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 4 of 5)

Reason: Did you see her when she was first lady?

Oglesby: I wouldn’t begin to be in touch with her now. I know what her enemies would do with a piece of information like that. They would defame me and defame her. There’s no point in it.

Reason: Is there today within her a trace of New Left anti-imperialism?

Oglesby: You got me. I don’t know much about her positions. What I think I know about Hillary Clinton is that she is honest and she’s good-hearted. She’s smart and she has lots of energy and she’s tough. I’m all for her. It’s too bad she and Barack Obama are having a faceoff. Both are good people. But she’s my guy.

Reason: Your own odyssey into American radicalism seems to have begun on November 22, 1963. Had Kennedy not been shot, do the ’60s and the New Left happen?

Oglesby: I don’t think so. If Kennedy is not shot, I think there’s not a Vietnam War and there is more energy put into civil rights. So to the extent that the movement of the ’60s was about the Vietnam War and civil rights more than any two issues, I would have to say that it was the assassination of JFK that swung that door open—or closed.

Reason: In The Yankee and Cowboy War, you theorized that “JFK was killed by a rightist conspiracy formed out of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, the Syndicate, and a Cowboy oligarchy, supported by renegade CIA and FBI agents.” Thirty years later, is that still your view?

Oglesby: These days I wouldn’t be so detailed. I still believe in the basic split between the Yankees and the Cowboys. The South, as it continually promised, is rising again. That’s a lot of what Bush is about.

Reason: But Bush is descended from Yankees.

Oglesby: He’s tried to adopt the Cowboy look. He is a Yankee, went to all the Yankee schools, had Yankee money in his blood. He goes to Texas, buys himself a pair of cowboy boots and a Stetson hat, and tries to speak with a bit of a drawl. He’s a phony. He’s a bad actor. He’s no more a cowboy than you or I—probably a good deal less. But his handlers grasped that there is a basic collision between the neo-Union and the neo-Confederacy. The Civil War is not over; its issues continue to echo. Bush II emerges from that process. He is a Cowboy, as I use that term, and represents the movement of the Confederacy from the East to the West.

Reason: Do you buy the Oliver Stone thesis that JFK was a late-blooming peacenik who was planning to extricate us from Vietnam, and that LBJ was somehow implicated in the assassination?

Oglesby: I think all those things are possible. Least likely is that LBJ was involved in any positive role. He wouldn’t have had to be. His people would have been able to make a decision to promote him to the presidency without any special advice from him. The Yankee and Cowboy war continues, and the JFK assassination was part of it. The JFK side—the neo-Union side—achieved a great deal in the way of a holding action in stamping out the original desire to depict Lee Harvey Oswald as a Soviet agent. If that doesn’t work, Oswald becomes the cause of World War III. If Oswald is tied to the Soviet Union, there is a cause of war. The assassination of a head of state by another state is a classical casus belli. Whoever was managing things around the Warren Commission did a good job in keeping that theory out.

The price of it was that Oswald had to be depicted as a loner—and that’s where so many lies and half-truths got drawn into the story. But better put up with a few lies and half-truths as to Oswald’s identity than to have him linked to the Soviet Union as an agent, which would drag the world into a nuclear war.

Reason: Just to clarify: You don’t believe that Oswald was a Soviet agent?

Oglesby: No, not at all.

Reason: You released two albums, Carl Oglesby (1969) and Going to Damascus (1971). Tell me about that period.

Oglesby: I started writing songs because I was no longer able to write plays. I had been a playwright before the movement came along. I’d written four plays that had been produced, the last being The Peacemaker, about the Hatfield-McCoy feud as a mirror onto the Civil War. It was about a historical character named William Dyke Garrett who tried to broker a peace between the Hatfield clan and the McCoy clan in the period after the Civil War. His wife, Sally, thought that he was doomed to fail and that the wisest thing to do was get out of that country and head west. He goes through a big crisis of conscience and decides that he can’t leave these people to the small war that they’re about to have with each other in the Appalachians. The Hatfield-McCoy feud did take place. Probably 50 to 60 people were killed over a handful of years. When I wrote that play there was a silly song: “The Hatfields and McCoys/Those feudin’ mountain boys.” Nobody took it seriously. You had to stop and reimagine it. These were real people who were shooting real bullets at each other. Was William Dyke Garrett right or just foolish to stay in the country and try to keep the shooting from starting?

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.

|3.1.10 @ 11:59PM|#

Hey I was in the Akron and Cleveland summer collectives with the KSU sds and then onto the Days of Rage- agree it was the JK,MLK, RFK shootings that mobilized us and I was in it for civil rights as my Akron Peace corps buddy JoeV

|3.31.11 @ 12:50AM|#

Carl Oglesby, Karl Hess and Tom Hayden spoke at the Left/Right Conference I attended @ USC in 1970. It was both leftist SDS and YAF / libertarian; and they agreed. They asked us to stay in school and get our degrees and teach - the goal was to initiate a long-term plan to "Change" America --- take over America via teaching the young people marxist ways .... which is exactly what's happened.
I ended up dropping out but it was eye-opening as I came to start my own business and saw just how the world works .....

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