What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?
Fallows, James
What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy? by James Fallows Many people think that the worst scars of the war years have healed. I don’t. Vietnam has left us with a heritage rich in possibilities...
...Our duty, therefore, was clear: as committed opponents of the war, we had a responsibility to save ourselves from the war machine...
...The Thinking-Man’s Route As other memories of the war years have faded, it is that day in the Navy Yard that will not leave my mind...
...I was six-feet-one-inch tall at the time...
...Vietnam has left us with a heritage rich in possibilities for class warfare, and I would like to start telling about it with this story: In the fall of 1969, I was beginning my final year in college...
...Thanksgiving weekend, when, while riding back to Boston from a visit with my relatives, I heard that the draft lottery’ had been held and my birthdate had come up number 45...
...And because of that, when our parents were opposed to the war, thev were opposed in a bloodless, theoretical fashion, as they might be opposed to political corruption or racism in South Africa...
...Many of my friends wore red arm bands and stop-the-war buttons...
...Besides them, seven of my classmates performed alternate service as conscientious objectors...
...It is clear by now that if the men of Harvard had wanted to do the very most they could to help shorten the war, they should have been drafted or imprisoned en masse...
...To answer the call was unthinkable, not only because, in my heart, I was desperately afraid of being killed, but also because, among my friends, it was axiomatic that one should not be “complicit” in the immoral war effort...
...The fifth anniversary report of my class at Harvard gives a more precise idea of who did what...
...There I got in-depth training on how to be a ‘Petroleum Supply Storage Specialist,’ i.e., a service station attendant...
...The lesson of the past concerns the complexities of human motivation...
...That was good for six months in the Reserves...
...The behavior of the upper classes in so deftly avoiding the war’s pains is both a symptom and a partial cause of the class hatred now so busily brewing in the country...
...Yet most of us managed without difficulty to stay out of jail...
...He wrote “unqualified” on my folder, turned on his heels, and left...
...It shattered altogether on...
...Even as we knew that a thousand, or ten thousand, college boys going to prison might make a difference, we knew with equal certainty that the imprisonment and ruination of any one of us would mean nothing at all...
...The talk was high-spirited, but there was something close to the surface that none of us wanted to mention...
...A few quotes convey its “The axiom that this nation’s tangled Selective Service System is bound to be unfair to somebody fell with a crash on the Harvard community yesterday...
...It may be worth emphasizing why our failure to resist induction is such an important issue...
...When we’re finished with you, you can go, and not a minute before...
...the long technical appeals through the legal jungles of the Selective Service System...
...The tonier sorts of anti-war literature contained grace-note references to Gandhi and Thoreau-no CO application would have been complete without them-but the practical model for our wartime conduct was our enemy LBJ, who weaseled away from the front lines during World War 11...
...Moreover, a whole theoretical framework was developed to justify draft evasion...
...There are those who contend that the world has always worked this way, and perhaps that is true...
...Even when that deferment was gone, Johnson’s administrators came up with the intelligencetest plan for draft deferments, an even bolder attempt to keep those voluble upper classes off the President’s back...
...On the black and white spectrum by which we judged personal conduct, bureaucrats were criminals if they stayed inside the government and politicians cowards if they failed to vote for resolutions to end the war...
...the businessmen of Dow and Honeywell were craven merchants of death...
...In the atmosphere of that time, each possible choice came equipped with barbs...
...Most of the rest of us trod quietly through the paces, waiting for the moment of confrontation when the final examiner would give his verdict...
...In the abstract, at least, we have learned those lessons...
...The rest of us escaped, in one way or another...
...World War I1 forced different classes of people to live together...
...But the six months was put to good use by the Nixon Administration...
...But there was no mistaking which emotions came from the heart, which principles really seemed worth fighting for...
...He went out to collect his lieutenant, who clearly had been through a Cambridge day before...
...Did we realize that the draft machine was tottering towards its ultimate breakdown...
...Q. What were America’s sins...
...Not that we didn’t suffer...
...There was, of course, the angst, the terrible moral malaise we liked to write about so much in the student newspapers and undergraduate novels...
...The second is why all the well-educated, presumably humane young men, whether they opposed the war or were thinking fopdly of A-bombs on Hanoi, so willingly took advantage of this most brutal form of class discriminationwhat it signifies that we let the boys from Chelsea be sent off to die...
