Refusal to Submit: Roots of the Vietnam War and a Young Man's Draft Resistance

Prologue

Dear Sam and Sarah,

I remember sitting at the dining room table searching for the words to explain how your quiet and bespectacled father ended up in an Arizona prison not far from Grandma’s house. You had come home from school, Sam—from first or second grade—having heard somewhere about all the bad men locked away in prison where they belong. Your mom and I looked at each other and realized it was time to tell you.

That war that got me into trouble—it must have seemed so strange and distant; it must have seemed to you like some kind of Narnian fantasy. I was afraid you might be too young to understand. Your mom, however, had grounded you early in the ethics of fighting and bullying, and you each must have carried, as well, a child’s wisdom about matters of war and violence. Perhaps that made it easier for you to grasp your dad’s refusal to fight in Vietnam; perhaps it made it easier to accept his criminal status and his completion of a two-year sentence with the Bureau of Prisons. We could see the confusion on your faces; you were having to learn early that the world is much more complicated than a simple division into good men and bad men.

Over the years, I recall relating a few sketchy incidents here or a random prison anecdote there. I think you told your friends with a certain pride that your ex-con old man had some kind of mysterious and vaguely disreputable past. But I never told you the story from beginning to end; you would have never sat through the whole thing, anyway.

As the national memory grows hazier, popular culture has produced its own version of events, often reducing the most complex characters to mere caricatures: the selfless combat veteran defending the country’s freedom, the strident and less than patriotic war protester, the hippie innocent bringing flowers to antiwar marches. Having taught twenty years in an Englewood high school, I am quite certain that Forrest Gump and Rambo, Part II impacted my students’ attitudes towards Vietnam far more than a thousand thoughtful books or documentaries.

Perhaps that helps explain why a persistent unfinished obligation continues to gnaw away at my bones. Among the sacred duties relegated to parents is the task of passing down the stories from one generation to the next. Now that you’re grown, it’s surely past time to sit down and record, as best I can, my own memories from this window of history that so defined our generation.

My own story must necessarily weave into the stories of others whose role was generally more forthright and dramatic than mine. Together we were labeled derisively by the street and oftentimes by the media as draft dodgers. We were nothing of the sort. We challenged the draft. We defied it. We confronted and resisted it. The legal documents of my court case charge me with refusal to submit to induction into the United States Army.

The vast majority of us—like most of the male American middle class—could have found some way—some extended student deferment, some contrived ailment, some psychiatrist’s saving letter, some indispensable government job, some barely active national guard unit which would have allowed us to sit this whole nightmare out and watch safely from the sidelines. You could call us crazy or foolish, masochistic, naïve, or quixotic—pick your favorite slur—but please don’t call us draft dodgers.

In reality very few of us actually ended up in those dreary federal prisons spread out in isolated spots across the country. They were little-known places: Lompoc and Terminal Island, La Tuna and El Reno, Sandstone and Springfield, Allentown, and my own temporary home outside of a desert town called Safford. Of the half million or so who clashed in some way with the Selective Service System only 3,000 of us were convicted in federal court and served time in one of those lonely prisons.

Our numbers were small; our aspirations quite large; our vision quite audacious. We meant to change the course of history. We meant to be the generation that could stop a war dead in its tracks. I think even the least political of us had a gut-level understanding of strategy: Fill the jails and we could bring the war to a grinding halt.

Ultimately the war depended upon a network of military induction centers which processed 30,000 young men a month, month after month, year after year, two million over the course of the war.

If one views the war effort as a gigantic production facility, the activities of the draft resistance movement represented our attempt to shut down the supply lines, to sever the flow of raw material, and so to strangle the operation of the plant before its machinery could inflict further damage.

The case of Muhammad Ali brought this possibility to the attention of the mainstream media in 1967. A world champion heavyweight boxer, a man who was named Sportsman of the Century by Sports Illustrated in 1999, he probably rates as the greatest stream-of-consciousness trash talker of all time. He called himself The Greatest, taunted his opponents mercilessly, described his unorthodox fighting style by claiming to float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. We as a generation followed the details and trivia of his life and watched his fights with the same intensity that the nation watches any Super Bowl today.

