Draft Resistance Indicted

Indictments

On January 5, 1968 Attorney General Ramsey Clark announced the indictment five men: author and pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, the chaplain of Yale University Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., 23-year-old Harvard University graduate student Michael Ferber, Mitchell Goodman, 44, of New York and Temple, Me., and Marcus Raskin, 33, of Washington, co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies, a private research organization on charges of conspiring to counsel young men to violate the draft laws. (NYT article)

According to the indictment, Dr. Spock, Mr. Coffin, Mr. Raskin, and Mr. Goodman agreed to sponsor a nationwide draft-resistance program that would include disrupting the induction processes at various induction centers, making public appeals for young men to resist the draft and to refuse to serve in the military services and issuing calls for registrants to turn in their draft cards.

The government accused the men of having violated Title 50, Section 462(A) of the United States Code Appendix, a section of the Universal Military Training and Service Act that dates to World War I. It declared that any person was guilty of violating the law if he “knowingly counsels, aids, or abets another to refuse or evade registration or service in the armed forces” or if he “shall knowingly hinder or interfere or attempt to do so in any way, by force or violence or otherwise,” with the administration of the draft. It also makes it a crime to conspire to commit these acts.

Draft Resistance Indicted

Draft resistance increases

On January 12, 1968, the New York Times reported that,  The Government disclosed…that more young men were prosecuted and convicted last year for draft violations than in any year since World War II. (Draft convictions)

On May 12, 1968 a jury was selected. It was an all-male jury (Jury selected).

Draft Resistance Indicted

Four guilty

On June 14, 1968, the jury found the four men guilty.

On July 10, 1968, Judge Francis J W Fort sentenced the four men to two years in prison

On July 11, 1969, because of insufficient evidence of a conspiracy, “The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed today the convictions of Dr. Benjamin Spock and three other men who were found guilty in 1968 of conspiring to counsel evasion of the draft.”

Draft Resistance Indicted

1968 Vietnam Turning Point

1960s Potpourri 

The 1960s:  sexual revolution, LSD, civil rights, black nationalism, feminism, political unrest, assassinations, the Great Society, and Vietnam with a magical mystery tour soundtrack played by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin,and Jimi Hendrix.

1968 Vietnam Turning Point

1968

And if one had to pick one year of that tumultuous decade that was “more” 1960s than any other, 1968 would be a prime candidate.

And if Vietnam was the decade’s salient feature, 1968 was a year that many Americans decided that the war was a waste of life and limb.

1968 Vietnam Turning Point

Light at the end of the tunnel (again)

On January 26, 1968 in Time Magazine, General Westmoreland said, “the Communists seem to have run temporarily out of steam.” The government had convinced us that the number of enemy killed, not the gaining and holding of territory, determined success. Such a policy had led to generals inflating the number of enemy killed even including civilians killed as the by-product of battles.

Three days later, the nation that heralded and commemorated George Washington’s Christmas night crossing of the Delaware River and sneak attack on the Hessian troops barracked in Trenton, was angered when the North Vietnamese and Vietcong launched the surprise Tet Offensive.

The US and South Vietnamese forces defeated the attacks which did not spark the popular uprising the North had  hoped, but back home in the USA those confident military reports of a weakened enemy became highly questionable.

The Battle of Hue during the Tet Offensive typified this turning point. While the American and South Vietnamese forces defeated the Communist forces,  the Pyrrhic victory cost the Allied victors 668 dead and 3,707 wounded . (NYT book review of  HUE 1968,  A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden)

1968 Vietnam Turning Point

Walter Cronkite speaks

On February 27, 1968, well-respected CBS News anchor  Walter Cronkite editorialized that “...it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out [of the war] then will to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”

On March 31, 1968, President Johnson announced that he would not run for a second term. (NYT retrospective article) (full text of LBJ’s announcement)

1968 Vietnam Turning Point

Bloodiest year

December 31, 1968:  the bloodiest year of the war came to an end. 536,000 American servicemen were stationed in Vietnam, an increase of over 50,000 from 1967.

Estimates from Headquarters U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam indicated that US and Vietnamese forces had killed 181,150 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese during 1968.

However, Allied losses were also up: 27,915 South Vietnamese, 14,584 Americans (a 56 percent increase over 1967), and 979 South Koreans, Australians, New Zealanders, and Thais were reported killed during 1968.

Since January 1961, more than 31,000 U.S. servicemen had been killed in Vietnam and over 200,000 U.S. personnel had been wounded.

The war that year had cost $77 billion (1968) dollars–$542 billion today!

In 2017, American troops strength in Afghanistan was approximately 11,000 and 11 Americans had died there that same year. We had spent approximately $5.7 billion.

1968 Vietnam Turning Point

Hero James Tom Davis

James T Davis, Tom to his friends, was one of the first American to die in action in Vietnam. He was killed on December 22, 1961. He was 25 years old.

President Lyndon Johnson, in a speech made years later, referred to Specialist 4 James T. Davis as “…the first American…”  to die in Vietnam and now several web sites refer to Davis this way. Even this blog had listed Davis that way. I have corrected that misstatement.

As the Virtual Wall site points out, “The first hostile action losses were two members of an Army advisory team, Major Dale R Buis of Pender, Nevada and Master Sergeant Chester M Ovnany, of Copperas Cove, Texas, who were killed (along with two ARVN security guards) in a VC raid on the team’s Bien Hoa headquarters on 8 July 1959.

None of which, of course, detracts in any way from SP4 Davis’s service to our country.

 

In 1961, the word Vietnam in 1961 meant nothing to most Americans. Only government officials involved in the deployment of American forces, the families of those forces, and  the very few media reporters assigned to the story could find it on a map.

Hero James Tom Davis

Cryptologist

Davis was in the 3rd Radio Research Unit. It used electronics to pinpoint the enemy’s location. The Vietnamese terrain made that job difficult and cryptologists had to get in close.

Traveling in country, a landmine struck the truck Davis was in.  Davis and the other Vietnamese soldiers with him fought the following attack, but all died. (for a fuller explanation of Davis’s job See The Story of a Cryptologic Hero for a fuller explanation of Davis’s job and his death)

Hero James Tom Davis

Davis Station

 

In 2009, Billy Petross, a friend of Tom wrote: I first met James Davis when we were in school at Tennessee Tech. During the short time that I had the honor of knowing James we became very close friends. James was an avid fisherman and we spent many hours together on the Dale Hollow lake near his home in Livingston. He was a quite and unassuming person. I met James’ mother at their home in Livingston. She was a wonderful person. I recall that once she fixed a steak dinner for us after one of our fishing trips. I was aware that James dropped out of college and joined the army because I recall trying to persuade him to stay in college. The last time I saw James was once after he joined the army he came back to the Tech campus while on leave. I never saw him after that. The next time I heard anything about James was an article in the Orange County Register in California about a James Davis from Livingston, TN who was the first soldier killed in action in Vietnam. He was a good friend. Billy Pettross  June 3, 2009 

Hero James Tom Davis

The Wall

Other comments about James T Davis from The Wall site)

Cryptologic Hero James T Davis

James T Davis’s name appears on Panel 1E, Row 4 of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Hero James Tom Davis