Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967

Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (v)

My “Political Sociology” course was taught by Professor Silver, who didn’t impress me as much as he had impressed Ted. At first, I attended Silver’s class regularly because I saw that Linda was also taking the course. Josh was in graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin and Linda, for the first time since I had met her, was walking around campus alone. As a result of being in the same class, we ended up getting into a fairly long conversation one afternoon. She seemed to miss Josh, was easy to talk with and was very intellectual. But by the end of October, Linda had stopped going to Silver’s class and was living again with Josh out in Wisconsin. Once Linda had stopped attending Silver’s class, I started to cut most of his remaining lectures.

One intellectually positive result of Silver’s “Political Sociology” course was that it led me to write a term paper on “The Ideology of Anti-Communism: The Masterful Put-On.” In the course of researching this term paper, I read a book by Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy on the Cuban Revolution and The Free World Colossus by David Horowitz, which was a left-revisionist history of the Cold War that Horowitz wrote before he became a well-paid right-wing propagandist in the late 1980s. I also documented the corporate economic interests that seemed to determine U.S. foreign policy actions since the 1917 Russian Revolution.

My “Shakespeare I” course was taught by F.W. Dupee, who had been some kind of a leftist in the 1930s and had founded Partisan Review with William Philips and Philip Rahv. In 1967, however, Professor Dupee seemed uninterested in radical politics and just interested in literary questions. Because Dupee was somewhat famous in academic circles and lectured on Shakespeare in an entertaining way, about 75 students enrolled in his class.

On the first day of class, I noticed that Mark was sitting on the other side of the lecture hall. After class we said hello to each other and talked for a few minutes, as we walked towards the southern part of the campus. I can’t recall attending many more class sessions with Professor Dupee, and my impression is that Mark also ended up cutting class often. To pass the course, I wrote a paper on Richard III, which noted the similarity of his Machiavellianism to the Machiavellianism of U.S. political leaders, and included a reference to the recent imprisonment of LeRoi Jones [a/k/a Amiri Baraka] by a U.S. judge who disliked his poetry.

Columbia SDS’s first meeting of the 1967-68 school year took place in Harkness Theatre, the basement auditorium of Butler Library. We seemed to have retained much of our mass activist base from the previous spring. About double the number of students who attended the ICV’s first meeting of the previous school year attended this Columbia SDS meeting. Harkness Theatre was packed with students, including many students who were newcomers to the campus.

Teddy spoke for about 30 minutes about Columbia SDS’s general political goals and its local campus goals. I thought Teddy’s keynote speech was coherent and well-organized. But New York SDS Regional Office activist Halliwell whispered to Ted, after Teddy’s speech had been well-received by the Columbia SDS membership, that “his speech was too apolitical” and “Teddy may be in over his head as Columbia SDS chairman.” Halliwell—being more into National SDS politics than Columbia SDS politics—probably preferred Ted politically to Teddy because Ted was much more Marxist-oriented on an ideological level and didn’t throw in so many references to religious values, Reich and psychological behavior patterns as Teddy did in his political speeches.

I don’t remember much else about Columbia SDS’s first general assembly meeting of the school year, except that a mailing list was passed around to be signed. SDS members signed up for various campus organizing and issue committees. Then a red-haired woman in her late 20s or early 30s sat down in the back of the auditorium and acted out in an angry, politically-flipped out way during the period of general debate, for a few minutes. This “crazy” woman was dressed in jeans and a leather jacket, although she still used lipstick and makeup.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967

Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (iv)

I had gotten my part-time job at the Journal of Philosophy as a result of my friendship with Nancy and Teddy. While walking around campus in late September, I bumped into Nancy and Teddy and mentioned that I was looking for a part-time job. Teddy looked at Nancy for a second and then turned to me with a big smile:

“We know of a job. Working where Nancy works. For John Cauman’s mother. At the Journal of Philosophy office.”

Nancy was also smiling and I felt excited at this sudden prospect of working with Nancy. “I’ll speak with John Cauman’s mother about you next time I go to work,” Nancy said.