That’s why what he did shocked the whole country. In 1964 Ali began hanging around with Malcolm X in Miami and that same year converted to the Nation of Islam, more popularly known as the Black Muslims. It was also in 1964 that Ali failed the qualifying test for the U.S. Armed Forces because his writing and spelling skills—the result of a segregated Louisville education—were tragically deficient. That was the year before American combat troops were shipped out to Nam; reserves were adequate then, and the military paid little attention to Muhammad Ali.

As the war heated up, however, as induction centers around the country required ever expanding numbers of raw recruits, the army scrambled to keep up. Qualifying tests were revised downward and in 1966, the world’s heavyweight boxing champion was finally deemed fit to enter the armed forces.

Ali’s response stunned the nation: War is against the teachings of the Holy Quran, he stated. We are not supposed to take part in no wars unless declared by Allah or the Messenger. We don’t take part in Christian wars or wars of any unbelievers. Then he added fuel to the fire: I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. They never called me nigger.

Muhammad Ali appeared at the Houston induction center in April, 1967, and refused three times to step forward as his name was called. An officer explained the five-year prison sentence he faced and the $10,000 fine. Once again they called his name and once again he refused. The New York State Boxing Commission stripped him of his title that same day.

The next day New York Times columnist Tom Wicker articulated a vision shared by most draft resisters.

A hundred thousand Muhammad Alis could be jailed. But if the Johnson administration had to prosecute 100,000 Americans in order to maintain its authority, its real power to pursue the Vietnamese war… would be crippled if not destroyed. It would then be faced, not with dissent but with civil disobedience on a scale amounting to revolt.

Two leading spokesmen of the resistance movement, Michael Ferber and Staughton Lynd, described similar scenarios:

Eventually, perhaps when ten thousand acted, perhaps when fifty, the prisons would fill, the courts would clog and the resulting bureaucratic flap would bring pressure on the federal government to end the war or at the very least, the president would have to ask Congress for legislation to make new courts and prisons and so risk a re-examination of the war and its rising costs. Moreover, the existence of hundreds and perhaps thousands of young men in prison over a matter of conscience would exert a steady moral pressure on the American public.

By 1967 resistance groups were springing up in cities across the country trying to bring this moral pressure to bear. I could never claim membership in one of those groups. I was too shy, too awkward in group settings, too lacking, perhaps, in the courage it takes to get up in front of a strange crowd and make a public stand. I was, however, one of those thousands who came out of the woodwork individually and, on our own, refused—eventually in public—to lend our bodies to the war effort.

It was a nationwide phenomenon but I can tell you here only a small part of the story, my own story and that of a number of compatriots who shared my experience in the draft resistance movement during the Vietnam War era, and who did time with me in an Arizona prison camp during the years 1968–1970. I try to cover a variety of topics in this story:

The hopes of the movement to put an early end to the war

The strains on our families

The reasons we were inspired to defy the draft law

The introduction to the county jail

The culture of a federal prison camp in Safford, Arizona

The struggle between a Marxist revolutionary, Bugsy Segal, and a pacifist, David Harris

The origins of the L.A. Resistance, the primary feeder of political prisoners to Safford

I was no captain in this movement, not even a squad leader. At the time of my incarceration I had no sweeping overview or grand strategy or any sense whatsoever of what it might take to mobilize enough Americans to put an end to that war. But I did enter into a flow of history, a flow—when placed into proper context—of a great social movement, and I can offer you a microcosm of what it was like.

Chapter 1

Fathers and Sons

Dear Sam and Sarah,

The Swift Trail Federal Prison Camp lay nestled at the foot of Mt. Graham, the highest peak in the Pinaleño Range of southeastern Arizona. The mountain towered 6,000 feet over the Gila River Valley; its base marked the location where the evergreen forest abruptly turned to desert—to arid brown hills covered with prickly pear and cholla, creosote bushes and scrubby mesquite trees. It was the kind of terrain your mother, having grown up in Tucson, learned to love at an early age. I, for my part, associated the countryside with prison and exile; it was years before I could appreciate its rugged beauty.

