the crew of an American merchant ship, the Mayaguez, was detained, but not harmed, by
Cambodian authorities. According to the War Powers Act, Ford should have consulted with
Congress. Senator Mike Mansfield, the Democratic leader of the Senate, said "I was not
consulted, but notified after the fact."32
President Ronald Reagan in the fal of 1982 sent troops into a dangerous situation in
Lebanon, again without fol owing the requirements of the War Powers Act, and soon after
that over 200 marines were kil ed in Lebanon by a bomb that exploded in their barracks. In
the spring of 1983 Reagan sent U.S. forces to invade the Caribbean island of Grenada,
again only notifying Congress, not consulting them. And in 1986 U.S. planes bombed the
capital of Libya, again without consulting Congress. In 1989 President Bush launched an
invasion of Panama (he cal ed it Operation Just Cause), again without consulting Congress.
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We have been speaking of open military actions undertaken by the president, uncontrol ed by Congress. But the absence of democracy in foreign policy is even more obvious when
you consider how much is done secretly by the president and his advisers, behind the backs
of the American public, as wel as behind the backs of their elected representatives.
The list of secret actions includes the ClA's overthrow of the government of Iran in 1953,
restoring the Shah to the throne; the 1954 invasion of Guatemala and the ousting of its
democratical y elected president; the invasion of Cuba in 1961; and the wide range of
covert operations in Indochina in the 1950s and 1960s, including the secret bombing of
Cambodia. More recently, we find the series of attempts to overthrow the Sandinista
government in Nicaragua by arming a counterrevolutionary force (the "contras") across the border in Honduras, and mining Nicaragua's harbors, as wel as the secret transfer of arms
to the contras in violation of a law passed by Congress.
When the "Iran-Contra" scandal became public in 1986-1987, President Reagan feigned
innocence—the doctrine of "plausible denial" again. With astounding hypocrisy, Reagan said in his State of the Union Address at the beginning of 1987 (the bicentennial of the
Constitution), "In those other constitutions, the government tel s the people what they are
al owed to do. In our Constitution, we the people tel the government what it can do and
that it can do only those things listed in that document and no other."
These actions (the word covert is used official y, perhaps it sounds more respectable than
secret) are fundamental y undemocratic; they take place behind the backs of the American
people. The people who carry them out are, therefore, not accountable to any democratic
process. The government has bypassed its own channels. For the citizens to stop this, civil
disobedience may be needed.
Is Civil Disobedience Always Right?
There is a common argument against civil disobedience that goes like this: If I approve your
act of civil disobedience, am I not honor bound to approve anyone's civil disobedience? If I approve Martin Luther King's violations of law, must I not also approve the Ku Klux Klan's
il egal activities?
This argument comes from a mistaken idea about civil disobedience. The violation of law for
the purpose of committing an injustice (like the Governor of Alabama preventing a black
student from entering a public school or Colonel Oliver North buying arms for terrorists in
Central America) is not defensible. Whether it was legal (as it was until 1954) or il egal
(after 1954) to prevent black children from entering a school, it would stil be wrong. The
test of justification for an act is not its legality but its morality.
The principle I am suggesting for civil disobedience is not that we must tolerate al
disobedience to law, but that we refuse an absolute obedience to law. The ultimate test is
not law, but justice.
This troubles many people, because it gives them a heavy responsibility, to weigh social
acts by their moral consequences. This can get complicated and requires a never-ending set
of judgments about practices and policies. It is much easier to lie back and let the law make
our moral judgments for us, whatever the law happens to say at the moment, whatever
politicians have made into law on the basis of their interests, however the Supreme Court
interprets the law at the moment. Yes, easier. But recal Jefferson's words: "Eternal
vigilance is the price of liberty."
There is fear that this kind of citizens' judgment about when to obey and when to disobey the law wil lead to terrible consequences. In the summer of 1968 four people who cal ed for
resistance to the draft as a way of halting the war in Vietnam—Dr. Benjamin Spock,
Reverend Wil iam Sloane Coffin, writer Mitchel Goodman, and Harvard student Michael
Ferber—were sentenced to prison by Judge Francis Ford in Boston, who said, "Where law
and order stops, obviously anarchy begins."33
That is the same basical y conservative impulse that once saw minimum wage laws as
leading to Bolshevism, or bus desegregation leading to intermarriage, or communism in
Vietnam leading to world communism. It assumes that al actions in a given direction rush
toward the extreme, as if al social change takes place at the top of a steep, smooth hil ,
where the first push ensures a plunge to the bottom.
