Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 10: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967

Chapter 10: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967 (iv)

During some political discussion in his apartment during the academic year, Teddy had mentioned that he “didn’t believe in shrinks” and that “friends should help each other solve their personal emotional problems.” At the time I heard Teddy make this statement I had nodded in agreement, because this was my feeling, too. And experience observing shrinks at the clinic had confirmed my view that friends were preferable to shrinks when it came to having someone to talk over your emotional problems.

So I wrote Teddy a note and asked if I could talk with him about my emotional problems. After receiving my letter, Teddy telephoned me.

“I got your letter. When do you want to get together?” Teddy asked.

I agreed to meet him in the evening at his apartment, later that week. When I got to Teddy’s apartment, I felt somewhat awkward. But I also felt relieved that he was kind enough to attempt to help me with my emotional problems. My love for Teddy was as strong as it would ever be, and I trusted him fully. He seemed like the best friend any person could have.

Teddy answered the door and looked concerned as he invited me into his apartment. Nancy was also in the apartment at the time, looking as beautiful as ever, but also looking concerned and uneasy as she said “hello.” Then, after a minute or two of small talk, Teddy and I left the apartment to go for a walk across campus and into Riverside Park. As we walked towards Riverside Park, I opened up myself emotionally to Teddy and he seemed very understanding.

“You have Nancy to love. And that makes life worth living. I can’t seem to find anyone to love. And without love, New Left politics gets to be emotionally empty after awhile,” I said sadly.

Teddy tried to cheer me up. “Being with Nancy doesn’t solve everything. The System is still enslaving and totalitarian and encourages sexual repression and alienation. But political activism can sometimes help overcome feelings of emotional alienation from everybody,” Teddy replied.

“But do you really think New Left activism can create a new ideal society? Won’t there always be people like Hitler and other frustrated artists who will be dissatisfied, even under a socialist society?” I asked.

“They’re building a new society in China and overcoming bourgeois artistic elitism and elitist intellectualism with their cultural revolution. And they’re creating a new man in Cuba. We can do the same in the United States…Although not all personal problems can be solved immediately by revolution,” Teddy answered.

We continued to talk about the need to change society and the human obstacles to building a new world in the United States, as we walked in Riverside Park. Then it started to get dark and we headed back towards Broadway and Columbia’s campus.

By the middle of my walk with Teddy, I began to realize that, although it felt good to talk about my feelings of emotional emptiness and loneliness with Teddy and he proved to be a kind listener, Teddy could provide me with no easy solutions. I would have to learn to live with my loneliness, but not let my emotional loneliness interfere with my ability to work politically to build a New Left radical movement that would strike at the sociological sources of my personal unhappiness.

On the Upper West Side, Columbia SDS activists who remained in Manhattan were taking part in “Viet Nam Summer.” Patterned after the “Mississippi Summer” of 1964, “Viet Nam Summer” was a nationwide student anti-war campaign to raise off-campus consciousness about what was going on in Viet Nam. SDS activists around Columbia set up tables on the sidewalks and canvassed Upper West Side apartment buildings. Some other Columbia SDS activists, like Mark, spent a good part of the summer out in California’s Bay Area, where Haight-Ashbury was experiencing its ‘Summer of Love.”

But the “Summer of Love” was also another “long, hot summer” in the African-American ghettoes of the United States. Black mass rebellions, generally triggered by acts of white police brutality, took place in Tampa, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Newark, Plainfield, NJ, Detroit and other U.S. cities. In the Newark Rebellion, at least 21 African-American civilians were shot down by police and National Guard soldiers. In the Detroit Rebellion, at least 33 African-American civilians were also killed by police officers or National Guard soldiers.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 10: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967

Chapter 10: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967 (iii)

I tried to link up with anti-war people in Queens on the weekends. But in July and August 1967 there still wasn’t that much of a peace movement out there. PL people in Queens were collecting signatures on Roosevelt Ave. in Flushing for a petition which called for an anti-war referendum to be placed on the New York City election ballot in November. After I signed their anti-war petition, they invited me to a meeting at their anti-war committee’s office in Jamaica, near Sutphin Blvd. and Hillside Ave. Because I still felt a moral and political responsibility, and a personal urgency, to continue doing New Left political work during the “summer of love” in 1967, I showed up at their meeting in the evening.

