Carl Oglesby - 60s Activist Remembered

* Carl Davidson remembrance
* Forbes.com obituary - '60s activist Carl Oglesby dies in
  NJ at age 76

==========

Carl Oglesby sadly left this world this morning after a long
bout with cancer.

Carl Davidson post on Facebook page - SDS & 60s Leftists
September 13, 2011

https://www.facebook.com/groups/203677943435/?notif_t=group_activity

Carl Oglesby sadly left this world this morning after a long
bout with cancer. President of SDS from 1965-66, he was a
passionate American radical and one of the New Left's most
eloquent speakers and critical thinkers. I made several
trips to Antioch College in the 1960s just to pick his
brain. His main books then were 'Containment and Change' and
'the Yankee-Cowboy War', from which many of us learned to
look at our society in a deeper way, to be better able to
change it. I'll post more later...

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'60s activist Carl Oglesby dies in NJ at age 76

by Hillel Italie, 
Associated Press

Forbes.com
September 13, 2011 - 08:40 PM EDT

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/09/13/entertainment-us-obit-oglesby_8677036.html

NEW YORK -- Carl Oglesby, a dynamic activist in the 1960s
who headed the campus organization Students for a Democratic
Society and gave an influential and frequently quoted speech
denouncing the Vietnam War and those who broke his "American
heart," has died at age 76.

Oglesby died Tuesday at his home in Montclair, N.J. Todd
Gitlin, a friend and fellow activist who went on to write
several books, said Oglesby had been fighting lung cancer
that spread throughout his body.

Born in 1935 and an undergraduate at Kent State University,
Oglesby was years older than Gitlin and other '60s student
radicals he befriended and was living a more conventional
life at the time he met them. He was married, with three
children, and was working for a defense contractor. But
while studying part time at the University of Michigan, in
Ann Arbor, he was so disgusted by the Vietnam War and so
taken with the then-emerging Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS), and the society with him, that he soon became
its president and most memorable orator.

"The only other person who compared to him was Martin Luther
King," Gitlin says. "He had the mastery of vivid phrases and
also the power of mobilizing people."

The SDS had been founded in 1960 at the University of
Michigan, and its early declaration, the Port Huron
Statement, helped embody the idealism of the early '60s. The
SDS supported civil rights and opposed the nuclear arms
race. It was strongly critical of the U.S. government and
called for greater efforts to fight poverty and big
business. By the mid-'60s, when Oglesby joined, the United
States had committed ground troops to Vietnam and the SDS
had expanded nationwide, with a more radical purpose, one
well captured by its new president.

The earnest and bespectacled Oglesby helped organize teach-
ins and rallies, and his stature peaked in November 1965 at
an early, and massive, anti-war rally in Washington. In an
address titled "Let Us Shape the Future," Oglesby spoke as a
disillusioned patriot and liberal who rejected not just the
war, which liberals had escalated, but much of American
foreign policy since the end of World War II and the free
enterprise system he believed demanded endless conflict. He
was equally critical of Republican and Democratic presidents
as victims, and enablers, of the corporate state and
insisted the country's founders would have been on his side.

"Our dead revolutionaries would soon wonder why their
country was fighting against what appeared to be a
revolution," he declared to ever growing applause

In his most memorable phrase, he challenged those who called
him anti-American: "I say, don't blame me for that! Blame
those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American
heart."

Activist and fellow SDS leader Tom Hayden called Oglesby a
"radical individualist" in the tradition of Henry David
Thoreau. He remembered Oglesby as a "brainy," self-taught
man whose research into the Cold War and national security
had convinced him that Communism was not the enemy and that
change in the United States would have to reach far beyond
getting out of Vietnam.

"He used to think you could argue with Pentagon
intellectuals like (Secretary of Defense) Robert McNamara
and get them to change their minds," Hayden told The
Associated Press. "But he later decided there would have to
be a fundamental power shift."

Gitlin noted that part of Oglesby's appeal was his own
story, one millions of people could relate to. He wasn't an
Ivy Leaguer or angry rich kid. He grew up working class,
from the Midwest, in Akron, Ohio, and had far more
experience than his fellow activists. He had given up a
safe, comfortable life, much to his father's anger, to
change the world. He also knew how to communicate, having
briefly tried a career in New York in his 20s as an actor
and playwright and attempting to write a novel.

But the '60s proved an unfulfilled dream from which he never
recovered, Gitlin says. By the end of the decade, King and
Robert F. Kennedy had been killed, the Vietnam War was still
on and Oglesby was being thrown out of the organization he
helped grow. Violent activists such as the Weathermen
dismissed Oglesby as a "hopeless bourgeois liberal." Oglesby
labeled the Weathermen's politics as "road rage and comic
book Marxism."

"He suffered greatly from that, maybe more than anyone else
of the older crown, from being targeted by the Weathermen as
a bad guy," Gitlin said. "He used to say that the Weathermen
were like the children of his generation, dismantling what
had been achieved."

In recent years, Oglesby became obsessed with the Nov. 22,
1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He wrote
the books "Who Killed JFK?" and "The JFK Assassination" and
contributed an afterword to Jim Garrison's "On the Trail of
the Assassins." In 2008, his memoir "Ravens in the Storm"
was published. He recorded music and taught at Dartmouth
College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He
also was featured in the 1991 television documentary "Making
Sense of the Sixties," which he didn't know how to do.

"We had an experience, which I suppose is unique in American
history and which nobody who ever went through it will ever
forget, an experience filled with treasured moments and
nightmares alike," he said during the documentary. "The '60s
will never level out. It's a corkscrew. It's a tailspin.
It's a joy ride on a rollercoaster. It's a never-ending
mystery."

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