In fact an act of civil disobedience, like any move for reform, is more like the first push up a hil . Society's tendency is to maintain what has been. Rebel ion is only an occasional
reaction to suffering in human history; we have infinitely more instances of submission to
authority than we have examples of revolt. What we should be most concerned about is not
some natural tendency toward violent uprising, but rather the inclination of people faced
with an overwhelming environment of injustice to submit to it.
Historical y, the most terrible things—war, genocide, and slavery—have resulted not from
disobedience, but from obedience.
Vietnam and Obedience
There are rare moments in the history of nations when citizens, their indignation
overflowing, begin to refuse obedience to the authorities. Such a moment in the history of
the United States was the war in Vietnam. When Americans saw their nation, which they
had been taught to believe was civilized and humane, kil ing Vietnamese peasants with
napalm, fragmentation bombs, and other horrible instruments of modern war, they refused
to stay inside the polite and accepted channels of expression.
Most of the actions taken against the war were not acts of civil disobedience. They were not
il egal, but extra legal—outside the regular procedures of government: ral ies, petitions,
picketing, and lobbying. A national network of educational activities spontaneously grew:
alternative newspapers, campus teach-ins, church gatherings, and community meetings.
When the supposed clash between U.S. naval vessels and North Vietnamese patrol boats
took place in the Gulf of Tonkin during the summer of 1964,1 was teaching in a Freedom
School in Jackson, Mississippi. In August the bodies of three missing civil rights workers,
shot to death, were found near Philadelphia, Mississippi, and many of us working in the
movement drove up to attend a memorial meeting held outdoors not far from where they
had been kil ed.
At the meeting, one of the organizers of the Mississippi movement, Bob Moses, stood up to
speak. He held aloft the morning newspaper from Jackson. The headline was "LBJ Says
Shoot to Kil in Gulf of Tonkin." Moses spoke with a quiet bitterness (this is a rough
recol ection of his words): "The president wants to send soldiers to kil people on the other
side of the world, people we know nothing about, while here in Mississippi he refuses to
send anyone to protect black people against murderous violence."
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That fal as the U.S. involvement in Vietnam began to grow, I was starting to teach at Boston University and became immediately involved in the movement against the war. It
was at first a puny movement, which seemed to have no hope of prevailing against the
enormous power of the government. But as the war in Vietnam became more vicious and as
it became clear that noncombatants were being kil ed in large numbers; that the Saigon
government was corrupt, unpopular, and under the control of our own government; and
that the American public was being told lies about the war by our highest officials, the
movement grew with amazing speed.
In the spring of 1965 I and some others spoke against the war on the Boston Common to
perhaps a hundred people. In October 1969 when antiwar meetings took place in hundreds
of towns and cities around the country, there was another ral y on the Boston Common, and
100,000 people were there. As the American involvement escalated—to 500,000 troops, to
mil ions of tons of bombs dropped—the antiwar movement also escalated.
Young black civil rights workers connected with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) were among the first to resist the war. In mid-1965 in McComb, Mississippi, young
blacks who had just learned that a classmate of theirs was kil ed in Vietnam distributed a
leaflet:
No Mississippi Negroes should be fighting in Viet Nam for the White man's
freedom, until al the Negro people are free in Mississippi.
Negro boys should not honor the draft here in Mississippi. Mothers should
encourage their sons not to go.34
In the summer of 1966 six young black men, members of SNCC, invaded an induction
center to protest the war. They were arrested and sentenced to prison. Julian Bond, another
SNCC member, who had just been elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, spoke
out against the war and the draft, and the House voted that he not be seated. (The
Supreme Court later restored his seat, saying his First Amendment right to free speech had
been violated.)
Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke out publicly against the war, ignoring the advice of some
other civil rights leaders, who feared that criticism might weaken Johnson's program of
domestic reform. King refused to be silenced:
Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of
God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose
land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is
being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double
price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I
speak as a citizen of the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken.
I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative
in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.35
Young men began to refuse to register for the draft or to refuse induction if cal ed. Students
signed petitions headed We Won't Go. Over a half mil ion men resisted the draft. About
200,000 were prosecuted, 3,000 became fugitives. There were too many cases to pursue
and most were dropped. Final y, 8,750 men were convicted of draft evasion.36
A student of mine, Philip Supina, wrote to his draft board in Tucson, Arizona, on May 1,
1968: "I am enclosing the order for me to report for my pre-induction physical exam for the
armed forces. I have absolutely no intention to report for that exam, or for induction, or to
aid in any way the American war effort against the people of Vietnam."37 He was sentenced
to four years in prison.
