Witness to the Revolution

by Clara Bingham

  But it turned out that these three rascals were also planning a demonstration for the fall of ’67, which they invited everybody in this little seminar to be part of. So, I went by just to witness. I had never thought of being arrested. It was so amazing to see it. It was such a beautiful demonstration. I thought of demonstrations as just this kind of thing on the street, yelling and confronting the police, which is a lot of what was going on then. But this was a really dignified, peaceful sit-in, blocking bus after bus of inductees who were being led into the Oakland induction center. I couldn’t help but join. I sat down, and I went to the Santa Rita jail outside of Oakland for ten days with three hundred others, including Joan, Ira, Roy, and the whole gang.

  RICK AYERS

  There was a march from [the University of Michigan] campus to the Ann Arbor draft board, and there were like two thousand people in this march. It had been planned ahead who was going to get arrested. It was very moving. They went in; they sat down; they wouldn’t leave. There were police lines and chanting outside. We stayed there while they carried people out and threw them into police vans. It was quite dramatic. Ann Arbor was a big activist center around anti–Vietnam War work. I mailed my draft card in, in a big protest. We all got our envelopes and threw them in the mailbox. Six days later it came back. “You’re reclassified 1-A.”

  Credit 5.2

  Police officers arrest a protester outside the armed services induction center in Oakland, California, October 1967.

  So I got drafted, which was a shock, because I still thought, This ain’t going to happen. And it did happen. I was very concerned, because the choices didn’t look good. I didn’t want to go to jail. I was too young and scared of what happened in jail. I was scared of the army because I thought, being antiwar, I would get beat up.

  My brother Bill was also at the University of Michigan. He was very active in SDS, but he hadn’t taken this path, and I asked him, “What am I going to do?” We went around and around, and we finally decided I’d go to Canada. We had friends in Toronto. It’s not that far from Ann Arbor. I went up to Canada and got a job offer letter, and I got a recommendation letter from the vice president of the University of Michigan, because I was on his advisory board. He was heartbroken that I was leaving. I had to tell my Greek professor. I didn’t tell my parents because I didn’t know if they would rat me out. So I drove with a friend to a border crossing and presented myself at the immigration board as requesting immigration—we had consulted lawyers, and that was a pretty fast way to get it if you have all your paperwork lined up. If you asked for immigration, they were not allowed to ask you about your draft status, but everyone knows what it is, and you become a landed immigrant. A landed immigrant status was temporary until they verified a lot of stuff. So they gave me papers, I walked right in, and I was a landed immigrant in Canada, and I went to Toronto and got a job at a movie theater. It was 1968 and I was twenty-one.

  DAVID HARRIS (draft resistance organizer)

  I was traveling up and down the West Coast giving speeches, and then I also start traveling nationally. I’d fly into Portland, I’d be met by the guy from the Portland Resistance, who had set up a bunch of gigs. I’d give anywhere from four to nine speeches a day, trying to get people to send their draft cards back, and then I’d move to the next city. I did that from 1967 essentially through the time I got incarcerated, July ’69. I was an organizer. That’s what I did.

  We took donations wherever we could. That’s how I met Joan Baez. There was a guy named Roy Kepler, who ran Kepler’s Bookstore in Menlo Park, which was kind of a hip left outpost. He had been one of the founders of KPFA, a local listener-owned radio station. He had been a draft resister in World War II. He also was Joan’s business manager. And he said to me, “You ought to talk to Joan about this. She’ll give you some money.” So he set up an appointment. I went down to her house in Carmel and got a check.

  She’s five years older than me, and at the time she was paramount. She was Ms. Folk Song of the Universe. She’d been on the cover of Time magazine in 1962. She was just coming off a romance with Bob Dylan. She was as big a star as there was in the music world at that point. Folk music was our own invention. The space between the Beats and the hippies was folk music, which had icons like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, who were all lefties. People sometimes sang with bare feet, which Joan did. She had long, straight hair down to her shoulders, which was not the way women were supposed to look at that time, so there was a counterculture aspect to it which soon became popular.

  Her father, Al Baez, was a physicist who refused to do war work during World War II, and he was a Quaker. So she came by her politics that way. She had been an outsider girl in high school and started singing and became this major celebrity. I liked her music before I ever knew her. Five months after I got that first check, we were married. What can I say? In that era, people got married a lot earlier. Also, we were on a speaking tour together. She was doing concerts and I was giving speeches, and we just kind of decided on the road, “Okay, let’s go get married.” We got married in New York City, and for a couple of years, I was part of Mr. and Mrs. Peace in America.

  Credit 5.3

  Resistance founder David Harris with his wife, folksinger and activist Joan Baez, at a war resistance demonstration in New York’s Central Park, April 1968.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT ALTMAN.

  WESLEY BROWN

  I graduated from college June of ’68, and I was called to report to my draft board in September, but I never showed up. By that time, I was living in Rochester [New York], and there was a chapter of the Black Panther Party there that I became involved with. In Rochester, I was doing community stuff, selling the Panther newspaper, connecting with local groups who were involved with school issues. We were trying to do things with regards to free lunch, free breakfast programs in schools, having more accountability with parents’ involvement in the local schools.

  In March of 1969, I wrote a letter to my draft board, quoting the Black Panther platform as an explanation for why I refused to sign up:

  Point six of the Black Panther Party platform and program states: “We want all Black men exempt from military service. We believe the Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.”

  This position I adhere to. Therefore, since the government grants no rights, I owe it no duties. And if you can’t relate to that, you can walk chicken with your ass picked clean.

  DAVID HARRIS

  I was ordered for induction in January of ’68. I rode the bus up to the induction center and then turned around and told them, “I’m not going any further. I’m done.” They indicted me thirteen days later—only Muhammad Ali got indicted faster than me. I know people who refused induction who have never heard from the government. By 1968, if you wanted to prosecute every violation the Selective Service had in the northern district of California, you would have to close the courts down for two years and just do draft cases.

  Two months later, Joan and I got married. Two months after that, I went on trial. We were always trying to find ways to talk about the war in the courtroom, because the courtroom is theater. That was part of our approach. If you’re going to be on trial, you make your trial a propaganda mechanism as much as you can. My lawyer was a guy named Francis Heisler, who was a longtime civil liberties lawyer. What we used for a defense was, in order to be convicted of a felony, you have to not only prove the facts of the case, they have to prove that you acted with intent and bad purpose. So we used intent and bad purpose to try and give testimony. “What was your intention, Mr. Harris?” I said I thought the war was immoral and I wasn’t going to be part of it. I had the jury out for eight hours. There
were two holdouts. There was a Quaker lady on the jury and a black housekeeper. The Quaker lady caved first. The last holdout was the black housekeeper, who finally, after they worked on her for eight hours, gave in. My trial judge was a guy named Oliver Carter, whose nickname was Death by Elocution. He said, “You may not need to be real ill-fated, but you’re going to be punished,” and gave me twice the length of any sentence that had been handed out in San Francisco ever for a draft case, which was three years. Normally you’d find, around the country in judicial districts, there was a standard length of sentence. In San Francisco, it was eighteen months. I spent the next year on appeal.

  RANDY KEHLER

  I registered for the draft, because at age eighteen I happened to be working on a cattle ranch near Cheyenne and the law then said when you turn eighteen, you register at the closest draft board, and that’s your permanent board.

  Around that time, I got a letter telling me to report for induction. So I went to the Oakland, California, induction center and there was a long line of young men who were about to be inducted that day. There was a line on the floor, and once you stepped over it, you were in—you were a member of the military. I remember getting closer and closer to the line. I had rehearsed this in my mind with trepidation. Just before I got to the line I turned around—thinking that I might be beat up or shot, or hauled off and arrested for what I was about to do—and I turned around to the guys behind me and I said, “I’m not going. This war is wrong. We should all be refusing to fight in this war. Let’s all go home.” And I walked out. Nobody blinked. Nobody did anything.

  In the end I was indicted out of Wyoming on five counts, carrying a potential of five years on each one. I only remember four of them. One was nonpossession of a draft card. One was failure or refusal to give current address. I would get mailings asking for my current address and I’d just throw them away. Another one was refusing a physical examination. Another was refusing induction.

  DAVID HARRIS

  When my appeal was finally turned down, I chose not to take the appeal any further. I wanted to get my time done. At that point Joan was five months pregnant, and the issue was, do you go in and get out earlier, or do you wait? It was a hard call. So she ended up having to go through childbirth by herself—she had people there, but not me. I’d been looking down the barrel of prison for three years at this point. I wanted to get going.

  On July 17, 1969, there I was, in San Francisco County Jail, where I was for a month. We staged a hunger strike, “we” being all the prisoners in the federal cell block. I was the only draft prisoner; the rest were you name it: car thieves, dope dealers, whatever. A month later they moved me to a prison in Safford, Arizona, where they were concentrating the West Coast draft prisoners. I walked in and it was full of people I had organized. At one point I shared a cell with another resister who I had organized, who had started as a defensive halfback in the Rose Bowl for UCLA, and then walked into the induction center in Los Angeles, grabbed a stack of files, and walked out into the street and burned them.

  RANDY KEHLER

  Instead of facing trial in Wyoming, and then prison, I could have gone to Canada, but I thought that was the most difficult and horrible option, because I thought I wouldn’t ever be able to come back home. I didn’t know that later there would be amnesty. I didn’t want to be separated from my family, my community, and all the people I knew and loved. I said, “I’m not going to let them chase me out of my country. I refuse to flee.”

  The other option was to start cooperating. I definitely wasn’t going to do that. I could have gone underground—Dan Berrigan*3 was underground at the time. I heard him speak, but I didn’t then know him. I thought, Hiding? I would need to go from place to place, cloak-and-dagger stuff, surfacing and then going back under. I thought, I’m not into that. You couldn’t be in touch with your family and friends, and you had to keep moving because you would be somewhat of a burden for whoever was hiding you; you would risk their well-being and safety. I just thought, I can’t imagine doing that, any more than I can imagine being forced out of my country.

  RICK AYERS

  We created a hostel for deserters only. It was a house we rented that only had three bedrooms, but it had a basement, and at any time we’d have between twelve to fifteen people. We learned to do fake IDs, because we were very defiant, so it wasn’t just getting them legal, although we had a bunch of lawyers helping us; but it was also getting ID for those who couldn’t get legal. We openly did marriages with Canadian women, and interestingly enough, a few of them turned into love. A lot of Canadian activist women did that. We had these GIs who would come to us and say, “I ran away from my base, and was hitchhiking. I had short hair, and someone picked me up, and I said, ‘I’m a deserter, help me.’ And they said, ‘Okay, I’ll help you. Get down.’ ” There was so much support in the land that these guys got across the border because they threw themselves at the mercy of the public, and the public would say, “What can I do for you?” It was very moving, and very beautiful. We had people who were in the Presidio 27 who were charged with mutiny, which you can get executed for.*4

  Credit 5.4

  GIs in uniform brazenly lead an antiwar march in San Francisco on October 12, 1968. In 1968, 155,536 soldiers deserted or went AWOL (absent without leave). Two days after this march, 27 soldiers in the Presidio military jail staged a sit-down protest.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN SHAMES.

  DANIEL ELLSBERG (RAND defense analyst)

  When President Nixon was elected he promised to end the war, and in August of 1969 everybody thought that the war was ending, so the emphasis of the War Resisters International*5 conference that I attended that month was on other liberation movements around the world. But I’d been talking to my friend who worked with Kissinger on the National Security Council [NSC], Mort Halperin, and he told me that not only was the war not going to end, but it was going to get larger.

  RANDY KEHLER

  Every three years War Resisters International would have a conference, and that August of ’69 it was held in the U.S. for the first time, at Haverford College, which has a Quaker background, and I was asked to give a talk there. Probably I’d been indicted and was about to get sent to prison. So a bunch of us from the War Resisters League in San Francisco jumped in a VW van and drove across the country to Haverford. That’s where I met Dan Ellsberg. He was with a brilliant young Indian woman named Janaki Tschannerl and, frankly, I think Dan was in love with her. She was a Gandhian and she’d introduced him to Gandhian thought, which blew his mind. “What do you mean, you don’t believe in an enemy? In Gandhian thinking, no one’s your enemy?”*6

  DANIEL ELLSBERG

  I chose not to potentially embarrass RAND by going to the conference on RAND money, and I paid my own airfare and took vacation time. But nevertheless, I was a consultant to Kissinger at that point so I was not anxious to be photographed in a vigil line for one of the resisters who was about to go to jail, Bob Eaton, in front of the Philadelphia post office. I seriously tried to think how to get out of this. I thought of being sick, but there were several more days of the conference, so was I going to stay sick? Or did I have to turn up miraculously recovered the day after the vigil? And that was embarrassing. I couldn’t tell them I can’t bear to be photographed at these things. And finally I figured I just had to go. I didn’t have the guts to refuse. So we go out to the first vigil and stand around outside the post office. Bob Eaton is going to be sentenced and sent away inside the courthouse. We were standing arm to arm outside the courthouse in a vigil and I was thinking, Boy, if there is a photograph of this, my colleagues in the Pentagon and at RAND would think that I’d gone insane, because they would consider this the lowest-prestige-imaginable way of influencing policy, to be standing on a street corner, literally like somebody on a soapbox, or a homeless person dragging a cart with a sign on it. I was obviously giving up the chance to write memos to the president, and to Henry Kissinger. I was with long-haired hippie typ
es from all over the world, and they were all pacifists, the lowest of the low. But you get used to anything. As the hours went by, I began handing out leaflets myself. I finally got enthusiastic about it. I would even go into the street and give leaflets to cars at the stoplight.

  RANDY KEHLER

  I’d been introduced to Dan before I gave my speech. I wasn’t even sure what his background was, but I was told that he was not one of us. Not hostile in any way, but just from a different background. I wondered, What’s he doing here? It turns out he had just finished working on a top-secret Pentagon study. He’d risen through the ranks of the Defense Department under McNamara and then RAND.

  DANIEL ELLSBERG

  Randy Kehler was speaking to a full auditorium about how he had gotten into the War Resisters League through the people he met at the Santa Rita jail, from draft resistance in Oakland. I was watching in this auditorium with people from all over the world, from India and Vietnam and Japan and East Europe, and I was thinking, I’m so glad that they can see this man, Randy Kehler, because he’s the best we’ve got. He’s the best young American. I was proud of being an American, and that they were seeing him. And so here I’m hearing that the best thing he can do with his life is go to prison.