The Strawberry Statement

In 1968, Random House published a book by James Kunen entitled The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary. The book glamorized the radical student movement and helped to make it grow. (MGM also helped by making a movie out of the book.) Kunen carried the usual New Left credentials and was a classic example of the extent to which an intelligent person can be programmed by the Establishment into thinking he is acting against the Establishment.

Kunen was one of the leading participants in the first student seizure of an American university, which occurred at Columbia in April 1968. Initially, the movement was not large and could have been easily stopped by a simple police action. But the anti-Establishment movement received its greatest help from the Establishment itself. For several days the police were told by University officials not to interfere. Meanwhile, University officials groveled in the face of outrageous propaganda charges, and the Establishment media made national heroes of the rebelling students.

In The Strawberry Statement Kunen made this interesting admission of the powers behind the scenes that bankroll the pressure from below:

In the evening, I went up to the U. to check out a strategy meeting. A kid was giving a report on the SDS [Students for A Democratic Society] convention. He said that … at the convention, men from Business International Round Tables, the meeting sponsored by Business International for their client groups and heads of government, tried to buy up a few radicals.

These men are the world’s leading industrialists and they convene to decide how our lives are going to go. These are the guys who wrote the Alliance for Progress. They are the left wing of the ruling class.

They offered to finance our demonstrations in Chicago. We were also offered ESSO (Rockefeller) money. They want us to make a lot of radical commotion so they can look more in the center as they move to the left.

Jerry Kirk, while a student at the University of Chicago, became active in the SDS, the DuBois Club, the Black Panthers, and the Communist Party. Not only did he observe the support provided by the Establishment during his revolutionary activities, but he was able to detect the strategy of pressure from above and pressure from below at work. Kirk broke from the Party in 1969. The following year, he testified before the House and Senate Internal Security panels:

Young people have no conception of the conspiracy’s strategy of pressure from above and pressure from below…. They have no idea that they are playing into the hands of the Establishment they claim to hate. The radicals think they’re fighting the forces of the super rich, like Rockefeller and Ford, and they don’t realize that it is precisely such forces which are behind their own revolution, financing it, and using it for their own purposes….

Militant communists and other street radicals will never succeed in overthrowing the U.S. government. But unless the Conspiracy is exposed, they will scare the American people into accepting the very totalitarian agenda that the Establishment Insiders seek.