I arrived there in chains in October of 1968, stepped out of a late-model Dodge sedan driven by two U.S. marshals and so began a convoluted journey which transformed my soul, shaped my political consciousness, and connected my life to the lives of a kaleidoscope of extraordinary characters. There were counterfeiters—the skilled tradesmen, the intellectual elite of the federal penal system. There were bank robbers and dealers of all manner of drugs—heroin and methamphetamines, the finest classes of LSD and marijuana. There were murderers, mostly from the reservations of the Southwest—Navajo, Pima, Papago, Pueblo: any felony committed on Indian land is a federal offense. There were car thieves: driving a stolen vehicle over a state line constitutes a federal offense.

Mostly there were Mexican nationals. I’d say 60 percent of Safford Federal Prison inmates were jailed for crossing the border illegally or for transporting their brothers from Mexicali or Nogales or Tijuana to factories and construction sites in L.A., to fruit orchards on the Western Slope or strawberry fields in Orange County.

There were, in addition, Jehovah’s Witnesses whose religion permitted them to go to war only in the Battle of Armageddon, only under the command of Jesus, and certainly not at the whim of a president who drank and swore and ordered men to fight for worldly things. And there was a small but growing number of antiwar draft resisters—far more political, far more secular, far more attuned to the issues in Vietnam than their brothers from the Kingdom Hall.

Among the resisters I first encountered were the old man Joe Maizlish and the youngest of us, Greg Nelson. I want to begin with their stories because they illuminate so many aspects of the movement. The story of resistance is a story of politics and radical new ways of viewing the world, but it is also a story of fathers and sons, of love and conflict, of anguished mothers and strained family relationships.

The old man was twenty-six. Twenty-six was the last year you could reasonably expect to be drafted and so Joe Maizlish was senior among West Coast draft resisters. His career in the academic world had already been assured. A graduate student in U.S. history and industrial relations at UCLA, a teaching assistant who had just passed his doctoral exam, he had received an automatic student deferment every year for seven years. At age twenty-five and a half, six months away from freedom, a bright future beckoning him, he chucked the whole thing, rejected his student deferment, returned his draft card to the Selective Service System and ended up in short order in the custody of the United States Department of Corrections.

Greg Nelson had never received any deferment at all. On June 17, 1967, eight days after his eighteenth birthday, he sent the following achingly simple letter written in pencil on a blank sheet of notebook paper to Local Board Group C of the Selective Service System in West Los Angeles:

Sirs:

As I have turned 18 (June 9), I am informing you of my decision not to register with the Selective Service Board. I want to make it clear, with this letter, that this is an act of civil disobedience and protest, not a simple evasion of the law.

I fully realize the possible consequences. However, I feel that not registering is the only thing I can do in good conscience.

When you want me, I am available at 1018 Pacific St., Santa Monica, California. I will keep you informed of my future movements.

Sincerely,

Greg Nelson

When you want me, I’m available... Those words almost jumped off the page when Greg showed me that letter decades later as we shared our memories on the beach in Venice in front of Figtrees Café.

Century City

The week after he sent that letter—as his fellow seniors at Santa Monica High School celebrated graduation night riding the Matterhorn and eating cotton candy at Disneyland—Nelson made his way instead to the sleek new development of gleaming highrises known as Century City. There at the Century Plaza Hotel President Lyndon Johnson arrived to address a $500-a-plate fund-raising dinner for the Democratic Party. He would be greeted by a huge crowd—15,000 to 20,000 marchers—gathered at nearby Cheviot Hills Park to express their unhappiness with the escalating violence in Vietnam.

Joe Maizlish was also among the thousands at the park, hoping to make his voice heard. That summer night was the first time Maizlish and Nelson crossed paths. Although each was unaware of the other’s presence, they would both become witnesses to a landmark event in the history of the antiwar movement as well as in the sorry history of police-community relations in the city of Los Angeles.

What Maizlish and Nelson saw might give you some sense of how polarized the country had become, how raw the emotions had grown, how the atmosphere had darkened into bitterness and fear. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was so astounded by the intensity of the event that they sent out a team of investigators whose findings eventually became accepted by even the most conservative of L.A. newspapers.

