionally won over behind some radical demands. And it showed that concessions could be wrested from these forces—slowing the escalation of the war, holding off on draft calls, reforming campus governance, cutting ties to the corporate and military machines—but only when (and by no means always even then) they were confronted by large-scale, serious, militant, political disruption.

Out of resistance, then, there grew an understanding of power, an appreciation of the values of confrontation, and thence a willingness to initiate violence. Not violence against people, it should be pointed out—it was the police not the demonstrators, the campus "jocks" not the radicals, the rednecks not the picketers, who generally started the fights; nor was it, in spite of the myopic media, violence on a scale remotely resembling "terrorism" or "bomb throwing" or "guerrilla warfare" or "revolution." It was violence against property and quite specifically property connected with a hated or complicit institution: benches in the Oakland streets, cars at the Hilton dinner, then draft records in Catonsville and Boston, finally, and dramatically, buildings on the campuses.”?

Between January and May of 1968 there were ten reported incidents of the bombing and burning of campus buildings related to political issues (half of them, however, directed at two buildings, the ROTC building in Stanford and the NROTC building at Berkeley). It marked the first concerted use of such tactics of violence by the student left in this generation—indeed, the first use by students in the history of the country." Compared to the violence of the state, this was a mite, compared to the violence of everyday public America, a snippet—yet it was a signal that times were changing, and rapidly, too.

SDS by no means embraced the new turn, the general sentiment seeming to be that violence was not defensible morally, not persuasive publicly, and not effective tactically.

Carl Davidson took pains to dissociate the resistance people from " 'the Left adventurers, ' or, simply, 'the crazies'"; Calvert added that "the New Left has its problems with the Leftwing adventurists who think that sabotage and terrorism will bring the socialist revolution tomorrow"; and the large bulk of the membership seemed to agree with a New Left Notes letter writer who argued simply, "We can't succeed with violence .... We cannot win an armed revolution—never." And yet it fascinated, the idea of violence, and as frustration grew, repression grew, the monumentality of the task grew, and its necessity, so did the possibilities of violence.

"Sunday, April 21. Days of Resistance." April began the escalation of student resistance that would mark this spring as the most explosive period up to that time in the history of American universities.

The Ten Days of Resistance (as it was now called), which had been thought of originally as SDS's dramatic escalation of activism, happened ironically without significant participation from national SDS. The reasons, as Bob Pardun recalls it, were two. First,

.. there was a lot of hostility to that program, an incredible amount of hostility .... PL had gotten itself strong in a whole lot of chapters, and being strong that meant they'd always bring up the whole thing about decentralism and NO coordinating from the top down, and all that bullshit. And when you'd say, What about your organization and "democratic centralism" and topdown, they'd say, PL is something different and as members of PL we have a right to organize any way we want, top-down or not, but as members of SDS we don't want that organization to be that way, SDS should be something else. That was always their excuse for hanging up action: the NO had conceived of it and therefore it was top-down and therefore it was bad and the local chapters shouldn't do it.

Second, the NO, smarting under the complaints from a number of chapters about its attempts to "go too fast" into resistance, shied away from mounting any kind of aggressive campaign and its staffers turned their backs. Pardun recalls:

There were faults of individuals who were assigned to do certain " things and didn't do them. Like the national coordinator [Greg Calvert] didn't do a thing, didn't coordinate anything, and as the Ten Days approached we had no idea what was to happen anywhere across the country. We knew stuff was supposed to happen in Chicago 'cause we lived there, and we heard rumors about Wisconsin, and Texas, but as for what was happening anywhere else, we just didn't know—because the founder of the plan, and coordinator of the plan, had flipped out and left.

What action there was during those days, therefore, was due to the energies of local SDSers who chose not to wait around for national direction and to the careful organizing done by the Student Mobilization Committee. At least fifty colleges and universities took part all across the country, with rallies, marches, teach-ins, and sit-ins, climaxing in a one-day "student strike" on April 26. It was a demonstration of significant proportions—probably as many as a million students stayed away from classes that day as a protest against the war and the government propagating it—and yet somehow its impact on the public was slight. Most reports at the time tended to focus on Columbia, which was certainly the most dramatic event of that week but had nothing whatsoever to do with the nation-wide Ten Days actions, and when local protests were covered it was often with the implication that they were aping the events in New York. Few media accounts emphasized the simple fact that the first mass strike action since the 1930s and the largest student strike in the history of the country was taking place.’

"Thursday, May 2 .... To NYC. Columbia." The rebellion of Columbia was ten days old by the time Bernardine Dohrn arrived from a Lawyers Guild trip through the South: the buildings had been occupied, communalized, and then forcibly emptied, the student demands had been hoisted, resisted, and then in part acceded to, the administration had been cowed, refortified, and then exposed in full complicity, the New York police had been called, tested, and found unbelievably brutal, and the whole thing had been broadcast, televised, written about, and pontificated at by every medium in every part of the country.

