Counter-Revolution

The campus of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville might have been deliberately created as a monument to every New Left cliché about the sterility of the U. S. educational establishment. Built only five years ago, it consists of eight or nine rust-colored, ultramodern buildings plopped down in the middle of 6000 featureless acres, like spaceships that have crash-lauded on a not-quite-habitable planet. Last spring, Young Americans for Freedom, the nation's largest organization of right-wing college students, chose it as the site for its Midwestern regional conference.

For two days, YAF delegates from 13 states gathered in a hall on the second floor of the student union. During one afternoon, they listened to a middle-aged housewife with a fixed smile deliver a speech on the Government's failure to adequately prepare for nuclear attack, discussing world annihilation as if she were reciting a recipe for chocolate-chip cookies. After a half-hour break, they returned to hear a retired general advocate a U. S. invasion of North Vietnam. "It's basic military tactics," he said. "You can't win until you carry the battle to the enemy's own ground." He analyzed the war for 45 minutes, without ever once mentioning the Viet Cong.

The young men in the audience were, for the most part, short-haired and clean-shaven and clad in business suits. None of the girls wore miniskirts. After the last session of the day, the out-of-state delegates returned to their rooms in a new but already decaying Holiday Inn near the campus. The motel is next to a cemetery.

It was a perfect picture in every detail. A battery of SDS propagandists couldn't have drawn a better one. And, like many perfect pictures, it was totally deceptive. "Boy," a member of YAF's Michigan delegation whispered to a friend while both were applauding the speech by Major General Thomas C. Layne (U. S. Army, Retired), "that old(continued overleaf) guy is really full of shit."

The image of college conservatives as brainwashed, middle-class squares out to abolish the 20th Century is rapidly being eroded--and the New Left may be responsible. For years, YAF chapters existed on most campuses as tiny discussion groups, unnoticed and often ridiculed. The peak of their activity was the occasional distribution of badly written pamphlets denouncing Social Security, East-West trade, the minimum wage, big-government restrictions on capitalism and other traditional ogres of the right. The now-almost-continuous wave of riots and strikes hitting major universities has changed all that. "Every time the left takes over a building, we pick up more members," says Randal Teague, YAF's executive director. "The moderate student--the guy who just wants to get an education--has nowhere to turn but to us. We're the only legitimate group that's able to challenge the SDS and the black militants."

Increasingly, the challenging is being done with the New Left's own weapons. When groups of moderates at Stanford, Columbia, Wisconsin and other schools attempted to physically "liberate" university buildings captured by militants, the local YAF chapters were usually behind the action. One YAF chapter organized a blue-power movement, distributing thousands of blank blue buttons and arm bands symbolizing resistance to the SDS. ("Governor Reagan out in California wears a blue-power button whenever he's on TV," Teague revealed proudly, then frowned. "Of course, it doesn't mean much to people who don't have a color set.") At YAF's national headquarters in Washington, half-a-dozen people work full time, mailing out posters and bumper stickers bearing slogans such as The New Left Is Revolting and Up Against The Wall, Commies. YAF even has a favorite industry to hate, picketing IBM campus recruiters in the same manner that SDS harasses representatives of Dow Chemical. IBM is accused of selling militarily useful computers to the Communist bloc.

YAF leaders insist that the group abstains from extralegal acts, no matter how tempting. (Randal Teague: "You can't fight anarchy with more anarchy.") But it doesn't always work out that way in practice. Last year, at the Newark branch of Rutgers University, YAF members came within minutes of triggering a violent battle between the Black Panthers and a white vigilante group. Rutgers at Newark occupies the most volatile territory of any American campus. It is literally a no man's land between the Central Ward--a vast Negro slum still maimed by a 1967 riot that left 27 people dead--and the North Ward, populated chiefly by lower-middle-class Italian Americans. The North Ward is the power base of city councilman Anthony Imperiale, the rotund creator of an armed "citizens' committee" dedicated to protecting the neighborhood from Negro invaders.

The leader of Newark's YAF--and also college chairman for the entire state--was Ralph Fucetola, a 24-year-old law student. A few months earlier, militants had seized a campus building to dramatize their demands for a black-studies program and open enrollment of Negroes. "They were in Conklin Hall for three days, just about shutting down the school," Fucetola recalled. "Finally, YAF rounded up enough moderate students to take the building back. But we hesitated, because the Black Panthers in the Central Ward--they really have a big outfit here--were ready to move in and help the strikers. One of us went to see Tony Imperiale. He's really a very moderate guy, once you get to know him. Tony said if the Panthers came on campus, he'd send over 500 volunteers from his people. We were all set to go when the administration heard about it and gave in to the militants. They were hunting for an excuse, anyway. They really don't have any guts." He shook his head ruefully. "I guess, in a way, we were partly responsible for the blacks winning."

