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Vietnamese support or to deny that the Viet Cong assassinated local
officials of the South Vietnamese government. I was not averse to
making these arguments myself. But we all knew that they were bo–
gus. Among ourselves we spoke of the inevitability of armed resistance
in authoritarian Vietnam. We were critical of China for not sending
more aid to the North Vietnamese Communists and were actually a
bit perplexed as to how to explain the fact that the supposedly coun–
terrevolutionary Soviet Union was the major supplier of arms to the
North Vietnamese war effort. The point was that if you were a new
leftist in this period, you probably thought that South Vietnam would
be much better off if the National Liberation Front, a Communist
Front, won the war.
My morality was thus based on a firm double standard: our
atrocities were to be denounced while their atrocities were the regret–
table unintended consequences of revolution. The American war was
one "against the people," while the Viet Cong owed their support to
having addressed popular grievances. The American effort to win
the war was immoral, while the Vietnamese Communists' effort to
do the same thing was a matter of national self-determination. At the
time, my views were a mixture of new left radicalism and the more
widespread opposition to the war based on liberal, internationalist
principles. The moralist in me would denounce the conduct of the
war, as if there was a better American "policy" to respond to the po–
litical and economic problems of countries such as Vietnam. As a
new leftist, I thought this moralism was dishonest, a ruse and a tool
with which to attack the imperialist system. When we succeeded in
gaining support from larger numbers of students, it was not because
we had converted them to new left radicalism. Only a very small mi–
nority of 1960s students were radical leftists. Our greatest successes
took place when we were able to link our radicalism to a more gen–
erally shared idealism.
In the 1970s, some analysts of the new left described a golden
age before 1968 when a still relatively small group of radical intellec–
tuals entertained visions of "post-scarcity communism." This golden
age was destroyed, according to these accounts, by the emergence of
such Marxist-Leninist sects as the Maoist Progressive Labor Party,
Communist youth groups, "Revolutionary Youth Movement II" and
"Revolutionary Youth Movement I," known as "Weatherman." What
these accounts fail to explain is why such obviously lunatic groups
were able to gain so many adherents at some of the best universities
in the United States. Clearly the golden age contained the seeds of
