War and Conscience After Vatican II
Second in a Two-Part Series

Jim Forest had organized the CPF in 1964, but it wasn’t until the next year that the pace picked up so that Jim had to quit his job as a journalist. In ’65 the load proved too much for him and he invited me in. That year the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council overwhelmingly and loudly approved their final document, Gaudium et spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, which called upon governments to recognize the right of conscientious objection (CO). Our theoretical battle was over, but the number of young men approaching us was still small. We had no funds to advertise; liberal Catholic journals of opinion ignored us. Potential conscientious objectors would be very lucky to know of our existence.

If they did find us, they would be luckier still to get to us one story above the last elevator stop of a New York City office building where we sub-let two small rooms from the War Resisters League. We had access to the gabled roof so that Jim and I could eat our lunch al fresco, looking out over City Hall and its park, with Barbara Webster and Abraham Maslow’s daughter, who was A.J. Muste’s secretary. Peter and Paul, but never Mary, sometimes joined us. The Student Peace Union and the Committee for Nonviolent Action sub-let other space, and the New York City Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) paid the rent for an office for A.J. Muste. We were surrounded by comrades.

Jim and I prepared educational materials for the CPF, a Bulletin, pamphlets, the first by Thomas Merton. Ed Rice and Merton’s other New York City buddies from his days at Columbia University, Betty Barthelme of Doubleday and Alice Mayhew of Random House, and Joe and Sally Cunneen of Cross Currents magazine collated their Christmas card lists and we constructed a mailing list from them. Dan Berrigan managed to plant a story about us in The New Yorker “Talk of the Town” section, and that helped. It was slow-going, to be sure, but a trickle began to form at the door, men seeking a way out of the draft.

Jim and I had to train ourselves in CO counseling, learning the law and regulations of the Selective Service System. We used materials from the American Friends Service Committee, the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, and the National Service Board for Conscientious Objectors, much of it very helpful. I read a sociological study of WWII COs by Julian Cornell, which portrayed the COs of that time as superior to their peers in all indices of intelligence and mental and physical health.

We had to have grounding in the theology of conscientious objection—that we had, having read just about everything available in English on the subject—and I read Abraham Maslow on counseling the high achiever and Carl Rogers on non-directive counseling. Jim and I agreed that counseling serves the person counseled, not any organization or any ideology. One of our sayings, which now hangs in the South Bend office, is: “We don’t counsel conscientious objection, non-cooperation, resistance, interference with the Selective Service System or anything else. We counsel young men.” So we learned all we could, said a prayer, and went to work.

Meeting the Needs
At first they were all, universally, outstanding individuals, well-educated Catholics with a grounding in the Church’s social thought and a high level of motivation to seek conscientious objector status. Most had no difficulty in meeting the legal requirement as an individual who “by reason of religious training and belief is conscientiously opposed to participation in war in any form.” A few were not sure that they were “pacifists” in the sense that they believed that war is always and in all circumstances morally wrong. We stressed that we would never counsel lies or facilitate a claim we believed was not truthful. Still, most came to see that they could make a perfectly honest claim while still entertaining doubts about the morality of say, the Battle of Zama in 202 BC, or defending a loved one being mugged in Central Park.

The relevant issue, we’d point out, is war - as it exists, not in hypothesis, but in fact. For example, during World War II and even after, many Jehovah’s Witnesses had been successfully prosecuted and imprisoned because they said that they were prepared to fight in the Battle of Armageddon. So, it was deduced, they were “selective COs,” not protected by the law. Then a federal appeals court decided that the Battle of Armageddon didn’t count, because it is “outside history.”

Jewish men came to the CPF door, passing by other agencies. That was a source of particular satisfaction to me. Jews respected us for the quality of our service. We were delighted. I remember one young fellow in particular. We talked at length. “I’m not religious,” he said. “I’m not Bar Mitzvah and I never go to synagogue.” “Tell me,” I asked, “how have you come by your sense of ‘compassion’ that you referred to as we spoke a few minutes ago?”

“Rahmones—compassion! My grandmother was religious, Orthodox. She sat me down and told me the most important thing to understand is that God is compassionate and that God wants us to be compassionate. Rahmones is the basis of our Jewish way of life.”

“Do you believe that?” “Yes, I guess I do.” “That’s your religious training and belief, guy! Just tell the draft board that and buy your grandma a bunch of roses.” He made it.

Our only failure was one claim based on just war principles, a perfectly honorable claim backed by the US bishops’ call for recognition of selective CO. Stephen Spiro wanted to make his claim on the basis that the war in Vietnam was unjust and that he would not participate in the military while that was in progress. If he had won, that would have been a signal victory and would have expanded the definition of CO substantially. We advised that he would lose in court and lose he did. But his judge was lenient, recognizing his sincerity no doubt, and sentenced him to what amounted to alternative service. “Shorty” Spiro now heads the New Jersey chapter of CPF.

Father Dick McSorley dropped in one afternoon when I was counseling a sensitive young man who seemed to me very fragile. We were well into it when Dick startled me with a question for this poor guy. “Would you die for your beliefs?” I gulped. The boy said yes. It was a piece of cake from that point on.

