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By Root 928 0

they were not leaders but rather “megaphones, you know, loudspeakers of the movement,” which was an accurate description of himself and many of the others. Cohn-Bendit engaged in a put-on. De Gaulle had first come to prominence in June 1940 when he left France, and in exile in Britain he made a famous broadcast to the French people asking them to keep resisting the Germans and not to follow the collaborationist government of Philippe Pétain. Cohn-Bendit now announced that he was asking for British asylum. “I will ask the BBC to reorganize the Free French radio as they did during the war.” He said that he would copy de Gaulle’s exact message, except that where he had said “Nazis” he would say “French fascists” and where he had said “Pétain” he would say “de Gaulle.”

The debate was dominated by Tariq Ali, the Pakistani-born British leader who had once been president of the famous debating society the Oxford Union. Ali said that students renounced elections as a means for social change.

Afterward they all went to the grave of Karl Marx and had their picture taken.

Cohn-Bendit returned to Germany vowing that he would renounce his leadership and disappear into the movement. He said that he had fallen prey to “the cult of personalities” and that “power corrupts.” He told the Sunday Times of London, “They don’t need me. Whoever heard of Cohn-Bendit five months ago? Or even two months ago?”

Cole found it a confusing experience. He never did understand what Cohn-Bendit’s ideology was, and he found Tariq Ali’s debating skills offputting. The people he connected with most were from the German SDS, and he toured Germany afterward with “Kaday” Wolf. “In the end,” he said, “the ones with the greatest similarities were the Germans. And the Germans had a lot of the same cultural influences—Marcuse and Marx. And an intense feeling of youth being incredibly alienated. A young person in young dress walks down a street in Germany and the older Germans just glared at him.”

But by fall Cole was back at Columbia with a theory he had gleaned from the French called “exemplary action.” The French had done exactly what the Columbia students were trying to do—analyze what they had done and evolve a theory from their actions. The theory of “exemplary action” was that a small group could take an action that would serve as a model for larger groups. Seizing Nanterre had been such an action.

Traditional Marxist-Leninism is contemptuous of such theories, which it labels “infantilism.” In June Giorgio Amendola, a theoretician and member of the steering committee of the Italian Communist Party, the largest Communist Party in the West, attacked the Italian student movement for “extremist infantilism” and scoffed at the idea that they were qualified to lead a revolution without having built their mass base in the traditional Marxist approach. He termed it “revolutionary dilettantism.” Lewis Cole said, “Exemplary action gave us our first theory. That was why we had so many meetings. The question was always, what do we do now?”

SDS poster announcing a demonstration before election day, 1968

(Center for the Study of Political Graphics)

With their theory now in place, they were ready to be a revolutionary center to prepare, as Hayden had said, “two, three, many Columbias.” The theory also helped the national office of the rapidly growing SDS become more of a command center. The first action at Columbia was a demonstration against the invasion of Prague. But that was still in August, and few people came. According to Cole, “It wasn’t very well done. The slogan was ‘Saigon, Prague, the pig is the same all over the world.’”

Columbia SDS, looking for an event to restart the movement, came up with the idea of hosting a student international, but from the outset it was a disaster. Two days before the conference began, the news broke of the student massacre in Mexico. Columbia students, feeling guilty because they had not even known that there was a student movement in Mexico, tried to organize a demonstration at the conference. But they were unable to come