Dohrn went right to work with other members of the Lawyers Guild to arrange bail and prepare cases for many of the 712 people arrested, while on the campus an all-out strike had just begun.”°

The sequence of events that has passed into the history of the sixties simply as "Columbia" has been told many ways, but perhaps most pertinent is to examine the central, though not necessarily controlling, role played by the SDS chapter. This is all the more pertinent because the history of the Columbia chapter is the history of many other SDS chapters of the time, writ larger, of course, and more flamboyantly, but in essentials the same.

Columbia SDS had several sputters in the early sixties, but the chapter began in earnest after the SDS march in the spring of 1965, largely around the efforts of John Fuerst, Harvey Bloom, and Neumann. In the spring of 1966 it was accorded recognition as an official campus organization, spending the term trying to build a membership; among the early converts were Ted Kaptchuk and Ted Gold, both sophomores at the time. SDS led a protest of some two hundred members and sympathizers against a CIA recruiter in the fall of 1966, its first real demonstration and one of the earliest attempts to organize around the issue of university complicity, and on the next day it took the (for Columbia) quite unheard-of step of marching into the administration building, to deliver a letter demanding the end of CIA recruiting; a week later, receiving no answer, the SDSers marched into the building again, this time cornering President Grayson Kirk and forcing him into a debate on university complicity at which the unprepared and stuttering president came off a decided second to the angry students. The confrontation, mild though it was, shattered Columbia precedent and established SDS as an important voice, certainly the leading radical voice, on campus, and its regular membership increased to something over one hundred, including a young sophomore from a New Jersey suburb by the name of Mark Rudd.

But the chapter leaders during the 1966-67 school year had no illusions as to power, and they bent themselves to methodical work at the mimeograph machines and with an occasional bullhorn, trying to establish broad student support, avoiding confrontations which they felt would only antagonize the campus. It was at this time that many of them became associated with the group of New York SDSers around the newly founded "Praxis" supplement to New Left Notes and fell quickly under the sway of the new-working-class theories; their campus work emphasized the university's role in producing the new technological society and they saw their mission chiefly as exposing university complicity (by research and writing if possible, by picketing and rallies if not), not confronting it. In fact, when the CIA recruiters returned again in February 1967, the chapter voted officially not to interrupt them, sensing that such a move was premature for the still-docile student body; and when eighteen students, many of them SDS members—including Tony Papert, a pre-med student and PL stalwart, and John Jacobs, known as "JJ" a onetime PLer turned free-lance radical—went and sat-in at the CIA office anyway, SDS leaders officially disavowed any connection. Instead, the chapter concentrated on the class-rank issue, full of meat for its complicity theorists, and swung its energies behind a student referendum on the issue which was inaugurated by the student government; it was only when the antirank position won by almost three-to-one and sizable student support was assured that SDS threatened a strike if the administration did not abolish ranking. After some footdragging, the university backed down and abandoned class rank, and SDS stock soared to a new high on the campus. Flush with success, SDS decided to go after the Marine recruiters, and though the demonstration ended up in violence, right enough, it was violence instigated by the conservative "jocks" of the campus, and served to enhance SDS's position as a "responsible" power on campus. And when SDS researchers went on that spring to present the campus with convincing proof of Columbia's involvement first with the Institute for Defense Analysis and then with the CIA, bringing complicity charges home in a way that even the most mole-eyed liberal could see, SDS seemed on the verge of becoming a major campus force.

Somehow it didn't happen. Throughout the fall of 1967, at a time when resistance was in the air everywhere, SDS at Columbia was quiet, confused, congealed: it was going through the doldrums that practically every chapter encountered at one time or another. Several of the former chapter leaders had graduated or dropped out. Drugs proved a more satisfying answer than politics for many, and certainly less frustrating. Progressive Labor members were gumming up chapter debates, turning the weekly meetings increasingly into battles between "correct lines" rather than forums to thrash out ideas. Elitism and male chauvinism turned away many potential recruits who could not find the in-group congenial, and lack of coherence and lack of action turned away still others. Membership fluctuated between two and three hundred despite organizing campaigns and dormitory canvassing. And above all sharp disagreements had grown up in the chapter between the moderate leadership, now dubbed, half-mockingly, the "praxis axis"—Kaptchuk, Gold, David Gilbert (a 1966 Columbia graduate), and others—and the resistance followers, who became known as the "action faction"—among them Jacobs, Papert, and Rudd.