The meeting was chaired by an intellectual woman who seemed to be in her early 30s and who wore a dress and used lipstick. Her last name was Silberman. She had run unsuccessfully as an independent anti-war Congressional candidate in Queens. Her husband was a radical professor at Queensborough Community College.

Three younger PL men activists and one younger woman activist, who also seemed to be college students, attended the meeting in Jamaica with me. All of us were white. For about 1 ½ hours we discussed possible strategies for increasing anti-war feeling in Queens that summer and raising consciousness about the Viet Nam War. But whenever I suggested doing anything other than working on the PL-conceived anti-war referendum petition campaign—like demonstrating in a creative way outside a draft board or trying to hold a big anti-war rally—all the others at the meeting would take turns speaking for 5 minutes and repeating almost identical arguments as to why a Summer 1967 petition campaign was the best way to reach the working-class in Queens with anti-war ideas. I decided not to attend the meeting the following week.

I also spent an evening during the summer attending a meeting in Queens which was addressed by two National Guardian editors, including Jane McManus, at some peace group meeting place near Jamaica. About fifteen other National Guardian readers attended the meeting. Most of them were Old Left, CP drop-outs in their late 40s, 50s or 60s. I can’t recall much about what was said at the meeting, except that it stressed how criminal was the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, that the problem of U.S. imperialism was deeper than the war and could only be eliminated by establishing socialism, and that there was a continued need for an independent radical newsweekly like the National Guardian [which later changed its name to the Guardian]. I received a lift to my parents’ apartment from a man and woman couple in their late 40s or early 50s, who both talked politics with me in the car. They both seemed to feel quite politically isolated in Queens, despite their National Guardian subscription, and they both seemed much less optimistic about the prospects for a New Left-led revolution than I was.

On an emotional level, I started to feel overwhelmed, myself, by feelings of alienation, misery and loneliness by July 1967. On most summer evenings and on weekends, I began to feel completely loveless and emotionally hung-up.

Out in Queens, I had lost contact with everyone I had grown up with or had known at Flushing High School. Aside from Llewellyn, no one interested me enough at the clinic for me to consider going out with socially. Meeting people on the street in a spontaneous way seemed impossible and none of the bars around Queens seemed to attract my type of people. I felt completely isolated.

My parents both felt I was too deeply into New Left politics. My mother thought that SDS activism was nothing more than a poor substitute for not finding myself a steady Barnard woman friend, preferably of Jewish background. I ate with my parents after work, but either went outside after dinner or kept to myself in my room, while they watched TV in the living room.

I felt desperate for love and for companionship and for community. I felt personally fucked-up because I couldn’t seem to develop a sustained love relationship with any woman. I missed talking with and seeing Teddy and Nancy every few days. I missed the upper-middle-class intellectual leftist youth/student community scene on the Upper West Side, which seemed more emotionally, morally and politically alive than the dead suburban-type affluent working-class neighborhood in which my parents lived. I had risen out of my class somewhat and become part of an upper-middle-class left community. Now I found it impossible to fit back emotionally into the affluent working-class family scene I was now compelled by economic circumstances to drop back down into.

I nearly fell apart emotionally. I was almost paralyzed by loneliness and emotional depression. I now found my songwriting and writing to be as emotionally empty and meaningless as my academic work had been. I the absence of a sustained love relationship with a woman, life on earth seemed totally meaningless when I was unable to engage in daily radical political activism. I felt I needed somebody to talk to about my emotional turmoil.

I also found it difficult adjusting to life in Queens that summer because I suddenly didn’t have ready access to pot when living in my parents’ apartment.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 10: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967

Chapter 10: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967 (ii)

Failing to find a summer factory job in Queens, I ended up seeking another NYC Urban Corps work-study job, through Columbia’s Placement Office at Dodge Hall. I returned to the campus for my summer job placement interview dressed in a sport jacket, dress shirt and tie. I wore sunglasses, because I felt strange walking around Columbia again while dressed so straight, and hoped to not bump into anyone around campus who would recognize me.

