[ Indistinct radio chatter ] [ Gunfire, men shouting ] -Make no mistake about it.

We are going to win.

And we don't plan to let people pressure and force us to divide our nation in a time of national peril.

The hour is here.

[ Engines roaring ] [ Explosions ] -I pray God that America will hear this before it is too late because today we are fighting a war.

I'm convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world.

♪♪ [ Dog barking ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Applause ] -You may announce your name to the mic if you wish.

-Joe Stewart, New York.

[ Cheers and applause ] -Ron Rosen, New York.

-Gerald Hutchens, New York City.

-Brian Wester from Lyndhurst, New Jersey.

-Phil Murphy, New York.

-Patrick Cunningham from New York City.

-I'd like to try and understand the act and understand what it means today to take the position of non-cooperation with the draft.

-That moment where they decide to go and turn in their draft card and invite prosecution, putting themselves in individual jeopardy requires a certain amount of courage and poise and grace.

-I grew up in Fresno, California.

Fresno High School Boy of the Year 1963.

I came to Stanford on a scholarship.

We registered for the draft when he turned 18, and I did that, you know, without a second thought, really.

-We were all spawn of the Second World War, where America was so great.

But this in Vietnam seemed to be a betrayal of all of that.

It was a full evolution from patriotism to a stance of resistance against a very ugly, vicious, you know, and amoral war.

-I felt really good about returning my draft card and making the decision to resist it, no matter what.

And so at that point in time, I knew I was going to go to prison.

I mean, I knew it.

-♪ I ain't gonna study war no more ♪ ♪ Study war no more ♪ ♪ Study no more, no more ♪ ♪ I ain't gonna study war no more ♪ ♪ Study war no more ♪ ♪ Study war no more ♪ ♪♪ -I was an All-American kid.

I loved the country.

You know, I played left field for, you know, Garden Grove Little League baseball team.

But I was never -- other than that, I was never a lefty, you know.

[ Chuckles ] I was a frat boy.

I was a ballplayer.

You play USC.

You run out on the field.

There's 100,000 people in the stands, you know, in the stadium.

It's just -- the energy is just -- I mean, you're not even touching the ground.

You know, you're flying.

It's just -- It's quite a moment.

At the same time, the same moment, you know, 50,000 Marines were hitting the beach at Cam Ranh Bay.

I mean, if we're really at war and I'm an American and a patriot, and it challenged me.

It called into question, you know, where I belong, what I should be doing.

Daily, the war was brought to our front rooms on the television.

So, I mean, there was no excuse.

-TV was very instrumental in influencing how I felt about the war, documenting horrendous footage of Buddhist monks burning themselves in protest.

-Now, this guy lit himself on fire because of this?

What's going on here?

-And that famous picture of where the police chief was shooting the guy in the head.

[ Gunshot ] And... Hmm.

-The young girl with the napalm on her back, screaming, running down the road, you know?

It's like... -We dropped more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped in all theaters of World War II.

It was a carnage of unbelievable scope and savagery.

-Question I think we all faced is our moral responsibility to confront what was happening over there.

This was not gonna be my war.

The issue was, how do we go about stopping it?

You know, not, how do I save my ass?

-I have today ordered to Vietnam, the Air Mobile Division and certain other forces which will raise our fighting strength from 75,000 to 125,000 men almost immediately.

This will make it necessary to increase our active fighting forces by raising the monthly draft call from 17,000 over a period of time to 35,000 per month.

♪♪ -For those who aren't familiar with what the draft law was, you were required to keep on your possession at all times proof that you had registered with the Selective Service System.

Not being in possession of that proof was punishable by up to five years in prison.

-♪ You're old enough to kill, but not for voting ♪ ♪ You don't believe in war ♪ ♪ But what's that gun you're toting?

♪ -The effect of conscription was to give the government a blank check.

They never had to go to the people and ask for permission.

They already had it.

They had the law in place.

-Congress passed the law with administration's full support to make it illegal to tear up or destroy your draft card.

So naturally, a form of protest against that was to destroy your draft card.

-The first person to challenge the new law is David Miller, a 22-year-old pacifist who publicly burns his draft card outside an Army induction center in Manhattan.

-I took my draft cards.

I put them in an envelope, sealed it up, put a stamp on it, walked down to the corner mailbox, put it in, and walked back about 12 feet off the ground.

