The Rise and Fall of the Nation's

Largest Student Movement: the

Students for Democratic Society
BY STEVE MARIOTTI
Part One - Carl Oglesby and the Hopeful 1960s Dawn of the SDS
It isn't the rebels who cause the troubles of the world; it's the troubles that cause the rebels. -
Carl Oglesby
Terry Robbins and Diana Oughton's shredded bodies littered the cellar floor after homemade
bombs prematurely exploded in a townhouse at 18 west 11th street in New York City's
Greenwich Village. Their friend, Ted Gold, lay dying under the rubble.

FDNY responds to the bombing.
Forty-four years ago, on March 6th, 1970, this momentous bombing marked one of the violent
transitions from the SDS into the Weathermen. By December of 1969, the Communist/Stalinist
incarnation of the Weathermen had successfully commandeered the SDS leadership, sending
dark waves through American politics and the anti-war movement. Because of my friendship
with Carl Oglesby and my involvement in the SDS, I have a unique history with this movement,
and hope now to share my insights on what happened during this rich time in American political
history. Much of the movement became anti-business -- a small number even became
communist -- but Oglesby's SDS was pro-civil liberties and free enterprise. At the time, I
thought this anti-war libertarian wing was the majority of the SDS, but I would soon discover
otherwise.
Hundreds and then thousands of Americans were dying every week during the Vietnam War.
America brought 3.4 million to Southeast Asia, and 650,000 of them were forced to serve as
draftees. Campuses erupted in student protests, culminating into what seemed like a civil war
between the advocates and opposition.
The SDS was a product of the Student League for Industrial Democracy in Ann Arbor, Michigan,
by Aryeh Neier (former head of the Soros Foundation). The Student League was a socialist
organization founded in 1905 that generally stood against private ownership and supported
state control of business. However, they were also pro-democracy and anti-communist. By the
early 1960s, the organization had about 2,000 members, mostly in the Northeast. But the
movement was about to come back to its Michigan roots in a major way.
When the radio news of the bombing reached my home in Flint, Michigan, a shiver went down
my spine. I knew some of the participants and had chosen to leave the SDS as a result of changes
in their new platform and the infiltration by young Marxists.
Today, the student-activist organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is being
reactivated on college campuses around the country as the New SDS. Yet, how many of its new
members are aware of SDS's complex past and the role of its legendary leader, Carl Oglesby?
What about its corruption by the violent, radical, Stalinist leftists who ousted Oglesby and began
bombing public places throughout the country? Will the new SDS be compromised as it was in
the 1960s?

The New SDS.
I write now from my perspective, and acknowledge that there are many valid and differing
accounts from the period and about the SDS organization.
*****
In 1961, my parents hired a very nice young man named Carl Oglesby to be my tutor. He
attended our Unitarian Church in Ann Arbor, and worked for The Bendix Corporation, a major
government military supplier. In 1963, he wrote a paper for the Michigan's Far East Journal
arguing for the immediate withdrawal of our troops from Vietnam.
Oglesby was influenced by his mentor, a Libertarian economist named Murray Rothbard, who
also became my friend until his death in 1995.
In Ann Arbor and Flint, we were strongly aware of President Eisenhower's warnings about the
military-industrial complex. We were also strongly against the Vietnam War--an illegal and
undeclared war, impossible to win, that was ultimately about nationalism and the movement for
self determination--and in my opinion, political and economic independence. From 1965 to
1969, the number of American troops in Vietnam went from 60,000 to over 500,000. Many of
the soldiers were draftees, and roughly 76 percent of the young men sent to Vietnam were from
lower-middle and working class backgrounds. The average age was about 223. They were given
three months of training by instructors with no comparable combat experience, and then
shipped out.
According to Nick Turse's recent book, Kill Anything That Moves, much of the horror took place
in the countryside, where our unsupervised, trapped teen soldiers, often high on local drugs,
would sleep in snake- and leech-infested swamps, among other nightmares.
Our boys were murdered. The death toll among American troops was over 58,000, with another
75,000 coming home classified as seriously disabled. It is estimated that as many as 3 million
Vietnamese were killed in the war and another million Cambodians died from secret illegal
bombings.