When the chapter finally did decide to mount an all-out drive against military and corporate recruiting, it was effectively coopted (in a move of rare sagacity by the Kirk administration) by the university's decisions to ban all recruiting until the Columbia College student body had a chance to vote on the issue and to appoint a faculty committee to offer its recommendations. Columbia SDS, like the chapters at many universities, was hog-tied by the referendum lactic, for it did not start out with the majority of students on its side, as it had with ranking—most still did not see the connections between recruiting and complicity, and were told that recruiting fell under the unassailable mantle of "free speech" or "civil liberties" anyway—and it was given only a few weeks to persuade them. The student body voted three-to-one for "open recruiting," the faculty followed this with a similar recommendation, and SDS was out in the cold. The free election of the masters by the slaves was invincible. As David Gilbert was to put it: "SDS, which a few months earlier had successfully led the majority of students against class rank for the war, was already discredited on campus as both adventurist and do-nothing."

It was in the wake of this defeat in early 1968 that the action faction began to assert itself.

Rudd, still new to radicalism himself but a man who knew what he liked, scored the praxis axis for putting " ‘organizing’ and 'base-building’ above action and 'confrontation' " and chided their "various pieties about the necessity to build the base before you take action." It was the actionists who turned a planned picketing of Dow recruiters on February 23 into an outright sit-in, much to the dismay of Kaptchuk, who objected unavailingly, "A picket line has its time and place," and was answered, "Who are you going to alienate—some halfassed liberals?" It was they who attacked the site of the Columbia gym in February, the day after construction had begun. And it was they who, against an explicit thirty-to-one vote of the chapter, pulled an unusual bit of theater the next month in throwing a lemon meringue pie in the face of an SSS colonel come to sell Columbia on the virtues of the military life.

Rudd later felt that this was a turning point—"in a criticism session held after the pie incident, members of the chapter began to learn the difference between the verbal 'basebuilding,’ nonstruggle approach of the old leadership and the aggressive approach of those who saw the primacy of developing a movement based on struggle"—for shortly thereafter Rudd was elected chairman of the chapter, Nick Freudenberg, another actionist and a sophomore, became vice-chairman, and the action faction held sway.

The issues which the action faction seized upon that spring were obvious ones: racism, as represented by the university's usurping Harlem land and building a gym which would admit community people through the back door; imperialism, as symbolized by the university's close involvement with the Institute for Defense Analysis and its secret defense department work; authoritarianism, as embodied in the arbitrary and unilateral rulings of the administration, especially with regard to student demonstrations and discipline. As at many campuses where demonstrations took place, the issues were both important and irrelevant at the same time. They were important in that they spoke to major social ills beyond the campus, thus giving student protest that wider dimension that it always must have, and because they tied the university directly into those ills, giving protest the immediate reality it needs to be effective. But they were irrelevant in the sense that they were only a few, and not especially the worst, of many similar issues that could expose the nature of the university and thereby the nature of the system of which it was a part, and in that even a university sanctioned by the gods and governed by saints could be made a target by those who were really addressing themselves to the larger maladies of the society, for which the university stood as surrogate. Conservative critics were right, for the wrong reasons, when they argued that if the university had given in on these demands the radicals would have found three others just as urgent; or, in the words of a famous Berkeley slogan, "The issue is not the issue."2”

Once the action faction found the university's weak spots it began to push. On March 27 Rudd led a hundred-strong delegation into Low Library (the administration building) with an anti-IDA petition, an action which led to six of the chapter leaders—Rudd, Freudenberg, Gold, Jacobs, Ed Hyman, and Morris Grossner—being put on probation. Two weeks later he disrupted a pious university memorial service for Martin Luther King with a blunt speech suggesting that an institution taking over Harlem land, fighting the unionization of its own black workers, participating in an institution (IDA) doing research on "riot control," and punishing students for nonviolent demonstrations, had little place paying honor to Dr. King.

And two weeks after that the chapter voted, despite strong resistance from the praxis people, to resist the university's moves against the six leaders by holding a rally and marching once again on the president's office; it even voted a "contingency" plan leading to "occupation and blockade" of the administration building, but hardly anyone took such an idea seriously and the vote was perfunctory. On the next day, April 23, the uprising began, surpassing anything that even the most militant of the activists had imagined.

During the early stages of the uprising—abortive marches around the campus, the occupation of one building by a black-and-white coalition, the holding hostage of a college dean—everything happened so quickly and haphazardly that the chapter factions never had time to show. But after the whites were kicked out of the occupied building and then in some disarray took over Low Library itself, the cracks began to appear. In Low perhaps a hundred or so white radicals heard the news that the cops were coming, Rudd and several of the action faction opted for discretion, a vote was taken to abandon the building, and the actionists scampered out the front windows to safety; Tony Papert, a few PL comrades, and a number of other determined SDSers (close to thirty in all) decided to stay, a move which succinctly made Papert the de facto leader of Low in the days to come and surrounded PL with a definite aura of respect. When the police "bust" turned out to be unfounded, more students drifted back to Low and the upper stories fell to the students. But the cracks kept appearing: at an SDS meeting that same afternoon, Rudd and a few of the action faction not occupying the president's office urged everyone to join the Low contingent; he was voted down, seventy-to-three, by the praxis people, who wanted to go slow, avoid "turning off" the majority of students, spend the time canvassing dormitories and holding discussion groups to build support before further action. Rudd then proposed that SDS take over more buildings, and was voted down again; in a white rage, Rudd shouted to the meeting, "I resign as chairman of this fucking organization,"*® and stormed out the door. Behind him the vote was overwhelming to try the base-building techniques of the praxis axis.

