[1] Carl graduated from Revere High School in suburban Akron, winning a prize in his final year for a speech in favor of America's Cold War stance.

After three years at Kent State, Oglesby dropped out and moved to the Bohemian neighborhood of Greenwich Village to pursue a New York stage career as an actor and playwright.

Influenced by Britain's "angry young men" literary movement, he wrote three plays, including "a well-received work on the Hatfield-McCoy feud",[1] as well as an unfinished novel.

In 1958, Oglesby and his young family moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan after he obtained a technical writing position at Bendix Corporation, a defense contractor.

He ascended to the directorship of the company's technical writing division while also completing his undergraduate degree as a part-time student at the University of Michigan (where he cultivated friends such as Donald Hall and Frithjof Bergmann) in 1962.

[6] In his 2008 autobiography Ravens in the Storm, Oglesby chronicles a fateful day in late 1963 when he was working at his desk at Bendix Corporation, and a co-worker told him the news from Dallas that President Kennedy had been shot.

He had recently written an article, printed in the University of Michigan campus magazine, which was critical of American foreign policy in the Far East.

One of his early projects was to form a "grass-roots theatre", but that effort was superseded by SDS opposition to the growing U.S. combat involvement in the Vietnam War.

Despite the notable age gap between the 30-year-old Oglesby and the college-aged undergraduates who comprised most of the membership, he was elected national SDS president within a year.

He helped organize a University of Michigan "teach-in", the first of its kind, in which faculty engaged in a work stoppage to protest the "moral, political, and military consequences" of the Vietnam War.

"[1] In 1967, he co-authored with Richard Shaull the book Containment and Change, which argued for an alliance between the New Left and the libertarian, non-interventionist Old Right in opposing an imperialist U.S. foreign policy.

It occurred during a rehearsal of the "Let Us Shape the Future" speech when Oglesby "used the word 'coordinates' to describe issues on which he believed the Left and the Right shared common ground.

"[22] Also in 1968, he was asked by Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver to serve as his running mate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket in that year's presidential election (Oglesby declined the offer).

Later in that year, Oglesby was forced out of SDS when the organization's left-wing members accused him of "being 'trapped in our early, bourgeois stage' and for not progressing into 'a Marxist–Leninist perspective.

It was later reviewed unfavorably by Village Voice rock critic Robert Christgau who wrote: "In which the first president of SDS takes after Leonard Cohen, offering a clue as to why the framers of the Port Huron Statement didn't change the world in quite the way they envisioned.

[29] He said the JFK assassination, Watergate scandal, and downfall of President Nixon represented "the violent eruptions of a deeper struggle of rival power elites identified here as Yankees and Cowboys.

"[30] According to his argument, a post-World War II schism arose in the U.S. ruling class between (a) traditional Eastern conservative "Yankees" (bankers mostly)—exemplified by Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Kennedy, Clark Clifford, and Averill Harriman—and (b) hard-right Sun Belt "Cowboys" (oil and aerospace magnates)—exemplified by H. L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, Howard Hughes, Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, and Richard Nixon.

In summarizing the book, Kirkus Reviews depicted Oglesby as believing that JFK was killed by "a rightist conspiracy formed out of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, the Syndicate, and a Cowboy oligarchy, supported by renegade CIA and FBI agents.

"[32] During the 1970s and '80s, Oglesby befriended New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and contributed the Afterword, "Is the Mafia Theory a Valid Alternative?