People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [361]
One of the young men who refused to register, James Peters, wrote an open letter to President Carter:
Dear Mr. President: On July 23, 1980, I . . . am expected to report to my local post office for the purpose of registering with the Selective Service System. I hereby inform you, Mr. President, that I will not register on July 23, or at any time thereafter. . . . We have tried militarism, and it has failed the human race in every way imaginable.
Once he was in office, Ronald Reagan hesitated to renew draft registration, because, as his Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, explained, “President Reagan believes that resuming the draft to meet manpower problems would lead to public unrest comparable to that in the sixties and seventies.” William Beecher, a former Pentagon reporter, wrote in November 1981 that Reagan was “obviously concerned, even alarmed, by the mounting voices of discontent and suspicion over emerging U.S. nuclear strategy both in the streets of Europe and more recently on American campuses.”
Hoping to intimidate this opposition, the Reagan administration began to prosecute draft resisters. One of those facing prison was Benjamin Sasway, who cited U.S. military intervention in El Salvador as a good reason not to register for the draft.
Aroused by Sasway’s civil disobedience, a right-wing columnist (William A. Rusher, of the National Review) wrote indignantly that one heritage of the sixties was a new generation of antiwar teachers:
Almost certainly there was a teacher, or teachers, who taught Benjamin Sasway to look at American society as a hypocritical, exploitative, materialistic roadblock on the path of human progress. The generation of the Vietnam protesters is now in its early thirties, and the academicians among them are already ensconced in the faculties of the country’s high schools and colleges. . . . What a pity our jurisprudence doesn’t allow us to reach and penalize the real architects of this sort of destruction!
Reagan’s policy of giving military aid to the dictatorship of El Salvador was not accepted quietly around the nation. He had barely taken office when the following report appeared in the Boston Globe:
It was a scene reminiscent of the 1960s, a rally of students in Harvard Yard shouting antiwar slogans, a candlelight march through the streets of Cambridge. . . . 2000 persons, mostly students, gathered to protest U.S. involvement in El Salvador. . . . Students from Tufts, MIT, Boston University and Boston College, the University of Massachusetts, Brandeis, Suffolk, Dartmouth, Northeastern, Vassar, Yale and Simmons were represented.
During commencement exercises that spring of 1981 at Syracuse University, when Reagan’s Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, was given an honorary doctorate in “public service,” two hundred students and faculty turned their backs on the presentation. During Haig’s address, the press reported, “Nearly every pause in Mr. Haig’s fifteen-minute address was punctuated by chants: ‘Human needs, not military greed!’ ‘Get out of El Salvador!’ ‘Washington guns killed American nuns!’”
The last slogan was a reference to the execution in the fall of 1980 of four American nuns by Salvadoran soldiers. Thousands of people in El Salvador were being murdered each year by “death squads” sponsored by a government armed by the United States, and the American public was beginning to pay attention to events in this tiny Central American country.
As has been true generally in the making of U.S. foreign policy, there was no pretense at democracy. Public opinion was simply ignored. A New York Times/CBS News poll in the spring of 1982 reported that only 16 percent of its sampling favored Reagan’s program of sending military and economic aid to El Salvador.
In the spring of 1983, it was disclosed that an American physician named Charles Clement was working with the Salvadoran rebels. As an Air Force pilot in Southeast