Defying the Draft

Abstract

Michael S. Foley.Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xv + 449 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, notes, and index. $55.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Americans, as the 2004 presidential campaign makes vivid, still don't know just what to think about the Vietnam War, military service in it, and protest against it. John Kerry thought it improper to convert his social privilege into an exemption from fighting in Vietnam, which he could have easily done. He came home a decorated veteran, but also a bitter foe of the war. Kerry has advertised both his participation in and opposition to the war as expressions of an electable patriotism that combines duty to country with duty to conscience. Yet even he, the "war hero," has struggled to shake the "soft on defense" label by virtue of having spoken out against a war that most Americans came to regard as a mistake. President Bush, by contrast, avoided active duty in Vietnam by means of a posh assignment in the Texas Air National Guard. Yet Bush claims to be the quintessential war president, resolved to keep America safe by being tough with its enemies in ways his purportedly feckless rival would not. The election will be, in part, a referendum on war and peace, biography and image-craft as they relate to Vietnam. Into this partisan welter of images, impressions, and spin steps Michael Foley and his admirable book Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War. Foley is part of a new generation of American historians, ably displayed in the John McMillian's and Paul Buhle's edited volume The New Left Revisited (2003), who were too young to have experienced the 1960s but who have made making sense of them their mission. Foley's particular calling has been at once to rescue, rehabilitate, and even redeem a vital part of '60s protest: draft resistance, broadly defined as publicly refusing induction and aiding others in defying the draft. Rescue, because textbooks, synthetic works on the '60s, and even studies of the anti-war movement typically grant draft resistance little attention and even littler understanding. Yet draft resistance potentially imperiled the actual prosecution of the war and dramatized opposition to it ways few other forms of protest did. Rehabilitate, because the memory of draft resistance has come [End Page 573] down to us either in grossly distorted form as draft evasion (paradigmatically, going to Canada) or through the incendiary and misleading icon of a "longhair" burning a draft card. "Selfish, cowardly, and traitorous"—epithets widely used in the 1960s—still dominate public perceptions of resisters (p. 9). Redeem, finally, because Foley aspires to give draft resisters, as "the antiwar movement's equivalent to the civil rights movement's Freedom Riders and lunch-counter sit-in participants," a near sacred place in the national story of freedom and conscientious dissent (p. 9). What results is a landmark study of draft resistance, made engrossing by breathtaking research, terrific storytelling, and Foley's efforts to see in the bounded drama of anti-draft protest in Boston the playing out of the great American passion in which "contested notions of morality, citizenship, and freedom" wrestle for the minds and hearts, the bodies and souls of the young (p. 9). It is also a book with political purpose, made more urgent by 9/11 and the wars that have followed. In a preface written just before the Iraq invasion, Foley draws this conclusion: "in a republic such as ours, questioning war is a perfectly valid act of citizenship. Unity for unity's sake is best left to . . . totalitarian regimes" (p. x). If Confronting the War Machine deals with big and timeless themes, it is dearly local in its scope and fleeting in its main story. It begins on March 31, 1966, when four young men burned their draft cards at a south Boston courthouse—the first such act in the area—and were attacked by an...