I mean, the eye opener for me was Mississippi.

♪♪ I was a civil rights worker in Quitman County, Mississippi, in 1964, and the experience of seeing what was under the covers in America suddenly gave you a whole new perspective.

-There are five counties in Mississippi, each at least 57% Negro, in which no Negroes at all are registered.

-Many of the draft resisters, they had gone south in the early '60s.

And so that's incredibly important as they plan their strategies and tactics.

-After suddenly experiencing America in the wrong, as one did in Mississippi, it was possible to evaluate the war they were asking us to fight, and it bore no resemblance to what I thought Americans were supposed to do.

Evil is a participatory phenomenon, and it counts on participation in order to be successful.

And the first option you have is withdrawing your participation.

-So I cut up my draft card, put it in an envelope with a note saying that I was no longer gonna cooperate with Selective Service.

-Any moment I'll be hauled off to prison.

-You make me laugh!

How could you do this?!

-This was not a popular position in greater America.

To the American public, particularly the pro-war American public, anybody who's a draft-law violator is a draft dodger and a coward and unpatriotic.

-And there from the crowd comes -- ooh.

-In South Boston, they announced in advance they were going to burn their draft cards.

A mob and this rush of 75 or so high school students storms the steps and just starts pounding on them.

[ Shouting and screaming ] And those guys all go to prison.

In 1965, there are 250 draft-related convictions.

In 1966, there are 450, and by '67 over 750, with thousands of cases pending.

♪♪ -What do you think of draft dodgers?

Is that an alternative to going to Vietnam?

-I think for we pacifists, all seven of us... -Yeah.

[ Laughter ] -...the most encouraging thing is when a young man says no to Uncle Sam and will take the jail sentence.

-You're vice president of a school, the School for Nonviolence.

What are you trying to do there?

-The reason I started the school was that we try to make available literature and things that give us ideas to alternatives to violence.

We don't have a graduation and tests and all that, but when they leave the school, they go to jail, you know?

[ Laughter ] ♪♪ ♪ Oh, oh, freedom ♪ ♪ Oh, oh, freedom ♪ Well, first I would talk about King's influence on me, which started when I was 16, and I was at a conference of kids from all over the country, and Dr. King was the guest speaker, and I was dissolved in tears for the whole speech, because I had read about nonviolence and I knew about nonviolence, and they were doing it.

-More than 200,000 came to Washington this morning in the struggle for equal rights -We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

-♪ Hold, hold on ♪ ♪ Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on ♪ -During the Christmas period of 1965, women in Macon, Mississippi, begin to talk about the war.

They wanted to know why it is that their sons were in Vietnam fighting for allegedly democracy, but you don't have democracy when you get back home.

-The beginning of 1965, there were 23,000 American servicemen in Vietnam.

Currently, there are about 267,000 U.S. fighting men in Vietnam.

-Situation and the system of the United States has allows for Black people no alternative but to become hired killers.

They don't have jobs in the ghetto.

Their only out is to try and make it in Vietnam.

That's the fault of the United States.

-Hell no, I ain't going!

[ Crowd chanting "Hell no!"

] -♪ I ain't gonna go ♪ -♪ Ain't gonna go ♪ - ♪ Oh, hell no ♪ -♪ Hell no ♪ -I was one of the people who decided to file suit against the Selective Service System offices in Georgia and South Carolina.

There was a disproportionate number of African Americans who were being drafted.

We all began to feel the pressure from the FBI and the military.

I was then drafted, and I did what we had asked other people to do, and that was say, "Hell no, I'm not gonna go."

They ended up sentencing me to five years in the federal penitentiary.

But we also began to, in our communications, have more and more discussion and dialogue with Dr. King, and began to ask, when was he going to make a statement against the war in Vietnam?

He was not prepared to push it.

He had an organization, and that organization had to be willing to accept the consequences.

I mean, that was a tough issue to take on.

-♪ I ain't gonna study war no more ♪ ♪ Ain't gonna study war no more ♪ -And we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam.

And I don't know about you.

I ain't gonna study war no more.

[ Applause ] -That cut the lines between him and the White House overnight, as soon as he left this rather safe area for the administration of civil rights and switch over to the not-so-safe.

♪♪ -The draft-resistance movement had picked up, the anti-war movement had picked up, and all of a sudden it wasn't just a couple isolated pacifists with placards, you know, holding silent vigils.

It was beginning to meld with sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.