The previous academic year, Cauman had been a bearded freshman who looked much older than most other freshman. As a freshman, he had served as Columbia SDS’s first treasurer and he seemed to be an efficient radical bureaucrat. He seemed to be politically radical mostly because he was cynical about the U.S. Establishment and intellectually turned-off by the illogical nature of most U.S. government arguments in favor of the war in Viet Nam, because he didn’t wish to be drafted and because he felt intellectually bored by Columbia’s academic life. Columbia SDS steering committee people had held at least one meeting in the Riverside Drive apartment where Cauman lived with his mother.

Cauman’s mother was a tall woman in her late 40s or early 50s who had a deep voice and a strong intellectual interest in philosophy and abstract questions of logic. She was in charge of putting out the Journal of Philosophy and would often raise her voice if she felt frustrated by other people’s inefficiency or demands. She did not like the fact that her son was bearded and more into being a Columbia SDS treasurer or a hippie, than being into academic careerism. Because of Nancy’s recommendation, Cauman’s mother hired me for the minimum wage shipping clerk job.

Nancy’s job was being a clerk-typist and she usually would put on her glasses and type up letters and forms for Cauman’s mother in a serious and efficient way. At the Journal of Philosophy office, Nancy was pleasant, but we rarely talked about more than our academic lives, our political lives or Columbia SDS chapter business. Teddy would often stop by and meet Nancy at 5 p.m. on the days she worked all afternoon, and he remained much friendlier towards me than was Nancy. After six months working at the Journal of Philosophy, I quit because Cauman’s mother was unwilling to give me a small raise.

My classes during Fall 1967 included courses required for my sociology major: “Systematic Sociology Theory;” “Society Transformation Post-1800;” and “Political Sociology.” My other courses were literature courses: “Poetry in the 20th Century I;” and “Shakespeare I.”

The “Systematic Sociology Theory” and “Society Transformation Post-1800” courses were both taught by the Columbia professor who was closest to Columbia SDS people on a personal and ideological level: Professor Dibble.

Dibble appeared to be in his 40s, had a mustache, and was especially fond of Harvey. During Summer 1967, before Harvey enrolled at the University of Wisconsin graduate school, Harvey was able to live in Professor Dibble’s apartment for free, while Dibble was away from New York City for the summer.

As a lecturer in class, Professor Dibble was pretty incomprehensible for many students, was ill at ease and would tend to mumble. But ideologically, Professor Dibble was a hard-line Marxist and staunch anti-imperialist. He also didn’t overestimate the 1960s revolutionary potential of the U.S. industrial working-class. When I mentioned that I might attempt to do factory work and attempt to organize factory workers after I graduated from Columbia, Dibble made the following observation: “I worked in a factory in Philadelphia once. And while the workers would bitch a lot and complain behind the boss’s back a lot, they were not open to radical ideas.”

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967

Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (iii)

As September 1967 passed by, other Columbia and Barnard leftist students began returning to the Upper West Side from around the U.S. and from summers in Europe—just in time for Freshman Week at Columbia College. There was new school year excitement in the air. Everybody at Columbia and Barnard seemed to be against U.S. military intervention in Viet Nam. Everybody with whom you talked seemed to be either a hippie or some kind of political leftist, left-liberal or anarchist. There was a sense of campus leftist momentum as we planned for Freshman Week.

Walking down Broadway on a summer-like September afternoon, I saw a student wearing sunglasses and sandals, who looked vaguely familiar. It was Mark. He had just come back from Berkeley. Although we exchanged some friendly conversation briefly, and I was amused to bump into him again by accident, I still didn’t feel that personally close to him. He still seemed hard to get to know and too impatient to really listen to you, if you spoke too long to him. I respected Mark as an orator and still thought he was a pleasant, interesting and funny guy. But I felt closer politically and personally to Teddy, Ted and Dave, at this time.

The final planning meeting for Columbia SDS’s countercultural Freshman Week was held in Mark’s apartment. Mark’s living room was crowded with Barnard and Columbia student activists, sitting close together on chairs or sprawled out on the floor. For about three hours that evening, we discussed how we could best “turn on the incoming Columbia freshmen” to New Left radical politics and a New Left activist lifestyle. It was suggested that we set up tables outside official Freshman Week events, leaflet the dormitories and hold dorm lobby meetings. Mark suggested, facetiously, that “We should go up to freshmen and offer them joints.”

