Vietnam Draft Board Raids, Part 2

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frey. This is part two of
our two part episode on the draft board raids that

(00:22):
took place in the United States during the Vietnam War.
In part one, we gave an incredibly basic overview of
the war and why the US was involved in it,
and some of the reasons why people were increasingly opposed
to it as the war stretched on. We also talked
about some of the earliest incidents of vandalism at draft

(00:43):
board offices, which started in nineteen sixty six. In nineteen
sixty seven, as US involvement in Vietnam was escalating, but
before it had reached its peak. It would be hard
to overstate how deeply device these issues were and how
incredibly polarized the United States was during the Vietnam War,

(01:07):
so much so that growing up in the aftermath of it,
not even during the actual war, has made me incredibly
wary of trying to tackle these subjects in any amount
of detail on the show. I kind of feel like,
no matter what I say, people older than me are
going to be very angry. The United States media framed

(01:30):
a lot of this discourse about the war as a
conflict between hawks who supported the war and doves who
opposed it. Opponents were stereotyped as like dirty hippies and
sanctimonious white college kids who spat on soldiers returning from service,

(01:50):
but the anti Vietnam War movement in the United States
was really broad. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panthers,
and Martin Leuether King Junior were all vocally opposed to
the war. The Asian American movement was deeply connected to
the anti war movement, and a lot of Vietnamese Americans

(02:10):
did not want the US to be fighting a war
in the place that they, or their parents or their
grandparents had come from. Japanese American young people had been
raised by parents who were incarcerated in concentration camps in
the United States during World War II, and they campaigned
both for redress for their parents and an end to

(02:32):
US imperialism in Asia. The Chicano Moratorium was a march
held in Los Angeles that included more than twenty thousand
Mexican Americans. These are just examples. It was not all
hippies and college kids. Most, but not all, of the

(02:52):
demonstrations we are talking about today were carried out primarily
by Catholic clergy and devout Catholic li lay people, and
that's another group that does not really fit in with
that stereotype of opponents to the war. On September twenty fourth,
nineteen sixty eight, a graduate student took over the cathedral

(03:12):
of Saint John the Evangelist in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This was
a diversion to allow fourteen men to break into the
Selective service building without being detected. Four of them were
from Milwaukee and the rest had traveled from somewhere else
to participate. They included four Catholic priests and one Catholic brother,

(03:33):
and many of the others were Catholic laypeople. One was
a member of the Church of Scientology. In photos of
the incident, the ones who aren't in clerical attire are
mostly wearing suits and ties, and one looks like he
might be in a work uniform. After removing about ten
thousand draft files, they took them outside the building and

(03:55):
burned them with homemade napalm. They focused on the files
classified as A one, meaning the people who were eligible
to be called up at any time. They sang hymns
while waiting for the police to arrive to arrest them.
They were charged with burglary and arson. Twelve of them
were tried together and were all convicted, and two who

(04:18):
were tried separately were convicted as well. As we talked
about in Part one, destroying draft cards was illegal under
federal law, but a judge throughout a separate federal case
because there had been so much publicity that it seemed
unlikely that they could ever convene an impartial jury. One
of the Milwaukee fourteen, Michael Cullen, was from County Wicklow, Ireland,

(04:40):
and he spent nine months in prison before being deported.
He was readmitted to the United States in nineteen ninety one,
so that was one of the draft rates from nineteen
sixty eight. Richard Nixon was inaugurated as president in January
of nineteen sixty nine. By that point, thirty one thousand

(05:01):
Americans had been killed in action in Vietnam, and half
of all Americans personally knew someone who had died in
combat there. More than half a million American troops were
in Vietnam. Nixon wanted to end the war within a year,
but without simply withdrawing troops and abandoning South Vietnam. His

(05:23):
administration had shifted from deploying increasing numbers of American combat
troops to Vietnam to supporting South Vietnam and building up
its own military capacity and also training the South Vietnamese
to take over these combat roles. There were also public
peace talks and secret, behind the scenes negotiations going on.