I mean, it was -- it was just wild.

[ Rock music plays ] -There's a moment where it's not clear what's driving the whole movement.

It's like a dance with all of these different groups doing the thing that's most important to them and focused on the war in different ways.

And then it ends up being draft resistance in a very, I think, clear and obvious way.

[ Cheers and applause ] -Very quickly then, I got indicted for my draft resistance.

So we thought we'd pioneer something new and we'd try a coffee house sanctuary.

And that didn't work out, actually, either.

[ Laughs ] I pled guilty and was sentenced to three years in prison and packed off to jail.

-I was a young guy back then, and I really never talked to anybody about the war.

I didn't really know how to deal with having to go into the Army.

I did get my induction notice, and I showed up at the induction center in downtown Los Angeles.

-Take your letter... -Well, I became the one and only staff person at the Los Angeles Resistance office.

Women did everything, everything.

And we were not in back.

We were right there with.

We would all go down, pass the leaflets out to all of the men getting off the buses.

-So there would be those of us who would be there, you know, with a little coffee table with donuts, coffee, and an attorney.

-We taught ourselves how to print.

I would go to the induction center to pass out flyers just about every day of the week that they were doing inductions at 6:00, 6:30 in the morning.

What if you can change one life?

-Demonstrators were talking to draftees and passing out flowers.

I did take a flower, and I stuck a flyer in my pocket and went inside.

Inside the induction center, while I was going through processing, I kept thinking that I could not in good conscience go into the army and kill somebody for a war I didn't believe in.

I didn't really realize that I could just say no.

And we were instructed to take a step forward, and everyone stepped forward except me, and I don't know who was more surprised -- me or the person giving the oath.

-But there's one person, just from passing out flyers and being at the induction center, changed his entire life.

-This was really a -- both individual act and a group act, and that's pretty powerful, I think, when those are thought of together.

-My name is Marty Harris, and I refused induction.

-My name's Rich... and I just refused induction.

[ Cheers and applause ] ♪♪ -So when I got home, I remembered about the leaflet and I pulled it out of my pocket and looked at it, and I read about the resistance for the first time, the L.A. Resistance.

So I went to one of their meetings, and I -- I really liked the community and the determination to stop the war and especially their commitment to nonviolence.

So I joined the resistance and started working against the war and the draft.

-America is committed to the defense of South Vietnam.

[ Applause ] ♪♪ -Meanwhile, we weren't stopping the war.

The war was escalating.

It was getting worse.

The movement was getting bigger.

More and more people were turning against the war, yet we seemed to have no effect on government policy.

And so, to me, it meant we had to take more dramatic actions and we need to build a mass movement.

This would be a massive rally in New York City that would make it hard for the government to get enough troops to fight in Vietnam.

-The estimated 125,000 Manhattan marchers include students.

-So somebody handed me -- I have no idea who handed me a Maxwell House coffee can.

It was burning, and I held it up and I said, "Let's burn our draft cards."

We had around 175 to 185 people burn their draft cards, which made this the largest act of civil disobedience against the draft, I guess, since the Civil War.

It was a great first step to build a mass movement against the draft.

-A companion-piece demonstration brings out 50,000 marchers in downtown San Francisco.

-That's the first coming out of this idea of the resistance being a nationwide movement.

-If you want to make a statement, join us.

-It has been said that I have two alternatives -- either go to jail or go to the Army.

-Ladies and gentlemen Mr. Muhammad Ali has just refused to be inducted into the United States Armed Forces.

-I just don't think I should go 10,000 miles from here and shoot some Black people that never called me nigger, never lynched me, never put dogs on me, never enslaved me.

And I just can't go over there and shoot them people.

-It took an all-white jury less than a half hour to find Muhammad Ali guilty of all charges and specifications.

He was sentenced to the maximum five years in prison and was fined $10,000.

-♪ No, I won't be afraid, no, I won't ♪ -I find nothing amusing or interesting or tolerable about this man.

He's a disgrace to his country.

He will inevitably go to prison, as well he should.

-Do you share the same concern that Muhammad has for his draft status?

-Oh, I certainly do.

My views on the draft are very clear.

I'm against it.

And I think the sooner our country does away with the draft, the better it will be for everybody.

-♪ Ain't gonna let nobody ♪ ♪ Turn me around ♪ -Well, the week from October 16th, 1967, to October 21st was extraordinary in both American political history and in the antiwar movement and the draft-resistance movement.

