Draft Tests

Thirty-five people from the DCEWV picketed at the Detroit Stock Exchange, Thursday, May 19, protesting the fact that the war in Vietnam, although in the interest of certain American corporations making skyrocket profits from war production, benefits neither the Vietnamese people nor the GIs who are sent to Vietnam to kill and be killed.

The Selective Service Classification Exams given in May and June have been the center of much peace activity in Michigan. The Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam has distributed leaflets at the six testing stations in Detroit and at other nearby stations. The Flint Ad Hoc Committee leafleted and had a march at Flint U. of M. and Flint Community College. The Committee for Social Concern in Kalamazoo leafleted at Western Michigan and Kalamazoo Community College. Students for a Democratic Society held a National Vietnam Examination in Ann Arbor, East Lansing, Albion, and Big Rapids. In response to the draft tests, groups have formed in Port Huron, Grand Rapids, Muskegan and Marquette to work for an end to the war. Ypsilanti now has an active chapter of about twenty people, both students and faculty of Eastern Michigan University. The Detroit Committee plans to help coordinate activities in Michigan and establish new peace-action groups beyond the tests. At Wayne State University the Ad Hoc Committee on the University and the Draft held a march and wrote to President Keast demanding that the two June exams not be held at the university and that Wayne present a clear statement of its policy regarding the Selective Service.

Sidebar

The CIA in Action (The New York Times, April 26, 1966)

In 1960, CIA agents in Laos, disguised as “military advisers,” stuffed ballot boxes and engineered local uprisings to help a hand-picked strongman, General Phoumi Nosavan, set up a “pro-American” government that was desired by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.

This operation succeeded—so much so that it stimulated Soviet intervention on the side of leftist Laotians, who counterattacked the Phoumi government. When the Kennedy Administration set out to reverse the policy of the Eisenhower Administration, it found the CIA deeply committed to Phoumi Nosavan and needed two years of negotiations and threats to restore the neutralist regime of Prince Souvanna Phouma.

Pro-Communist Laotians, however, were never again driven from the border of North Vietnam, and it is through that region that the Vietcong in South Vietnam have been supplied and replenished in their war to destroy still another CIA-aided project, the non-Communist government in Saigon.

It was the CIA that built up Ngo Dinh Diem as the pro-American head of South Vietnam after the French, through Emperor Bao Dai, had found him in a monastery cell in Belgium and brought him back to Saigon as Premier. And it was the CIA that helped persuade the Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations to ride out the Vietnamese storm with Diem—probably for too long.

Related

See Fifth Estate’s Vietnam Resource Page.