16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An inside look at SDS and the radicalization of the anti-war movement., June 5, 2008
This review is from: Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Anti-War Movement (Hardcover)
What a long strange trip it was for Carl Oglesby! In 1965 Oglesby was busy working for the defense contractor BDS. He was happily living the middle class lifestyle in suburbia with his wife Beth and their 3 children. But independent from his duties at BDS Oglesby had quietly come to the conclusion that United States involvement in Vietnam was a huge mistake. His views on the war crystallized when he was asked to put together a campaign brochure for Democratic congressional candidate Wes Vivian. Well, one thing led to another and before long Carl Oglesby would resign from BDS and renounce his comfortable lifestyle to become President of the fledgling organization known as SDS. "Ravens In The Storm: A Personal History of the 1960's Anti-War Movement" is Carl Oglesby's memoir of those turbulant days in the mid to late 1960's when it seemed that the whole world was turned upside down. This is compelling reading folks!
What is so fascinating about "Ravens In The Storm" is the fact that this book probably could not have been written without the thousands of pages of documents from the files of the FBI and CIA that Carl Oglesby was able to obtain in recent years through the Freedom of Information Act. He no longer had to rely strictly on memory to document so many of the events that he recalls in his book. Because of the fact that the SDS had been infiltrated by government agents and his home phone had been tapped by the Feds, Oglebsy now had access to actual transcripts of many key organization meetings and phone conversations from this period.
To me what is most striking about "Ravens In The Storm" is how radicals like Bernadine Dohrn, Mike Rudd and David Gilbert were able to co-opt the agenda of SDS and steer the group in a direction totally contrary to the vision that Carl Oglesby had for the organization. Seems like the 1968 assasinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy was the last straw for most of these folks. Whereas Oglesby had sought to foster dialogue and education to help bring an end to the Vietman War the group that would come to be known as the Weathermen favored armed conflict and ultimately revolution. It seems to me that had Carl Oglesby's even-handed approach won the day that the war in Vietnam would have come to a conclusion much sooner. It was also extremely unsettling to read about Carl's 1965 meeting with a group of eight South Vietnamese business leaders who outlined a plan to bring the conflict to a rapid and just conclusion. And as Oglesby recalls on page 75 "The ghastly fact to contemplate decades later is that, in its salient points, this is almost exactly the peace plan that was adopted in 1975, ten years after that meeting and as many as three million lives later."
For me, "Ravens In The Storm" was a real eye-opener. Contrary to my recollections of the period it is comforting to know that there were some thoughtful and reasonable people like Oglesby with very honorable intentions involved in the anti-war movement. Carl Oglesby is a superb writer who tells his story with verve and makes his argument most eloquently. "Ravens In The Storm: A Personal History of the 1960's Anti-War Movement" should prove to be an important addition to the history of this period. Highly recommended!
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the 1960s Anti-War Movement, May 22, 2008
This review is from: Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Anti-War Movement (Hardcover)
"Ravens in the Storm" is at once an elegiac memoir, a chronicle of the inside workings of the antiwar movement and an apologia. There is a wistfulness about it, a sense of opportunities squandered and chances missed, but also a triumphant air that Carl Oglesby and his cohorts in the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS movement, had actually, in the final analysis, accomplished something not achieved before or since. They made a difference at a critical time in our nation's history that has eerily familiar parallels to today, as we live through another illegal, ill-advised and unwinnable war.
The similarities to the 1960s Vietnam War era and the current fiasco in Iraq are an undercurrent in "Ravens." Oglesby never mentions our current conflict, leaving it to the reader to draw the unmistakable conclusions: a nation of sleepwalkers trusting in a corrupt government, a president with an unclear mission and a blank check, and a compliant Congress that failed to fulfill its constitutional responsibility to reign in an out-of-control administration.
Oglesby's 1960s featured a government that lied to and spied on its citizens, a corrupt, profit-driven military-industrial complex; a country bent on nation-building in a faraway place of which we had and have little cultural or historical understanding, and little sympathy for the millions of lives destroyed in a horrific and pointless war. Sound familiar?
The difference is for Vietnam they had Carl Oglesby and the SDS, and the best we could manage for Iraq was Cindy Sheehan.
