Writer on the Storm

Former New Left leader Carl Oglesby on the '60s, his old friend Hillary Clinton, and the dream of a left-libertarian alliance

Bill Kauffman from the April 2008 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

Reason: Did the Weathermen and SDS contain many federal agents provocateur?

Oglesby: Many? Who knows. Some, certainly. If there were no agents among us, then as taxpayers we would be well within our rights to demand to know why not!

I don’t think anybody ever objected to surveillance. People assumed that surveillance would exist; you just had to live with it. People were also willing to assume that surveillance would be honest, and that the government would not create, out of whole cloth, a pattern of abuses that it could attribute to us and use against us in the courts of public opinion and of law to destroy us. That was playing dirty.

I was not one of the first to see that the government played dirty. It took me a while to come to terms with that—if I ever did. My thought was, let the informers inform. If they’re honest, what they’ll inform is that we were an open, democratic organization with no hook-up to any foreign groups, no hook-up to the Communist Party. If you establish that, everything else is inconsequential.

But I was naive. The government had its own reasons for wanting to destroy SDS. We were messing up their plans, and they didn’t like us. So they did what they thought they needed to do to tear us up. That’s one of the reasons the Weathermen formed. I wouldn’t be surprised if the government had something to do with the Weathermen. [Johnson adviser] McGeorge Bundy said that the best thing they had going for them was the “violent doves.” It was to the government’s advantage if SDS undertook violent tactics: It turned the public against us, and it opened up the gates on police action.

Reason: In Ravens in the Storm, you recount a series of fascinating exchanges with Dohrn. “I’m not sure I know where you’re coming from,” says Dohrn. To which you reply, “Ann Arbor, Kent, Akron, Kalamazoo.” Not to frame the question too tendentiously, but did you represent a kind of hopefulness about America, while Dohrn and the Weathermen had given up on the place?

Oglesby: I had more faith in the country’s system, its decision-making apparatus. I had more faith in democracy. The Weathermen lost faith in democracy, if they ever had it. They decided that in America, democracy was a kind of ruse. I never agreed with them about that. They were convinced that no good decision was ever going to be made by appeals to American democracy, and so they tried to step into that moral gap with a set of decisions that they’d already reached. From then on, that was that. The decision to take up weapons, to become violent—that was not a democratically reached decision. Nobody ever put that to a vote. Obviously there would be special difficulties in debating something like that in a open organization. But there was never any particular constituency that was formed or sought out on the question of political violence.

Reason: There is a tension in your book in your exchanges with Bernardine Dohrn. Were the two of you ever an item?

Oglesby: We were very close.

Reason: Romantically linked?

Oglesby: What can I say? We were very close. But those were days in which a lot of people were serially linked. It was a period of open if not blatant sexuality. I was never her only squeeze. She was never mine. My marriage had broken up, so I was kind of a loose cannon.

Reason: You’ve said that the SDS “had the best parties, the prettiest girls.” When did the Left lose its sense of fun?

Oglesby: A good benchmark would be the explosion that killed Terry and Diana and Teddy. There was, as you can imagine, an enormous sense of loss and shock when they killed themselves. The Weathermen didn’t give up on violence after that. They just tried to be more careful in how they used their dynamite.

Reason: A young Hillary Rodham is said to have read with avidity an essay of yours in a magazine for Methodist youth. As a result, some of the dimmer bulbs on the anti-Hillary right assert that she was “deeply influenced” by the “Marxist/Maoist theoretician Carl Oglesby.” First, are you now, or have you ever been, a Marxist/Maoist theoretician?

Oglesby: I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me! No, that’s just slinging mud.

Reason: Tell us about your relationship, as it were, with Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Oglesby: It was a friendship, a comradeship, within the context of the movement. She and I, for a while, were warm with each other. She and I were semi-close. I always liked her. I thought she was bright and had a lot to say. A friend of mine mentioned me to her not long ago, and according to him she got a case of the shakes. I think it was because she could imagine if any of her considerable enemies on the right wanted to do her in they would be happy to discover a relationship between her and me. Especially given this lie that I was a “Maoist.” I mean, no way! I was the last thing from a Maoist!

