Interview with Ira Smolensky

Conducted in the fall of 2001 by Regina Bannan, Monmouth College '01.

 

Ira Smolensky was drafted in 1969 but was refused induction.  He received his bachelor's degree from Rutgers University (New Jersey) in 1970, his master's degree in 1976, and his Ph.D. in 1982, also from Rutgers.  Today he is a professor of Political Science at Monmouth College.

Bannan:  Did you serve in Vietnam?

Smolensky: I didn’t serve in Vietnam. I didn’t go into the service. I was drafted in 1970 or 1969 and I was refused induction into the armed forces.

Bannan: Was that for medical reasons or because you were in school?

Smolensky: No, I asked for conscientious objector status and I was denied it. Then I told them that I would refuse induction  So they arranged to have me inducted personally with a couple of FBI guys there. If you don’t step forward, you aren’t inducted so I didn’t step forward.

Bannan: What is a conscientious objector?

Smolensky: There is a status for conscientious objector. Even during WWII where “everybody fought,” there were people who didn’t fight.  In the United States the criteria is that you have to be somebody who doesn’t believe in violence at all. You have to have a religious conviction that is tied to an established religion involving divinity where your freedom of religion includes not being violent and it has to be universal. My ground was that citizens sometimes have to say no. I think that I said in my literature that I couldn’t allow [President] Richard Nixon to pick my war for me. I knew that I wouldn’t be awarded conscientious objector status but I asked for it anyway and was denied.  I went in 1969 to give up my 2S status. 2S is your college status. Of course in that draft, the injustice of it was that we didn’t draft college students but we did draft people who weren’t in college. There was a social-economic bias and a racial bias to that draft.

So I went in early in the last academic year and said that I wanted to give up my 2S status and I wanted conscientious objector status. I figured that I would go and get arrested. They told me to keep my 2S until I graduated and it was the draft board’s decision after that. It is important because that is how I got off the hook later on. So I went in after I graduated college and had been working for a few months. Then my turn came and I was drafted. They had a lottery and my lottery number was low so I knew that I was going to get drafted. I went down and was arrested, but I only spent two hours in jail before I made bond, which was good because it was a weekend. After I was arrested, there was a story of it on the front page of the newspaper and I remember sitting out and guarding my dog to make sure that no one came to kill my dog since I had been arrested for resisting the draft. At one point I went to go see a lawyer--and I don’t think that he wanted to take my case because I am sure the guy did a hundred cases because he was a typical hippie lawyer who was very dedicated and selfless. He just wasn’t expressing what I wanted to express. He was going to cost too much money that I didn’t have.

So I did my own case. You were allowed to ask the draft board for the reason that they had denied your conscientious objection. When I did, they had sent back that I had waited until I graduated and I had not. I had asked for it and they told me to wait. So I waited. They were the ones who suggested that. Shortly after we had that exchange, they dismissed the charges. So I did resist the draft but I didn’t have to go to prison and I did not get fined $10,000.  Ten thousand dollars seemed like a lot of money.  Five years in prison seemed like a lot, too, so I was very happy with the result.

Bannan: So where did you go from there? You were obviously against the war?

Smolensky: I was but I wasn’t a big member in the anti-war movement because I came from a working-class background where I could identify more with the guys going over to Vietnam than I did with the movement. I did have some contact early on--maybe in 1966--with some anti-war protestors and they really seemed dedicated. They got booed down because nobody really cared about the war in Vietnam. Those people had a lot of courage. But by the time I was in school and there were these mass protests, a lot of the leadership, it seemed to me, was not very dedicated. They were enjoying this, they were really brats and they were doing this because it was something they could get away with. I thought it gave the revolution a terrible shallowness. So I never really got into it. I was against the war but I also didn’t like the movement. I felt alienated with the anti-war movement and felt a much closer relationship with the troops. But I also thought that they weren’t over there thinking about their citizenship duties.  I thought resisting was a citizen's duty when the war is unjust.

Bannan: How did your parents feel? Did they want you to go? How did they feel when you resisted the draft?

Smolensky: They were pretty supportive. They didn’t have much to do with it. I started from a fairly early age making my own decisions and not consulting too many people. When I told them about it, they may have been doubtful but they weren’t openly critical of me. I think that my mother may have come close. It wasn’t really about the draft. I think sooner or later, she would just find something to criticize about me. I remember the night before I was going to be arrested my father and I went out to see a movie together—we saw a James Bond film. So I thought that he was pretty supportive. They both thought that the war wasn’t going right. Certainly they weren’t Republicans so a Nixon war would not be very attractive to them. I had a cousin who volunteered and went to Vietnam and been killed. I had corresponded with him and between his accounts of the war and seeing the shear waste of it, I think that is why my parents saw so many advantages of not going. They may have been critical in terms of patriotic values but they did not want to see their kid die in a war that we didn’t believe in.

Bannan: How old were you when you were drafted?

Smolensky: I guess that I was twenty-one.

Bannan: Did it make you feel any less patriotic about your country for deciding not to go over?