I noticed that Columbia SDS had set up an anti-war table on Low Plaza, and that a fairly large group of summer school students were gathered around it, debating the war in Viet Nam. Before going up to the Columbia Placement Office, I decided to surreptitiously stop by at the SDS table and listen in on the debate. After listening for a few minutes to the debate, I heard Teddy’s voice, suddenly, exclaim with a laugh: “Bob! What happened to you? Why is your hair so short? Why are you so dressed up?”

“I’m still hunting for a summer job,” I replied.

Teddy then mentioned that Harvey had a good summer job that summer in which he could do whatever he wanted all day, as long as he went to a sympathetic professor’s office at the end of the week and signed his time-sheet accurately. I laughed, but felt some envy that both Teddy and Harvey seemed financially able to afford to spend the summer around Columbia’s campus, without having to go home and live with their parents and work off-campus like I was required to do.

During the academic year, though, Teddy, even as Columbia SDS chairman, had to hold a work-study job all year-long to support himself, unlike Mark or I. Teddy’s work-study job was being a “study-hall monitor” in Carmen Hall a few evenings a week. Being a “study-hall monitor,” in practice, meant that Teddy would sit next to Nancy at a desk, while they both studied in front of whichever Carmen Hall students were using the dorm study hall on that particular night, and would make sure no group of students made too much noise in the study hall room.

After saying goodbye to Teddy, I marched up to Columbia’s Placement Office to secure my Urban Corps summer job. The work-study job I was placed in was in the psychiatric clinic at Queens General Hospital, between Union Turnpike and Grand Central Parkway and 164th St. and Parsons Blvd. The supervisor at the psychiatric clinic was Mr. Crosby, an African-American who seemed to be left-liberal in his political views.

“You’ll be doing some intake work and some writing of social histories. But most of your work will be helping out on the clerical side, answering phones, making appointments and relieving our receptionist,” Crosby said to me on the first day I started work at the clinic. “You may not be experienced enough to satisfy some of the patients or patient families you speak to or to be able to help them with their personal problems. But just do the best you can…And if you need help, don’t ever be afraid to come into my office and ask for assistance.”

I worked at the psychiatric clinic from mid-June to mid-September 1967 at $90/week, Monday through Friday. One night a week, I worked until 8 p.m. As far as jobs went, this Social Worker Assistant job was a much more fulfilling job than my UM&M clerical job had been, and it was more stimulating than my assistant teacher/day care center jobs of the summer of 1966 had been. But compared to being a New Left activist at Columbia, my social worker assistant job seemed less fulfilling. To function adequately as a social worker assistant, I had to block out of my mind the reality of the Viet Nam War.

At the clinic, I was able to converse with two other African-Americans besides Mr. Crosby and the African-American patients (who made up about one-half of all clinic patients). On the evenings I worked late, a good-natured, jovial nurse named Mrs. Powell would come to supervise the clinic and sit at the reception desk with me. In-between answering patient questions on the phone or in-person, she would share with me her latest insights into the scene at Queens General Hospital. She was well-liked by all the patients because she was a hard-worker, kind, had a big-hearted, warm, funny personality, was a great conversationalist and had a wealth of experience in hospital work.

And then there was beautiful Llewellyn, the clinic clerk-typist who registered patients and typed up forms and cards all day and answered phones. She was so good-natured, warm and sweet that I wrote her a song in the middle of the summer called Beautiful Llewellyn. Each day Llewellyn must have smoked a pack of cigarettes. [In the 1960s, cigarette smokers were allowed to smoke at their workplace desks]. And while she smoked, we conversed with each other whenever I was needed to join her in doing some of the clerical work of the clinic. Llewellyn was around 20 and was from South Jamaica. We made each other laugh easily and, by the middle of the summer, I was quite fond of her. I didn’t ask her out, though, because, by Summer 1967, inter-racial love affairs were frowned upon in Black Liberation Movement circles.

“I’m going to miss you, Bob. I’m going to miss you not being here,” Llewellyn said with tears in her eyes in the back of the clinic, right before I kissed her goodbye and hugged her on my last afternoon of work at the clinic. I felt like crying for an instant as I hugged her goodbye. I then quickly walked to the front of the clinic and out of Queens General Hospital for the last time that summer.

