Carl Oglesby

Carl Preston Oglesby

Carl Preston Oglesby (July 30, 1935 – September 13, 2011) was an American political activist, author, academic, and playwright. From 1965 to 1966, he served as president of the leftist student organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

After leaving the SDS, Oglesby researched and wrote about post-World War II American history, in particular the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and was credited with helping to bring about the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976.

Early life

Carl Oglesby's father was from South Carolina, and his mother from Alabama. They both migrated north for job opportunities. They met in Akron, Ohio, where the elder Oglesby worked in the rubber mills.

Carl Oglesby graduated from Revere High School in suburban Akron, winning a prize in his final year for a speech in favor of America's Cold War stance. He then enrolled at Kent State University for three years before dropping out to attempt to make his way as an actor and playwright in Greenwich Village, a traditionally Bohemian neighborhood in New York City. While at Kent State, he married Beth Rimanoczy, a graduate student in the English department; they ultimately had three children (Aron, Caleb and Shay). After a year in New York, he returned to Akron, where he became a copywriter for Goodyear and continued working on his creative endeavors, including three plays influenced by Britain's "angry young men" literary movement (exemplified by "a well-received work on the Hatfield-McCoy feud") and an unfinished novel.

In 1958, Oglesby and his wife and children moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he took a technical writing position with the Bendix Corporation, a defense contractor. He ascended to the directorship of the company's technical writing division before completing his undergraduate degree as a part-time student at the University of Michigan (where he cultivated a circle of friends that included Donald Hall and Frithjof Bergmann) in 1962. In that same year, his play The Peacemaker was produced in Ann Arbor and Boston.

Involvement with SDS

Oglesby first came into contact with the SDS in Ann Arbor in 1964. In the University of Michigan's campus magazine, he had written a critical article on American foreign policy in the Far East. SDS members read it, and went to meet Carl at his home to see if he might want to join their organization. As Oglebsy put it:

We talked. I got to thinking about things. As a writer, I needed a mode of action.... I couldn't just grumble and go off to the creative spider-hole and turn out plays. From what SDS said about the Movement, it sounded like a direct way I could deal with things. I had to decide: was I going to be a writer just to be a professional writer, or was I going to write in order to make change? I saw that people were already moving, so I joined up.

He left Bendix in 1965 to become director of a newly formed SDS unit called "Research, Information, and Publications".

It isn't the rebels who cause the troubles of the world, it's the troubles that cause the rebels.

—Carl Oglesby

He was so impressed by the spirit and intellectual strength of SDS that he became deeply involved in the organization. Despite the notable age gap between the 30-year-old Oglesby and the college-aged undergraduates who comprised most of the membership, he was elected national SDS president within a year. His first project was to form a "grass-roots theatre", but the project was soon superseded by SDS opposition to escalating American activity in Vietnam. He helped organize a Michigan teach-in against the war. In his first National Council meeting on April 17, 1965, he initiated plans for a large SDS peace march to be held later in the year in Washington, D.C.

On November 27, 1965. Oglesby delivered a speech entitled "Let Us Shape the Future" before tens of thousands of anti-war demonstrators in the nation's capital. It was the high point of his SDS presidency. He compared the Vietnam revolution to the American revolution. He said, "Our dead revolutionaries would soon wonder why their country was fighting against what appeared to be a revolution." He condemned what he called "corporate liberalism" and accused anti-Communists of self-righteously denouncing Communist tyranny, while ignoring the "right-wing tyrannies that our businessmen traffic with and our nation profits from every day." In a memorable passage, he challenged those who called him anti-American: "I say, don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart." The speech became one of the most important articulations of the anti-war movement. According to Kirkpatrick Sale,

It was a devastating performance: skilled, moderate, learned, and compassionate, but uncompromising, angry, radical, and above all persuasive. It drew the only standing ovation of the afternoon... for years afterward it would continue to be one of the most popular items of SDS literature.

