L: Can I lead off with some context?

T: Sure.

L: Cause I think you need to understand the 60’s in relation to the 40’s and 50’s. I mean the 40’s, we… The US won this great big war and everybody was happy and then in the 50’s the economic thing really took off, but the military but the military had this confrontation with the civilians and MacArthur was fired and the Korean war was kind of at a stalemate. So there was this underlying thing, the military thought they were unappreciated and the economic engine kept going on. Then you gotta realize the military was heavily southern and so as the whole civil rights movement was really trying to turn that upside down it was also happening within the army and the military. So the civil rights movement was turning the civilian culture upside down and then this military was still angry, especially the southern military and so they were looking for a place to redeem themselves. Kennedy was sort of letting them dabble, but when he was killed, all of a sudden there’s a southerner in the white house and the southern part of the military said ah-ha!, here’s our chance to redeem ourselves. And LBJ wasn’t about to reign them in because he didn’t like those kennedy people who were hanging on, and then the democratic party was a strange coalition of northern progressives and southern democrats and so that was all being torn asunder. So you really had all those things coming together, and then you had this population bubble that was hitting draft age, so all those factors are coming together, and the society really was getting turned on it’s head. Civil rights was sort of the underlying thing, and then you have the military thing, and then you have the economic thing, and so it was a time where the order of the 40’s and 50’s really wasn’t going to work anymore. And the pivotal thing was JFK’s assassination. I mean we all think that JFK would’ve found a way to walk through this.

(…LBJ, McNamara)

T: So I think that’s a good foundation, I’m interested in getting specific about your personal timeline, and you guys were in San Francisco till 1967?

L: ’65 to ’67 yes.

T: And so, from what I’ve read, the first draft protest was in Berkley in ’65, and I’m interested in what you saw and what you felt during that hot time, and I’m interested in your decision to move to the country in the midst of this, especially with the troops getting committed in ’65 and moving from 3500 on the ground to 200,000 by the end of ’65.

L: I think you got to realize that this buildup, from 65, 66, 67, was much slower than you would think. The scene in San Francisco as I remember it was more cultural than war related.

B: What I remember thinking when I was there, going back to what the 50’s were like, was really an Ozzie and Harriet kind of world. Everything was good, everyone wore iron starched clothes, and the moms stayed home and kept the house, and it really was… people went to church, and I remember staying in San Francisco and thinking that our parents were hippocrites. They raised us with this Christian ethic, but they’re not following it, they’re doing something different from what they taught us to do, um, like the war and um…

L: The war was just one of 5 or 6 things, it wasn’t the dominant thing.

B: yeah, I remember having that thought… we’re doing what they taught us to do when they’re thinking we shouldn’t do this, that we were wrong, the whole peace and love, that was my feeling there. And then it did feel to us then, that all the people we knew were moving to the country, and I think it was like, um, the Whole Earth catalogue was big then, and it did feel to us then that anybody who was anybody was trying to get out of the city.

L: This was the time of the Organization Man, and the Gray Flannel Suit, and so it was really a throwing off of that and the war was a minor part of that, minor minor minor… and then it got major when it blew up at Tet and so on. But the war was just another example of this hypocrisy.

T: ok, and so the moving to the country was because of a realization that what your parents were up to was no good, so screw that, we’re going to figure this out for ourselves and we’re going to start simple?

B: uh-huh.

L: You know, the whole hippie commune, you know the farm, I mean why fight it in the urban, there was Tennessee and all these places you could go and do it the way you wanted to do it.

(Berkley draft demo, their meeting, etc)

T: and so then in 67 you set off to Wyoming together?

L: We, um, we notified the draft board in Wyoming that we were going to Europe, and so my draft board said we’re not going to let you leave the country.

B: They said, but – if you’ll teach junior high English we’ll give you a one-year deferment because they needed a junior high English teacher.

T: In Wyoming?

B: In Lovell, yeah.

L: But they knew they had until I was 26 years old to get me in the draft and so they were thinking farther ahead than I was.

T: oh, they were going to tie you up for a little while and then still be able to get you.

L: Yep.

B: especially if he quit teaching. Probably if he’d kept teaching they wouldn’t have.

T: so you’re in Wyoming on your way to Europe when this happens..

B: yes, we had all of our stuff and we’re going to leave it in Ward and Glenna’s garage (Lee’s folks).

T: And how did they feel about it all?

B: They thought we were very bad. They were very much against it all.

L: They just didn’t understand, and, you know, very verbally abusive to us.

T: About going to Europe or the war stuff?

L: What was embarrassing to Ward was the people on the Big Horn County draft board were his political cohorts [Ward was a Wyoming state congressman and speaker of the house], and they were giving him shit about his son not stepping up and doing his duty.

B: This is sort of interesting too, when Lee started teaching he had a full beard and they made him shave it off.

L: It was that sort of expectation that irritated us more than the war, but the war kept on getting bigger and bigger. And one of the biggest apologists for the war was a Wyoming Senator, Gale W. McGee. He was a democratic senator and he was standing up there saying, this is part of the fabric of southeast asia and we can’t let it be torn apart.