Work at the psychiatric clinic gave me other memories: patients who threatened suicide over the phone and who were then given emergency appointments with the shrinks; interviews with parents, whose teenage daughter preferred hanging out with hippies in Greenwich Village in the evening, to sitting with them in front of the TV set in their living room; taking a suicidal, depressed, unhappy wife to Creedmoor’s admissions office on a 30-day voluntary stay; interviewing an African-American bus driver with a perfectly healthy and emotionally sane teenage son, who was being seen at the clinic only because a racist white teacher in junior high school had labeled the son “disturbed” for not being interested in mathematics; patients who had spent years isolated in various mental hospitals around the U.S.A. and were coming to the clinic because they couldn’t get hired for jobs, once their mental hospitalization history was mentioned to prospective employers.

While working at the psychiatric clinic, I read Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization. As a result of this reading and my summer work experience, I concluded that psychiatric treatment under corporate capitalism was useless. Nearly all the clinic patients were unhappy because they were either unfree, lonely, sexually repressed or the victims of class exploitation or racial oppression. Their emotional misery would not end until society became less repressive, more leisure-oriented and more democratic, until they were able to find and give love, and until they could act in a sexually free way, without guilt.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 10: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967

Chapter 10: The Viet Nam Summer of Love, 1967 (i)

I was not eager to return home to my parents’ apartment in Queens for the summer. But to keep attending Columbia, I had to earn money during the summer. A few days prior to leaving the campus I bumped into Josh and Linda, who were walking up Broadway. Josh smiled at me as they walked and said with a giggle: “I-D-A. I-D-A.” I laughed, spoke with him and Linda for a few minutes and learned that he, Harvey and John were all going to attend graduate school in Fall 1967 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

During this time, war tensions were building up in the Middle East. Like most white Movement people in the U.S., I assumed that Israel was being unjustly threatened by reactionary nationalist Arab states. I had never really studied the Palestinian or Arab nationalist point of view, prior to the June 1967 Middle East War. I assumed Israel pursued a non-aggressive, morally righteous foreign policy.

Shortly after awakening one day in early June, I was listening to Larry Josephson’s WBAI morning program when I heard that “Egypt and Syria have attacked Israel” and that “Israel’s survival as a nation is in jeopardy.” Because the U.S. mass media portrayed Israel as being the victim of Arab military aggression in 1967, I did not get upset when it appeared that the Zionist military machine was rolling over the Egyptian Army and would win the June 1967 War quickly. In late June, however, I bumped into Harvey while going into Butler Library one afternoon to do some anti-war summer research on Columbia President Kirk, in preparation for the fall term.

“You know, Bob. The Left may be wrong in mechanically supporting Israel. Israel, you know, started the war in order to capture new lands,” Harvey said.

“I thought the Arabs started the war in order to drive the Jews into the sea?”

“No. The Arabs were the victims of Israeli aggression. And some of the Arab governments are more anti-imperialist than Israel.”

Harvey’s analysis of the 1967 Mideast War caused me to read more deeply about what had exactly happened. And when SNCC came out in opposition to Israel’s 1967 seizure of Arab lands and continued refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the claims of the Palestinian refugees and their Palestinian nationalist representatives, I inwardly supported SNCC’s position. But Viet Nam, not the Middle East, was the war issue that most seemed to threaten my life, because of the draft. So, like most other Movement people, I didn’t make Palestinian solidarity work any kind of political priority at this time.

After having gone to the barber shop to get a haircut, I then began to look at want-ads in the now-defunct Long Island Star-Journal for an open factory job. I assumed that, if exposed to a New Left political analysis and New Left anti-corporate political program and Movement, white blue-collar workers of both sexes would soon become leftist and communist in their orientation.

Students and African-American people were mobilizing for radical change in 1967, as were politically frustrated pacifists. What was missing was anti-Establishment political resistance to corporate domination on the U.S. factory shop floor, which would push U.S. unions into an anti-war, anti-capitalist and anti-racist political stance, and into a genuine commitment to “organize the unorganized” to fight for the freedom of labor from 9-to-5 wage-slavery. I wanted to start to do my bit for the cause of blue-collar labor by doing manual labor, instead of working in a skyscraper office at some clerical job.

I trekked around to various factories in Queens. But I couldn’t get hired for a summer factory job, once I told them I was a student at Columbia. “You attend Columbia. You’d get bored too quickly with the work in this factory. This kind of work isn’t for you,” one Jewish factory owner in Flushing in his 50s told me in a fatherly way, after I insisted I wanted to try factory work in his company.