Smolensky: No, because I never felt that I did it out of fear. I think I could say this honestly. I felt that I was going to have to go to prison. Now I know that I had a decent chance at beating the rap. At that time, there were probably more people doing what I did than I knew. But I thought I was one of the few. A lot of people were joining the National Guard, or going in Canada, or getting their doctorates. But I thought that I was going to end up going to prison. Before I got arrested, I spent a lot of time getting in shape so I could beat the first guy who tried to bully me in the federal prison. I feared prison more than I feared service. I think I was too dumb to know how much you should fear combat. So I didn’t fear combat as much as I feared prison. So I didn’t feel unpatriotic because I didn’t feel like I was running away. I felt like I was doing something scarier than going to war. If I were smarter, I would have realized that going to war was scarier.

Bannan: What about your group of friends who all went to the service? How did they feel about you and how did you feel about them?

Smolensky: I told you about getting block busted. That was right after high school so I lost touch with many of my friends from high school. I went to a mixed high school with one pretty wealthy neighborhood and a couple of less wealthy neighborhoods.  But a lot of people whom I hung around with in high school either didn’t make it to the service because they died out on the street or they were brains and planned to go off to college and grad school and didn’t have to face the draft. Some of the people I knew joined the National Guard.  I remember one guy whose number was up in the three hundreds--and the odds were very heavy that he wouldn’t be drafted--but he joined the National Guard anyway because he was not going to take any chances of going to Vietnam.

There was a marshal, a federal marshal, who took me down to the court room. He said to me that if everyone was like me, we would be speaking Japanese right now. I didn’t believe him because I thought that they were different wars and I thought that he was wrong. But it made me think at least. When I was arrested, I was working as a baker at a bagel factory. One of the guys I worked with had been to Vietnam and was in the Navy. I know that he didn’t like my resisting and I respected his criticism. So I don’t think that I felt unpatriotic but I respected how some people didn’t see what I did as patriotic.    

Bannan: Do you think that the media portrayed Vietnam in an unbiased fashion ?

Smolensky: I know that images can be very misleading. I know that one picture is worth a thousand words and it could be a thousand wrong words. There were many images that were played on American TV such as Vietnamese soldiers shooting prisoners and the Buddhist monk who burned himself. They certainly helped to take your stomach away for war. People often criticize the coverage of TET and they pointed out that militarily, we fought off these people, but I think the media was pretty accurate. We had been told, by our leaders, that there was a well-rooted democratic regime in South Vietnam and that was false. We had been told that there was only a symbolic resistance among the communists in the North and the Vietcong in the South. That was false. I think that you could find media that was very patriotic and find media that misled us into thinking that the war was more hopeless than it was and our purposes were less good than they had been. But I think overall, the media gave us a pretty honest look at what was going on there. Americans rejected the war on rational grounds.

Bannan: How do you think your community reacted to the war?

Smolensky: I was really only vaguely aware of the war until 1968 and 69. So I think that most people didn’t know in the early part. There was about three phases for me and I can’t give them years. But there was a phase when I, and most of the people I knew, hardly knew that there was a Vietnam. Then was a phase when the protestors came out and we thought that they were crazy people. Then there was a phase that all of a sudden we recognized that this war was very different. At the time that I started to pay attention, there were a lot of people who were also paying attention to the war and losing their confidence that the war was right. So I would say we were divided.

During college, I remember an econ professor I had who never told us about the economics but he did tell us how we ought to bang the heads of every demonstrator. Obviously he was pro-war and he thought that the patriotic thing to do was to fight the non-supporters. Then at the same time, there were people who were extremely sympathetic to the protestors and were anti-war. So our society was very divided and we haven’t healed yet. My own decisions about the war I made in context where there were a lot of different points of view.

Bannan: So how old do you think you were when you first heard about Vietnam?

Smolensky: The first time I heard it at all and started thinking about it I was maybe eighteen. That was `66.

Bannan: Do you think Vietnam had an impact on you in any particular way or changed you in any way?  What were you like before and after?

Smolensky: I wasn’t really politically conscious before the war. It is almost in my blood to care about civil rights because I was a Brooklyn Dodger fan. I can’t ever remember not loving Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella and other Dodger players (black and white). That was always my ideal--that black and white people should do things together. So I was always sympathetic to the civil rights movement. I had a strong opinion about that.

I have a vague affiliation with [President John F.] Kennedy and after Kennedy was killed, I had a very strong feeling for [President Lyndon B.] Johnson. He was associated with civil rights and I also could identify with people who were down and out. So I had those vague notions of helping people who needed help. In domestic policies, LBJ was my hero, yet he was pursuing this war that a lot of people didn’t believe in. So it forced me to actually go and study politics. I liked thinking about issues and I did like international politics because I wanted to know what was going on in the world and I wanted to be able to speak in an informed way about the war and whether we should be there or not. So I became politically conscious with the Vietnam war.

I think that my idealism was heightened and defined by the war in two ways. One--I never wanted to give up being an idealist.  But it also led me to believe that there are also false ideals. As I told you, I didn’t believe that the anti-war movement was truly devoted. I thought that there were truly devoted people but then there were a lot of people who were just going along with the crowd. A lot of it was in fun and they were just entertaining themselves. I think the outcome of that was to come out of it idealistic but looking for other sources of idealism.

