They Chose to Remain Despite Amnesty : Many U.S. Draft Evaders Succeeding in Canada

“At least he didn’t go to Canada,” said President-elect George Bush during the recent political campaign, referring to Vice President-elect Dan Quayle’s decision to join the Indiana National Guard during the Vietnam War.

The young American men who did come to this country in the 1960s and 1970s, fleeing what were for them the distasteful choices of military service in Vietnam or jail in the United States for refusing to serve, are now in their 40s. Many of them are fighting middle-age spread and watching their own sons approach the draft-eligible age of 18.

Most of those who evaded the draft and who chose to remain in Canada, even after President Jimmy Carter’s amnesty program made it possible for them to return to the United States without suffering penalties, have tried to blend unnoticed into Canadian society.

Some have made significant contributions to Canadian society.

Becomes City Official

Ex-New Yorker Ken Greenberg completed his architectural studies in Canada after coming here after he received his draft notice 20 years ago. He later became director of architecture and urban design for the city of Toronto and designed, among other projects, the Peace Garden on the plaza of Toronto City Hall.

Patrick Hickey, who was raised in Brooklyn, has traveled the length of Canada as a reporter and is now sports editor of the Montreal Gazette.

Benjamin Radford, a former member of the anti-war Students for a Democratic Society, left his home in Chicago to avoid the draft and took up social activism in Canada. After spending years in Ottawa, where he agitated for tenants’ rights and health-care issues, he came to Toronto two years ago and is executive director of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations.

Others became geologists, lawyers, professors, environmentalists, home builders and government officials.

“There were a significant number of the social elite,” said environmentalist and former Californian Susie Washington-Smith, who knew many of them. “They had the skills and the cultural background to enable them to succeed and they have enriched Canada.”

‘They’re Still Paranoid’

“There are also a lot of people who haven’t made it,” she added. “I’m not sure if it was the war or the drugs--you know, ‘Tune in, turn on, drop out,’ ” she said, reciting a popular 1960s counterculture slogan. “But there’s a whole lot of people like that. They’re in the bush. They’re doing odd jobs. Hiding. They’re still paranoid about being visible in the United States. There’s still that incredible mistrust of the United States.”

Many of those who became successful in Canada are not interested in talking for publication about their decision to avoid the draft. Several who were contacted for this article declined to speak on the record. Many others said they had exemptions from the draft when they emigrated here in their 20s.

Indeed, the controversy over Quayle’s Vietnam-era military service shed renewed light on a chapter in history most of them seemed to want to forget.

“I don’t see where there’s any great virtue in having fought in Vietnam,” said Hickey, the sports editor. “I don’t mean that as a put-down of people who went there. I don’t see where there’s any great shame in not having been there. One of the things the Quayle thing does point out is the great inequality in American society.”

There is no accurate accounting of just how many young men came to Canada to avoid the draft, since the Canadian government never asked emigres about their status or kept any records. Estimates--wild guesses, really--range as high as 40,000.

Objected to War

But Sam Lanfranco, a statistician and economics professor at Toronto’s York University who studied immigration records, said his research showed that about 20,000 American men in their 20s and early 30s came to Canada during the Vietnam War era. He said that some, like himself, were exempt from the draft but came because they objected to the war. He had been a graduate student at UC Berkeley.

Lanfranco estimated that about 7,000 remained after the Carter amnesty program and one earlier under President Gerald R. Ford.

“You had both people who were highly motivated and just drifters,” said Lanfranco, who provided anti-draft counseling. Draft evaders, he said, were largely middle class, predominantly white and tended to assimilate easily.

Military deserters, however, were more likely to be from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and frequently they did not settle in very well, he said. “Some deserters were out-and-out misfits,” he said. “They would have had a hard time adjusting to anything.”

However, Bob Rabinovitch, a senior aide to former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, said he had hired a U.S. military deserter in the 1970s for an important staff position with the federal Cabinet.

