My life

All of us who gathered that weekend have since led lives we couldn’t have imagined as autumn dawned in 1969. We just wanted to help stop the war. The group was planning the next large protest, known as the Vietnam Moratorium, and I made what little contribution I could to their deliberations. But mostly I was thinking about the draft, and feeling more and more uncomfortable with the way I’d handled it. Just before I left Arkansas for Martha’s Vineyard, I wrote a letter to Bill Armstrong, chairman of my local draft board, telling him I didn’t really want to do the ROTC program and asking him to withdraw my 1D deferment and put me back in the draft. Strobe Talbott came to Arkansas to visit and we discussed whether I should mail it. I didn’t.

The day I flew out, our local paper carried the front-page news that Army Lieutenant Mike Thomas, who had defeated me for student council president in junior high school, had been killed in Vietnam. Mike’s unit came under attack and took cover. He died when he went back into the line of fire to rescue one of his men who was trapped in their vehicle; a mortar shell killed them both. After his death, the army gave him a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart. Now almost 39,000 Americans had perished in Vietnam, with 19,000 casualties still to come.

On September 25 and 26, I wrote in my diary: “Reading The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy [by David Halberstam], I was reminded again that I don’t believe in deferments. . . . I cannot do this ROTC.” Sometime in the next few days, I called Jeff Dwire, told him I wanted to be put back in the draft, and asked him to tell Bill Armstrong. On October 30, the draft board reclassified me 1-A. On October 1, President Nixon had ordered a change in Selective Service System policy to allow graduate students to finish the entire school year they were in, not just the term, so I wouldn’t be called until July. I don’t remember, and my diary doesn’t indicate, whether I asked Jeff to talk to the local board before or after I learned that graduate deferments had been extended to a full academic year. I do remember feeling relieved both that I’d get to spend some more time at Oxford and that the draft situation was resolved: I was reconciled to the fact that I’d probably be called up at the end of the Oxford year. I also asked Jeff to talk to Colonel Holmes. I still felt an obligation to him: he had helped keep me from induction on July 28. Even though I was now 1-A again, if he held me to my commitment to the ROTC

program beginning with next summer’s camp, I thought I would have to do it. Jeff indicated that the colonel accepted my decision, but thought I was making a mistake.

On December 1, pursuant to a bill signed by President Nixon five days earlier, the United States instituted a draft lottery, with a drawing in which all the days of the year were pulled out of a bowl. The order in which your birthday came up determined the order in which you could be drafted. August 19

came up 311. Even with the high lottery number, for months afterward, I thought I had a fair chance of being drafted. On March 21, 1970, I got a letter from Lee Williams saying that he had talked to Colonel Lefty Hawkins, the head of the Arkansas Selective Service System, who told him we would all be called. When I got the high draft number, I called Jeff again and asked him to tell Colonel Holmes that I hadn’t gone back into the draft knowing this would happen and that I understood that he could still call me on the ROTC obligation. Then, on December 3, I sat down and wrote Colonel Holmes. I thanked him for protecting me from the draft the previous summer, told him how much I admired him, and said I doubted that he would have admired me had he known more about my political beliefs and activities:

“At least you might have thought me more fit for the draft than for ROTC.” I described my work for the Foreign Relations Committee, “a time when not many people had more information about Vietnam at hand than I did.” I told him that, after I left Arkansas the previous summer, I did some work for the Vietnam Moratorium in Washington and in England. I also told him I had studied the draft at Georgetown, and had concluded it was justified only when, as in World War II, the nation and our way of life were at stake. I expressed sympathy with conscientious objectors and draft resisters. I told him Frank Aller, whom I identified only as my roommate, was “one of the bravest, best men I know. His country needs men like him more than they know. That he is considered a criminal is an obscenity.”