Limited Program, Limited Response

As President Ford last week unveiled his program to permit Viet Nam War evaders and deserters to earn their way back into U.S. society, he termed it "an act of mercy to bind the nation's wounds and to heal the scars of divisiveness." But the wounds bled anew. Leaders of veterans' organizations immediately denounced the plan as "a gross injustice" to those who had served, died, and suffered. Members of war resisters' groups assailed it as a "punitive" assault upon men who had been guilty only of "premature morality." Yet Ford's plan, an extremely complex attempt to resolve a national dilemma, doubtless reflected the middle position of most Americans on the issue.

Certainly, there are inequities in Ford's program, which had been opposed as too gentle by the Justice and Defense Departments and some Congressmen. It falls well short of the blanket postwar amnesty that past Presidents extended, and few were rushing to accept it until they could figure out just how it would be administered. If in practice the leniency stressed by Ford prevails over the fairly harsh provisions of the plan, many exiles may return. If the plan is rigidly applied, relatively few may do so.

The key question is whether returnees from abroad and the U.S. underground will have to serve the full two years in low-paying public-service jobs. Ford's proclamation requires that the jobs be in fields that "promote the national health, safety or interest"--in hospitals, forests, schools and public institutions, usually as menial laborers.

Uncertainty arises because the plan empowers officials to reduce a term on the vague basis of past "honorable service, penalties already paid under law, and such other mitigating factors as may be appropriate to seek equity." These judgments will be made by regional U.S. Attorneys or a military Joint Alternative Service Board at Indiana's Fort Benjamin Harrison under general guidelines from their Washington superiors. The scheme is designed to minimize inequities stemming from local prejudice.

Incredible Oversight. The plan for handling deserters contains two sharp differences from the treatment of draft evaders: 1) only deserters must take an oath reaffirming their allegiance to the U.S.; 2) through an incredible oversight (privately admitted by the Pentagon but publicly denied as a mistake by the Justice Department), deserters can escape serving the alternate public-service work. They will be given "undesirable discharges" and must pledge to take a compensatory job, but will lose only the benefit of changing their discharge to one termed a "clemency discharge" if they fail to do so. Neither type of discharge is a legal barrier to employment in civilian jobs; both deny veterans' benefits to the holder. Few deserters are likely to find two years of enforced labor worth the distinction.

Men who have already been convicted of draft evasion, including those in prison, will also be treated differently. Their cases will be reviewed by a new nine-member Presidential Clemency Board, headed by former New York Republican Senator Charles Goodell, who sharply opposed the Nixon Administration's Viet Nam War policy. This board will be able to recommend to the President that specific men serving in prison be released. It will determine how much compensating service in jobs must be performed in each case. It will also have the task of reviewing the files of some 216,500 veterans who received less than honorable discharges, and upgrade those discharges if the rating seems unjust.

Assessing Motives. Precisely how many men will be eligible for the program is in dispute. The White House issued the following figures: 15,500 draft evaders (including 8,700 men who have been convicted, 4,350 under indictment, 2,250 under investigation and 96 in prison); 12,500 deserters at large; 660 deserters either confined or awaiting military trial. Draft resisters' groups place the number of dodgers and deserters at more than 50,000.

Whatever the number of men who finally respond by the Jan. 31, 1975 deadline, the case-by-case review is certain to be a difficult task. To assess accurately the motives of men who evaded service as long as five years ago may prove impossible. There is a problem of equity too for the many men who sought status as conscientious objectors and would have served 24 months in alternate work, but were denied that classification by local draft boards. To ask them to take menial jobs now, when they have acquired careers and families, seems harsh. Many also became fugitives before the Supreme Court, in June 1970, broadened the definition of conscientious objector to embrace persons resisting service on ethical rather than purely religious grounds. In addition, many draft evaders have received short or suspended sentences from compassionate judges and face no job requirement at all. Draft evaders convicted during 1971, for example, served terms averaging only 9.4 months.

The program got off to a slow start last week as only 18 military deserters reported to Fort Benjamin Harrison, where the joint review board is prepared to process some cases in as little as four days. The Pentagon released 95 convicted deserters from military prisons while their situations are being studied. Attorney General William Saxbe gave 30-day prison furloughs to 83 convicted evaders pending reviews.

Contrasting Fates. The first men seeking to turn themselves in to civilian authorities met contrasting fates. Doug Bitle, 28, flew to San Francisco from Vancouver and basked in a well-publicized welcome. But he was unable to get any definitive information on his case by telephone from the U.S. Attorney's office. Unwilling to surrender without legal advice, he contends that every lawyer he contacted wanted between $500 and $2,500 to take his case, so he returned to Vancouver. "If I had had the opportunity to do valid public service four years ago," he says, "I never would have left the country." On the other hand, John Barry, 22, a draft-dodging San Francisco musician, hired a lawyer and gave himself up to the same U.S. Attorney's office. Considered a hardship case because he supports his widowed mother, he was told that he would probably have to work for only six months.

No amnesty plan, of course, could be expected to bridge the gulf between extreme views of the problem. To many, failure to fight when the nation called was a cowardly, treasonable act and an assault upon the values of all those who sacrificed so much. To others, evasion of service in an unprincipled war was a courageous and lonely act of high patriotism, challenging the national conscience and making future such wars less probable. Put more moderately, the problem is how to distinguish between society's need to enforce its laws and the individual's right to follow his conscience.

A balanced assessment of the Ford program was offered by Bill Meis, 29, an aspiring novelist who lives with his wife and two children in Montreal. Denied conscientious-objector status, he fled in 1968. "O.K., I accept the sentiment behind the proposal," he says, "but it's a kind of humiliation, a concept that we were subversive. It's a hardship for our families. Some of them would have to go on welfare for two years while husbands served out their debts. I've had a very good life here, but there's no point in denying it --there'll always be a lot of me that's American. I think that over the next three or four months, as a few test cases go through, the resistance is going to break down a bit. Maybe 15% or 20% will go home if leniency is shown."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.