(05:44):
At first, the American public didn't really know much about
this policy shift, and while Nixon was reducing the number
of American troops in Vietnam, overall, people were still being
drafted and deployed, so protests against the war and the
draft continued. As one example, on May twenty fifth, nineteen
sixty nine, fifteen people broke into a draft board office

(06:08):
in a predominantly non white neighborhood on the South side
of Chicago, destroying about fifty thousand draft records. On November three,
Nixon gave a speech outlining the basics of his so
called Vietnamization strategy to end the war. He acknowledged that
the nation was deeply divided over the war, and he

(06:32):
called on a quote silent majority to support him in
ending it in a way that would bring a just
and lasting piece to Vietnam, meaning he could not just
unilaterally decide to withdraw all the troops. Nixon did not
give a specific timetable for this, because the timeline for

(06:53):
troop withdrawal would have to depend on what was actually
happening in Vietnam, but, in his words quote, if the
level of enemy activity significantly increases, we might have to
adjust our timetable accordingly. Also by this point, the war
was unpopular in the United States, but the anti war
movement was even more unpopular, and Nixon was really willing

(07:17):
to put the focus on the protesters if it meant
less attention to his military policy. Four days after he
gave this speech, on November seventh, eight people, including two
Catholic priests, a nun, and a seminarian, broke into draft
board offices in the Boston neighborhoods of Jamaica, Plane, Dudley,
Upham's Corner, and Copley Square, which contained records from six

(07:41):
different draft boards. They destroyed records for one a draftees
as well as one y which were designated as people
who could be drafted in the event of a national emergency.
They also damaged or destroyed other registers and documents. These
demonstrators also took some of the records to Washington, d C.

(08:02):
And destroyed them there and tried to get arrested for
their actions. During the second Moratorium March, which was held
in Washington, d C. On November fifteenth, and which included
roughly half a million marchers, the Boston Eight issued a
statement in which they described having marched, written letters, conferred
with officials, and spoken out against the war, capitalist materialism,

(08:26):
and military control. This statement went on to say, quote,
if you feel, as we do, that marching and demonstrating
are unproductive, we encourage you to take responsible action to
secure peace and end injustice. We have fashioned hope with
our bodies, as free people must do. We oppose with

(08:49):
our lives genocide and Vietnam and the arms race, exploitive
investment abroad, rape of foreign manpower and resources, domestic racism,
environmental ruin, and militarism in any form selective service, lottery
or volunteer army. The raided offices were closed for about

(09:09):
a week, and people whose records were in those offices
were immune from the next call up, but the records
were reconstructed before the one that followed. If the Boston
Eight ever faced charges, I did not find evidence of it.
It's possible they did, but the Boston Globe quoted a
US attorney as saying that they would never be indicted

(09:33):
because while they had taken responsibility for the damage, there
was just no corroborating evidence they had actually been involved,
so the FBI could not justify an indictment. Some of
the people who named themselves in the statement were later
arrested in conjunction with other anti war demonstrations. Though, just

(09:54):
a few days after the Boston Eight raids, the public
learned about the Meli massacre, which had happened so months before,
in which US troops had massacred more than three hundred civilians.
Then a few months after that, Nixon ordered ground troops
to invade Cambodia. Vocal opposition to the war once again
rose in the wake of the revelations around the Meeli massacre,

(10:17):
and Nixon's invasion of Cambodia accelerated that dramatically. On May fourth,
members of the Ohio National Guard killed four people and
wounded nine others during an anti war rally at Kent
State University. The number of draft board raids peaked in
nineteen seventy as all of this was happening, and in

(10:39):
the months afterward. That February, the Beaver fifty five had
destroyed an estimated ten thousand draft records in Minneapolis and
Saint Paul, Minnesota. On July second, a group of women
calling themselves Women Against Daddy Warbucks rated fifteen draft boards
in New York City, shredding the paperwork and then throwing

