Epilogue

From the Vantage of Fifty Years

As I write these words, I am now further removed from the events of the 1960s than I was in 1964 from World War I, which then seemed unimaginably ancient history.

So much has changed in these fifty-plus years. Today there is an American Chamber of Commerce in the city that used to be named Saigon.¹ The old Soviet Union collapsed. Communist parties around the world imploded, transformed, or disappeared. The Chinese economy has grown into a juggernaut with a new form of state capitalism, with all the voraciousness and vitality of capitalism but with none of the liberal democratic forms associated with capitalism in the West.

Now young Vietnamese line up to enter McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Starbucks, Pizza Hut, and Burger King; one can buy a cold Coca-Cola in Hanoi.² Nike makes Air Jordan sneakers in Vietnamese factories, employing the granddaughters of those who fought us.³ In a neighborhood where once tens of thousands of American GIs strolled the streets, workers at the Danu Vina factory turn out plush Mickey and Minnie Mouse dolls for Disney.⁴

US Navy ships make calls to Danang and Ho Chi Minh City. In the wake of anti-Chinese riots across Vietnam, and Chinese activity in the South China Sea, the US 7th Fleet suggested that it should make more stops in Vietnam.⁵ In 2018 the US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson steamed into the port of Da Nang, welcomed by Vietnamese leaders. In the following days 6,000 American sailors engaged in “community service projects” in Da Nang and the 7th Fleet Band conducted free concerts.⁶ In September 2023, Vietnam elevated its diplomatic relationship with the United States to its highest level, a “comprehensive strategic relationship.”⁷

Coke. Plush Minnie Mouse dolls. The second fastest growing economy in Asia. Anti-Chinese riots. A close diplomatic relationship created in large part by concern about China. In 1964 anyone suggesting that a North Vietnamese victory would lead to this future would have been a candidate for a mental asylum.

During the war, we were told endlessly that failure to win in Vietnam inevitably meant that one domino after another would fall to communist aggression, threatening the security of America. That has been proved wrong. The dominoes that did fall fell instead to the powerful forces of global economics, culture, and technology.

From the vantage point of fifty years, some things are clear. The war that our leaders waged in our name, with our young men’s lives, with the riches of our land, was the wrong war at the wrong time and in the wrong place.

History has shown that the basic world view that was the rationale for the Vietnam War was simply wrong. The world was and is a far more complex and nuanced place.

The Second World War ruptured the tectonic plates of history. While most American political leaders focused on the lessons of Munich (“appeasement”), the war cracked open space for strong independence movements in former colonies around the world. One of those was the French colony of Vietnam. We can never know what might have happened if the United States had continued to embrace the communist-led independence forces after World War II as it had when those forces fought the Japanese occupation. There is no way of knowing whether the Vietnamese Communist Party might have been even more of a maverick than Yugoslavia’s party. The brief but very real Sino-Vietnamese war of 1979 certainly suggests that possibility.

The fact that the communist leaders of Vietnam, emerging from three extraordinarily bloody decades of revolution and war, were not, and are not, democratic does not change the fact that our country should never have prosecuted that war.

With all the benefits of hindsight, would I try again to create opposition to that war? Absolutely! But I hope we would be smarter and better. There is no question that our movement against the war mattered. It was a critical factor in driving Lyndon B. Johnson to reject his generals’ request for more troops, not to run again, and to start peace negotiations. Richard Nixon was obsessed with the antiwar movement. We now know that the antiwar movement was a constant constraint stopping him from ever more outlandish escalations. Without the movement Nixon and Henry Kissinger might well have used nuclear weapons.⁸ While we made mistakes, our efforts mattered.

The war destroyed so much. In that long list of losses, I count our original vision of a New Left, our political innovation, and our innocence. The politics of our country became distorted and fractured. In so many ways, in the admirable effort to end that war, we lost much of what was best in ourselves.

In a short time, we experienced the unimaginable: we went from a tiny band of the scorned to leaders of demonstrations of hundreds of thousands. We saw the war escalate and escalate, witnessed violence unceasing and unimaginable, and it felt as if we were the only ones there to stop it. We became the leaders of a massive youth insurrection at a time when all around the world, young people were shaking the foundations of society. And throughout, we were so incredibly young. That youth gave us our energy, our passion, and our ability to think in new ways. But it also meant we lacked a grasp of strategy and a mature understanding of how to succeed at the enormously difficult tasks we set for ourselves.