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In previous wars, there had been opposition within the armed forces, but the Vietnam War produced open protests and silent desertions on a scale never seen before. As early as June
1965, West Point graduate Richard Steinke refused to board an aircraft taking him to a
remote Vietnamese vil age. He said, "The Vietnamese war is not worth a single American
life."
There were many individual acts of disobedience. A black private in Oakland refused to
board a troop plane to Vietnam. A navy nurse was court-martialed for marching in a peace
demonstration while in uniform and for dropping antiwar leaflets from a plane onto navy
instal ations. In Norfolk, Virginia, a sailor refused to train fighter pilots because he thought
the war was immoral. An army lieutenant was arrested in Washington, D.C., in early 1968
for picketing the White House with a sign that said "120,000 American casualties—Why?"
Two black marines were given prison sentences of six and ten years, respectively, for
talking to other black marines against the war.
Desertions from the armed forces multiplied. We can't be sure of the exact number, but
there may have been 100,000. Thousands went to Western Europe—France, Sweden, and
Hol and. Most deserters crossed the border into Canada; 34,000 were court-martialed and
imprisoned. There were over a half mil ion less-than-honorable discharges.38
The GI movement against the war became organized. Antiwar coffeehouses were set up
near military bases around the country, where GIs could come to meet others who were
opposed to what was going on in Vietnam. Underground newspapers sprang up at military
bases across the country—fifty of them by 1970. These newspapers printed antiwar articles,
gave news about the harassment of GIs, and gave practical advice on the legal rights of
people in the military.
The dissidence spread to the war front itself. When antiwar demonstrations were taking
place in October 1969 al over the United States, some GIs in Vietnam wore arm bands to
show their support. One soldier stationed at Cu Chi wrote to a friend on October 26, 1970,
that separate companies had been set up for men refusing to go into the field to fight. He
said, "It's no big thing here anymore to refuse to go." A news dispatch in April 1972
reported that 50 infantrymen of a company of 142 refused for an hour and a half to go out
on patrol round Phu Bai. They shouted, "We're not going! This isn't our war." Others
commented, "Why the hel are we fighting for something we don't believe in?"39 One army
sergeant, captured by the Vietnamese, told later about his march to the prisoner-of-war
camp, "Until we got to the first camp, we didn't see a vil age intact; they were al destroyed.
I sat down and put myself in the middle and asked myself: Is this right or wrong? Is it right
to destroy vil ages? Is it right to kil people en masse? After a while it just got to me."
The French newspaper Le Monde reported that in four months, 109 soldiers of the first air
cavalry division were charged with refusal to fight. "A common sight," the correspondent for Le Monde wrote, "is the black soldier, with his left fist clenched in defiance of a war he has never considered his ow
n."
In the summer of 1970, 28 commissioned officers of the military, including some veterans
of Vietnam, said they represented about 250 other officers and announced the formation of
the Concerned Officers Movement Against the War. In mid-1973 it was reported there were
drop-outs among West Point cadets. A reporter wrote that West Point officials attributed this
to "an affluent, less disciplined, skeptical and questioning generation and to the anti-military mood that a smal radical minority and the Vietnam war had created."40
There is probably no more disciplined, obedient, highly trained element of the armed forces
than the fliers of the air force. But when the ferocious bombings of civilians in Hanoi and
Haiphong was ordered by the Nixon administration around Christmas 1972, several B-52
pilots refused to fly.
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The massive civil disobedience against the Vietnam War—by men in the military, by
draftees, and by civilians—cannot be justified simply because it was civil disobedience, but
because it was disobedience on behalf of a human right—the right of mil ions of people in
Vietnam not to be kil ed because the United States saw in Southeast Asia (as President John
F. Kennedy put it), "an important piece of real estate."
Actions outside the law or against the law must be judged by their human consequences.
That is why the civil disobedience of Colonel Oliver North, il egal y sending military aid to the
terrorist contras in Central America who committed acts of terrorism against Nicaraguan
farmers cannot be justified. But the civil disobedience of those who wanted to stop the
kil ing in Vietnam was necessary and right.
The congressional committee that interrogated Oliver North in 1987 as part of the Iran-
Contra hearings did not ask him about the innocent people kil ed in Nicaragua because of
what he had done. They concentrated, as the American court system general y does, on the
technical question of whether he had violated the law, not on the more important question:
for what purpose did he violate the law.
It is interesting to note that North did not hold to the rule of law over the rule of men. He
was wil ing to break the law to obey the president. He told the hearing committee, "And if
the Commander-in-Chief tel s this Lieutenant Colonel to go sit in the corner and stand on his