We eventually held a mass introductory meeting for freshmen in Earl Hall, which was attended by about 100 freshmen. At this meeting, National SDS Secretary Greg Calvert gave the principal speech. Calvert was dressed in proletarian jeans and a blue denim jacket, and had a mustache and medium-length hair.

“I’m not going to congratulate you for getting admitted into Columbia University. Because it’s just a question of luck that you had the right class background to get into the Ivy League,” Calvert said at the beginning of his speech, in a sarcastic tone, as he stood in front of the auditorium. “The difference between a liberal and a radical is that a liberal doesn’t feel himself personally oppressed. He just fights for the freedom of others. A radical does feel himself personally oppressed. He fights for his own freedom, as well as for the freedom of others. SDS people are white radicals, not white liberals.”

Calvert had been on an academic careerist grad student/teaching assistant track in the early 1960s, and had studied in Paris before becoming radicalized and shifting his orientation from academic study to radical activism. In 1967, he was around 30-years-old and, because of the 1960s New Left’s homophobic nature, he hid his gay sexual orientation. He had apparently had his first gay love affairs in Europe. In his public role as a New Left male leader, however, Calvert seemed no different from any comparable heterosexual male activist, and he adopted no stereotyped gay male mannerisms.

In the W. 94th St. apartment, I started to get closer to Dave. By early October 1967, Ted was pretty much spending most of his nights sleeping with Trude in her W. 108th St. apartment. So it was pretty much just Dave and I who lived in the 94th St. apartment.

I would spend most of the day and evening around Columbia’s campus, attending some classes, browsing in the library and bookstore, attending Columbia SDS meetings, doing SDS political work, hanging out in the Lion’s Den cafeteria of Ferris Booth Hall, constantly talking with other SDS people or bringing SDS politics to lectures and meetings that were being addressed by speakers from off-campus. I also started to work at a part-time job from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, at the Journal of Philosophy office, as a shipping clerk at minimum wage, to help pay my off-campus living expenses.

Dave would spend most of his days and evenings downtown attending grad school at the New School, building an SDS chapter there or attending meetings at the SDS Regional Office. He and other Regional SDS people were both working to build SDS and attempting to build an “adult,” non-student Movement for a Democratic Society [MDS] of ex-student radical professionals who had left the campus scene for meaningless off-campus 9-to-5 jobs. In addition, Dave spent his spare-time studying Marx’s Das Kapital book and writing more New Left theoretical papers on imperialism and U.S. domestic consumption, consumerism and “the new working-class.” In October 1967, Dave had begun to look somewhat like Marx, himself, and had grown a long black beard.

In the late evening, Dave and I would each finally return to the apartment. And most evenings—in-between answering the constantly ringing telephone—Dave and I would usually use his water pipe to constantly get smashed to the music of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club and Revolver albums, Rolling Stones albums and early Dylan albums. Most of Dave’s phone calls came from various Movement women with whom he worked at the SDS Regional Office.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967

Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (ii)

A few days later, I also helped Dave move his stuff from an apartment on W. 110th St., between Amsterdam and Broadway, which he had sublet for the summer. I arrived in the afternoon. We talked for a few hours, while we waited for another friend of Dave to drop off the car and U-haul in which we were going to move his stuff.

As Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde album played on a stereo, Dave told me more about his past life, and discussed his current study of Das Kapital with me. He also gave his interpretation of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization to me at this time. After talking about the Civil Rights Movement’s continued shift towards Black revolutionary nationalism, Dave mentioned that he used to have intense discussions with a Black woman activist in Harlem during the period when “we were all naïve about the political implications of inter-racial love affairs.”

A few moments later, Dave sang along with the chorus of Dylan’s Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again song, where Dylan moans: “Oh, Mama! Can this really be the end?”

“Do you hear that pain, Bob? Dylan’s expressing the pain that you get when you realize that no matter where you go geographically under capitalism, you’re still going to end up feeling the same intense alienation and loneliness that the System produces everywhere,” Dave explained.

Dave, like everyone else around Columbia SDS, liked to spend time analyzing Dylan’s lyrics and philosophical shifts. Dave seemed to empathize more with Dylan’s shift away from his earlier, more politically radical-oriented albums than Ted did.

