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A New Left and the Start of the Student Movement

When you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not try to weakly reconcile yourself with the world… . Adhere to your own act and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the late summer of 1964, I entered Harvard as an advanced placement sophomore. I felt liberated, excited, and fully grown up. I moved into a tiny single in Greenough Hall, one street over from Harvard Yard. It had just enough room for a small bed, a desk, and a chair—yet I felt a new space around me, possibilities everywhere. My parents were living only three miles away in a small duplex on Aberdeen Avenue with the landlord on the first floor and his plaster statue of the Madonna in the tiny, low fenced front yard. Despite the geographical proximity, I was in another universe.

Suddenly I was surrounded by thousands of people my own age. Out of open dorm windows, the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the Supremes’ “Come See about Me,” and the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” floated out into the September evening, thrummed through the air, provided a backbeat to 1,200 young men prowling the early fall evenings in the hope of something unsaid but desperately wanted. Everywhere you looked, there were masses of fresh-faced young men and women, excited, eager, curious. The energy of so many of us was palpable on the streets, in the dorms, in the dining rooms, in the classes. The music throbbed. The talk never stopped. We were so eager, so hopeful, so sure that the future was soon to be ours.

Along with a scholarship that paid 90 percent of the cost of my tuition, I was given two jobs, working in the freshman dining hall and selling peanuts and popcorn at football games. Between work, studying for my major in history and literature, visits to Amy who was down in Providence studying at Pembroke (the women’s college at Brown), and my organizing work, I was living packed, eighteen-hour days.

I still had work to do on Noel Day’s campaign, primarily recruiting college students to make the bus trip down Mass Ave into Roxbury to volunteer. Increasingly, though, I was focused on building a student movement, creating a New Left in America.

There are things one knows analytically. And there are things one knows instinctively. I knew in my bones in that fall of 1964 that we could build a new student movement. This belief was not based on data or reason—I felt it. I felt my generation. If young African Americans could overcome almost a century of terror and change the Jim Crow system, certainly my generation could and would remake America. It would take years, but we would start by building a student-based New Left. With the arrogance of the young, I was certain.

I did not want to work on one issue here and another there. I saw racism, inequality, poverty, nuclear weapons, a stifling materialistic culture as interconnected evils of a system that put more and more power in fewer and fewer hands. I wanted to be part of something brand new, something vibrant and only imagined—a New Left that was organized around extending democracy. I wanted a New Left that would tackle the unique problems of our age: bureaucracy, rapid technological change, materialism, the need to balance community and individual freedom, as well as the enduring challenge of economic inequality. All people should be able to make the decisions that affect their lives. It meant students should have a say in the decisions of their universities. Welfare mothers in the policies of the welfare state. Workers in some of the decisions at their factories. Residents in the decisions that would shape their neighborhoods.

I was sure that the old left, the withered Communist and Socialist Parties, the intellectuals who had come of age in the 1930s, even the organizers who had built the unions, all had nothing to teach us. I scorned old leftists with their embrace of foreign models, their excuses for authoritarian states—we wanted more democracy not less. Their ideology was too determinist, too focused on state control. I associated the old left with people like my parents, tired, beaten. They lacked humor, they lacked music, they lacked youth—they were old.

Liberal ideology dominated the country. I thought mainstream liberals excused too much, were too incremental, always urging any insurgency to go slower, rarely questioning the power of the corporate elites. They were locked into a Cold War framework that stifled new thinking and justified the American imperial role in the world. Although I had no sympathy for communist systems, I rejected the rigid anticommunism that Cold War liberals sought to impose as the test for all politics. Cold War liberals, too, seemed old.

