Published: The Stanford Daily, Volume 161A, Issue 3, 27 June 1972.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Venceremos and the Revolutionary Union, two Bay Area Maoist groups, are a potential threat to national security, the House Committee on Internal Security said yesterday.
The HCIS, issuing a formal report after more than a year of investigation, said that the two groups were the strongest revolutionary organizations in the country.
Both have been active in and around the Stanford campus, with Venceremos playing a particularly active role in campus politics. A number of students, staff, and faculty are members of the latter organization, which grew to its present strength after a large faction split from the Revolutionary Union (RU) in late 1970.
While there are no known RU members on the Stanford campus right now, a number of Stanford graduates are active in both groups.
The report includes a list of several revolutionaries the HCIS claimed were leaders of the two groups, including:
–recently dismissed English Prof. Bruce Franklin, who San Francisco Examiner police reporter Ed Montgomery said, in a story last night, “was the principal overseer in the acquisition and stockpiling of weapons”;
–former Stanford worker Aaron Mangianello, active in this area for a number of years, whom the HCIS called “an advocate of violence”;
–former hospital worker John Dolly, now in jail for obstructing a Sheriff’s Deputy on campus in February, who was fired by the hospital last Friday;
–former student Barry Greenberg, who edited the Stanford Daily in fall and winter quarters of 1960-1961, and his wife Mary Lou, termed “extremely radical and militant” by the committee. Montgomery claimed Barry Greenburg was “the only known paid official” of the RU.
–Miriam Cherry, once involved with the Roman Catholic community at Stanford, who split first with RU and then with Venceremos. She now is a member of the Intercommunal Survival Committee of the Black Panther Party.
The report also said the two groups contain “secret apparatus” for “assassinations, robberies, and sabotage,” according to Montgomery.
“I don’t want to play the game of saying ’no, we don’t do that’,” Mangianello, chairman of the Venceremos Central Committee, told the Daily last night. “We admit there is secret apparatus as necessary. If they have any evidence, let them show it.”
Mangianello said the report would mean “more police harassment and more people losing their jobs like Bruce [Franklin] but I think we’re strong enough to weather that.”
He said he hadn’t seen a copy of the HCIS report, but that “The thing that really pissed me off [in the Montgomery story] was that the pigs think the same thing a lot of revolutionaries do, thinking that the organization started when Bruce joined.”
[Montgomery’s story claimed Franklin founded the organization and said he was still the “principle organizer.”]
“Everybody thinks that because you’re white and a professor all these niggers and spics are going to follow you,” Mangianello said.
He also said while John Dolly has “done good work” for the group, he was not an upper-echelon decision-maker, as the HCIS reported.
Much of the report was based on the testimony of FBI agents Lawrence Goff and his wife, who Montgomery claimed infiltrated both groups. But Mangianello said that was incorrect.
“They were never in Venceremos,” he insisted. “They were people in San Jose in and around the movement. Of course, you’ll have to ask RU about involvement with them.
“I think that history shows that any organization that reaches a certain level of really serving the people gets smashed by the state,” Mangianello said, explaining why the report was issued. “It’s a yardstick in measuring the success of serving the people. We’re an enemy of the state.”
But he added that “I would say that the oppressed masses are more dangerous than any revolutionary organizations.”