Antiwar protests.
Carl Oglesby became a leader of the SDS in 1965 at Camp Kewadin in northern Michigan. His
mentor, Murray Rothbard, was overjoyed that Oglesby, as a free-market Republican/Democrat
of the Libertarian Party, had become the leader of one of the most influential youth movements
in the country.
On the way to that meeting, he told my family that if he were to be elected, he would change the
SDS from its broad mission to uphold civil rights and ban nuclear weapons to specific tactics:
anti-war, anti-draft, anti-tax, and pro-small business. Oglesby correctly argued that the Vietnam
War helped the growth of the large and oppressive state by expanding the government's power
and influence. He and other leaders from Ann Arbor also advocated ending the Vietnam War as
a primary political goal. This anti-war, pro-capitalist stance put our family in agreement with the
majority of the SDS members at the time.
Carl traveled tirelessly around the country building up local SDS chapters on college campuses.
Soon, there were over 300 chapters nationwide with 100,000 members organizing local teach-
ins and protests against the war. So, Carl decided to leave Bendix early in 1965 (he formally left
in June), so that he and his wife, Beth, could become "full-time SDSers."
We attended the first anti-war "teach-in" on March 24, 1965, led by Carl at the University of
Michigan's Student Union. Twice, we had to leave the building due to bomb scares, a harbinger
of the chaotic times to come. Arthur Miller was one of the speakers on March 24th. I clearly
remember sitting in the audience when Miller said, "You mustn't forget that the FBI is among
you."
After the meeting, Carl asked me to write strategy papers for the SDS discussing how to best
market the organization to working-class kids in places like Flint, Michigan, where General
Motors was based. He then appointed me the "theoretician" of the national junior high school
chapter of SDS. As there were no organizational charts, in reality no-one was in charge and there
was no centralized leadership.

Flint, as it looked in the 1970s.
We all agreed on one thing: the Vietnam War must end. A defining moment in the anti-war
movement came when Alice Herz, an 82-year-old Quaker from Ann Arbor, immolated herself to
protest the bombing of Vietnamese villages. This event received national attention: the brutality
of the war was making itself apparent to people from all walks of life.
We really believed that our student-activist movement would not only end the war, it would
change our country for the better, making it more democratic, more free and more just. Little
did we know, forces within SDS were mobilizing to internally infiltrate and corrupt. Our lives
and our SDS were soon to be radically altered.
Part Two: How both the Nolan Chart and Libertarian Party were influenced by the SDS
In 1965, Carl Oglesby assumed leadership of the student-activist organization (Students for a
Democratic Society aka the SDS). This change reflected what I believe was an ideological shift in
America's left wing: from the East Coast intellectual tradition to the New Left emerging from the
Midwest.
After one Sunday service at our former church in Ann Arbor, Carl asked to practice a new
speech, which later became quite well-known as "Let Us Shape the Future," in front of the
church membership. He had planned to deliver in at the March for Peace in Vietnam, held in
D.C. on November 27th, 1965. I was thirteen at that time, and had been elected president of the
Unitarian Church youth groups in both Ann Arbor and Flint. Watching him in action within the
organization, I came to idolize Carl.

The Parish House where the War Council took place in 1969.
As we listened, we noticed that Carl used the word "coordinates" to describe issues where he
believed the Left and Right shared common ground. This led us into a discussion of the
limitations of the Left/Right line chart, which was often used to illustrate a person's political
views.
LEFT---------------------------------------RIGHT
The Left/Right chart plotted a person's political leanings along a line depending on where one
stood on issues of economic and personal freedom. The chart was based on the assumption that
people on the Right were focused on economic freedom, while those on the Left were more
concerned with personal freedom. Carl was trying to explain in his speech that plotting our
political ideologies in this way had created a false Left/Right dialectic--one that made
Democratic and Republican viewpoints seem hopelessly in conflict.
My father understood Carl, but he knew there was better way to explain this important
discovery. Knowing my love for math, he asked me to diagram Carl's concept. Eager to show off,
I grabbed a piece of chalk and drew an X and a Y axis. I labeled them economic freedom and
personal freedom. This diagram eventually came to be known as the Nolan Chart, named for
David Nolan.

