The disparate social forces frozen in the Johnsonian consensus are marked with fine crack-lines like old pots. This was the case also among American Negroes at the moment before the Birmingham battles, after which the earth yawned. It is the case among the students now, and everyone knows it today only because of Berkeley. Like everyone else in Berkeley who has written about these events, I have taken sides. We were all involved.
Objectivity is another matter.
What I did commit myself to, actively, was defense of the Free Speech Movement before the university community, both at FSM rallies and at other meetings on and around the campus. Factual accuracy is still another matter. Virtually all accounts of the Berkeley movement that I have seen, on all sides, are peppered with errors of fact, often quite untendentious. More than once, in checking points of detail with people who were on the spot, I was able to confirm the famous lawyers', historians' and psychologists' principle that few people remember accurately what happens before their very eyes. I owe a debt of gratitude for scores of changes and modifications, especially but not only on the factual side.