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Some executive orders issued early in a president’s term have stirred considerable opposition. President Jimmy Carter’s Executive Order 11967 and its accompanying Proclamation 4483 were among those and caught a lot of flak. It was that order—issued 44 years ago come Thursday, Carter’s first full day in office—that offered pardons to Americans who had non-violently violated the Selective Service Act by resisting, evading or helping others evade the Vietnam era draft. The key elements:
1. The Attorney General shall cause to be dismissed with prejudice to the government all pending indictments for violations of the Military Selective Service Act alleged to have occurred between August 4, 1964 and March 28, 1973 with the exception of the following:
(a) Those cases alleging acts of force or violence deemed to be so serious by the Attorney General as to warrant continued prosecution; and
(b) Those cases alleging acts in violation of the Military Selective Service Act by agents, employees or officers of the Selective Service System arising out of such employment.2. The Attorney General shall terminate all investigations now pending and shall not initiate further investigations alleging violations of the Military Selective Service Act between August 4, 1964 and March 28, 1973, with the exception of the following:
(a) Those cases involving allegations of force or violence deemed to be so serious by the Attorney General as to warrant continued investigation, or possible prosecution; and
(b) Those cases alleging acts in violation of the Military Selective Service Act by agents, employees or officers of the Selective Service System arising out of such employment.
This amnesty included the 3,250 of us who had refused to be drafted but chose not to hide out or leave for Canada or other countries and were indicted, convicted, and imprisoned. As a consequence of my refusal to be drafted, except for three weeks of processing at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, I spent nearly 14 months of what was meant to be a two-year sentence at the minimum security federal prison camp at Safford, Arizona, northeast of Tucson about 40 miles from the New Mexico border. It has long since been turned into a full-fledged prison in which one of the first inmates was John Ehrlichman, President Richard Nixon’s domestic affairs adviser convicted for Watergate crimes. For four months, I was in the same building as David Harris, a co-founder of the antiwar, anti-draft grassroots organization The Resistance. At the time he was still married to folksinger Joan Baez. He was soon transferred to a more restrictive prison in Tucson.
Carter’s general amnesty wasn’t the first covering the Vietnam War era. President Gerald Ford in 1974 offered a conditional pardon to people who had violated the draft law but were willing to turn themselves in, swear an oath of loyalty, and serve 24 months of non-military alternative service.
Like Ford, Carter didn’t include deserters in his amnesty, something which many of us activists strongly objected to, arguing that those who had evaded the draft were generally white, well-educated, and middle class, while deserters were more likely to be people of color and low income, a familiar American story. Indeed, Carter himself referenced this fact on the campaign trail in 1976 when he spoke to a mostly Black audience at the Second Christian Church in Indianapolis, as reported by Charles Mohr:
Mr. Carter spoke at length, in a quiet, somber tone, of the inequalities of sacrifice borne by American classes in Vietnam.
He said, “I think the most heroic young people we’ve ever seen were those, in a way, who went to Vietnam thinking or knowing the war was wrong but because of their ignorance, because of their lack of education, because of their lack of prestige, because they didn’t know where Sweden was, or didn’t want to go to Canada, or didn’t have enough money to hide in college—they went.”
“I’ve always felt,” he continued, “and of course my thinking changes over a period of years as I see things from a different perspective, now running for President — I never thought I would in those days. But even then there was always a very deep sense of appreciation in my mind of the young people who were in Vietnam, who were castigated at home, who were despised because they went, who went because they were obeying the law, who went because they didn’t want to hide.”
“It’s hard for me,” he said, “to explain the dichotomy which exists among the American people, which is certainly mirrored in my own feelings about the war. I don’t know how to rationalize it further.”
Objecting to the whole idea of amnesty for draft evaders, much less deserters, were veteran groups and military families and countless politicians. Barry Goldwater, the Republican senator who had been wiped out in the 1964 presidential election by Lyndon Johnson, called it “the most disgraceful thing a president has ever done,” while the director of the Veterans of Foreign Wars described it as sadder “than Watergate or Vietnam itself.” Carter himself said it was the hardest decision he’d ever had to make.
Making the decision to resist the draft was also hard for many of us who made that choice. For me, not so much. Since my best high school friend had been killed in Vietnam three weeks after arriving in 1965, I had been educating myself about the war and participating in a few peaceful campus protests. Along with others, I was arrested for blocking a thoroughfare during one of these. Charges were immediately dropped, but as a student on scholarship, I was specifically called in by a university counselor to be warned that I could lose it if I kept protesting.
That didn’t sway me, and the threat was never carried out, even though there were many subsequent arrests. I soon refocused from what had been civil rights activism to spend more time opposing the war. This included giving advice to, and organizing support for, men facing the draft. I soon joined Students for a Democratic Society in those days before the organization splintered into hard ideological factions, including what would become the Weather Underground. With its 100,000 members, SDS was at the heart of the antiwar movement before the split shattered it and deeply damaged the American left.