I know that many of my friends from those days will not like my account of our failures. I have read many books by former activists that let us off the hook of historical judgment. There is a great desire to either ignore the craziness that gripped so many of us in 1968, 1969, and 1970 or to see it as somehow a product of government repression, manipulation, agent provocateurs, and infiltration.

Indeed, there is now a well-documented history of how the government launched covert operations targeting both the civil rights and student movements. In the FBI’s massive Counterintelligence Program, J. Edgar Hoover did order his agents to “expose, discredit, neutralize and otherwise eliminate” the activists of the Civil Rights Movement, the antiwar movement, and the New Left.⁹ That did happen. It was serious. It was often illegal. There were undercover informants; there were agent provocateurs who promoted internal division and urged extremism.

However, to think that the craziness that overcame the student New Left was primarily the product of government infiltration is just not accurate. John Maher didn’t accuse me of “objectively” working for the CIA because of government agents in the movement—although I am sure that those agents were happy to amplify such charges. The Weatherman in the New York townhouse didn’t plan to bomb the dance at Fort Dix because some government provocateur seduced them into it.

Our youth and the wild ride of those years drove us. Guilt hung heavy. Guilt that we had not ended the war. Guilt that many of us could avoid the draft. Guilt over the many privileges provided us by the very systems we so passionately wanted to change.

Too many New Left leaders careened off the tracks of reality. I saw talented, brilliant friends of mine whose political journey started with a profound rejection of the old left’s idolatry of foreign leaders and foreign countries, fall into a parody of all that they had rejected. Our intellectual journey had been launched by studying C. Wright Mills, Marcuse, Jefferson, and Emerson, by exploring American moral traditions, looking for new ways of extending and reinvigorating democracy. By 1969 too often that journey descended into deranged dogmas, secular cults, and a glorification of violence.

It is unlikely that even a sane New Left could have stopped the rise of the vicious conservative counterreformation that dominated the next fifty years of American politics. Once the voting rights bill had been signed, it would not have been possible to stop the consolidation of the white South into a Republican Party on its long march to becoming the party of white grievance, the party of Donald Trump. Equally there is probably little that in the end could have stopped the political and ideological mobilization of the insanely rich.

Still there could have been a more serious, intellectually rigorous, politically relevant resistance.

Counterfactual history is always a subjective, unprovable option. What would our history have been without assassinations? What would have happened had John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy lived? What might have developed had Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis crisscrossed the country in 1968 encouraging us to run insurgent antiwar candidates rather than demonstrate in Chicago? What would have happened if Hubert Humphrey had won in 1968 because, instead of his dogged support for the war, he had denounced it? Or if the antiwar movement had decisively mobilized young voters against Nixon? Or if Johnson had aggressively prosecuted Nixon and Kissinger for treasonously sabotaging the Paris peace negotiations?¹⁰

What could have happened had the New Left matured, not shattered but instead had made a long march through America’s institutions, changing cities, media, businesses, and politics?

In the end, the answer is, of course, unknowable.

Many veterans of SDS and the New Left kept working and work to this day for social justice and economic reform. Many have stayed true to their values, lived moral lives, made countless contributions to decency. I could compile a long list of those people; they have my admiration and deep respect.

Yet many more of my generation set off on a long march through society’s institutions as individuals. While we had an impact on those institutions, the institutions had a much greater impact on us, deflecting us from the path of serious seekers of change. We failed to challenge the extreme concentration of wealth, the poisonous increase in inequality. We failed to make the threat of climate change a political cause that could not be ignored years ago when there was still time to prevent the worst damage. And of course, tragically, we failed to vanquish the racism that, along with extreme inequality, deforms our politics and degrades our society.