Other factories did not want to hire just for the summer. To get hired, I had to show personnel people my draft card. Once they saw my “2-S,” they always assumed I would return to school in the fall.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 9: Confronting The Marines, 1967

Chapter 9: Confronting The Marines, 1967 (vii)

At the end of the Spring 1967 term, Ted decided he wanted to move out of Furnald Hall and into an off-campus apartment during his senior year. I was also tired of having to conform to the anti-feminist restrictions of Columbia dormitory life, its cramped living space, and its sterile, sexist, 1960s all-male barracks-like atmosphere. So when Ted suggested that we rent an apartment together during the 1967-68 academic year, I agreed that it might be fun. A few days later, Ted learned that Dave also needed new living space in September 1967. So we decided to look for an apartment in which Dave would also live.

As Columbia SDS grew during the Spring 1967 term, Dave tended to return to the Columbia campus only to offer a “radical education” counter-course for Columbia SDS freshmen and sophomores in a lounge in Ferris Booth Hall. Most of his activism was centered downtown at the New School for Social Research or at the New York SDS Regional Office. Although Dave had become increasingly friendly with Ted during Spring 1967, I still had not spoken to him much on an individual, personal relationship basis prior to May 1967. So Dave and I agreed to meet briefly in the Furnald Hall lobby a few days before I was going to move out of the dorm for the school year.

I was talking with a freshman in the Furnald Hall lobby when Dave appeared in the dorm. I introduced Dave to the freshman as “The Father of Columbia’s New Left.” After the freshman went on his way, so that Dave and I could speak alone, Dave said with a smile: “It embarrasses me to be called `The Father of Columbia’s New Left.’ It makes me feel like I’m an old man already.”

“Oh, I’m sorry I called you that. But you were the Columbia activist who turned on people like me to New Left radicalism when I was just a freshman. I’m really excited about rooming with you, you know.”

Dave blushed and smiled again. And then we started to talk about Ted, about how hard it was to find an apartment and about SDS politics. It was agreed that he and Ted would be looking around for an apartment during the summer, while I was living out in Queens. If anything was found, Ted would telephone me.

Dave was from the Boston area and spoke with a Boston accent. His father was a liberal Democrat who worked as a manager in a toy company. At Brookline High School, Dave had been involved in civil rights activity in relation to the African-American community’s campaign in Boston for quality education and an end to de facto segregation. But when entering Columbia in Fall 1962, Dave was still just a left-liberal Democrat, politically.

By the time I entered Columbia 3 years later and first heard him speak on the sundial against the war in Viet Nam at ICV rallies, Dave was a revolutionary communist and New Left radical on a political level, somewhat bohemian culturally and very intellectual, morally passionate and earnest. He always seemed to be in a pleasant and enthusiastic mood. Like Harvey, Dave seemed to be one of the New Left activists around campus who knew the most about any politically relevant subject; and, like Harvey, Dave was a philosophy major as an undergraduate. As an orator and agitator, Dave was also quite good. And as a day-to-day organizer, Dave was very hardworking.

After Dave left me in Furnald Hall, I felt excited at the prospect of being able to room with him, as well as with Ted, in the fall. Dave still interested me intellectually very much, seemed so politically committed and dedicated to serving humanity, and seemed like a beautiful guy on a personal level. He was also more emotionally open and easier to get closer to on a personal level than Mark was in May 1967.

The academic term came to an end and I passed all my courses, despite my high rate of cutting. In the “American Foreign Policy II” course which had led me to do the research on the U.S. military-industrial complex that produced the discovery of Columbia’s secret IDA connection, I only received a “C-minus.” Despite my low grades, though, I seemed to know more about intellectually and politically relevant matters than most of the other Columbia College sophomores. More and more Columbia and Barnard students appeared to be moving in the radical intellectual and philosophical direction that I had started to move as a freshman; and this reinforced my belief that it was more intellectually productive to read on my own, instead of reading what was assigned by non-activist, “bourgeois liberal” Columbia professors.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 9: Confronting The Marines, 1967

Chapter 9: Confronting The Marines, 1967 (vi)

May 1967 was a slow month politically, except for Columbia SDS people attending an Earl Hall forum in which a Columbia Administration official, Herbert Deane, who had been a Columbia Professor of Government, spoke to a small group of students. He repeated the Administration’s contention that “Columbia University must stay politically neutral and not make value-judgments.”