The book traces Oglesby's unlikely and meteoric rise from middle-class homeowner with a wife and two kids living in the suburbs working within the military-industrial complex at Bendix Corp. -- with top-secret security clearance -- to the world stage as president of the radical student group SDS. Like Woody Allen's Zelig, Oglesby seems to have been at every major event of his time and met most of the movers and shakers of his day.
"Ravens" is well-written, mainly because Oglesby was a trained writer and editor at Bendix who also is a playwright, poet, songwriter and pretty good raconteur. He's got five other books to his credit, including two on the JFK assassination.
Here's a sample from the book, and you tell me whether it sounds like a description of where we are today:
Our national debt was up, our taxes were up, our inner cities were up in flames, our war strategists were up a tree, our kids were up to their necks in killing and getting killed in a lost cause, our North Atlantic allies were almost up in arms against us. The war had to come to an end. Johnson had to go.
Replace "Johnson" with "Bush" and you're here now, in 2008, in Iraq, not in 1968, in Vietnam.
It is the parallels with today that give "Ravens" its immediacy, its importance as a book that should be read by anyone who wants to understand how America could get itself into the kind of intractable predicament we currently are in.
But it is Oglesby's unique place in modern history that lends the book a certain gravitas. As president of SDS Oglesby turned the organization -- which at its height counted 317 chapters and 100,000 members -- toward protesting the Vietnam War and away from its grass-roots community organizing mission.
He participated in a tribunal organized by philosopher Bertrand Russell and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, he was at the 1968 riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, he was asked by Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver to be Cleaver's vice-presidential running mate in the 1968 elections, he went to Cuba and organized a program wherein Americans went to the island nation -- illegally -- to help with the sugar harvest.
But his turning of SDS into a radical antiwar organization also led to the government's illegal and violent crackdown on the entire antiwar movement, to the formation of the radical Weatherman movement and, ultimately, to the downfall of SDS at the hands of the government and its own internal entropy.
Oglesby sacrificed much for his involvement with the cause: he lost his family, was star-chambered by SDS and forced to resign from numerous jobs because of his association with the antiwar movement and his principles.
But he always (at least as he tells it) cleaved to those principles, even when it cost him dearly. He consistently promulgated a moderate liberal agenda that counseled inclusion and a willingness to promote dialog over diatribe, understanding over insurrection and engagement over violence.
The book would have been stronger with a section of photographs from the era, which would have put faces to names and places. It would have benefited by a more talented proofreader, but these are small criticisms that only in minor ways detract from its power and impact.
It is a thoughtful, reflective and insightful book. "Ravens in the Storm" should be required reading for anyone who wants to try to understand some of the most turbulent and, finally, most interesting times of the 20th century.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Aa terrific memoir!, May 31, 2009
This review is from: Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Anti-War Movement (Hardcover)
This is a wonderful book, an exciting, very moving, fact-filled inside look at the anti-war movement of the 1960's, Oglesby's very important part of that movement, and its tragic demise. Oglesby doesn't say much about his actual emotional response to his meteoric rise as one of the main spokespersons of SDS--which must have been exhilarating--and the heartache he must have felt at seeing SDS being destroyed by government infiltration and attacks, the seizing of power by the violence-advocating Weathermen, the death of three close friends who were killed by their own bomb, and hearing his own South Carolinian family mouthing racist, right-wing nonsense. But one can read between the lines and he comes across as a rather humble, fair-minded, eloquent person who was able to tolerate complex ideas. He describes meeting and working with people like Sartre and de Beauvoir; debating US senators ; and giving anti-war talks all over the world. What Oglesby attempted to do, which comes across very clearly, and which is similar to what Obama attempts to do today, is to steer a path between the extremes of left and right, and avoid their narrow, anti-democratic positions while, at the same time, attempting to understand their concerns. It is understandable why he wrote a play called "The Peacemaker," where the hero is a man who attempted to intervene and bring an end to the tragic Hatfield-McCoy conflict.
I was moved almost to tears by his poetic description, on the last page, of the ravens who are flying, seemingly with great relish, at the windy aftermath of a hurricane in Martha's Vineyard, where he had rented a house in 1975. He started the book by describing the raven in the Bible as a better bird then the dove at dealing with the hawks. And, at the end of the book, he says:
"Ours was a movement of ravens. . .a great flocking and soaring to and fro in the big storm of the American sixties. Sometimes we could really fly. When we crashed, it was from an enormous height."
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