Jon Knowles' Contribution on
the 65th Anniversary of our Class
I received the 65th Anniversary Report ‘red book’ and read it cover to cover. It made for very reflective, sober and appreciative reading – about life and of classmates sharing their stories of their lives.
I haven’t submitted a report before but have decided to now. Why now? Late - yes, very. What can I say? Better late than never.
There are several reasons I haven’t submitted a report nor attended a reunion. First, I didn’t choose an expected “Harvard path” -- doctor, lawyer, professor, scientist, economist, government official -- as so many classmates have. Indeed, I didn’t choose a career at all. Second, Harvard was a liberal bastion and in the 60’s I became a radical, a red. Not the best fit for a Harvard reunion in those times and, to be candid, the liberal establishment was not perceived as allies at that time by those of us on the extreme Left. Also, my friendships with Eliot House classmates did not continue after graduation. As life went on, I did connect with high school classmates on the West Coast, but rarely with college friends.
However, that said, if a reunion had taken place in California, I would likely have made it (I’m in the SF Bay Area). I seldom got back to Boston, although I grew up there (Gardner, Weston, Malden, Norwood). Practically the day we graduated I flew to the West Coast and it’s been my home since.
At one point I did continue on a Harvard path – got an M.A. in English Language and Literature, UC Berkeley, 1966. Then I taught at San Diego State College for a year, but that was it. I quit, travelled to Mexico, stayed several months studying Spanish, then returned to California. No more academia.
Before all that: JFK drafted me in 1961 and I spent a year and a half in Germany in a missile battalion in the 7th US Army. After discharge, I took a boat to Israel and worked on a socialist kibbutz (Mishmar Ha’emeq). There I experienced the surprising realization that working for money was wrong. There was no money on the kibbutz. It was weird but felt right. Another surprise: there was a lot of anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union - the kibbutz had direct knowledge of it. After four months there, I returned to California and enrolled in the English Department at UC Berkeley. One day I happened to hear Mario Savio speaking, “got the news”, and became active in the Free Speech Movement. Professor Charles Muscatine lamented that we did not have the enthusiasm for Chaucer that we did for Free Speech. For me, it wasn’t even close. FSM was an exhilarating experience and the beginning of my political awakening. I ended up sentenced to 10 days in the Santa Rita jail for our sit-in, my only arrest in 30 years of political activity.
While studying for my M.A., I became involved in the anti-war movement in Berkeley. After getting the degree and teaching for a year at San Diego State College, I had had enough of life-at-one-remove - and the 60’s were in full swing. After returning from Mexico, I moved back to Berkeley and became a pot-smoking hippie. I met a Berkeley undergrad who was going to study abroad so I decided to join her. I ended up teaching ESL at New Asia College in Kowloon, Hong Kong for two years (very enjoyable years!)
Living abroad, in Germany, Israel, Mexico and Hong Kong gave me much-needed perspective on our country and what was going on in the world.
I returned to the Bay Area in 1971 and co-founded an anti-war center (“Liberation Hangar”) and a newspaper (“Travisty”) by and for GIs just outside Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California. Travis was the main gateway to transport draftees to face death in the jungles of Vietnam. By 1971 many soldiers were eager to get out and willing to organize against the war. They were even fragging their officers over there. I stayed active at the center till the war came to an end in 1974. By that time, I had become a Marxist, as my parents had been.
Background - in 1952 my mother had been called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and had lost her job as a librarian in Norwood, MA. Herbert Philbrick had fingered her as a red. She had been a secretary at the CPUSA-oriented Samuel Adams School in Boston. We moved to Pennsylvania where the Quakers/Friends hired her and came to her defense. They provided wonderful support. My parents had never talked about Marxism with me, and I was not political at the time, but seeing my mother, the very soul of integrity, attacked like that opened my eyes a bit and set my mind against McCarthyism.
In 1974 a “New Communist Movement” was emerging across the country, inspired by the “socialist camp” led by Russia and China. So, I joined Marxist study groups in the Bay Area and participated in trying to build a revolutionary party. In a striking display of American individualism, seven small Marxist groups persuaded themselves that each alone was the repository of socialist wisdom and each went ahead to form their own communist party. My friends and I did not agree and did not join any of the sectarian sand-box parties. We merged with other circles and formed what we hoped would a revolutionary organization, but without pretense of being “the party”. In retrospect the majority in the NCM were ultra-Left, which we were against, but we all mistook the potential for Marxism-Leninism in the United States. We were ultra-Left too. Meanwhile the so-called conservative forces were able to build a base in small towns and cities all across the country - the Democratic Party didn’t do that, and we didn’t either.