(11:00):
it around Rockefeller Center like confetti during lunchtime. Eight days later,
on July tenth, teams of two or three people broke
into selective service offices in Little Falls, Alexandria, Winona, and Wabasha, Minnesota.
Eight of them were captured and became known as the
Minnesota Eight. Their goal was to destroy as many one

(11:23):
A draft files as possible. This was a somewhat more
secular group than some of the others that we've talked about.
Many of them were college students and some were classified
as conscientious objectors, but religion was still a factor for
some of them. One in particular, Francis Kronk, laid out

(11:43):
an argument that what they had done was a necessary
act required by Catholic moral responsibility and that the selective
service system was unconstitutional and morally unjustifiable. One of the
Minnesota eight entered a guilty plea and got no prison time,
and the rest served between fourteen and twenty nine months

(12:03):
in prison. The last of them was released in January
of nineteen seventy three. These were not at all the
only raids carried out that year. People broke into draft
boards and destroyed records in Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island,
and Delaware in nineteen seventy as well. These raids continued

(12:24):
into nineteen seventy one, including in Evanston, Illinois, and multiple
cities in New York. On January twenty fifth, nineteen seventy one,
Daniel and Philip Berrigan were on the cover of Time
magazine with the headline Rebel Priests the Curious Case of
the Berigins. At the time, the Berigans were serving their

(12:45):
sentence in federal prison. FBI director Herbert Hoover had claimed
they were involved in a wide ranging plot to attack
government sites and kidnap Henry Kissinger attributed to the East
Coast conspiracy to save lives, and when the article was written,
they and other alleged co conspirators had been indicted for

(13:06):
this as well. Philip later faced trial for this, but
he was not convicted. I find the two of them fascinating,
but their story is like way beyond apart from the
draft board raids, like way beyond the scope of the
podcast for the most part. That brings us to the
Camden twenty eight, which we will talk about after a

(13:27):
sponsor break. The draft board raid that led me to
this episode was the Camden twenty eight raid on August
twenty second, nineteen seventy one. By this point, there had
been hundreds of break ins at draft boards all around

(13:50):
the United States. As we've said, not all of them
had been carried out by people who were motivated by
their faith, specifically by like religious convictions. But when those
religious convictions were a factor, getting arrested was usually part
of the plan, and so was going to trial and

(14:11):
being convicted and receiving some kind of sentence. While some
people were fined, a lot of people were incarcerated. So
by nineteen seventy one, almost four years into these raids,
some of the most committed active people in the Catholic
Left movement either were or had been in prison. There
were often other people who were willing to take smaller

(14:34):
risks with smaller possible consequences, but there were just not
as many people still prepared to be imprisoned for months
or years in these Draft Board actions. Also, people had
been protesting US involvement in Vietnam since the war had started,
or since the American involvement in the war had started,

(14:56):
and these protests had been growing for years, but there
still did not seem to be any end to the
war anywhere in sight. So a group of people started
planning a raid in which they would try to take
all of the records from the Draft Board office in Camden,
New Jersey. Camden is across the Delaware River from Philadelphia,

(15:19):
and in the eighteen thirties it became connected to New
York City by rail. It grew into an important industrial
manufacturing and shipbuilding center over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
but the city had gone into a major economic decline
after World War Two as two of its major employers,

(15:40):
RCA and Campbell's Soup started decentralizing their operations. The third
major employer, New York Ship, also started losing business as
newer more modern shipbuilding facilities were built in other parts
of the country. About twenty percent of the city's population
moved away between nineteen fifty and nineteen seventy. This was

(16:03):
part of the postwar white flight to the suburbs, meaning
that the city's demographics shifted over those years, becoming more
prenominantly black and Hispanic because of a range of economic factors. Poverty,
a lack of housing, and a lack of job opportunities
all became serious problems in the city. The people who
planned the raid on the Draft Board office in Camden