After the car and U-haul arrived, I helped lift chairs, a desk, drawers, boxes of books and a mattress from the apartment to the elevator, and then into the U-haul. When we had finished moving Dave’s furniture and boxes of books to our new apartment, we returned to the 110th St. apartment in the evening, where we found many people high, and dancing, at some kind of hip left party. I didn’t know any other people at this party, because most of the hip left people there were a few years out of college and not part of the Columbia SDS scene.

Dave introduced me to another New York SDS Regional Office activist at this party, named Joe, who Dave felt was “a hard worker and a dedicated guy.” Joe was blind in one eye and had a speech impediment, but he didn’t let his poor vision and speech impediment stop him from doing more than his share of the SDS Regional Office shitwork. Unlike most Movement activists, Joe lived with his parents.

A final Summer 1967 Columbia SDS steering committee meeting was held one afternoon in September at the Schneiders’ apartment. Ted and Trude, Teddy and Nancy, the Schneiders, Al and I were there. And, for the first time, a Columbia College student named Robby appeared at a summer steering committee meeting. During his 1966-67 freshman year, Robby had chosen not to be that politically active in Columbia SDS circles.

I had first met Robby in a parking lot that we used as a stickball field—inside the Beech Hills development in which I lived—during the 1950s; and he was, thus, an old childhood acquaintance. Robby’s parents were Old Left professionals. After we confronted the Marine recruiters in April 1967, Robby seemed to become less frivolous in his attitude towards life and more interested in radical New Left politics than in Columbia University academic life, although he had still remained outside the SDS steering committee’s inner circle discussion group.

Sundial: Columbia SDS Memories: Chap. 11: Ted Gold Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967

Chapter 11: Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert: Roommates, 1967 (i)

In late August and early September, Ted and I walked along Claremont Ave., ringing bells of superintendents and asking if there were any vacant apartments in the buildings. We didn’t find any vacancies.

Ted did not yet wish to move in with Trude. So Ted, Dave and I continued to search for a vacant 3-bedroom apartment, and it was a difficult task. Dave and Ted found a reasonably-priced apartment eventually and paid money to a broker on W. 72nd St. and Broadway to reserve the right to rent the apartment. But the broker played some kind of “bait and switch” game with Dave and Ted. The apartment suddenly became unavailable, and Dave and Ted lost $600 in broker’s fees, until they could win a court judgment against the broker.

In mid-September, with the help of Columbia’s Off-Campus Housing Office, Ted, Dave and I finally managed to find a run-down, vacant, 3-bedroom apartment on W. 94th St. Our landlady was a woman in her late 50s named Mrs. Grossman.

Ted and I dropped by the W. 93rd St. apartment of Ted’s parents, to pick up some of Ted’s extra books and records that he wished to drop off at our apartment. When I examined Ted’s bookcase there, it was interesting to notice that he had back-issues of the now-defunct muckraking Ramparts magazine from the early 1960s. I thumbed through some of these early issues, while Ted figured out which of his extra books and records to gather up.

I also noticed that Ted had a copy of Fleming’s The Origins of the Cold War, which argued that the Soviet Union wasn’t responsible for starting the Cold War after World War II. When Ted noticed that I was glancing at Fleming’s book, he smiled and said: “You know Fleming isn’t even a Marxist, but just a fairly conservative historian. Yet even he admits that the United States government was responsible for starting the Cold War.”

The apartment of Ted’s parents was furnished much like the apartments of those right-wing relatives of mine who owned small businesses or were accountants or insurance salesmen. Ted’s younger brother happened to be in the apartment and Ted said hello to him. But they exchanged few other words, before his brother went into his own room.

“He’s a good kid. But he’s not interested in radical politics at all,” Ted said with a shrug, as we walked back to our new apartment, carrying boxes of records and books. Trude then arrived at our new apartment a short while later, and the three of us walked across Broadway and up one block to W. 95th St. to the Thalia revival film house to see Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

I visited the apartment of Ted’s parents a few more times that month, including one time during the evening. At this time, his mother was sitting with a group of three or four women friends or women relatives—who all appeared to be in their late 40s or early 50s—and they were chatting when we walked in. Everybody said hello to Ted with fondness in their voices when we entered the apartment for a few moments. But then the women quickly resumed their conversation, as we picked up more of Ted’s things and quietly left the apartment.

Around this time, I asked Ted how his parents first indicated to him that the United States was an imperialist society.

“My father explained to me how oil company interests determined U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East,” Ted replied.

