Carl Oglesby | |
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.jpg) Carl Oglesby in 2006 | |
| Born | (1935-07-30)July 30, 1935 Akron, Ohio, U.S. |
| Died | September 13, 2011(2011-09-13) (aged 76) Montclair, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Occupations | Technical writer, activist, college teacher, author |
| Known for |
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| Spouses |
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| Children | 3: Aron, Shay, Caleb |
| Parent(s) | Carl Preston Oglesby Sr. Alma Romaldus Loving |
Carl Preston Oglesby Jr. (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 organizationStudents for a Democratic Society (SDS).[1]
After leaving SDS, Oglesby researched and wrote about post-World War II American history, in particular theassassination of John F. Kennedy, and was credited with helping to bring about theU.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976.[2] He is also credited with coining the term "Global South", which he first used in a 1969 article.[3]
Carl Oglesby's father was fromSouth Carolina, and his mother fromAlabama. They both migrated north for job opportunities. They met in 1934 inAkron, Ohio, where Carl's father had found work at aFirestone tire plant.[1]
Carl graduated from Revere High School in suburban Akron, winning a prize in his final year for a speech in favor of America'sCold War stance.[4] He then enrolled atKent State University. While there, he met and married Beth Rimanoczy, a graduate student in the English department. They would eventually have three children (Aron, Shay, and Caleb). After three years at Kent State, Oglesby dropped out and moved to theBohemian neighborhood ofGreenwich Village to pursue a New York stage career as an actor and playwright. Following an unsuccessful year in New York, he returned to Akron to become acopy editor forGoodyear. He meanwhile continued his creative endeavors. Influenced by Britain's "angry young men" literary movement, he wrote three plays, including "a well-received work on theHatfield-McCoy feud",[1] as well as an unfinished novel.
In 1958, Oglesby and his young family moved toAnn Arbor, Michigan after he obtained atechnical writing position atBendix Corporation, adefense contractor. He ascended to the directorship of the company's technical writing division while also completing his undergraduate degree as a part-time student at theUniversity of Michigan (where he cultivated friends such asDonald Hall andFrithjof Bergmann) in 1962.[5][6] In that same year, his playThe Peacemaker was produced in Ann Arbor and Boston.[7] In his 2008 autobiographyRavens in the Storm, Oglesby chronicles a fateful day in late 1963 when he was working at his desk at Bendix Corporation, and a co-worker told him the news fromDallas that President Kennedy had been shot.[8] The JFK assassination would later occupy more than two decades of Oglesby's life.
Oglesby first came into contact with SDS in Ann Arbor in 1964. He had recently written an article, printed in the University of Michigan campus magazine, which was critical ofAmerican foreign policy in theFar East. SDS members read the article, and went to meet Oglesby at his home to see if he might want to join their organization. As Oglesby 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.[9]
He left Bendix in 1965 to become director of a newly formed SDS unit called "Research, Information, and Publications".[10]
He was so impressed by the spirit and intellectual vigor of SDS that he was soon extremely active in the organization. One of his early projects was to form a "grass-roots theatre", but that effort was superseded by SDS opposition to the growing U.S. combat involvement in theVietnam War. 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. He helped organize a University of Michigan "teach-in", the first of its kind, in which faculty engaged in a work stoppage to protest the "moral, political, and military consequences" of the Vietnam War.[11][12] On April 17, 1965, he and Beth attended the first SDS-sponsored March on Washington against the war, with approximately 25,000 demonstrators in attendance.[13] He then initiated plans for a second 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 another large audience of anti-war protesters in the nation's capital.[14] 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."[15] He condemned what he called "corporate liberalism" and accused anti-Communists in the U.S. of self-righteously denouncing Communist tyranny, while ignoring the "right-wing tyrannies that our businessmen traffic with and our nation profits from every day."[15][16] 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."[17] The speech became an important early articulation of theanti-war movement. According toKirkpatrick 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.[18]
Oglesby's political outlook was more eclectic than that of many SDS members. He was heavily influenced bylibertarian economistMurray Rothbard, and dismissedsocialism as "a way to bury social problems under a federalbureaucracy."[1] In 1967, he co-authored withRichard Shaull the bookContainment and Change, which argued for an alliance between theNew Left and thelibertarian,non-interventionistOld Right in opposing animperialist U.S. foreign policy.[19] He once unsuccessfully proposed cooperation between SDS and theconservative groupYoung Americans for Freedom on some projects.[20] His contributions toContainment and Change were later praised inThe 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."[21] Another wrote:
In his essay "Vietnamese Crucible," published in ...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." InvokingSenator Taft, Gen.Douglas MacArthur,Congressman Buffett, andSaturday Evening Post writerGaret Garrett, among other stalwarts of theOld 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 ofThomas Jefferson were conservatives doing holding the bag forRobert Strange McNamara?[1]
