In 1965, when Carl Oglesby threw himself into the New Left—“the movement” was the more intimate term, meaning life-force, energy, motion—he was a 30-year-old paterfamilias with a wife and three small children, living in a nice little Ann Arbor house on (he relished the memory) Sunnyside Street, making a solid living as a technical editor-writer for a military-industrial think-tank called Bendix. He golfed, drove a snappy little sports car, wrote plays, and smoked good dope—a damn fine life for the son of an Akron rubber worker and the grandson of a coal miner. He’d been a champion debater in high school and at Kent State University, and for a time an actor. Pretty much an autodidact, he was reading Cold War revisionist scholarship in an effort to figure out why America, the only country on earth he could ever have hailed from, was burning up peasants on the other side of the world.

At high velocity, as people did then, he “went through changes.” One minute he was writing against the Vietnam war for a Democratic congressional candidate (who refused to deliver the speech); the next, he was writing it up for the University of Michigan literary magazine; the next, he was turning it into a pamphlet for Students for a Democratic Society, which was organizing a national demonstration against the war but didn’t yet have any antiwar “literature” on offer. In June 1965, Oglesby, the evident talent of the hour, was elected president of the organization, and as the antiwar movement burgeoned, he was much in demand. Whirlwind tours ensued. In November, as SDS president, he was the token radical at a Washington Monument rally, placed late in a program of moderates. Many had drifted away when he stole the show with the finest piece of oratory ever to emerge from the white New Left.

It was a dream moment for an unabashed moralist skilled in the dramaturgical arts. The moral stakes of the moment, he insisted, rested on both an intellectual and an existential choice between “two quite different liberalisms: one authentically humanist; the other not so human at all.” The bad one was “illiberal” and “corporate.” The alternative, “in the name of simple human decency and democracy,” was nothing less than “a humanist reformation.” “We radicals,” he said, asked liberals to “risk a leap. … Help us build. Help us shape the future in the name of plain human hope.” Can you imagine a time when a radical orator spoke like this?

Idealistic he was, but not naive: “Revolutions do not take place in velvet boxes. … It is only the poets who make them lovely. What the National Liberation Front is fighting in Vietnam is a complex and vicious war.” He was all-American, Midwestern, and original: “We have lost that mysterious social desire for human equity that from time to time has given us genuine moral drive. We have become a nation of young, bright-eyed, hard-hearted, slim-waisted, bullet-headed make-out artists.” Was Soviet Communist not a rotten system? Of course. But “my anger only rises to hear some say that sorrow cancels sorrow, or that this one’s shame deposits in that one’s account the right to shamefulness. And others will make of it that I sound mighty anti-American. To these, I say: Don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.”

People heard this intense American voice rising in indignation, and patriotic disgust, and “plain human hope,” and felt spoken for. They joined SDS. Thousands of young people, on fire, imagined that they could change the world. Here was a man old enough to be their older brother, a man of neither their generation nor their parents’, an accomplished man who had thrown in his lot with the big new thing that was happening—who had picked himself up and transformed his own life. His passion and persuasive power were infused with the sense that he poured his whole self into the new possibilities that the movement stood for. He was at stake. He wasn’t playing a role; he was living a life.