Oglesby's political outlook was more eclectic than that of many SDS members. He was heavily influenced by libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, and dismissed socialism as "a way to bury social problems under a federal bureaucracy." In 1967, he co-authored with Richard Shaull the book Containment and Change, which argued for an alliance between the New Left and the libertarian, non-interventionist Old Right in opposing an imperialist U.S. foreign policy. He once unsuccessfully proposed cooperation between SDS and the conservative group Young Americans for Freedom on some projects. His contributions to Containment and Change were later praised in The American Conservative magazine. One writer said that Oglesby "was on to something when he suggested that the Old Right and New Left have (some) common ground." Another wrote:

In his essay "Vietnamese Crucible," published in the 1967 volume Containment and Change, Oglesby rejected the "socialist radical, the corporatist conservative, and the welfare-state liberal" and challenged the New Left to embrace "American democratic populism" and "the American libertarian right." Invoking Senator Taft, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Congressman Buffett, and Saturday Evening Post writer Garet Garrett, among other stalwarts of the Old Right, he asked, "Why have the traditional opponents of big, militarized, central authoritarian government now joined forces with such a government’s boldest advocates?" What in the name of Thomas Jefferson were conservatives doing holding the bag for Robert Strange McNamara?

Steve Mariotti, a teenage SDS colleague of Oglesby's in 1965, credits Oglesby with describing an early form of what became known as the two-axis Nolan Chart. It occurred during the delivery of his "Let Us Shape the Future" speech when he distinguished between authoritarian conservatives and liberty-loving right-wingers.

In 1968, Oglesby signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing along with several hundred others that they "would not pay a proposed 10 percent income tax surcharge or any other [Vietnam] war-designated tax increase." Also in 1968, he was asked by Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver to serve as his running mate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in that year's presidential election (Oglesby declined the offer).

In 1969, Oglesby was forced out of SDS when numerous left-wing members accused him of "being 'trapped in our early, bourgeois stage' and for not progressing into 'a Marxist–Leninist perspective.'"

Later years

After his departure from SDS, Oglesby became a musician, writer, and academic. His self-titled folk-rock album was released in 1969 by Vanguard Records. It was later panned by Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau who wrote: "In which the first president of SDS takes after Leonard Cohen, offering a clue as to why the framers of the Port Huron Statement didn't change the world in quite the way they envisioned. Overwritten, undermusicked, not much fun, not much enlightenment—in short, the work of someone who needs a weatherman (small 'w' please) to know which way the wind blows." Oglesby released one more album, "Going to Damascus", in 1971.

In 1970, he was a featured speaker at the "Left/Right Festival of Liberation" organized by the California Libertarian Alliance. This attempt at political bridge-building was characteristic of Oglesby, who had written three years earlier: "In a strong sense, the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically coordinate."

In the early 1970s, he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts where he founded the Assassination Information Bureau (AIB), an organization credited with applying pressure on the U.S. Congress to re-investigate the JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations. Eventually, a buildup of popular demand resulted in the creation of the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976.

External audio
"Cowboys and Yankees." A discussion of assassination in Boston, from 31 January – 2 February 1975. Broadcast on KPFK 2 April 1975. Pacifica Radio Archives.

Oglesby wrote several books on the JFK assassination and the various competing theories that sought to explain it. He believed JFK was killed by "a rightist conspiracy formed out of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, the Syndicate, and a Cowboy oligarchy, supported by renegade CIA and FBI agents." During the 1970s and '80s, Oglesby befriended New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and contributed the Afterword, "Is the Mafia Theory a Valid Alternative?", to Garrison's 1988 book On the Trail of the Assassins.

Oglesby taught politics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dartmouth College. In April 2006, he attended the Northeast Regional Conference of the "new SDS" where he gave a speech in which he said that activism is about "teaching yourself how to do what you don't know how to do."

On September 13, 2011, Carl Oglesby died of lung cancer at his home in Montclair, New Jersey. He was 76.

In popular culture

Oglesby has been credited with originating the term "Global South", which he first used in a 1969 article.

On November 19, 1991, he appeared on The Ron Reagan Show with other JFK assassination researchers including David Lifton, Robert J. Groden, and Robert Sam Anson.

Oglesby was portrayed by Michael A. Dean in the 2020 feature film The Trial of the Chicago 7.