YAF spokesmen make a special effort to emphasize that the organization is not racially prejudiced, as its opponents usually charge. "We took a survey and only four percent of our members were for George Wallace in the last election," Randal Teague said. The claim is, for the most part, an honest one. YAF publications scrupulously avoid even hinting at racial malice in their attacks on black militants, blasting their tactics rather than their demands. But individual members are often insensitive to the Negro's real situation in American life. Although not guilty of bigotry, many YAF leaders can safely be accused of lack of imagination.

An example was the "Polish student union" rally held at the University of Louisville. Its organizer was YAF's then--Kentucky state chairman, Brad Evans, a 23-year-old ex-Marine majoring in foreign studies. Huge, boisterous, a former varsity football player, Evans speaks with the self-mocking toughness of a man who knows no one in his right mind will ever take a swing at him. "The black student union was really raising hell," he said, laughing. "They wanted all kinds of wild things. Five out of the ten members on the school's board of trustees should be Negro, stuff like that. We answered by holding a 'Polish student union' rally, pushing Polish power. You know--what's good for the blacks is good for the Poles. Probably aren't six Poles in all of Kentucky. But we got out a crowd of 800 white students. The blacks and the SDS really blew their lids."

In 1968, the national membership of YAF was under 30,000. The figure is now 51,000 and is still growing. Paradoxically, Randal Teague admits, this abrupt emergence from obscurity has had some unexpected results. "To win over moderate students, we've had to become more moderate ourselves," he claims. "The Wallace business, the way I look at it, is beneficial. It's helped us get rid of the weirdos and kooks." "The Wallace business" was the culmination of a bitterly fought internal conflict. It began during the 1968 Presidential campaign, when the editors of The New Guard, YAF's monthly magazine, refused to accept ads from Youth for Wallace. The decision prompted thousands of Southern members to bolt the group--and led to the formation of the National Youth Alliance, created as an alternative to YAF. Now, a resolution condemning the NYA as racist was being submitted at each of the seven 1969 regional conferences. It passed at Edwardsville by a 65-to-10 vote. (A few weeks later, it was publicly revealed that the NYA had been taken over by the Liberty Lobby, a rightist cult described by the late Drew Pearson as neo-Nazi. Ironically, at the very moment the Edwardsville delegates were voting to condemn the NYA for racism, several smiling girls in the back of the hall were passing out literature supporting Ian Smith's white-supremacist government in Rhodesia. The pamphlets were published by Friends of Rhodesia, another Liberty Lobby front.)

Most YAF leaders dismiss the NYA with contempt, predicting that it will soon be out of business. This attitude isn't shared by Irwin Suall, an official of the Anti-Defamation League, which has compiled a file on the group. "It's definitely a Liberty Lobby front, but they'll deny it," he said. "Liberty Lobby is run by Willis Carto, a kind of gray eminence of the anti-Negro, anti-Semitic right. The real danger isn't in the NYA itself but in the nonpolitical kids they might inflame. You know, jocks and fraternity boys--the kind who, when they get fed up enough with New Left tactics, may become violent. So far, no one's ever organized them."

Last spring, dozens of such vigilante outfits sprang up on riot-torn campuses. At the University of Wisconsin, they called themselves the Hayakawas, after the SDS-busting president of San Francisco State College. Black militants on the campus claim that roving bands of Hayakawas beat up and attempted to rape two Negro female students. The University of Bridgeport in Connecticut spawned the American Eagles. The Eagles allegedly remained active after the last New Left strike died down, continuing to terrorize students they considered "too radical." In (continued on page 176)CounterRevolution (continued from page 138) the Chicago area, an outfit called the July Fourth Movement is on the rise. They made their first public appearance in March 1969, when they disrupted a conservative vs. SDS debate at the Wright campus of Chicago City College, shouting down Bernadine Dohrn, ex--national interorganizational secretary of SDS. ("Bernadine was so mad she handcuffed herself to a urinal in the men's room afterward," a YAF witness reported. "She does that every once in a while to get publicity. I don't know why. No one ever pays any attention unless he wants to use the urinal.")