Comments

|3.26.08 @ 12:48PM|#

Carl reinvents himself 40 years later! Two friends who attended the 1968 SDS convention returned to tell me that the Maoists had taken over the SDS. They said this in triumph, as they were quite sympathetic to that point of view. (I was disappointed. I had hoped the New Left might get beyond that.) They said Oglesby was the chief Maoist and had manipulated his own riseto power. Carl had no real organizer's skills, and he lost heart in the New Left with the death of his friends. The SDS did not fail due to the Weathermen, but because Carl seized power and then lost heart.

I'm willing to believe that he is now a Libertarian, but there is no way he expressed that point of view then. The whole SDS Convention knew he was a Maoist, and he never denied it in 1968.

Jesse Walker|3.26.08 @ 12:55PM|#

Two friends who attended the 1968 SDS convention returned to tell me that the Maoists had taken over the SDS. They said this in triumph, as they were quite sympathetic to that point of view. (I was disappointed. I had hoped the New Left might get beyond that.) They said Oglesby was the chief Maoist and had manipulated his own riseto power. Carl had no real organizer's skills, and he lost heart in the New Left with the death of his friends.

Carl Oglesby was SDS chief from 1965 to 1966, not in 1968. And the Greenwich Village deaths didn't happen until 1970.

Episiarch|3.26.08 @ 12:58PM|#

Now I don't know what to believe!

Jesse Walker|3.26.08 @ 12:59PM|#

I think Blaupanzer is confusing Carl Oglesby with Carl Davidson, another SDS activist (and a bona fide Maoist).

Episiarch|3.26.08 @ 1:03PM|#

Well, in all of their defense, they were probably pretty high at the time.

Paul|3.26.08 @ 1:06PM|#

"humanistic individualism and voluntaristic associational action."

So he wasn't exactly immune from the jargon-riddled patois of the 60's.

Paul|3.26.08 @ 1:16PM|#

Whatever decision gets made, it should be democratic. It was on that basis that SDS cut through the whole argument about socialism vs. capitalism. We simply said that whatever economic formation we adopted should be adopted democratically and openly.

Could this be the core of what ultimately turned out so wrong with the left? That they saw an opportunity to make economics itself democratically controlled, and thus we now have the world where the left believes that things like property rights should democratized?

|3.26.08 @ 1:16PM|#

Episiarch,

Maoist movement high.

Episiarch|3.26.08 @ 1:19PM|#

Maoist movement high.

Is that the extreme altitude high you get when you invade Tibet?

Jesse Walker|3.26.08 @ 1:22PM|#

I think it was a song by Bizarro-World John Denver.

|3.26.08 @ 1:26PM|#

And it's Jesse for the win. Though Episiarch's answer adds a nice nuance to the whole tune.

Maoist mountain high.
Damned Dalai Lama. Maoist mountain high.

|3.26.08 @ 1:27PM|#

"I think Blaupanzer is confusing Carl Oglesby with Carl Davidson, another SDS activist (and a bona fide Maoist)."

Jesse may be right. After 40 years, maybe all the Carls blend together in my head. I still do not recall any SDSers who were in agreement with Goldwater (i.e., libertarians) in Oglesby's period of time.

Episiarch|3.26.08 @ 1:29PM|#

Bizarro-World John Denver am me favorite singer-songwriter.

|3.26.08 @ 1:30PM|#

Is that the same Carl who blew up Bushwood under questionable circumstances? I didn't know that was politically motivated.

Jesse Walker|3.26.08 @ 1:51PM|#

After 40 years, maybe all the Carls blend together in my head. I still do not recall any SDSers who were in agreement with Goldwater (i.e., libertarians) in Oglesby's period of time.