I then asked Deane the following question at the forum: “If Columbia University is `neutral,’ why is it an institutional member of the Institute for Defense Analyses, which performs weapons research for the war in Viet Nam?”

Other Columbia SDS people at the forum applauded and giggled, before Deane gave an evasive answer. A few days later, Deane was interviewed by a Spectator reporter and, when asked again about IDA, replied that Columbia University “wasn’t a democracy,” and that student opinion mattered as little as “strawberries” in determining Columbia University institutional policy.

Near the end of the school term in May, I can recall studying with Harvey, Mark and Teddy, at Teddy’s apartment, for Professor Kesselman’s final exam. We ended up getting bogged down in a discussion of Harvey’s latest theory about the rise of fascism and gossiping about Kesselman and summarizing why Professor Kesselman’s political ideology was actually “counter-revolutionary.” Harvey used to read every issue of Monthly Review at this time and much of his intellectual thought was heavily influenced by his Monthly Review reading.

During this collective studying session for Kesselman’s final exam, Teddy showed us one of the term papers he was going to hand in for one of his classes that he had “borrowed” from one of the other intellectuals in Columbia SDS. Within Columbia SDS, like within Columbia’s male fraternities, if you had “writer’s block” and/or didn’t feel like having to spend any time preparing another meaningless term paper, you could sometimes secure an old term paper from one of your comrades, which could then be given to your Columbia professor.

In the middle of May 1967, I recall hanging out with Mark around campus on the night before the military’s “Armed Forces Day” parade was to be held in Manhattan. Mark suggested that a small group of us run over to the Law School Library bridge which spans Amsterdam Avenue, between W. 116th St. and W. 117th St., and wave red flags and shout anti-war slogans as the caravan of military trucks passed. The idea didn’t appeal to me at that time, but Mark and another guy ran over to the Law School bridge and did chant at some of the military trucks.

Mark was beginning to seem more spirited, “crazy” and wild-eyed than most other Columbia SDS people. And his growing enthusiasm, even without a crowd around him, for New Left politics now started to personally appeal to me. After Mark’s two-person nighttime demonstration against the U.S. military caravan, I didn’t see him again until September 1967. Aside from the charisma and oratorical skill he had shown on April 20, 1967, there still hadn’t been much indication to most people around campus that he was to be Columbia SDS’s Savio figure.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 9: Confronting The Marines, 1967

Chapter 9: Confronting The Marines, 1967 (v)

Following the confrontation with the Marine recruiters, most of the newly politicized and radicalized SDS supporters returned to their normal academic and hedonistic routines. But Ted, Teddy, Nancy, the Schneiders and a few other Columbia SDS steering committee “heavies” spent the next few weeks putting together a Columbia SDS publication called New Left Notes: The Journal of Columbia SDS. This SDS newspaper contained articles and columns on the SDS-Marine confrontation, on the “free speech/freedom to recruit” vs. responsibility to resist Columbia complicity with the war machine controversy, on draft resistance, on the latest Viet Nam War escalation and on Columbia’s IDA connection. It also included a short poem by Bertolt Brecht. I contributed the article on Columbia’s IDA connection. (I found a photocopy of this particular newspaper in my de-classified FBI file, in the late 1970s).

Much of the work of putting out this May 1967 Columbia SDS chapter newspaper was done at Teddy’s W. 115th St. apartment. Nancy applied her past experience as a high school newspaper editor to the Columbia SDS newspaper project. She’s the one who did most of the technical preparation and make-up and lay-out on the 4-page newspaper, after Columbia SDS steering committee people had contributed the articles and Ted “Acapulco” had edited them. Because Ted, like everyone else around the New Left, was smoking pot everyday by this time, people thought it was funny to start calling him by that nickname.

In Teddy’s apartment, Nancy usually just dressed casually in jeans, a nightgown or shorts. And whenever I stopped by to bring over flyers, attend meetings there, drop off my article or pick up and drop off Columbia SDS table literature, she was very warm and good-natured. Both she and Teddy always seemed to give off good love vibrations and I continued to feel a strong love for both of them.