Bill Mencarow, the Illinois state chairman of YAF, took the stage after the cops had ejected the July Fourth hecklers, disavowing any connection between their group and his own. Weeks later, several members of the movement invaded a party in the Edwardsville Holiday Inn, held after the opening session of YAF's Midwestern conference. They quickly handed out mimeographed sheets denouncing Mencarow as a traitor to the conservative cause. Then they ran like hell, the last infiltrator barely escaping a roundhouse swing of Brad Evans' right fist. A moment before, Evans had announced that nothing the SDS did would ever provoke him to violence. (The contradictory mood evident in Evans' words and behavior pervades the Right. Last April, baffled pacifists attending a get-out-of-Vietnam rally in New York's Central Park looked on while representatives of YAF and the National Youth Alliance engaged in a mass fistfight. Both groups had gone to the park to heckle the demonstrators but ran into each other first.)

Despite their comic aspects, such incidents illustrate the complexity of the relationships among far-right organizations. Spokesmen for the July Fourth outfit described themselves as members of the New Right movement. The New Right is a creation of Breakthrough, a Detroit youth group linked to the paramilitary Minutemen. Several months ago, Breakthrough became the Michigan arm of the National Youth Alliance, with its leader--Patrick Tifer, then a student at Wayne State University--briefly moving up to become national chairman of the NYA. His first official act was to expel Willis Carto from membership and denounce the Liberty Lobby as crypto-Nazi, thus creating a schism within a schism.

"The NYA has no connection at all with Liberty Lobby," said Doug Clee. It was two weeks before Patrick Tifer's surprise move and Clee, then chief NYA administrative officer, was supervising the mailing of pamphlets and membership applications to nearly 10,000 college students. The scene was a room in Liberty Lobby headquarters, a few blocks from the Capitol in Washington, D. C. The building has a giant steel eagle mounted over the front door. In addition to being chief administrative officer of the NYA (at the time, anyway), Clee was managing editor of Liberty Letter, the official Liberty Lobby publication. "The NYA just rents office space here," he said. "Lots of organizations do. The Friends of Rhodesia, for instance. No connection at all. Me? Oh, I took a leave of absence from my regular job to head up Youth for Wallace. When the kids decided to turn it into a permanent organization, I volunteered to help out. I feel that supporting young people is a duty."

"Most of our members were in YAF," he said over a cup of coffee. "They got fed up with it. YAF isn't daring enough. How can a decent conservative stay with a group that supports a liberal like Richard Nixon? Our kids have intelligence. They don't rationalize. They aren't afraid to say that the races are different. Not that we're anti-Negro. Far from it. I like to think we're doing more than others to help the Negro. You remember that old phrase, 'the white man's burden'? They don't use it much anymore. That's how I feel toward Negroes. The white man was wrong--unkind--to send the Negro out into an advanced civilization he'll never be able to handle. Those with the capacity to lead should assume the obligations that capacity gives them." Clee leaned across the table and clutched the listener's forearm. "I want to tell you something. Our kids aren't fooling around. They're ready to fight to the death for the honor of their country and the integrity of a constitutional republic. Most people think the end of the Vietnam war will bring peace. Don't you believe it. The liberals want peace so they can intervene in the Middle East. On which side?" He winked and relaxed his grip. "Which side do you suppose? Not that I'm anti-Semitic. I don't have anything against loyal American Jews. We have no business in the Middle East, that's all. Besides, how would you get supplies to the troops? They can't even handle it properly in Vietnam. Now that the Russians control the Suez Canal, we'd really be in trouble."

The Anti-Defamation League provided this reporter with the names of several NYA student leaders but had no record of their current addresses and telephone numbers. Doug Clee said he couldn't supply them. A few days later, the reason became evident: All had split with their Liberty Lobby sponsors. The rupture began during an NYA regional leadership conference held at a motel near Pittsburgh. The national officers of the group, veterans of Youth for Wallace, walked into the meeting room and discovered it to be packed with members of the Francis Parker Yockey Movement, a notorious anti-Semitic organization. The movement is named for the author of Imperium, a racist tract once described as "slightly to the right of Mein Kampf."