I've read enough of Oglesby's '60s stuff to know that he wasn't a 100% pure libertarian on every issue. His basic values were solid, though, and he didn't have any totalitarian tendencies; I would be very surprised to learn it if he was carrying a torch for Chairman Mao.

He also got more libertarian as he got older. Indeed, the one time I actually met him, in 1991, was at a Libertarian Party convention. We sat at the same table during a Ron Paul speech that blew Oglesby away.

|3.26.08 @ 2:10PM|#

If I remember rightly Karl Hess joined the SDS.

And he wrote speeches for Goldwater.

|3.26.08 @ 2:21PM|#

Mind you, I'm also pretty sure that Karl was pretty much an outlier in the organization.

Kolohe|3.26.08 @ 2:49PM|#

Ah, 'Students for a Democratic Society.' Worse misnomer since the Holy Roman Empire.

|3.26.08 @ 2:53PM|#

Whenever I imagine what it would had been like to be a part of the group of twentysomething radicals in The Weathermen, I just imagine what it would be like if all of my idiot twentysomething friends, people who can't even keep a rock band together, where to gang together and try to overthrow the government.

|3.26.08 @ 5:25PM|#

"Ah, 'Students for a Democratic Society.' Worst misnomer since the Holy Roman Empire."

It wasn't a ridiculous misnomer until the Maoists took over. For a brief moment, the Left almost got reinvented as a democratic movement -- "overcome the republic by becoming even more democratic." This direction did not serve either the Socialists (read: those of the New Right by the later era under Bushes I and II) or the government (read: all organizations in that 60's era were viewed as either for the current system or as representing "evil Communists" (an unnecessary redundency)). One way or the other the ideals fell to be replaced by the intelligence guys' nightmare.

|3.26.08 @ 5:31PM|#

From what I understand, it was Oglesby who brought the communist factions into SDS by removing the organization's anti-communism stance.

|3.26.08 @ 5:33PM|#

You've got to remember that SDS was a very new organization, and the fact that I had just come in the door was not unique; a lot of people were in the same position. There had been a movement to get rid of the national officers on the grounds that to have a president, a vice president, a national secretary, was inherently elitist. I spoke against that, saying that SDS was going to be a part of the world and needed to have spokespeople it could hold to account. That position won out, somebody nominated me for president, and the winner turned out to be me.

That's interesting; the current SDS has no national leadership and operate on a commune/co-op kind of structure, even when it comes to local chapters. I'd say that the former would be better for the reasons he said.

Gene Berkman|3.26.08 @ 5:43PM|#

Carl Oglesby was a featured speaker in 1970 @ the "Left Right Festival of Liberation" sponsored by the California Libertarian Alliance. His speech was well delivered, although I am not sure what the substantive points were.

Carl hung out both days of the convention, and on Monday hung out with Karl Hess (our other featured speaker) and some of the organizers. He was still developing his thoughts, but clearly in a libertarian direction. And he was not in any way a Maoist.

I met Karl Hess originally at the 1969 YAF National Convention, and he showed me his SDS membership card. Then following the 1970 CLA conference, he joined the IWW at a party with a group of anarchists.

economist|3.26.08 @ 7:53PM|#

I have none of Oglesby's faith in democracy.

|3.26.08 @ 9:49PM|#

Also, a while ago I asked some old SDS members whatever their was a libertarian presence within SDS and one of them said "fuck no."
All three of them were Marxists, so I'd guess by the end of SDS came, the libertarians where completely ousted.

Matt|3.27.08 @ 10:49AM|#

"The decision to take up weapons, to become violent-that was not a democratically reached decision."

So according to theses liberals, the violence was fine if there had been a vote.

The Founders understood democracy was bad because it would not protected the rights of the individual. Liberals are ALWAYS trying to confuse these principles. References in this article: Democracy - 13, Freedom - 0, Liberty - 0.