It was part of an event they called Stop the Draft Week.

-Stop the Draft Week.

The object -- to prevent the orderly induction of recruits.

-Nonviolent resistance... -Get back.

Get down, down.

-...it's a willingness to go into our own style of battle.

♪ Na-na-na-na na-na-na-na-na-na ♪ ♪ Want my freedom now ♪ ♪ Well, Paul and Silas, oh, yeah ♪ And then I'm aware that when I'm singing, it's giving other people courage.

And then they sing, too.

And your example is gonna mean something.

-Row after row of people locking arms, singing songs, peacefully blocking the roads with these buses of inductees trying to get to the induction center in Oakland.

After a while, I just couldn't stand there and watch.

I jumped into the lines.

Next thing I know, I'm hauled off to jail for a 10-day sentence.

-Demonstrators protested the draft, and some were arrested by police who kept order, and inductees went into the service, all very peacefully.

-So while protesters in Oakland are trying to shut down the induction center using nonviolent civil disobedience, that afternoon in San Francisco, David Harris kicks off a national draft card turn-in day.

-Well, October 16th had been the date we had set when we first started the resistance for the first national draft card return, during which all around the country, and as it turned out, in 18 different cities, there would be demonstrations at which people would collect draft cards and give them to the federal government.

2,000 of us gathered on the steps of the Federal Building in San Francisco, and as the basket moves around the crowd, all these hands coming up holding draft cards.

-And what we say to a society of murder and racism is a very simple no.

And what we say to our brothers around this country and around the world is a very simple word.

That word is resist.

[ Cheers and applause ] -On October 16th, there are kind of clear differences in tactics and tenor.

In Boston, it takes on almost a kind of sacramental tone.

-We decided to do it in a church.

After all, it's a solemn and almost religious act to turn in your draft card and vow to go to prison.

But we had 5,000 come out, and then we marched to the Arlington Street Church.

[ Church bell ringing ] As we approached the church, the bell started playing "We Shall Overcome."

So I was, like, already in tears.

[ Bell plays "We Shall Overcome" ] I gave a short sermon on behalf of the guys turning in the cards.

We broke bread, almost as if it were a mass.

-♪ That saved a wretch like me ♪ -We did that to get the word out that something remarkable was happening on both coasts, but it was rather, I think, an electrifying moment.

And then at the end of that week, I carried the bag of draft cards to Washington, D.C., which was part of the national plan to gather them all together.

And then they were carried into the Justice Department building and turned over to the Attorney General's office.

Michael Ferber from the Boston Resistance.

I bring from the Arlington Street Church 237 cards.

[ Cheers and applause ] -Lenny Heller the Berkeley resistance, Palo Alto resistance, San Jose resistance, San Francisco, Davis, California, Sacramento, Santa Barbara -- 298 cards.

[ Cheers and applause ] -We thought we were bringing the war home in a humane and democratic way.

We weren't dodging the draft.

We were resisting it, confronting it, and taking punishment.

-The president himself is bewildered about draft resistance, right?

He didn't understand why his officials in his own administration would accept those draft cards without arresting people immediately.

[ People shouting and screaming ] -Good evening.

The Stop the Draft Week continued today across the land, along with the violence and the arrests that have become part of the protests.

-Stop the draft now!

-It turned into a riot by these young militants who want peace in Vietnam.

-That was a turning point for many in the movement.

By the end of the week, some people who are not part of the resistance started to fight the cops, and we had to think about, are we gonna pursue a peaceful path of civil disobedience, or are we gonna take more militant actions?

I disagreed with that tactic.

[ Sirens wailing ] -The conservatives and the establishment like it when we go violent, because they know what to do about it, and they know we lose support from the general public when we do that.

But in a political movement, it's got to be nonviolent, or we're simply gonna fail and deserve to fail.

[ People shouting ] -It was an extraordinary waste of an opportunity.

♪♪ The name of the game was changing minds.

You don't change minds with violence.

At least nobody's succeeded in doing it yet.

-And so it became one of the real struggles in the nonviolent movement was how to deal with the attraction and the charisma of violent struggle.

[ People shouting ] -And I'm looking at Stop the Draft Week, and I'm thinking, "Wow!

That was cool!"

It was cool to be breaking windows and blocking buses and doing a rampage.