Two years before, I had chosen Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) as my future political home. There was a lot of overlap between the small SDS group in Cambridge and the Friends of SNCC. I had spent a lot of time with the Friends of SNCC and gotten to know two white Southern couples. Bob Zellner had been the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) first white field secretary. I met Bob and his wife Dottie during their many trips to Boston. Another couple were Robb and Dorothy Burlage. Robb was a graduate student at Harvard and Dorothy at the Divinity School. I had met Robb through my civil rights work and through him made my way to a regular gathering of SDS members. Episodically, when organizing and schoolwork allowed, on Thursday evenings, I headed over to Cronin’s Bar on Mt. Auburn Street in Harvard Square to join a regular gathering there. A small group of young men debated the issues of the day and discussed what would constitute the vision of a New Left. I was particularly mesmerized by two Harvard students, Richie Rothstein¹ and Todd Gitlin,² who had far-ranging intellects and could bring a new perspective to almost any topic. They were frequently joined by Lee Webb from Boston University with whom I had canvassed for the Hughes campaign and Mike Appleby, the young staff person for the American Friends Service Committee.³ Sometimes they were joined by others I had met during the Hughes campaign. I was the only high school kid there. I rarely said much. Too young to drink beer, I nursed a soft drink. My brain felt like a massive sponge.

These early SDS leaders were smart and moral and practical and inspirational—exactly the combination I was seeking. They kept returning over and over to issues of strategy. Because of them, I had started to read small magazines, Root & Branch and the British New Left Review. Because of them, I read the Port Huron Statement, and once I had read it, I knew I had found my political home.

The Port Huron Statement took its name from a meeting at the United Auto Workers camp in Port Huron, Michigan, where, in June of 1962, the leadership of SDS, then a tiny organization, met, rewrote, edited, and approved a draft largely written by Tom Hayden. It began with a generational appeal that immediately spoke to me:

We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.

When we were kids, the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world. Freedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, and for the people—these American values we found good, principles by which we could live as men. Many of us began maturing in complacency.

As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the Cold War, symbolized by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract “others” we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time. We might deliberately ignore, or avoid, or fail to feel all other human problems, but not these two, for these were too immediate and crushing in their impact, too challenging in the demand that we as individuals take the responsibility for encounter and resolution.⁴

The statement proceeded to discuss values, politics, technology, and the challenges of individualism and community, and to call for “participatory democracy.” The statement tackled the economy, the military-industrial complex, the impact of rapid technological change, the individual in the welfare state, foreign policy and the Cold War, the rise of independence movements in the former colonial countries, and the rigidity and stultifying ideology of anticommunism.

Today, much of it is dated: the male only language, the dominance of liberal ideology, the problem of Southern Democrats’ hold on power, the Cold War, and, of course, the absence of any analysis of the treatment of women and gays.

In other ways, it still seems relevant: the impacts of rapid technological change, the need for more democracy and more community. Its statement, “We can no longer rely on competition of the many to ensure that business enterprise is responsive to social needs. The many have become the few. Nor can we trust the corporate bureaucracy to be socially responsible or to develop a ‘corporate conscience’ that is democratic” is, if anything, even more apt today. As is “America should concentrate on its genuine social priorities: abolish squalor, terminate neglect, and establish an environment for people to live in with dignity and creativeness.”⁵ SDS leaders’ willingness to be precise about the politics of the moment as well as visionary in their calls for the future, added up for me to a breathtaking call to action. I wanted to be part of this bold project.

By then, I considered myself a democratic socialist. Yet I agreed with the prevalent thinking in SDS not to use the term socialism. I believed that an economy run purely for private profit made no sense. Instead, we needed a new model where workers had a say in their work, where economic activity benefited society as a whole.

However, for most Americans still caught in Cold War thinking, socialism was associated with the authoritarian communist states, regarded as un-American. Better to not use the term and focus on the content of democratic participation.

As soon as I arrived at Harvard, I was part of a group reorganizing the SDS chapter, which, until then, had been tiny. I was confident that I could be an organizer that transformed the brilliant ideas that I had absorbed at Cronin’s into concrete action.

We started by convincing those participating in single-issue efforts to come into SDS. I found that many students were already there. The antinuclear group Tocsin, the students returning from Mississippi, many of whom had been active in the Civil Rights Coordinating Committee, a few members of the Student Peace Union, and the students who had volunteered on the Day campaign all agreed to merge into a revitalized SDS. Conscious of my youth (having just turned seventeen), I worked hard to promote other, older students into formal positions of leadership.

