You didn’t even have to know or bribe someone. There were activist doctors that would write a deferment for anyone. I recently found out that my Uncle got one for chronic migraines which he really did have but probably not really to the point of not being able to be a soldier. Of course, inner city minorities probably didn’t know about those docs.
For a fascinating study of the entire issue of the draft, read “Chance and Circumstances” which details just how fluky the draft could be and strategies that were successfully used to avoid it.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/0394412753/R1JNI3KTV2P3OJ/ref=cm_cr_dp_aw_rw1?cursor=1&sort=rd
Why? Should only guys from the Vietnam era be eligible for the Presidency?
Not so. Canada had conscription in both World Wars. However, the conscription acts were repealed at the end of each war, so at the time of Vietnam, there was no Canadian offence of evading military service.
It’s a standard clause in extradition treaties that a person can only be extradited if the alleged offence is a crime in both countries. Since there was no Canadian offence of refusing military service, American draft-dodgers were not liable to extradition.
Bush flew F-102 fighter jets. There were 875 of these jets in service. Of these, 259 were lost in accidents during routine training. 70 Air Force and ANG pilots were killed in those accidents. Is that “harm’s way”?
On edit: ninja’d by AK84
However, deserters were. If you got to the point of signing the papers, it was too late. The same went for President Ford’s pardon.
Desertion was not a crime in Canada at the time? I am doubtful. :dubious:
There is a distinction between dodging the draft and desertion.
Habeed writes:
> There’s an article - I can’t find it - but it’s written by a former student at an Ivy
> League school.
Habeed, I linked to that very article. Why didn’t you bother to read my links? I don’t link to them for the fun of putting links in my posts. I do it because they have relevant facts in them.
There were many rules about ways to be exempt from the draft (either temporarily or permanently), having to do with physical/medical status, student status, married status, last surviving child, etc. Regardless of any given person’s eligibility for one deferment/exemption or another, it always seemed to be helpful to have “connections”. Skill at speaking in the passive voice is also helpful.
Dan Quayle was famously the beneficiary of phone calls that were made. From a presumably official source, www dot senate dot gov:
Many of the Americans who moved to Canada or other countries because they suspected that they would soon be drafted moved there before getting a draft notice. They went on to get citizenship in that country without ever getting any notice from the American government that they would be drafted. One example is William Gibson. Gibson got an interview before a draft board, but he never got a notice to go for a physical before leaving for Canada:
If you weren’t actually drafted, technically you aren’t a draft dodger.
And, furthermore, did W actually do any flying? Seems like all we ever read about him (regarding his National Guard service) is that he rarely, if ever, showed up at squadron exercises, and somehow never got in trouble for that. (This, from all the liberal lamestream media of course. :dubious:) I never saw any mention of him ever actually flying, or any mention that he ever actually learned how to fly for that matter.
ETA: Just saw AK84 post. Did Bush actually fly the F-102 or any other plane himself?
More than that, attempting to avoid the draft was not dodging it any more than itemizing deductions is tax evasion. The use of draft-dodger for anyone who didn’t want to be drafted and got a deferment is an ideologically-based insult.
I think it was in 1968 that I was ordered to appear for my physical. There, we had to fill out a form, and I checked the box for “Homosexual” (the truth). I was taken out of line, and had to confront a “psychologist” sitting at a desk in a tiny room. He asked me all sorts of questions about my sexuality . . . history; frequency; where/how to meet partners, etc. I just answered his questions honestly, and I guess that was sufficient. I also wore my tight white Levi’s, and acted very slightly swishier than normal. I was classified as 1-Y, meaning I could still get drafted, but only if the country was facing war or national emergency.
Of course he did and his peers considered him to be a good pilot. You can’t say you were a pilot in the military while seeking national office if you weren’t. Both aviation and the military keep some of the best records around. There are plenty of mysteries surrounding his service overall but the fact that he flew fighters has never been in question. He did stop flying voluntarily two years early with no good explanation but he really did complete fighter training successfully and flew patrols with plenty of other pilots on record.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/president/2004-02-15-bush-record_x.htm
His stepfather owned the car dealership, and then sold it and bought a 400 acre farm. That’s not poor - it seems pretty wealthy; and this is info from the wikipedia cite you used 
You saw AK84’s post but you didn’t follow the link he gave, did you?
“Bush had over 600 flight hours when he left the Guard, and 278 of these were aboard the F-102 and TF-102.”
Speaking as one who was in the middle of it, the Vietnam-era draft was so screwed up it was hard to tell who was gaming the system from those whom the system left untouched.
Prior to 1965, married men were - if not technically exempt - so low on the priority list they were practically guaranteed not to be called. At that point, troop needs were pretty low, so even if you were drafted, you might spend your active service in West Germany, or never leave the U.S. at all.
About that time (Trump was born in 1946, so he would have been eligiblle starting in 1965 or 1966) the flood of baby boomers was so huge that many local boards had a fresh pool of 19-year olds every year to fill their quotas, and never needed to call anyone beyond that group, so if you either had a deferment or managed not to be called in your first year of eligibility, chances were pretty good you’d never be called at all. That was really the era where all sorts of shennanigans were taking place to keep from being drafted in your first or second year of eligibility.
In late 1969 the draft lottery was instituted. It was supposed to give some assurance that the system couldn’t be gamed so easily. What it really led to was the people with the highest lottery numbers not needing to game the system so much. The ones with the low numbers were in the same situation as before.
The lottery system was only in effect for a few years. The last draft call took place in December 1972.
I have been hard on Bill Clinton at times but I have to stick up for his story here. He really did grow up in a family that wasn’t just poor - they were true white trash. Look at his brother Roger even today and his late mother was a real hussy bless her heart. I doubt you are familiar with the area of Arkansas that he is from but I am because I grew up not that far from it and been to Hope, AR many times. That isn’t even the nice part of Arkansas. The whole area is mostly dirt poor today and it was even worse when Bill Clinton grew up there.
You may be picturing a large, upscale car dealership like are popular today but that is not accurate. We are talking about a small town auto dealership in Arkansas during the 60’s. All small towns like that had a few of them and the owners generally weren’t rich or even upper-middle class at all. With just a few employees that did everything from sales to oil changes to back office type stuff, most of them struggled to survive and eventually didn’t make it.
A 400 acre farm sounds impressive if you live in the Northeast or California today but I can assure you that it was not and still is not in that area. Bulk land like that was as close to free as you can get for anyone that wanted it. Tracts of that size typically went for about $100 an acre and sometimes less. My family bought massive amounts of land around that time for almost no money. That 400 acre farm might have gone for about $40,000 as long as the house was included. It isn’t hard at all to believe that someone could sell off an entire car dealership and then take all the money and think “Screw it, I will just try farming instead”. If that is your idea of wealthy, you aren’t familiar with how demanding farming is.
Bush was trained as a fighter pilot (at great expense), and has since claimed that he “strongly supported” the U.S. action in Vietnam. So not a draft-dodger, but definitely a coward.
Thank you for the response; the cite alone does not give the needed clarity about the situation to evaluate the situation properly.
To add to my confusion, Wendall wrote that the stepfather was a service manager and not the owner - there is definitely a significant difference between those positions.