This interview was done for The Bill of Rights Journal. At the time, Oglesby, the former president of SDS, was a freelance writer, living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I was in Ann Arbor working in the defense industry in the late 50s and early 60s. During that same time, I was also a playwright and a novelist. I'd come home from work and put on a black turtleneck sweater and became a basic beatnik. I wrote plays that actually did get produced. Who knows, if I kept on writing, my life could have been different.

The Ann Arbor folk song revival was happening in those years. A lot of people in the defense industry were doing that and saw themselves as cultural if not political radicals, but everybody bought into the Cold War. The same kind of people today who would be very quick to see through some government-attempted deception, for instance to land the Marines in El Salvador or some such place; but back in the 50s, few were in a position to be so critical or to see any congruity in going to a defense plant behind a blue badge of secret clearance and a neck tie and white shirt, and then in the evening enjoying the ambience of the university, the coffee shops, the poets, the culture. A lot of people did that. There was no sense that it was inconsistent in any way.

In 1960, I supported Kennedy, who came to Ann Arbor that year and very late one night from the steps of the Michigan Student Union proclaimed the Peace Corp. I was in that crowd of several thousand people that stood out all night to get a glimpse of him. That generation was ready to form. Kennedy was a comfort and a promise that the United States could modernize its attitudes without going through agonizing social dislocations.

At that time, I felt that Kennedy did embody what was best about a new generation in America. If there were shortcomings, well I shared many of them, and I thought we could all learn together. I felt Kennedy was fresh, He didn't seem like such a relic, an antique from an age that was not only bygone but that had become irrelevant. Yeah, Jack Kennedy, Smiling Jack Kennedy--PT 109--Good Guy.

In November, 1963, I was working at the Bendix Corporation's Aerospace Systems Divisions in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which did all its work for the Defense Department and NASA. I was supervisor of the technical publications department. We were all in the grips of a last minute, rush-rush secret proposal when one of the editors came into my office with a quizzical smile that people get when they have to deliver strange, baffling and terrible news.

She said, "Did you hear the news? The president's been shot."

I looked up at her from my work, "C'mon, I'm busy."

"No, in Dallas, they've shot him. It's on the radio. Phil's got it on in the art department."

We drifted over to the art department, which was a couple of rooms away from the editorial offices. Sure enough, one of the guys had a radio going. Everybody gathered around it, and then a little while later, the fateful words, "The president is dead," and then everything shifted into the
Eroica Symphony for the next three or four days.

I wound up getting into an argument with the personnel director later that afternoon. I thought they should lower the flag to half-staff. But, the guys at the upper level at Bendix didn't seem to be that perturbed over what had happened. In fact, I sensed a kind of relief. Kennedy had canceled a couple of projects of ours. I got the distinct impression that many of them believe military industry people were quite happy from a practical standpoint to see Kennedy gone.

At the time Kennedy was killed, you could say I was a very respectable, middle class citizen, happy to be living on a street called Sunnyside Street in Ann Arbor, Michigan with three nice kids, and a good solid job at a local defense lab. I was proud of my secret clearance and proud of the fact that I worked on defense-related projects.

A year after Kennedy was killed, I had just written a research paper for a politician strongly critical of the Vietnam War, urging withdrawal, and I started to make friends with people in the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. By the summer of 1965, I was president of SDS. It was the Kennedy assassination that broke the continuity of my life in terms of my sense of American political realities.

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Kennedy gets bumped off, and Johnson comes in, then gets elected. Now instead of getting out of Vietnam, we're going back to Vietnam in a big way, and instead of Bendix losing military contracts because the president was canceling them out, suddenly there were a lot of new contracts in the pipeline.

The killing of Oswald was what drove the trauma in, and it made it impossible to hold any innocuous explanation of the assassination. In 1964, I got involved with a politician who was running for Congress against a 14-year Republican incumbent. In one his strategy sessions, he complained he didn't know what to say if someone should ask him about Vietnam. Someone had to do some research. We drew straws, and I got the short one and started spending my evenings in the library.