After most of Ted’s stuff was moved into the apartment, his father came over on a Sunday afternoon with Ted and me, and he looked over the apartment. Ted and his father seemed to relate to each other as much in a brotherly way as in a father-son way. Ted’s father thought the apartment was over-priced, but he didn’t express any disapproval at Ted for moving from the dorms into his own apartment. Although Ted’s father was a doctor, on Sundays he dressed casually. He seemed youngish in his physical appearance and was a Maoist, but he wasn’t interested in having any extended political discussion with me and Ted at the apartment. He was just interested in checking out his son’s new living quarters.

One evening in mid-September, Ted drove his father’s car out to my parents’ apartment to help me move my guitar, some suitcases of clothes and some books into our new apartment. After loading my stuff in the trunk of his father’s car, Ted drove north towards the Whitestone Bridge, over the bridge and then across the Cross Bronx Expressway towards Upper Manhattan. A thunderstorm began as we approached Manhattan. The rain had stopped and the sky was clearing up, however, by the time we reached our apartment.

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

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

Ted had spent early June with friends out in Berkeley and had let his hair grow long for awhile out there. Then he had returned to the Upper West Side for the rest of the summer in order to be a group counselor in Columbia’s white paternalistic “Double Discovery” program. In late July, I dropped by Ted’s dorm room in Furnald Hall to talk about his apartment hunt, and to turn on with him.

After starting the fan in his dorm window—to reduce the accumulation of smoke in the room—and filling up his pipe with some marijuana, Ted passed the pipe to me. We then each took turns holding a match over the pipe, as the other inhaled. Folk music and folk-rock music provided our background musical atmosphere.

After talking about the “adjust to a repressive society” politics of the psychiatric clinic I was working at, discussing Ted’s attempt to expose his “Double Discovery” group of high school students to the writings of Malcolm X, and exchanging thoughts about the organizational problems Viet Nam Summer organizers were having on the Upper West Side, Ted suddenly asked with a smile: “Have you heard the new Beatles’ album?”

“No. I still don’t like the Beatles too much. They’re boring, compared to trying to analyze Dylan lyrics,” I answered.

Ted laughed and replied: “That’s what I used to think, too. But the Beatles seem hipper in their new album.”

Ted then took the record out of the album jacket, lifted off the turntable the folk record that had been playing, and put on the turntable the new Beatles record. A few seconds later, for the first time, I heard the song lyrics:

“It was twenty years ago, today.
Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play…”

We kept smoking in the dorm room, as the record continued to play. Our time sense became distorted, as each 3 minutes of record time felt like 15 minutes. We were both giggling a lot by the time the song that began “I read the news today, oh boy” on the second side started. Laughing, Ted pointed out the skillful way the Beatles used sound effects to prolong the “I’d love to turn you on” phrase in the song.

I asked Ted if he had decided yet what he was going to do after his scheduled Spring 1968 graduation.

“I might go to grad school in London,” he answered with a shrug.

“Aren’t you tired of being in school?” I replied.

Ted shrugged again. “My mother wants me to go to grad school. And I think I could get a good recommendation from Professor Silver,” he said.

Columbia Professor of Sociology Silver was Ted’s favorite professor during his junior year. Ted then felt Silver was quite deep intellectually and quite decent, personally. In part, because of his admiration for Silver, Ted had decided to shift his academic major from mathematics to sociology. “Professor Silver has no family and seems like a lonely guy. But he really seems dedicated to his students. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with him in his office. And I feel very attracted to him, in a platonic way,” Ted had said earlier in the year.

Ted then asked me if I knew what I wanted to do after I graduated.

“Avoid the draft. Then go to Appalachia and organize poor whites for awhile. Then move someplace else and organize people there. I want to live in different cities in the U.S. after college for a few years. Not just live in one place and be stuck in just one job for 40 years, like my father. I want to work at many different kinds of jobs during my life,” I replied.

“You have post-scarcity consciousness. If we can make a revolution and gain control of the technology, people won’t be trapped in one city and in one career for their whole lives,” Ted said with a smile.

After awhile, Ted and I started to talk about Teddy.

“You know, I love Teddy a lot. But I think he’s stopped growing politically and intellectually,” Ted suddenly said.

