My father was an officer in the Army Reserve for twenty years. My brother ended up a captain in the Eighty-second Airborne Division. I’ve had ancestors in every war starting with the revolution. Like all my generation, I assumed that we would have a war to fight. We grew up watching Victory at Sea on television. But when the war that they had for us came, it was obvious this wasn’t what I thought I would be doing. This wasn’t about freedom or democracy or wearing white hats or helping people. This was essentially keeping a bunch of scumbags in power and prolonging the French Empire. Coming back from Mississippi, I could believe it.
WESLEY BROWN
A few days after my arrival, I was sent to Jackson, Mississippi, for a demonstration with the intent of filling up the jails. Within minutes of getting out of the car in Jackson, I was arrested, and thrown into a field house with hundreds of protesters, because the city jails were full. Before bail was set, the lawyers were interviewing people, and they asked me, “Do you want us to get in touch with your family to let them know where you are?” It was Father’s Day, and this lawyer talked to my father, and wished him happy Father’s Day for me. After I got out a week later, I contacted my parents and I let them know that I was okay. It was a very emotional and not a happy time for them.
Like any parents, my father and mother did not want their children to have to go through the things they had gone through when they lived in the South. They shared my beliefs but didn’t want me to have to deal with the consequences of my beliefs. My father used to say, “You can’t get up in the face of the powers that be. You have to find a way to work around the system, but if you make too much noise and draw attention to yourself, you’re just setting yourself up for a fall.”
DAVID HARRIS
I considered myself part of the movement from the day I left for Mississippi. What we call “The Movement,” capital T, capital M, was a commitment to justice and the values of democracy. They called us the New Left because it wasn’t an ideology. There wasn’t a specific politics attached to it. What it was, was a set of values finding ways to express themselves.
I was in marches, I was in rallies and demonstrations. But there was always the larger question of the conscription system. In that era, when any male turned eighteen, he had to go to the post office and register for the Selective Service System. When you registered for Selective Service, they gave you two cards. One was proof that you had registered, and the other indicated your classification. Because under the Selective Service, there were various classifications, starting from 1-A, which meant you were cannon fodder, to you were going to get a notice soon in the mail saying “Report to 4-F,” which meant you were physically unable to perform and therefore exempt. In between that, the largest one was 2-S, which was the student deferment. Anybody in college making, quote, “reasonable progress towards a degree” had a temporary exemption until they finished their education. So that was the system that covered all of our lives—all of the male lives, anyway.
Always there was floating out there, what happens when they call your number? We—understandably—focused on that a lot. I mean there were people going to graduate school so that they wouldn’t get drafted. There were people getting married so they wouldn’t get drafted, because early on, being married was an exemption. They weren’t going to draft family men. They thought if I want to take a year off and just go to Paris and write poetry, you’re headed for the tall grass if you do that. This defined everybody’s life.
WESLEY BROWN
After I left Mississippi and returned to college, I went to the school registrar with a friend and we asked that our student deferment classifications not be sent to the Selective Service, because we felt that it discriminated against blacks who didn’t have the opportunity to go to college. The registrar went ballistic but honored my request, and my classification was changed to 1-A, which meant I was subject to be drafted. But because I had been arrested in Mississippi, my classification was changed to 1-Y, which meant that if you had an outstanding legal charge against you, you wouldn’t be among the first who would be called.
DAVID HARRIS
What got me was a sense of moral responsibility, whether you like it or not, it’s your war. This is yours. You participate in a society; you’re responsible for what the society does. I had read a lot about the Indian Revolution and Gandhi and the use of satyagraha, or truth force. I, like everybody, watched what was going on with the war, in which more and more people were doing things that Americans were never supposed to do. Ultimately, we killed two million people, for Christ’s sake, and left God knows how many people crippled for life, including generation after generation. Agent Orange is still working its way through the gene pool in Southeast Asia, and we’re the ones who put it there. We committed massacres from thirty thousand feet. We walked into villages and burned them down. We followed a strategy of forcing people out of the countryside into the urban areas that we could control, and we did that by desecrating their culture and killing them and forcing them to run.
I got elected Stanford student body president at the end of my junior year, in ’66. Nobody expected me to be student body president, including me. At that time, student politics at Stanford was fraternity row. Everyone put on their suits and ties and did whistle-stop campaigns around the campus, and I was in my movement uniform, blue work shirt, Levi’s, moccasins. I had what passed for long hair in those days. It was over my ears. That was considered amazing in those days. This was at the same time Haight-Ashbury was forming up thirty miles north in San Francisco. There was this kind of lead cultural edge. I had one big musical rally for my campaign, in which, to get a sound system for the rally, we traded a lid of marijuana with Jefferson Airplane*3 for the use of their system.
Fraternities at that time didn’t want anything to do with someone like me, and we had a really radical platform. We were talking about student control of student justice, equal rights for women students. They hadn’t gone to coed dorms. Typically, if you and your girlfriend stayed out all night, nothing happened to you and she was kicked out of school, because she was supposed to sign in at ten o’clock. They had all this in loco parentis bullshit. Part of our platform was ending cooperation with the war in Vietnam, legalizing marijuana. We threw it all in there, because I didn’t care. Hey, if I lose, I lose. I’m counting on losing. At the interfraternity council the first question was “Well, what do you think of fraternities?” And I said, “I think fraternities are a pile of shit.” I took 60 percent of the fraternity vote in the election. Go figure.