Within a day, however, it appeared that things had gone too far for that: the campus was already, in the word of the day, "polarized." Two more buildings were taken over by people who were not associated with any faction of SDS, conservative students had organized and were preparing to try a little confrontation of their own, and the faculty had entered the fray. The SDS forces regrouped, Rudd was accepted back as chairman without ado, and both praxis and action alike found themselves in agreement that defiance in a time of crisis was necessary; indeed, both sides were able to claim victories, the action faction showing that building takeovers had succeeded in shaking up Columbia as never before, the praxis axis saying that such student support as there was to date would never have materialized without the earlier months of base-building. That night SDS presented a solid front to the faculty, and it was praxis leader David Gilbert who made a passionate and unflinching defense of the SDS tactics to the assembled professors. Later the same night, with the proSDS forces bulging the rafters at Low, SDSers took over still another building, Mathematics Hall.

For the next four days, with five buildings in the hands of some thousand students, the incredible adrenalin of victory and fear kept together what were by now dozens of political factions. A "Strike Central" was established in a neutral building, where Rudd, senior SDSers Lewis Cole and Juan Gonzalez, and other members allied to the action group held sway (most of them were to remain there when the bust finally came, avoiding arrest), and where the readiness of a cadre of PL people to keep the bureaucracy functioning gave PL still another red feather in its cap. Other PLers joined the crowd at Low, where Tony Papert held forth in the President's office, talking about class conflict and a prerevolutionary society and the necessity of revolutionary change, fresh and heady stuff for many of the young occupiers. And in Math, where Tom Hayden and a mélange of New York street radicals including some of the Motherfuckers had come to lend their support, all kinds of politics were represented but the communards turned out to be rather more concerned with "life styles" than rhetoric. The effective united front among all the variety of SDSers was neatly symbolized on Saturday night, when three SDS leaders addressed a crowd of antiwar marchers who collected outside the university gates: Mark Rudd, Ted Kaptchuk, and Tom Hayden.

The police attack, coming on the eighth day of the occupations, and with the full approval of the Columbia authorities, was not extraordinarily brutal compared to the treatment dealt to ghetto minorities, the gunning down of unarmed students at Orangeburg, or even the precedents at Berkeley, Wisconsin, and Oakland. But the grim, methodical cruelty, the indiscriminate use of force on any nearby body, the injuries to more than two hundred young people, the mass arrests of more than seven hundred people, and the presence of reporters from every known media, combined to give it a special impact on the students involved, on the flabbergasted faculty, on campuses elsewhere, and on much of the nation beyond academe. It was one more example of students putting themselves on the defensive, in spite of the presumed lessons of the Oakland and Rusk demonstrations, a lesson that many would not forget.’ It was also one more link in the chain of evidence—the police riot at the Democratic Convention would be another one—that active dissent would not be tolerated by the state and violent repression would be.

During the successful month-long strike which followed the clearing of the buildings, the paper began to peel from the cracks of the SDS chapter even as the bulk of the student body rallied to the cause. The majority wanted to stick to the hard line and see through the original issues of the protest, but there were many willing to modify the stance so as to insure greater campus participation in the strike. Most of the chapter supported the idea of holding "liberated classes" during the last weeks of the semester, where old teachers would offer new courses and new teachers would offer radical ones; but PL, for example, was vociferous in opposing the plan, arguing that the struggle had to be escalated against the real administration, not blunted by substituting an alternative, albeit "liberated," one. Some, supported by PL and a variety of other radicals who had already done work in the surrounding community, wanted to take the battle off the campus and involve the people actually being squeezed by Columbia's slum-lordism; others, mostly praxis people, felt that the first job was on the campus, trying to demonstrate in a "liberated university" what it was that the radical vision was all about. And because the chapter as a whole had never faced up to these issues before, because it was no more united in goals than it was in tactics, differences such as these prevented it from joining ranks in the hour of its victory and pushing its advantage along a single front. SDS floundered. When the liberals, who were now by far the largest group supporting the strike, eventually came forward with an old-fashioned student-power line—"restructuring" and reforming the university to give the students a larger voice, make classes more "relevant," and the like—SDS had no way to oppose them because it had no concept of its own of what it wanted the university to be, or do, or whether there should be a university at all. Within days, the liberals broke from the radicals, drawing most of the student body with them, and set to work making schemes for a nicer and more cosmetized university, much to the relief of the vested interests among faculty and administration, not to mention the Ford Foundation and other bulwarks of the status quo who came forward with $40,000 to help the liberal students along. Reform is what really won the rebellion at Columbia—as at many other places where radicals began the job but were either too inexperienced or too powerless to continue it—and the radical vision which animated the high moments of crisis proved chimerical in the long days afterward.

