Former SDS president reflects on ride with 1960s biggest anti-war student group

"Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Anti-War Movement" (Scribner, 352 pages, $25), by Carl Oglesby: One of the biggest radical groups in U.S. history, Students for a Democratic Society, imploded in 1969 amid a whirl of ideology and extremism, even as opposition to the Vietnam War soared.

One-time SDS president Carl Oglesby traces the group's spectacular trajectory in his new book "Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Anti-War Movement," crafting a political parable of activism and ideals, indoctrination and violent disillusionment.

Oglesby, ever an advocate of dialogue over doctrine, has a taste for moderation that frames his memoir, just as it defined his approach toward activism. For years, he reached out to hawks as well as doves, trying to convince anyone who'd listen that the Vietnam War was wrong and unwinnable " arousing the ire of revolutionaries who came to dismiss that kind of dialogue as a bourgeois delusion.

But Oglesby is drawn to conversation and contradiction. A self-defined "radical centrist," he joined SDS not as a student, but as a married man and father of three " by day employed with secret clearance at a Michigan defense contractor, by night writing plays with leftie poets.

He researched Vietnam for a local politician, publishing his findings in an essay read by a young SDSer, who recruited him to join the group. Within months, Oglesby was voted SDS president, setting off on a half-decade hurricane of public speeches and back room strategy sessions to help build the anti-war cause.

His account of those years is driven by personal memories, and omits many of the most typical sit-in and rally scenes to instead showcase the odd meetings and unexpected moments that must have most excited and impressed him as a man.

The result is a fast-paced, fly-on-the-wall account of 1960s activism, an eclectic stew of cerebrum and celebrity. Oglesby investigates the war with Jean-Paul Sartre, secretly sips Sam Adams with Cuba's U.N. ambassador and is asked to run for vice president alongside a Black Panther. When police swarm peaceful protesters at Chicago's Grant Park, he is center stage holding the microphone; a year later, he follows Mayor Richard Daly on the Chicago Seven trial witness stand.

Through it all, what seems most interesting to Oglesby, who helped introduce the teach-in, are the moments of dialogue and intersections of opinion " openings for fact, reason and persuasion.

"Carl, why do people have to keep reminding you that the revolution is not a debating society?" asks Bernadine Dohrn, a bright, beautiful SDSer, a founder of the Weathermen and his ultimate foil.

Curiosity pulls Oglesby into any conversation " with friends, enemies, Marxists, capitalists, hawks, doves or government agents; on television, in churches, barns, airports and back rooms. Words are always his weapon of choice. It should come as no surprise then, that he pins SDS's demise on ideology, as the group's leaders, frustrated by an ever-escalating war, abandon nonviolent discourse to "pick up the gun."

Oglesby seems at times amused by their revolutionary turn: "Honey, Marxism has clogged your pipes," he tells Dohrn. But more often, he is distraught, desperate to halt a swing toward extremism that he fears will sink the anti-war cause.

"The revolution is anguish and chaos," he blurts out when an SDS faction, soon to be Weathermen, expel him on suspicion of being a federal agent, in an inquisition that lays bare the struggle for the anti-war movement's soul, methods and goals.

Oglesby sees absolutism and ideology as privileged indulgences that transform his righteous comrades into terrorists, killing three in an accidental Greenwich Village explosion.

A former playwright, Oglesby has an eye for character and scene that helps him laugh at his life, even as he mourns its lost cause.

Some observers have found inconsistencies in his account, questioning select dates and figures; and it is hard to believe that he was as calm a political combatant as he suggests. But Oglesby is so reflective and unashamed of contradiction, that such points seem irrelevant to his broader message.

What was best about SDS, Oglesby says, was not that its members were hawks or doves, but rather " taking a metaphor from the biblical flood " that they were "ravens in the storm" who chose to ride the era's most turbulent winds.

His book is a reflection on the nature of resistance, a poignant insider account of the rise and fall of one of the most infamous anti-war groups and a window into the nuances of 1960s radicalism. And it is a reminder that once upon a time, hundreds of thousands of Americans stood up against a distant war that seemed to have no end.