(16:25):
were white, but they saw the residents of the city
as disproportionately at risk from the draft and at higher
risk while serving in Vietnam because of their race and
economic status. They also saw a connection between the country
spending on military and war and the systems of poverty
at work in Camden. The Camden twenty eight included four

(16:48):
Catholic priests and one Lutheran priest, and most of the
rest were Catholic laypeople. Seven were women. The Draft Board
office that they raided was located on the upper floor
of a building that also included courtrooms, actually the same
courtrooms where they would later stand trial and the post office. Initially,

(17:09):
they cased the building from the outside, but one of them,
Robert Hardy, known as Bob, decided to try to get
inside to find out exactly where the draft files were
and what they would need to do. Once they got
into the building, he took one of the others with him,
and he walked in and said that he wanted to
learn about how the draft system worked. That would seem

(17:31):
suspicious to me, but the staff was apparently very happy
to show him. Hardy wound up being instrumental in planning
this raid. In fact, both he and other members of
the group said they had pretty much abandoned the whole
idea before he got involved. He was a former marine
and a contractor. He had some of the tools that

(17:52):
they would need, and he already knew how to use them.
They decided to enter through a fire escape, and he
worked out where to put the ladder to avoid setting
off an alarm. He also provided the latter which participants
practiced scaling against another building, and he taught them how
to drill through a window to break through it without
shattering it. The day after he was approached about being

(18:15):
part of this raid, Hardy had also started informing on
them to the FBI. He told agents he was concerned
about what they were doing and thought the FBI should
put a stop to it. He was against the war
and the draft, but also against tactics like destroying draft records.
According to his sworn affidavit, FBI agents asked him to

(18:37):
monitor what was happening with the group and keep them informed,
assuring him that they would prevent the raid from happening,
they would make their arrest during a dry run, and
that none of the people involved would face jail time.
The FBI did not stop the Camden twenty eight during
their dry run, and in the early hours of Sunday,
August twenty second, several of them broke into the Selective

(19:00):
Service office and filled twelve large bags full of draft records,
throwing him out the window. But before they could leave
the building, FBI agents arrived on the scene and arrested them.
A total of twenty eight people were ultimately arrested, some
who had been part of the break in and were
there right that at that moment, and the rest who

(19:21):
had helped with the planning and preparation. It didn't take
long for people to figure out that Bob Hardy had
tipped off the FBI, among other things. As everyone else
was taken into custody, no one could figure out where
he was. According to Hardy, the FBI had paid him
the equivalent of his usual daily wage while he was

(19:41):
acting as an informant. He said the FBI had provided
the walkie talkies they used to communicate during the raid.
The FBI reimbursed him for that ladder and all the
other tools and equipment that Camden twenty eight used, and
even for the gas for his van that he used
to drive them around. Hardy had been updating the FBI

(20:02):
about their progress daily. Hardy's affidavit about this and a
lot of points was not very flattering. In his characterization
of the Camden twenty eight, he wrote, quote, it's really
impossible to exaggerate how inept, undisciplined, and generally unable to
pull off this action they were. They wouldn't keep to schedules,

(20:25):
and they kept making simple matters complicated. At the same time,
he did write this while trying to make the argument
that the raid would not have happened without him or
without the FBI, and in the same statement he described
the Camden twenty eight as quote, the finest group of
Christian people I have ever been associated with, and he

(20:45):
described the raid as the best cooperative effort that he
had ever experienced. Understandably, many of the rest of the
Camden twenty eight felt immensely betrayed by Harty's actions. But
on September tenth, less than a month after the raid,
Hardy's nine year old son, Billy, fell from a tree
and landed on a fence, and he was seriously injured.