Observers there described the beginning mood as festive and almost picnic-like: the hot dog vendors, the young man flying a kite, the steady thump of tin can drums gave the gathering the air of an outing. One marcher, Dr. Theodore Munsat, said that The mood was one of extreme friendliness ...a cross-section of businessmen, housewives, children, hippies and students. Many were there with children in baby carriages; many had older children, there were people on crutches, people in wheelchairs. All of them came with the expectation of a peaceful march. Most were attending their first demonstration. Maizlish recalls Muhammad Ali’s short speech at the park as the highlight of the evening: If there should be trouble tonight, he cautioned, let them start it.

The Los Angeles Police Department did not share the festive mood. Their relations with minority groups over the previous two years had been marked by explosive violence. There had been, of course, the Watts riot of 1965—six days of violence and thirty-four dead during which Police Chief Parker called the rioters monkeys in the zoo. There had been the hippie riots, otherwise known as the Sunset Strip Curfew riots of 1966 over the closing of a night club known as Pandora’s Box. (It had been the unrestrained use of night sticks against these youth that inspired Stephen Stills to write his iconic song For What It’s Worth. ...Stop, children, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.) There had been the Silver Lake gay riots in the spring of 1967.

Now came before them this crowd of middle-class dissidents that filled the streets from curb to curb. They must have seemed to this tense police force an ungrateful mob, displaying a complete lack of respect for the president and, by implication, for the young men battling in Vietnam.

The situation was not helped by the reports of a paid informant hired by the Century Plaza Hotel. Sharon Stewart, an employee of International Investigations Systems, had attended a Peace Action Council meeting a week or so before at the First Unitarian Church. She informed the participants that one of her brothers had died in Vietnam, a second had volunteered and was preparing to be shipped out. She claimed she wanted an end to the war for the sake of her brothers.

It was all a lie. Having misrepresented herself, she went on to misrepresent the nature of the meeting. Her report claimed a detailed plan to disrupt the Democratic dinner through such tactics as unleashing mice and roaches, setting off stink bombs, and breaking through police lines in an attempt to storm the lobby. The report failed to mention that all of these suggestions came not from the leadership but from a few individuals in the audience and that all such ideas were flatly turned down out of hand with practically no discussion.

Based on her report, however, Superior Court Judge Orlando Rhodes issued a temporary restraining order placing certain restrictions on the parade permit. The use of a sound truck was prohibited and the march had to be continuous; no one was permitted to stop along the route.

As Maizlish and Nelson marched the half mile down Motor Avenue from Cheviot Hills to the Hotel on the Avenue of the Stars they had no idea any kind of injunction had been issued. Neither did any of the other marchers. The Peace Action Council had not even been present at the court proceedings called by hotel attorneys. Council Chairman Irving Sarnoff had been given the judge’s order moments before the start of the parade, had glanced at it, puzzled, and handed it to one of the council’s attorneys.

The first casualty was a blue Toyota pickup, rigged with speakers and amplifiers, and intended for use as a sound truck. Police made it emphatically clear that the truck was not permitted, but not before the hapless Toyota had been engulfed by marchers and rendered immobile. Eager to enforce the letter of Judge Rhodes’s injunction, one officer sprang from the police line, held his billy club with both hands, and began beating full force on the windshield, shattering windows on the front and side. A marcher, incredulous, approached, shouting, What are you doing?, whereupon another officer wheeled and with a violent swing drove the end of his club up into the man’s abdomen. A boy and a girl who occupied the truck bed were pulled down and beaten repeatedly while a bystander shouted in horror, The police are killing that boy; they’re killing him! It was not an auspicious start for a peaceful parade, but monitors begged the crowd to stay calm and eventually the march continued.

Marchers who reached the front of the hotel were met by 1,300 police officers in full riot gear. Clad in white helmets and shiny black boots, they formed a virtually impassable defense of the hotel lobby, three lines deep between the protesters and the lobby 185 feet away.

There was among the marchers, a small group—about twenty—that had decided to ratchet up the intensity of their protest. Their behavior and attitude were bitterly resented by many of the marchers. They came off as arrogant, provocative, and completely out of touch with the peaceful tenor of the event.

The report issued by the ACLU, however, indicates that regardless of their attitude or poor judgment, any provocation was, indeed, slight. The small band of protesters merely sat down in front of the hotel—a completely nonviolent act of civil disobedience to underscore their unhappiness with the war. The Peace Action Council had already disassociated itself from this action even while deciding not to interfere with it. Instead, they instructed their monitors to guide the parade around those who chose to sit down.