But three momentous experiences which underlay the Columbia rebellion did linger and did much to shape the revolutionary politics that SDS was edging toward. The first was the experience of those who encountered the communal life—thrown together with like-minded men and women, sharing, meeting, loving, eating, defecating, sleeping, talking, and deciding together, with no authority, no rules, no force to limit them, and making the decisions that affected their own lives. One man wrote, "This was the first event in most of our lives where we felt effective, where what we were doing belonged to us," and another, overwhelmed by "the satisfaction of acting together with others,"°! concluded: "I wanted to organize my life around being and doing radical work partly because it was sexier and it made me feel smart and partly because it was freeing and it felt right inside." The second experience grew out of the alliance with black students—one of the earliest expressions of the Lexington National Council spirit and the first practical racial coalition since the civilrights days—and the strength this gave to the white students’ cause. The blacks were slow in joining the issues at Columbia (it was SDS, for example, which instigated the gym and Martin Luther King protests) and insisted on going their own way once they had (carrying on their own negotiations, breaking from the central strike committee, making their separate peace with the authorities), but their mere presence gave the rebellion legitimacy, confidence, and power. "We were spurred on," Mark Rudd said later, "by a tremendous push from history, if you will, embodied in the militant black students at Columbia." The third experience was the most complicated of all, for it had to do with students’ taking a political view of themselves, and their university, and the society beyond, confronting the true implications of the old SDS slogan, "A free university in a free society." When one professor asked Mark Rudd on the third day of the takeovers whether he really wanted to destroy the university—"Doesn't the university have any redeeming features that merit your saving it?"°2—the SDS chairman was at a loss for an answer: he hadn't really thought about what he really wanted out of the university in the long run, what kind of reforms he expected from an institution which he knew to be so complicit and compromised; hardly anyone in the chapter had. But during the next days and weeks, as the administration and then the trustees and then the faculty showed themselves to consist of limited, rigid, compromised people (the liberals as much as the moderates), and as the liberal students deserted the SDSers for their own narrow concerns, it became clear to many SDSers in a very direct way that it was not the reform of the university that they really wanted, not the limiting of complicity, not the restructuring of the evil complex, but something much vaster, more significant, more, well, revolutionary. "To student rebels," wrote Dick Greeman, an SDS veteran and one of the few Columbia faculty members unflinching in his support for the radicals, the lessons of Columbia were that "allies must be sought in the black ghettos and in the ranks of labor, not on campus. It means that ‘a free university' will only exist after we have won a ‘free society.’ " Many of the Columbia strikers made their break with the academy after these days, putting the dream of university reform and student power behind them forever; by commencement time neither Rudd nor most of the other SDSers had much doubt about how to answer the question of the university's "redeeming features."

The seeds of Weatherman are planted here.

Columbia 1968 was the most significant student rebellion to date, surpassing even Berkeley 1964 (an event with which it shared many characteristics), and, according to Carl Oglesby, "just as important, just as pregnant and portentous, as what happened in Haymarket Square" a century earlier. Not so much because it was extreme or unusual (there had been other building takeovers, other hostage-holdings, other massive police busts) as that it occurred in the media capital of the world, at a prestigious Ivy League university, at a time when campuses everywhere were roiled with demonstrations—and, like Berkeley, suggested that America's children had not only awakened from the American dream but were prepared to move on to actually destroying all it stood for. Columbia quickly became the symbol of all campus protest, and it energized the news media, angered the politicians, terrified the academics, and inspired the students. And it put SDS (whatever its deficiencies at Columbia or its difficulties nationally, SDS played some role in virtually every outbreak) on the frontpages and news programs of the land, catapulting it to a prominence that no other student organization had enjoyed before or since. As Fortune put it, somewhat hyperbolically, "You can't argue with success: and S.D.S. has yet to lose a battle."°?

