From Draft NOtices, April-June 2022
-- Rick Jahnkow
This summer will mark the 40th anniversary of an event that began a life-changing period for many members of activist communities around the country. It started with a phone call received by a young person in San Diego County on June 30, 1982, the results of which soon triggered a whirlwind of intense reactions around the U.S.
Before saying more about the phone call, some backstory is needed: In 1980, then-President Carter ordered young men to begin registering with Selective Service for a possible future military draft. He intended registration to be a symbolic threat to the Soviet Union following its invasion of Afghanistan. It proved to have no effect on the Soviets; what it did do, however, was trigger a renewed movement of war resistance in the U.S. that had not been seen since the end of the Vietnam War.
During the summer of 1980, the implementation of draft registration was begun with separate deadlines for two age groups, starting with males born in 1960 and followed by those born in 1961. At the end of the two deadlines, news media were reporting statistics that indicated a significantly low rate of compliance in many places. In San Diego County, for example, the total number of registrations was less than half the number of men in the two age groups. Nationwide, the estimated number of non-registrants was in the hundreds of thousands. The statistics looked so bad for Selective Service that, by 1981, there was a growing assumption that the government would soon feel compelled to begin prosecuting at least some non-registrants.
Government Investigations
In 1981, I was a member of the San Diego chapter of the Committee Against Registration and the Draft (SDCARD). At our monthly meeting in August of that year, we were visited by Ben Sasway, a young man from North San Diego County who was on summer break from Humboldt State University. He explained that in 1980, he had publicly announced his refusal to register in a letter to President Carter, and recently, he had begun receiving threatening communications from the Department of Justice. (We later learned that Ben was one of 134 individuals who were being investigated for possible prosecution.)
After taking office in 1981, President Reagan issued a temporary postponement of any prosecutions. It was lifted by April of 1982, clearing the way for at least some individuals to soon be indicted. With an estimated 500,000 men not having registered, it was not publicly known when or where prosecutions might begin, so anti-draft groups, including SDCARD, developed contingency plans for local protests on the day after the first indictment. In San Diego, members of SDCARD and the local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) also began meeting with and advising Ben Sasway. Moreover, in case of a need for resources to support local resisters, we created the Draft Resisters Defense Fund of San Diego County (DRDF).
In late June of 1982, Ted Bumer, an NLG volunteer attorney, was able to confirm that Ben was, indeed, going to soon be charged. As a preemptive step, a news conference was organized in Ted’s office on June 28. It was well-attended and Ben was able to effectively explain to the media his reasons for refusing to register. I participated on behalf of the DRDF.
The next day, a producer from one of the national TV network news shows called my home. The person said they had a reporter on stand-by and asked if I could set up an interview with Ben the next morning. They claimed to have had a tip indicating Ben would likely be indicted by a federal grand jury on June 30. Personally, I was doubtful that the government had picked Ben for what might be the first prosecution in the nation, but I agreed to lead the news crew to the Sasway home in a nearby semi-rural area of Vista, California.
A Media Convergence
When we arrived there the next morning, I was surprised to find other national news crews already present. CBS, NBC, ABC and a Los Angeles TV station were all represented. They were soon joined by an Associated Press photographer and a cub reporter from the local Vista newspaper. Everyone had received a similar tip about Ben. They also knew that an afternoon news conference had been scheduled by the U.S. Attorney at the Federal District Court in San Diego. Obviously, the government had leaked the tip to ensure primetime news coverage of an impending announcement.
The TV crews all planned to go to the news conference, but they also wanted to be present to capture the very moment when Ben might get a phone call telling him he’d been indicted. During four hours of waiting for that possibility, some fairly sympathetic interviews were recorded with Ben and his parents. At the same time, the phone at the house was ringing off the hook. I volunteered to answer and screen all the calls.
At one point, a caller told me he was from GMA and asked to talk to Ben. I had never heard of “GMA,” so I covered the phone with my hand, turned to the media people sitting in the room behind me, and asked if any of them knew what it was. No one responded, so I went back to the caller and said, “What is GMA?” My inexperience must have been really obvious as he informed me it was Good Morning America (i.e., ABC’s popular national morning show).
As it got closer to the time for the news conference, “the” call still had not come in. The TV crews were nervous about the 45-minute drive to San Diego, so they decided to depart. This left only the A.P. photographer, Vista newspaper reporter and me with the Sasway family.
Shortly after 2:00 p.m., I answered the phone and found it was a member of Ben’s legal team. I handed him the phone and he was given the news: he had been indicted by the grand jury and would have to be at the courthouse the next morning for arraignment. Ben, having prepared himself for this development, reacted very calmly. His parents, even though they had known it might eventually happen, understandably reacted with a great deal of emotion.
An image of Ben taking the phone call was captured by the A.P. photographer and appeared the following day on the front page of most of the country’s daily newspapers. At the next-day arraignment, Ben was accompanied by his mother, father, sister and grandmother, and at least a hundred supporters rallying outside the courthouse.
The planned day-after protests went forward in many places around the country. Of course, things didn’t stop there, as indictments came down in other places and anti-registration organizing continued to intensify. In the end, a total of only 20 non-registrants were prosecuted, all of whom had publicly declared their resistance.
Upshot of the Indictment
It was eventually learned that Ben Sasway was chosen for the first case at the recommendation of Edwin Meese, a top advisor to President Reagan. At the time, Meese lived in San Diego County, home to one of the largest military complexes in the world. Presumably, it was thought that starting with a trial in such a conservative place would produce a quick legal victory and have an intimidating effect on those who hadn’t yet registered. But it didn’t exactly go according to plan. Ben was tried and convicted, but the support rallies for registration resisters in San Diego were frequent and large, including a crowd of 1200+ people who marched around the federal jail where Ben was being held pending sentencing. Even after he was sentenced to 30 months in prison and a resister named David Wayte had been indicted in Los Angeles, the draft registration rate in California continued to fall significantly short.
By the 1990s, plans for further prosecutions were abandoned; in part, because government documents uncovered during some of the trials had begun to lay a groundwork for possible acquittals based on selective prosecution. The government switched from indictments to coercing compliance through the passage of federal and state laws denying non-registrants civil service jobs, student financial aid, and drivers’ licenses. Though registration rates have inched up over time, such methods of enforcement have not addressed the fact that among those who have registered, a significant percentage have changed their addresses without telling Selective Service. It has made the implementation of a successful draft impractical, if not impossible.
As I noted at the beginning of this, the June 30th phone call and its aftermath had a major impact on many people. Besides generating immediate ripple effects nationally, it had an unexpected, lasting impact on activism in San Diego. Ben’s case generated considerable resources that made new local initiatives possible for us, like the launching of the Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities. And for many years, SDCARD was able to organize the distribution of tens of thousands of leaflets at high schools and run dozens of paid ads in student newspapers. When one school district banned students from accepting the ads, SDCARD won a federal court decision that has since been used by counter-recruitment groups to argue successfully for the same access to schools as the military. These and many other related activities that were sparked by the prosecution of Ben and other non-registrants are documented in SDCARD’s historical archives, 1,000 pages of which will soon be publicly available in the digital library collection of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Postscript: In 1984, to reflect the broader mission it wished to embrace, SDCARD changed its name to Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD).
This article is from Draft NOtices, the newsletter of the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (http://www.comdsd.org/index.php/draft-notices).
Please consider becoming a $10 per month supporter of The Committee Opposed to Militarism & the Draft
Our investigations and advocacy are an important contribution to the national peace community in the USA.
Donate through the Project on Youth & Non-military Opportunities
###
