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H-NET BOOK REVIEW Published by H-List@h-net.msu.edu (March 2005) Foley, Michael S. _Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War_. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xviii + 449 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2767-3; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-5436-0. Reviewed for H-1960s by Michal Belknap, California Western School of Law Hell No, We Won’t Go! With tens of thousands of American soldiers and Marines bogged down in a massive and prolonged engagement in Iraq, and onetime weekend warriors from the National Guard now serving multiple tours on active duty, it is obvious that the U.S. armed forces are stretched thin. Small wonder that, despite repeated denials from the Bush administration, many people believe this country will soon see the return of something its young men have not experienced since the Vietnam War more than three decades ago: military conscription. With opposition to the current war widespread, questions inevitably arise as to how those affected would respond to a renewed draft and what effect their reaction would have on national policy. Michael S. Foley could not have picked a better time to publish _Confronting the War Machine_. This fascinating study of resistance to the draft during the period 1966-1968 seeks to assess the impact of draft resistance on America’s involvement in Vietnam. The impact was far greater than most accounts of the Vietnam era would lead one to suppose. Historians have underrated it, Foley contends, in part because they have confused “draft resistance” (the principled refusal to comply with the Selective Service laws that exposed those who practiced it to possible imprisonment) with “draft dodging” (the sort of exploitation of legal loopholes in the system that allowed, among others, former President Bill Clinton, to avoid military service lawfully). Even more, however, “The virtual omission of draft resistance from the historical accounts of the Vietnam War is a manifestation of the period’s still nagging effect on American culture and memory” (p. 13). That has kept the men (and some women) who were on the leading edge of opposition to the war from receiving the attention they deserve. Foley’s objective is to fill this gaping hole in histories of the Vietnam conflict and to establish that “draft resisters were the antiwar movement’s equivalent of the civil rights movement’s Freedom Riders and lunch-counter sit-in participants” (p. 9). Besides attempting to recover the lost history of an important social movement, Foley has sought “to capture the experiences of draft resisters and their supporters in a way that preserves individual stories while also making generalizations possible” (p. 363). He has done so by utilizing a methodology he characterizes as “a blending of sociology and history” (p 363). His sources include numerous manuscript collections at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, the Richard Nixon Presidential Project of the National Archives, and Swarthmore College’s Peace Collection, as well as several in private hands. Foley has also mined eleven newspapers (three published by college students) and conducted more than sixty oral history interviews. In addition to this impressive but traditional historical research, he sent out lengthy and detailed questionnaires to over 300 resisters and their supporters. He got back 185 of these. From them, Foley obtained extensive information about the background, experiences, and later lives of those involved in the draft resistance movement. Foley has pieced together a wealth of information from this unusual array of sources to produce a fascinating and extremely well-written book. His description of the October 16, 1967 ceremony at Boston’s Arlington Street Church, where 214 young men turned in their draft cards and an additional 67 burned theirs, is particularly moving, capturing adeptly the powerful emotions that suffused this dramatic event. Even his reports on survey information make for far more lively reading than most sociological literature. The survey data is noteworthy. Foley found that although the draft-resistance movement in New England was church-based, only 6.5 percent of those involved were ministers and divinity students, and only 2.0 percent obtained conscientious objector status [1]. The typical draft resister in Foley’s survey was a middle-class youth, whose parents were Democrats. His father was a college-educated professional, and his mother, a homemaker. More surprisingly, Foley’s data also shows that the typical resister’s father was a veteran, and that both of his parents disapproved of his turning in his draft card. Interestingly, more than 25 percent of the protesters and supporters in the survey eventually became academics. And almost 50 percent became involved in the anti-war movement of the 1980s, opposing the Reagan administration’s intervention in Latin America. Foley makes good use of more conventional sources as well. He offers insightful analysis of critical court cases like _United States v. O’Brien_, in which