IN 1961, THE NATIONAL STUDENT ASSOCIATION became a political battleground, as both the disaffected new conservatives in the Young Americans for Freedom and the leftist Students for a Democratic Society, who saw it as fertile recruiting ground, plotted to take it over. The traditional liberals who led the association found themselves caught in the middle, trying to repel YAF initiatives and coopt SDS leaders.
Over the next few years, as the CIA caucus fought to retain control of the NSA, it focused on the threat from conservatives, whose aggressive anticommunism and insistent demands for a victory over the Soviets ran counter to everything the liberals believed would win friends for the West. For years, the NSA had insisted to foreign student leaders that it had no Cold War agenda, even when its actions belied the rhetoric. Witting staff had become skilled at the verbal acrobatics necessary to reconcile the tension between public pronouncements and private agendas. But in 1961, YAF demands for the NSA to take a more vocal anti-communist stand threatened to upset this balancing act.
In the face of the imminent YAF threat, the NSA-CIA team ignored the challenge from the left. Yet SDS members were organizing on numerous campuses. They opposed Kennedy’s Cold War policies and ridiculed fervent anticommunism. They attacked the Cold War as a costly impediment to tackling problems at home of poverty, unemployment, and education. Despite vigorous fights with older liberals and socialists over the lessons of the 1930s popular fronts, the SDS defiantly refused to prohibit communist students from joining. Students across the country were developing a new interest in Marx and Hegel, reading the sociologist C. Wright Mills’s Listen Yankee (a defense of the Cuban revolution), forming study groups, and churning out mimeographed critiques of U.S. foreign policy that were passed from campus to campus.1
Almost all the thousand-plus students who poured into Madison, Wisconsin, in late August 1961 for the NSA Congress expected a showdown between left and right. Years later, some of them understood they were bearing witness to the irreconcilable political forces that eventually would alter and polarize U.S. politics.
In anticipation of the 1961 congress, YAF member Howard Phillips, the intrepid Harvard conservative who in protest had grabbed Fidel Castro’s beard, put together an ad-hoc Committee for a Responsive National Student Organization. Its list of leaders reads like a Who’s Who of the new right: Carol Dawson Bauman, M. Stanton Evans, David Franke, Tom Huston, Fulton Lewis III, and Robert Schuchman. Phillips lobbied outgoing NSA president Richard Rettig to invite the conservative senator John G. Tower (R-Tex.) to speak at a plenary session, calling Tower a “living symbol of the rising conservative tide among American youth.”2 When Rettig chose a date that conflicted with Tower’s Senate obligations, Phillips charged that the conflict was deliberate. Phillips also requested that conservative working papers be distributed at the Congress, but Rettig refused.3
The YAF prepared for battles over Cuba (against Castro), the House Committee on Un-American Activities (in favor), and the new Peace Corps proposed by Kennedy (against). By mid-August, conservative reform organizations had sprouted like weeds. Phillips’s committee newsletter listed five groups no one had ever heard of before.
The NSA was not without allies. The Students for Democratic Action (SDA), the home of Roosevelt liberals, among them NSA veteran Allard Lowenstein, mobilized to ward off both the YAF challenge and separate threats coming from Kay Wonderlic. A liberal Harvard student and NSA loyalist, Barney Frank, formed Independent Student Action to offer alternative reforms.4 Frank, quick-witted, brash, and fast-talking, frequently disarmed NSA opponents with his biting wit. The future congressman from Massachusetts hoped to defuse the conservative backlash against the NSA by appearing to lead a reform movement, albeit one that had the support of the NSA leadership.