When I started to do that paper, I realized very quickly I had no solid background on Asian history. I needed to get factually oriented on the Asian Cold War. I went to see a retired Air Force colonel who worked at Bendix named Joe Coffey, an old-school conservative. He was running Bendix's arms control and disarmament department. I guess you put a hawk over the henhouse. However, as hawkish as he was, he was also a pretty honorable and honest person. He was said to be a special student of the literature of the Cold War, so I asked him for a couple of books to read.
He said in effect, "You might think it's a trifle left wing, but the best source of the actual day to day chronology of the Cold War is D.F. Fleming's The Cold War and it's Origins. As I later found out, this was two volumes of minute and overwhelming destruction of conventional American ideas as to the origin and meaning of the Cold WAr. Reading that book was an utterly amazing experience.

I came out with a position paper--this was in 1964--that I am still pretty proud of. It said we were fighting in Vietnam because we don't like Red China. The thing to do in that I case I thought was to make up with Red China. Then we wouldn't have to fight in Vietnam. The candidate said that this was too radical. It was the first time anybody called me a radical. I didn't like it, and I fell out with his campaign.

I was fascinated with this material. I had this pile of research data, and I didn't want to lose it. I decided to take a vacation from the novel I had been working on and write it up. Part of it was published that winter (65-66) in the University of Michigan literary magazine, Generation, where it was spotted by some SDS people. They decided I must be one of them and were surprised that they didn't know me. An SDS guy called me on the phone. A year later I was president of the organization.

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At the national convention of SDS in upper Michigan when I got elected president, I had a beard. I had a beard at Bendix, which wasn't that common in 1964 or '65, and I thought I had to give the wise heads a veto over my beard because it might create the wrong image for the organization. It wasn't like there weren't any longhaired people already, but SDS people were generally short-haired. They were practical, non ideological, smart and mostly sociologists, not many writers, not many philosophers. They told me to keep the whiskers.

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I was head of the SDS from 1965 to '66 and a member of the national leadership group until the organization's breakup in 1969. I didn't leave the SDS. The SDS left me. It was destroyed by the Weathermen and the Progressive Labor Party, working in some awful symbiosis, even though they imagined themselves to be deadset against each other. Neither the Weathermen nor PL alone would have been able to destroy SDS, but together they were like a hurricane. Their conflict whipped up such a storm that the organization couldn't hold together.

The Weathermen thought they were doing the right thing, and from their standpoint what they did took a lot of courage, because they were baiting the bull in the bull ring, and they had nothing to hide behind except their own ingenuity, which was untested and certainly immature. How could they expect to go up against the most repressive forces in the government? Yet, they destroyed a vital organization. SDS was a necessary organization, and it was a terrible mistake to treat it as unimportant and to throw it away. The Weathermen did that because, inexperienced as they were, they believed the walls of Jericho were about to start crumbling in a big way.

From the Weathermen's point of view, anything that they could see a case for doing, needed to be done secretly, and anything that was done secretly therefore could not be done through the venue of SDS--which being a democratic organization would have to discuss things openly. SDS was sitting right there out in the open. It had no way to keep people out. It was too hard to defend.

However, there was another important factor in its demise. I think we had won the debate on the war, and I think a public organization could not be allowed to survive winning a debate of that magnitude. The real attack on SDS and the anti-war movement from the government side began after the public opinion polls, the elections, the primaries of '68, the movement in the Democratic Party around Bobby Kennedy, and numerous other events in the body politic made it clear that people felt closer to the critical position of the war than they did to the pro-war position.

That was when the serious repression started coming down. It wasn't when we were a minority making small radical noises in a vast conservative wilderness. It was when we started to become the voice of a discontented center that the FBI stopped pulling its punches with us.
At the same time, PL also wanted to knock SDS out. Their reasons were different from the FBI's and from the Weathermen's, but all three of them reacting off each other, created conditions of internal conflict which I think no political organization could have survived. Certainly SDS did not.

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