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entire current baby-boom leadership of the Republican Party (except for
Senator John McCain) in both houses of Congress.
(At the same time, spring-summer 1967, the New Left received a jolt
when the Six Day War broke out. A split opened up between Jewish and
non-Jewish supporters of Israel and an increasingly anti-Israeli current in
the Left. Combined with the black-Jewish tensions that broke out in the
New York City teachers' strike in 1968, this split became increasingly bit–
ter and was one source of the emergence of intellectual neo-conservatism
in the 1970s and 1980s. As important as this issue was in the United States,
it was even more so for the West German New Left.)
In Madison, the defining moment of the sixties Left took place on
October 18, 1967 when five hundred or so of us in the core of the radical
Left blocked the entry of fellow students seeking job interviews with the
Dow Chemical company, then infamous for producing napalm for the war.
In the indiscriminate way in which it literally covered and stuck to any–
thing and then burned it in the most agonizing manner, napalm crystallized
in our minds the barbarism of the American war. The police, in order to
evict us from the building and open access to the job interviews, entered
the building. I still vividly recall the sound of smashing glass, of clubs land–
ing on bodies, people screaming, fights, epithets, and then the smell of tear
gas directed at a crowd of thousands that had gathered outside. Seventy-five
people were taken to the hospital with a variety of injuries-mostly
demonstrators, but also several policemen who were quite seriously
injured. Nothing was the same in Madison after the Dow demonstration.
The intellectual life, the reading groups, and the journals continued, of
course, but the movement became bigger, younger, less intellectual, and
increasingly anti-intellectual, more macho and angrier.
The Tet Offensive of January 1968 was in our view the most dramat–
ic demonstration that history was moving in the direction of the
revolutionary Left; that, as the communists used to say, "the correlation of
forces" had shifted in favor of world revolution. I believe that for the his–
tory of SDS and the New Left as a whole around the world, Tet was the
decisive causal event of 1968; the event from which all the others flowed,
from Columbia in April to Paris in May, was the Tet Offensive of January.
No matter that in military terms, Tet was a defeat for the National
Liberation Front and North Vietnamese armies. The appearance to us–
and to leftists around the world-was that the most powerful military
machine in the world had, however briefly, been thrown on the defensive.
Hence actual defeat became a symbolic victory. The Pentagon and Whi te
House claims of light at the end of the tunnel became objects of ridicule.
For both communists and the New Left in Europe,Japan, Latin America,
and the United States, Tet meant that the United States was not only
