THE NEXT DAY the plenary session continued with a discussion of tactics. Jerry Gordon, the chairmen of the Cleveland Area Peace Action Council, the group which organized the conference, was sitting near the front. He was a middle-aged fellow with close- cropped hair. He looked exhausted. I asked him what he felt about the conference. He lamented the fact that SDS and PL had "obscured" the issues, but he felt that was just part of the overhead of having an open conference. When asked who was running the conference, he became even sadder, and said intensely, "The people are running this. To say anybody else is running this thing is ridiculous. The people are running it."

He said that SMC was not getting along well with the New Mobe, a group he called "a bunch of generals without an army." He claimed they were moving into civil disobedience, which in his opinion, was not what the majority of people in the movement wanted. New Mobe had called a conference for the week following the Cleveland conference. Jerry Gordon emphasized that he was concerned with an anti-war movement. He made little mention of other issues such as racism or imperialism.

Meanwhile, in the conference being run by the people, there was a lot of dissatisfaction with the chairman. Various proposals were on the floor about what the future of the movement should involve. The majority of speakers seemed to be in favor of a resolution introduced by Jerry Gordon and Jim Lafferty. Members of the audience were calling for equal time for those who wanted to speak for and against the proposal. One man had been trying to raise a point of order for fifteen minutes. The chairman said he would not stop in midbreath to deal with it.

As time went by, however, the man with the point of order became more annoyed. He finally stood up and kept shouting that he wanted to be heard. The chairman, unable to continue, said he would have a vote by the body to see if they wanted to hear the point of order. Dan Siegal, former president of the Berkeley Association of Students, then took over the chair. "The ruling of the chair as I understand it," he said, "is to go on with the agenda and not stop for all this procedural bullshit all the time." This was greeted with cries of rage, and so he was forced to take a vote on whether the body wanted to overrule the chair. The vote was held, and was overwhelmingly against the chair.

"The chair is clearly upheld," said Siegal. This was too much for the audience, and they started screaming at him. He held another vote, which was evenly distributed, probably because no one was clear on what they were voting for. Again, Siegal claimed the chair was clearly upheld. People began standing in the aisles and velling. The marshalls started yelling "SIT DOWN," but were drowned out by the countercries of "LET HIM SPEAK." There was general chaos for at least ten minutes.

Finally, one of the speakers who had been already recognized gave up his time so that the point of order could be made. The point of order was that there should be some speakers from SDS and PL, and more people allowed to speak against the Lafferty proposal. It was pointed out by the man who raised the point of order that the chairmen who had refused to recognize him was none other than Jim Lafferty himself, the man whose proposal was being discussed on the floor. In the ensuing vote on whether SDS and PL should be allowed to speak, the audience overwhelming supported them.

THE SDS AND PL speakers were followed by a Workers' League speaker who charged that the movement was "liberal to the core."

A woman's workshop tried to get their proposal on the floor. It accused the conference of having been run in a male chauvinist manner. They were told that their proposal would be taken up later with the proposals of the other workshops.

The proposal by Jerry Gordon and Jim Lafferty, the SMC-YSA proposal, suggested four tactics the movement should use. They called for:

a summer of intensive organizing and educational work:

local anti-war demonstrations on August 6-9, the period from Hiroshima Day to Nagasaki Day:

support for the August 29 Chicano Moratorium:

a day of nationally coordinated massive anti-war demonstration on Saturday, October 31.

The SDS-PL proposal called for the following specific actions:

a demonstration on June 20 against Stokes as well as Agnew: