I spent five years representing draft resisters and being excited about it. I have young kids that are all over the
United States now, who are "my kids" that I saved from going to the
penitentiary or being killed. I want to tell you an interesting thing
about the draft. Unlike most of the people in ACLU, of which I am a
member of the national advisory committee and I am also a contributing
attorney for the American Friends Service Committee, I'm for a draft
army over a volunteer army. The reason for it is that I learned
something. The reason is that all of the radicalism and the dissent
against the Vietnam War, virtually all of it, came from the middle and
upper classes that were caught up in the draft. Blacks and browns were
escaping from the ghettos and escaping from a second-rate war to a
first-rate war. They got better guns in the Vietnam War, they got a
pension, they got a medal, they didn't go to the penitentiary, they were
escaping from something that really was almost worse than what they had
back where they lived. Whereas the kids in the middle class, the swanky
parts of Texas and North Carolina or wherever, they knew what they were
going to lose and that's where the radicalism came from. It's an
interesting thing, I don't want to talk too long, but it is an
interesting thing that over fifty percent of my enlisted men clients
were kids from small Catholic colleges who had been educated enough in
these little rinky-dink Catholic colleges by the brothers and priests
and lay teachers to know that they were getting rooked, but because they
were Irish or Italian or German and not socially powerful enough to put
a fix on the draft board like we Episcopalians and Presbyterians could
do. Well, those were the ones who raised hell. Now, among the doctors,
over half of them are Jewish, but there is a different set of historical
reasons that we could talk about forever.
The reason that San Antonio was so important as a conscientious objector
center was that this was where the 1-A-O conscientious objectors were
sent. That means the guy who can be the medic. They
got down here and they began to see that the mission of the medic was
ultimately to kill people just like the infantryman because they were to
"sustain the fighting force," or words to that effect. That was the
motto. Kids would constantly be lectured in terms of getting a man back
on the battlefield to kill someone. So, they would have a change. They
would change from 1-A-0 to 1-0 and that's when they would come to see
me. I was the only lawyer in town representing them until a young lawyer
named Jerry Goldstein came along, who I trained and who became better at
it than I was, and then another one named Leonard Schwartz, two young
Jewish lawyers and myself. Only three lawyers out of over two thousand
that would walk into a court for those kids voluntarily. The thing that
I always resented and resent today, is that during the time when the
Vietnam War was still popular, I would walk into a federal court with a
poor little kid that didn't want to murder anybody and he would be
shaking in his boots and I would be shaking in mine and we would be
treated more rudely than . . . I would make maybe five hundred dollars
and we would be treated more rudely than a lawyer who would walk in with
a heroin pusher and making a $15,000 fee and caught with fifty pounds of
heroin in the back of a trunk somewhere. It was rough.