What the parade organizers did not count on was pedestrian gridlock. Police had blocked off some lanes; bystanders, spectators, and a few counterdemonstrators on the sidewalk had choked off additional passageways. The parade soon came to a complete standstill.

A Police Riot

High above the Avenue of the Stars, Police Chief Tom Reddin watched all this unfold from his vantage point on the ninth story of the Century Plaza. Claiming he saw a bulge in the crowd and fearing an assault on the hotel itself, the chief issued an order to Captain Louis Sporer: disperse the crowd. Sporer took the mic from a police sound truck, declared (because all motion had come to a halt) that the assembly was illegal, declared the permit null and void, and relayed Reddin’s order to disperse. Hardly anyone heard. Observers testified the sound system was so distorted and garbled as to be incomprehensible.

Following a second dispersal order, one demonstrator approached a police officer and asked, Where should we disperse to? He just shrugged his shoulders. So the crowd remained milling about. Very few noticed when the massed police began taking off their ties and putting on their leather jackets.

Joe Maizlish stood way in the back unable to see why the parade had stopped. For at least half an hour, He said, I was standing right next to a policeman on his motorcycle. He didn’t say to leave or anything; he was just standing there showing us the peace symbol that was either drawn or tattooed on the back of his hand. Pretty soon everyone was pushing us back, the police started to advance on their motorcycles and some people were coming from the front just running. I saw my former roommate running; he was almost crying and saying, ‘Joe, they’re beating people up there!’ The simple order to disperse the crowd unleashed a torrent of pent-up rage within the ranks of the LAPD.

The first police rush came as a complete surprise, said one spectator. No warning. No apparent reason. No one had attacked the police or made any move on the hotel 60 yards away.

Page after painful page of testimony filled the ACLU investigative report: Parents lifted children into their arms, frantically seeking a way out. Susan Langdon, seven and a half months pregnant, approached several officers: I’m pregnant and I want to go home. Will you please let me through? They looked at her blankly, then pushed her and her husband back away with billy clubs. A white-haired lady was smacked across the face as she moved too slowly away from the police line. A girl who tripped over a traffic island was sitting stunned when an officer hit her over the back of the head. An observer testified that, He raised the club over his head and came down as hard as he could.

Greg Nelson was standing a good quarter of a mile away from where the trouble started. I was standing there with my Resistance sign totally unaware of what was going on. All of a sudden people were streaming by me running and I was standing there—what’s going on—and then there appeared this big wall of police and some guy with a club just pushed me down to the ground. He didn’t swing it at me; he had it in both hands and he hit me hard enough to knock me over and push me down to the ground. I had done nothing; I was just standing there with my sign but I had done absolutely nothing to provoke it and neither had anybody else there. That’s why they called it a police riot. If there was any provocation, they went way off the deep end. It’s like—wait a minute—if two or three people did something, then go get them but you don’t club 10,000.

All told, five hundred people submitted statements to the ACLU. One hundred seventy-eight reported injuries. Forty reported being hit on the head. Sixteen reported blows to the back or kidneys. Ninety-seven said they were hit on the neck, arms, legs, or elsewhere on the body. Four police were injured, the most serious with a broken toe.

President Johnson, though he was a man who tended to denigrate the antiwar opposition, was said to have been deeply moved by what he saw and heard at the hotel. One report described a visibly shaken president... airlifted off the hotel roof. Peace Action Council Chair Irv Sarnoff claimed that the president from that point on, could not appear anywhere in the U.S. outside of a military base.

The Press Conference

As the city pondered the meaning of the violence on the Street of the Stars, Joe Maizlish, especially, was giving some serious thought to what he witnessed.

He had grown up in a family of journalists. In the late 1950s his father, Harry, had opened up one of the early FM radio stations. FM was not hot back then, but his dad carried a vision that FM was the wave of the future for quality programming. His KRHM radio station (R for Ruth, his wife, H for Harry, M for Maizlish) broadcast music of all kinds—jazz, classical, folk—and quality news. Hired on by his dad, the younger Maizlish taped fifty thirteen-and-a-half-minute interviews with Mississippi civil rights workers in 1964. They were broadcast by KRHM, KPFK (Radio Pacifica), and eight other stations nationwide. Through that experience and the fact that his mother, Ruth, was writing book reviews and feature interviews for a small newspaper, Maizlish was able to obtain credentials to attend a press conference with the L.A. police chief in the immediate aftermath of Century City.