I can thank Marxism for meeting my life-partner, a wonderful woman - in a San Francisco study group (and after a paranormal experience which I’ll omit here). To make a living, members of our group took service and educational jobs; I became a teacher of basic math and English and then a medical transcriptionist working at home. As the years went by, the NCM floundered, destroyed by the collapse of the “socialist camp” and the fact that we lived in “the belly of the beast.” About 35 years ago I decided to withdraw from the organization (which still exists - Liberation Road) since the prospects for the organization and for socialism were dim.
Family life took over - my wife and I have been together for 40 years now. Our son, my stepdaughter and four grandkids live within 5 miles of us in the East Bay. We are very fortunate to be in reasonable health and with my wife’s extensive family in NorCal.
Continuing on my non-career non-path, I discovered something called remote viewing. RV is a psychic craft that was developed and utilized by U.S. intelligence agencies and the Stanford Research Institute from 1975-1995. The public got wind of it in 1995 and it has been put to civilian uses since then (paid and pro bono client work - finding missing people, business and science issues, financials, sports markets, etc.). RV has been called a mental martial art. It definitely works, as evidenced by the fact that the government spent $20 million on it over a period of 20 years (the Star Gate project). However, while it’s real and has concrete uses, it’s not always accurate and few can perform it well enough to make a living. Which is why you’ve probably never heard of it.
I've been practicing RV these past 30 years and have written two books on the subject. Getting up into my 80s, I felt I needed to write one more book. It’s MarxPsi (a free pdf download from my portal) – a sourcebook which aims to bridge the gap between Marxists, who don’t think psi is real, and remote viewers, who have no use for Marxism.
When Trump was acquitted from his first impeachment trial, I figured I needed to get involved in politics again. This guy is the ultimate anti-Veritas - he made lying the default in public politics – quite a feat. Modern media is a scary thing, as is the country’s troubled history, and millions bought his act then and nine years later still do. As Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. put it, “When Barack Obama was elected President, a lot of white folks lost their minds.” Trump, a master deceiver, never let them get it back. It’s uncanny. The Democratic Party had ineffectual responses – we haven’t had a good President since FDR, in my opinion - liberals became marginalized, and the actual Left (the socialist left) had disappeared. Trump usurped the populist space which the Democratic Party had long ago vacated.
In 2020 I didn’t know which progressive national groups were active against Trumpism, so I started a Facebook group as a resource for others who were seeking such a group. I've continued to take part in electoral work since then, realizing that Voting Blue was the only way to prevent the return of Trump. For all its failures, the Democratic Party had become the bastion against the onslaught. At this point I consider myself a Left social Democrat, someone who could support Bernie Sanders.
It is truly amazing that this abominable man has been awarded a second term. The Democrats rolled over and didn't even contest the 2024 election - there are strong indications it was manipulated by Musk and his allies. Now (June 14, 2025) we face the prospect of Trump moving to full-blown fascism via the Insurrection Act of 1807. I am active in the resistance with Indivisible and we can only hope that Americans by the millions wake up and get involved.
Summing up - As someone wrote in the Report, I don't know if I could even get into Harvard today! When I arrived at Mower B32 in the Yard, I thought I was pretty smart, but I soon realized I was not. Calculus can do that to you. After graduation I could have continued an academic path after my M.A., but I chose not to go for a Ph.D., and I don’t regret it. I feel very fortunate. I’ve led a varied, full and satisfying life with my wife, children, family and friends at its core. I’ve taken part in movements and endeavors that I felt were important, whether successful (and some were) or not. Life has worked out quite well – I wish the same could be said for the country. But, regrettably, our generation was not able to reverse the strong right-ward movement of the country following the Vietnam War. The prospects for our children and grandchildren are dire.
To conclude on a speculative note, I've been reading about AI, quantum physics, quantum computers, nanotech, robotics, computer-brain interfaces, UFOs and consciousness, amid the severe dangers of overpopulation, climate change, and the renewed prospect of nuclear warfare. Astronomers tell us that there are at least a trillion galaxies in the universe, and each galaxy has billions of planets. Could it be that millions of civilizations have faced the confluence of game-changing developments that we do, when advanced technology and planetary crisis manifest at about the same time, creating an existential tipping point – leading to survival or obliteration. And if so, will our civilization survive?
On a local but in-our-face scale, will the country even survive as a place we and our offspring want to live in? President Garber and the Harvard community standing up against Trumpism was bold and brave. Let’s hope enough of us follow that lead and we take this menace down.
Portal https://www.jonknowles8.com/
2024+ Progressive Organizing: groups/187507739
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Email: jonknowles8@yahoo.com
Address: 5121 Ygnacio Avenue; Oakland, CA 94601