Activist Legacies in Hoosierland – Lives of the New Left III

Hoosierland USA – who would have guessed that placid Indiana University (IU) would become a hothouse in the ‘60s for the politics of the left as well as the right. Not only were dozens of New Left activists nurtured there, but also several nationally known conservative student leaders. Several extremist IU alums even went on to join one of the most violent groups of those times, the notorious Symbionese Liberation Army, or SLA.

On the right – the New Right of conservative politics – three fellow students, who would subsequently assume major leadership roles in the nationwide conservative movement, actively contested the IU New Left on the Vietnam War. One became President of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) and  later served in the Nixon White House, another founded a magazine that became immensely influential in conservative circles in Washington and across the country, while the third alum assumed leadership of the national pro-Vietnam War movement.*

For the New Left activists, most of them anyway, who returned to IU for a gala reunion in August 2013 as well as for two of the campus conservative leaders, family politics had been a significant determinant of their activism as students and beyond. In contrast, the genesis of the IU SLA members’ – William Harris, Emily Harris, and Angela DeAngelis Atwood – subsequent infamous behavior is less well understood.

Perhaps most surprising was the case of Angela DeAngelis, who subsequently took the nom de guerre ‘General Gelina’ in the SLA and helped kidnap Patricia Hearst. Angela had arrived at Indiana University from a New Jersey high school where she’d been a popular young woman, cheerleading captain, and the star of many school musicals. True, at IU she fell under the influence of Gary Atwood, a student left activist whom she later married, but otherwise hers was a fairly typical college experience – joining a sorority, performing in university theater, majoring in education.

Angela DeAngelis, Indiana University ‘70

The New Left returnees included several ‘red diaper babies’** and a number from politically active liberal families; another was the son of British Laborites, members of the Labor Party. One of the conservative leaders came from a Republican activist family, while the other – who had served two tours in Vietnam – was from a family whose members had served in previous wars. The offspring of all these legacies went on to make waves on the placid surface of Indiana University and later in society at large. In contrast, the extremist SLA dramatically crashed and burned, so to speak, during the ‘70s. Only one member remains in prison serving a life sentence, while others who have served time keep a low profile.

The one outlier among the IU New Left was my younger brother Jeff Sharlet (1942-1969), who, during his IU years, became a leading member of SDS, or Students for a Democratic Society. Jeff and I came from an apolitical family. Our parents probably voted Democratic, but they never revealed their preferences to us. I recall only one family ‘political’ outing. In the late ‘40s a few years after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, my mother took me – Jeff was too young – on a kind of pilgrimage from where we lived down along the Hudson River to visit the late president’s grave in the garden of the Roosevelt estate at Hyde Park NY.

The only topics of conversation Jeff and I ever heard at table were about our parents’ business or their busy social life. No politics or political issues were discussed. I later learned why. Their business was in a town marked by partisan politics where power changed hands frequently. The key office was town assessor. The incoming administration would reward its business supporters with lower tax levies, while the assessments for those who opposed them would rise.

So Jeff and I went out into the world as political innocents. To add to our quiescence, we both attended a traditional military prep school where the politics of the day were never mentioned. No doubt it was simply assumed that the mainstream ‘50s consensus of the Eisenhower era prevailed. I left home first, eventually landing in academe where I imbibed the standard liberal politics of the professoriate, while Jeff ended up in Vietnam where disillusionment with the mission politicized him. Later at IU among the New Left, the very group now meeting decades later, he became radicalized.

Jeff Sharlet’s senior yearbook photo, The Albany Academy, 1960

           

Because Jeff died at an early age, I was invited to the reunion in his stead. Hence, I found myself at the gathering’s ‘Town Hall’ – a general meeting – listening with fascination as Jeff’s old friends and comrades spoke of their lives on the left. In their activism at IU, two of those profiled below clearly reflected their families’ political legacies. The other individual, very much in the spirit of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology (1915), read a posthumous statement, literally a voice from the grave.

Tom Balanoff’s (IU ’72) father had been a man of the Old Left, the well-known director of the largest district in the steelworkers’ union during the heyday of American heavy industry. No real surprise then that Tom followed in his footsteps, choosing the Old Left over the New Left at IU, and later pursuing a career in the trade union movement.           