Civil rights activist Curtis Gans returned to the Congress to direct the SDS-dominated Liberal Caucus. Gans cared deeply about the NSA, and like many liberals felt that the new conservatives threatened its very existence. The senior NSA leadership encouraged him, even though he was often to their left on positions. He later explained, “I probably pushed them beyond where they would like to be, but I wasn’t crazy,” referring to the heated rhetoric of the SDS.5 Earlier in the summer, for example, SDS founder Al Haber had warned prospective NSA delegates that the YAF consorted with “racist, militarist, imperialist butchers.”6
Delegates listened as keynote speakers tried to shape the upcoming debates. The governor of Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson, an ardent New Deal liberal and Wisconsin progressive who had fought the right-wing anticommunism of Senator Joseph McCarthy, dismissed the new conservatives. “There is no conservative revival … merely a revival of the Know-Nothing spirit.”7 Former NSA president Richard Murphy reverted to an old cliché and told delegates that if they were attacked from both left and right, they were doing something right.8 Richard Rettig accused the conservatives of hindering the ability of NSA officers to carry out Congress mandates.9 In his longer report to the NSA executive committee, Rettig acknowledged a serious and growing gap between the campuses and the NSA officers.10
The two hundred Young Americans for Freedom who descended on Madison wore suspenders on the plenary floor so they could recognize one another. They tracked debates and votes via walkie-talkies.11 Phillips was on academic probation at Harvard and could not be an official delegate, but he set up shop in the nearby Madison Inn with a battery of secretaries and staff and produced a flow of pamphlets and flyers, despite a behind-the-scenes fight over the high cost of the operation. The conservatives lived up to their advance billing, vocally opposing any remotely liberal measure, including support for the new Peace Corps, a centerpiece of the Kennedy administration.
In his role as chair of the Committee for an Effective Peace Corps, formed the previous spring, Phillips had called instead for a hard-hitting propaganda campaign against international communism. He suggested that the Peace Corps change its name to the Anti-Communist Freedom Corps.12 He argued that volunteers should be trained in communist propaganda, undergo security clearances, and be prepared to combat socialist and Marxist ideas.13 Liberals easily defeated the conservative minority and passed a resolution in full support of the Peace Corps.14
These were mere skirmishes compared to the fight over HUAC. The YAF maintained that the protest against HUAC earlier in the year in San Francisco was communist inspired. In the previous months, conservatives had traveled the country to prove their charges by showing a HUAC-made movie, Operation Abolition, which portrayed communists as seeking to destroy the nation’s security and as having duped the non-communist liberals, tricking them into going against the forces of law and order.15 Left and liberal delegates, incensed at what they perceived as either slander or poppycock, stepped up their demands that HUAC be abolished. That demand in turn frightened witting NSA officers and staff, who, despite their general antipathy toward HUAC, feared that such a position would leave the association open to charges of communist infiltration.
After heated debate, postponements, and parliamentary maneuvers, the vote to call for HUAC to be abolished succeeded, 269 to 156.16 It appeared that the left had won a decisive victory. But the final resolution had been artfully amended by witting staff: it recognized the legitimacy of the U.S. Congress “to investigate acts of espionage, sabotage, and conspiracies to overthrow by force the Government of the United States” and recommended that “these functions be exercised by the Judiciary Committees of the House and Senate respectively.”17 In effect, the resolution enabled the NSA to argue that it did not advocate abolishing investigations into subversive activities—just the body that traditionally conducted them.
The trickiest issue for the international staff was Cuba. Two and a half years after Castro came to power, the NSA had not changed its position in support of the revolution, despite Eisenhower’s mandates and growing reports of repression within the country. In the months before the Congress, NSA staff worked to ward off a YAF initiative to condemn Castro for atrocities as well as an SDS initiative to condemn the United States for actions against Cuba, while coping with internal pressure over the arrests of Cuban students who had once been close to the NSA.
One such student was Ramón Prendes, and Lucille Dubois, the irrepressible head of the Latin American subcommission in Miami, mounted a one-woman crusade on his behalf. Prendes, who had once plotted to kill Batista, had spoken at the 1958 Congress. Now he was under arrest in Havana, and in January 1961 Dubois pleaded with the NSA to take action, warning, “They [the exiles] know for sure Ramón will be shot.”18
It fell to Latin America specialist Manuel Aragon to explain to Dubois why the NSA could not act on Prendes’s behalf. In February he assured her that the NSA was “increasingly preoccupied about the situation in Cuba as more information on the repression of students has become available.” But the question was “extremely delicate,” he added, because the NSA had “cordial relations” with Roland Cubela, a Castro lieutenant and the gun-toting head of the Cuban student union.19
Then, four months before the Congress, the full import of Eisenhower’s directives became clear, narrowing the NSA’s options. Near midnight on April 14, the first American-backed Cuban teams trained in Guatemala departed from a Nicaraguan port to invade Cuba. (It seems that Phillips was not the only one obsessed with Castro’s beard: the Nicaraguan dictator Luis Somoza, an American ally, requested souvenir hairs from it in return for his support.) As the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion began, American officials from Secretary of State Dean Rusk to U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson denied any U.S. involvement. The resulting debacle cost 200 lives; 1,197 invaders were captured, including Americans.20
Anyone who worked with Latin Americans knew that the invasion would put the entire region in an uproar. Even Cord Meyer, the students’ ultimate overseer in the CIA, later confided in his diary that he regretted going along with Richard Bissell, head of clandestine operations and the invasion’s principal architect.21 Meyer blamed his acquiescence on the influence of his elders in the Georgetown social set who thought highly of Bissell.
