The banner headline on the front page of the Great Neck Record exactly 30 years ago - Thursday, May 2, 1968 - was about a Vietnam war protest organized by Great Neck Students for Peace in Vietnam (SPV). The headline read: "Student Strike Seen Success: No General Amnesty." At the time, I was co-chairman of SPV.

The Academic Strike was coordinated nationally, the event in Great Neck on Friday, April 26, 1968 was one of hundreds staged simultaneously in high schools and college campuses across the country. The following day, April 27, 1968, there were massive peace demonstrations in New York and San Francisco.

The Academic Strike in Great Neck did not mean a day off for students. Instead, we set up a "Peace School," with speakers and seminars on a variety of peace-related topics. Our original plan, announced in the Great Neck Record the previous month, was to hold the Peace School at the then-North Shore Community Arts Center on Middle Neck Road with an expected 500 students in attendance. However, when it became clear that close to triple that number of students would attend (thereby virtually shutting down both North and South high schools), we had to look for a larger facility. In the end, we make use of the facilities of Temple Israel.

Boys had to wear jackets and ties to the peace school, girls had to wear skirts or dresses. This occurred about a year after students had agitated successfully for the elimination of most of the previous dress code in Great Neck's two high schools. In discussing the dress requirement for the Peace School, our publicity flier said, "We are going to be discounted for many things...At least we don't have to give (people) additional things to discount us for."

The academic strike, of course, involved a mild form of civil disobedience, and our publicity flier discussed the difference between an illegal absence (one for a purpose not sanctioned by the state) and a truancy (an illegal absence without parental knowledge). In our publicity materials we urged participating students to let their parents know of their plans for the day: "This does not necessarily mean that they must approve: it means that they should know."

Was the academic strike successful? The answer depends on how you define "successful."

I was quoted in the Record's article on the strike as saying, "The purpose of the academic strike is basically to protest against the war and to call attention to our protest to make the community at large aware of this dissent." By this standard the strike was an overwhelming success. Together with SPV's demonstration on the Village Green on Memorial Day in 1967, when our application to participate in the Memorial Day Parade was turned down by the American Legion, and our participation in the Memorial Day Parade, the following year, the Peace School was probably the most widely publicized and discussed peace event ever to occur in Great Neck.

In addition, I think that the Academic Strike - and other peace actions at the time - were successful in a wider sense. There can be little doubt that the successive moves toward peace undertaken by Presidents Johnson (such as entering into the Paris negotiations in 1968) and Nixon (such as signing the Paris Agreement in 1973 and later, ending the draft) were actions forced upon these essentially bellicose leaders by the strength of the domestic peace movement.

Moreover, I think the actions of the peace movement three decades ago helped to change the entire tone of discourse in this country on war and peace issues. In February of this year, when President Clinton was gearing up for war with Iraq and the American people were being told that Saddam Hussein is the new bogey-man (just as Ho Chi Minh was in an earlier era), the administration staged what was to be a massive pro-war rally, before a carefully screened audience, in Columbus, Ohio. The results, broadcast live around the world on CNN, were a shock to everyone: the administration was greeted with vociferous anti-war protests and the administration's spokespeople, including three cabinet members, were seen to be unable to articulate a coherent story as to why we needed to go to war in the Persian Gulf. At the 11th hour, war was averted.

Those peace demonstrators in Columbus in 1998 were the direct political descendants of the peace demonstrators on the 1960s. Thirty years ago, with events like the Academic Strike, we changed the framework for discourse in the United States; never again would an American president be able to lead us to war and assume that he would be safe from domestic protest.

Looking back from the vantage point of 30 years later, I am delighted with what we accomplished with the Academic Strike in Great Neck in April, 1968.

Jerry Elmer graduated from South High School in June, 1969. The following year, he took part in the public, nonviolent destruction of draft files in Providence, Rhode Island, for which he was arrested and prosecuted. On the 20th anniversary of the draft board raid he graduated from Harvard Law School and was sworn in as a member of the federal bar in the same courtroom where he had been convicted two decades earlier.