Starting modestly, Tom began at the bottom of the career ladder as a lowly union staffer. However, his talent for organization and leadership was soon recognized, and he moved up the hierarchy, eventually becoming a major national and international union leader. In the post-industrial landscape of past decades, Tom’s organizational base became the ‘Service Employees International Union’ (SEIU), made up mainly of janitors and security guards.

 

Tom Balanoff, union leader in action

In his remarks at the IU Town Hall, Tom Balanoff filled in the details of his career as a left activist who went on to success in the contemporary labor movement:

I was here in Bloomington from ’68 to ’72, a very exciting time to be here. I’m also a red diaper baby so I came to IU with a very strong sense of politics. My friends, many of whom are here – who were in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) – didn’t  really agree with my politics because we were with Joe [Stalin, an allusion to the American Communist Party] instead of Leon [Trotsky, guiding spirit of the SWP]. Quite frankly it seemed appropriate to me at the time, but it doesn’t seem that appropriate anymore.

After leaving Bloomington, I went into the labor movement – actually I first went to grad school. Initially I tried to get into the labor movement – you know like my father, work my way up in the mill – but looking back no steel mill anywhere in Indiana would hire me because of our family name. So I ended up going to grad school [for an MA in Labor and Industrial Relations], and then I went into the labor movement. I’ve been in the labor movement for the last 40 years.

I work in the Service Employees International Union. I worked for a number of industrial unions, and in ’88 I went to the SEIU as a research director. I will say that it’s the one job – and I’ve had a number of positions – but the one job I really wasn’t qualified for, but that was neither here nor there. They actually recruited me – I became Research Director of the Property Service Division.

Maybe you’ve heard about the ‘Justice for Janitors Movement’? … I was the national director of it, and then in ’94 I went back to Chicago for SEIU … I made the transition to an elected position, got elected president of that local.

I’m president of Local 1 in Chicago, it’s a Property Service local, we’re a central region local. … I don’t know if any of you have heard about the Houston janitors struggle, but we organized that. I was the president and negotiated all those contracts – won two successful strikes, our first historic one in 2006, and last summer a five-week strike to maintain janitors’ standards in Houston. … I do a lot of stuff for SEIU – I’m on the national board. I actually do a lot of international labor stuff [too]. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 40 years.

As a prominent union leader, Tom is active in national politics as well as the local Chicago scene. He spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2008, and most recently he joined the street protest against closing school closings in Chicago.

Unlike Tom Balanoff – at IU Ellen Ostrofsky made the transition from a family of the Old Left to the campus New Left. Her mother and uncle had been young activists for the Old Left, but Ellen and her future husband became New Left activists at IU. Of course, the New Left was initially an offspring of the Old Left, but soon left behind the doctrinaire, hierarchical, and highly disciplined political style of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) as well as the various non-communist old line socialist alternatives.

At the Town Hall Ellen was on the far side of the large room, so below are excerpts from her remarks which came through clearly on the audio:

I came [to the reunion] with my brother Charlie. … I was in high school in ’67. I wasn’t a red diaper baby, but there were people in my family who were in the progressive movement. My mother told me that as a child she sold the ‘Daily Worker’ in New York.  …

The Daily Worker, official paper of the American Communist Party

I remember when I was in high school, my mother was at the Democratic National Convention [in Chicago ‘68], and I remember her saying, “You should be down there marching!” …. I went down there with my dad and I passed out leaflets, and we talked and talked.

And then Charlie went to IU and of course my dad wanted me to come here too. So I came down in ’69 and I just loved it here … some of the best years of my life. When my husband went [out] with me – he was my boyfriend then – we were active and went to all the demonstrations.

It’s funny, I remember one of the antiwar demonstrations in Washington. We were running down – going down the middle of the street and there was my aunt from New York City. She’s standing in the middle of the street saying, “Well we were here looking for Charlie.” And she found me! Some of the best years and we made some great friends. I remember people here, great friends ….

I have to say, I haven’t really been active though I taught art in school in Chicago for years. Teaching school was a real education, a real education. I think I learned more from my kids. As I said, these are some of the happy memories ….

The last speaker of this profile was quite unusual. Not a person of the left, Anna Wiley, IU ’56, had heard that members of the former IU New Left were coming back to Bloomington, and had come to the Town Hall to greet them on behalf of her late husband, some of whom he had taught at IU.

