Word: coffining
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...students announced last night that they would be holding a conference here in mid-April to consider various strategies. Key speakers will include Reverend William S. Coffin of Yale, who urged divinity students to turn in their draft cards in a recent speech at George Washington University...
Under current Selective Service rules, seminarians are automatically granted 4-D deferments. Supporters of the plan to turn in draft cards, like Coffin, argue that this move would "make a mockery" of the administration's policy towards conscientious objectors. To be exempt from military duty a conscientious objector must be opposed to all wars. Many divinity students object to the war in Vietnam but are not opposed to war in general. If Hershey refuses them C.O. status, the students would prepare to face prison sentences rather than submit to the draft...
...Coffin's recent appeal was met with a great deal of enthusiasm by seminarians throughout the country. Some 250 students had plans to turn in their draft cards, confident that they would not be arrested because of the size of the group. "But we realized that they would just pick off the leaders," John E. Cuppels, second year Divinity student who is organizing the conference, said, and the movement lost strength...
...major point of friction was the logistical and procedural snarl of returning to Washington. Manchester implies that it would have been much easier on Mrs. Kennedy if Johnson had left the presidential plane to her and the coffin and used the similar vice-presidential jet himself. Says Manchester of the two Boeing 707s: "Each carried the same equipment, both were guarded." On the contrary, says Roberts, U.S.A.F. 26000, the presidential craft, "then contained far more and better communications equipment-transmitting, receiving, coding and decoding-than any of the back-up jets...
...Inevitable Delay." Then there was the question of when to depart. Johnson wanted to be sworn in officially before takeoff. Kennedy aides wanted to leave Love Field as soon as the coffin and Mrs. Kennedy arrived. Manchester, relying on interviews conducted later, reports a tense scene between Johnson and Kenneth O'Donnell, J.F.K.'s appointments secretary, in which O'Donnell "over and over" insisted: "We've got to go, we've got to get out of here, we can't wait." But Roberts says he could detect no "atmosphere of crackling tension." Further...