Aaron Sorkin Bungles the Sixties « Student Activism

Aaron Sorkin Bungles the Sixties « Student Activism:

Aaron Sorkin Bungles the Sixties

by Angus Johnston

Last Sunday on The Newsroom Aaron Sorkin’s anchor-hero Will McAvoy offered up a whirlwind tour of the history of Students for Democratic Society, the Yippies, and the Vietnam antiwar movement that managed to get pretty much everything completely wrong in the service of an analogy that made no sense. Here’s my take, because when else am I going to get a chance like this?

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“Back in 1968 when Rennie Davis and Hayden and their guys organized the SDS,

SDS was put together in 1960, not 1968. Its organizational roots stretch back as far as 1905. And although Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden would both become important figures in the group in the early sixties and after, neither participated in its founding meetings.

 it was specifically to end the Vietnam war

Nope. SDS was a broad-based, multi-issue organization from the beginning. It addressed itself to concerns