Phillip Abbott Luce

Phillip Abbott Luce (October 17, 1935 – December 9, 1998) was an American author, lecturer and political organizer who had earlier taken leadership roles in communist organizations, mostly the pro-Red Chinese Progress Labor Movement (PLM), only to repudiate them by early 1965. He was indicted in 1963 as one of the main leaders and spokesman for an unauthorized trip to communist Cuba that arranged an audience with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. He was later acquitted in a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court decision, which ruled that "Crimes are not to be created by inference." After the breakup, Luce became a leading campus activist in the conservative Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), gravitating towards libertarianism by 1970, speaking at the "Left-Right Festival of Liberation" conference in 1970, later known as part of the libertarian Future of Freedom Conference series.