In October, I attended a small meeting of SDS members from around the region to figure out how to organize across New England. A dozen of us sat in a typical, shabby student apartment with too few chairs, grappling with how to get more SDS chapters organized. Representing Harvard-Radcliffe, Tufts, Boston University, and MIT, we started listing all the other schools where we wanted SDS chapters. I mentioned that Amy would try to pull together students at Brown. Soon we had a list of twenty-five colleges. Someone said, “We obviously need a regional organizer in charge of starting new chapters.” Everyone agreed. There followed an awkward silence. Someone finally asked, “Well, who wants to do it?” David Smith from Tufts spoke up, “I am willing to take it on.”⁶ He was two years older, clean cut, wearing khakis and a collared shirt. For reasons now that I cannot recall or fathom, I thought, I can do this, and said I wanted the job as well. There was another awkward silence until someone said, “Great—let’s have two of you.” And so, the group selected two regional organizers.

I look back and am amazed: I had just arrived at college, entering as a sophomore with a full academic load; I had to work at two student jobs to help pay for school and have some spending money; I was committed to organizing the SDS chapter at Harvard while pursuing “the love of my life” who was in Providence, while also helping the Day campaign and the Dudley Street Action Center—and I wanted to be one of the first unpaid regional organizers for SDS! But I was seventeen, arrogant, and sure there was nothing I could not master if I put my mind to it.

In the following months, I visited Boston College, Holy Cross, Simmons, Emmanuel, Northeastern, and BU, organizing SDS chapters. When visiting Amy, I would work with her to get SDS groups going at Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design. At new colleges, I would often start by dropping by the campus newspaper to ask if anyone was already active. Sometimes, in the smaller schools, I could go to the library and look at the due date cards to see the names of students who had checked out the books by C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse. I would check in with the campus ministry whose members almost always knew the names of activists or potential activists.

Once I had connected with them, it was often easy to convince these students to consider working with SDS. I would introduce myself as the organization’s regional organizer and ask if they had heard of us. Usually, they had. Then I would ask about them—where were they from, what were they studying, how were they finding school. Often, I would be talking with first year students. They were politically conscious, and usually they had done something to support civil rights before coming to college. They would tell me about tutoring for the Northern Student Movement, raising money for SNCC, or marching in support of a local African American organization. Often, they had protested nuclear testing.

Many of the young people I connected with to form SDS chapters came from families that approved of their activism. Some were “Red Diaper Babies” having grown up in socialist, communist, and former communist families. Others had parents who had been politically active New Deal Democrats. In those families dissenting from the prevailing political orthodoxies was not seen as unpatriotic. It was easier for young people from these families to become activists. This first generation of SDS members would soon be swamped by a much larger wave of students who came from conservative and apolitical family backgrounds.

I had learned from my organizing with Boston Action Group (BAG) and Noel’s campaign that I was not a “salesman.” I was not “selling” SDS. I was connecting. We found points of common experience to talk about. How horrified we had been at the murder of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. How shocking the betrayal of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) had been in Atlantic City. What “duck and cover” meant to us in high school. How appalled we were by the sterility of mass culture and crass consumerism. How inspired we were by Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement. Then I would work the conversation around to what they were hoping to do at college. I would listen and see what openings they provided me for making the point that there was only one multi-issue, national student organization that was working on foreign policy, civil rights and for greater student power—SDS. I would ask if they had read the Port Huron Statement and if not, I would leave them several copies, along with other literature.

Many of the young men and women I met with quickly wanted to explore putting together an SDS chapter. Often, they were already meeting with a group of like-minded students, talking about what they could do together to support civil rights or press for a larger student voice in their school. I would explain that SDS was a membership organization, but I never pushed any student to pay the two-dollar membership fee and get their SDS card. I always emphasized, “What is most important is for you to start working with us, to be part of the movement and then later on, if you want to formally join SDS, you can.”

For example, at Harvard I met David Loud, who was skeptical at first about SDS. David had just returned from a year in France. He wore a stylish cap, had a goatee, and seemed far more sophisticated than I ever could be. He was not sure SDS was left enough. I knew I would not get him to become a member right away, so I focused on the work that I knew he cared deeply about. “Don’t worry about becoming a member,” I would say. “Let’s do the work.” Soon he was engaged and went on to become a critical part of the Harvard SDS leadership and a lifelong friend.

Over the next year, small SDS chapters were formed on virtually every campus in New England. Many were helped along by Dave Smith or me but just as many started without any outside assistance.