It was so militant fighting cops, and I wanted to do that, too.

-To me, as an organizer, precisely the people who we were gonna frighten with those kind of tactics are the people we needed in order to stop the war.

[ People shouting and screaming ] -I don't know how you had your head screwed on so right.

-Well, I don't know -- -'Cause I would have -- I did succumb.

I helped found an organization called the Weather Underground.

The goal of that organization was the violent overthrow of the government of the United States.

And I was a fugitive for seven and a half years.

-It's been peaceful so far.

Let's keep it that way!

[ Shouts indistinctly ] -David's right.

Nonviolence was a much better strategy.

If you have 10,000 people but one person breaks a window, then the entire coalition gets tainted by violence.

[ Camera shutter clicking, people shouting ] ♪♪ The idea of political nonviolence, that's the gift of the 20th century to the world.

-You doubtless, Joan, have heard about the demonstrations which followed the one in which you were arrested.

What's your opinion about the week of Stop the Draft?

-I was hoping, you know, that the nonviolence would continue, but it's -- it's much harder.

-Oh, this is interesting because we thought we should go back and do a Christmastime nonviolent sit-in at the Draft Board.

[ Applause ] -♪ Someone's praying, Lord ♪ ♪ Kumbaya ♪ -So at that time, because I was then a repeat offender, I and those who were doing this for the second time got 45-day sentence.

-♪ Kumbaya ♪ ♪ Oh, Lord, Kumbaya ♪ -The Alameda County Prison Farm has been home to 78 die-hard anti-war demonstrators ever since their arrest at the Draft Induction Center in Oakland last week.

-Of all the women arrested on December 1967, I was the only woman of color.

But all the women who were in Santa Rita at that time, 99% of them were Black women.

And they came up to me and said, "Well, why are you here?"

Well, Dr. King came and visited Joan, and when they heard that Dr. King was at Santa Rita for the reason why we were all there, they went, "Now we really, really get it."

-I've just had the opportunity of visiting my very dear friend Joan Baez as an expression of my appreciation for what they are doing for the peace movement and for what they have done for the civil rights movement.

And we must continue to follow the dictates of our conscience, even if that means breaking unjust laws.

[ Cheers and applause ] - ♪ Swing low ♪ ♪ Sweet chariot ♪ -Dr. Martin Luther King, 39 years old and a Nobel Peace Prize winner and the leader of the nonviolent civil rights movement in the United States, was assassinated in Memphis tonight.

-The perpetrator of this deed brings down upon all of us the painful charge that we Americans are prisoners of violence and destruction and death.

-♪ Coming to carry me home ♪ [ People shouting ] -The nine, some of them Catholic priests, seized Selective Service files.

They brought those files out into this parking lot and then burned them.

-I believe we are in such times as make it increasingly impossible for Christians to obey the law.

We have chosen to be powerless criminals in a time of criminal power.

-People were going to prison.

People were putting their lives on the line, and we were -- we were eager for that.

We were in protest.

We were in opposition to this war.

And we were ready to take it a step further.

We grabbed the baskets and headed out the side door, headed down the alley, around the corner.

We took the baskets and put napalm on them -- just simply gasoline and soap -- and then lit a match, and there they went.

And Walt had wiped it off on his shirt.

And so when the baskets went up in flame, he did, too, just the front of the shirt.

So we were able to put him out pretty quickly.

We were pretty pleased with ourselves, you know, that we were able to pull it off.

I mean, we got three years.

Each of us got three years.

Just for me to know that there was somebody out there, there were people out there who were really thinking this, who were thinking this war is wrong, there was a lot of us.

[ People shouting ] [ Rock music plays ] -And if I have done a good job of anything since I've been president, is to ensure that there are plenty of dissenters.

[ Laughter ] -Public opinion has already been moving against the war and now it seems to be accelerating, thanks to this kind of sustained protest that's led by the draft resistance movement.

-There is incipient uprising in this country in opposition to this war, and it's going to get worse.

-In less than two years, 1,400 young men have been convicted of violating the Selective Service Act.

The average sentence has been three years in prison.

-You face up to five years in jail.

Have you had any second thoughts about your act at all?

-I have no regrets about it.

-David was this powerful figure doing something I hadn't known about.

And I think that the whole concept of what he was doing was so astounding to me.

And he was just a lovely guy and somebody that young engaged the way he was, was very appealing.