Yet two months after the invasion, the NSA was still hedging its bets. Manuel Aragon told an NSA constituent that the International Commission had “not found it possible at this point to make a decision on the representative nature of FEU in Cuba now or on the representative nature of any of the exile groups.”22 To anyone in the know, it was jaw-dropping dissembling.
The truth was that not long after the revolution, Havana had begun to rival Prague as a center of militant activity. Raúl Castro had made good on his World Youth Festival promises, offering Havana to the International Union of Students and the World Federation of Democratic Youth as a base for reaching Latin American young people. Soon afterward, the Cubans hosted a Latin American Youth Congress and established a school to train revolutionaries.23 The Cubans also hosted a Congress of Central American Students, wresting control of it from Guatemala.24
In June 1961, Havana hosted an IUS Council meeting and welcomed thirty-six delegations to the city.25 The elaborate pageantry mimicked the World Youth Festivals. Welcome banners streamed from Havana buildings and President Osvaldo Dorticós and Prime Minister Castro mingled with the delegates. The Cuban National Theater produced special programs, including a beauty pageant. The FEU led tours to the Bay of Pigs. IUS president Jiří Pelikán made a pilgrimage to the grave-site of José Antonio Echeverría and placed a wreath on his tomb. The IUS then voted to condemn “aggression against the Republic of Cuba by the imperialist government of the United States” and to “denounce new plans for aggression hatched by those who wish to utilize the Organization of American States.”26
Bob Kiley, by then on the COSEC staff, today describes the 1960–61 period, understatedly, as “one of rising tension” between NSA witting staff and CIA case officers.27 The NSA friendship flights to Havana finally ended but the campus constituency created as a result of Operation Amistad fueled protests against the invasion. Within the ISC and COSEC, enthusiasm for the revolution remained high. Not only would the NSA be isolated if it condemned Castro at home or in the ISC but doing so would undermine claims of independence from U.S. foreign policy, the basis of the NSA’s overseas legitimacy. Yet there seemed to be no middle ground.
At the 1961 Congress, both the YAF and the NSA used Cuban exiles to try to gain an advantage with delegates. The YAF had invited New York–based Lesmes Ruiz to dramatize Castro’s crimes.28 The Congress initially rejected a request for Ruiz to speak on the procedural grounds that he lacked delegate status, but after frantic consultations, international vice president Jim Scott moved that the rules be suspended.29 Ruiz delivered an emotional brief against Castro. Then Robert Schuchman from the YAF demanded an investigation into charges of repression and proposed that a delegation be sent to Cuba.30 Scott stepped in to squelch the idea, arguing that such a trip “might enrage rather than mollify Castro. It is in the best interests of NSA that YAF should play no part, not even a small part, in the Cuban business.”31
Delegates then followed Scott’s lead and agreed to hear from the NSA-preferred Cuban exile, Juan Manuel Salvat. The former head of Agrupción Católica at the University of Havana, Salvat had once belonged to Echeverría’s revolutionary group Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil. Like many Catholics, Salvat had turned against Castro, and in 1960, Castro had arrested him for protesting a visit from the Soviet official Anastas Mikoyan. After his release from prison, Salvat fled Cuba to Miami and joined the Bay of Pigs operation.32