...Lyndon Johnson clearly understood it, which was the main reason why the graduate school deferment, that grotesque of class discrimination, lasted through the big mobilizations of the war, until the springtime of 1968...
...If nothing else, a glance back at our own record might give us an extra grain of sympathy for the difficulties of bringing men to honor, let alone glory...
...The National Security Council’s draft directive puts almost all college seniors and most graduate students at cne head of the line for next year’s draft calls...
...But our calculations rarely even reached that point...
...The irrational war machine would grind on as if we had never existed, and our own lives would be pointlessly spoiled...
...That was it, the almost incredible level of understanding and compassion we displayed at the time-the idea that the real victims of General Hershey’s villainous schemes were the students who would have jilled the nation’s graduate schools next fall...
...Two years ago, Harvard students complained that the system was highly discriminatory, favoring the well off,” Glassman wrote...
...Threefourths of the second-year law class will go off to war...
...When I look at the memorial roll of names I find that I recognize very few, for they were mainly the anonymous Mexican-Americans (as they were called at the time) and poor whites I barely knew in high school and forgot altogether when I left...
...At a minimum, the record of my class should help Midge Decter over her fears that the people of my generation have somehow strayed from the straight and narrow path...
...There, sympathetic medical students helped us search for disqualifying conditions that we, in our many years of good health, might have overlooked...
...Several people from my high school left the country...
...Two were in the Coast Guard, two in the National Guard, and seven more in unspecified branches of the military...
...Five years later, two questions have yet to be faced, let alone answered...
...One had been in the Marine reserves...
...Not everyone at Harvard felt that way, nor, I suspect, did even amajority of the people throughout the country who found painless ways to escape the draft...
...Most of them were younger than us, since they had just left high school, and it had clearly never occurred to them that there might be a way around the draft...
...During many uf the same meetings where I heard about the techniques of weight reduction, I also learned that we should think of ourselves as sand in the gears of the great war machine...
...When I was not participating in anti-war rallies, I was poring over the Army’s code of physical regulations...
...While perhaps four out of five of my friends fro’m Harvard were being deferred, just the opposite was happening to the Chelsea boys...
...With much the same intensity with which I wanted to stay alive, I did not want those things either...
...In the meantime, there was the physical to prepare for...
...The rest of us sat rigid and silent, clutching x-rays and letters from our doctors at home...
...and we, meanwhile, were nothing less than the insistent voice of morality, striving tirelessly to bring the country to its senses...
...They called the 2-S an unfair advantage for those who could go to college...
...Beneath all the explanations about self-help and just deserts, there remains the vein of empathy and guilt...
...I tried to avoid noticing, but the results were inescapable...
...This was not such a difficult insight, even at the time...
...By comparison, of two or three hundred acquaintances from college and afterwards, I can think of only three who actually fought in Vietnam...
...Like many of my friends whose numbers had come up wrong in the lottery, I set about securing my salvation...
...is a residual resentment, the natural result of a cool look at who ended up paying what price...
...But as the war wore on, “The altruism was forgotten...
...After the usual three-year stint (at Columbia) I find myself in the unusual position of practicing law in the entertainment field...
...Granted, there is a difference between those two risks...
...This argument was most reassuring, for it meant that the course of action that kept us alive and out of jail was also the politically correct decision...
...There were about 1,200 people in the class, and slightly fewer than half wrote in to report on what had happened to them since 1970...
...They remind us that there was little character in the choices we made...
...imprisonment for a felony is a serious matter, and it was perhaps one degree more perilous to refuse induction as a 21-year-old than to throw aside a career as the 45-year-old father of three...
...We knew now who would be pled...
...Here are two from people who felt the pinch: “Number four in the draft lottery sparked my idealism, and I entered the Peace Corps following graduation...
...The first is why, when so many of the bright young college men opposed the war, so few were willing to resist the draft, rather than simply evade it...
...Clients include Norman Lear, Burt Reynolds, Ryan O’Neal, Valerie Perrine, et al., as well as a number of ‘struggling young artists’-the latter pro bono, of course...
...We were right...
...Oh, suicide-yes, I’ve been feeling very unstable and unreliable recently...
