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366 H e was apprehensive, more so than he’d expected. It was, he assured himself, a familiar room, the auditorium on the second floor of Central Methodist Church, the massive stone building on lower Woodward Avenue where he had spoken many times before. Just the same, he felt the tension this December evening in 1966 as he stepped to the speaker’s rostrum. Perhaps it was the intense lights of the cameras of all three national networks, their crews crowded into the front of the room, waiting for Goodman to address the closing rally of the daylong “Conference on the Draft.” Perhaps it was the intense scrutiny that he knew would follow his call for legal resistance to the war in Vietnam, especially to the forced conscription that was sending thousands of young men to fight in Southeast Asia. Or perhaps it was the menacing presence in the back of the room of a half dozen men in suits and ties, sullen and quiet, their close-cropped hair and conservative dress setting them apart from the larger crowd of students and old leftists. “The great question that young men face today,” said Goodman, holding the rostrum with both hands, “is how far can an individual go in carrying out, in good conscience, the will of the state in conducting an immoral and illegal war? Is a moral choice possible?” It was a question he had been addressing since the fall of the previous year, when he agreed to serve as defense counsel for twenty-nine young men and women arrested in nearby Ann Arbor for a draft board sit-in. The protesters had not disputed their technical violation of the laws of trespass, but Goodman, in appealing their conviction through state and federal courts, had turned the case into a public forum on the higher laws that justified their civil disobedience. Citing the judgment of the allied tribunals at Nuremberg following World War II, Goodman had asserted that individuals not only had the right to resist the illegal actions of their government, they had the obligation to do so under international law. The Nuremberg tribunals had 11 Rebellion and Reaction R E B E L L I O N A N D R E A C T I O N 367 explicitly ruled that German officials guilty of crimes against humanity could not absolve their role by invoking the orders of their government. “It is no longer enough,” Goodman had argued in his brief, “to hold only the government as an abstract entity or its ruling officials responsible for the violation of international law. Each individual, in accordance with his own ability and awareness, must act.” The state court had refused to allow Goodman to make this argument to the jury, but antiwar activists had distributed thousands of copies of Goodman’s brief across the country . Nuremberg, Goodman now explained to the draft-age students at Central Methodist Church, had established the individual’s responsibility for opposing aggressive war, and the United Nations had made these principles a matter of international law.1 Once again, Goodman was at odds with prevailing opinion. As with the defense of Communists during the McCarthy era and of civil rights protesters in the South, he and his fellow critics would have to contest a broad consensus that supported official government policy. U.S. military action in support of the Republic of South Vietnam was legal, the American Bar Association had declared earlier that year, because article 51 of the United Nations Charter justified a “defensive” war against the aggressive actions of the North Vietnamese Communists, led by Ho Chi Minh. This justification for U.S. support of South Vietnam still commanded a nearly unanimous following in the media and both major parties, all the more so after President Johnson announced that on 4 August 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats had launched unprovoked attacks on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. The public would learn later that the government had misrepresented these events to win support for bombing North Vietnam. In the meantime, Goodman and other critics of the war struggled to make the case against this escalating military intervention. The conference at Central Methodist Church was an opportune moment to do so, for by targeting the forced conscription that made every young man a potential casualty of the spiraling violence, the meeting had drawn the interest of the national media. Goodman turned his audience’s...

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