SDS, if not quite a household word yet, at least penetrated the living room. Grayson Kirk went on national television and denounced SDSers as "those who are out to wreck the university." Eric Sevareid and other television commentators delivered themselves of philippics against the unwashed and misbehaved. The Associated Press, whose headquarters sits on land owned by Columbia University, filed thousands of inches of copy daily, with pictures, interviews, and a special "backgrounder" that showed how Mark Rudd had planned the whole thing in diabolical detail since October.” The national news weeklies rushed into print with skeletal profiles of SDS, seeing it as the "prime mover" of campus revolts, full of "intellectual arrogance and a facile conviction that ends justify the means," and able to employ with "single-minded fervor" the "classic revolutionary techniques." The New York Times, in whose backyard the rebellion took place, gave especially prominent and lengthy coverage to Columbia and to SDS's role, though displaying its penchant for inaccuracy both in a myriad of everyday details and in the conclusions it drew." In the eyes of the nation's leading newspaper, whose board chairman was a Columbia trustee and whose powerful assistant managing editor was an ardent alumnus, SDS engaged in the "rule-or-ruin tactics of a minority" and "substituted dictatorship by temper tantrum for undergraduate democracy," thus interrupting the work of a great university that should be allowed "to turn once again to its mission of teaching, research and public service"—written without irony, as if none of what SDS had been saying about the university's missions of slum-lording, war complicity, autocracy, and public disservice had reached its ears. The Times's remedy for the problem was force: "Any society, academic or other, that lacks the will to defend itself against illegitimate disruption and takeover is crippled and, as a free society may be doomed"; and, "Even most sympathizers with the Columbia students feel the line has to be drawn somewhere if an orderly society is to survive." Even the Times, however, was outdone by Barren's, the right-wing, surprisingly influential, weekly of Dow Jones & Company, which carried a front-page article full of foreboding:

The siege tactics which disrupted Columbia and brought its normal activities to a halt represent the latest attempt by a revolutionary movement which aims to seize first the universities and then the industries of America. The rebels are members of Students for a Democratic Society .... Since SDS tactics have succeeded in crippling a great university, the next target can be a City Hall, the State Capitol, or even the White House ... . The Columbia crisis vitally affects the life of every American.

So pleased was Barren's by its message that it took a full-page advertisement in the Times four days later to reprint the article in full. It was then only left for Fortune to set out for the Establishment the true nature of its enemy:

These youngsters, organized in the Students for a Democratic Society, (S.D.S.), are acting out a revolution—not a protest, and not a rebellion, but an honest-to-God revolution. They see themselves as the Ché Guevaras of our society, and their intention is to seize control of the university, destroy its present structure, and establish the "liberated" university as the redoubt from which to storm and overthrow "bourgeois" America. This is what they say they are doing—they are the least conspiratorial and most candid of revolutionists—and this is what in fact they are doing.

The most ardently resistant SDSer couldn't have put it better—and even he wouldn't have been so convinced.

In the weeks after Columbia, as protests continued throughout the country, the press was joined by the politicians. President Johnson led the pack, with a speech at Texas Christian University—one of the few campuses, it was said, where he would be safe to go—accusing militant students of being "young totalitarians." The House Un-American Activities Committee rushed forth with a report (written by Phillip Luce, the one-time PLer now turned witch-hunter) saying that radical and black groups "are seriously considering the possibility of instituting armed insurrection in this country" and citing SDS in particular as a group planning "guerrilla-type operations" against the government (a charge apparently based solely on Calvert's misunderstood remarks to the Times reporter the previous May). At least half the state legislatures in the land received bills outlawing various radical organizations and withholding funds from disorderly students or insufficiently hard-line administrators.

The U.S. Congress went even further, passing bills that would withdraw aid from students who "disrupt" universities, deny funds to universities that ban military recruiters (as at least twenty-two institutions had done by May), and allow the President to send federal troops, specifically exempted from sanctions on interfering with an individual's civil rights, anywhere in the country at his own whim. (This was in addition to a law passed in Marchthe one that would be used against the "Chicago Eight"—making the crossing of a state line to participate "in a riot or committing any act of violence in furtherance of a riot" a crime punishable by five years in prison and a fine of $10,000.) Meanwhile, in less public actions, the FBI instructed its offices to send out right-wing literature "anonymously to college educators who have shown a reluctance to take decisive action against the 'New Left’ "selecting for one of its innominate missives the Barren's article—and thereafter to report "positive results or comments by recipients." And at the Pentagon a so-called "domestic war room" was set up to examine files from the now-enormous army surveillance system and to prepare military responses to civil insurrections, guerrilla warfare, and whatever else the citizens might spring.

University administrations tended to interpret Columbia much as they had Berkeley, and just as Berkeley had triggered a series of academic changes under the threat of "another Berkeley," so now began a wave of concessions and reforms designed to frustrate the SDS slogan of "two, three, many Columbias."" Plans for "restructuring" began to appear everywhere, students were hastily placed on university committees, student-facultyadministrative forums were held, curriculum committees were set up, vice-presidents-forstudent-affairs were installed; in all, according to one extensive survey, no fewer than 72 percent of American colleges and universities expanded and improved measures for student participation in campus governance during this school year, and it doesn't take much imagination to figure out when most of that happened.