It was a beautiful plan, declared Reddin to the assembled press. And it was well executed.

I thought, ‘jeez, these reporters are not asking the right questions,’ Maizlish remembers. Those police reporters, I guess, they have to develop their own relationship with the police. Because it was the chief’s birthday, they even sang ‘Happy Birthday, Dear Chiefie’ at the end. But they weren’t asking the tough questions. (Reddin) said that he was concerned that people might rush the hotel so that’s why they wanted to get us away from there. Maizlish had the opportunity for just one question: Was there ever any move by the people to rush the hotel? he managed to ask. At least he didn’t fake his way out of the question. He just answered, ‘No.’

Later on, Art Kunkin’s alternative Free Press ran an entire issue painstakingly challenging every detail of the official police version. In the face of this compelling evidence, combined with the authoritative ACLU report, even the conservative Los Angeles Times had to revise its original support for the LAPD.

But Maizlish was troubled on a deeper level. Over the coming days I did a lot of thinking about this. I could feel the marchers were getting more strident, he recalls. Not necessarily violent, although some people, not most, seemed to welcome (the violence) or want them to go in that a direction. Fearing an escalation of violence on the street, having been greatly influenced as well by the ideas of the civil rights workers he had interviewed, Maizlish began contemplating other forms of confronting the war. "That’s where I came to the conclusion that we just need more actions (of a different kind). People were pouring all their intensity into mass demonstrations. If they could slice off some of that intensity and express it through changes in their own lives, they wouldn’t have to bet everything on one number of the roulette wheel.

I was beginning to think ‘What is the connection of all these marchers to the war system? Are they supporting the war in some way in their daily lives? Could they be opposing it in some way in addition to the parading and the letter writing and the posters?’ Then I began thinking, ‘How am I supporting this war effort? Oh, of course! I’m a draft registrant and I’m a deferred one too.’ His own most intimate connection to the war effort had become obvious: his status as a draft registrant rendered him a potential warrior. I had just read the Malcolm X autobiography and it was very challenging. It made you think; it made you say ‘Okay, how am I supporting this system of privilege in some way that I can change or try to change? Well, I got this deferment. But that would be some serious consequences if I relinquished it.’

Maizlish thought about this all summer. It was an historic summer that included a war in the Middle East and a riot that left sections of Detroit in ruins just as Maizlish drove into Ann Arbor to drop off his brother at the University of Michigan. There was a curfew that night, a gasoline shortage, and the Motor City was still smoldering. It was a pretty crowded period there in 1967, says Maizlish.

He also met Greg Nelson and a number of other resisters. For years Maizlish had very much welcomed his student deferment and I suppose, he said, concern about being drafted was a factor in my charging ahead with my studies. Here was this kid Nelson, eighteen, just out of high school and ready to put into practice some of the ideas that Maizlish had been studying for years in his post-graduate studies at UCLA. By September Maizlish had made up his mind: He refused to renew his student deferment. I looked at it; I looked at the form and said to myself, ‘You can’t do this anymore.’ He left the form blank.

The Elder Maizlish

Challenging the Selective Service System was one thing; talking to his dad quite another. Harry Maizlish was shaken to the core by his son’s decision. To be sure, he was not particularly ashamed of Joe’s moral stand. For years both his parents had admired the work of Martin Luther King and civil rights activists in the South. These are the values you taught us, Joe told them. But the thought of his own son in a federal prison scared his father to death.

Joe’s bond with his father ran deep and he harbors a rich store of family memories. A while back, I ran out of gas one night around midnight, he recalls. I pulled into a station and who was in the money booth? It was this girl; she had to be like ten or eleven at most. She was sleeping in a chair; her little brother was crawling around on a table. He made change for me, that little six- or seven-year-old guy. And I thought, ‘That’s my dad.’ His dad too had lived the immigrant life, arriving impoverished from the Ukraine at age three and stepping immediately into a life of work. On Sunday mornings he got up at 3, got on his little bicycle, went off to get stacks of newspapers that he loaded on the bike and then ran around Lynn, Massachusetts, selling them. Age six, eight, something like that. A total life of work from childhood. He was selling papers every evening. When he got old enough, he’d go sell out on the streets of Boston and then get back somehow to Lynn."