On the afternoon the Columbia SDS newspaper was ready to be picked up from the printer I was hanging around the Columbia SDS table on Low Plaza. So I volunteered to go downtown to the printer and meet Nancy in order to assist her in carrying back the heavy bundles of newly-printed newspapers. She had been downtown most of the day in the print shop, making sure the newspaper was being printed correctly. I enjoyed working with Nancy on this little errand. She seemed much happier than I was, and still deeply in love with Teddy. She still seemed like the best woman around Columbia and Barnard.

Around this time, I first visited Mark’s 501 W. 110th St., 7th floor apartment, to attend a meeting to discuss Columbia SDS plans to run a slate of candidates in the Columbia University Student Council [CUSC] elections on a “student power” platform. At first I was going to run as a candidate, along with Mark and a few other SDS people, because somebody had decided that I would make a good candidate. But, after thinking about the prospect of running for the Student Council, I decided it wasn’t the kind of political role I wanted to play.

In order to make sure that I would pass my courses that term, I also couldn’t afford to spend the final weeks of the semester campaigning, instead of completing term papers. I also didn’t believe there was much political value in running in student council elections because real power at Columbia rested with the Columbia trustees, not with the student council. Mark and the other Columbia SDS candidates stayed in the student council election campaign and didn’t win many votes—for reasons indicated in Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, which describes the origins of “false consciousness” in advanced capitalist society. But perhaps some consciousness-raising gains were made by the New Left at Columbia because of its participation in the 1967 “Mickey Mouse” student council elections.

I don’t recall much of what was talked about at the meeting in which I first visited Mark’s 110th St. apartment. What I do recall most vividly is that Mark had hung a huge poster of Mao Tse-Tung on his living room wall and that the apartment resembled most hippie pads of those days.

Mark was cheerful at the meeting, but he still seemed hard to get to know and not more than superficially friendly towards me. He still didn’t seem to think as logically in a political way as Harvey, Dave, Josh, Ted, Teddy, John, the Schneiders, Evansohn or Nancy all did around this time, despite the charisma he had shown at the April 20, 1967 post-right-wing attack rally. When Mark talked politically at this pre-student council election meeting, he sometimes seemed to make sense, but other times he seemed scatterbrained, too rhetorical and not politically concrete enough.

On a political level, Mark still seemed unclear about the direction that he wanted Columbia SDS to be going. You got the sense that Mark enjoyed speaking before a leftist crowd, saw Columbia SDS as being an effective campus anti-war group, thought New Left politics could be popularized easily at Columbia if people worked at it and was into Columbia SDS because it was fun to be a New Left activist, as well as because he felt personally threatened by the draft. Mark gave no indication that he was especially interested in the question of African-American Liberation or that he had ever been involved in Civil Rights activity or peace movement activity before joining the ICV or Columbia SDS. He also never mentioned that he had ever been into writing plays, although he was open about being an English major at Columbia.

At 501 W. 110th St., Mark roomed with Herbert Marcuse’s stepson, a guy named Neumann. Neumann’s older brother, Tom Neumann, was one of the founders of the non-student “Up Against The Wall, Motherfucker!” Lower East Side chapter of SDS. This chapter combined an anti-student, anti-white collar radical, hippie lifestyle with a hard line revolutionary politic. The Neumann who was Mark’s roommate was never very active politically at Columbia. He seemed to be amused in a supercilious way at Mark’s growing inclination to become involved in day-to-day Columbia SDS campus organizing after April 1967. Neumann’s biological father, Franz Neumann, had fled from Nazi Germany and written the book about Nazi society, Behemoth.

Mark’s other roommate was a guy named Lieberman, who was also never politically active at Columbia. Lieberman just seemed into studying and smoking pot and never said much to me whenever I bumped into him either on campus or in Mark’s apartment.

Unlike most other Columbia SDS steering committee people, Mark, thus, roomed with non-activist student roommates. His apartment always smelled heavily of marijuana and there was usually FM rock music being played in the background. In early 1967, I recall seeing Mark walking on the street with this blond-haired woman with an English accent, named Mary, who also never became that active politically.