Just as it is tantalizing to think how a successful New Left from the 1960s might have shaped the last fifty years of our nation’s history, it is tempting for me to think about the populist road not taken. What if, instead of becoming a party focused on elites, the Democratic Party, or at least major forces within it, had taken up a progressive populism in the vein of Mass Fair Share? Where once it claimed to be the party of the common man, until very recently the Democratic Party was enthralled with elites. That those elites included university presidents, Hollywood actors and even a few writers, does not alter the fact that much of the Democratic agenda was shaped by the interests of the rich and powerful, the titans of tech, bank CEOs, and hedge fund managers.

That embrace occurred while the elites set the rules for a period of accelerated globalization of the economy. Democrats under Bill Clinton, and to an extent under Barack Obama, were as complicit as the Republicans in supporting ever more mobility for capital and allowing American corporations to dramatically lower costs by moving production abroad. Domestically, Democrats, as well as Republicans, worked to slash regulations, allow for ever more financial speculation, and did not vehemently fight the weakening of unions.¹¹ The elites failed to evince the slightest concern for the impact of these policies on vast swaths of America as factories closed, towns withered, and incomes decreased or stagnated. The result has been extreme income inequality, the hollowing out of the heartland, the ruin of many families.

Intertwined with all this has been the infusion of ever larger sums of money into our politics. In an effort to roll back the tides of the sixties, corporate interests and the wealthy poured money into Republican campaigns. By 1980 there was a clear imbalance. Republicans had won the campaign fundraising arms race. Democratic Congressman Tony Coelho proved that Democrats could compete. There was a new generation of elites who had come of age in the 1960s. They were more sympathetic to Democrats on social issues and, so long as one acquiesced to their economic agenda, they were willing to write large checks. Soon Democratic candidates were spending most of their days dialing for dollars—and talking with the wealthy. Steadily the Democratic economic agenda shifted. Democrats embraced “free trade” and failed to fight against the depredations of unfettered globalism. More and more Democrats supported deregulation and the economy of speculation.

Add to all this the lasting white backlash to the Civil Rights Movement, a wave of new immigrants, and the growth of radical connectivity and social media. The result has been the growth of an ugly populism of the right. It is reminiscent of other past populist moments and leaders: Father Charles Coughlin, Huey Long, George Wallace. America has a long history of populist xenophobia—the Know Nothings, the movements that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Mexican Deportation Act, the endless waves of racism directed at immigrants and, again and again at Black people first brought to this country in chains. Populism has now become identified with demagoguery, extremism, and white supremacy.

However, there is a significant, if troubled, history of a different sort of American populism. Its most vivid expression came in the People’s Party of the 1890s, which campaigned against the banks, plutocrats, the railroads, and the elites. Rooted in agrarian communities in the Midwest and South, this populism rested on a foundation of organic organizations such as the Farmers Alliance. The populist third party in the presidential election of 1892 received 8.5 percent of the popular vote and carried five midwestern and western states. In the congressional elections of 1894, populists took 10 percent of the vote. These populists considered themselves part of the left, often allied with labor and in league with the Socialist Party. In the South they self-consciously organized alliances of Black and white farmers.¹²

The troubled aspect of that legacy is best represented by Tom Watson. In the 1890s he was famous as a leader of the populists, urging Black and white farmers in the South to fight together against “the money power.” In 1890 he was elected to Congress and was able to pass the legislation that created Rural Free Delivery, which meant that families in rural areas no longer had to travel miles to get mail and parcels or pay private carriers. However, in Georgia the conservatives mobilized to suppress the votes of Black people. Watson was defeated for reelection. While early in his career, he had been famous for his support for Black farmers, for supporting Black people’s right to vote, and for his vociferous opposition to lynching, in his later years Watson became equally vociferous attacking Black people, Catholics, and Jews and campaigning to protect a white Protestant America.¹³

Those of us who emerged from the New Left to become organizers of Mass Fair Share sought to create a new populism of the left. We recognized the beginnings of a profound process that has indeed played out over the last forty years. A large segment of the population, especially those who had no college education, faced new challenges; their incomes stagnated and then declined, their social world collapsing. It was clear that they would feel betrayed and could fall prey to demagogues. Or possibly they could be organized to see the sources of their problems as rooted in the growing inequality of wealth and power and could be organized to band together with people of different races and ethnicities who had long experienced the same inequality. We sensed it would be one or the other: the demagogues of the right or a progressive populism.

