Carl Oglesby (nonfiction)

Carl Oglesby (July 30, 1935 – September 13, 2011) was an American writer, academic, and political activist.

Biography

Oglesby enrolled at Kent State University for three years before dropping out to attempt to make his way as an actor and playwright in Greenwich Village, a traditionally bohemian neighborhood in New York City. While at Kent State, he married Beth Rimanoczy, a graduate student in the English department; they ultimately had three children (Aron, Caleb and Shay).

After a year in New York, he returned to Akron, where he became a copywriter for Goodyear and continued working on his creative endeavors, including three plays influenced by Britain's "angry young men" literary movement (exemplified by "a well-received work on the Hatfield-McCoy feud") and an unfinished novel.

In 1958, Ogelsby and his family moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he took a technical writing position with the Bendix Corporation, a defense contractor. He ascended to the directorship of the company's technical writing division before completing his undergraduate degree as a part-time student at the University of Michigan (where he cultivated a circle of friends that included Donald Hall and Frithjof Bergmann) in 1962.

Oglesby first came into contact with members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in Ann Arbor in 1964.

He left Bendix in 1965 and became a full-time Research, Information, Publications (RIP) worker for SDS.

He was the President of the leftist student organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) from 1965 to 1966.

Oglesby's political outlook was more eclectic than that of many in SDS. He was heavily influenced by libertarian economist Murray Rothbard, and dismissed socialism as “a way to bury social problems under a federal bureaucracy."

In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[11] Also in 1968, he was asked by Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver to serve as his running mate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in that year's presidential election (he declined the offer).

Oglesby was forced out of SDS in 1969, after more left-wing members accused him of "being 'trapped in our early, bourgeois stage' and for not progressing into 'a Marxist-Leninist perspective.'"

Oglesby moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he founded the Assassination Information Bureau, an organization that has been credited with bringing about the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations. He wrote several books on the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the various competing theories that attempt to explain it. According to Oglesby, Kennedy was killed by "a rightist conspiracy formed out of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, the Syndicate, and a Cowboy oligarchy, supported by renegade CIA and FBI agents."

He recorded two albums, roughly in the folk-rock genre, one titled "Going To Damascus."

He taught politics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dartmouth College.

He attended the April 2006 North-Eastern Regional Conference of the "new SDS" and where he gave a speech in which he said that activism is about "teaching yourself how to do what you don't know how to do."

Oglesby died of lung cancer at his home in Montclair, New Jersey on September 13, 2011, aged 76.

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Assassination of John F. Kennedy (nonfiction)

External links

• Carl Oglesby @ Wikipedia
• Alumni profiles @ Antioch College