In June of 1971, I was once more out of a job. My courses at UMBC, including revolutionary literature, received positive student reviews. Mostly with Florence Howe, I continued to publish extensively, including The Conspiracy of the Young in 1970 and articles in the New York Review of Books. I’d become something of an authority on community control of schools. Good enough credentials for tenure, I thought, especially at a new and not very well-developed college. But the dean didn’t want someone who conspired with students to oppose the war, or some man who agitated for women’s studies. So I was gone at the end of my two-year contract.

But once again, opportunity emerged from adversity. Florence, who had been elected MLA second vice president and chaired its active Commission on the Status of Women, had become a hot professional commodity. She opted for a new tenured job at the SUNY College at Old Westbury on Long Island in New York, and so I decided to follow whence I’d come—back to the city. I began to look around for employment. One of my movement friends proposed that I should take the reins of the United States Servicemen’s Fund (USSF), an organization that supported coffeehouses near military bases, underground GI antiwar newspapers, and other forms of edgy entertainment for guys in the service.

A dubious marriage I thought. I had been 4-F (unfit for military service) and viewed military service through the anxious lens provided by Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity. Neither my father, either of my grandfathers, nor anyone else in my immediate family had, so far as I knew, served in any army—not the tsar’s, the emperor’s, or the president’s. It was almost a tradition. Moreover, I shared something of the mainstream peace movement’s gut-level but dumb antagonism to soldiers—why hadn’t they beaten the draft? Then again, I had some experience raising money for antiwar projects, which the position required. And I was deeply committed to ending the war. So I became “national director” of the USSF.