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As a teenager, Marshall recalls, he was taken by his father, a liberal intellectual, to see Martin Luther King's 1963 march on Washington. The experience propelled himwith his parents' encouragementinto the civil rights movement, and then a gradual evolution into antiwar radicalism. By 1968, Marshall was one of the most experienced student organizers in the U.S. The next year, after graduating from Cornell University, he was paid $20 a week by S.D.S. to organize radical antiwar movements on campuses up and down the East Coast. "I was told they had 10,000 pages on me at the FBI," he says now, no doubt hyperbolically, but with a certain tinge of pride. "My career ten years ago was the perfect case of the outside agitator." In December 1969, no longer with S.D.S., he and three fellow Cornell radicals headed for Seattle, apparently drawn by the sheer glamour of the wild West. "We were East Coast boys who related very heavily to cowboys," says he. "We all had long earrings, long hair, and boots."
Marshall and his hard-drinking, smash-the-state buddies then plunged into a peculiarly American form of modern revolutionism for several months. By day, they harangued students at Seattle's high school and college campuses on the war, racism and capitalism. By night they caroused into the early hours in a blurry continuum of beer, pot, sex and leftist war cries. But the frenetic "mobilizing" and hedonism was itself a clue to Marshall's own eventual disillusionment with radicalism. He had broken with S.D.S. in 1969 when it was taken over by the hate-filled and paranoid Weatherman. He says now, "The cultural thing really freaked me: destroy the family, destroy monogamy. They wanted to destroy the specialness of all personal relationships. I knew Mark [Rudd] and Bernardine [Dohrn]. I saw them go over the edge."
But the headlong revolutionary plunge could hardly last. In February 1970 Marshall and others helped organize a downtown Seattle demonstration to protest the verdicts of the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial. By December, after a monthlong trial in which he and six others (the eighth alleged plotter went underground) were unsuccessfully prosecuted for conspiracy to damage the Seattle Federal Building, he was in jail for contempt of court. All seven would have been freed had they not provoked the elderly judge with catcalls during the proceedings. At one point, two of them presented him with a Nazi flag.
Marshall backpedals hard from all this today. "I did read Marx, but I was never really anti-American," he says, a trifle defensively. "I never thought America was fascist." He explains: "I think a lot of it was puberty. It was so exciting." If so, intense study in jail helped bring on Mar shall's capitalist manhood. He and his wife Dianne, 32, own a pleasant houseboat and mooring space on Seattle's Portage Bay. "Liberal economics just doesn't work," he now says firmly. "It did for a time, but not any more. Self-reliance, productivity and independence are important. We used to assume that the wealth of some inevitably led to the poverty of others. But business interests me. Even profit doesn't bother me as much as it did."