And, um, so we got married.

[ Church bells tolling ] -There are probably a lot of you who have heard me speak before, and perhaps the only thing that'll be different about tonight is that you won't have to hear it again for a while.

[ Light applause ] [ Laughter ] And the specific reason is that I'm gonna spend the next three years of my life in a federal prison.

-T-minus 15 seconds away from the Apollo 11 liftoff... -It was the morning that the first rocket for the moon left.

I remember it quite well.

-♪ In my heart ♪ ♪ I will wait ♪ ♪ By the stone gate ♪ -I'm leaving my wife pregnant.

I am leaving all those things.

-♪ ...one in my arms will sleep ♪ ♪ Every rising of the moon ♪ -I think people should see their presence in jail as a real political presence.

I mean, being a political prisoner is a fact in this society.

-The last time I saw David, I saw them driving off down the road.

And one of the girls who works with resistance had put a big old "resist the draft" sticker on their bumper.

And that's the last I saw.

-How do you view this?

Do you think it's worth it?

-I knew when we got married that he would be spending time in prison.

I feel that if he and I continue to be involved in the revolution, which we will, we'll both spend time in prison.

So it's just something that you have to adjust to.

-Did you have any final things to say to David before they took him away that you can tell us?

-Yeah, I said, "I love you."

-Mr. Jones and Mr. Uri.

-I didn't have a legal advisor or a lawyer speaking for me, and this was a conscious decision because it was part of our nonviolent action, was to speak from our hearts to the jury and to the judge and try to share with them why we refused to register or be inducted.

I've been waiting two and a half years to have a trial, and it's good to know, finally, that it's gonna be over.

-I really think if we, over and over again... -I was gonna stand there and tell them I did not do anything wrong.

And if you want to put me in jail, then you go ahead and put me in jail.

And that, of course, is what they did.

-I was prepared to go to prison for five years.

Two years?

No -- No problem.

-And I, in San Francisco, where the average was two years, only got one year.

And it's because I think we got through to the judge's heart.

-And indeed, he and the other judges in the district started reducing the sentences over the next couple of years.

-In major cities, you had situations where 90% of the people indicted were not prosecuted.

The courts were in chaos.

They couldn't handle it.

They couldn't enforce the draft laws anymore.

-My whole appeal was to the jury and to the righteousness of what I was doing.

Now the courtroom was packed, every seat taken.

We have a picture of our guru on the front seat.

I'm wearing pants that I made myself, and I've got a beard down here and hair down to my shoulders.

And I'm barefoot.

The judge comes back.

He says case is dismissed and people are just cheering.

They're going, "We love you, Judge Curtis."

And it was a radical, different situation.

-But it showed how the times were changing and that people were willing to take the risk and to stand up for what they believed.

And ultimately, you get more than 200,000 cases are referred by the Selective Service to the Department of Justice.

You get 20,000 indictments, 8,000 convictions and 4,001 who get sent to prison.

-It's time for new leadership for the United States of America.

-On the 1968 campaign trail, Richard Nixon runs as a peace candidate, promising to abolish the draft and pledging to end the war with honor.

-The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.

This honor now beckons America.

-The first thing that he does is he tries to create the impression that he's scaling down the war effort, which, of course, is a smoke and mirrors game.

In fact, he's escalating the war dramatically, particularly the air war.

But he does start to bring the first troops home.

He tries to reduce draft calls, move to a lottery, get rid of the Selective Service director, all of those things, and he's kind of creating the impression that he's winding things down.

-The reality was he was lowering the troops in order to stay in indefinitely with airpower and with some troops.

-Which led him to develop the notion of bombing the dikes, slaughtering millions of people through floods, maybe even using atomic weapons.

"This is gonna be -- If Ho Chi Minh does not come around, this is what we're gonna do."

Then we had the moratorium, the single largest peace demonstration in American history.

-This was the look of the land today from one coast to the other.

-♪ We have got to get it together ♪ -Never before has Boston seen so many demonstrate so peacefully for peace.

-100 or so went in with a petition asking the United States Attorney to stop prosecuting war resisters.

The moratorium demonstration was historic in its scope.

Never had so many demonstrated their hope for peace.

-♪ Revolution's here ♪ -Nixon is weighing a ground invasion, and we know from his memoirs that he decides not to in part because the scale of protests at home is already so significant that he didn't dare do it.