David Wiley had a long and successful career as a theater professor and director of student productions – from Shakespeare to the modern Theater of the Absurd – at several colleges and universities. He was on the faculty of Indiana University during its most tumultuous period, 1966-73. Throughout his academic career, Professor Wiley also distinguished himself as an activist for liberal causes.

At his first posting, a college in Virginia in the ‘50s, he promoted racial integration. In Bloomington in the ‘60s, he assumed leadership roles in the ACLU, or American Civil Liberties Union, both locally and statewide. At his final teaching position, a southern university in the Bible Belt, Wiley and his wife, Anna, were plantiffs in a lawsuit in federal district court against Bible study in public schools – a courageous stand that cost him his departmental chairmanship in that fundamentalist environment. The chancellor of the university asked him to step down.        

Akin to the inhabitants of fictional Spoon River who declaimed from the town cemetery, David Wiley ‘spoke’ to the New Left that morning in a letter written before his death. Following a speaker who read out a roll call of the IU activists dead and gone, including brother Jeff, Anna Wiley rose from the audience, saying “I’d like to add a few words from the grave”:

My husband, David Wiley, in the years you’re talking about, was a theater professor. He directed Gary Atwood, whom you may remember, and Angela DeAngelis in ‘The Winter’s Tale’. But at the end of his career – he is now gone – he wrote these words about you, and so I thought you might be interested:

          I remember finding before me at Indiana University, 

          women in fighting dress:  jeans bell-bottomed, tie-dyed

          T-shirts, and an embarrassing absence of bras, and the

          men hardly distinguishable from the women.  They were

          students who took no prisoners, who were suspicious of

          the faculty and abhorred the administration, who could

          go on strike and blockade the classroom buildings, who

          made demands, who forced the central administration of

          a great university to set up a secret headquarters in case

          the president's office was occupied.

          Their language was forthright, figurative, and four-

          lettered.  By our latter-day standards, foul-mouthed.

          I had not heard that language since my Army days.  

          Many of them though were intellectually tough and

          relentlessly honest, but some sadly took on a kind of

          inexplicable madness, perhaps under the frustration

          of not being able to change the world in a day or night.

          One of my advisees [Angela DeAngelis Atwood]

          distinguished herself by becoming a member of the

          group [the SLA] that kidnapped Patty Hearst, and

          in a firefight with the police. 

          [Anna: At the time my husband lamented that her

          education had failed her.]

          But these were not just hippie-esque  folk, a passing

          curiosity in American life.  They shocked the old

          traditions of  the academic world and pulled them up

          by the roots.  The present state of relationships between

          students, faculty, and administration my be linked

          directly to the upheavals of their generation.

          They had discovered something that their forebears

          missed:  that students had power.  They demanded and

          got places for students on key administrative committees.

          They made student evaluations of the faculty popular.

         They and their progeny were willing to challenge the

         canons of literature and the arts and the sciences,

         questioning the dominance of Eurocentric studies in 

         colleges and universities in America, demanding new

         courses of study, even new departments.

So we end this segment with David Wiley's eloquent paean to the New Left and its impact on university life and society – echoing themes and counter-themes of the analogue text Spoon River mentioned earlier. Both the poet Masters and the collective voices of the IU Town Hall shared disappointment during their respective eras that America's original democratic ideal had grown tarnished; however, their remedies diverged profoundly.

Masters, fundamentally pessimistic about his America at the turn of the 20^th century, looked back wistfully to an Edenic past characterized by a simpler Jeffersonian society, while the gracefully aging IU activists, inspired by Marx, still hopefully aspired to a future marked by the Marxian ideal of a fairer society.

 __________________

*http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2013/07/blueprint-fr-police-state-in-american.html

**The phrase 'red diaper baby' usually signifies a child born of at least one parent associated with the American Communist Party, although more loosely as the offspring of radical parents of the Old Left.  It's difficult to know, however, whether such a self-described person means the term narrowly or broadly.

Blueprint for a Police State in America

During the ‘60s, Indiana University (IU) was alive with protest and not just from the left. Nestled amidst the soybean and corn fields, IU was an infertile place to nurture radical dissent against the war in Vietnam. Conversely, the university and southern Indiana generally were much more congenial habitats for protestors from the conservative right.

Early in the decade, Senator Goldwater – point man for the emerging conservative movement – had begun to attract attention in the Midwest. In 1960 an IU student had co-founded a Youth for Goldwater for Vice President drive looking toward the ’60 Republican National Convention; dozens of Youth for Goldwater clubs sprang up on campuses across the country. Although he did not get tapped for vice president, his speech at the convention got him in front of the nation, and in ’61 a new drive was in place for Goldwater for President.

