REBEL

5. Triumphs. Transitions. Tragedies: 1962–1964

Rebel 94 Triumphs.Transitions. Tragedies: 1962–1964 The euphoric peak of the early sixties—the civil rights march on Washington—preceded the abyss of John Kennedy’s death by fewer than one hundred days. Such were the times—triumph and tragedy began to shadow each other. The potential of the Kennedy administration, and an era, were slain on a Dallas afternoon. Our personal lives were strained and fragmented. Just as we reached for it, the promising vision of Port Huron foundered, and the age of innocence was ended. After the Port Huron convention in 1962, my plan as the new SDS president was to establish a headquarters in Ann Arbor while attending graduate school. The New York office would remain the administrative center, but many of the organization’s political leaders came to be concentrated in Ann Arbor; by 1963, they included the Flackses, Bob Ross, Rennie Davis, Paul Potter, Mary Varela, and Carol McEldowney. It was an exciting core. I drove to Ann Arbor ahead of Casey, to look for housing and work. About a mile from the central campus, near Yost Fieldhouse, I rented a convenient single-family house at 715 Arch Street. It had nondescript gray shingles, a breezy front porch, and a large basement I could turn into an SDS office. For income, we had my graduate student’s stipend, but finding a job for Casey was not as easy. Finally, through church contacts , I lined up a secretarial position at Ann Arbor’s Presbyterian church. Meanwhile, I enrolled and found part-time employment at a research institute. Looking back, I was not aware that these new arrangements primarily benefited myself. Casey was leaving a full and challenging life in her native South to become a graduate student’s traditional wife in a distant northern town. We planned the time in Ann Arbor to be brief, however. The purpose was not to pursue an academic career, but to build a national campus profile for SDS. In a year or so, we expected to define long-term roles for ourselves in the movement and settle in somewhere. 5. 5. 95 The Arch Street basement became a storm center of protest activity right below our kitchen floor. There was a side door people could use, and the flow of activist traffic was constant. The pace of political activity in Ann Arbor was escalating. There were regular meetings of SDS leaders to discuss and plan general strategy for the organization. Phone calls from the South brought pleas for bail. I was in perpetual motion, trying to keep up regular contact with the New York office, follow daily dramas in the South, speak on college campuses in the East and Midwest, and generally fan the flames of organization. We were jolted by the Cuban missile crisis in mid-October. The unfolding confrontation was kept secret from the American public for nearly a week. When the bare facts became known, they appeared to contain the most real threat of nuclear war in our lifetime. Around the country, thousands felt the same way. The Arch Street phone lines burned with calls stimulating local demonstrations in favor of a negotiated resolution, including several protests in Ann Arbor, where the school board rejected a civil defense proposal to create fallout shelters in schools. These were the first truly visible signs of a grass-roots peace movement in the sixties. But to what avail? Ending a futile week, Casey and I drove to Washington with the Flackses and many others. We were convinced that we were driving into the bull’s-eye where Russian missiles would soon hit. I remember prominent muckraking writer I. F. Stone, like an Old Testament figure, giving an apocalyptic speech in a Washington church.The announced deadlines for a negotiated U.S.-Soviet settlement had passed. Stone was talking about the beginning of World War III. I couldn’t take it anymore. Feeling utterly powerless, the four of us went to a restaurant, and waited. Nothing happened. At that moment, Robert Kennedy was talking in deadly earnest with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. Early the next morning, Nikita Khrushchev began withdrawing Soviet missiles from Cuba. The crisis had passed. We were deeply concerned, however. For the second time since coming to office, the administration had marshaled military force over the threat of Cuba. Clearly JFK’s sense of crisis management involved playing the nuclear “card,” an option we found unthinkable. In our White House conversation with Schlesinger only three months before...