the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had violated the First Amendment when it made draft card burning a federal crime, and _Oestereich v. Selective Service Local Board No. 11_, in which the Supreme Court thwarted an attempt by a Wyoming draft board to revoke a divinity student’s statutory exemption when he turned in his draft card [2]. Foley shrewdly notes how “the federal government provided an unintended boost to the [antiwar] movement by indicting the men the press dubbed the ‘Boston Five’ and reclassifying and attempting to indict resisters” (p. 226). Fortunately for Foley, all of these cases arose in the vicinity of Boston, for that is the only geographic area that receives significant attention in _Confronting the War Machine_ [4]. This is a good case study, but it is not as comprehensive as the subtitle suggests. Those interested in, for example, draft resistance in the San Francisco Bay area, will need to look elsewhere for information on that subject. The coverage is also limited chronologically to the period from 1966 to 1968. The book begins with the March 1966 demonstration that spawned the _O’Brien_ case and ends around the time of the _Oestereich_ decision, when the New England Resistance was shifting its focus from defying the draft to other tactics. The limited chronological and geographic scope of _Confronting the War Machine_ are not real problems, for Foley has found plenty of useful material on what happened in the Boston area during those three critical years. But a number of flaws in the text merit mention. Foley is probably incorrect when he states that an agent from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) joined two FBI agents in infiltrating the crowd at the demonstration where the O’Brien of _United States v. O’Brien_ was arrested (p. 21). This agent was almost certainly working for a different army organization, Military Intelligence. It monitored civilian protests, while the CID was limited to investigating crimes committed by servicemen [5]. This is a minor error, apparently attributable to the sources on which Foley relies. The same does not hold for the errors he makes in discussing court cases. His explanation of the law of conspiracy (pp. 288-89) is accurate as far as it goes, but it omits one crucial requirement the prosecution must meet in such a case: proof that there was an overt act in furtherance of the defendants’ illegal agreement. This omission mars an otherwise insightful discussion of the trial of Dr. Benjamin Spock. And Foley’s summary of the Supreme Court’s holding in _United States v. Seeger_ is just plain wrong (p. 421, n.81). The shame of it is that he could easily have avoided such errors by consulting a standard treatise on criminal law or any of the numerous law review articles that explain and comment on the _Seeger_ decision [6]. Foley’s failure to examine the relevant legal literature may cause legal historians to ignore or dismiss his work. That too would be a shame, because they could and would learn a great deal about several court cases from this book. Certainly this reviewer, who thought he knew all there was to know about _Oestereich v. Selective Service System_, discovered important new facts concerning the origins of the case. Other legal historians would undoubtedly benefit from Foley’s book as well. But most are likely to dismiss it because of what will seem to them like large and obvious gaps in his research. As it stands, _Confronting the War Machine_ is a fine example of interdisciplinary scholarship. It deserves the careful attention of all students of the political and social history of the 1960s. It also deserves the attention of legal historians. One can only regret that most of them are likely to ignore this worthy addition to the historical literature on the Vietnam War. Notes [1] These figures are based not on Foley’s own 1997 survey, but rather on the New England Resistance Master File, maintained by resister Alex Jack and now contained in the Alex Jack Papers. Michael S. Foley, _Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War_ (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), p. 349. [2] United States v. O’Brien, 391 U.S. 367 (1968). [3] Oestereich v. Selective Service System Local Board No. 11, Cheyenne, Wyoming, 393 U.S. 233 (1968). [4] Although registered with a draft board in Wyoming, Oestereich was a student at the Andover-Newton Theological Seminary. [5] This is a very minor error that few readers are likely to detect. I did so only because I happened to serve in Military Intelligence during much of the period covered by his book and have a great deal more personal knowledge about its monitoring of civilian protest activity than I wish I did. [6] See in particular Wayne R. LaFave, _Criminal Law_ (Thomson-West, 2003; fourth edition), pp. 613-62; see also Michal R. Belknap, “The Warren Court and the Vietnam War: The Limits of Legal Liberalism,” _Georgia Law Review_ 33 (Fall 1988): pp. 65-154. Copyright © 2005 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H- Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
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