One question is all it takes.

Todd Gitlin '63, former president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), professor of sociology at UC/Berkeley and author of The '60s: Days of Hope, Days of Rage (1987), launched into a nostalgic journey back to his days at Harvard, remembering his involvement with Tocsin, a student anti-nuclear group founded in the winter of 1962, and the way in which it affected the rest of his life

The 1960s still live in the hearts and minds of the generation of students who were politically active then and who have gone on to leave their mark, says Gitlin, who finds that the SDS movement may have died, but that the activists of his generation remain involved with the issues that first inspired them.

Q: What was it like to be a student activist in the early 1960s?

I had not been political in high school, nor in my freshman year. In the fall of '60 I was initiated into Tocsin. There was a real tidal shift in that fall. I had a group of about seven or eight friends and none were interested in politics.

Over the summer [of 1960] I fell in love. My girlfriend was very political. One of the first days after I got back [to school], I was talking with someone and they told me about a rally being held to protest sane nuclear policy. Erich Fromm and Joan Baez were going to be there.

I said to myself, `of course I'm going.' I didn't know why. It was very weird. But everyone assumed they were going. We weren't political though. We weren't great Kennedy fans.

The next day in Quincy dining hall I was wearing a pin from the rally. It had a mushroom cloud on it, and Robert Weil ['61], a leading member of Tocsin, came up to me and asked me to come to a meeting. The group didn't sound too collectivistic, so I went.

Before long I was going up to Vermont to campaign for a pacifist congressman. The next thing I knew I was on the executive committee [of Tocsin]. It all happened in a month. Tocsin became the center of my life for the next two years...

The whole period was thrilling, even though we felt desperate and scared a lot of the time. We organized a rally after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The rally was crammed with people. There were right-wing Cuban beating on the doors.

Barrington Moore [a social scholar known for his classic work, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy]... gave a speech which changed my life. He said protest was nice, but, let's face it, it's not going to accomplish what we need to accomplish. America was a `bastion of reaction the world over.'

He said; `don't waste your time on concrete proposals.' We believed in sweet reason. `[Secretary of State McGeorge] Bundy wants to survive as much as you do,' he said. `What we really need to do is have simultaneous revolutions in the United States and the Soviet Union...We have to create destructive criticism of a destructive system.'..

Suddenly everything crystallized. What his speech told us was that Tocsin's politics of amiable persuasion were not enough. The effort of changing their minds by proving how well-read we were was valiant but fruitless. I resigned as chair of Tocsin soon thereafter. I knew that I had to do something else, though I didn't quite know what it was.

I had gotten to know some of the SDS people nationally. I got to know Tom Hayden. We had the back room at Cronin's. It began to seem to me that the issues were interrelated and something more had to be transformed. I got involved with the Civil Rights Movement. I was very impressed with SNCC [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee]. This was also the spring of the Birmingham violence.

After graduating, I went to Ann Arbor. I knew that I wanted to be a writer. I loved the energy of SDS, whose center was there. I did not want to be a professional politico. I went from graduation straight to an SDS convention in New York. I was elected president of SDS right there.