Vietnam: A Television History; Interview with James M. Fallows, 1982

Did you learn about that. What if I could I'd like to take a couple steps back because the the ideas that I brought to that time was the last year I was in college in 19 fall of 1969 affected the way I felt I had grown up in a small town in southern California where Barry Goldwater carried when he ran it and so when I was in high school and I was to graduate from high school in 1966 the big build ups in Vietnam were underway by that time but I took them entirely for granted because everything that was part of government policy was part of what one did in my town. And so when I went to college in the fall of 66. I first began by thinking that of course this war was right. The government had had endorsed it and therefore I would too. I also thought it one step back in my subconscious that was something I would never be involved with because it was four years from now before I'd be be out of college. As time went on that Harvard where right was in college the first of those premises namely this was automatically right became eroded and the

time when I remember it just very clearly happening was in January of nine hundred sixty seven when Arthur Goldberg came to Harvard to explain the war and he was in a debate with some professor there and the professor spent an hour making the case about why this was wrong and why we're going to lose etc. etc. and I thought well now Arthur Goldberg will stand up and give the answers. And he stood up and he talked and he didn't give the answers and that was a time when in my own life to the time when when I felt my my feelings change over the next couple of years I ended up going to marches at the Pentagon and in Boston things I would never have done in my previous life it was it was out of character for my family for my town that I didn't go to the extremes of being in the STDs or the weatherman but I thought this was a wrong enterprise and that people needed to oppose it. It then came to be the the fall of 1969 the last year and you know we we move now to the story. Yes and then finally we move now

to the fall nine thousand six hundred one. Change in time. It was the fall of 69 I was beginning my last year in college and also when he had just put in the draft lottery. As I remember and again I didn't really think that I was going to be directly involved nighties these things and they had been drawn to the water I think I was coming back from seeing my relatives for Thanksgiving and Pennsylvania that was coming back into Boston I heard that my birth date August 2nd to come up as number 45 on the draft list and suddenly I realized this was something that I had to figure out what to do about this I had not really thought I would have to before there were there were many confused spirits and climates in the air those days that were going through my own mind. The one thing I knew was that I I didn't want to go to the war. I had I was not as cynical then as I might have been were I more cynical I would have

realized that I could have joined the Navy and gone to a language candidate school or I could have gone and been an intelligence officer in Germany or something but I wasn't that knowing about the world I thought and we all seem to think the choice was staying out of the draft or going and being killed. That was that was the way the world worked. So I knew that I didn't want to have to go do that. I'm not sure the proportions here are some part of it was feeling this was wrong I didn't want to be involved in an incorrect enterprise. People were very high in the literature of civil disobedience in those days. Part of it was feeling I didn't want to go. I didn't want to go be in the foxhole. There was an additional complication which is that in December I want a Rhodes Scholarship. So I was I was going to be fine ASCO spent the next two years in Oxford and I want to do that instead of going to Vietnam. So the the course that I ended up choosing and it was I was again in the spirit of those times was to look for the the painless way out namely a physical deferment.

I consider this conscientious objector thing but never went through with that because I wasn't really a conscientious objector to all wars ever I was against this and against my being in it. And so one of the best selling items in the Harvard Square bookstores now is they have something called the draft physical. And it was a list of all the things people could get out for. And I saw it when I I looked through that that. There was one way I could beat the rap which was I was then very very skinny my butt weighed about 130 pounds in those days and that was on the on the merits that was below the height and weight qualifications for somebody of my height and with a combination of just generalized anxiety and with determination to get out I lost about 10 pounds over the next few months so that the time of the draft physical I weighed about a hundred twenty pounds and was a real specimen of May she ation in the you know if you get lots of fun you describe was quite

right the less you get. I mean you're hearing what they eat. When this came to a head for me was in May of 1970 school year was over when the school year had been closed down in fact because this was a few days after the show. These all of this came to a head for me and May of 1970 when it was the end of my last year at college the school year had been called off because of the the riots in Cambridge and elsewhere after the shootings at Kent State. The invasion of Cambodia. And just about this time was it was a physical examination time and the way they did that in Boston was to have one day at the Boston Navy Yard for each of the local draft boards. There was one day that was Cambridge day and what Cambridge day map was maybe 5 percent of people who lived in Cambridge and 95 percent who went to Harvard or MIT. So at