And the students elsewhere—what of them? For reasons having as much to do with their own particular circumstances as the example of Columbia, but clearly shocked, angered, inspired, and animated by those widely publicized events, they exploded. Columbia, and the Ten Days action which accompanied it, was like a detonator. More student protests took place during the following weeks than had ever occurred before, and they were of greater militance, concerned with more sweeping demands, and engaged in by a greater number of students. Significant demonstrations, with escalated tactics, occurred on at least forty campuses—there were building takeovers, for example, at Brooklyn College, Cheyney State, Delaware, Delaware State, Denver, Northwestern, Ohio State, and Stanford, and other forms of demonstrations leading to police attacks, violence, and the arrest of more than 150 students at Alfred, Brooklyn, Hawaii, Long Beach, Marquette, University of Miami, Ohio, Roosevelt, San Francisco State, and Southern Illinois. There is no way to measure exactly the number of demonstrations during these weeks, but several major studies at the time suggest the rough dimensions, and there is no doubt that this spring surpassed anything seen before; one of the surveys concluded succinctly, "College student unrest has escalated to the point where perhaps most officials responsible for the higher learning in America would now consider it their number one problem."

The surveys bear a somewhat closer look, for they suggest not only the quantity of student revolts but their quality, which were both little understood at the time. As to numbers, the National Student Association calculated that there were 221 demonstrations involving 35 or more people at no colleges and universities from January to June, with the bulk of them falling in April and May. A survey by the authors of Protest! indicated that during this period there were as many as 310 demonstrations (included in this definition are the circulation of petitions and the formal enunciation of demands by student groups). And a study by the Educational Testing Service, using an even looser definition, found no fewer than 3,463 protests during the year, of which something like 2,000 can be presumed to have taken place in the spring. As to the quality of student resistance, all three surveys arc in general agreement. The protests were widespread, occurring coast to coast and in the South as well as the North, at small Catholic colleges as well as major state universities, affecting at least two-thirds of the larger institutions. The tactics were militant, perhaps as many as a third involving sit-ins, strikes, hostages, and takeovers, but all but a very few took place without violence (in the sense of bodily harm or serious property damage), and what there was tended to be instigated by the calling in of police. The greatest number of protests focused on the larger political and social questions—Vietnam and racism, predominantly—and only a few of the significant demonstrations had anything to do with student power, parietal rules, curricula, and the like. New Left campus groups, chiefly SDS chapters but also many ad hoc organizations, were instrumental in leading the protests, especially the political ones and especially the larger and more militant. And students in the great majority of instances won their battles, wresting administration concessions, promises, and reforms, while in only a few cases were they punished by arrest, suspension, or university discipline.

Two, three, many Columbias indeed.

"Tuesday, May 21. 5—Columbia sit-in Hamilton—barricades." The events of the spring were making an impact on Bernardine Dohrn. The disappointments of draft resistance, the shock of King's death, the frustrations of the slow (and errant) grinding of American courts, the extraordinary explosion of the campuses—these must have wrought a slow metamorphosis. By the time of the second Columbia outbreak, Dohrn was there, literally at the barricades.

Columbia had traveled through warped space; Rudd called it a déja-vu. Exactly four weeks after its first demonstration SDS led another rally on the campus—this time to protest disciplinary action against four of its leaders—moved into the very building it had begun with before, barricaded the doors again, and once more prepared for the police to come.

The chapter had shaken down considerably by then, the actionists having carried the day and won new recruits in the wake of the police invasion and the SDS victories (an end to gym construction, withdrawal from the IDA, reorganization of student discipline, humiliation of the administration). The most virulent debates now were apt to come between the regular SDSers and the PL faction, the latter having won a good deal of respect during the April days and used its advantage wisely to draw in new recruits; but both were united in the need to act again in the face of further administrative threats and both were well represented at this new takeover. For most of them this round of the battle would be decisive: the university announced that day that any student arrested when the police cleared the building would be suspended, and the question of whether to be full-time students or full-time radicals was posed irrevocably that night. Juan Gonzalez defined the issue:

It was a confrontation which showed how much we believe in what we were fighting for. If our goals went beyond the university, then we should have been willing to leave it if necessary. Were we students who were politically active, or activists who happened to be students?

For most of SDS, praxis and action alike, the answer was clear. In the end seventy young radicals made their career decisions that night, to which the actual calling-in of the police and the ensuing brutality was secondary. Weatherman was beginning to take shape.

"Wednesday, May 22. Ct [court]—160 arrests. Tombs [the Manhattan House of Detention], .. » Monday, June 3. Fly to Chgo .... Great joy." Dohrn and others in the National Lawyers Guild were important in handling the cases of many of the Columbia students. After the initial court procedures were finished she made a brief visit to Chicago to see her parents and some old friends, and to check on the preparations for the Democratic Convention, before going off to the SDS convention in East Lansing, Michigan, where her life would be changed.

She was not the only one in Chicago feeling great joy those days. The SDS National Office, as might be expected, was riding high. Membership took a quick jump, at it always does in the wake of widespread publicity when unaffiliated students get the sense that there's something going on that they should be a part of—national membership rose to perhaps seven thousand, and chapter membership, according to Carl Davidson, to forty thousand.