As the Vietnam war progressed and the draft intensified, the stream of counselees swelled to a torrent. There was a young hippy (they were new on the scene) who wore a Superman cape, smoked oak leaves in a corncob pipe and called press conferences on the wildest of pretexts—reporters actually came to them! And one who claimed to be a sun-worshipper. He got out of the draft because of the damage he did to his retina gazing into the object of his devotion.
People in the military started arriving. The first was an Air Force officer based in Seattle. When military personnel start resisting, you know that things are changing, and that’s the way it is today, when CPF helps to staff the GI Rights Hotline. For questions we could not answer, we called NISBCO, now the Center on Conscience and War in D.C., for expert legal advice. They never steered us wrong. We also had a battery of physicians and psychiatrists ready and willing to examine and even treat our clients free of charge.

For Catholics, Vatican II had a lot to do with the larger numbers we saw. The Council’s praise for COs and plea for their legal protection (Gaudium et spes #79-80), and a real change of attitude on the part of leading American bishops, helped raise awareness. A small minority among COs in previous wars, Catholics were now disproportionately represented and draft counseling spread far beyond the CPF office to rectories and sacristies across the land.

As the war lost popular support, and it became easier for anyone to claim CO successfully, I had to ask myself: “Is it getting too easy? When does self-interest overtake principle? Are there any grounds so trivial that they are not sufficient reason for wanting to stay out of an unjust war?”
Still, we continued to work with everyone who came to us, with a very high degree of success. We kept minimal records, for the reason that they could never be secure and we did not want to have any client compromised if our files were confiscated by the FBI.

Our telephone line was tapped, we were sure. Linda Forest picked up the phone one afternoon to make a call and heard a recording of a conversation that she had had the previous day. Someone at the FBI had thrown the wrong switch! Every now and then the FBI would visit to ask about a client. We would say the same thing over and over again: yes, we know this fellow; yes, he has been in counseling with us; and yes, we believe that this is a sincere and valid claim. They seemed to trust us because we operated in “openness and truth.” We had a good reputation. If ever we needed to, we could call the Pentagon and, at our request, induction orders would be cancelled or suspended if we said the client had a valid claim that needed more time for appeal. It never failed!

Far From A Romantic Time
The most difficult counselees to deal with were those who proclaimed that they had such contempt for the system that they would refuse any cooperation with Selective Service and, despite the consequences, they wouldn’t apply for CO. They would simply refuse induction and any alternative service requirement on principle. The problem was, I agreed with them. Total non-cooperation is the best route.

But are you sure it’s principle or is it distaste for “the system?” And how do you know that you can take the consequences? Two years in prison, and you can count on that at least, can change a man drastically. Experience had taught us to be leery of absolutist claims. Too many victims of their own enthusiasm ended up permanently scarred or even maimed. Some of them looked like poor bets to begin with, and they were the ones who most adamantly refused to see a psychotherapist.

On the other hand, there were legendary non-cooperators, like Ammon Hennacy, Wally Nelson, and Dave Dellinger, whose lives gave witness to their integrity and soundness of judgment, and who made significant contributions to the common good. So, in the face of a potential non-cooperator, we decided to drop the non-directive approach and give him a fight. He would have to battle everybody else, so let him start with us. If a fellow persisted, then of course we gave him all the moral and practical support possible.

There was another set of problems by the late Sixties: things were going crazy. It is impossible to describe the atmosphere, the paranoia, the despair, the hysteria in the air to people who did not experience it. From a distance, this epoch may look romantic. But I saw squalor, mental illness, and death, not romance. Martin King was murdered and rage spread across American ghettoes. Then Robert Kennedy was killed and hope seemed to die with him. “Bye-bye Miss American pie, drove my Chevy to the levy and the levy was dry....”

Indeed, the price of those days was high, not only on the battlefields of Southeast Asia. Four of my counselees killed themselves.

Eventually, there was such massive opposition to the war that courts were less and less likely to convict anybody and the Justice Department less willing to prosecute. The movement had, in effect, nullified the draft law. The CO rate doubled that of World War II, that is, it went from .0002 percent of the draft age male population to .0004 percent.
Sorry to say, the vast majority of Vietnam era resisters were not COs, or if they were, they did not know it. That is, they didn’t know that there was legal provision for them. Many fled to Canada. This number even included the son of an FOR National Council member; his claim would almost certainly have been sustained. He never had adequate counseling! Others evaded the draft by going underground in this country or by starving themselves or drugging and drinking or in other ways compromising their physical and mental health to qualify for 4-F.

Counseling has been the specialty of CPF from the beginning. Thomas Merton urged us to maintain our charism of pastoral and educational work, even if we made occasional forays into direct nonviolent action, demonstrations and the like. Others wanted CPF to transform itself into the coordinating agency for raids on draft boards. Some on the Left criticized conscientious objection as a “bourgeois phenomenon,” something for the educated. But all can be educated, if there are those who will teach them. Perhaps what some really resented was the personalist focus: CO is about accepting personal responsibility for one’s own moral actions. It is to present oneself before one’s fellow citizens, subject to the law, the Higher Law included, to take a stand. The more the norm of personal responsibility takes hold, the more unlikely it will be that unwilling masses will be cajoled, threatened or lied into war.

Now with the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the need is pressing, and once again, CPF is taking the lead, with new people, I am so grateful to say. We should find ways of making CO more accessible in impoverished communities. But if any sun-worshippers or oak-leaf smoking hippies in Superman outfits show up in South Bend, they’ll probably send them to me in New York.

?Tom Cornell is the co-founder, with Jim Forest, of the Catholic Peace Fellowship. He now lives at Peter Maurin farm in Marlboro, NY. This reflection expands on an essay in the September, 1996 issue of Salt of the Earth magazine.