(21:09):
He died on October third. Some of the Camden twenty
eight really rallied around Hardy during all of this. In
a two thousand and seven documentary about the raid, some
of the members talked about encouraging others to forgive Hardy
in this moment, because if they didn't, they would regret
having not done so. Later, the Reverend Father Michael Doyle,

(21:30):
one of the Camden twenty eight, led Billy Hardy's funeral mass.
Back at the beginning of part one of this episode,
we mentioned that two of the Camden twenty eight had
been involved in the break in into the FBI office
in Media, Pennsylvania. That was Keith Forsyth and Robert Williamson,

(21:50):
although that was not known until much much later, way
after all of this. At the time, nobody knew the
identities of the people who had broken into the FBI
office in Media, but Media and Camden were only about
twenty miles apart, and the FBI believed that the media
perpetrators were among the people planning the raid in Camden.

(22:13):
So it appears that one of the reasons the FBI
allowed this raid to continue and even enabled its happening,
was with the hope of using all of this to
apprehend the people who were responsible for the break in
in Media. We will talk about what happened when the
Camden twenty eight went to trial after we paused for

(22:34):
a sponsor break. A year and a half passed between
the arrest of the Camden twenty eight and the trial. Initially,
prosecutors planned to try everybody together, which was a huge

(22:55):
challenge for the defendants, not just a lot of people
and on time that the Camden twenty eight was not
one unified, coalesced organization. It was more like several smaller
groups of closer knit people which then had some connections
among one another. Some were Catholic clergy, but most of

(23:16):
them were lay people, and everybody had different priorities and
different responsibilities going on in their lives. They did not
have anything close to unanimous agreement on a lot of
really important questions, like whether they should accept a plea
deal if they were offered one, or what their goal
should be at the trial, like did they want to

(23:39):
focus on winning so that they could hopefully avoid jail time,
or did they want to have what had become known
as a movement trial or a political trial, making the
trial itself part of their anti war advocacy, not just
keeping it in the news, but making their testimony an
anti war act. They were really all over the place

(24:01):
on everything from how to raise money for bail to
how and how much to prepare for the trial. Eventually,
an organization called the Camden twenty eight Defense Committee formed
to help coordinate, raise funds and support the defendants. This
included holding regular rallies that were part anti war demonstrations,

(24:21):
part fundraising, and support for the defense. Once the trial started,
the Defense Committee also made sure there were always lots
of supporters in the gallery. In the eighteen months that
passed between the raid and the trial, public opinion in
the United States had continued to turn against the war,

(24:42):
and against the Nixon administration. The New York Times had
started publishing excerpts from the Pentagon Papers a couple of
months before the break in at the Camden office. These
top secret documents had been leaked to the press, and
they revealed all kinds of details about now the US
involvement in Vietnam and in Southeast Asia more broadly, going

(25:04):
all the way back to the Truman administration. These reports
and the decision to publish them were really controversial, but
a lot of the details that they contained were also
very damaging to the government's reputation. Also, the Watergate break
in took place during the period between the draft board
break in and the trial, and that led to an

(25:27):
enormous scandal for Richard Nixon. Eventually, the prosecution decided to
sever ten of the defendants from the Camden twenty eight trial.
These were people who had been accused of being involved
in the planning and coordination, but not the actual break in.
One other defendant accepted a plea deal. The remaining seventeen,

(25:48):
which included four Catholic priests, were all tried together. Two
defendants were charged with conspiracy and the rest with conspiracy,
breaking and entering and destroying draft records. The prosecution really
thought it had an open and shut case. The people
who had broken into the draft office had been caught

(26:08):
red handed, and others had acknowledged what they had done.
They had photographs, they had recorded conversations from those walkie
talkies that the FBI had given to Bob Hardy. The
prosecution also argued that these were not hapless amateurs, but
experienced anti war demonstrators, and they expected Bob Hardy to

(26:32):
be a key witness. It just really did not seem
like it was going to be difficult at all to
get a guilty verdict. But according to Hardy's account, he
had been assured that the authorities were going to stop
the raid before it happened, and that any charges that
Camden twenty eight might face wouldn't lead to prison time
if they were convicted. Now they were facing the possibility

