(3 of 6)
To know the Vietnik is not necessarily to love him. At his best, he is inspired by the U.S. civil rights revolution and the practical results of nonviolent protest as applied to that Gandhian principle by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He has a rather irritating habit of claiming a monopoly on humanitarianism. In justifying civil disobedience or downright defiance of national law, he is quick to cite the Nuremberg trials, which, he insists, made it a matter of international law that the individual cannot be excused for crimes committed by government order; thus cooperating with the U.S. Government in its participation in the Viet Nam war makes a soldier criminally responsible.
With this long-range formation of traditional pacifism and short-range formation of intellectual influences, the war protesters make voluble answers when confronted with the average man's suspicions of disloyalty, softheadedness, immaturity, or even subversion.
Paul Booth and Richard Rothstein, both 22, are Chicago leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, a "new left" organization. Both have applied for draft deferment as conscientious objectors. They urge others to follow their example, though they oppose such prison-risking stunts as burning draft cards. "We are a moral movement primarily," says Rothstein, a native New Yorker with a Harvard degree in political philosophy. "It horrifies me that people here can walk around oblivious to the fact that they're responsible for a war and all that war means—destruction and murder. It's as if they'd lost all their moral sense." Booth, who studied political science at Swarthmore College, nods his agreement. "It's not very descriptive to say the Viet Cong are Communists and therefore we have to kill them." Concludes Rothstein: "The Communist nations are not a threat to us. The U.S. is more of a threat to the sovereignty of the peoples of the world than Communist China."
David McReynolds, 35, who speaks for the War Resisters' League in New York City: "Suppose you're convinced that you'd crack up mentally if you went into the service," he says. "You don't have the requisite philosophical stance to satisfy the legal requirements for conscientious objection, so you'd have to go to jail for refusing to fight, and you're convinced you'd crack up there. What alternatives do you have? If you think you have to go to the draft board and pretend you're a homosexual, then O.K. We don't counsel that, but we don't think it's cowardly or wrong." What about Viet Nam? "We recognize objectively that U.S. withdrawal is going to mean a Communist victory. But it's their country. We don't belong there. I would prefer not to see Communism triumph. I'm sorry about that. But we have spent ten years trying to find viable democratic alternatives short of blowing the place up, and we have failed."