navigator and intelligence officer. In 1966, he resigned his commission in the Air Force Reserve as a protest against the Vietnam War. Stanford years Franklin earned his doctorate from Stanford University in 1961. He was hired that year at the university as an assistant professor of English; he was promoted to associate professor in 1965. He was also a lecturer in San Jose, California's municipal adult education department from 1963 to 1964. He became an expert on American writers, particularly Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. At one point, he served as president of the Melville Society. His first book, The Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology, examined Melville's use of mythologies and intellectual milieu from Meso-American to Sanskrit. Franklin wrote a scholarly edition of Melville's The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, which traced obscure classical and "alien" references embedded in Melville's prose. Franklin and his family spent a year in France from 1966 to 1967. He taught for six months at Stanford's campus in Tours, France, and then moved in Paris. There he and his wife Jane studied Marxist theory, helped organize the Free University of Paris, and participated in setting up the European network of GI deserters, who were primarily young men opposed to the Vietnam War. When he returned to the United States in the late 1960s, he became a prominent activist in the movement against the Vietnam War. Maoism, Revolutionary Union, and Venceremos In 1968, Franklin was one of twenty-four founders of the Revolutionary Union. After Franklin left the RU, the organization became the Revolutionary Communist Party. The organization was infiltrated by the FBI, which planted informers within the leadership of the group to heighten members' "suspicions of each other". Detailed information about this period and the FBI's attempts to "neutralize" (their word) Franklin can be found in the thousands of pages which he later collected under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). He donated this material to the Bancroft Library of the University of California in Berkeley. Doctrinal differences soon emerged between followers of Franklin and followers of Robert Avakian over revolutionary strategy. In a matter of months Franklin, along with roughly half of RU's members, left to join a Chicano-based leftist group in Palo Alto called Venceremos. Some of its members were active in prisoner outreach programs. Termination from Stanford At Stanford, in 1971, Franklin was accused of inciting anti-war protests on campus. At a campus