Bøker av Carl Oglesby

As conspiracy theories reach a heady roil in today's globally networked environment, Carl Oglesby's political work offers context and sheds new light upon what may prove to be the mother of all conspiracy theories: "The Secret Ending of World War II," the ramifications of which have echoed throughout modern American history, from the Kennedy assassination to Watergate and potentially through to the bitter partisanship of 2020 America.Combining selections of Oglesby's work on his political awakening, deep state conspiracies of the Kennedy assassination and Watergate, and a previously-unpublished work proposing a shocking secret ending to World War II, Clandestine America invites and motivates readers, scholars and political thinkers to identify a through line-and to question authority, dig deeper, and either refute or validate Oglesby's horrifying findings.

In 1964, Carl Oglesby, a young copywriter for a Michigan-based defense contractor, was asked by a local Democratic congressman to draft a campaign paper on the Vietnam War. Oglesby's report argued that the conflict was misplaced and unwinnable. He had little idea that its subsequent publication would put him on a fast track to becoming the president of the now-legendary protest movement Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In this book, Oglesby shares the triumphs and tribulations of an organization that burgeoned across America, only to collapse in the face of surveillance by the U.S. government and infighting. As an SDS leader, Oglesby spoke on the same platform as Coretta Scott King and Benjamin Spock at the storied 1965 antiwar demonstration in Washington, D.C. He traveled to war-ravaged Vietnam and to the international war crimes tribunal in Scandinavia, where he met with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He helped initiate the Venceremos Brigade, which dispatched thousands of American students to bring in the Cuban sugar harvest. He reluctantly participated in the protest outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention and was a witness for the defense at the trial of the Chicago Seven the following year. Eventually, after extensive battles with those in SDS who saw its future more as a vanguard guerrilla group than as an open mass movement, Oglesby was drummed out of the organization. Shortly after, it collapsed when key members of its leadership quit to set up the Weather Underground. This beautifully written and elegiac memoir is rich in contemporary echoes as America once again must come to terms with an ill-conceived military adventure abroad. Carl Oglesby warns of the destructive frustrations of a peace campaign unable to achieve its goals. But above all, he captures the joyful liberation of joining together to take a stand for what is right and just -- the soaring and swooping of a protest movement in full flight, like ravens in a storm.