"Drew Pearson ran an item on the conference, but he got things all mixed up," said one of the startled Wallacites. He was Dennis McMahon, a 19-year-old Fordham freshman. "He said the place was hung with Nazi banners. Oh, some of them wore jeweled swastika cuff links and the meeting began with everybody singing the Horst Wessel Song, but there weren't any banners. Anyway, we were already nervous about Willis Carto. He started a membership-drive contest with copies of Imperium as the prizes. We had trouble explaining that to the Jewish members." (Another witness to the meeting was less blasé: "Those guys scared the hell out of me. One of them was walking around with two loaded Lugers stuck in his belt. For God's sake, don't use my name!")

McMahon--plump, short, stolidly mannered--is the son of a post-office employee. He lives with his parents in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. He says that his family approves of his political activities: "They're really proud when I'm on TV or somebody quotes me in the newspapers. That's one of the reasons I didn't want to get branded as a leader of the U. S. Hitler Youth. Neither did the other fellows. I guess we were pretty dumb where Carto was concerned. When the Youth for Wallace movement was getting started, we were broke. Carto stepped in and lent us $40,000. After that, he tried to run everything. He must have been surprised when Pat Tifer turned on him. Pat was elected national chairman after we all pulled out to form our own National Youth Alliance. I don't know what will happen next. We've sent telegrams to J. Edgar Hoover and Representative Richard H. Ichord of the House Internal Security Committee, asking for an investigation of the whole thing. We haven't gotten any answers yet."

Without Carto's financial support, NYA quickly found itself $50,000 in debt. Tifer was forced to sell the title and whatever tangible assets the group had to 38-year-old Louis Byers, who had organized for Wallace in 1968 and was a former area coordinator for the John Birch Society. Byers told Washington Post reporter Paul Valentine that the Birchers expelled him because of his "publicly racist" views. Byers deposed Patrick Tifer, and Doug Clee left to work full time for the Liberty Lobby. In its present incarnation, the National Youth Alliance defines itself as a "fighting movement" whose purpose is to crush radical student and black-power movements and also to assert the positive value of "Western destiny." The image of Francis Parker Yockey is proudly displayed in NYA's office, and his testament, Imperium, is well boosted by NYA publications.

With the fringe right expending its energies in intramural wars, it's evident that--at least for the next academic year--Young Americans for Freedom will continue to dominate the conservative forces on campus. YAF's national chairman is Dave Keene, a 24-year-old law student at the University of Wisconsin.

Keene is, in some ways, typical of YAF members. Stocky and regular featured, he can discuss any phase of conservative politics with lucid, articulate precision. He is a native of Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, where his father runs a tavern. Both his parents are registered Democrats and former organizers for the United Auto-workers union.

"YAF has made mistakes," Keene said. "Big ones. In a way, we were responsible, partly, for the rise of the New Left. They really got their start with the civil rights movement in the early Sixties. The basis of conservatism--our kind, anyway--is the idea that the rights of the individual are paramount. Logically, we should have led the drive for Negro equality, not ignored the whole issue." Questioned about current YAF programs to advance racial justice, he hesitated for a moment. "Well," he said, finally, "we support Nixon's black-capitalism idea. In the long run, that will do more good than all the welfare programs put together."

Like many college conservatives, Keene feels that the furor over SDS and black power is diverting Americans from the country's real troubles. "Except for tactics, we aren't far removed from the SDS on some points," he said. "We're both reacting against the liberal establishment, the superstate. That's the enemy. We just fight it in different ways. We usually have the more libertarian viewpoint, in fact. The New Left wants to abolish the draft in order to stop the Army from killing Communists. If the Vietnam war was against fascists and the SDS was in power, they'd draft their own grandmothers. YAF is for an all-volunteer military under any circumstances. We think conscription is a form of legalized slavery, a violation of individual rights."

There is one subject on which virtually every male college student--radical, liberal, noncommitted or conservative--agrees. He doesn't want to go into the Army. Conservatives have a special difficulty in justifying their feelings, however. No other faction is also shouting for total victory in Vietnam. Attempts to resolve the contradiction are sometimes logically tortuous. "The draft is actually holding the Army back technologically," New Jersey's Ralph Fucetola has said. "Without a guaranteed pool of manpower to draw on, the Pentagon would develop machines to do most of the fighting." But hadn't critics of Vietnam strategy argued that the Army was already using too many machines for such limited, anti-guerrilla combat? Fucetola: "They aren't the right machines!"

