SDS was in the process of becoming a huge organization. At that time there were only about 1000 members on paper, which means de facto a few hundred. Within two years it had greatly grown, largely thanks to the Vietnam War.

In '64 and '65 we organized the Peace Resurgence Education Project. We organized a sit-in at the Chase Manhattan Bank over the issue of loans to South Africa. There were 40 or so people arrested. A month later we organized the first national march on Washington. There were about 25,000 students.

Most of the crowd in SDS from '64 to '65 decided we needed to leave the campuses and focus on the interracial movement of the poor. In the summer of '65 when we were working with organizing Blacks and the Civil Rights Movement, I realized I wasn't a very good organizer. I wasn't patient enough.

I decided to write and be a mediator for the movement. I was inspired by James Agee's book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. I had won the Harvard Detur prize in my freshman year and that had been the prize.

Eventually, I ended up in California. The organizing projects were not working out that well. I felt a need to get back in the movement. I was working for an undergraduate paper. I was a free-lance agitator for two years.

I stopped going to conventions in 1967. I had become increasingly disgruntled with SDS. It had become an arena of various factions. There were the Leninist and the ultra-militant. It had become fratricidal. Comrades were trashing each other.

It was like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons. Road Runner suddenly veers off right before a cliff as Wile E. Coyote is chasing after him. Wile E. Coyote runs off the cliff and keeps running until suddenly he looks down and the moment of truth arrives. He runs in place, suspended in the air for a few seconds and then he crashes. This is the feeling I was getting from SDS in its later stages.

It was a wonderful place to roost. I never thought about a career because I thought the movement was going to be my life. When it crashed and burned, I was devastated. By '69 there were close to 100,000 members. The more unpopular the war became, the more unpopular the movement became. The movement was losing content and skidding...

It was the loss of many of my oldest connections. The willing forces were getting stupider. There was no spirit of the movement. There was no place for any intellectualism in the movement. Many were becoming very spiritual. Many were going straight in a sense [going back to traditional jobs].

From '70 to '73 I did part-time teaching at San Jose State. SDS broke apart in '73. One part wanted to blow up somebody and did blow up themselves and then there was the Progressive Labor faction, which was riddled with class guilt. I thought this was nonsense. So I treaded water for a few years.

I had never thought of getting a PhD, though in '74 I did. After '71, I couldn't even have fantasies of a post-student, savvy New Left. I met some people at Berkeley who suggested that I get a PhD. But I didn't want to be narrow.

I started getting interested in the media and the part that the media was playing in reflecting the movement. The seed for my dissertation was in an article that I wrote in '69 on the movement and the media, the dance they performed.

I became a professor through the back door and Berkeley made me director of its mass communications program. I have been fitfully active in politics, but I do most of my political work as a writer. My dissertation became a book [The Whole World is Watching]. My latest book is much more personal, and also part is memoir.

I was involved in UCal's divestment in '85. [Gitlin also serves on the board of Harvard-Radcliffe Alumni Against Apartheid (HRAAA)]...

My teaching is another way in which I carry on what I was doing in the '60s. I teach about the nature of things in such a way as to clarify the conditions and possibilities for change.