(26:56):
of lengthy prison sentences. He felt complempletely betrayed by this,
and like it just wasn't what he had agreed to.
In March of nineteen seventy two, Hardy filed a motion
for the case to be dismissed, which read, in part quote,
the substantive crimes were committed because the government wanted them
committed and made their commission possible. They were committed by

(27:19):
and or with the indispensable assistance of the government. Without
the action, expertise, and material support of the FBI informer,
the conspiracy would have remained abandoned. This motion to dismiss
was denied, but Hardy instead became a witness for the defense.
He helped to build a case that the raid would

(27:41):
not have happened without his involvement and support, and that
he would not have been involved had the FBI not
directed him to keep on working with the group and
provided him with the money and the supplies to do it.
The resulting trial was in many ways unconventional. In a
lot of the political trials or movement trials that evolved

(28:02):
over the nineteen seventies, people often defended themselves. This was
the case for a lot of the Camden twenty eight.
Although some of the defendants did have attorneys, there were
three attorneys involved with the trial, and many of the
defendants acted as one another's co councils. The defense pursued
a strategy of jury nullification, that is that the jury

(28:25):
would find the defendants not guilty in spite of their
established guilt because of the moral and ethical questions surrounding
the case. To successfully do this, the defense would need
to prove misconduct on the part of the government and
also convince the jury that an acquittal was the only
moral and just thing to do. The defense also needed

(28:48):
the right jury to be able to pull this off,
so there was a lot of research into potential jurors,
paired with a very careful jury selection process. This was
a fairly new strategy which had been employed in only
a couple of trials and is now known as scientific
jury selection. This also only really worked because the judge

(29:10):
US District Court, Judge Clarkson Fisher, was pretty permissive in
what he allowed the defendants to do. The defendants were
allowed to give testimony about their opposition to the Vietnam War,
and to bring in details about things like the Watergate
scandal and the Pentagon papers and those documents that had
been stolen in the raid on the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania,

(29:33):
which were a big part of shutting down co Intel
pro None of this was directly related to what had
happened at the Draft Board, but the defense used it
to establish a pattern of dishonesty and malfeasance on the
part of the US government. Defendants also gave their thoughts
on greater social and political questions during the trial. One

(29:54):
of them showed slides of burned out villages in Vietnam
juxtaposed with destroyed buildings in Camden, and his opening statement,
Father Michael Doyle asked rhetorically whether a place as troubled
as Camden should exist in a nation as rich as
the United States. Opening statements started on February twenty seventh,

(30:17):
nineteen seventy three, and since there were so many people
acting as attorneys, there were a lot of statements. Overall.
The defendants tried to create an atmosphere of an almost
spiritual community during the trial, like the defendants who were
also acting as one another's attorneys, introducing themselves and saying
hello and calling each other brothers and sisters, or celebrating

(30:41):
whoever's birthday it was in the courtroom. They also took
questions directly from the jurors, which was another new thing
in US legal proceedings. The defendants, whose cases had been
severed from the rest were still present in the courtroom
almost every day and over the course of the trial,
the Camden twenty eight became a lot more coalesced than

(31:03):
they had ever been before it. Bob Hardy appeared as
a defense witness on April tenth and was questioned for
the next three days, building a narrative about how much
of his involvement in the raid had been facilitated and
encouraged by the FBI. During a cross examination, an FBI

(31:23):
inspector had also confirmed that he had been paid about
seven thousand, five hundred dollars, both for his work as
an informant and for various tools and travel expenses that
he was reimbursed for. Philip and Daniel Berrigan were among
the expert witnesses. Historian Howard Zinn, who had also testified

(31:45):
in the trials of other draft board readers, was another
expert witness, giving an overview of the history of colonialism
in Southeast Asia and civil disobedience in the United States.
There was also testimony by some of the defendant's parents,
including Betty Good, mother of Bob Good. Another of her sons,

