great Bill Russell write their autobiographies, then wrote his magnificent Pulitzer Prize–winning book,
Besides Rick and Taylor, there were four other men at the reunion whom I kept up with over the years: Sam Brown, one of the most prominent leaders of the student anti-war movement, later got involved in Colorado politics and, when I was President, served the United States with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe; David Mixner, who had begun organizing fellow migrant workers at fourteen, visited me several times in England and later moved to California, where he became active in the struggle against AIDS and for gay rights, and supported me in 1992; Mike Driver became one of my most cherished friends over the next thirty years; and Eli Segal, whom I met in the McGovern campaign, became chief of staff of the Clinton-Gore campaign.
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
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.”
Then I admitted I had considered being a resister myself, and accepted the draft “in spite of my beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system.” I also admitted that I had asked to be accepted in the ROTC program because it was the only way I could “possibly, but not positively, avoid both Vietnam and resistance.” I confessed to the colonel that “after I signed the ROTC letter of intent I began to wonder whether the compromise I had made with myself was not more objectionable than the draft would have been, because I had no interest in the ROTC program in itself and all I seemed to have done was to protect myself from physical harm… after we had made our agreement and you had sent my 1-D deferment to my draft board, the anguish and loss of self-regard and self-confidence really set in.” Then I told the colonel that I had written a letter to the draft board on September 12 asking to be put back into the draft but never mailed it. I didn’t mention that I had asked Jeff Dwire to get me reclassified 1-A and that the local draft board had done so at the October meeting, because I knew Jeff had already told the colonel that. I said that I hoped that “my telling this one story will help you to understand more clearly how so many fine people have come to find themselves still loving their country but loathing the military, to which you and other good men have devoted years, lifetimes, of the best service you could give.” It was how I felt at the time, as a young man deeply troubled and conflicted about the war. In any case, I still considered myself bound to the ROTC commitment if Colonel Holmes called me on it. Because he didn’t reply to my letter, I didn’t know for several months what he would do.
In March 1970, at about the same time I heard from Lee Williams that he expected all the lottery numbers to be called, I received two tapes made by my family while David Edwards was visiting them in Hot Springs. The first tape contains a lot of good-natured bantering around our pool table, ending with Roger playing the saxophone for me while our German shepherd, King, howled. The second tape has personal messages from Mother and Jeff. Mother told me how much she loved me and urged me to get more rest. Jeff gave me an update on family matters, then spoke these words: I took the liberty of calling the Colonel a few days ago and visiting with him a little. He wishes you well and hopes you’ll find time to drop by and say hello to him on your return. I would not be concerned at all regarding the ROTC program as far as he is concerned, because he apparently understands more about the general overall situation of our young people than people would give him credit for. So by the second week of March 1970, I knew I was free of the ROTC obligation, but not the draft. As it turned out, Lee Williams was wrong. The deescalation of the war reduced the need for new troops to the point that my number was never called. I always felt bad about escaping the risks that had taken the lives of so many of my generation whose claim to a future was as legitimate as mine. Over the years—as governor, when I was in charge of the Arkansas National Guard, and especially after I became President—the more I saw of America’s military, the more I wished I’d been a part of it when I was young, though I never changed my feelings about Vietnam.
If I hadn’t gone to Georgetown and worked on the Foreign Relations Committee, I might have made different decisions about military service. During the Vietnam era, 16 million men avoided military service through legal means; 8.7 million enlisted; 2.2 million were drafted; only 209,000 were alleged to have dodged the draft or resisted, of whom 8,750 were convicted.
Those of us who could have gone to Vietnam but didn’t were nevertheless marked by it, especially if we had friends who were killed there. I was always interested to see how others who took a pass and later got into public life dealt with military issues and political dissent. Some of them turned out to be superhawks and hyperpatriots, claiming that personal considerations justified their failure to serve while still condemning those who opposed a war they themselves had avoided. By 2002, Vietnam apparently had receded so far into the shadows of the American psyche that in Georgia, Republican congressman Saxby Chambliss, who had a Vietnam-era deferment, was able to defeat Senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, by questioning his patriotism and commitment to America’s security. In stark contrast to the activities of the nonserving superhawks, America’s efforts to reconcile