Through work, sacrifice, and community service, Mr. Maizlish had gained considerable stature in the Los Angeles community. During the ’30s he became a publicist for Warner Brothers Motion Pictures. In the process of setting up large functions—premieres and theater openings—he had connected with a good many civic figures from mayors to police chiefs to aldermen. His later ownership of KRHM increased his reputation as a pillar of the community. Having worked his whole life to build some respectability and a little security, he now saw his son risking his entire future.

He never said he was angry, says Maizlish. But he was worried because he thought this might interfere with my career. Let’s remember, he had sacrificed a lot for his family and the whole value was ‘If we’re gonna survive as this impoverished immigrant family everybody’s gotta be working for everybody else and that any advance you can make you don’t ask any questions. You got a chance for a little more income—that helps everyone.’ He was concerned about the career impact.

He had one request. Please go see my lawyer before you follow through on this.

Dutifully, Maizlish found his way to the office of Irv Prinzmetal. I followed through and did what my dad wanted, all these things my parents wanted me to do to make it a little easier for them, to let them know I had checked in with the people they wanted me to see. Prinzmetal lifted the phone and called a federal judge, a judge in fact who was the father of one of Maizlish’s high school buddies. The judge was blunt: He’ll never get a position of trust in business or government for the rest of his life.

That was quite interesting to hear, recalls Maizlish, but no big surprise. Despite the judge’s warning, despite his father’s misgivings, there was no turning back.

Maizlish rejected his student deferment, then prepared the next step: he would return his new draft card—complete with a letter articulating his categorical divorce from the system. The date planned was October 16, 1967, the day a mass national draft card turn-in had been scheduled. Once again, however, his father asked to negotiate. Don’t send it in with everybody else, he requested. Make sure it’s something you would do just for yourself.

It seemed reasonable. I figured that’s a good compromise, recalls Maizlish. It wasn’t giving up on any important principle. I said, ‘Dad. You want me to wait a few days, I can do that.’ So I mailed mine in myself on October 20.

Mr. Maizlish took a copy of the accompanying letter, folded it carefully, and placed it in his billfold where he carried it around everywhere. My personal experience, it began, and what I have been able to learn from public affairs, have led me to the conclusion that mankind will make life more free and peaceful as individuals turn away... from the means of war....

On a business trip to San Francisco, the elder Maizlish saw a familiar figure on the street in front of his hotel. Maizlish had known him years before when the man was district attorney for Alameda County. Seeking reassurance wherever he could, Maizlish ran up to the now Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren, handed him the letter and asked: What do you think will happen to him? The chief justice took a moment to read the statement, then looked up. These are fine young men, Harry. Unfortunately, they’re going to prison.

Greg Nelson’s father didn’t share the ambiguous mix of emotions that churned in Harry Maizlish’s belly. Nor was there the bond that had developed between Maizlish and his father. Richard Nelson was old school, a conservative ex-marine from the Midwest, a second lieutenant during World War II who participated in Pacific-island hopping operations at places like Iwo Jima and Okinawa. When he learned of his son’s refusal to cooperate with the draft, his face reddened with shame.

He was very upset I wasn’t going to go, recalls Nelson. His whole side of the family, they were good folks but they had trouble understanding that Vietnam was different from World War II. They just thought if the government called you, you’re supposed to go. They couldn’t see the idea that there was a difference between being attacked and going off to try and create an empire somewhere. I remember my dad taking me to one of his old commanding officers back in New Jersey, some lieutenant colonel who tried to convince me to register.

I’m Not Gonna Register, Period

The FBI tried the same thing. In the spring of 1968, a couple of agents knocked on Lois Nelson’s door in Santa Monica, informing her they just wanted to talk to her son. I went down to the Federal Building downtown; I walked into the FBI office and said, ‘I’m Greg Nelson and you guys came by to talk to me.’ There were two or three guys there and they tried to talk me out of it. They were offering alternatives like giving me another chance to join or registering as a conscientious objector. They were basically telling me that I was making a big mistake, that I was gonna ruin my life and that I should obey the law. I was the young kid that they saw going astray and they were giving me a chance to change my ways. I said ‘No, I’m not gonna do it. I’m not gonna register, period!’

