Felon for Peace: The Memoir of a Vietnam-Era Draft Resister

2. Students for Peace in Vietnam

10 Felon for Peace certain teachers and what they had written about me. Many of my teachers wrote similar things: Jerry is a bright kid with poor social skills; he could probably do reasonably well in life if he were able to get a grip on his behavior issues; I hope he does and I wish him well in the future. This struck me as rather insightful. But Miss Kozlarek had written that I was a bad kid—bad in the sense of being truly evil. Her evaluation of me jibed accurately with my recollection of her. I had thought she was a witch (and, on one occasion, I had told her so to her face). I was not a model student. 11 2 Students for Peace in Vietnam MY PARENTS HAD COME OF AGE in this country and were liberals, but were not especially active politically. They supported Adlai Stevenson for president in 1952 and 1956, and although they had never been members of the Communist or Socialist parties, they had friends who had been. When I was growing up politics were not the most important discussion topic around our dinner table. Nevertheless, my parents and I read the New York Times every day, and we discussed the events of the day at the dinner table. Because of their liberal views, my parents were mostly supportive of my anti-war work when I was a teenager. My father took me to my first Vietnam peace demonstration on Saturday, November 27, 1965, in Washington, DC. This was one of the first large demonstrations against the war. We went with one of my father’s tennis partners, Bob Praver, taking a special train from New York chartered by the peace group SANE to bring demonstrators to Washington. The large crowds of peace demonstrators made a big impression on me. I had been a bit tentative in my anti-war views and had felt myself part of an isolated minority. It felt exhilarating to be part of a crowd of 30,000 people who shared my views; I lost my squeamishness when I realized that, while I might be part of a minority, I was certainly not alone. For several years after that, when people asked about the efficacy of the large demonstrations, I thought about how they not only affected government policy but also provided encouragement and support to antiwar people by showing them that they were not alone in their heresy. During the rally at the Washington Monument, I told my father that I was going to look for my social studies teacher, Mr. Foote, whom I 12 Felon for Peace knew was there, and that I would be back in half an hour. When I look back on that now, I cringe: a fourteen-year-old boy going off on his own in a crowd of 30,000 demonstrators; the ever-present risk of violence; the hopelessness of finding a particular person in that crowd; and the virtual certainty of not connecting again with my father. But I walked directly to where I figured Mr. Foote would be, found him, chatted for a while, and then returned to my father without incident. After that, I always made a habit of looking for people I knew at the big peace demonstrations. At that demonstration, I bought a large blue lapel button that read “Peace in Vietnam.” The following week, I wore the button to school. One of my teachers, Mr. Ranhoeffer, who was pro-war, instructed me to take it off. I refused, and Mr. Ranhoeffer sent me to the school office to be disciplined. The principal supported Mr. Ranhoeffer and ordered me to remove the button, but I confronted him with a written policy adopted by the Great Neck Board of Education that said students were permitted to wear buttons to class. I returned to class wearing the button. After that initial demonstration in Washington, my involvement in the peace movement grew rapidly and I became active in Great Neck Students for Peace in Vietnam (SPV). The following spring I helped SPV distribute publicity flyers for the March 26, 1966, peace demonstration in New York. My father did not attend that demonstration, but I went with Mr. Foote and Mrs. Kramer, a English teacher at my junior high school. In Central Park, they introduced me to two social studies teachers from...