The
tumultuous ‘60s ended with a bang – the implosion of SDS, the Students for a
Democratic Society. As the Vietnam War revved up in far off Southeast Asia, SDS
became the core of what morphed into a vast movement against the war.
Many
memoirs have been written on the decade, but a fairly recent one may be the
best.* Author John Maher bore witness to the evolution and subsequent decline
of the Vietnam antiwar movement. And along the way he had known the major
players on both sides of the split that rendered SDS asunder in ’69.
Born
in ’38, John Maher fell between me and my younger brother in age. During our
younger years it appears John and I had been doing some of the same things, although
in reality we were ships passing in the night. Later it was very different
between John and my brother Jeff Sharlet, a leader of GI protest against the
war; not only did they move in sync along near similar trajectories, but they
became good friends as well.
John
Maher and I both went to college in the Boston area during the late ‘50s – he to
Harvard, I to Brandeis. There our headings began to diverge since he was
already tacking left as I sailed a middle course – a standard liberal.
John Maher during
his university years
Paradoxically,
despite our different political vectors, John was associated with the junior
Harvard professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, destined to become an establishment
foreign policy specialist with whom I coincidentally worked in the ‘70s; simultaneously
at Brandeis I was studying with the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, soon
to become guru to the New Left.
Though
we never crossed paths, Maher and I shared some common experiences. We had both
hung out at Club 47, the folk café just off Harvard Square where each of us got
to know the fetching young Joan Baez as her brilliant career was taking off.
Joan Baez,
Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA, 1962
Upon
graduating from Harvard, Maher and a few friends traveled to the Soviet Union
as tourists. A few years later I spent a year at Moscow University researching
my PhD dissertation. Not long after, in the mid-‘60s, both of us happened to
land in Washington as consultants – he with the War on Poverty, I on the
Soviet-American arms control negotiations.
As
the war in Vietnam began to heat up, our paths sharply divided. I became an
academic preoccupied with Soviet politics & law as John moved into the
maelstrom of emerging antiwar activism.
He
soon acquired an impressive New Left resume, coming into contact with Noam
Chomsky of MIT; Marty Peretz, publisher of the New Republic; I. F. Stone, premier critic of Washington from the
left, as well as serving as a principal organizer of ‘Vietnam Summer’ – a
series of antiwar protests across the peace movement.
However,
it was while working with the Boston Draft Resistance Group (BDRG), the most
effective anti-draft outfit in the country, that John first met Jeff, editor of
Vietnam GI (VGI). The foremost underground GI antiwar paper, VGI was published out of Chicago, but
Jeff periodically traveled east to raise funds for the paper among wealthy left
liberals in Boston and New York. Abby Rockefeller, into whose extended family
John Maher had married, was a generous contributor.
BDRG activist
distributing Vietnam GI, Boston Army
Center, 1968
BDRG
had linked up with VGI, printing
several thousand additional copies of each issue for passing around at military
installations throughout New England. The anti-draft activists took every
opportunity to hand out VGI to GIs as
well as civilians in the induction process. Speaking of his personal role in
the BDRG-VGI connection, John wrote:
I helped raise money for the paper and distributed
it around the Boston area.
When the work was
done, Jeff and I loved to sit around
and drink beer
and talk politics. We became close
friends.**
Later
in ’68, an illness Jeff first experienced in Vietnam back in ’64, caught up
with him and he flew to our parents’ place in Florida for medical help. The
diagnosis was dire; though Jeff still had hope, he was to have only a few months
more to live.
Jeff’s last
photo – with his parents and sister-in-law Nancy,
Coral Gables,
FL, March 1969
♫Yes, how many
ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind.†
Meanwhile,
SDS was veering toward destruction. Sharp factional conflict had been growing
within the organization during the past few years and by late spring ’69 had
gotten much worse. On one side was the national SDS leadership group styling
itself as the ‘Revolutionary Youth Movement’ (RYM). Opposed to RYM was a
strong, well-disciplined faction that identified with the Maoist Progressive
Labor Party (PL). Essentially an internal power struggle, it was fought out
under the guise of conflicting political theologies.
The
two groups’ implacable differences came to a dramatic climax at what was to
become the last SDS national convention, a gathering of nearly 2,000 delegates
in Chicago, mid-June ’69. In just a few days of wild proceedings, the
organization split irrevocably, with RYM, calling itself Weatherman, soon after
turning to violence and going underground.
John
Maher was in the convention hall and initially hoped SDS might weather the
storm and survive intact, but it was not to be. At the opening session there
was a moment of unity, albeit extremely brief, as all the factions united in grief
for Jeff who had died two days earlier. As John remembered the scene:
The chair asked us to rise for a
minute of silence
in memory of
my friend Jeff Sharlet, editor of
Vietnam
GI.***
*John
Maher, Learning from the Sixties: Memoir of an Organizer (2011)
**Ibid, 159.
***Ibid, 198-99.