In December of 1964, Amy and I went to New York City for our first national SDS meeting, the National Council. This gathering brought together SDS activists from all over the country. Attending were sixteen national officers, representatives of thirty-seven chapters, and almost 300 “observers” who did not have a vote but could participate in the discussions.⁷ This made this four-day gathering much larger than the previous year’s entire national convention. I was the official voting representative of Harvard-Radcliffe SDS.

The first day of the meeting was dedicated to speakers and panels, the second day to workshops, and the final two days to decision-making plenary sessions.

The first day began with welcoming speeches by Michael Harrington, the author of The Other America, the book that “discovered poverty” in America, and Paul Potter, the president of SDS. Then we swung into a panel on “Breakthroughs in Student Action” with Professor Staughton Lynd who had directed the Freedom Schools in Mississippi for Freedom Summer; Jesse Allen from Newark talking about the Newark Community Union Project, the SDS community organizing effort there; Eric Levine, a leader of SDS in Berkeley discussing the Free Speech Movement that had rocked the Bay Area; Peter Brandon of the Meat Cutters Union discussing a North Carolina Student Labor Project; and me, discussing the Day campaign and the ongoing organizing efforts that had emerged from the campaign.

I cannot remember what I said, only the excitement I felt at being part of this brilliant, passionate, moral group of young people. I thought I was mature and knew so much. I was young and knew so little. I liked everyone I met at the meeting. Yet the room was filled with tensions I did not understand, groups dividing, emotions, and arguments, like flashing schools of fish darting in the rapids, half seen. I could sense them but had no real understanding of what was happening or what was at stake.

SDS had grown out of the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), the student arm of the League for Industrial Democracy, which traced its history back to its founding in 1905 by Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Clarence Darrow.⁸ SLID was generally associated with the Socialist Party and its anticommunist, social democratic politics. The Civil Rights Movement stirred young people across the country including those in SLID. The organization changed its name to Students for a Democratic Society, fortuitously planned a conference on Human Rights in the North, which was boosted by the first round of lunch counter sit-ins. With a grant from the UAW, SDS hired Al Haber, a University of Michigan grad student, as a full-time organizer. Haber cultivated a remarkable group of student leaders at Michigan, including Bob Ross, Dick Flacks, Tom Hayden, and Sharon Jeffrey. Then he began finding leaders at other campuses.

The first generation of SDS leaders were profoundly shaped by the Civil Rights Movement and began to conceive of the organization as the Northern, white analog to SNCC.

As ferment spread through young people, SDS was one of the few multi-issue organizations that transcended single-issue efforts. Throughout the early 1960s it steadily grew. By December 1964 it had chapters on a growing number of campuses, and it also had a significant number of leaders who had graduated from college.

At the December gathering, one clear grouping was made up of the organizers who had left the campuses and moved into poor communities. The year before, SDS had recruited one hundred young people to go into neighborhoods in Northern cities to organize an “interracial movement of the poor.” These “ERAP” (Economic Research and Action Project) organizers were heavily influenced by SNCC and the twin concepts of grassroots organizing of the poor and creating “the beloved community.” A concept embraced both by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and SNCC, the beloved community was intended to describe and define both how the organizers and activists related to one another and what they sought to build “out there” in the world they sought to transform. Over time the beloved community in SNCC and then in SDS organizing came to mean decision making by consensus and nonhierarchical organizational forms where all were equal, and all were cherished, respected, and supported. It fed into the claim “there are no leaders here.”

The young people of ERAP wanted to create a community of dedicated organizers who would entrench themselves in the poor neighborhoods of the North and Midwest. They hoped to bring low-income and working-class white people into “the movement.” They lived together, worked together, grappling each day with issues of class and race and, without being as conscious of it, gender.

At the SDS National Council the ERAP organizers were led primarily by Tom Hayden. This was my first interaction with a person whose writings I had been reading and admiring for the last three years, especially his electrifying writing of travels to the front lines of Mississippi and Alabama where he had been savagely beaten. Now Tom was in Newark, New Jersey, with a group of ERAP organizers.

Throughout the meeting, Tom sat off slightly to the side or back, toothpick nonchalantly perched in the side of his mouth. Periodically he would rise, riveting the attention of the entire room and say, “Suppose we rush through the debate and ‘decide’ to do something by a vote of thirty-six to thirty-three. Will we really have decided anything?” Or “What if Robert’s Rules of Order are really a capitalist conspiracy?” After each of these oracular, haiku-like questions he would slide back to his seat.