The Nolan Chart.
This simple chart opens up the political landscape, prompting readers to re-think political
assumptions. For example, when using the old Left/Right line chart, it is hard to say whether
Ron Paul or Rick Santorum is more "conservative." But, using two axes creates new options.
Without the Nolan Chart, words lose their meaning and analytical power.
My great friend David Nolan and I met when we served on the executive and platform
committees of the 1970s Libertarian party. Nolan first published his version of the chart in the
January 1971 issue of The Individualist, a monthly magazine distributed by the Society for
Individual Liberty (SIL). The Nolan Chart became the defining document of the Libertarian
party, which Nolan founded in December of 1971 using ideas developed by Thomas Jefferson,
Carl Oglesby, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Henry David Thoreau, and F.A. Hayek.
Incidentally, in 1972, I presented to Nolan and Rothbard the idea of a three dimensional chart,
making it a cube and adding the concepts of legality and morality.While they both loved the
idea, it was too complicated for widespread use. This would enable people who are against for
example drug use to oppose it morally without asserting or staking control over other adults
based on that belief.
His mentor, economist Murray Rothbard, another central figure in the early Libertarian Party,
reviewed Carl's speech in late October. I still remember Carl poring over the speech a week
before he went to Washington, and I also recall Murray phoning Carl on a Sunday to give him
some last-minute feedback. We all knew it would be an important speech, but we didn't realize
how lasting its effect would be on the political landscape of our nation. (Read the speech here).
On November 27, 1965, roughly 35,000 filled D.C.'s National Mall to hear Carl's speech, which
he expected to give to a crowd of 5,000. My parents and I had ringside seats.
His historic speech took the anti-war movement to a higher level and is widely viewed as one of
the greatest speeches of the 1960s. I was personally inspired by it more than twenty years later,
when I adapted Carl's speech, calling all to take ownership of their future, as the tagline for my
foundation, The Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, "Owning Your Future."
After the speech, Carl was mobbed, and we weren't able to talk to him. In early 1966, however,
he called our house and asked me to head the SDS outreach for youth under fifteen. I eagerly
agreed, and began to write papers in my sprawling, crooked handwriting, advocating anti-war
actions like a student strike, which had virtually no impact at Zimmerman Junior High or at
Flint Southwestern High School. I recruited a whopping three members to the anti-war
movement.
When he invited me to meet with him and other SDS members in Ann Arbor, I was thrilled. I
walked into the meeting at the Brown Jug assuming that everyone there would be on the same
page--that we were all anti-war, pro-democracy and fans of both economic and personal
freedom. I was in for an unpleasant awakening.
Although the SDS had always been an anti-communist organization, it was being infiltrated by
the Progressive Labor Party (PLP, see), a Communist-front group that in 1965, would be
successful in removing the anti-communist plank from the SDS's platform.

J.J. Jacobs.
I was stunned after meeting with the new incarnation of the SDS. Carl later said he should have
warned me that there were now two parts of the SDS: one led by him and Murray, which
supported private ownership, aligned with small business and protected the free market; and
one concluded that democracy came from decentralization of wealth and power. The Marxist
side believed in a communist takeover of the world based on Lenin's strategy.
This was my first experience with the small radical sect, and it left me pretty shaken. I was
shocked to realize how little these young activists had read, unaware of the critical debates
against the labor theory of value made by Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises,F.A. Hayek, and
Milton Friedman.
They were even unaware of the differences between Trotsky and Lenin. Even accepting their
economic and political illiteracy, I could not believe that they had not heard of Khrushchev's
speech, a seminal indictment of Stalin by his successor. Although they said they were Marxists,
they were unaware of the Manifesto of Equals, the key document for justification of mass
murder. I didn't fully grasp the implications of the factional struggle that was emerging with the
SDS, which is why I want to communicate this history now to young people who are getting
involved with the New SDS.

Carl Oglesby.
At this time, my primary focus was how to get working-class youth to rally against the war. Even
then, I was a fan of small business, and I outlined my belief that young people could free
themselves from the working-class by becoming entrepreneurs instead of laborers. Basing my
arguments on the classical liberal literature of Mises, Jefferson, Schumpeter and Hayek, I also
argued that any entrepreneur should reject war because of its negative impact on trade and
political freedom. Carl copied my papers and read them to local SDS groups. He liked my ideas
enough to put me in charge of developing SDS strategies for high-school and junior-high
students.
Carl and my mother had a falling out when Carl left his wife for another woman. My mother was
also displeased that Carl had become aligned with Black Panther Party member Eldridge
Cleaver, who had spent ten years in jail for serial rape. Cleaver gave a rousing speech at the 1968
Peace and Freedom Party convention in Ann Arbor, and was invited to meet with our church
group where someone yelled, "He's a rapist pig!"
Nonetheless, Carl Oglesby and Eldridge Cleaver became friends; as Cleaver was pro-small
business and supported political rights.

