My St. Paul’s grades had not been good. Probably Dad’s name contributed to my admission to Stanford. My older sister Margy had attended before me, and it felt right to follow in her footsteps, but the greatest factor in my college decision was the desire to escape Washington, New England, and the entire East Coast.
It was 1969 in the Bay Area, and I was nineteen. This was a new world, and I was a boy, trying to become a man. Some of my boarding school peers were coming with me. Still, Palo Alto was vastly different from anywhere I’d lived. At St. Paul’s, I’d first begun to be tormented by my father’s role in the history of the twentieth century. Now I was in the land of my demons, and the demons were all real. Northern California was the home of hippies and a stronghold of antiwar activism. The evils of the war were not swirling in the back of my mind; they were being shouted in the street.
Like it is for any young man entering adulthood, it was my destiny to confront the legacy of my father. Dad was now the subject of both public admiration (by those already nostalgic for the Kennedy era) and public pillorying (by both radicals and Republicans). His refusal to speak publicly and to pressure his successors to get out of Vietnam was a primary reason that I started to protest the war. If he wouldn’t tell the truth, I would do it for him. At the time, I thought I was taking control of my own life. Really, I was carrying some of his weight.
It would have been odd to remain silent. Dissent against the war was no longer underground, if it had ever been. Maybe it was just easier after 1968, when Nixon was President. I no longer felt conflicted by personal attachment to the men in charge. My childhood memories no longer stood directly in the way of my anger. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger definitely weren’t inviting me over for lunch and a swim.
There’s one protest I remember very well. It must have been the autumn of 1969, my freshman year. I drove from Palo Alto to Berkeley to participate in a demonstration. I’m not sure how I heard about the event; in those days it seemed as though word traveled easily. I was going to the East Bay, and I had no idea what to expect when I got there. Zooming over the water, still and silent below, I felt my anticipation growing. If you looked at me from the window of another car, you wouldn’t have guessed that I was making my way into a churning pool of anguish and anger.
In Berkeley, the demonstrators gathered on one of the big central streets, lined with shops and businesses. I remember a crowd of thousands. More joined in as the cheering and chanting began. There was a staging area, hastily assembled, and I remember being somewhere toward the back of the crowd, a watcher.
The voices of the organizers boomed over speakers and echoed through the alleys. They were holding a mock trial for President Nixon, presenting the evidence for his crimes in Vietnam and his extension of the war into Cambodia. Predictably and theatrically, they found Nixon guilty. The verdict whipped the crowd into a frenzy. Soon I was running the streets, with the lights of police cars flashing around me, the scream of tires and the sound of breaking glass filling my ears. Shop windows were smashed, signs torn down, and fights started. The demonstration turned into a riot.
At first I was trying to calm people down. I remember shouting, “Don’t break the windows!” I think I remember pleading logically with someone my own age, trying to convince him that the Establishment would use this destruction to paint us as violent, to portray us as hypocrites.
I’m not sure how I eventually fell into the rage. Taken up in the anger of the crowd and moved to blind emotion by the truth of our cause, I broke things and smashed glass. I talked my way out of getting arrested. I’m not quite sure how I got back to campus that night, nor how many cuts I washed out in the shower.
I was participating in the antiwar movement in order to survive my own family trauma. This template of protest was the only thing available to make sense of the ugliness in my inner world. I was unable to articulate my own chaotic feelings, but the nation presented them for me. In the streets of America I was finding a truth that provided both relief and more pain.
It wasn’t all happening on the street. Back on campus, our education had become practical. We occupied administration buildings and held weekly sit-ins. In those settings, the rage simmered. One of the most important and upsetting incidents involved my literature professor. Bruce Franklin was a great teacher, a Melville expert and an articulate lecturer. I took several of his courses, and eventually the classes departed from Moby-Dick and focused on what was going on around us. He’d teach us to write by asking us to compose antiwar leaflets. In class discussions, we’d debate the best way to get our message out to the public. Sometimes Bruce even canceled class so we could focus on demonstrations instead.
As I recall, the entire campus was quite frequently shut down. School seemed much less important than activism. But the Establishment found ways to win. Bruce, a tenured professor, was unceremoniously canned and turned into a scapegoat. Looking back, I don’t find it surprising that I dropped out after five quarters. What was I going to learn in that bubble that I couldn’t see for myself in the real world? Writing my own leaflets, I wasn’t the young kid who sheltered in a phone booth anymore, meekly asking his dad to send war propaganda in the mail.