Bannan: How did you feel about the government and its involvement in keeping the troops there as long as they were kept there?

Smolensky: That issue became clear in my last year of college. It became clear that the Cambodian crisis emerged and [President] Richard Nixon was conducting operations in Cambodia that nobody in the United States was supposed to know about but of course everyone over there knew about. I didn’t trust Richard Nixon in 1968. I was really rooting against him. What he did that I didn’t like was that he was very divisive. He turned white against black and he tried to turn young against old. I didn’t trust Nixon. I never thought he made a wise effort to try to end the war. Subsequently, I think that no matter what amount of credit you want to give Nixon and [Henry] Kissinger for opening China and the policy of detente with the Soviet Union, it doesn’t make up for what happened in Vietnam. We lengthened the war out to seven years and a lot of people were killed. It took seven years to try to make ourselves look good at the cost of a tremendous amount of lives and suffering

Bannan: What did you think about the veterans when they came back?

Smolensky: I don’t know anybody who didn’t honor the veterans. As I told you, I related more to the guys who went over there. What was interesting was veterans who came out and joined the anti-war movement. They thought it was wrong to go over and support a war without thinking about it.  I certainly didn’t blame them for losing the war. I don’t remember treating anyone with scorn. The people who I hung out with didn’t treat them with scorn. If anything, we treated them with honor. I know that there were people who thought that those who served in Vietnam were all pigs. I think that the perception that Vietnam vets have was that they were objects of scorn when they came home is in comparison with veterans of other wars. Veterans coming home from WWII had confetti in the sky and everyone was happy and celebrating. But my suspicion is that for people coming back from war there is a form of alienation between those that went and didn’t go. There is almost this world—war--that you know about but can only vaguely describe to other people. I think that there is a gap between people who went and people who didn’t go. That is natural and probably happened in both wars. But if you came back from Vietnam and there is a gap and it is a war that nobody likes, you probably aren’t the same person you were before.

Bannan: Being someone who empathized with the soldiers, how did you feel about those who were treated poorly?

Smolensky: I disagree with that totally. I just thought it was wrong.

Bannan: The baby killer idea.

Smolensky: I thought it was wrong. Even though I have seen policemen acting like pigs, I also think it is wrong going around and calling them pigs because there are lots of different kinds of police. Police usually aren’t in that job because it is their first choice of what they want to be. I also thought as a blue-collar person that I could identify with police and the troops. Growing up in New Jersey, I saw some horrifying cops but I don’t like the idea of taking any group of people and labeling them. When you are spitting on somebody and calling them a baby killer, that doesn’t have anything to do with what they did, it has to do with your desire to put somebody down and somehow feel superior.

Bannan: You said you didn’t like the counterculture?

Smolensky: I did like the counterculture in many ways but I didn’t like the anti-war movement in the time that I associated with it.

Bannan: Did you participate in any protest?

Smolensky: Yes, I marched a couple times. I knew something was going on. I was also into a lot of reading and thinking of things on my own. My professors opened up a new world to me and I was actually discovering the intellectual world and the real world at the same time.  I didn’t like the crowds because I felt that people drew their strength from not with what was inside of them but from what was outside of them. I didn’t like that part of the movement. But I did like the counterculture. I liked the new music, theatre, and literature.

Bannan: Have your views as a twenty-one year old who said,” I am not going” had an impact on how you teach today and the things that you believe now? How do you talk to your son about war and the draft?

Smolensky: Well there are times when I would gladly send him over to any war and drop him right over the most dangerous front!  It is up to him. I would like him to respect life. I believe that there are things worth fighting for. I hope that he will know the difference between the things worth fighting for and the things that are not worth fighting for. He grew up in a more difficult political context because we live now in a time of great moral confusion.  I grew up in a time of idealism. At least we thought we knew what was right. I think I have an open teaching style. I don’t like to lecture very much. I enjoy finding out what students know and think. But I also want students to think more aggressively and think of things on a different level. I think that that goes back to my experience. I had a great awakening in the Vietnam era and I would like to help students today to have a great awakening in a very different context. But I think that it is one where there is a great need for idealism.

Bannan: So what, overall, do you think your great awakening was?

Smolensky: I think that it involves a lot of different things, but to understand that there is such a thing as justice in the world--and that justice is worth fighting for. Justice isn’t as simple as looking at the flag and saluting and doing what people tell you to. It is a more complex thing than that. I do love my country and I loved my country when I resisted the draft, but loving the country is a difficult and complex thing. The intellectual awareness I gained made me realize that this is not a simple world, but rather a very complex world. I was brought up in a very traditional religious background that I had pretty much shed by the time I went to college. My whole view of the world, how we got here, where we were going, how we determined right from wrong, and what we should do and be in the world was undergoing a redefinition. I didn’t come out of college thinking wow, there is a lot of money to be made. I went in a different direction.

Bannan: Looking back now, do you have any regrets?

Smolensky: No, I don’t have any regrets that I didn’t go to Vietnam.

Bannan: Do you think that the events of Vietnam changed your view of the government?

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