I was surprised at this comment. I hadn’t yet noticed any particular change for the worse in Teddy, politically or intellectually.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“He doesn’t seem to want to think too deeply about political questions or read political books anymore. When I try to talk strategically with him, he just seems content to answer by rhetorically repeating some quotation he’s memorized from Mao or Che Guevara or Ho Chi Minh,” Ted answered.

“I haven’t noticed that. But he’s still a good speaker and has that great, warm personality. Everybody seems to like him,” I replied.

Ted laughed and retorted. “I know he’s a great talker. And, like I said, I still love him. But do you know? Teddy doesn’t know how to write a coherent leaflet. He can speak. But if he tries writing anything, it contains a lot of grammatical and spelling errors, and a lot of confused politics. Unless I write the leaflets myself this fall, the chapter will be in trouble.”

I laughed.

Ted also first mentioned to me at this time that he had fallen in love with a recent Barnard graduate named Trude. “She’s also a counselor in the Double Discovery program,” Ted noted.

After Ted introduced me to Trude later in the summer, Trude and I both thought it coincidental that when Trude was a senior at Broad Ripple High School in Indianapolis, I had been a sophomore there. In her senior year at Broad Ripple, Trude had been the yearbook editor and very active in high school journalism affairs. In New York City, by the time she had graduated from Barnard, Trude had become popular with leftist Columbia men because of her sweet personality, her gentleness, her intellectual seriousness and her increased surface beauty. She now dressed more bohemian than she had dressed in Indianapolis, wore blue jeans and let her long brown hair hang down.

Ted also indicated in this Furnald Hall dorm room discussion that he felt the African-American rebellions of the summer meant that the mass of African-American people had outgrown Martin Luther King’s pacifist political line and were moving in the direction Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and SNCC had predicted people would move. “I’ve been doing a 15-minute political commentary show for WKCR this summer, explaining why the Black rebellions are justified,” Ted said.

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

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

In late July, Columbia SDS steering committee people started to meet in the Schneiders’ high-rise apartment on LaSalle St., a few blocks from Columbia’s campus. Meetings were held in the evening during the week, on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Political strategy for the coming 67-68 school year was discussed. At one of the meetings, Katie and a male student activist, both from Princeton SDS, participated in the strategic discussion with us. We talked about our experiences in attempting to mobilize students in opposition to both Princeton and Columbia’s Institute for Defense Analyses connections and both Princeton and Columbia’s performance of Pentagon-sponsored research and weapons development activity on campus. Katie was a good-natured, serious intellectual activist who seemed to know almost as much about U.S. university ties to the Pentagon as Mike Klare knew.

Nearly all the people attending the informal summer Columbia SDS steering committee meetings were “Praxis Axis” people. Teddy, Nancy, Ted, the Schneiders, Harvey, Evansohn, a grad student from Boston named Al and I were among the people meeting. I brought research about IDA’s involvement in “Project Agile”—which directly related to weapons research for Viet Nam War operational activity—to one of the meetings. I also listened to much theoretical discussion about New Left political strategy and SDS chapter internal organization and education. Peter Schneider, Teddy and Ted, especially, seemed to feel that too great a gap existed between the political consciousness level of Columbia SDS’s leadership and its rank-and-file’s political consciousness level. Each felt that in the 67-68 academic year a special effort should be made to involve rank-and-file members in smaller groups, to maximize their participation in SDS chapter activity.

In Summer 1967, Monthly Review published an English translation of Regis Debray’s Revolution In The Revolution, which argued in support of Che Guevara’s “foci theory of revolution.” Near the end of the summer, SDS Regional organizer Halliwell appeared at one meeting to make the case for applying Regis Debray’s theory of “mobile tactics” to Columbia University conditions, with Columbia SDS acting as the non-violent equivalent of Che’s “guerrilla foci group.” According to Halliwell’s analogy, the mass of Columbia students, like the mass of Latin American peasants, could only be aroused if Columbia SDS developed the capacity to act on an off-campus level as a mobile guerrilla foci at anti-war demonstrations. In Halliwell’s view, Columbia SDS should continue to use its usual educational methods to persuade future members of the new working-class—the mass of Columbia University student “peasants”—to become off-campus mobile demonstrators who pushed the U.S. anti-war movement “from protest to resistance,” by their mobile tactics.