[citation needed] By late 1966 Gold had rejected many Old Left cultural and lifestyle values which he had come to regard as too "bourgeois", but he considered himself a Marxist and a communist who sought to establish "decentralized socialism" in the United States.
He became the most politically influential leader of Columbia SDS's New Left "Praxis Axis" faction, which emphasized education, rather than confrontational direct action, as its primary campus organizing strategy.
The major point of debate was whether Columbia SDS would gain more politically and win more mass support by stopping campus Marine recruitment and possibly fighting it out with other students, the right-wing protectors of the U.S. Marines, or by having a more mass-based, non-violent anti-war demonstration directed at protesting the policies of its main political enemy, the Columbia Administration.
Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) aide, James Bevel, would be invited to address the campus rally.
Yesterday, President Kirk provided the University's facilities for the U.S. Marine Corps for this purpose, in this case overriding the objections of student officials.
The Marines were granted space for recruiting in Butler Library, even though the Columbia University Student Council was denied the use of that very spot for the draft referendum.
Since President Kirk ignored representative student institutions in favor of the Marines, it is clear that the Administration enforces even its own rules only when it sees fit.
It is clear that The Columbia Chapter of Students for a Democratic Society believes that every faculty member should be aware of the issues involved in yesterday's demonstration.
If you agree with us that the military has no place on our campus, we ask you to join us at our sundial rally at noon today, and our subsequent peaceful picketing of the Marines, to demonstrate this belief to the Administration and to demand an end to Columbia's complicity with this war.
Because Gold, like many associated with the New Left, was smoking cannabis on a regular basis by this time, people thought it was funny to start calling him by that nickname.
At the end of the Spring 1967 term, Gold decided he wanted to move out of his eighth floor Furnald Hall dormitory room and into an off-campus apartment during his senior year.
After visiting Berkeley, California, and the West Coast in early June 1967, Gold returned to his Furnald Hall room by July 1967 and, for the second year in a row, worked as a summer group counselor of inner city high school students in Columbia University's "Double Discovery" tutoring program.
There was also much theoretical discussion at these informal summer meetings about New Left political strategy and Columbia SDS chapter internal organization and education.
Each felt that in the 67-68 academic year a special effort should be made to involve rank-and-file members in smaller groups to maximize their participation in Columbia SDS chapter activity.
In July 1967, Gold had also become romantically involved with a recent Barnard College graduate named Trude Bennett, who was also working during the summer as a "Double Discovery" project counselor.
By the beginning of August 1967, Gold felt that the African-American ghetto rebellions of that summer meant that the mass of African-American people had outgrown Martin Luther King Jr.'s pacifist political line and the original nonviolent stance of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and were moving more in the direction that Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and the SNCC had predicted people would move.
On WKCR, the Columbia student radio station, Gold also was invited to do a 15-minute political commentary show each week during the summer of 1967, in which he explained why he felt the black urban rebellions were justified.
In explaining why he decided to participate in the October 21, 1967, non-violent mass sit-in at the Pentagon, Gold observed a few days later: "Sometimes spontaneous events happen that you have to take part in, even if it doesn't fit directly into a local organizing strategy.
"[citation needed] The following month, Gold and Columbia SDS activist Mark Rudd were arrested in midtown Manhattan on November 14, 1967, for chanting through a bullhorn and encouraging anti-war demonstrators to go "block the limousines" in the streets and "block the rush-hour" traffic near the Hilton Hotel to protest the presence of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk at a Foreign Policy Association gathering that was being held at the hotel.
[citation needed] In his 2010 book, Mohamed's Ghosts, journalist Stephan Salisbury observed: "The FBI began gathering information on" Gold "in earnest in 1967."
Gold's FBI files, according to Salisbury, "stacked on a table, stand at least a foot high;" and they are "full of descriptions of meetings, speeches, names of friends, telephone numbers, organizations--all meticulously detailed by Bureau agents, informers, and memos derived from electronic surveillance.
[4] Gold had become more militant after a visit to Cuba, during which he and some other U.S. anti-war activists met with representatives of the Vietnamese people[13] who were also opposed to continued U.S. military intervention in Indochina.
Braudy's book also revealed that "in front of the burning house, an FBI agent who had been part of the surveillance team keeping watch on the young radicals quickly snapped pictures of the house's crumbling brick Greek-revival façade" and "since the buildings on the block were of significant design interest, [the FBI agent] had been posing as an architectural historian".