...One of the things we had learned from the draft counselors was that disruptive behavior at the examination was a worthwhile political goal, not only because it obstructed the smooth operation of the criminal war machine, but also because it might impress the examiners with our undesirable character traits...
...Hundreds from my high school were drafted, and nearly two dozen killed...
...General Hershey was never in danger of running out of bodies, and the only thing we were denying him was the chance to put us in uniform...
...The Merchants of Death It isn’t a pleasant exercise, dredging up these hulks, but I think reviewing my generation’s feelings about Vietnam is important...
...As we climbed into the buses and as they rolled toward the Navy Yard, about half of the young men brought the chants to a crescendo...
...Even as the last of the Cambridge contingent was throwing its urine and deliberately failing its color-blindness tests, buses from the next draft board began to arrive...
...I hope to deliver babies on Maui someday...
...Draft resistance, the course chosen by a few noble heroes of the movement, meant going to prison or leaving the country...
...and, one degree further down the scale of personal inconvenience, joining the Reserves or the National Guard...
...It does not require enormous powers of analysis to see the basic fraudulence of this argument...
...What was most important now was saving your own skinpreventing yourself from being in a position where you would have to kill a man you had no right to kill...
...On the day after the graduate school deferments were snatched away from us, a day Johnson must have dreaded because it added another set of nasty enemies to his list, the Harvard Crimson responded with a magnificently representative editorial entitled “The Axe Falls...
...I was overcome by a wave of relief, which for the first time revealed to me how great my terror had been, and by the beginning of the sense of shame that remains with me to this day...
...and, though no one reported going to prison, one wrote from England that he was a “draft resister...
...one that I know of went to jail...
...For better or worse, it will be years before we again cheer a President who talks about paying any price and bearing any burden to prop up some spurious overseas version of democracy...
...My normal weight was close to the cut-off point for an “underweight” disqualification, and, with a diligence born of panic, I made sure I would have a margin...
...From a certain perspective, it could even seem like grandstanding, an exercise in excessive piety, to go to the trouble of resisting the draft...
...The implications for the present are less comforting and go back to the question asked several pages ago...
...What I wanted was to go to graduate school, get married, and to enjoy those bright prospects I had been taught that life owed me...
...Am practicing corporate law (mostly tax), working fairly hard, enjoying my schizophrenic law firm/Berkeley hippy life very much...
...He started reading out instructions for the intelligence tests when he was hooted down...
...I learned quickly enough that there was only one way to get what I wanted...
...when they were, regret was expressed that they had not yet understood the correct approach to the draft...
...he asked after he finished looking over my chart...
...Learning From Lyndon First we should consider the conduct of those who opposed the war...
...that is how long it took to get me a security clearance for a job in the Executive Office...
...It was, initially, a generalized shame at having gotten away with my deception, but it came into sharper focus later in the day...
...I stood there in socks and underwear, arms wrapped around me in the chilly building...
...The question is why, especially in the atmosphere of the late sixties, people with any presumptions to character could have let it go on...
...Another 32 people, most of whom had held ROTC scholarships in college, had put in time with the Navy...
...The more we guaranteed that we would end up neither in uniform nor behind bars, the more we made sure that our class of people would be spared the real cost of the war...
...We resolved to launch political-education programs, some under the auspices of the Worker-Student Alliance, to help straighten them out...
...Twice I saw students walk up to young orderlies-whose hands were extended to receive the required cup of urine-and throw the vial in the orderlies’ faces...
...The orderlies looked up, initially more astonished than angry, and went back to towel themselves off...
...In a land of supposed opportunity, the comfortable hate to see the poor...
...On either side of the class divide, the war has left feelings that can easily shade over into mistrust and hostility...
...our heritage from Vietnam is rich with potential for class hatred...
...What makes them a class is that they all avoided the draft by taking one of the thinkingman’s routes to escape...
...The barbed alternatives would be put off...
...These included the physical deferment, by far the smartest and least painful of all...
...But somehow the x-rays were deflected...
...Vietnam kept them rigidly apart, a process in which people like me were only too glad to cooperate...
...A physical deferment would restore things to the happy state I had known during four undergraduate years...