By ’63, as the Arizona senator was edging toward the ’64 nomination, IU’s ‘Young Americans for Freedom’ chapter (YAF) invited him to the university where he delivered a rousing address to an enthusiastic audience of 3000 while outside liberal delegates to the Little United Nations (LUNA) protested the “Arizona lunatic”.

The IU student left, of which my brother Jeff Sharlet (1942-1969) was a part, and the campus right held sharply divergent positions on the Vietnam War – antiwar vs pro-war respectively.  Both sides pitched their messages to the majority – the politically moderate, if not indifferent, students in Bloomington. Each side had its successes although most of the silent majority largely remained silent on the war.

The average Indiana student was not into politics and did not tune in to the activist gladiators from either side. Football, frat parties, flirtations, and, of course, academic work reigned supreme. Hence, the common ‘opponent’ for both the left and right at IU was student apathy. As a result, neither the groups on the left (SDS, YSA, YPSL, DBC, CEWV)* nor those on the right (YAF, Conservative League, ISI, SFS)** attracted much of a following. At best, they were relatively small competing bands of brothers arguing for and against the Vietnam War.

Given my continuing ‘search’ for brother Jeff, the IU New Left has received extensive coverage in this blog; the time has come to examine their adversaries of yesteryear, the New Right. Three Indiana students from the ‘60s stand out in particular – Tom Charles Huston, Robert Turner, and R Emmett Tyrrell, Jr – each a leader of the IU New Right.

The conservative three had much in common – they shared the notion that the United States should and could achieve victory in Vietnam and were highly critical of the IU New Left. All three were bright, motivated, and ambitious; two of them were Indiana boys, while the other, also a Midwesterner, came from a suburb of Chicago. The two Indiana natives went on to serve as Army officers during the Vietnam War.

Pro-Vietnam War rally at Indiana University

There were also differences among them. While Huston was a true believer and an ideologue, Turner was a libertarian, and Tyrrell maintained a more skeptical perspective like his early role model, H L Mencken, an admirer of Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. All three young men had good organizational skills which they deployed on campus, statewide, and beyond in academe writ large. However, each engaged the New Left from a different angle.

For Huston, it was essential to build the organizational infrastructure for a campus, statewide, and, in time, a conservative youth movement which would extend across the university campuses of America. In contrast, Tyrrell was more intent on taking on the campus left in the realm of political ideas via media, initially creating a competing voice to the IU New Left’s alternative newspaper, The Spectator. Eventually he would continue the struggle over ideas at the national level, challenging long-established left-liberal publications such as The Nation and The New Republic.

Of the three Indiana conservative leaders, Turner was the most singularly focused on supporting the war in Vietnam. To that end he offered to debate campus New Left leaders and frequently appeared in the letters section of IU’s main student paper, responding to antiwar positions until he accepted leadership of a statewide pro-war campaign, a goal of which was the ‘liberation’ of North Vietnam from communism.

Just as several alums of the IU New Left went on to have an impact in the world at large – Jeff, who founded the first GI-led antiwar paper, Vietnam GI; Jim Retherford, who played a role in the planning of the ’67 ‘siege’ of the Pentagon and later helped Jerry Rubin write his book Do It!; and the former Paulann Groninger (now Sheets), who became Assistant Attorney General for the State of New York and a force for environmental protection – Indiana University also served as an incubator for nationally prominent conservative spokesmen.

From northern Indiana, Tom Charles Huston became a campus conservative leader at IU, rose to national prominence in the conservative movement, and landed an influential position in the Nixon White House, but soon got into difficulty, finally retreating to a quiet career in real estate law back home in Indiana.

At IU, Robert Turner had made the Vietnam War his special interest as both student and activist, became an Indiana statewide pro-war leader, and volunteered for two tours in Vietnam as an infantry officer. Returning to the States in the ‘70s, he served in Washington as national security adviser to the Senate Republican leadership before going on to law school.

Pursuing a career as law professor, he continued consulting on national security issues at the Pentagon, the White House, and the State Department.  Turner also testified before Congress numerous times, most recently in 2007 on FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act governing the National Security Agency’s (NSA) highly secret surveillance work until the recent leak.

