Those Were the Days

One of the many myths that have buried the true history of the Vietnam War is that the anti-war movement was motivated by selfish desire, especially among college students, to avoid the draft (a view that conveniently ignores the movement’s throngs of female participants, whose gender automatically exempted them from the draft).  Quite to the contrary, students demonstrating against the draft deferment tests [College Qualification Test, a.k.a. the Selective Service Examination, an “objective” assessment of each test taker’s verbal and mathematical skills, to be used [...] to determine who was entitled to that precious 2S deferment and who should be shipped off to Vietnam] were specifically undermining and targeting their own privileges and exemptions, which, as they passionately argued, came at the expense of poor and working class people.  At Stanford, a number of people actually disrupted the test.  The young men involved thus proved that their goal was not to avoid the draft but to end it, since they had been explicitly warned that their actions would jeopardize their own deferments.  When students filed in to take the Selective Service test, other demonstrators handed them the SDS “alternative test” on the history of U.S.-Vietnam relations.  About ninety students organized a sit-in in the President’s office.  In a manifesto issued from the sit-in they denounced their own privileged status: “We oppose the administration of the Selective Service Examination . . . because it discriminates against those who by virtue of economic deprivation are at a severe disadvantage in taking such a test. . . . [The] less privileged, Negroes, Spanish-Americans, and poor whites, must fight a war in the name of principles such as freedom and equality of opportunity which their own nation has denied them.”  “Conscription,” they declared, has throughout American history “invariably been biased in favor of the wealthy and privileged.”

Enter young Mitt Romney, right on cue, waving a sign denouncing the anti-war students.   He, like his fellow almost all-male participants in this pro-war demonstration, fervently argued in support of the war and the draft.  But not, of course, for himself.

When Mitt enrolled at Stanford back in the spring of 1965, [...d]raftees were not yet being used in combat.   So Mitt and his dad clearly intended the fall of 1965 to be the beginning of a fine four-year career at Stanford for the young man.  But Mitt’s last month as a Stanford student was May 1966.  Why?

Although the Selective Service Exam radically reduced the chances of college men, especially those with the test-taking skills of most Stanford students, to be conscripted into the Vietnam War, it was no guarantee of long-lasting deferment.  There were other, surer, escapes from the Vietnam nightmare.   One of the very best was the ministry. 

  Counterpunch

And maybe Mitt's grades weren't good enough to ensure a dodge of the draft? But I'm stuck on marvelling at the fact that privileged Stanford students were protesting the unfairness of the draft. I can't imagine finding even 90 these days.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.