I won in the biggest turnout by the biggest margin in the history of Stanford student politics. So all of a sudden, Stanford has a radical student body president. If I had been at Berkeley and gotten elected, nobody would have noticed, but suddenly I was noticed. Stanford was the other end of the political spectrum from Berkeley, supposedly.
MICHAEL KAZIN
(Harvard leader of Students for a Democratic Society)
I grew up in New Jersey, and both my parents were liberal Jews. I went to teach-ins, and the first antiwar demonstration SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] sponsored in 1965. I joined the Young Democrats of America [YDA] first, and then I got recruited to join SDS.*4 I think I was the only person who was on the executive board of both SDS and the Young Democrats at the same time, but then I became so disgusted by the war that I quit the Young Democrats. The war was a great dividing line at the time. The YDA slogan in ’64 was “part of the way with LBJ.” Well, that was unsustainable by ’65, ’66, once U.S. troops took over the brunt of the fighting and we started bombing the North. So I couldn’t be a Young Democrat anymore, at least in that context, because I felt like being a Young Democrat was supporting the administration, which was prosecuting the war. There were Democrats like Al Lowenstein, Eugene McCarthy, and Bobby Kennedy who could be critical of the war and still be Democrats, and people supported them. But at the time, I was nineteen, twenty years old, I saw politics as a moral pursuit, and I thought it was immoral to
remain a Young Democrat.
I went to Harvard in ’66 and became one of the chairs of SDS. A few years later, the Selective Service System was interested in me because I had taken the fall off to cut sugarcane in Cuba. And then they called me up—I was still a Harvard kid, and my local draft board liked that fact. They didn’t have that many kids going to Harvard from my hometown. But then I burned my draft card—I actually rolled marijuana in my draft card and smoked it; you know, a little combination of counterculture and politics—at a party. I told the draft board that I’d done that, and I told them that they could take their 2-S and shove it, or words to that effect, because I didn’t think that I should get a deferment when some working-class kid could not get a deferment. So they called me up for a physical.
DAVID HARRIS
I was trying to make up my mind about what to do about the draft. I had one more year, plus every year you have to renew your student deferment. Each year that became harder for me, because I didn’t believe in student deferments. Why should rich people be exempted from the war? If we’re going to fight wars, everybody’s supposed to fight. I didn’t think this war was worth fighting, but I didn’t think that separating the classes, in terms of who does combat and who doesn’t, was right. So that became harder, and then that year the Selective Service System amped things up. Not only was the draft call getting bigger and bigger, but they created a new system where they were going to administer a test every year so that you could prove you were making reasonable progress towards a degree.
They were going to come onto the Stanford campus, with the cooperation of the university, to give this goddamn test, which raised all kinds of questions, like whose university is this? Why is the university cooperating with this kind of thing? This is not in line with the values that are supposed to hold sway in a university. You believe in the life of the mind, and the life of the mind doesn’t napalm people. That was the last straw for me. I refused to take the test.
There was a sit-in at Stanford against the test, just after I was elected student body president, which I joined. So at that point I had made up my mind that I wasn’t going to do this. Right after the end of the school year, I sent a letter to my local draft board with my draft cards enclosed. It said, “I’m not carrying these ever again. And if you don’t like it, you know where to find me.”
MICHAEL KAZIN
I thought it was a horrible war, and resisting the draft in any way you could was fine. I think we helped get the U.S. out of Vietnam by so many people resisting the draft. Did I do it in the most moral way possible? No. I have friends who went to jail. I didn’t do that. The physical was in the middle of May and some friends of mine and I were scheduled for a physical the same day. We sat around calling out answers to the questions to make sure everyone failed it. We decided we had to make it a democratic procedure, so at each stop along the way of the physical—give urine, get your lungs tested—we said, “Let’s have a vote! Do we want to do this or don’t we? Discussion?” We stretched it out as much as we could.
In the end I saw a psychiatrist and I told him I would shoot my officers if they drafted me, I lied and said I was a homosexual, and I pretended to stutter seriously. I remember he put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Mike, you should get some help.” I guess he believed me.
DAVID HARRIS
It’s fall quarter. I’m student body president. I had gotten an invitation from one of the fraternity row houses at Stanford, and I was kind of surprised. But, I thought, hey, I’ll go. So I’m about twenty yards from this row house, and a guy steps out from behind a bush and he says, “Mr. Harris?” And I thought, Why is this guy in a Beta jacket and penny loafers calling me Mr. Harris? All of a sudden, the rest of them jumped out, grabbed my arms, my legs, and carried me into a vacant lot. They had some clippers, and they were going to cut my hair off, and my beard. They were all wearing Halloween masks.