Professor Robert Turner, University of Virginia Law School

R Emmett “Bob” Tyrrell, Jr was from a well to do family in neighboring Illinois; as a scholar-athlete whose specialty was the breaststroke, he was recruited by Indiana University’s legendary swim coach to hopefully set world records like IU Olympian Mark Spitz later would. Although Tyrrell got outclassed in the pool, he stayed on at IU for grad school and, as a ‘response’ to the campus New Left, launched a small conservative campus magazine, The Alternative, later renamed The American Spectator. As editor in chief, Tyrrell eventually grew the magazine into a nationally influential journal of opinion on the right, widely read in Washington circles as well as in the nationwide conservative movement.

R Emmett Tyrrell on William Buckley’s Firing Line, 1984

When Bloomington’s conservative three arrived on campus in the late ‘50s/early ‘60s, the Cold War was still a very dominant concern in the country. The Vietnam War, which would become so divisive, was not yet on the public’s radar, still several years ahead. In the wake of Khrushchev’s '59 visit to the US, icy relations between the nuclear superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union – had thawed a bit. But not long after, in May ’60, came the U-2 incident – the shooting down of an American spy plane over the USSR – followed two years later by the alarming Cuban Missile Crisis.

International communism remained very much on the public’s mind, while on the homefront the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) continued to patrol the country’s internal security perimeter in search of ‘domestic subversion’.

Between them, the three young IU students would assume the mantle of conservative student leadership at the university during the ‘60s and beyond and come to style themselves ‘responsible conservatives’ in contrast to the liberal Republicanism of the Eisenhower years. Just as no member of the IU left, if asked, would have conceded any lineage to the infamous West Coast Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) of the mid ’70s (even though four of their classmates were members of the fringe group before the SLA’s fiery demise), similarly on the right, the future young conservatives would distance themselves from the reactionary John Birch Society (founded in Indianapolis in ‘58) notwithstanding its Indiana roots.

During their IU tenure, Huston, Turner, and Tyrrell were acquainted or at least aware of each other and were of course affiliated with the same cluster of campus conservative clubs, but each was carving out his own niche in emerging American conservatism. Hence, they didn’t work together or actively collaborate during their college years.

In fact, at one point in ’66, when a New Left club was banned from campus and Bob Turner as a libertarian joined the left outcry in defense of the club’s right to express its views – from Turner’s point of view, however extreme its leftwing views – Tom Huston reportedly referred to his fellow student conservative quite incredibly as ‘soft on communism’.

It was only later after their IU days that the three interacted to a degree through the medium of The American Spectator. When Huston was politically on the hot seat in ‘70s Washington, Tyrrell defended him in the pages of the magazine, while both Turner and Huston at various times contributed book reviews to the American Spectator.

Of the three activists, the public career of Tom Charles Huston as a conservative, arguably the most driven individual of the trio, would soar the highest before it came crashing down to earth in infamy. By tracking Huston’s short-lived meteoric trail across the political heavens of the ‘60s and early ‘70s, we can divine the seeds of both his success and the destruction of his ambitions.

At first glance, Tom Huston would appear to be a typical IU freshman, a middle class boy from small town Indiana. At home his father was active in the Republican Party nationally, but when young Huston sought to work in a local election campaign, the Logansport Republicans weren’t interested. Eager to get into the game, he instead volunteered for the Democrats, his first foray in politics. Upon arriving in Bloomington in the fall of ‘59, however, Huston soon changed his colors. Feeling there should be a student conservative presence on campus, Huston organized the Conservative League.

The following year, after Young Americans for Freedom was founded as a national organization, Huston set up a YAF chapter at IU. An ambitious young man and talented organizer, Tom Huston rapidly ascended the hierarchy of the national organization"

                  1960 – Founder-Chair IU YAF chapter

                  1961 – Elected statewide Chair of Indiana YAF

                  1963 – Selected YAF Midwestern regional director

                  1964 – Elected Vice-Chair national YAF

                  1965 – Elected Chair national YAF

Slight in stature, but a dynamo of energy – a classmate later described him as a ‘funny, charming, skinny kid’ – during his seven years as undergrad and law student at Indiana, Huston rarely missed an opportunity to meet the challenge of the highly active IU student New Left.

