Evening With a Rabble-Rouser

At one end of the hall, arranged to suggest the mouth of a cave, was a picture of an American Indian illumined by a spotlight. Moving in and out of the narrow beam of light, orating and gesticulating, was a plausible young man who calls himself Gordon D. Hall. In the obscurity of the cave sat an audience of university students, most of them staring at the speaker with fanatical attention.

We were in the YMCA adjacent to the campus of the University of Illinois. And it was Hall’s second appearance on that campus. He was giving substantially the same speech that he had given last February, a speech contrived to defame directly or by implication every conservative organization and publication in the United States.

TC

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Thomas Burke Carson

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William F. Buckley Jr.

At one end of the hall, arranged to suggest the mouth of a cave, was a picture of an American Indian illumined by a spotlight. Moving in and out of the narrow beam of light, orating and gesticulating, was a plausible young man who calls himself Gordon D. Hall. In the obscurity of the cave sat an audience of university students, most of them staring at the speaker with fanatical attention.

We were in the YMCA adjacent to the campus of the University of Illinois. And it was Hall’s second appearance on that campus. He was giving substantially the same speech that he had given last February, a speech contrived to defame directly or by implication every conservative organization and publication in the United States.