Eldridge Cleaver.
In March of 1969, Carl traveled to the national SDS meeting in Austin where he was blindsided,
confronted by the executive committee of the SDS about the "incorrectness" of his political
thought. The SDS leadership had become increasingly radical and they denigrated Carl in front
of the membership for his willingness to work with businessmen, and his commitment to
nonviolence, insisting it was time "to take up the gun." By the end of the session, Carl had been
forced out as a spokesperson of the SDS: "the SDS has evolved, Carl has fallen behind," they
declared.
Years later, Carl obtained 4,000 pages of secret government notes through the Freedom of
Information and Privacy Act. These helped him recall the events and conversations he detailed
in Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement (Scribner 2008).
Afterwards, the new leadership--consisting of Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, David Gilbert, Mark
Rudd, Naomi Jaffe, and Diana Oughton--held a "War Council" in Flint. Mark Rudd's father was
in the Air Force, and all leadership came from middle- or upper-class families. They held a pre-
meeting at the Howard Johnsons, where John Jacobs fired me from my post as an SDS youth
leader for my pro-democracy, pro-entrepreneurship, and anti-communist views.
This story will emerge in Part Three, my final installment of this series on the history of the
Students for a Democratic Society, and I will also describe how it was brought down by young
Marxists using the murderous tactics of Debray.
Part Three: You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows
In March 1969, my hero and mentor, Carl Oglesby was forced out as president of the Students
for a Democratic Society (SDS) by a radical left-wing faction that had taken control of the
organization. Some of the members were Red Diaper Babies--so called because of their rearing
on Lenin, Marx and Fanon by former members of the Communist Party USA. These young
Marxists swiftly took the SDS in a frightening and violent direction.
After forcing Carl out in March, SDS diverged to form the Revolutionary Youth Movement
(RYM), including the Weatherman tendency. The RYM was a reaction to the Progressive Labor
Party (PLP), which also formed the SDS split after the Chicago 1969 SDS National Convention.
The Weatherman designated John " J.J." Jacobs as one of their leaders. J.J. co-authored a new
manifesto, "You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows," which was
published in New Left Notes when the SDS National Convention opened in Chicago on June 18,
1969. The Weatherman manifesto stated that "the goal [of the revolution] is the destruction of
U.S. imperialism and the achievement of a classless world: world Communism." It advocated a
violent revolution and called upon SDS members to form collectives in the nation's major cities
to support the struggle.

"You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows."
After the Chicago SDS convention, the Revolutionary Youth Movement splintered into two
groups: RYM I, driven by Bernadine Dohrn; and the Revolutionary Youth Movement II, led by
Mike Klonsky. Both groups positioned themselves against the Worker Student Alliance, which
was the youth chapter of the Progressive Labor Party.
They both believed world imperialism needed to be destroyed. However, RYM I not recruit the
working class, as they found the demographic hopeless, having been fundamentally influenced
by corporations from the U.S. empire, as well as a white-skin privilege. Thus, they believed the
revolutionary mass must be cultivated elsewhere--in youth.
Different from RYM I, the Revolutionary Youth Movement II viewed U.S. working class as
difficult to motivate, but not impossible. They believed education to be the most effective
catalyst for a revolution.
Politically, both RYM I and II took issue with what they alleged was PLP's opposition to the right
of self-determination for oppressed nations and ethnic groups. They pointed to the PLP's attacks
on the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, whom PLP accused of betraying the worldwide
revolution by engaging in Paris Peace Talks with the U.S. RYM I and RYM II also opposed the
PLP's attacks on the Black Panther Party. PLP found African-Americans within the Black
Panther Party to be a super-exploited part of an exploited working class, and thus black
nationalism was a bourgeois affectation and could not be supported.
At the time, however, I was blissfully unaware of the radicalization and splintering of what I
thought was a pro-democracy pro-business SDS. As far as I was concerned, I was still the high
school coordinator of SDS, a post Carl Oglesby had appointed me to in 1965. I had been the
organization's junior high school coordinator from 1966-1968, and I took both my posts very
seriously, despite my marginal impact.
Carl shared my conviction that, in the long term, a solid small-business community was the only
hope for the United States to flourish. I had been encouraged by his positive feedback, and had
been putting out a one-page quarterly that I thought was being sent out to the entire SDS
membership by the national SDS office. Decades later, I learned that it was sent to several dozen
teenagers on the mailing list.
At sixteen, I was deeply committed to the anti-war movement, so when my parents received a
phone call from the National SDS office informing them that I was to receive an award for my
work, on student strikes I was over the moon. The caller added that my strike model had been
used successfully at Columbia University in New York City, and that I was a hero. I was invited
to meet the SDS leadership to receive my award at a Howard Johnson Hotel on Miller Road in
Flint.