Keene is admittedly envious of one aspect of the New Left: "They have a sense of political community we can't match. They act together. I guess it's natural for a conservative to be basically a loner. A lot of the leftists--and moderates, too--complain that they've lost their identity, become numbers in a bureaucratic machine that ignores their needs. I never felt that, even when I was a freshman. I knew who I was. What difference did it make if most of my instructors didn't know who I was? The SDS recruits lots of members because they offer a smaller world of shared values within the university, a kind of refuge. Frankly, we don't and maybe we can't. It just isn't in our natures."

Not all college conservatives are as detached and theoretical as Keene. That evening, several members of the Madison chapter gathered for conversation and beer at the Brathaus, a restaurant near the campus. Possibly because it was raining, their mood was listless. It picked up when the door burst open to reveal a tiny, pale youth, accompanied by an equally diminutive blonde with shy blue eyes and a wistful smile. Their clothes were soaked, their hair plastered damply to their skulls.

"We've been putting up posters for the meeting tomorrow night," the young man said, heading for the table. He removed a sample poster from a plastic-wrapped bundle under his left arm, which was in a plaster cast up to the elbow. "Pretty good, eh? Silk screen. Took me hours to design it. Irene and I have been putting them up since six this morning. Didn't even stop when it rained."

"The meeting's been canceled," said the chapter's information officer.

A reporter sitting at the table expected the student to explode with anger on hearing the news so belatedly. Instead, he shrugged, casually threw away the remaining posters and sat down. "I infiltrate," he volunteered. "Irene here helps me. We've infiltrated lots of things. You name it and I'll infiltrate it. That's my thing. Infiltration." He went on to unfold a wild saga of deception, betrayed trust and quasi burglary, mitigated by a lack of guilt so total that it was almost charming. Here at last was the real thing--a freewheeling, life-loving, kick-'em-in-the-balls, all-American zany. And he was only 19 years old.

"Fred Blair," the infiltrator said with a cheery, lopsided grin. "He's the head of the Communist Party in Wisconsin. Infiltrated his headquarters in Milwaukee this summer. Hung around for three weeks, stealing all kinds of papers. Turned 'em over to the FBI. Infiltrated the Young Socialist Alliance right afterward. I dated one of their leaders, got all kinds of valuable information." Irene's smile briefly disappeared. "Infiltrated the drug scene here at school. There's a hamburger joint down the street where all the real junkies hang out. Learned all about them, gave their names to the Madison police. Big bust. Last mayoral election, I was ward campaign manager for all three candidates. Really blasted the two I didn't like. Slapped their bumper stickers on the rear windows of cars, made telephone campaign pitches at one A.M., stuff like that."

He took a deep breath, downed half a stein of beer and held up his plaster cast for inspection. "Got this infiltrating the SDS. Went to one of their meetings a few weeks ago, started writing down the names of everybody there. Guy came over and said, 'You can't do that.' 'This is an open meeting on school property,' I said right back. 'Who's going to stop me?' Some son of a bitch turned out the lights. Crrack! They dislocated my thumb. Be in a cast for another three weeks. Chicago peace people had a big anti-Vietnam parade on Easter. Irene and I infiltrated the hell out of that one. Got there two days before the parade, went to the home of Mrs. Bit Lewis. Crazy name. She's a wheel in Women for Peace. Told her we were in town for the parade, had no money, no place to stay. She took us in for the night. Stole all her papers, turned them in to the Chicago police's Red squad."

Was Mrs. Bit Lewis a Red?

"Don't really know. Anyway, the Red squad took the stuff. Next night, we went to the house of Dr. Maxwell Primak, head of the Chicago Peace Council. Told him the same story and he took us in. Got away with the council's entire membership list. Really cut loose next day in the parade. They made us marshals, gave us official aprons and stuff. Every time we ran across somebody who looked like a sincere pacifist, we threw him out of the parade. Figure it must have created a lot of resentment. When I'm not infiltrating, I keep busy other ways. Like ripping down SDS and black-militant posters. You know, they actually staple those things to trees! Got a lot of fine old trees on this campus. Put enough staples in a tree and it'll die. I'm a conservationist as well as a conservative." His expression saddened. "I hardly ever have enough time to take out the staples after I rip down a poster. It's a shame."

Half an hour later, he and Irene left the Brathaus, with their joined hands swinging, the way Donald O'Connor and Janet Leigh used to do it in those old college musicals. One student stared after them, admiration in his eyes. "You know," he said, "if we had ten more like him, we'd really be in business."

