When at the University of Texas at Arlington, I got involved in debates over the direction of our national  government on the run up to the 1968 general election, which featured Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, and George Wallace.

My oratory caught the attention of the administration and I was appointed to a vacant seat on the Student Council and invited to join the UTA debate team.

My first act as a member of the Student Council was to lobby for approval of on-campus sales of the SDS’ decidedly left-wing newspaper – The Rag – the then current issue of which had on its front page a photo of two lions copulating.

Approval of the petition was the purview the Dean of Student Affairs, the most closed, uptight, and opinionated woman I’ve ever met who deemed the photo obscene during a meeting on the subject in her office in the student union building.

The gist of her argument against The Rag was that allowing such radical views to be available on campus would be to open the door to things like on-campus distribution of Mao’s Little Red Book.

The meeting came to an abrupt end when I told her Mao’s writings were required reading for some history classes and that The Little Red Book was, in fact, already on sale at the student bookstore.

Bitch turned beet red, jumped out of her seat, and headed for the bookstore fairly foaming at the mouth saying, “I’ll just see about THAT!”

There were no further meetings and permission for on-campus sale of The Rag was granted, but that wasn’t the end of the matter for me.

In 1975, the FBI included my advocacy in their report vis-à-vis my eligibility for a Top Secret clearance and my suitability for Federal employment by the Computer Services Directorate of the Naval Air Station Patuxent River, both of which were approved after a formal security interview.