Days of Rage (source).
I was excited and eager for recognition, and a little nervous, too. I was really looking forward to
seeing Carl, who was not on speaking terms with my parents since leaving his wife. Although our
families had once been very close, we hadn't seen Carl for eighteen months. One day, though, a
package arrived for me with a note from Carl that only said "Be prepared." He had sent me Leon
Trotsky's paper "The French Turn." He had also included the book What Is To Be Done? by
Nikolai Chernyshevsky, which had influenced on Lenin, and a copy of Lenin's famous pamphlet
"What Is To Be Done: Burning Questions of Our Movement."
I knew from my reading that Trotsky and Lenin were leaders of the Russian Revolution. I also
knew that Trotsky had opposed Stalin, so he was driven out of the country and eventually
murdered by an agent of that psychotic leader, Stalin. The French Turn was a tactic Trotsky
urged his followers in France to use in the mid-1930s in order to radicalize their youth
movement from within and to take over democratic organization.
At the time, I didn't understand why Carl had sent these materials to me--and I couldn't ask my
parents because of their falling out with him.
My passionate, life-defining involvement with the SDS came to a shocking end on December 27,
1969. It was bitterly cold. I walked from the Unitarian Church up Miller Road to the Howard
Johnson Restaurant where I was to receive my award. The SDS National Convention was
beginning later that day and Carl had scheduled me as one of the speakers for the first day.

Carl speaking to a group of Anti-war protesters (source).
My mom waved to me as she entered Bill Knapp's parking lot across the street, embarrassing me
but indulgently agreeing to wait there with my father in the parking lot. As I approached the
Howard Johnson lobby, I saw J.J., whom I recognized him from his pictures. He was tall and
incredibly good looking.
"Where's Carl?" I asked, as I started to unbutton my coat.
"Carl can't come. He's been removed," said J.J. "He is our hardworking assistant office
manager," J.J. added mockingly.
I was stunned, although it did explain why I hadn't seen him for so long. After a moment, I
squeaked out, "Am I still going to present at the convention?"
"Are you kidding me? No, you are not involved in any way," J.J. sneered, his eyes ablaze. "Your
papers make me sick!" he ranted, adding, "they are capitalist garbage." His companions were
silent.
"Wh-what?" I stammered, "I don't understand." Being the high school coordinator for the SDS
had been such a huge part of my identity that I was having trouble processing.
J.J. threw a photograph at me. It was a picture of the Chicago police beating demonstrators
during the Days of Rage in 1969. The photo was covered in what looked like dried blood.
I learned later that J.J. carried this picture with him wherever he went. I knew that he had been
beaten recently at a demonstration. He was seething with rage and didn't seem altogether sane.
In 1980, Carl revealed to me more details of J.J.'s behavior: on the flight to Flint, he had
violently run up and down the aisle, knocking over people's food and drinks. Something was
deeply wrong.
"The truth is here," J.J. announced, clutching a copy of New Left Notes. It was open to "You
Don't Need to Be a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows."
"You are bourgeois and spoiled--a loose cannon," he spat at me. "You are not to use the SDS
letterhead or refer to us in any way. You're out. Don't ever contact us again."
"This is Leninist!" I yelled. "You can't do this, you don't have the authority. I know what you're
doing! It's the French turn! And then, like the child I was, I blurted without thinking: "I am
going to call the FBI!"
Without missing a beat J.J. said, " Do it, punk"
*****
The next four days were a disaster for the SDS. J.J. and his cohorts cut out other moderates and
then held a series of meetings called "the Flint War Council" at an old dance hall on the corner of
Hamilton and Saginaw streets. There, they abolished the SDS and declared guerrilla warfare
against the U.S. government. During one of the meetings, a Weatherman defended the Sharon
Tate murders; there was karate practice and group sex; in another meeting they discussed the
possibility of murdering infants as part of justified revolutionary violence.

