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

[johnnie]

NEW YORK (AP) — 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.

More:

http://news.yahoo.com/60s-activist-carl-oglesby-dies-nj-age-76-222913355.html

[DrunkenBoat]

1. I'm sorry to hear this. Oglesby was also the author of the excellent political book,

the Yankee & Cowboy War.

Here's a sample:


Introduction

The assassination of John Kennedy and the downfall of Richard-Nixon have both been viewed as isolated moral disasters for American democracy: Kennedy's murder as a demonstration of our continuing national inability or unwillingness to cope with violence; Nixon's downfall as a demonstration of the failure of our democratic institutions to overcome the abuses of secret intelligence and electronic surveillance at the seat of national power.

But these two events represent neither isolated disasters nor a generalized failure of American institutions but something almost beyond the ability of ordinary people even to see, much less control. The two events - Dallas and Watergate - are actually concrete links in a chain of related and ominous events passing through the entire decade in which they occurred and beyond. And this chain of events itself represents only the violent eruptions of a deeper struggle of rival power elites identified here as Yankees and Cowboys.

This book proposes to show that Dallas and Watergate are intrinsically linked conspiracies in a hidden drama of coup and countercoup which represents the life of an inner oligarchic power sphere, and "invisible government," capable of any act in the pursuit of its objectives, that sets itself above the law and beyond the moral rule: a clandestine American state, perhaps an embryonic police state.

We see the expressions and symptoms of clandestine America in a dozen places now-the FBI's COINTELPRO scheme, the CIA's Operation Chaos, the Pentagon's Operation Garden Plot, the large-scale and generally successful attempts to destroy legitimate and essential dissent in which all the intelligence agencies participated, a, campaign whose full scope and fury are still not revealed. We see it in the ruthlessness and indifference to world, as well as national, opinion with which the CIA contracted its skills out to ITT to destroy democracy's last little chance in Chile. We see it as well, as this book argues, in the crime and coverup of Dealey Plaza, the crime and cover-up of Watergate.

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=7287

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. Thank you for that link.

All the energy, commitment and courage this man showed, only to find, at the end stage of his life, it all being undone as the pendulum swings even farther to the right.

Mixed emotions at news of his death.

[Hardrada]

3. Someone I always greatly admired.

Another speaker of truth is gone.

[johnnie]

4. Kick

Don't know if this was re-posted, but I thought I would kick it again.