I recognized some voices, a couple of guys who were in my freshman house. They weren’t saying much, but I thought, Hey, I never get to talk to these people. What the hell? I recognized the voice of this one guy whose nickname was Gooey. I said, “Gooey, is that you out there?” I said, “Jesus. Are you guys working with the Ku Klux Klan or something?” I just was giving them shit.
They made it through cutting my hair off, and took a picture of me while my hair was being cut, that they gave to the San Francisco Chronicle, which ran it the next morning. Their thought was the student body was going to rise up, proclaim them to be their liberators, and thank God somebody did this to this hippie fuck. But instead the opposite happened, and they solidified my standing and political power on campus.
The hair-cutting incident was a manifestation of the cultural and political divide that was going on in America between the ones who wanted things to be the way they were and the ones who wanted things to be different. That’s the simplest way to put it. We didn’t accept the way the institutions were being run. We didn’t accept the policies that were made by the government. On the other side, there were these guys who said, “Love it or leave it.”
JOHN PERRY BARLOW (Grateful Dead lyricist)
I graduated from Wesleyan in 1969 and the draft board in my hometown of Pinedale, Wyoming, wanted to draft me because I was the only hippie from Pinedale. People forget the country was divided into two extremely hostile camps. The cowboy culture in Pinedale was definitely not pro-hippie, and I was definitely a hippie. I’d come back there from Wesleyan, to have a few drinks in a bar, and this little bus would stop on its way from Jackson to Rock Springs, and if a long-haired guy got off the bus to go to the bathroom, they’d come out of the bar and nab him and take him off into the alley and shave his head. That was the kind of stuff that was going on. So I would come home with this long hair, and they’d take a run at shaving my head.
MICHAEL KAZIN
As I walked out of my physical, I saw this guy with short hair who was waiting to go in. I was a draft counselor, so I knew ways he could get out even then, and I said, “Hey, I could get some papers, you can say you are a conscientious objector, you can delay this process or get out of it completely.” He was very nervous and he said, with a strong Southie accent, “What do you mean, man? If I don’t pass this physical my parents are going to kill me. Every man in my family has been in the military, going back to World War I, and I got no job anyway, and I better not fail this physical.” That was an important moment for me. It helped me understand that with the moral righteousness and self-righteousness of a lot of people like me in the New Left, we were missing the emotions, the needs, of a broad swath of America. The war wasn’t doing them any good, but we didn’t understand the problems they had. I thought we were not reaching the people. We were pissing them off—the “people” meaning primarily white working-class, lower-middle-class people.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW
I was very worried about the draft, and I had finally shaped my future expectations around it. I was just going to resist, and then at the last minute, I thought, Ah, I don’t know. I don’t want to do this if there’s a way around it. So I went to a series of doctors’ offices in Hartford, and in Middletown, Connecticut, and stole letterhead from ear, nose, and throat specialists. I studied stress-induced asthma and wrote a bunch of letters attesting to my having a fairly serious case of it, and then I showed up for my induction physical in Salt Lake with these letters. The guy at the end of the line read them, and gave me a 1-Y, which meant that I was drafted if they attacked us, which seemed pretty unlikely. I’m starting to walk away and he said, “Hey. Let me see those letters again.” So I go back and I hand him the letters, and he looks at them and he says, “You put in a lot of work on these.” And I said, “What makes you think I wrote them?” And he said, “If it had been me, I would have used a different typewriter for each one.” And then he said, “What are you going to do if I tell you to get on the bus?” I said, “Well, you’re going to have to call a federal marshal because I’m not getting on that bus.” And he said, “
Really?” And I said, “No, I’m not.” And he looked at me for a long time and he said, “Well, you know, I get about thirty cowboys in here every week that cannot wait to kill a gook. And I can’t see a good reason to make you kill one. So take your letters and take your 1-Y and get out of here.” I was completely dumbfounded to be in the state of unanticipated liberty.
Credit 1.2
Young men burning draft cards in New York’s Central Park in 1967.
WESLEY BROWN
Because of my involvement in Mississippi, I found it reprehensible that I could be asked to put my life at risk in the Mekong Delta, when the rights and lives of blacks in the Mississippi Delta were not being protected. I could not, in good conscience, put myself at risk, ten thousand miles away, to fight for values that were not being honored in the country of my birth.*5 I was put in touch with Howard Moore, who was a lawyer for SNCC, and I explained my situation to him, and he said, “You might be interested in being part of a case that Rabinowitz, Boudin, and Standard are trying to create.”*6 They were a very progressive law firm that had been providing legal assistance for civil rights workers. The lawyers wanted to have conscientious objection to the war accepted on moral grounds, not just religious grounds if you were a Quaker, or a Jehovah’s Witness. My objection to the draft was on the basis of a personal moral code, which was the kind of case that Victor Rabinowitz, Leonard Boudin, and Michael Standard were trying to build. So I was interested and I wrote a statement, which they worked on with me, that I sent to the Selective Service Board. The firm was trying to collect all of these draft resisters under one umbrella and then present this case, saying that young men should be exempt from military service because of a personal moral code, because, ethically, they found the war abhorrent.
Witness to the Revolution Page 4