There was one time during this period, which was usually full of tremendous energy, when I got a preview of the quiet, burning sadness I would feel in years to come. It was during a protest at the San Francisco Airport. A few of us occupied one of the main terminal buildings.
The terminal was extremely crowded that day. We stood in the middle of the big marble floor and read aloud the names of US soldiers killed in Vietnam. The stack of papers with the list of names was enormous, so we’d take turns. One person would read for a few hours, and then the next person would take over.
The majority of people in the airport ignored us. A few of them probably nodded or waved in support. The thing I remember most is the few men—all of them men, most in their fifties—who tried to threaten and intimidate us. They called us sons of bitches and worse. The name-calling didn’t really hurt. It stung me more when someone yelled, “You haven’t been there.”
This insult brought to mind all my childhood memories. I hated thinking about those fifteen-odd years when I had been relatively clueless about the war. Adding to a kind of survivor’s guilt, I now also suffered from impostor syndrome. You haven’t been there hurt because it was true. I didn’t know very much. I certainly didn’t know anything about the people we were fighting in Vietnam.
Hearing those men scream at us in the airport—knowing that a few of them were probably World War II veterans—made me think of rubbing Dad’s back in the ski lodge and seeing him listen to the words of the Quakers. I felt now that I should have been standing shoulder to shoulder with those people, facing him and confronting him. As a child I couldn’t imagine that my father would do something he knew was wrong. It had taken me too long to see the truth.
In the years after I became involved in the peace movement, You haven’t been there turned into You weren’t there. Because I wasn’t. I didn’t go.
When I was at Stanford, I had the opportunity to take a deferment. So did my peers. We were college kids, and therefore the Establishment valued our lives. Many of us were the sons of Establishment leaders.
I had learned from other activists that deferments were both racist and classist. On a personal level, I thought taking a deferment amounted to going along with the war planners, taking my father’s side. By 1969, my father was no longer at the Pentagon. Still, I figured that he must have approved the use of deferments while he was in office, or at least had allowed them to continue.
I don’t remember the process involved in refusing the deferment—whether I had to actively decline one or if I simply didn’t request one. My memory really kicks in when I received my draft notice at Donner House on the Stanford campus. After getting the summons, I took a bus from San Jose to the nearest induction center. It was a long ride around the Bay to Oakland. I remember that I was on a Greyhound bus. It was hot, and the seats were filled. I felt a sense of approaching doom, like being pursued by a figure of Death in a dream.
At the gates of the induction center, there were antiwar protesters handing out pamphlets urging us to resist. Chanting, singing songs. Of course, most of the draftees weren’t from Stanford. There were kids from all the surrounding communities, and they were of every race. Still, I remember that the majority of kids had brown skin; the inequities of the draft were obvious. Some of the protesters came up to us as we stood in line to inform us about all the different ways that we could get classified 4-F, ineligible for service. The message was You don’t have to do this.
The draft board treated us like cattle. Once inside, we were poked and prodded. The main part of the day consisted of a humiliating physical. We were stripped and searched, for the contraband of weakness. It felt like they were denuding us mentally too.
The last inspection was with a shrink. This guy had longish hair and a thick beard. He asked me if there were any psychological reasons why I couldn’t serve in the military, and he asked in such a sincere way. I was honest with him. I told him that I was completely against the war. Maybe I mentioned going to a Quaker school. He seemed to hear me. Surely this was someone who understood that I was a tormented soul.
“Anything else?”
It was almost like he wanted me to make something up. Like he was saying, This is your chance. I’d heard stories of the things people would say to the army shrinks. One friend of mine even lied about his sexuality and told them he was gay.
I didn’t make up any stories that day. Unless—and this seems truer in retrospect—every story I told about myself back then was partially made up, partially constructed from conflicting desires. To serve, to not die. To be a good soldier, to be true to myself. That day, the only story I told was one that felt very true: I told the shrink that I had stomach ulcers. That was my medical issue.
With his hair and beard, the psychologist had made himself look almost like a hippie. He was attentive and sensitive as a listener when I told him about the ulcers. He asked me how long I had been experiencing them. He asked me to describe my symptoms. I breathed easier, sensing the decision would be made for me—they would not send me.
“Have you been to a doctor?”
Yes, I told him. The conversation ended shortly after that. The shrink said I was good to go. He waved me through, a 1-A. I was good to fight.