Hamilton and Saginaw Streets.
In January, the weatherman leadership destroyed the records of those most committed to the
anti- draft and anti- war movement. The national SDS office located in Chicago was closed. The
young revolutionaries named their new group The Weather Underground Organization (WUO)
because some female members objected to the original name, "Weatherman", on the grounds
that it was sexist. This turn of events was brutally executed by J.J. and the others, based on the
very paper Carl had sent me--The Left Turn. It left the 100,000 responsible members of the SDS
as confused and shocked as I was. Years later in his book Underground, Mark Rudd said of the
take over, "The destruction of the SDS.... was a historical crime."
Despite this setback the national anti-war movement was able to generate millions of anti-war
activists to demonstrate against this undeclared war. But the lack of a national student
movement hurt us tremendously after the the Cambodia bombings and the Kent State shootings
in 1970.
Back in Flint, I sank into a deep depression, feeling alone and realizing that everything for which
Carl and I had worked came to nothing. We should have tried to use SDS to build as broad and
powerful of an anti war movement as possible.

The aftermath of WUO's Pentagon bombing (source).
The WUO issued a "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States government and
began orchestrating underground activities in hopes of sparking a revolution. The ultimate goal
was to bring a Stalinist-type communist government to the US, including a plan to relocate
American resistors to work camps. Starting in 197o, the WUO bombed the Capitol, the
Pentagon, and several police stations in New York and many other sites. As J.J. predicted, they
would "bring the war home." During periods of the 1960s, there was a bomb exploding every day
somewhere in America.
Three members of the Weather Underground died when a bomb they were making in a
Greenwich Village townhouse at 46 E 11th street exploded prematurely on March 6,1970.

Bernadine Dohrn (source).
Bernardine Dohrn was placed on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List and became a fugitive. While on
the run, she married another WUO leader, Bill Ayers, a former kindergarten teacher from Ann
Arbor. The couple surrendered to police in 1980, stating concern for their two children. Today,
she's an Associate Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law. In 1997, J.J. died
from skin cancer in 1997 in Vancouver--still a fugitive.

After the Kent State shootings in 1970 (John Filo's Pulitzer-winning photo) (source).
After the 1971 public exposure of COINTELPRO by a dissident organization which broke into
FBI headquarters outside Philadelphia, copying its internal plans for disrupting the antiwar
movement. After publication of COINTELPRO plans, widespread criticism emerged of the illegal
and undemocratic tactics used by COINTELPRO and the Red Squads. In 1978, Congress passed
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA, see), which placed limits on the power of police
and Federal agencies, and ended the official use of Red Squads. The Director of COINTELPRO
was fired by Hoover in 1971, and died during a tragic hunting accident in '79.

A COINTELPRO document.
According to FBI documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, J. Edgar Hoover's
budget for COINTELPRO was $50 million dollars per year. He had 100 full-time FBI agents
assigned to the antiwar movement, plus some informants receiving payments of $300 dollars
per month. Much of COINTELPRO's work, however, was to successfully undermine the horrific
and brutal work of the Klu Klux Klan.
Clearly, Richard Nixon benefitted from these programs. He won the 1968 election due to media
coverage of the Democratic National Convention. Individuals from the SDS party were involved
in this event, but not the organization itself. As a result, he beat the antiwar candidate, Hubert
Humphrey.
The October 1969 Days of Rage protests, incited by the WUO, only fueled Nixon's supporters
and Nixon intensified U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. This caused massive inflation, as
the war was being financed by government increases in the money supply. In a nationally-
televised address on August 15, 1971, Nixon announced price controls for the U.S. economy,
making it illegal for the first time ever in this country to change prices or wages.
These totalitarian controls, which were supported by many economists, caused shortages and
made many entrepreneurs fearful to start businesses--after all, they were not free to determine
the most advantageous prices and wages. All of this so angered the "freedom community" that
they led to the incorporation of the Libertarian Party in December of 1971 by David Nolan in
Colorado. But that is another story.

J. Edgar Hoover.
I'm glad to see a new generation of students organizing to effect political change, and I hope you
will all study and learn from the lessons of your predecessors in the 1960s. So many of our
nation's current foreign policy and internal security issues are rooted in what happened then so
this is a story that hasn't been told.