Salvat was among the young Cubans who slipped secretly onto the island ahead of the disastrous landing. He was caught, arrested, and released—probably because he operated under a false identity. A few months after he spoke to NSA delegates, Salvat would begin what the CIA called “boom and bang” operations—hit-and-run raids against the Castro regime. By then, the Kennedy administration had approved Operation Mongoose, a covert operation to harass Castro after the invasion failed.33 (In his most famous exploit, in the summer of 1962 Salvat and his friends powered across the seas in a leaky dinghy from Florida to blow up the Havana hotel where Castro was entertaining a Russian delegation, but the bombs exploded after Castro and his entourage had left.)34 And it would be Salvat and his fellow raiders who first identified the Russian-made missiles on the island of Cuba that led to the Kennedy-Khrushchev confrontation and took the world to the brink of nuclear war.35
The great irony in the NSA’s decision to choose Salvat over Ruiz is that both were on the CIA payroll.36 The CIA believed in funding all factions in a political conflict, although the CIA station chief in Miami, Ted Shackley, later wrote that he had warned his superiors that leaders of the new DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil en el Exilio), including Salvat, resisted direction and treated U.S. policymakers with “contempt I repeat contempt.”37 That contempt would turn to hatred and accusations of betrayal after the missile crisis, when Kennedy cracked down on their boom and bang adventures and ended funding subsidies.38
At the Madison Congress, Salvat won the delegates’ rapt attention when he described how Castro had arrested student leaders José Puente Blanco, founder of Operation Amistad, and Alberto Muller, a palace attack survivor. After the speech, the delegates agreed to send a protest telegram to Castro urging him to spare the lives of the students who had been arrested. Salvat later praised the NSA action, believing that it, along with similar protests in Latin America, saved Muller’s life. “So great was our influence,” Salvat wrote to Manuel Aragon afterward, “that Che [Guevara] himself went to the Oriente to forbid the court to impose a penalty of more than twenty years.”39
Yet the international staff managed a sleight of hand to keep the cable to Castro separate from the NSA’s resolution on Cuba. Having satisfied anti-Castro sentiment, the longer resolution on Cuba balanced praise for the revolution’s achievements, such as Castro’s literacy campaign, with concern for violations of academic freedom. It contained a mild protest against the Bay of Pigs invasion: “The attainment of a Cuban solution to the problems [of academic freedom] is jeopardized by such external interventions as the United States government involvement in the Cuban refugee invasion of April, 1961 and the Soviet arms shipment to the Cuban Government.”40 By pairing Soviet arms shipments with the U.S.-supported invasion, the NSA could argue that it was even-handed in its criticism. The only mandate for action involved “gathering information” on conditions in Cuba. Once again, the NSA international team had preserved its flexibility, avoiding an outright condemnation of the Bay of Pigs and keeping its overseas options open.
The NSA leadership had been prepared for the debates on HUAC, Cuba, and even the Peace Corps. What caught officers off guard was an inflammatory speech by National Review founder William F. Buckley. After the NSA refused to let a conservative give a major plenary speech, the YAF invited Buckley to the Congress to demonstrate that the NSA did not allow free speech. At the Madison Inn parking lot outside YAF headquarters, Buckley spoke to a large crowd one evening. He slammed NSA policy in Africa. “One of the great liberal fallacies is to assume that we can have freedom for Mau Mau, for Mozambique, and for Algeria.” He called the NSA stands on Mozambique and Algeria geographically and anthropologically illiterate.41
Toward the end of his speech, Buckley took questions. A Ceylonese visitor asked why Buckley was critical of African independence movements when the United States itself had fought a revolution against a colonial power.42 Buckley chastised the questioner: How dare he compare the “semi-savages of Africa to the American founding fathers.”43
The crowd let out a collective gasp.
