<Begin Segment 17>

PI: Now, at the same time, my draft situation was going along, back-and-forth letters between me and my draft board. Nothing was happening. But in 1964, in August just after the Democratic Convention or at about the same time in that summer, the Vietnam War officially began. Now, we had been sending more troops to Vietnam, but fairly quietly. And in August of 1964, supposedly the North Korean -- or the North Vietnamese, without provocation, attacked a U.S. ship in the Gulf of Tonkin right off of North Vietnam. Well that ship as it turned out later -- and I.F. Stone was the person who raised the first real questions about this -- it was not unprovoked. We in fact had been provoking the North Vietnamese, sending in surveillance and harassing their coast. And they had retaliated. There never was in fact an armed attack on the navy destroyer. But, and U.S. officials as it turned out later through the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s flat out lied about what had happened because they wanted an excuse to start bombing North Vietnam. So Congress passed, with only two or three dissenting votes, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, saying that the president had the power to commit American troops in Vietnam, literally as he, as he pleased. Congress was not going to second-guess the president. Tremendous, patriotic rally behind the flag kind of thing.

Well, the week after Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, I was indicted by a federal grand jury for violating the draft law. Back in 1963 I got my notice to report for military service, and I had simply ignored it. In fact, I sent a letter to my draft board, "I'm not coming." Show up at Fort Dix, Kentuckyat 6 o'clock in the morning, when I was living in Washington. And I really hadn't thought that much about what would happen, the consequences of that. And it was a year later that I got this notice that I'd been indicted. And the Justice Department -- Bobby Kennedy was then the attorney general -- the Justice Department had decided that they would indict a draft resister in every one of the federal districts around the country to send a message -- we're now at war and you've got to obey the draft law -- because they had anticipated correctly, first, that they would have to draft hundreds of thousands of troops to serve in Vietnam and, secondly, that there would be resistance to this. And they wanted to stop that resistance as quickly as possible. This was before, or about the time people were burning their draft cards, and there was serious concern in the government that there would be a widespread draft resistance. And in fact, the draft resistance movement was pretty strong at the time.

AI: So this was a huge shift from the time that you had first sent your draft card back...

PI: Right.

AI: ...to now we're in 1964, and the draft resistance movement has really grown tremendously.

PI: And I was very active in that draft resistance movement. I had, in fact circulated before I left Antioch, had circulated a pamphlet all around the Midwest college campuses urging people to send their draft cards back and resist the draft. In fact, I had been visited by the FBI after that, while I was on the Antioch campus. They had threatened to come back and arrest me for sedition, and they never showed up. But I realized, I guess at that time that there was a possibility that at some point this would put me in, have to make a choice -- go to prison or cooperate. And I could always have gotten out of it by becoming a conscientious objector.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.