Richard Reeves on Political Books
Richard Reeves on Political Books Sometime in the late 1960s, when I was the City Hall bureau chief of The New York Times, I worried that I was making a big mistake by not going to Vietnam. As...
...One familiar...
...Wicker shut up...
...Byt it’s true...
...After talking with other younger men, I understand, too, that draft-age men could not share their experience very well with older people-either because their elders didn't seem to understand or because the young men were ashamed of what they were doing...
...Tom Wicker can only say that Vietnam made him feel lousy one afternoon-that’s about the usual price reporters pay for a view of other people’s agony...
...There is just too much in the book to cite here...
...but in the end I got into my rented car and went on out to the Stockyards and up to the press gallery...
...For me, two volumes could not have been more different than these...
...I was wrong, of course...
...That is why the generation of Americans behind me has labels sucker, opportunist, evader, deserter...
...Perhap that was the key, the unfairness Why me, when 99.98 percent will live...
...So was Wicker, and Vietnam is at the heart of his book about what he’s learned in 30 successful years...
...While I was reading the galleys, I asked a 29-year old friend why he did not go to Vietnam...
...The impact of the data and individual case studies is cummulative The authors not only had access to the Pardon Board's proceedings and records but, with the backing of Notre Dame University and the Ford Foundation, conducted two surveys of draft-age men...
...Richard Reeves is the a Chance and Circumstance is a rather dry book, filled with statistics and case studies, but almost every page stunned me...
...Suffice it to say that the second survey of 1,586 men in Indiana, Michigan, and Washington, D.C reads like 1,586 tragedies-and the saddness doesnt depend on wether a man went to war or ran...
...March, Mr...
...But he only wrote: “ So I stood there a while longer, and the picketers went on past, until those who had called to me were far up the avenue...
...What they were was just young, which meant they could be drafted and some would die in Vietnam...
...But not without paying a price-not so much because of the uncertain enforcement of the draft laws as the scorn of their uncompre hending countrymen...
...There are insights in On Press -maybe “tips” is a better word-and two should be repeated because sources and reporters never seem to get them right...
...March with us, M the kids yelled to him in 1968...
...As a reporter...
...At his best, Wicker is writing about our detachment, our disen the pride and the shame of ences,” he says, “sometim disbelief when I insist that I am not trying as a columnist to achieve’anything other than the intellectual stimulation of readers...
...Didn't that deception bother him...
...I had believed always that I belonged with the young and the brave and the pure in heart...
...I understand now, I think...
...Yes, it is, dammit...
...Not all the young men were brave or pure in heart...
...As political science, Chance and Circumstance is an extraordinary case study of the unexpected effects of government policy...
...In the end, it could be the most important one because it goes a long way toward explaining what happened at home, how, once young men began being drafted for an undeclared, unjustified war, the nation was almost inevitably torn apart...
...Very few-less than 0.02 per cent of them-were going to die...
...Not surprisingly, the generation almost randomly selected to test Hershey’s theories revisited evaded and deserted...
...If I hadn’t figured that out before, it certainly became clear reading the galleys of two books to be published early this year: On Press by Tom Wicker, which will be published in February by Viking Press (an excerpt appears on page 8...
...Years,” he writes, “in which the practice of journalism itself would be greatly altered, with even the hallowed traditions of ‘objectivity’ beginning to yield-if slowly-to a new and less cautious ethic of disclosure...
...No, he said, he was too scared and too selfish...
...But then he saiud he wanted to write about it to explain why, to make people understand...
...Baskir and Strauss, respectively, the general counsel and planning director of President Ford’s Clemency Board, have written about the trauma of the 27 million Amerimen three to seventeen years ger than I, the generation that fought, or did not fight, in Vietnam...
...the other uncomfortably strange, kind of frightening...
...and Chance and Circumstance by Layrence M. Baskir and William A. Strausi, which will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in April...
...What happened between 1965 and 1972 happened here, at home...
...Eveq though he is 12 years older than I, Wicker could have been writing the story of my life: ambitious l@d works his way up from smalltown weekly to The New York Times and baffling influence, then tries to figure out what it means...
...Wicker...
...Last: “Over the years, with considerable hesitation and owing to the bitter experiences having been both too far in and to far out, I think more often than not-something on the order of eight cases out of ten-the news source needs the reporter more than the reporter needs the source...
...First: “Nothing is ever finally off the record if it’s said within hearing of a reporter...
...I was already in my thirties, beyond the reach of Selective Service...
...I was afraid that if I didn’t do my two years there, if I didn’t know what it was like, that I wasn’t going to be able to understand the America of my generation...
...Beginning in 1947, Hershey had deliberately put together a system-"channeling"- designed not to fight a war, but “to strengthen the Nation's civilian ecology and to foster the family life of the Nation," The system, essentialy totalitarian, would determine, in his words, "whether a man is more valuable as a father or a stuident scientist or doctor than as a soldier" Haunted by England's loss of its leadership class on the battlefields of World War I, Hershey concluded that he had the responsibility to preserve America’s potential elite with an incredibly coplex series of deferments-he would decide who should live and who should die...
...As recent history, it is a convincing explanation of the bond between the children of the sixties and an education for someone like me who was not one of them...
...Where the hell was I? I was in the press-doing quite well, thank you...
...and in on the wilting heat I felt sad and old and out of shape...
...He said he had faked back troubles to win a 4-F deferment...
...The villain is the draft system itself and its autocratic though perhaps well-meaning architect, General Lewis Hershey...
...At his most powerful...
...Finally, reading On Press and Chance and Circumstance, I'm forced to ponder the limits ofjQurnalism...
...Come on, Mr...
...Political views aside, the false evaders decided to allow others to serve in their place...
...There are no heroes in Chance and Circumstance, but it is one of thy best books to come out of this war or any war...
Vol. 9 • January 1978 • No. 11