Mass Fair Share briefly showed that progressive populism was possible. It demonstrated that the appeal of such a populism went beyond the blue-collar and low-income neighborhoods and could create a remarkable suburban–urban political force. It showed that even in the wake of the racist backlash to court ordered school busing, it was possible to bring Black and white families together around a common economic justice agenda. Sadly, we were not capable of leading Fair Share through its massive growth, and we were not able to leave that political heritage for our children and grandchildren.

In recent years, the amazing response to police killings of unarmed African Americans has taken me back to my days in the Civil Rights Movement. For many in my generation, before the war in Vietnam shoved everything aside, the Civil Rights Movement was the defining moral issue. Yet we were not able to move from the success of ending legal segregation to realize full racial justice. The clearest evidence of this is the relentless racial disparity in household income and even more, the extreme racial wealth gap. The typical white household has ten times the net worth of the typical Black household.¹⁴

The cause of this is clear: one hundred years of policies and laws that prevented African Americans from gaining access to the same home ownership that was provided for white people. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans Administration (VA) aggressively promoted housing segregation. The postwar GI Bill that was so critical to the families of millions of white veterans, effectively excluded most of the 1.2 million Black veterans. The massive postwar boom in suburbs excluded Black families who were confined to inner-city ghettos. Explicit racially restrictive covenants, as well as the segregation policies of the VA loan guarantee program and other federal programs, denied home ownership to Black families.¹⁵

Without access to the new, affordable housing in the suburbs and restricted to racially segregated inner-city neighborhoods, Black families experienced a long-lasting wealth gap. While the Civil Rights Movement successfully ended legal segregation, it failed to redress the economic impact and betrayals of Black Americans that started with Reconstruction and continued through to the 1960s.

The heroic Civil Rights Movement that so inspired my first forays in activism spun apart in the late 1960s. The murder of key leaders played an important role: Evers, King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, and more, all murdered. The FBI’s virulent campaign to undermine Black leaders. The turn to Black Nationalism. The enormous white backlash. The unrelenting racism and threats. The movement could not sustain an assault on the key systems of economic injustice: the segregated housing system, the decline of good-paying blue-collar jobs, the resegregation of school systems.

Now we have a Supreme Court determined to roll back so many of the hard-won gains, eager to strike down any race-specific solutions such as affirmative action. It is useful to remember that this is not the first time the court has acted in ways that should not be followed. In 1857 the court ruled that Americans of African descent, whether free or slave, were not citizens and could not sue in federal court. In 1883, despite the very clear language of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, the court nullified the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had outlawed discrimination in hotels, trains, and other public spaces. Those amendments are still part of the Constitution. There is no practical or legal way to remedy race-specific crimes without race-specific solutions.

Today the politics of the nation remain as polarized around race as at any point in my lifetime. White grievance is essential to the political forces working to undermine our democracy. While it is a hard time to continue the work of racial justice, it is an absolute imperative if we are to save American democracy.

America has been experiencing its fourth great wave of immigration. Over the last forty years thirty million legal immigrants have moved to the United States. Eighty percent of those immigrants came from Latin America and Asia.¹⁶ This wave of immigration, like those that preceded it, has been essential to the country’s economic growth and prosperity.

Before 1965, the United States had no numerical limits on immigration from any country in the Americas. Each year more than 500,000 Mexicans came across the border to work in the United States. Many returned South through the porous border. In 1965, legal immigration was capped. In 1986, as articulated by President Ronald Reagan, the Immigration Reform and Control Act was an attempt to curb the immigrant “invasion.” The Southern border was militarized and enforcement dramatically beefed up. Still there was a constant inflow of people seeking work, many of whom have ended up staying in the United States, producing our estimated eleven million undocumented immigrants.¹⁷

Over this period the Republican Party, once the “party of Lincoln,” became the party of white voters. For the last fifty years every Republican presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote.¹⁸ Race has remained the central fault line in American politics. As the country changes, Republicans have used all the undemocratic aspects of the system (the US Senate, the electoral college), along with gerrymandering, and stealing Supreme Court appointments, to work for minority rule.