Steve Mariotti, a teenage SDS colleague of Oglesby's in 1965, credits Oglesby with inspiring what became known as the two-axisNolan Chart. It occurred during a rehearsal of the "Let Us Shape the Future" speech when Oglesby "used the word 'coordinates' to describe issues on which he believed the Left and the Right shared common ground. This led us into a discussion of the limitations of the Left/Right line chart, which was often used at the time to illustrate a person's political views."[22]
| It isn't the rebels who cause the troubles of the world, it's the troubles that cause the rebels. |
| —Carl Oglesby[7] |
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."[23] Also in 1968, he was asked byBlack Panther leaderEldridge Cleaver to serve as his running mate on thePeace and Freedom Party ticket inthat year's presidential election (Oglesby declined the offer).[24]
In 1969, he editedThe New Left Reader, an anthology of speeches and writings by radical thinkers such asFrantz Fanon,Herbert Marcuse andC. Wright Mills who had influenced theNew Left movement, of which SDS was a part. Later in that year, Oglesby was forced out of SDS when the organization's left-wing members accused him of "being 'trapped in our early,bourgeois stage' and for not progressing into 'aMarxist–Leninist perspective.'"[1]
After his departure from SDS, Oglesby became a musician, writer, and academic. His self-titledfolk-rock album was released in 1969 byVanguard Records. It was later reviewed unfavorably byVillage Voice rock criticRobert Christgau who wrote: "In which the first president of SDS takes afterLeonard Cohen, offering a clue as to why the framers of thePort 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."[25] Oglesby released one more album, "Going to Damascus", in 1971.[26]
In 1970, he was a featured speaker at the "Left/Right Festival of Liberation" organized by the California Libertarian Alliance. This attempt at bridge-building was characteristic of Oglesby, who had written in 1967: "In a strong sense, the Old Right and the New Left are morally and politically coordinate."[27]
To earn his livelihood, Oglesby turned to college teaching. He taughtpolitical science atDartmouth College and at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology.[7]
In the Introduction to his 1992 bookThe JFK Assassination: The Facts and the Theories, Oglesby noted that "once I wandered into the [JFK assassination] case in 1973, I have never found my way back out."[28] By 1973, he was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts and had helped found the Assassination Information Bureau (AIB), which he also co-directed.[6] The AIB would be credited with applying pressure on the U.S. Congress to re-investigate the JFK andMartin Luther King Jr. assassinations.[29] Eventually, the buildup of popular demand resulted in the establishment of theUnited States House Select Committee on Assassinations in September 1976.[2]
| External audio | |
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 "Cowboys and Yankees." A discussion of assassination in Boston, from 31 January – 2 February 1975.Broadcast onKPFK 2 April 1975.Pacifica Radio Archives. |
Oglesby wrote several books on theassassination of John F. Kennedy and the various competing theories that sought to explain it. In the first of these books,The Yankee and Cowboy War (1976), he proposed a new analytic framework for understanding recent U.S. history.[30] He said the JFK assassination,Watergate scandal, and downfall ofPresident Nixon represented "the violent eruptions of a deeper struggle of rival power elites identified here as Yankees and Cowboys."[31] According to his argument, a post-World War II schism arose in the U.S.ruling class between (a) traditional Eastern conservative "Yankees" (bankers mostly)—exemplified byNelson Rockefeller,Henry Cabot Lodge, John Kennedy,Clark Clifford, andAverill Harriman—and (b) hard-rightSun Belt "Cowboys" (oil and aerospace magnates)—exemplified byH. L. Hunt,Clint Murchison,Howard Hughes,Lyndon Johnson,Barry Goldwater, and Richard Nixon.[32] Using this framework, JFK's murder was an assertion of power by the Cowboys who wanted rapid escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In summarizing the book,Kirkus Reviews depicted Oglesby as believing that 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."[33]
During the 1970s and '80s, Oglesby befriended New Orleans District AttorneyJim Garrison and contributed the Afterword, "Is the Mafia Theory a Valid Alternative?", to Garrison's 1988 bookOn the Trail of the Assassins.[34] In November 1988 he appeared onThe Morton Downey Show to discuss the legacy ofJohn F. Kennedy.[35] As a journalist, Oglesby covered the filming ofOliver Stone'sJFK and commented on the extraordinarymainstream media scrutiny the film received while in production.[36] He contributed the foreword toDick Russell's 1992 bookThe Man Who Knew Too Much aboutRichard Case Nagell[37] and was interviewed for the documentaryBeyond 'JFK': The Question of Conspiracy, released in the same year.[38]
In April 2006, Oglesby spoke at the Northeast Regional Conference of the "new SDS" where he said that activism is about "teaching yourself how to do what you don't know how to do."[39]
On September 13, 2011, Carl Oglesby died of lung cancer at his home inMontclair, New Jersey. He was 76.[17][16]
Oglesby has been credited with coining the term "Global South", which he first used in a 1969 article.[3]
On November 19, 1991, he appeared onThe Ron Reagan Show with other JFK assassination researchers includingDavid Lifton,Robert J. Groden, andRobert Sam Anson.
In the 2020 feature filmThe Trial of the Chicago 7, Oglesby (who testified in theChicago 7 trial as a defense witness) was portrayed by Michael A. Dean.
| External audio | |
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| "Medical Evidence about the JFK Assassination." Interviewed and produced by Bob Young. California:KPFK (27 May 1992). |
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