Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Anti-War Movement, by Carl Oglesby; Scribner; 2008.

OK, I’m a sucker for the 1960s, those halcyon hippie days of political foment, social struggle, free love and good music. I missed them, mostly, being just a kid at the time, though I did my best during late adolescence and early adulthood to live them, at least the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll part.

So, when presented with an opportunity to review a book by one of the major players during some of the most turbulent days of the ’60s, I jumped at the chance. I’m glad I did.

“Ravens in the Storm” is at once an elegiac memoir, a chronicle of the inside workings of the antiwar movement and an apologia. There is a wistfulness about it, a sense of opportunities squandered and chances missed, but also a triumphant air that Carl Oglesby and his cohorts in the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS movement, had actually, in the final analysis, accomplished something not achieved before or since. They made a difference at a critical time in our nation’s history that has eerily familiar parallels to today, as we live through another illegal, ill-advised and unwinnable war.

The similarities to the 1960s Vietnam War era and the current fiasco in Iraq are an undercurrent in “Ravens.” Oglesby never mentions our current conflict, leaving it to the reader to draw the unmistakable conclusions: a nation of sleepwalkers trusting in a corrupt government, a president with an unclear mission and a blank check, and a compliant Congress that failed to fulfill its constitutional responsibility to reign in an out-of-control administration.

Oglesby’s 1960s featured a government that lied to and spied on its citizens, a corrupt, profit-driven military-industrial complex; a country bent on nation-building in a faraway place of which we had and have little cultural or historical understanding, and little sympathy for the millions of lives destroyed in a horrific and pointless war. Sound familiar?

The difference is for Vietnam they had Carl Oglesby and the SDS, and the best we could manage for Iraq was Cindy Sheehan.

The book traces Oglesby’s unlikely and meteoric rise from middle-class homeowner with a wife and two kids living in the suburbs working within the military-industrial complex at Bendix Corp. — with top-secret security clearance — to the world stage as president of the radical student group SDS. Like Woody Allen’s Zelig, Oglesby seems to have been at every major event of his time and met most of the movers and shakers of his day.

“Ravens” is well-written, mainly because Oglesby was a trained writer and editor at Bendix who also is a playwright, poet, songwriter and pretty good raconteur. He’s got five other books to his credit, including two on the JFK assassination.

Here’s a sample from the book, and you tell me whether it sounds like a description of where we are today:

Our national debt was up, our taxes were up, our inner cities were up in flames, our war strategists were up a tree, our kids were up to their necks in killing and getting killed in a lost cause, our North Atlantic allies were almost up in arms against us. The war had to come to an end. Johnson had to go.

Replace “Johnson” with “Bush” and you’re here now, in 2008, in Iraq, not in 1968, in Vietnam.

It is the parallels with today that give “Ravens” its immediacy, its importance as a book that should be read by anyone who wants to understand how America could get itself into the kind of intractable predicament we currently are in.

But it is Oglesby’s unique place in modern history that lends the book a certain gravitas. As president of SDS Oglesby turned the organization — which at its height counted 317 chapters and 100,000 members — toward protesting the Vietnam War and away from its grass-roots community organizing mission.

He participated in a tribunal organized by philosopher Bertrand Russell and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, he was at the 1968 riots at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, he was asked by Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver to be Cleaver’s vice-presidential running mate in the 1968 elections, he went to Cuba and organized a program wherein Americans went to the island nation — illegally — to help with the sugar harvest.

But his turning of SDS into a radical antiwar organization also led to the government’s illegal and violent crackdown on the entire antiwar movement, to the formation of the radical Weatherman movement and, ultimately, to the downfall of SDS at the hands of the government and its own internal entropy.

Oglesby sacrificed much for his involvement with the cause: he lost his family, was star-chambered by SDS and forced to resign from numerous jobs because of his association with the antiwar movement and his principles.

But he always (at least as he tells it) cleaved to those principles, even when it cost him dearly. He consistently promulgated a moderate liberal agenda that counseled inclusion and a willingness to promote dialog over diatribe, understanding over insurrection and engagement over violence.

The book would have been stronger with a section of photographs from the era, which would have put faces to names and places. It would have benefited by a more talented proofreader, but these are small criticisms that only in minor ways detract from its power and impact.

It is a thoughtful, reflective and insightful book. “Ravens in the Storm” should be required reading for anyone who wants to try to understand some of the most turbulent and, finally, most interesting times of the 20th century.