(It seems possible that this latter figure is too low by a third, judging from information uncovered by the Educational Testing Service in its 1967-68 survey showing that student left groups, "mainly" SDS chapters, have "something on the order of 2 percent of the national student population," which would be approximately 140,000 people.) Chapters, too, were added at an accelerated rate, Davidson again figuring more than 350 chapters by the end of the spring (this estimate seems borne out by the ETS survey, indicating that there were left-wing groups at some 395 of the institutions it contacted, and "these would mainly be SDS chapters").

Finances, too, enjoyed the same upswing, though in the end it amounted to nothing more spectacular than enough to bring the organization to a happy breakeven point by the middle of June. The whole question of where SDS got its money became of much interest to the media just now, ironically at a time when New Left Notes was no longer making SDS finances public, and dark theories were invented to explain how this apparently ragamuffin organization, operating out of clearly church-mousian headquarters, could have the cash to finance a student rebellion. The Chicago Tribune was typical, declaring mysteriously, "Officers of the SDS seem to have abundant funds for travel, not only from campus to campus in the United States but also to Viet Nam, Cuba and other Communist countries," and noting that they "welcome and receive Communist support." No doubt the NO wished that such easy access to the Banco Habana and the Central Peking Bank really existed, but in fact the sources were much more ordinary: as the NO reported to the June convention, the total income for the 1967-68 school year was $115,094, of which $51,773 came from outright contributions. and $19,059 from dues and subscriptions, with the rest, if it followed the pattern of previous years, from the sale of literature and buttons, and from outside printing jobs. Expenditures were $114,642, with the largest outlay going for a brand-new Heidelberg Printing Press purchased during the heady days of June.” Columbia, and the outbreak of student protest which it symbolized, also had its effect on SDS thinking. It seemed first of alt to be the culmination of the period of resistance, proof that the long months of SDS work were paying off, both in the targets students were picking (war, complicity, racism, rather than dress codes and dorm hours) and the tactics (sit-ins, hostages, takeovers, not petitions and pickets). Carl Davidson saw it as a major turning point in SDS history:

Since the Columbia Rebellion, SDS has been thrust onto a new plateau as a national political force. The importance of that event in our history should not be underestimated. More than any other event in our recent political past, Columbia has successfully summed up and expressed the best aspects of the main thrust of our national political efforts in the last two years.

But more than that, Columbia was a vivid demonstration that students, though (as the general SDS analysis had it) still irrelevant insofar as they pressed for their own selfish ends, could be a serious threat to the society when they acted for larger political goals; as Tom Hayden felt it:

The striking students were not holding onto a narrow conception of students as a privileged class asking for inclusion in the university as it now exists ....

The Columbia students were instead taking an internationalist and revolutionary view of themselves in opposition to the imperialism of the very institutions in which they have been groomed and educated .... They want a new and independent university standing against the mainstream of American society, or 'they want no university at all.

Moreover, students, through their head-on confrontations with some of the major institutions of the society (universities, police, media), could expose the nature of those institutions, radicalize the community of the young, and create new recruits to the cause of total social transformation. That is what SDS meant by "two, three, many Columbias." "The Columbia strike," wrote New England regional traveler Eric Mann, "more than any other event in our history, has given the radical student movement the belief that we can really change this country."*°

"Wednesday, June 5. Kennedy shot." The death of Robert Kennedy came with a kind of fated resignation, another glaring symptom of the national malady. Few in the upper levels of SDS had any special regard for Kennedy—though on the chapter level there were reports of SDSers willing to defect from radicalism if he became the Democratic Presidential candidate—but, as with the death of King, there was an undefinable sense of anguish, and it is said that Tom Hayden wept beside the coffin of Robert Kennedy as it lay open for final homage.

"Sunday, June 9. To East Lansing. Steve & Tom—off to write at Student Center." Bernardine Dohrn arrived at the SDS convention a little early, planning to write a position paper with Steve Halliwell, the New York organizer with whom she had been close throughout the spring, and Tom Bell, the Cornell SDSer who was now working as a Teamster and an MDS organizer in Springfield, Massachusetts. Their purpose was to put forth a program for the coming year that would embody the rudimentary new-working-class ideas, offset any worker-student program the PL people would come up with, and turn the manifest revolutionary spirit of the spring into an organized force for the fall.

"Monday, June 10. SDS Convention ... . Friday, June.14. Caucus. Elected." On Wednesday night of convention week open warfare broke out between Progressive Labor and the other factions in SDS. In response an alliance of disparate people—some actionists, some praxisites, some pro-working class, some campus-directed, but all troubled by PL—was formed into a rival caucus. The caucus put forth a slate of three officers to be presented to the convention, and for Inter-organizational Secretary it chose Bernardine Dohrn. On Friday night Dohrn faced the plenary to answer questions about her background and beliefs. In one of those answers, with only six words, she presaged the new direction that SDS would take in the final period of its history.

"Do you consider yourself a socialist?" someone in the crowd asked.

"I consider myself," Bernardine Dohrn said, "a revolutionary communist."**

She was elected without opposition.