Word: ferber
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Michael K. Ferber is a young foot soldier in the fight against the war in Vietnam. When the Justice Department last Friday indicted the generals--including Dr. Benjamin Spock and William Sloan Coffin Jr.--for conspiracy against the draft laws, it picked Ferber out of the ranks to join them. Despite the prospect of a five-year prison sentence for his October anti-draft sermon in Boston's Arlington Street Church, Ferber last night committed what the Attorney General might consider a similar "offense" in speaking at Harvard's anti-war, anti-draft Teach...
...press conference Saturday, Ferber said that the only appropriate response to the indictments is to redouble anti-draft activity across the country. In face of the indictment, he plans to continue "teaching, preaching, and speeching" against the draft--just as before. It's the kind of thing that people have come to expect from...
...Ferber once described himself as a "child of the New Left." If he is that, he is also a product of the government's treatment of dissenters characteristic of the post-McCarthy period. He once said that he imagined that the current crop of war resistors probably started out being "nice, sincere, honest, strictly legal, thoughtful guys who never dreamt of being radical or of taking a step that would put them in prison." He might as well have been describing himself...
...Ferber has all the superficial characteristics that most college students have come to associate with New Left people. In private conversation, he speaks softly, slowly, locking eyes with his listener. In public speeches, he's forceful, fiery, even dramatic. His conversation is sprinkled with phrases like "doing their own thing" and "friction in the machine"; he quotes Stokely Carmichael and Paul Goodman...
...resists the temptation to slip him into the New Left cubbyhole and looks beneath the superficialities of speech and manner, Ferber comes forth as a complex, contradictory blend of the pragmatist and idealist, religionist and radical idealogue. His belief in non-violence is firm. His sense of perspective and grasp of social realities make him an exceptional even atypical, member of the New Left. If the government jails him, he just may have the entire prison organized before he leaves...