6 a.m. in the morning I showed up at city hall in Cambridge shivering because I was so skinny it with all these other people and I surveyed the scene around me. There were people and Red Hand bams with their torso was all painted with various obscenities. There were people getting the HO HO HO Chee man chants going up and there was an almost everyone's hand from Cambridge de the doctor's letter. The trick back. The psychiatrist excuse the B homosexual exemption etc.. Everybody had had prepared to get out in some way. So we rode the bus over to the pasta Navy Yard this was one of the rare encounter any of us have had with the organization of the military except to be sitting outside the Pentagon. Cetera they took us in there. There was an interesting change in the people I had running the introductory indoctrination first they had one person who obviously had not been through Cambridge days before and he was shaken in a few minutes in Atlanta people were yelling at him and screaming telling him to get the fuck out. Now the rest

they say got rid of him and brought him somebody who'd been through many of these things before said look you got all day. Now we can take as long as you want. Maybe you can you're going to go through with this. There were many little grace notes to this event. They gave that as a mental classification test everybody if you're sitting before you went to the physical and of course all of the all the wiseguys from from the Cambridge day were deliberately failing the test so they would be trying to get out and the examiner told him no that wasn't going to do. That was over. We started going through the line and each station of the cross if you will each one of the examining points in the Navy Yard there was some new little surprise there were some people who had been hoping to get out because of the anti disciplinary and personality traits they would throw cups of urine. The order because I saw that happen twice. There were people who had surprise messages on their underwear around their genitals for the doctors that went through. The doctors had seen this all before they were there much less spaced my own epiphany came

as I was going through the and it reached a heightened weight station realized that I was going to make a cut and finally came to a doctor who was relying on marginal cases like mine. There's obviously nothing really wrong with a person but technically it was a violation and he looked at me said he was looking over the chart he said Well have you ever considered suicide. This was a new thought to me he said Oh yes I've been feeling very depressed and anxious recently and I looked at the ground and he finally stared at me and I knew that he knew exactly what was going on the road disqualified or one wire or whatever but was putting me in the side of the people who were not going to go. I felt at that moment I think of a lot of people felt and some sense of that instantaneous sense was relief. The thing that people had been planning for had had had worked out but it was for anyone who was not blind. It was complicated by several other senses one with a sense of just shame and humiliation that this is the one thing in my life that I most wish I had not

done. And and just as a tangent the course of principle in those days would have been for people to formally refuse induction as as a few few people did. That was one of the complications a sense of personal embarrassment. There was a different one to it that many people tried to blind themselves to it which came just as we were nearing the end of our session as people were getting ready to get back on a bus to go back to Harvard to go back to their their future lives because they started bringing in the people from another part of Boston not from the university part from the white working class district of Boston. And much as four out of five of my friends were getting exempted 9 out of 10 of these people were going through being approved going off to war. And I think that was when everybody had to face the fact of what was going on and what the consequences or actions were that we were not going but somebody else was in there seeing people who were going to be going to be in the army. That moment has stayed with me you know the intervening 12 years

because I think it says something. It says something about individuals but it says something probably more important in a practical sense about the way we run our society. What it says about individuals is that there was a a class of privileged people who took the expedient course who were who were willing to to lead it who are willing to blind themselves to the consequences of what they were doing. And I didn't know you was that fun. Near the end of the induction day the Boston Navy Yard is that people from Cambridge are getting ready to go back on the bus and go back home to their their new lives. We realized the other complication our feelings and it was because the buses started or I started running from a different district in Boston not a university one but a white working class district of Boston. And while four out of five nine out of ten of

my comrades from Harvard MIT were getting out with their doctors excuses the same proportion of people from this part of town were marching right through the physical work going off to the military going off to the war. Nobody could avoid recognizing what that that meant then we knew that while we were not going to war we're seeing the people who were missing people who were going to be killed. The question is does this matter. I think it mattered a lot both both then and now. The reason it mattered then was showing the fraudulence of the basic reasoning that people like me had used in choosing our courses of action. That reasoning I remember hearing about some of the the draft counseling seminars at Harvard. They say we should think of ourselves as sand in the columns of the great war machine and in general Hershey the Selective Service director was running out of bodies and by exempting ourselves from his grasp it would be slowing down the pace of the war. What was obvious to anybody who

was not and who the personal interests were wrapped up in believing that that argument as ours were what should've been obvious is that we weren't bringing the war to a stuff that way there was no shortage of bodies what we were doing was making sure that. Parents like ours the most. Some but the more influential classes of the nation were entirely spared the cost of this war that that because their children weren't going to be paying at a cost either in terms of going off the fighting or having to do a painful course of of of resistance going to prison or whatever. You didn't have mothers from Beverly Hills and Belmont and Evanston and all the other equivalent communities around the nation screaming at a congressman you know who killed my son we have to stop this. There wasn't that direct tie between the most influential parts of the country and the policy of the war. Yes.

