PERSPECTIVE ON THE DRAFT : What Clinton, Quayle Did Was the Collegiate Norm : Loopholes were available to middle-class, white men; anti-war protesters didn’t even go to prison, much less the Army.

In 1967, I was teaching on four faculties at Columbia University and was an adjunct professor at Union Theological Seminary. I was up to my neck in students, and the students were up to their eyeballs in the Vietnam War. No amount of revisionist history will ever blur the memories of those days.

From the very beginning, the Vietnam War was different. It was anathema to the young student. Its purpose was obscure. It lacked romance (no songs were written to glorify that conflict). It was unheroic. The Vietnamese appearing nightly on television seemed more pathetic than menacing.

Across the country, thousands of students were demonstrating, burning their draft cards, vowing to go to jail rather than serve in this unpopular war.

I worried about what might happen to these young men--more boys than men, really, most of them white and middle class--in federal prison. So did Myrl Alexander, then director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and John Conrad, the director of research. The brutalizing of a congressman’s nephew would capture headlines in a way that routine rapes and slashings in a typical prison population had not. Such publicity could undermine both the war effort and the prison system’s functioning. In addition, these atypically compassionate bureaucrats had a genuine concern for the idealistic young firebrands. For these and other reasons they granted my request to visit the incarcerated war protesters and research this population as it grew.

We needn’t have worried. In 1967, when I began what turned out to be three years of research, there were all of 70 imprisoned political war resisters in the entire country. Where were all the rest? They were utilizing the loopholes and dodges that were built into the Selective Service Act to protect the children of the middle class. Even when most middle-aged influential men supported the war, they were making sure that their sons did not serve. As late as 1969, I did not have one friend, one colleague or patient who had a child serving unwillingly in Vietnam. How did they get out? They wriggled through the loopholes that had been designed for them.

They discovered religion. They swamped the seminaries with the best pool of applicants these schools had ever seen. They discovered secular religion. They decided to serve the needs of the inner city. In 1968, the New York City Board of Education received 20,000 more applicants for teachers’ licenses than the year before, almost all from men under 26.

Young men suddenly decided that they had a calling for medicine--to be medics, but not soldiers--or that God had called them to reject military service altogether on religious grounds. They claimed to be psychotics, homosexuals or drug addicts; indeed, in the process, many of them became that which they pretended to be.

There were other escape mechanisms available for the rich or well-connected. One could, for example, buy the assistance of a physician to legitimize a borderline or nonexistent medical condition for deferment. (Pilonidal cyst, anyone?) But the ultimate institution for the privileged, the ultimate sanctuary for the politically connected and socially aware was the National Guard. It even came with a uniform!

It is not difficult, therefore, to see why Bill Clinton squirmed through procedures made available to him by an Establishment that did not want to send educated white boys to war. Nor is it difficult to understand why the wealthier, better-connected Dan Quayle had to do less squirming to get himself leapfrogged into a choice position in the National Guard. Neither young man had to be ashamed of the action he took; they were expected to take such action. Republicans and Democrats, pro- and anti-war, we protected our children.

It is the rhetoric of retrospection and revisionism that I found objectionable. Clinton should not have apologized for what he did then. He did that which was typical of many sensitive and decent young men of his time who were opposed to that war. Quayle also owes no apologies for what he did then. On the other hand, when he now states that he supported the moral nature of the war, his motives for joining the Guard appear suspect. It is pure cant to claim that anyone enlists in the National Guard in time of war out of patriotic fervor. For that, you join the Marines.