...I recognized for the first time that, inflexibly, I must either be drafted or consciously find a way to prevent it...
...For one thing, there were undercurrents of the sentiment that another Crimson writer, James Glassman, expressed in an article early in 1968...
...Of that number, 12 said that they had been in the Army, two specifying that they had served in Vietnam...
...The boys of Chelsea were not often mentioned during these sessions...
...It was a monstrous war, not only in its horror but in the sense that it was beyond control, and to try to fight it as individuals was folly...
...By the impartial dictates of public policy I would be Free to pursue the better side of life...
...Yesterday’s directive is a bit of careless expediency, clearly unfair to the students who would have filled the nation’s graduate schools next fall...
...But I recall no suggestion during the sixties that it was graceless, wrong of us to ask the Foreign Service officers to resign when we were not sticking our necks out at the induction center...
...The “we” that I refer to are the mainly white, mainly well-educated children of mainly comfortable parents, who are now mainly embarked on promising careers in law, medicine, business, academics...
...Most chanted the familiar words, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh/NLF is Gonna Win...
...But I did, and most of the people I knew did, and so did the hordes we always ran into at the anti-war rallies...
...I We returned to Cambridge that afternoon, not in government buses but as free individuals, liberated and victorious...
...During one of those counseling sessions I sat through a speech by Michael Ferber, then something of a celebrity as a codefendant in the trial of Dr...
...Inside the Navy Yard, we were first confronted by a young sergeant from Long Beach, a former surfer boy no older than the rest of us and seemingly unaware that he had an unusual situation on his hands...
...Doubtless because the enemy we were fighting was so horrible in its effects, there was very little room for complexity or ambiguity in the anti-war campaigns...
...With four unpleasant medical school years behind me, I am enjoying Philadelphia and internship...
...Among those who went to war, there...
...That it was hardly in better condition than old General Hershey himself...
...Among the bright people of my generation, those who have made a cult of their high-mindedness, the sight of legless veterans and the memories of the Navy Yard must also touch that vein...
...We have not, however, learned the lesson of the day at the Navy Yard, or the thousands of similar scenes all across the country through all the years of the war...
...Virtually everyone who showed up on Cambridge day at the Navy Yard was a student from Harvard or MIT...
...The examinations were administered on a rotating basis, one to two days each month for each of the draft boards in the area...
...On the part of those who were spared, there is a residual guilt, often so deeply buried that it surfaces only in unnaturally vehement denials that there is anything to feel guilty about...
...On the morning of the draft physical I weighed 120 pounds...
...Although, on the doctors’ advice, 1 made a half-hearted try at fainting spells, my only real possibility was beating the height and weight regulations...
...During the winter and early spring, seminars were held in the college common rooms...
...I got a lucky draft, number 13...
...That is why Vietnamization was such a godsend for Nixon, and it is also why our reluctance to say No helped prolong the war...
...With a briefcase of anecdotes, I decided to divert my attention back to my studies in economics at Wisconsin...
...These bore the boys from Chelsea, thick, dark-haired young men, the white proles of Boston...
...gist: X-Ray Vision It would be unfair to suggest that absolutely no thought was given to the long-run implications of our actions...
...I knew as I looked at the doctor’s face that he understood exactly what I was doing...
...As the months went by, the rock on which I had unthinkingly anchored my hopes-the certainty that the war in Vietnam would be over before I could possibly fight-began to crumble...
...My eyes darted up to his...
...They walked through the examination lines like so many cattle off to slaughter...
...When the lone heralds of morality, the anti-war protesters, finally appear, the audience breaks into cheers...
...She is associated with Cravath, Swaine, and Moore, and I am with Davis, Polk, & Wardwell...
...The one moral issue that was within our control was whether we would actually participatewhether, as Glassman put it, we would be forced to kill-and we could solve that issue as easily by getting a deferment as by passing the time in jail...
...A. The Arrogance of Power, the Isolation of the Presidency, the Burden of Colonialism, and the Failure of Technological Warfare...
...The easiest way to see those feelings revived is to attend a showing of the movie Hearts and Minds in the company of the young...
...More than that, it does sum up the home front’s story of the war: we happy few were sped along to Maui or the entertainment law firm, or at worst temporarily way-laid in the reserves, while from each of our high schools the less gifted and industrious 7, students were being ’shipped off as cannon fodder...
