|  Carl
Oglesby may be the ultimate politically hyphenated American: He's an
anti-interventionist-New Left-humanist-libertarian. He's also a folk
singer with two albums to his credit, an author, and one of the nation's
leading experts on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Oglesby's background didn't hint that he would end up, as Murray Rothbard
called him in 1992, a "longtime libertarian." Born in Ohio,
Oglesby attended Kent State University and then worked in Michigan as
a technical editor for a defense contractor.
His world turned upside down in 1965 when he became radicalized about
the United States' growing military involvement in Vietnam. Later that
year, he was elected president of Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS), a "New Left" group that organized student opposition
to the Vietnam War.
As he traveled around the country, Oglesby came to realize that the
United States' foreign policy wasn't just a matter of left (good) versus
right (bad). In 1967, he wrote Containment and Change (with
Richard Shaull), which argued that the libertarian, non-interventionist
"Old Right" should be the New Left's best ally in opposing
an imperialistic American foreign policy.
In 1971, Oglesby was a speaker at a "Left-Right Festival of Mind
Liberation." The event, sponsored by the California Libertarian
Alliance, was designed to lay the groundwork for a libertarian/New Left
anti-war coalition. Oglesby made the case that "the Old Right and
the New Left" were "morally and politically" united in
their opposition to war, and should work together.
Oglesby also began speaking out against the alliance of big business
and government -- what he called the "corporate state" --
and in favor of "radically humanist politics" that embraced
decentralization and free association.
During those same years, Oglesby earned recognition for his musical
talent. He released two albums, Carl Oglesby (1969) and Going
to Damascus (1971), that were praised for their "psychedelic
folk rock sound." The albums were re-released in CD format in 2003.
After the Vietnam War ended, Oglesby's innate suspicion of government
led him down another career path -- investigating the assassination
of John F. Kennedy. He wrote three books: On the Trail of the Assassins
(with Jim Garrison, 1988); Who Killed JFK? (1991); and
The JFK Assassination: The Facts and the Theories (1992). All three
voiced skepticism about the government's "lone-gunman" theory.
In 1991, Oglesby again bridged the gap between his libertarian/left
perspective and the liberty movement in a speech to the Massachusetts
Libertarian Party. In it, Oglesby discussed secret American intelligence
operations, including the U.S. Army's post-World War II "Gehlen
Deal" that recruited former Nazis to spy on the USSR for NATO;
the CIA's 1953 Operation Ajax that overthrew the government of Iran;
and the FBI's Vietnam War-era COINTELPRO campaign against anti-war activists.
Such covert operations, warned Oglesby, were indicative of an out-of-control
"national-security oligarchy" that constituted "a secret
and invisible state within the public state."
-- Bill
Winter
|