Those of my generation who were so inspired by the Civil Rights Movement still believe in racial justice. But over these last fifty years we have failed to fight for it. Many like me have moved to almost all-white suburbs. We did not oppose mass incarceration. In our pursuit of comfortable lives, and our fixation on our own children, all too often we have forgotten children not our own. Once again, the country finds itself with the moral imperative to dismantle the deeply rooted systems of racism. Once again, we need more than words. Even more than protests. We need to put a stake through the heart of white supremacy and finally redress decades of segregation and racial injustice.

Over these fifty years I have often found myself pondering leadership, both my own experience of leading, and the culture and practice of leadership. In the student movement we were profoundly confused about the role of leaders. Surrounded by examples of command and control, top-down leadership, we rejected leadership all together. “We have no leaders” was a common refrain.

That was nonsense. Every social movement and every organization has leaders, formal or informal. The question is not whether we have leaders, but whether we have good leaders, leaders who empower others, who build successors, who are accountable. In SDS, the confusion over leadership inhibited our effectiveness, allowing young, arrogant men like me to lead without being accountable. All too often we lacked both the structures, and the culture needed for a democratic leadership that would build lasting organization. Leadership structures and a culture that promotes the intentional development of new leaders are important for any insurgent democratic movement. It is especially important for student organizations where every four years, older leaders cycle out and every year new people cycle in.

I loved being a leader. I loved inspiring people, helping them see what they could accomplish together. I loved the aspects of leadership that involved teaching and the development of others.

And of course, I came to love the power that comes from changing people’s lives. It is intoxicating stuff.

For many years I exercised a furious will—we will do more; we will achieve the unexpected. My relentless drive, my furious will, my ever increasingly transactional approach, all combined to hollow me out and drain me.

I never thoughtfully engaged with the flaws in my own leadership practice. I look back over all these years, and I see a young man who believed deeply in empathy, in empowering others but who was consumed by stopping the war, by achieving great things, by fighting for justice.

It certainly did not help that the deep antiauthoritarian and individualistic culture of our movements threw up unending resistance to those who led. There was a constant stream of criticism and harsh personal attacks. Looking back, I am struck that we never engaged the question of how we might sustain and nourish our leaders.

A changed America, of course, demands a changed politics. The crises we face today include new challenges that our past movements did not anticipate. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the inequalities, the racial disparities, and the problem of disinformation. Climate change is now a profound threat to the future. The concentration of wealth and power has reached an extreme we could not have imagined. New technologies are profoundly altering how most Americans get information. We live in a period where more information is more easily available to more people from more sources than ever in human history. We also live in a period where disinformation and willful falsehoods are warping millions of Americans’ perceptions of reality.

It is not easy to marry the just demands for racial and gender equity with a populism that embraces those left behind and left out. Not easy, but it is possible. Indeed, we are now seeing some signs of it.

The reaction to Trumpism has produced a new wave of activism. It has not yet cohered but its signs are everywhere: defending women’s rights, pushing back against extreme economic inequality, demanding action on climate, mobilizing against attacks on immigrants and people of color. Union organizing has increased. Workers are more willing to strike. While our politics are often dominated by the effort of the old men of the Republican Party to create the conditions for minority rule, increasingly the young, people of color, and infuriated women are resisting.

Despite the profound changes of the last fifty years, I see some of the same dynamics as when I was young. A small group of old white men clinging desperately to power. The ongoing failure of the country to face up to the systems of racism that have settled bone deep in the land. And young people whose futures are at stake. Young people who want to live lives that have meaning and value, who want to be able to have a stake in shaping the decisions that will determine their lives.

Now looking around at America after those five decades, I am struck by how much I still believe in young people. When I am hopeful about our nation, it is because of our young people. They will fight for their futures. I believe that. And in fighting for their futures, they will make America a more decent, tolerant, democratic, creative country. They will force the country to deal with climate change. They will fight for racial equity. They will struggle against extreme economic inequality. They will win back reproductive freedom. They will challenge foreign misadventures. They will work to reinvigorate democracy. Even in the darkest times, they will continue the hard work of hope. That they will struggle to shape the future is a given. That they will succeed remains an open question. I hope they can learn something from my experiences, from my many mistakes. This book is, in the end, dedicated to them.