Infuriated by Buckley’s statements, student guests to the Congress from Asia and Africa signed a petition against Buckley’s remarks, while outgoing NSA national affairs vice president Tim Jenkins publicly condemned the remarks: “I think now we have unmasked in the final reality what exactly exists behind the face of the conservative imagination, because now we see the base, and the debased, colonial, repressive, slave-owning kind of mentality that can exist in a hard, fascist type of regime.”44 Jenkins’s language in turn upset members of the NSA executive committee, which met through the night to decide whether to censure his remarks. Toward dawn they decided against censure, 30–0 with 3 abstentions, on the grounds that Jenkins had acted as an individual and not as an officer.45
Buckley later added fuel to the fire when he defended his remarks in the National Review, citing tribal wars in African countries as evidence of savagery, adding provocatively, “Some Africans have literally eaten their opponents.”46
While Buckley was stirring up drama outside the formal sessions, exhausted delegates inside had to decide on another controversial issue: whether to invite the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee to affiliate with the NSA. James Forman, who after the 1956 NSA Congress had decided that the organization was too conservative a vehicle to fight for civil rights, attended the 1961 Congress as the new executive director of SNCC to plead the case. Jenkins and others in the NSA leadership had remained close to SNCC, hosting meetings and raising bail money for jailed students. A few months before the Congress, SNCC and the NSA had sought funds for a joint voter registration project, a plan intended to bring southern blacks to the polls that would later be recast by some black power and SDS militants as a diabolical Kennedy plot to coopt the radicalism of the civil rights movement. But the Congress rejected formal affiliation with SNCC, instead urging member campuses to cooperate with individual chapters.47 It was a tepid gesture, and the new officers of the NSA scrambled to offset the damage to the NSA-SNCC partnership.48
The last act of the sleep-deprived delegates was the election of officers. Before the Congress, from his COSEC post in Leiden, Kiley had worried that a capable Notre Dame student, John Keegan, might run for NSA president and “attempt to make political capital of the mysterious NSA establishment’s involvement in policy-making at the Congress.”49 He advised witting staff of this “potentially very dangerous tactic” and urged them to reduce the visibility of “overseas representatives, the International Advisory Board and ‘old-hand’ expert advice in crafting resolutions.”50
That someone from the SDS left would run for office was a foregone conclusion; the question was who. The answer was Tom Hayden, who wrestled with the decision after trying to sort out his experiences with NSA officers. In his memoir, Hayden noted that the international staff had rejected his application to the prestigious summer seminar on the grounds that he was already “sufficiently knowledgeable about foreign policy.”51 Perhaps as a consolation prize, Rettig had hired Hayden to write a booklet on the civil rights movement, and then refused to publish it, without explaining why.52
Hayden was also uncertain whether the NSA offered him a national platform. He could pursue his passion for civil rights and organize northern students if he ran for the post of national affairs vice president, previously held by Gans and Jenkins, which still served as the nerve center of the NSA’s civil rights organizing. He decided to run.
Hayden soon heard rumors that he was too militant. Then he found damaging evidence of opposition from the leadership: “On the last night of the Congress,” he wrote years later, “a yellow pad was obtained from the office of the NSA president. It was an organizational chart of the convention’s political forces. On one side was a box inscribed Hayden-Haber. On the other was a box labeled YAF. Lines were drawn upward from the two boxes to a circle at the top of the chart marked Control Group.”53
Hayden was aware that there was an NSA establishment that tended to run things, but he was taken aback by the blatancy of the diagram. He withdrew his candidacy and threw his support to Paul Potter from Oberlin, a more temperate SDS colleague with closer ties to the NSA leadership who, unlike Hayden, had been accepted to the summer seminar. Potter had lost an earlier vote in the presidential race against Edward (Ed) Garvey, a University of Wisconsin graduate and former student body president, but he had enough support to win the national vice presidency.
Hayden did not go gently. On the plenary floor, he gave an angry speech in which he lambasted the “secretive NSA elite” for blocking his candidacy.54 After the Congress Hayden left the NSA and committed himself to the civil rights movement, where he continued his transition from liberal to radical. But the thrust of his campaign, and especially his charge that a secretive elite ruled the NSA, took hold among undergraduates.