If YAF has a true cultural hero at the moment, it is probably Phillip Abbott Luce. During the early Sixties, he was a leader of the Maoist-oriented Progressive Labor Party, editing their monthly magazine. In 1963 and 1964, the Government indicted him for leading illegal student trips to Cuba. He was acquitted both times. Born in Springfield, Ohio, he holds an M. A. in political science from Ohio State. Besides lecturing frequently on campuses, he writes a column for The New Guard, YAF's monthly publication, and is the co-author of The Intelligent Student's Guide to Survival, a witty manual on methods of coping with college rebellion. He had lived in La Jolla, California, but has moved recently to Washington, D. C., and is currently Director of College Services for YAF.

The highlight of YAF's Middle Atlantic regional conference was a cocktail party for Luce, held in New York's Commodore Hotel. It was sparsely attended, probably because of the ten-dollar admission price, too steep for most of the student delegates. The guest of honor arrived late, having been trapped for two hours in a holding pattern over Kennedy airport. Understandably, he headed straight for the liquor table, trailed by his lovely, olive-skinned wife.

Luce is a lean, slightly stoop-shouldered man with curly, long-sideburned, reddish-brown hair and eyes that manage to be simultaneously wary and probing, a tough combination. Several Scotch and sodas later, he discussed the reasons for his political about-face. "It wasn't the complicated, soul-searching business people imagine," he said. "I was just too damned young when I went into the P. L. P. I rose fast, because they didn't have anybody else in those days. It was their mistake to give me so much responsibility. Later, when I'd split, they accused me of being a bourgeois radical. I think they were right. I've always been a libertarian first. I got fed up with the P. L. P. when I realized it was becoming a totalitarian movement. In lots of ways, YAF isn't that much different from the New Left." (He had a point. At a conference business meeting that afternoon, Ralph Fucetola had introduced a resolution advocating the legalization of LSD and prostitution. It was tabled.)

The day before, club-swinging cops had temporarily put down the first New Left strike at Harvard. "They're doing the same dumb things all over again," Luce commented in disgust. "And now the politicians are cooking up bills to outlaw SDS. All cops and repressive laws do is radicalize more students. Out in California, older people actually get mad when YAF says the students themselves should stop the radicals, the way Harvey Hukari--he's the YAF chairman at Stanford--and his people recaptured a building from the SDS several months ago. Every time I'm on television, I get phone calls from middle-aged women who say: 'College students are too young to understand these matters. Leave it to the police.' Jesus! You know what conservatives in California are really uptight about? Sex education! They're crazy mad to stamp out sex education. I told one guy: 'Buddy, soon you will be able to stop worrying about sex education. All the schools will be burned down.'"

Campus conservatives aren't nearly as respectful of their elders as most people believe. Stanford's Harvey Hukari, Jr., is a case in point. Physically, he looks farther left than Mark Rudd--shoulder-length hair, Mao jacket, cord bell-bottoms, etc. "It makes me a little more difficult for the SDS to attack," he said, going on to rap Max Rafferty, California's state superintendent of education, an idol of the Old Right: "I don't object to Rafferty politically. I object to him aesthetically. All that flag waving. Rafferty and Joe Pyne [a West Coast TV and radio personality] are examples of people we don't need. What we do need are people with style and wit, people who are hip to the media. Like Jerry Rubin."

Later in the evening, Phil Luce grew more somber. "You know what I'm afraid of?" he said. "Becoming a professional ex-Communist. They won't admit it, but lots of New Leftists go into a slump when they're out of school. There isn't any adult apparatus, like the old-style Communist Party, to keep, their interest up. A while back, I had a public debate with Bettina Aptheker. You remember--she was the queen of the Progressive Labor Party a few years ago. I could see she just wasn't having fun anymore, standing there spouting the same old crap. She has a husband and a baby now. You settle down when you have a baby. I hardly had the heart to attack her."

Luce's own noticeably pregnant wife wandered over. They were married after meeting at a YAF convention. "Tell him about your mother," she teased. When Luce winced in embarrassment, she went on: "His mother made him get a haircut when she and my father-in-law came out to visit last month. It was right down to his coat collar. She came in and said, 'Phil, you head straight to the barbershop this minute.'"

"I hadn't seen my father in eight years," Luce cut in. "He owns a drugstore in Illinois. We had a fight when I joined P. L. P. Now we're reconciled."