Works

Books

• Containment and Change: Two Dissenting Views of American Foreign Policy, with Richard Shaull. Introduction by Leon Howell. New York: Macmillan (1967). OCLC 5432663. Contains Oglesby's award-winning essay, "Vietnamese Crucible: An Essay on the Meanings of the Cold War," pp. 3–176.
• The New Left Reader. New York: Grove Press (1969). ISBN 978-8345615363. OCLC 44987.
• The Yankee and Cowboy War: Conspiracies from Dallas to Watergate. Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel. 1976. ISBN 0836206800.
• Bob Vila's Guide to Buying Your Dream House, with Bob Vila. Research by Nena Groskind. Boston: Little, Brown (1990). ISBN 978-0316902915. OCLC 19775698.
• Who Killed JFK? Berkeley, Calif: Odonian Press (1991). ISBN 978-1878825100. OCLC 25093879.
• The JFK Assassination: The Facts and Theories. Signet (1992). ISBN 0451174763.
• Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement. New York: Scribner (2008). ISBN 1416547363.

Selected articles

• "The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt." CovertAction Information Bulletin (Fall 1990).

Filmography

Television documentaries

• Beyond JFK: The Question of Conspiracy (1992). Directed by Barbara Kopple & Danny Schechter.
• Articulate '60s Activist Looks Back To See How He Failed Making Sense of the Sixties (January 21–23, 1991). PBS. Read excerpts.
• Rebels With a Cause (2000). Written and directed by Helen Garvey.

Interviews

Radio

External audio
"Medical Evidence about the JFK Assassination." Interviewed and produced by Bob Young. California: KPFK (27 May 1992).

• Interviewed by Bob Fass (31 January 1975). WBAI Radio (New York). doi:10.7916/d8-q3mg-7326.

Audio

• Interviewed by Bret Eynon (1981). New York Times oral history program. Contemporary History Project oral history collection, no. 35.
• "Student Movements of the 1960s: The Reminiscences of Carl Oglesby." (December 12, 1984). Interviewed by Bret Eynon. Columbia University Oral History Collection (Cambridge, Massachusetts). doi:10.7916/d8-ga9g-2y51. Full transcript / audio.
• "Former SDS Leader Insists That LaRouche 'Has Never Been a Marxist.'" Interviewed by Herbert Quinde. Executive Intelligence Review, vol. 13, no. 20 (May 16, 1986), pp. 32–33. Full issue.
• "Carl Oglesby Interview" "Resistance and Revolution: The Anti-Vietnam War Movement at the University of Michigan, 1965–1972", Interviewed by Bret Eynon (July 1978).

Print

• Rosenblatt, Rand K. "Carl Oglesby (Silhouette)." Harvard Crimson (15 February 1966).
• Kauffman, Bill. "Writers on the Storm." Reason (April 2008). Full issue. "Former New Left leader Carl Oglesby on the '60s, his old friend Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the dream of a left-libertarian alliance."

Discography

• Carl Oglesby [LP] (1969)
• Going to Damascus [LP] (1971)

Collected works

• Clandestine America: Selected Writings on Conspiracies from the Nazi Surrender to Dallas, Watergate, and Beyond. Cambridge, Mass.: Protean Press (2020). ISBN 978-0991352050.

Further reading

• Sale, Kirkpatrick (1974). SDS: Ten Years Towards a Revolution. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0394719654. See esp. 194–199.
• Rosenblatt, Rand K. (February 15, 1966). "Carl Oglesby (Silhouette)." Harvard Crimson.
• Russell, Dick (Nov. 1993). "From Dallas to Eternity." Boston Magazine. pp. 62–65, 82, 85–88.
• Gardner, Fred (2016). "The Working Class Stranger – Carl Oglesby." O'Shaughnessy's'.

External links

• Carl Oglesby at Discogs
• Carl Oglesby at IMDb
• Carl Oglesby collection at the Harold Weisberg Archive via Internet Archive
• Archive of SDS documents, including two speeches by Carl Oglesby.
• Carl Oglesby Papers, 1942–2005 Archived August 19, 2017, at the Wayback Machine at University of Massachusetts at Amherst
• Oglesby Songs Archived October 26, 2020, at the Wayback Machine – Website devoted to the music of Carl Oglesby, including arrangements of several of his songs.
• Johanna Vogelsang. "I told you things were crumbling." (c.1975) at Center for the Study of Political Graphics