During this time, I had the privilege of a student deferment from the draft. Practically the instant I graduated, my Selective Service classification of 1-A came through, and I was ordered to report for induction into the Army. I appeared, but when asked to sign, I said I wouldn’t. I was informed of possible penalties. “Yes,” I said, “I know.” Two weeks later I was called in for an interview with two FBI interrogators who tried to determine whether I was a threat to national security. They decided I wasn’t, and in a week I got my second notice to appear for induction. Having been in the draft resistance for four years by then, I knew full well what would happen when I refused a second time, and when I did I was given a summons and released. In court weeks later, I was not allowed to defend myself on the ground that the war was immoral just like every other resister who tried that approach. I was adjudged guilty and sentenced. I was given one week to report to a federal address. But on the morning I was to report, I was greeted at my front door by two federal marshals. After a day of hanging around in handcuffs waiting, I was sent by bus with other prisoners to Leavenworth. Three weeks later I was transported with two others to the Safford prison camp.
I had done 23 months in “reform” school and a few short sentences for protest-related activities already and so had reason to be nervous. But while tedious and boring, I never encountered violence beyond fistfights at that minimum security facility. Days were mostly spent outdoors cutting brush or, for selected groups of prisoners, maintaining or cutting trails in the Coronado National Forest. It could in no way be considered hard time, but it certainly wasn’t fun.
One thing I want to be clear about. I am not now nor was I then a pacifist. I firmly believe in self-defense, personal and national. But always and only as a last resort. So I couldn’t honestly be a conscientious objector and perform alternative service as some pacifists do. It was the Vietnam War that I opposed, not every war, although the majority of wars the United States has fought were either unnecessary or imperialist, including the longest conflict in the nation’s history, the Indian Wars of 1788-1890.
One problem I couldn’t do anything about in prison was the fact that my mother and stepfather had ceased communicating with me as soon as I let them know I was going to go to prison for refusing to be drafted. That felt crappy but it was an estrangement that had been building since my political activism was sparked in 1963. The other problem was that the library was non-existent. Prisoners were allowed to have books sent to them, and these were passed around, but it was meager fare. No TVs either. Still, my incarceration more than a decade earlier at the Industrial School for Boys in Golden, Colorado, had been worse by far, violent, abusive and deeply racist at a time the civil rights movement had barely made a dent in the national consciousness. Safford was filled with political protesters and small potatoes white-collar criminals, about a third of them Black, Latino, and Native, quite a bit lower than in the nation’s prison population overall. I got along without much friction. I was released after serving just over half my sentence.
As soon as I left prison, I began a long association with the American Indian Movement and the New American Movement until it merged with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee to become the Democratic Socialists of America. Despite my record, I had no trouble finding a job—going to work first as a printer, then in low-level positions for a couple of winning congressional campaigns, and then for the Associated Press and the Rocky Mountain News. Right about then, Jimmy Carter got himself elected president.
The day after he took the oath, he proclaimed the amnesty. He sincerely wanted to heal the national rift caused by the war. By then, my parents and I had bridged our personal rift and begun speaking to each other again. Each person who had evaded the draft or resisted it had to individually ask for their pardon. This troubled many resisters who wondered why there was no publicly proclaimed “amnesty” for the leaders who had prosecuted that war, lying about it to the American people, most particularly to the individuals who fought it, ordering grotesque atrocities like chemical defoliation, with residual effects continuing today among Vietnamese and U.S. veterans, and leaving around 3 million civilians and soldiers dead—Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Australians, South Koreans, Canadians, and Americans. And lasting trauma and disability for many millions more. But then those leaders weren’t charged so they couldn’t be pardoned.
The month my friend Manny was sent to Vietnam in 1965, the Gallup Poll asked Americans, “In view of the developments since we entered the fighting in Vietnam, do you think the U.S. made a mistake sending troops to fight in Vietnam?” 24% said yes. By the time I was on my way to prison in 1969, 58% said yes. By 1990, 72% thought the war had been a mistake. By the time Gallup asked about Vietnam again, in 2000, 69% thought the war had been a mistake, but only 60% thought the United States had supported the South Vietnamese.
A mistake happens when you accidentally over-salt the minestrone. It is not a mistake, not an accident to lie the country into war, lie about its progress, continue to send more troops even when you know the war cannot be won, and then mistreat those who fought the war by denying that there even is such a thing as post-traumatic stress syndrome and health effects from defoliants.
During the campaign, Carter had been booed at the American Legion for bringing up amnesty for draft evaders. But it didn’t deter him even though he supported the war until 1974, a year after the Paris Peace Accords were signed. In His Very Best, a new biography of Carter, author Jonathan Alter writes:
And so, on his first day in office, Carter summoned Max Cleland a double-amputee Vietnam veteran who was his choice to head the Veterans Administration, and Sam Brown, the antiwar activist slated to be the new director of ACTION, the agency that ran the Peace Corps and domestic national service programs. Cleland and Brown would be the first Carter administration officials sworn in—before even the secretary of state. When Cleland told the president he’d heard that congressional Democrats would support the pardons, Carter replied, “I would do it even if a hundred senators opposed it.” […]
Many veterans who had voted for Carter ten weeks earlier now regretted it, but for the new president, that was a fair price to pay for closing a painful chapter in American history. “This was one of the bravest decisions I’ve ever seen a president make,” remembered Bob Kerrey, who as a Navy SEAL lost part of a leg in combat in Vietnam and went on to serve Nebraska as governor and senator.
Despite the clamor, Carter has never regretted his pardoning decision. I’ve never regretted choosing to be locked up for opposing a misbegotten war.
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