(32:06):
Paul Good, had been killed in Vietnam, and she gave
wrenching testimony about his death. This trial lasted for fifteen weeks.
When it was time for the jury to deliberate, Judge
Fisher gave them instructions that included this quote. If you
find that the overreaching participation by government agents or informers

(32:28):
in the activities as you have heard them were so
fundamentally unfair to be an offense to the basic standards
of decency and shocking to the universal sense of justice,
then you may acquit any of the defendants to whom
this defense applies. The jury deliberated for four days. Part

(32:50):
way through, the foreman had to be replaced. Apparently her
family had been telling her they thought the jury should
find the defendants guilty, and base on all their pressure,
she did not want to be the one to deliver
the verdict. At this point, the defendants thought they might
be winding up with a hung jury. There had been

(33:11):
one juror in particular who had asked a lot of
questions during the trial, and some of those questions really
seemed to imply that he was in favor of the war.
But on May twentieth, nineteen seventy three, the jury found
the defendants not guilty on all counts. To my knowledge,
the remaining ten defendants were never tried. I could not

(33:33):
find any mention of them eventually going to trial, and
this also did not reveal any connections or lead to
any prosecution for the people who had broken into the
FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. That investigation was closed in
nineteen seventy six, and the identities of the people who
were involved remained unknown until twenty fourteen, when five of

(33:56):
them agreed to have their identities revealed. Although there had
been a lot of testimony about the Camden twenty eighth
moral opposition to the war, the case itself really wasn't
about whether the war was just or whether the US
was right to be fighting it. The judges instructions to
the jury had also put the focus on the actions

(34:17):
of the government in relation to the raid, not the war,
But this verdict is often read as a referendum on
the public's attitudes about the Vietnam War in the spring
of nineteen seventy three. By the time the trial ended,
the draft had ended as well. The last US troops
had also left Vietnam. That happened on March twenty third

(34:40):
of nineteen seventy three. Two years later, the US suspended
selective Service registration, although it resumed in nineteen eighty. Still today,
male US citizens and male immigrants to the United States
are required to register within thirty days of turning eighteen.
With few excit, President Jimmy Carter issued a blanket pardon

(35:04):
for the people that had evaded the draft during the
Vietnam War, but not to people who had deserted the
military on his first full day in office. The people
who were part of all these various draft raids all
went on to have their own lives, with many of
them continuing their anti war activism. The Berrigan brothers, who

(35:24):
both had long and complex lives beyond this, became founding
members of the anti nuclear Plowshares movement, whose activities included
damaging warhead nose cones and pouring blood onto files at
a General Electric nuclear missile facility in King of Prussia,
Pennsylvania in nineteen eighty Nixon's remarks in his Silent Majority

(35:46):
speech that we referenced earlier focused on the idea of
removing US troops in a way that would leave South
Vietnam able to defend itself, and in January of nineteen
seventy three, the US and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam
had signed peace accords, but the fighting there had continued.

(36:06):
By April of nineteen seventy five, the US had started
evacuating non essential personnel from Vietnam and had brought people
from the more remote areas of Vietnam into the South
Vietnamese capital of Saigon. An effort was also made to
evacuate South Vietnamese orphans, called Operation Babylift. We talked about

(36:28):
that in an installment of Six Impossible Episodes in June
of twenty eighteen. Saigon ultimately fell to the North Vietnamese
Army on April thirtieth, nineteen seventy five, leading to a
massive effort to evacuate remaining diplomats, embassy staff, and other
Americans who were still in Vietnam. Since other routes of

(36:49):
evacuation had been blocked, the one way remaining out was
by helicopter from the US Embassy. US Ambassador Graham Martin
ordered the evacuation of South Vietnam these officials and staff
as well. Ultimately, about five thousand, five hundred Vietnamese people
were evacuated from South Vietnam, but thousands more had tried

(37:10):
to get a spot aboard departing helicopters and were not
able to. In nineteen seventy six, Vietnam unified as one
nation under the Communist Party of Vietnam, which is the
nation's sole legal party today. There's a pretty new book
about the Camden twenty eight. I think it came out
last year. It's called Spiritual Criminals by Michelle M. Nickerson.