The new president, Ed Garvey, had been recruited by Matthew Iverson, a University of Wisconsin friend who was then the assistant director of the Foreign Student Leadership Project. Iverson presented Garvey to the NSA leadership as “a very astute and successful campus politician,” whose main drawback was cynicism about the NSA.55 Iverson thought that immersion in the summer ISRS might bring him around. The strategy was effective in the short term: Garvey became a trusted witting officer who worked with the CIA for five years, including a year at CIA headquarters. But he is now scathing in his criticism of the NSA-CIA relationship.56
At the time of his election, Garvey had no inkling that he had been recruited into a special fraternity until Kiley invited him to Washington, ostensibly for a football game but in reality for the oath signing. (After he was made witting he went home, crashed through the door of his apartment and announced to his wife, “You will never believe …,” thereby violating his security oath within hours of having signed it.)57 His astonishment at learning the secret soon gave way to something approaching awe. A succession of thoughts went through his head: relief that the NSA was not a “commie pinko organization” as charged by conservatives, a swelling of pride—“Damn, we’re that good!”58 He worshiped the Kennedy family, and when Kiley told him that Bobby Kennedy backed their work and asked if he would like to have his picture taken with Bobby and President Kennedy, he was euphoric: “I felt I’d fallen asleep and awakened to a wonderful dream.”59
The CIA also had a reliable pick in the victorious international affairs vice president, a previously vetted Princeton graduate named Donald K. (Don) Emmerson. After a few weeks in office, Emmerson described the NSA to a Princeton audience as “a magnificent opportunity to work myself to the bone doing something I believe is worthwhile.”60 Over the next year, the reliability of the top officers, the warm personal relationship between Garvey and Paul Potter, despite their differences, camouflaged the growing ideological gap between liberals and the SDS.
An objective observer might have asked how long the NSA could survive a membership whose political beliefs were diametrically opposed to each other. Yet the CIA’s obsession with the conservatives made them oblivious to the challenge from the left. After the 1961 Congress, Kay Wonderlic, who advocated procedural reforms, not the abolition of the NSA, had an encounter with a friend who she knew worked for the CIA. “She warned me to be careful,” Wonderlic recounted in an interview; “The CIA is worried about your activities.”61 The caution left her mystified. How could the CIA be afraid of “a naive North Shore Chicago girl, a Miss Goody-Two-Shoes?”62 Over fifty years later, she still could not answer that question. At the time, the warning frightened her. After marrying a YAF activist, she left the student scene.
The warning had not been idle. A declassified CIA memo, “Right Wing Attacks Against the United States National Student Association,” written after the 1961 Congress, devotes four pages to the conservatives’ actions and singles out Wonderlic for special attention. Using the language of the clandestine world, the author describes Wonderlic as running a front: “She operated SCANR out of her home but apparently cooperated covertly with YAF.”63 Wonderlic (today Kathy Kolbe) scoffs at the notion she was a stalking horse for the YAF and describes its members as wackos.64
The declassified CIA memo is also illuminating for its description of the conservatives. They are depicted as ignorant and ill-informed, susceptible to a “a series of pat solutions to problems which fail to meet the test of realistic applicability to the modern world but which are simple and easily understood.”65 Conservatives appeal to “segments of the American public which have difficulty understanding domestic, economic, or international political questions.” While the contemptuous language accurately conveys the smugness that liberals felt toward conservatives, the memo does not qualify as good intelligence reporting.
The CIA memo ended on a dire note: “What has traditionally been a minor irritant has now developed into a major headache.” The unnamed author singled out the YAF-led disaffiliation campaigns as attacks that threatened to undermine the NSA “claim to represent American students” and that could “seriously hamper the USNSA international program.”66
The memo ends with a multi-point action agenda to decrease the conservative threat. Fifty years later, that portion remains classified.
THE CIA HAD ALWAYS WORRIED about the stability of the NSA. One of the reasons it obtained draft deferments for officers and staff was to avoid a sudden decimation of the association if all were called for active duty. But stability also meant support from the campus members. As the campuses came alive politically, John Simons at FYSA proposed and funded a new program intended to solidify student support for NSA international objectives. It was an abject failure. His Regional International Relations Student Seminars, patterned after ISRS, exposed the gulf between a given topic and the knowledge of the average undergraduate. In one role-playing session, a young woman tapped to play an Algerian revolutionary took a pro-French position.67
CIA liberals realized too late that the success of covert operations with a domestic organization such as the NSA depended on an underlying consensus about the Cold War. Years later, it became fashionable to blame the Vietnam War for shattering that consensus. But even a cursory examination of campus politics between 1959 and 1961 shows rising activism and challenges to Cold War policies from both left and right that predate the Vietnam protests. Liberals did not have to join the SDS or see themselves as part of the new left to develop doubts about the invasion of Cuba or abhor the violence against civil rights activists in the South. Liberals were slowly moving to the left. As their campus ranks swelled, their clout inside the NSA also grew.