Always attuned to Amy, sitting in the chair next to me, I quickly realized she, along with many others in the room, was quite smitten with this charismatic figure. Instantly, I was seized with a silent determination to oppose whatever Tom supported and support whatever he did not. I would like to write that at my first national SDS meeting, I was driven by incisive strategy but in truth I was steered more by a carefully concealed jealousy. I was, for all my passionate dedication to the movement, only seventeen.

Another group of the SDS leadership led by Paul Booth and Todd Gitlin was more focused on politics and campaigns. They argued for launching a campaign on the fifth anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre in which the apartheid regime of South Africa fired on a peaceful protest killing or wounding over 200 people. They suggested we target the Chase Manhattan Bank given the institution’s heavy investments there. Then, they audaciously proposed that SDS call for a first ever March on Washington to protest escalation in Vietnam. There was a subtle tension between these groups and even with other smaller subsets, which I could feel in the room but did not understand. It was all too exciting and new. In the end, the ERAP organizers largely went their own way but always remained part of SDS, as the “old guard.”

Flowing into the organization were new undergraduates, like me, from an ever-increasing number of colleges, the vanguard of a massive wave that was soon to lift the organization into a totally new dimension and level of importance. We, the new folks, were in awe of the ERAP organizers; we were inspired by Freedom Summer, the courage and stalwart morality of the MFDP who had refused to accept a token compromise urged on them by the liberal leadership of the Democratic Party.

We were equally inspired by the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley that had given us the first glimpse of what mass student action could be. Returning from Freedom Summer, activists in the Bay Area had been determined to continue their work with a campaign to end discrimination at home. The university tried to stop them from recruiting on campus, activists were arrested, and the result was the first massive student uprising of the 1960s. Just before we met in New York for the SDS meeting, 4,000 students had demonstrated, sitting in at Berkeley’s Sproul Hall. There, Free Speech leader Mario Savio, who would be one of the 800 arrested, gave a speech that captured the essence of how we all felt:

we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be … made into any product! Don’t mean … to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings! … There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.⁹

We, the fresh-faced campus representatives who came to New York for that national SDS meeting, were ready to throw our bodies upon the gears and wheels. Even if at that meeting, we represented groups that numbered less than fifty, we felt the quickening pulse of a new movement. We felt that soon we would be marching, the walls shaking.

The debate over calling for a march against the war in Vietnam was heated. At first it failed to pass. Tom was opposed, so I was passionately in favor. The ERAP organizers feared such a march would take attention away from building the interracial movement of the poor. (In the long run, they were correct. The war and our opposition to it would overwhelm all other initiatives.) There was continued wrangling. The meeting was run with a conscientious adherence to Robert’s Rules of Order. Bob Ross, who had voted against the resolution for the march, was persuaded to move reconsideration. In the end, we narrowly voted to call for the march in Washington in April to oppose the war. We also jumped at the chance to act against apartheid. We wanted a national movement, so we voted to have a national office for SDS—so long as it was not in New York where it would be in thrall to the “old left.” We refused to continue the 1950s ritual of “cleansing” our organization by prohibiting communists from participating in the march and our other activities. While we had no love for communists, we were determined to break from the Cold War mentality with its rigid and to us, simplistic insistence that every conflict was part of the struggle against communism.

Our refusal immediately led to a rupture with the anticommunist left that had been the support and birthplace of SDS. It had been bad enough that SDS had not focused on unions as the instrument for change but our failure to embrace the anticommunist positioning of the Cold War American left was fatal in their eyes. Their rejection did not bother us at all. We were happy to be on our own. We knew we had everything to learn. At the same time, we were sure the stale old left in all its variety had nothing to teach us as we strode confidently, confusedly, onto the stage of American history.

On the fourth day of the conference a young Bob Dylan came by to shyly mingle and ask if he might volunteer at an ERAP project.

By then most of us had resonated to Dylan’s words and music. “It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls, for the times they are a-changin’.” When he sang, “come mothers and fathers throughout the land, don’t criticize what you can’t understand, your sons and your daughters are beyond your command,” he was singing for us, “the old road was rapidly aging”. Soon each of us could and would shout out: “please get out of the way of the new one if you can’t lend a hand” because the times were certainly changing.