(37:33):
I only read a couple of chapters of it leading
into this because there was like one particular area that
I felt like I needed another perspective on. But those
chapters were really good. So if you want to check
that book out, it exists. Do you have some listener
mayl Now that we have wrapped up this rather large topic.
That's that's such a large topic, we'll talk about more

(37:55):
about how big it is on Friday. I do have it.
This is from Sammy. They wrote and said, Hi, Holly
and Tracy, I just listened to your episode on Exem Clement,
attorney at law, in the Saturday Classic on the Lost
Cause of the Confederacy. I was tickled to hear that
Exem started as a stenographer and clerk. Since I am

(38:17):
currently a court clerk and looking into stenography. Clement's connection
to the lost cause is very interesting to me, since
the most important part of stenography is maintaining an accurate
and honest record of events. But it is just like
an attorney to pick out the words states' rights and
leave behind to own slaves when defending their point, even

(38:39):
if it's a bad one. Most people know that court
reporters slash stenographers type really fast and transcribe hearings. What
many don't know is that the Steno machine is a
shorthand keyboard that's completely different from a standard quirty keyboard
and uses different letter combinations to type the meal and syllabically.

(39:02):
This allows for typing speeds as fast as two hundred
words per minute, when most people can type forty words
per minute. It's much easier to keep up with people
talking that way. For example, the word keyboard would look
like this on a Steno machine. Sammy has then put
in kind of a little It's two lines with letters
broken out over the two lines, and only some of

(39:25):
them line up with each other. It's a little hard
to describe, but like the top line is K and
then a space AO, and then a space and E,
and then at the bottom there's some space and then
PW and then space, and then AO and then a
bigger space, and then R and then a space and
then D. Sonography isn't to sought out as a career anymore,

(39:45):
screw you, AI, but its applications are so important to
Not only do sonographers transcribe legal and medical hearings, they
also provide closed captioning services to death and heart of
hearing folks. Any Ways, thanks for this show and all
that you do, and of course obligatory cat pictures attached.
Binks mostly black tuxedo, the only one not related Bebop,

(40:10):
mostly white tuxedo, Jet, all black Valentine multicolor jet and
Bebop's mom. All my best wishes, Sammy. Thank you so much,
Sammy for this this email. I did not really know
that about the tools that stenographers used to keep all
their typing. I did kind of think that they typed

(40:32):
just really fast. Also, I see your Cowboy Bebop naming convention.
I see it. Yeah, yeah, I love that. These are
some adorable cats, Oh my goodness, just so much. They're
all loungy, except for one who looks like this kitty
cat might attempt to eat a part of a Christmas tree.

(40:53):
I'm not sure that's actually what's going to happen, but
if this were my cat, I'm thinking that cat is
about to jump up and grab the end of the
Christmas tree. Froud. This has just given me fresh fear
in my soul as I have been talking about our
ill behaved new cats lately. I'm like, oh, man, Christmas
is gonna be a disaster. But oh goodness goodness. Now

(41:20):
I'm kind of wondering should there be an episode on
the Steno Machine. Maybe I don't know. So thank you
so so so much, Sammy for this email and these
cat pictures. We always love cat pictures. If you don't
have cats or dogs or any other pet animals, you
don't have to worry about that. You can send pictures

(41:41):
of a bird you saw or a flower you saw outside,
or some other random thing, or no picture. It's fine.
But we do love all the pictures that folks send in.
So thank you, so so so much, Sammy. If you
would like to send us a note about this or
any other podcast, we are at History Podcast at heartradio
dot com, and you can subscribe to our show on

(42:03):
the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like to get
your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.

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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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