Richard Nelson’s shame intensified when his son agreed to dramatize his stance by seeking sanctuary at the Grace Episcopal Church in downtown L.A. The Reverend William Sloane Coffin, later to be embroiled in his own antidraft trial, summarized the history and symbolism of sanctuary in a sermon he had delivered the previous fall at a similar action in Boston:

Thou spreadest a table before me in the presence of my enemies. These familiar words from the 23rd Psalm refer to an ancient desert law which provided that if a man hunted by his enemies sought refuge with another man who offered him hospitality, then the enemies of the man had to remain outside the campfire light for two nights and the day intervening. In Exodus we read that the altar of the Tabernacle is to be considered a place of sanctuary and in Numbers and Deuteronomy we read of cities of refuge, three in Canaan and three in Jordan. During the Middle Ages all churches were considered sanctuaries.... Now if in the Middle Ages, churches could offer forty days to a man who had committed both a sin and a crime, could they not today offer an indefinite period to one who had committed no sin?

I wasn’t the kind of person who liked to be front and center, recalls Nelson. "I’m basically shy to the point where I don’t deal well with people. I’m not a leader in that sense, not an organizer. I didn’t bring up the idea of sanctuary but once (a group of us from The Resistance) decided, I was willing. Being shy, in fact, having this social anxiety disorder, it was one of the hardest things I ever did—to stand up in front of everybody in that church. Standing up in the middle of a room with a spotlight on me was terrifying. It was harder for me to do that than to go to prison... But at that point, I was willing to do anything to publicize opposition to the war. Whatever sand I could throw in the gears, I wanted to throw. If I could be on the front page of the L.A. Times, I wanted that because I wanted people to think ‘this war’s got to stop.’"

And so Nelson composed a letter to the Episcopal Church. No court has the right, he stated, to judge a man for what his conscience compels him to do. For this reason, it’s impossible for me to recognize the power of the government to place me on trial. For we are again in a period in which government is not responsive to the will of the people, a period in which our government seems to have forgotten the principles and morality on which it was conceived. Hiding under its cloak of legality, it refuses to answer the moral imperatives of our age. Since I cannot turn to the court for justice, I turn to the church. I ask that you lend your church for the role that churches once played. I ask you to grant sanctuary.

The sanctuary was planned for the day of Nelson’s trial. A local activist group had previously posted several thousand dollars in bail money, so shortly before the planned event, Nelson appeared before Judge Albert Stevenson and requested to be put on OR—Own Recognizance. That means no bail money is involved, just a defendant’s promise to appear in court. His motivation, of course, was to protect his sponsoring group from losing its bail money. He was unaware of the fact that there was no danger of forfeiting the money as long as he eventually showed up in court.

Well, the judge agreed to reduce my bail to OR, says Nelson, but then he was really pissed off when I didn’t show up for trial because of the sanctuary. He took it as a personal attack, basically. It was like, ‘You lied to me; what’s this about?’

Finally, Mike Greene, a lawyer who helped Nelson with his case, was able to explain. I wasn’t trying to screw him; I just didn’t want this group to lose their money, says Nelson, and I didn’t know the law. When the judge realized that he thought, ‘Oh he’s just a stupid kid; he doesn’t know any better.’ That calmed him down.

Sanctuary

Greg Nelson was late for his own sanctuary. In the old days the offender would flee to a place of refuge with his captors in hot pursuit. In this case the cops were already there by the time he showed up.

Nelson and fellow resister Bill Garaway had gone to the airport to pick up David Harris, the most notorious leader of the West Coast draft resistance movement. L.A. traffic being what it is, says Nelson, "we got stuck. The whole church is filled with people waiting; it was supposed to start at 10:30 and here it is getting towards noon and I’m not there. By the time I arrived, the whole building is surrounded by U.S. marshals looking for me. At that time I had long blond hair and Karen Dellenbach, a leader in the L.A. Resistance, also had long blond hair and was about my size. She came out and gave me her parka and we decided that maybe I