I would not be there to meet Dylan. I had received a message to call home right away. My father had experienced a massive heart attack. He was in the ICU, and it was not clear if he would live. My mother and seven-year-old brother needed me. Leaving Amy, I immediately took the bus for downtown Boston, hopped on a Green Line trolley to the Brigham Hospital and sought out my mother.

I went from the excitement of that meeting in New York to a hospital room where everything was flat and pale: the walls, the light, and my father’s suddenly papery skin as he lay in that hospital bed.

My mother was uncharacteristically quiet. She explained that the doctors said it was touch and go and my father was in critical condition. She never asked me what I had been doing in New York, and I was happy not to discuss what seemed like a different world. We sat in silence, waiting for further word from the doctor.

My father would survive this attack. And over the next decade and a half, he would be back in the hospital again three more times, each time the outcome precarious. Whenever I was called back to the hospital, time seemed to slow. I would be yanked from my life of wild possibility back into the vortex of my immediate family, sliding into the inevitable waiting room where my mother, red-eyed, tired, smoking one cigarette and lighting the next before she finished the first; my brother wide-eyed, simultaneously bored and scared; and I would wait for the doctor’s periodic pronouncements, my father would live if he survived the next so many hours… . If the operation to take part of one vein and repair the aorta worked … if he made it through the night.

The audacious decision to call for a national march against the war in Vietnam would transform SDS. While I had voted in favor of the resolution setting the date for the march as Saturday, April 17, 1965, coinciding with Easter college vacation, primarily out of jealously, I now threw myself enthusiastically into organizing for it. Throughout every college in New England, we were spreading the call. In March, President Lyndon B. Johnson had begun an unprecedented bombing campaign, Operation Rolling Thunder, dropping thousands of tons of explosives onto Vietnam every day. We had to make students feel the blasts of those bombs as they pursued their peaceful young lives on the idyllic campuses of America.

We had to explain the basic facts about Vietnam over and over. In leaflets that we would slide under every dorm room door. Over meals in dining halls. In small groups. After classes. Everywhere we could, we explained how Vietnam, after centuries as an independent country, had been colonized by the French, how then the Japanese had occupied the country during the Second World War, and how the United States had supported the resistance to the Japanese led by the communist Ho Chi Minh. Then after the defeat of the Japanese, the attempt by the French to reassert their colonial control, and the new war of independence once again led by the communists and Ho Chi Minh. The critical and misguided US support for the French all in the name of opposing communism. The 1954 Geneva Accords temporarily divided the country into north and south and promised internationally supervised free and fair national elections in a unified country in 1956. Those elections were never held because of US intervention. Over and over, we would use this quote from President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his memoir Mandate for Change:

I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader.¹⁰

We relied on I. F. Stone, the crusading left journalist who published his own weekly newsletter and who consistently documented that the administration was lying about the history, lying about its policies, lying about the South Vietnamese government it was creating, lying about having been attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin.

We educated. We listened. We organized. We produced fact sheet after fact sheet, our hands stained purple from running leaflets on Gestetner machines, our clothes splotched, black from mimeo ink.

In the month before the march, the faculty and graduate students at the University of Michigan held the first “teach-in.” Amazingly 3,000 students cycled through the prolonged event. Soon SDS and sympathetic younger faculty were organizing teach-ins at one hundred universities across the country. They were meant to be like a “sit-in,” professors, teaching fellows, and students making presentations and speeches, one after the other, hour after hour. The crowded halls were filled with couples snuggling, antiwar activists recruiting the people in the next seat over, wide-eyed freshmen from conservative families wrestling with what they were hearing, a few members of Young Americans for Freedom at the doors denouncing the whole affair as a red conspiracy, and large numbers of reporters writing furious notes and doing interviews in the hallways outside. Of course, the teach-in organized at Berkeley was the largest. Over three days more than 30,000 young people participated. That spring, opposition to the war was taking root on America’s campuses.