Barbara Luce smiled her approval. "We're thinking of moving to Mexico. Phil wants to do some real writing. Non-political. Besides, I'm awfully nervous in La Jolla. The radicals are carrying guns out there now and they all hate Phil. They follow me around when I research his articles at the University of California in San Diego. He keeps changing his appearance--different hair styles, a beard sometimes--to fool them. I'd really be less nervous in Mexico."

Luce's account of his difficulties with older West Coast conservatives hinted at YAF's greatest source of frustration. In the words of political historian George Penty; "No creature on the globe has more contempt for the young than the successful American businessman." For all the bumper stickers and posters and buttons, YAF remains virtually unknown outside the colleges. Part of the resulting pain is financial. The organization, according to its leaders, has more trouble raising money than does SDS. At times, YAF members almost seem to envy the fear and confusion generated in the adult community by the New Left, since fear and confusion at least indicate a perverse kind of respect. "I've had dozens of debates with leftists like Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis and Paul Krassner," Dave Keene said resentfully. "A lot of the programs were set up by business and professional groups. You can imagine how I felt when I learned most of them were paying the radicals $1000 to appear and I was getting only $250. I turn the fees over to charity, anyway, but it still burned me up. Now I insist on the same amount the left receives."

The problem was visible on another level during the Edwardsville conference. The restaurant and cocktail lounge at the Holiday Inn became saturated with hostility whenever a large number of YAF delegates appeared. The older guests--middle-aged married couples, businessmen, prosperous-looking farmers--just didn't know who those chattering, pamphlet-waving kids were. And they suspected the worst. The reaction was almost epileptic in two burly, balding men who seemed to be semipermanent occupants of the bar. At the very sight of a Young Americans For Freedom badge, their faces knotted with anger. That the words young and freedom could be applied to an organization defending a great many things they held dear was clearly beyond their comprehension.

Their fears were confirmed when a dapper young Negro and a white reporter wearing YAF badges--required for admission to the formal sessions--sat down at the bar. Larry Sumner, 21, is an education major at Southern Illinois University. The son of a school custodian in nearby Cahokia, he was attending the conference to plug his candidacy for president of the university's Young Republicans. He did not belong to YAF. (The organization has a few black members, but none of them were on the campuses visited by the reporter.) "I just don't believe you can have real civil rights progress without order," Sumner said, after ordering a Coke. "That's why I supported Nixon. I think he'll fulfill his word to blacks. No one expects much from him. A man in that position can accomplish more than someone who's promised people the impossible."

Asked if he had considered joining YAF, Sumner frowned slightly. "I don't know," he began. "They have some good people, but----"

Before he could finish the remark, one of the staring businessmen left his companion at the other end of the bar, sat down next to Sumner and prodded the student's YAF badge with a heavy forefinger. "Do you mind very much if I ask you somethin'?" he said in the unctuously polite tone that often precedes a punch in the mouth. "What is this outfit, anyway? You gonna tell me?"

"Glad to," Sumner said. "The Young Americans for Freedom is an organization of college students dedicated to advancing the cause of civil libertarianism and reducing--or, preferably, eliminating--the power of the state to control the national economy."

The man squinted. It sounded like communism to him. Then he nodded curtly and returned to his friend. The stage whispers began immediately: "Goddamned radicals coming in where they're not wanted. ... This black-power shit has gone too far. ... Ought to round up the whole lousy bunch and----"

Besides hinting at one reason for Larry Sumner's not having joined the Young Americans for Freedom, the incident illustrated anew the paradox that dogs every campus conservative. He is just as alienated from mainstream U. S. culture as the sandal-wearing, bearded leftist he derides. YAF leaders repeatedly emphasize that they share enemies with the New Left. Five years ago, most right-wingers would have been keelhauled before making such an admission. But it is now literally true--although the character of the enemy exists mainly in the eye of the beholder. To Tom Hayden and Eldridge Cleaver, university administrations and the Federal Government are dominated by bland, hypocritical front men for capitalist imperialism, veiled racial hate and a fascist military. To Dave Keene and Phil Luce, the same establishment figures are whining liberals out to crush individual initiative and, perhaps unintentionally, lay the groundwork for a Communist take-over. Both factions agree that symptoms of disease exist, disagree on the nature of the malady--but are often curiously close when proposing a cure. The unlimited personal "libertarianism" of the farthest-out YAF cliques would create a society virtually identical to that envisioned by the New Left's dreamier anarchists. Behind both philosophies lies a profound--if confused and semiarticulate--distrust of every phase of economic, social and political life in America. In short, the center had better watch the hell out.