After my visit to the draft board, probably just a few days later, my brother-in-law helped me contact the doctor who had diagnosed me with ulcers. I don’t remember if I took the initiative in this, or if the draft board requested documentation as a result of my statements to the psychologist. Whatever the case, the doc ultimately wrote a letter confirming that he’d been treating my ulcers for years. Finally, on December 19, 1969, I got a notice in the mail, addressed to my dorm room, informing me that I was “medically disqualified under current medical fitness standards for induction into the Armed Forces.”
I wasn’t allowed to serve. I say allowed because it’s a true word. I had conflicted feelings all along, and I have them still, but one thing is clear: not going to Vietnam as a soldier still causes me overwhelming guilt. It’s like a gap in my soul. On some level, I believed that serving would pay a debt for my father’s involvement in the war. To whom, I’m not sure. Maybe to humanity, maybe to some disembodied spirit of justice, maybe to our relationship, as a form of communication in place of what had not been said out loud. I didn’t want military glory. I certainly didn’t want to kill anyone. I didn’t believe in the cause. I just felt that I had this obligation, which I didn’t fulfill.
I always thought it was ironic that ulcers were the thing that got me out of serving. I believed they were caused by the stress I felt throughout the mid-1960s, attributable to my boarding school struggles and my dysfunctional relationship with Dad. Did Dad ever think about this? Did he even consider it? Maybe he would be relieved to know that he caused me so much anxiety that I was 4-F, safe and sound. Is it even a good thing to be safe when you’re living with that level of physical stress?
The ulcers shouldn’t have been disqualifying. They didn’t disqualify me from backpacking in the Sierras and skiing in Colorado. In recent years I’ve come to understand more about the bacterial origins of ulcers, and I am less certain that they were directly attributable to my particular childhood traumas.
Would fighting in a bad war have made any of this better? Would it have made my life easier to live—if I had survived—in the aftermath? Would it have improved my relationship with my father? I doubt it, but the guilt and regret are still there, feeding off the possibilities.
There were plenty of draftees who had some sort of medical issue but couldn’t afford medical visits. Others didn’t have relatives willing to help them navigate the process. There were also young men who wanted to go—some too young to serve, some too skinny or too sickly—who did everything in their power to make sure that they got over there, out of a sense of duty. I wasn’t that person.
I feel certain that my father did not intervene in this matter. I never talked to him about it, so my belief is unconfirmed, but it probably doesn’t make a difference that it’s unconfirmed. If I had spoken to him, there’s no possibility that he would have told me the truth. I’m certain that if I had asked, “Dad, did you get me 4-F’ed?” he would have fallen silent. He didn’t even have anything to say about my decision to show up at the induction.
He was out of government in 1969, then serving as the president of the World Bank, and this fact adds to my belief that he didn’t pull any strings. It was probably the lowest point in our relationship, when I dissociated from him the most and he understood me the least.
Reflecting on my draft experience now, trying to understand, feeling both enormous guilt and gratitude for being alive, I see myself in the year 1969 as a person with only partial agency, swept along by this complicated history. In other words, I was a kid. The son of Robert McNamara but a kid all the same. This all happened during my first three months on the Stanford campus. The ones who went were kids too.
Last year, as we were in the midst of the walnut harvest, I met a Vietnam veteran. He was one of the truck drivers who arrived at the farm every morning to load our product and transport it to wholesalers. As I greeted him, and we waited for the out-loading conveyor belt to do its work, he told me a little about his life. It turned out that he was born in 1950, the same year as me. He went to a rural high school in Northern California. After he graduated, he said, there were no opportunities. So he enlisted.
“Are you glad you did that?” I asked. I didn’t know what else to say.
“It was the worst and the best decision of my life,” the truck driver told me.
I asked him what he meant by that.
“The worst decision was going.”
And the best decision, he explained, was the time when he refused to follow orders. A superior had commanded him to destroy a hamlet where it was suspected that some of the villagers were sheltering VCs. He didn’t do it. He stood down.
I didn’t ask the driver what happened next. He didn’t say whether or how he was punished for his insubordinate act. If he had followed orders, I suppose his punishment would have been to live with the knowledge that he had destroyed innocent lives. That knowledge would still be with him, even in the moment when we stood in the early-morning dark together.
While the truck driver told me his story, I listened. I didn’t say a word. The guy had no clue whose son I was. He drove off, and the sun was coming up, and I faded away from that conversation about Vietnam, which I’ve been having my whole adult life. It stops and starts, and it happens with different people and at different times. For me it is one ongoing confession. I went back to my land that morning, back into the harvest and the soil.