‘Cleared by Security’

“He was cleared by security,” Rabinovitch recalled. “He had Canadian citizenship by then and he had not committed any Canadian crime.” Rabinovitch said he learned about the man’s past because he had said upon being hired, “I think there’s something you ought to know. . . .”

Rabinovitch said he did not think it was necessary to inform Trudeau.

Hickey said some other deserters found newspaper jobs.

There was never any formal decision by Canadian governments of that era to make this country a haven for Americans avoiding the service. “It was not an issue in the sense that it was a really controversial one,” said Tom Kent, who was the senior civil servant in the Immigration Department.

Kent does recall having to issue instructions to Canadian immigration officers, whom he described as largely “people who had been sergeants” during World War II, to cease barring, on false legal grounds, young American men from attempting to cross the border.

Kent said the college backgrounds of most of these men made the decision to allow them entrance to Canada “practicable.”

‘Readily Assimilated’

“If they could be readily assimilated,” Kent said, “then those were the people we could happily accept.” He said the Royal Canadian Mounted Police often groused about the policy, but as far as he knows, no formal representations were ever made by the U.S. State Department.

Many Canadians opened their homes to the draft evaders when they arrived here. Some even went to college campuses in the United States to sell Canada as an alternative to military service.

Still, there was considerable ambivalence within the Canadian public about the evaders’ presence here. Some Canadian conservatives argued that the men should have gone to Vietnam. Some liberals, on the other hand, contended that they should have stayed in the United States, resisted the draft and publicly protested the war.

Although architect Greenberg said his avoidance of military service has been a “neutral” factor in his career, it was mentioned by some City Council members when he was up for a promotion to head the Toronto planning department, a job he did not get.

Sports editor Hickey said he sometimes has been “razzed” about it but never seriously. The only time he believed it was a factor, he said, was when he returned to the United States after the declaration of amnesty and unsuccessfully tried for a job at the New York Times.

‘A Sad Listlessness’

Describing the draft evaders in Canada in 1968, writer Robert Fulford observed:

“They have certain things in common . . . a sad listlessness, a post-decision depression. . . . Canada was kind of a myth to them back in the United States, and when they come here to encounter the reality they find . . . Canada looks so much like America that they can’t quite believe they’ve arrived someplace else.”

Radford, the social activist, recalled an initial confusion, then a growing awareness of differences between the countries. “I had to cool my jets,” he said. “Canadian society is a bit more passive, not as aggressive, not as violent, shyer, not as outspoken.”

While he said he believed at first that Canada lacked the racism of the United States, Radford, who is black, said he has come to believe that the racism here is only subtler.

For Greenberg, there was a long period of feeling “pinned in.”

“It’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced it,” he said. “For five years I had no citizenship. I had an American passport but on principle I did not use it.”

Sports editor Hickey did slip back into the United States on one occasion. He was working in Vancouver at the time and he wanted to interview basketball star Bill Walton. He used the identification of one of his brothers, he said, to cross the border and go to Seattle and then return.

FBI Visits Parents

He also recalled learning of a chilling visit by the FBI to his parents’ Long Island home. He said an FBI agent told his parents, “You know your son will never be allowed to come home. We’re going to be watching the paper for death announcements, wedding announcements.”

Many years later, Hickey, Radford and Greenberg, given a chance to return to the United States under the amnesty program, chose to remain in Canada.

Greenberg did return to straighten out his citizenship status. He, his wife and their children--a son, 18, and a daughter, 16--hold dual U.S.-Canadian citizenship, he said.

“They’re Canadians and I think that’s their strong feelings,” he said of his children, although he added that he is careful about not trying to influence their decision about whether they will eventually settle in Canada or the United States.

Hickey said he finds that the “whole way of life” in Canada seems “more geared toward people--you know, the social programs, a slower pace of life, a little friendlier.”

“I guess the United States is ‘the old country’ to me now,” Radford said. “I haven’t renounced my citizenship. But this is my home.”