SPOCK AND OTHER PROMINENT ANTIWAR FIGURES INDICTED
New York
The U.S. government has launched its first major attack on the movement against the Vietnam war in this country. A federal grand jury indicted five prominent opponents of the war January 5.
The five were charged with "conspiring to counsel young men to violate the draft laws." They face up to five years in prison and fines of $10,000 each if convicted.
The government, aiming to terrorize and intimidate the antiwar movement, chose for its victims some of the most widely known and respectable figures associated with the moderate wing of the movement.
Most famous of those indicted were Dr. Benjamin Spock, the author and pediatrician, and William Sloane Coffin Jr., chaplain of Yale University.
The other three under indictment are Marcus Raskin, codirector of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.; novelist Mitchell Goodman; and Michael Ferber, a graduate student at Harvard University.
According to the indictment, the five agreed "to sponsor a nationwide draft resistance program that would include disrupting the induction processes at various induction centers, making public appeals for young men to resist the draft and to refuse to serve in the military services and issuing calls for registrants to turn in their draft cards."
Dr. Spock declared that one reason for the indictments was that "Lyndon Johnson and the Administration are feeling more desperate all the time because the war is still going against then."
He correctly said that his conduct was “legal in the highest sense" and pointed to the Nuremburg decisions as justification for his actions because the American government “is up to crimes against humanity."
Spock said he was not afraid to go to jail but that he would fight all the way to the Supreme Court. "The Government is not going to quit easily and neither are we," he said.
The case is certain to become a rallying point for the entire antiwar movement. It is plainly conceived by
America's rulers as a political attack to silence dissent. Thus if the prosecution is successful it would be only the beginning of wholesale indictments of antiwar activists across the country.
The government's intention of opening a head-on confrontation with the antiwar movement is clear from its decision to attack the most respectable rather than the most radical wing of the movement. These are men of some stature in the United States.
Dr. Spock is the country's leading authority on child care, and his book, Baby_and Child Care, has sold more than twenty million copies. Both he and William Sloane Coffin come from families on the fringes of the ruling class itself.
Spock's father was general counsel of the New Haven Railroad, and Coffin's father was vice-president of W. and J. Sloane, the large chain of luxury furniture stores.
Marcus Raskin was a member of the White House staff during the Kennedy administration, when he was a disarmament advisor on the staff of the National Security Council. He was also a member of the U.S. delegation to the 18-nation Geneva disarmament conference in 1962 and served on a special presidential panel on educational research and development.
Mitchell Goodman, 44, is a graduate of Harvard College and served as an artillery lieutenant during World War II. He has published one novel and has written for the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Redbook and Esquire. He has taught writing at Stanford University and the City College of New York.
The response to this attack by all opponents of the war must be to unite in the broadest possible movement of defense. If the political character of the government's assault can be made clear to the mass of the American people by the time these men are brought to trial, Johnson may discover that this was not exactly the most auspicious way to open his presidential campaign in 1968.