We expected a few thousand students to show up in Washington, DC, on April 17. Instead, 25,000 people marched that sunny day. I was thrilled that we brought 1,000 students from Boston, the men almost all in suit jackets and skinny ties, their hair short, many of the women in skirts, white socks, and ponytails. Most of the marchers were college students, but SNCC organizers marched alongside ministers and preachers. Roughly 10 percent of the march was made up of African Americans. The weather was warm and breezy. We listened to songs by Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Phil Ochs. We listened to speeches from one of the two senators who had voted against the Tonkin Resolution; we were welcomed to Washington by a small, spectacled Izzy Stone. We were excited to hear from the legendary Bob Moses of SNCC up from Mississippi. The speech of our own SDS president Paul Potter, then twenty-six, gave voice to what we thought, what we had been saying in small groups but now was being said before 25,000 people.

As I sat on the grass on that wind-whipped April Saturday, I felt a direct connection with what Paul said.

Most of us grew up thinking that the United States was a strong but humble nation, that involved itself in world affairs only reluctantly, that respected the integrity of other nations and other systems, and that engaged in wars only as a last resort … Vietnam has provided the razor, the terrifying sharp cutting edge that has finally severed the last vestige of illusion that morality and democracy are the guiding principles of American foreign policy.

Hearing that I nodded in agreement. That was exactly how I felt. I had genuinely believed in American exceptionalism, in the goodness of our nation.

Paul went on:

We must accept the consequences that calling for an end of the war in Vietnam is in fact allowing for the likelihood that a Vietnam without war will be a self‑styled Communist Vietnam … this country must come to understand that creation of a communist country in the world today is not an ultimate defeat.

Again, I felt a surge of assent as Paul continued:

I do not believe that the president or Mr. Rusk or Mr. McNamara or even McGeorge Bundy are particularly evil men. If asked to throw napalm on the back of a ten‑year‑old child, they would shrink in horror—but their decisions have led to mutilation and death of thousands and thousands of people.

What kind of system is it that allows good men to make those kinds of decisions? … What kind of system is it that disenfranchises people in the South, leaves millions upon millions of people throughout the country impoverished and excluded from the mainstream and promise of American society, that creates faceless and terrible bureaucracies and makes those the place where people spend their lives and do their work, that consistently puts material values before human values‑and still persists in calling itself free and still persists in finding itself fit to police the world?

We must name that system. We must name it, describe it, analyze it, understand it and change it … How do you stop a war then? If the war has its roots deep in the institutions of American society, how do you stop it? Do you march to Washington? Is that enough? … I believe that the administration is serious about expanding the war in Asia. The question is whether the people here are as serious about ending it.

I thought about how serious I was about ending the war. On that April afternoon, as the sun started to go low in the Washington sky, I felt determined. I had no idea that it would take us ten years—no idea of what that war would cost, not just in Indochina but at home. No concept of what we were hurtling toward and the role that march meant we would play in those next ten years. None.

The day after the March, President Johnson responded directly: “There is no human power capable of forcing us from Vietnam. We will remain as long as necessary, with the might that is required, whatever the risk and whatever the cost.”¹¹

By the end of April 1965, American troops in Vietnam reached 46,500,¹² headed to 184,000 by year’s end.¹³

After the March on Washington, SDS emerged as the leading student organization opposing the war in Vietnam. As the war became the dominant issue on American campuses, so SDS would become the dominant student movement in opposition to the American government and its policies. SDS would become a massive organization that grew faster than anyone could have expected and would, briefly, carry many of the complex aspirations and dreams of a significant part of my generation.

I had arrived at Harvard thinking I was part of birthing a New Left. It was to have been a long-term project of building around values and vision. It was to have been the political expression of a new generation, my generation, that would slowly expand what was possible in American politics. I knew it would take years, decades even, but I was filled with hope and expectations.

In fact, I had embarked on something quite different. I did not realize it at the time, but I had started down a ten-year effort to do something that had never happened before in American history: force our nation to stop a war.

My next decade would be consumed by that struggle. I would learn how to organize sit-ins and marches and even riots. I would be part of a massive movement not for a new vision of America but in opposition to the war in Vietnam. In that crucible of fevered resistance, we would sway the nation, topple a president, ultimately help end the war, and change the American campus forever. But at what cost? As the antiwar effort consumed us, we would lose the optimism and vision that animated us in 1964. And the incandescent heat of the experience would warp our souls.