In the fall of ’62, when IU’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee and its allies supported Castro’s Cuba during the Missile Crisis, YAF chair Huston rallied his members to champion the US naval blockade of the island. When in early ’63 the county prosecutor (DA) was considering indicting several campus radicals for ‘subversion’ of the State of Indiana Constitution, the IU the ‘Young Socialist Alliance’ (YSA) group, a Trotskyist outfit, picketed the courthouse, and in response Huston and his people counter-picketed in support of the DA.

During the academic year 1965-66, the university brought to campus three major pro-Vietnam War speakers – former Vice President Nixon, Army General Maxwell Taylor, and Selective Service Director Lewis Hershey. On each occasion, Jeff and fellow activists were out there demonstrating against the Washington ‘hawks’, fulsomely introduced by the IU president, himself a former Secretary of the Army during the early Vietnam War.

Rather than leave the field to the left, the campus New Right mounted counter-demonstrations on behalf of the distinguished visitors, complete with signs supporting the US mission in Vietnam.† Tom Huston, as well as Bob Turner, even debated the campus New Left, ably represented by their standard bearer, Robin Hunter, a graduate student expert in Marxist theory.

Obsessed with Vietnam, Huston felt strongly that the New Left was aiding and abetting the enemy, Communist North Vietnam, by their protests. One time, according to IU New Left alum Jim Retherford, Huston took advantage of the ‘Students for a Democratic Society’ (SDS) policy of open meetings, absent structured agendas, during which anyone could take the floor and speak. Well-known as the leader of YAF, he filibustered an SDS meeting, provocatively calling the group ‘a totalitarian Communist front [organization]’.

Shortly after his elevation to the national chairmanship of YAF, Chairman Huston flew to Manila for a conference of an Asian anti-communist organization. Subsequently the Asian group arranged him to visit South Vietnam where he spoke in support of the troops.

The next year, 1966, the chairman led a national campaign against American Motors to stop the company from selling cars to the USSR. Huston argued that the sale would allow the Soviets to conserve valuable resources that would end up in North Vietnam for use against American forces. AMC backed down.

After a post-law school stint in the Army, in early ‘69 Huston accepted a position in the Nixon White House. He soon made himself indispensable to senior staff and won the President’s confidence. His assignments included confirming suspected (but non-existent) foreign communist influence on the antiwar movement; setting up a White House internal security apparatus to bypass Justice, which Nixon felt too ‘soft’ on student protest; and coordinating the intelligence community’s efforts against Nixon’s opponents. It was the latter task which would land Huston in deep trouble, ensuring his subsequent notoriety in modern American political history.

Thomas Charles Huston, 1975

Huston’s apocalyptic vision of American society under siege by radical legions on the brink of insurrection suited Nixon perfectly. He wrote the President long memos – in one urging him ‘to purge’ dozens of officials and then ruefully commenting, “I’m beginning to sound like Stalin.”*** He took to signing memoranda ‘Cato’ after the incorruptible Roman, but behind his back others tagged him with derisive names like ‘Secret Agent X-5’ and, in its dark WWII connotation, the ‘gauleiter’ of the intelligence agencies, while for J Edgar Hoover Tom Huston was simply that ‘hippie intellectual’ in the White House.

As staff expert on ‘revolutionary youth affairs’, Cato the Younger drew up a secret memo, quickly dubbed the ‘Huston Plan’ – a witch’s brew of extralegality from ‘black bag’ jobs to, reportedly, detention camps in the West for antiwar opponents. The President was delighted and ordered the plan implemented post haste.

Nixon had not however reckoned with Hoover who considered Huston’s plan a trespass on his turf, a violation of his territory, and persuaded the President to rescind it. Within a week of its approval, the Huston Plan was officially a dead letter, although several of its pernicious features lived on to surface another day and play a part in Nixon’s downfall, Watergate.

Huston stayed in Washington another year, resigning the White House in ’71 – his legacy, a “blueprint for a police state in America.”**** He went home to practice law – just a dozen years after he’d hit the ground running at Indiana University, an eager striver with high hopes and great expectations for a life at the top.

† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-generals-march-on-indiana.html

*Students for a Democratic Society, Young Socialist Alliance, Young People’s Socialist League,W.E.B. DuBois Club, Committee to End the War in Vietnam

**Young Americans for Freedom, Conservative League, Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (now Intercollegiate Studies Institute), Students for a Free Society

*** “Confidential Memorandum for the President from Tom Charles Huston,” 11/13/70, (Declassified 3/15/82), 12

****D Wise, The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power (1973), 154