Word: spock
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Were the recent indictments of Spock, Coffin, et al part of a coolly calculated policy? Or an act of desperation? Or both? Let me suggest a context which may explain why the government chose this time to prosecute some articulate and famous spokesman from the draft resistance movement...
Finding time running out the government now seeks a dramatic confrontation to prove that even famous people involved in draft resistance are not immune from prosecution. The fundamental purpose of this attack is not to put Spock, Coffin, et al away, to make martyrs of them, but to intimidate into inaction those thousands of others whose daily activities now give life to the movement, those without whom Spock and Coffin, for all their courage, would be isolated and ineffective. A week ago no one could have predicted the outcome. Today it is clear that the government has failed. Moreover people...
...arrested for failing to comply with the law that violates their consciences, we too must be arrested, for in the sight of that law we are now as guilty as they." When he was not immediately arrested, he called the Government "derelict in its duty." As for Spock, he told the reporters swarming through his East Side apartment that he hoped "100,000, 200,000 or even 500,000 young Americans either refuse to be drafted or to obey orders if in military service...
...recent federal grand jury indictments of Michael Ferber 2G, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and the Rev. William Sloan Coffin Jr. sparked this debate on the war, resistance to the draft, and the future of the protest movement...
Michael K. Ferber is a young foot soldier in the fight against the war in Vietnam. When the Justice Department last Friday indicted the generals--including Dr. Benjamin Spock and William Sloan Coffin Jr.--for conspiracy against the draft laws, it picked Ferber out of the ranks to join them. Despite the prospect of a five-year prison sentence for his October anti-draft sermon in Boston's Arlington Street Church, Ferber last night committed what the Attorney General might consider a similar "offense" in speaking at Harvard's anti-war, anti-draft Teach...