Shepard, observing the slowness of change, says pressuring institutions and the government is "like leaning on an elephant." The recognition of this, he says, allowed him the opportunity to "keep my basic values and live my own life at the same time." Others in his class say the same thing: a more realistic appraisal of the chance for change allowed them to moderate the intensity of their activism and thus they had more space to pursue other goals and enjoy their own personal lives with friends and family.
Whether this is selling out, or compromising ideals, is not an easy question. But it is enough to note that the activists' ability to tone down their political or social involvement without contradicting their beliefs is much easier once they have concluded that fundamental change is a slow, long-term process that does not occur in a blinding flash. Emmanual P. Krasner '69's statement in the 15th year Class Record speaks for many of his classmates: "I recall that I once intended (with a few friends) to wreak massive changes in the world and I haven't done it...I am devoting less time to saving the world and more time to carving my own space in it."
But not all of those who graduated in 1969 have had to struggle to come to a working agreement between their conscience and their materialism. Some, who did not agree with the direction the activists took, found themselves moving toward the right. After graduation, these conservatives (or more centrist liberals) seemed not to encounter conflicts between their ideals and their conception of the good life that were special to their generation.
Elliot Abrams '69, currently assistant Secretary of State for human rights, remembers the campus radicalism as "mindless, anti-intellectual...it made me wary of these people in national politics; I gravitated further to the right." Abrams says he is not surprised that his classmates, who "screamed that they were the best generation and were going to change the world, end up in corporate law firms." It was a big fraud, he says of the activism back then, and involved a great deal of adolescence. This is why, he adds, the leftists in the Class of '69 have abandoned their former positions. For his part, Abrams opposed the strikes, and was the founder of the ad hoc Committee in Keep Harvard Open (which was comprised of five people).
Kaufer rejects the criticisms that the activists were a fraud because they were adolescents: "it that necessarily negative: We were adolescents. Adolescence is a constructive period of trying to decide for ourselves, putting things on the line and making decisions. In addition, Kaufer and others claim that as they passed out of adolescence into the "real world," they maintained their positions and values they had come to in college.
If the revolution was just around the corner, then the block stretched out indefinitely.
Most of the members of the Class of '69, it seems, never sheltered themselves from the outside world when they left Harvard, nor automatically moved to the right as a reaction against emotional mass struggles. The students graduated and slowly built their own lives trying to negotiate the inevitable conflicts as best they could.
One thing that made a large difference in the shape of their trade-offs was the lack of a community of like-minded peers facing similar situations and conflicts. Moving into the world, by ones or twos, they had to start from scratch. The political convictions of many, though without the same intensity of political practice, survived; for others, these convictions were not strong enough to weather the pressures of the American Dream; in short, there are some who sold out.
Yet, leafing through the 15th year Class Record, one finds statement after statement referring not only to "an earlier interest in liberal politics" (Jeffrey C. Alexander '69), but also to new issues and struggles which arise from the same consciousness of concern as in '69:"...my views on the likelihood of a nuclear obscenity are essentially unchanged...Perhaps each of our efforts over the next five years, mobilized by a common interest in avoiding oblivion, can make a difference. We believed it could and did in 1969." (David L. Ach '69)