And it also it taught lessons about individuals and about the way a society should should be run. What it says about individuals and what obviously has been on my mind since then on many other people's is that is that a class of the most privileged people took a course that was that was without character that was was not something they they should have done they didn't do the brave or correct thing I think for people for men of my generation this is a that will be a permanent breach. People who who took one course or another during Vietnam about the way society should be run now I think it teaches a slightly different lesson because you can't set up the rules for a nation on the principle that people will do heroic things. You can expect that you can expect them to rise above self-interest. What you have to do is Ally their self-interest with the things you want to see accomplished. Which is why I think that if there had been no student deferment during that the middle 1960s work there would have been no war in Vietnam because everybody would have known from the beginning the political costs would be paid. That's why I think we are

making a tragic mistake to have a volunteer force now because it's the same thing as what I was saying about induction day in the Boston Navy Yard. But institutionalized and more extreme because now no one from the good colleges is gone. Very few people from the good colleges are going to that into the service and it's it's much more foreign to our nation economically and educationally than it was even during during Vietnam so I think. The lesson I have drawn about society is that we need to have a universal draft with no exceptions. We want to avoid that painful experience again. Yeah right. It seems clear at least to me that that among the decisive influences and why we're going to Vietnam the way we did in wide wide blade aligned the painful way it did for so long

was that politicians especially Lyndon Johnson made the decision to fight this war on what's been called the political cheap to not mobilize the nation and. Well which meant not mobilizing reserve to start with. It also meant something more cynical than that which was to deliberately I think deflect the cost from people in colleges and graduate schools and you will hate it now seems seems astonishing but it's true that until the spring of 1968 there was a deferment for graduate school students so that if you have enough money you could stay in school until you were 26 you could buy your way out for ever of any of the cost of that year when they graduate school deferment was removed in 1988 it was this tremendous Jack upward in protest of the war. Part of that have to do with the Tet Offensive but a lot of it I think had to do with the fact that many people were suddenly touched in their personal lives lives. But this is why I think that if those feedbacks between all of the different classes of the

nation all strata of our society the feedbacks between them and political decisions had been building from the beginning if there had been not only no graduate school deferments but no 2x deferment for college students we would never have fought that war because the politicians would have known from the beginning that it could not have been fought on the cheap if it was going to be fought then the children of congress men and of doctors and the bankers were going to be there doing the fighting too and that they were either going to have to fight to find a war they could justify to the public and pursue a normal military ways or else they were going to be able to do it. And that was that's a mistake we can't pay. You know this this may be somewhat at odds what you're really looking for in the prevailing political vision and what I would was young was that of capitalism and liberty under siege. The idea was that politicians like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan who I supported in his first race for governor of California

1966 worked for him as a teenager. They were the way to arrest the tide of socialism and of international compromise and things like that. And in this setting the war in Vietnam seemed like a like the right thing for America to be doing this was this was taking it a step against the communists here as opposed to Pearl Harbor or San Francisco and so while I was in high school I thought of this as a perfectly normal thing it was like the Korean War which is only 10 years in the past after all was part of defending liberty around the world I'm the only person I knew in my high school who questioned it was somebody who for that reason became a weirdo. He was that he just was ostracized from all things was not part of normal high school society and that was the the the mental baggage I took with me when I went off to college. And you know. The first time I had a sense that the war was going to touch me personally the first time I knew that in my

soul was in the fall of 1969 or beginning of my last year in college when the draft lottery had just been introduced I was had spent Thanksgiving weekend to my relatives in Pennsylvania was coming back to Cambridge and I heard on the radio that the lottery had been held and that my birthday which was August 2nd to come up number 45 that is a sure draft and that was I guess the first time that it struck me that I had to figure out for myself not in the abstract not in terms of political realities of what I was going to do. Well yes the you know this is this is a new thought this is the sort of time the. The scene that presented itself that the Boston Navy Yard as the people from Cambridge started going through was was a lot of talented well-educated privileged people who had decided that the way for them to carry out their political beliefs and their personal salvation was to take on the most loathsome sort of personality traits and so there were people who were

who were yelling and demonstrating and chanting ho ho ho Chee man they were people who would never be rude in their normal lives who were unbelievably rude to the orderly and the sergeants who were steering them around. Probably the extreme of this was something that I saw twice which was as you passed the urinalysis station where you're seeing if you had diabetes people would come up holding this vial of urine as nine year the orderly flipped it in his face and that I think was that that was the extreme of what what this line of thought led people to. Back at the end of the physical they had a doctor who ruled on cases like mine a very marginal case of whether somebody was was fit or not. I was led in front of this guy and he looked over the folder showing that I was basically healthy but I was somehow very much underweight and he looked at me. He had a fatherly air like my own father a doctor and

sized up what was going on. Look in my eyes and said we were considered suicide. This was a new thought to me and I said oh yes suicide I've been feeling very unstable very much under pressure. He looked at me for a second again I turned my eyes to the ground because I knew what was going on he knew what was going on. He picked up a form again and dashed across it disqualified one why would ever the logo was handed to me and walked out and he had I don't know what was going through his mind because perhaps he he was a willing accomplice in all this he knew what was was happening to perhaps his own children were in a similar situation but I saw him go through that exercise several times that day with people other than me. I think yes you know you did.