...That there is such a class, identifiable as “we,” was brought home to me by comparing the very different fates of the different sorts of people I had known in high school and college...
...From its struggles in World War 11, this country created a cushion of class toleration...
...I had stepped on the scales at the very beginning of the examination...
...Johnson and Nixon both knew that the fighting could continue only so long as the vague, hypothetical benefits of holding off Asian communism outweighed the immediate, palpable domestic pain...
...the more disingenuous resorts to conscientious objector status...
...The children of the bright, good parents were spared the more immediate sort of suffering that our inferiors were undergoing...
...Another dozen or so served in safer precincts of the military, and perhaps five went through the ordeal of formal resistance...
...It serves two purposes-to tell us about the past, and to tell us about the present...
...I walked in a trance through the rest of the examination, until the final meeting with the fatherly physician who ruled on marginal cases such as mine...
...The answers to the other grand questions about the war have become familiar as any catechism...
...Six months after my arrival there, the Wage Price Control Program was hatched, and the next three years were spent diverting public attention from other matters that were attracting that attention...
...James Fallows is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly and a member of the White House staff: This article was originally published in October 1975...
...From that point on the disruption became more purposeful and individual, largely confined to those whose deferment strategies were based on anti-authoritarian psychiatric traits...
...That was the bite the military took from half my class at Harvard during a bloody year of the war-56 people, most of them far from the fighting...
...Have you ever contemplated suicide...
...What is interesting is how little of this whole phenomenon we at Harvard pretended to understand...
...With the same x-ray vision that enabled us to see in every Pentagon sub-clerk, in every Honeywell accountant, an embryonic war criminal, we could certainly have seen that by keeping ourselves away from both frying pan and fire we were prolonging the war and consigning the Chelsea boys to danger and death...
...They knew that when the screaming grew too loud and too many sons had been killed, the game would be all over...
...beat the rap on a legal technicality,” and another that he had “several years of legal entanglement with the draft and the Justice Department...
...Occasionally, both in the Crimson and elsewhere, there were bows to the discriminatory nature of the whole 2-S deferment system and the virtues of the random lottery which Edward Kennedy, to his eternal credit, was supporting almost singlehandedly at the time...
...Of course we were right to try to stop the war...
...Meanwhile, those who did not go were preparing themselves, each by his own lights, for their contributions to the world: “My wife and I graduated from Harvard Law School in 1973 and we are both working for New York City firms...
...Desperate at seeing the orderly write down 122 pounds, I hopped back on and made sure that he lowered it to 120...
...We’ve got all the time in the world,” he said, and let the chanting go on for two or three minutes...
...I am not talking about those who, on the one hand, submitted to the draft and took their chances in the trenches, nor, on the other hand, those who paid the price of formal draft resistance or exile...
...He looked at me, staring until I returned my eyes to the ground...
...There was no mistaking the political temperament of our group...
...As long as the little gold stars kept going to homes in Chelsea and the backwoods of West Virginia, the mothers of Beverly Hills and Chevy Chase and Great Neck and Belmont were not on the telephones to their congressmen, screaming you killed my boy, they were not writing to the President that his crazy, wrong, evil war had put their boys in prison and ruined their careers...
...The normal benchmark of morality was this: if we were showing our stuff by taking to the picket lines (meanwhile continuing our cruise through college), then our elders were shameful, middle-aged cowards if they did not do their part, too...
...Spock...
...After eighteen or so peaceful and mostly enjoyable months in and around a peasant village in Senegal, West Africa, I returned home and ended up in the jungles of Harvard Law School...
...He excited us by revealing how close we were to victory...
...That each body we withheld from its ravenous appetite brought it that much nearer the end...
...Five years after Cambodia and Kent State, it is clear how the war could have lasted so long...
...A few of the personal reports are worth quoting for what they tell about the way the burden of the war fell on the men of Harvard...
...Before sunrise that morning I rode the subway to the Cambridge city hall, where we had been told to gather for shipment to the examination at the Boston Navy Yard...
...There was, I believe, one genuine concern that provided the x-ray shield and made theories like Ferber’s go down more easily...
Vol. 8 • February 1977 • No. 12