♪♪ -It was a minimum-security camp, and as long as you followed the rules and don't get caught, you know, you could get along and you had to look like you're working, but nobody really worked.

The highway that we were put there to build was slated to take, like, 138 years to be completed at the current rate.

-But then we started having strikes.

I didn't last that long in Stafford.

For the next year and a half, you know, I refused to work.

-"A" block was maximum security.

Couldn't have anything but a Bible.

You could have a Bible, but there were no lights, so it was very hard to read.

So that went on for, you know, a year or so.

-I don't want to for a moment get nostalgic and say that prison is -- it was a wonderful thing.

I learned an immense amount because I was thrown in with people I never would have ever met.

But prison is a dehumanizing, ugly, ugly institution, and nobody should ever forget that for a moment.

-I had some miserable times.

I mean, you know, it's prison.

My first time, I did two months down in isolation when I first got there.

Once a week, they let you go down the hall to the shower.

My son was born four months after I got to the joint.

That was tough.

-When they made the cover of Look magazine, they legitimized everything we were doing.

That shot was taken when he was in prison.

The story contained that information about why he's there because he didn't kill anybody.

They legitimized being a prisoner in a time of war in America.

-Being a political prisoner was not uncommon.

There was intimidation and harassment.

I went to 18 different prisons.

My daughter was born while I was in prison.

And so we gave her an African name, Abu Damia, which means "born while father's away."

♪♪ -Dan Ellsberg came to visit me in prison.

He was deeply moved by it, thinking if I were willing to risk imprisonment like Randy Kehler and these other young men, what could I do to help stop this war if I were willing to take that risk?

He realized not long afterwards that he could release this secret study, now known as the Pentagon Papers.

-This weekend, portions of a highly classified Pentagon document came to light for all the world to see.

-Its main effect is to refute the notion that we stumbled into the war.

-A name has now come out as the possible source of The Times' Pentagon documents.

It is that of Daniel Ellsberg, the top policy analyst for the Defense and State Department.

-Without the draft resistance, I would not have had this notion of going all the way.

But it did put into my head the notion, "Okay, even if there is a chance that this will help, it's worth doing."

-David Harris was released from a federal prison near El Paso, Texas, today.

[ Cheers and applause ] -When he came home, things unraveled pretty quickly.

You know.

We both changed.

Somebody goes to prison.

You know, I was home painting floors, getting recipes, trying to be -- get ready to be the perfect wife, you know.

So it was sad to me, too, I couldn't...do it.

♪♪ -I have concluded that the time has come for action.

This is not an invasion of Cambodia.

-The intervention in Cambodia triggered sharp and strenuous protests in the United States, mainly at hundreds of college campuses, most notably at Kent State University.

National Guardsmen senselessly opened fire into a crowd of demonstrators, killing four students and wounding nine.

-♪ Four dead in Ohio ♪ ♪ Four dead in Ohio ♪ -Just days after Kent State, two African American protesters were killed and 12 injured by police at Jackson State College in Mississippi.

The Cambodia invasion sparks a wave of antiwar and anti-draft action.

Draft boards across the country are ransacked.

Tens of thousands of draft files were burned, which permanently eliminate those men from the call-up.

4 million students go out on strike, shutting down campuses nationwide.

-This campus is on strike to reconstitute the university as a center for organizing against the war in Southeast Asia.

[ Cheers and applause ] -Within a month, 25,000 draft cards have been turned in nationally.

Within a year, over half the inductees at the Oakland Induction Center refused to show up when called.

-This war is going on and on and on.

These draftees are more and more distressed with what's going on, and there was a breakdown of morale.

-♪ And the war ♪ ♪ Drags on ♪ -I think also on a very practical level, we created a phenomenon which ultimately threatened the government's capacity to wage the war.

I mean, by 1970, they were drafting three people to get one foot soldier.

-You know, by 1970, the spirit of rebellion that had motivated the anti-draft people had made its way into the military.

-I haven't fired my gun since I've been here.

I like it that way.

Killing for peace just doesn't make sense.

-How long the war goes on, those things are dictated by many factors, but draft resistance, it certainly helped prevent it from escalating dramatically.

And that's no small thing.

-Very few -- Even scholars today really have it in their minds that that war could have been even worse than it was.

♪♪ The Joint Chiefs were pressing every day of the week for it to be worse than it was.

-I think that the antiwar movement definitely kept a ceiling on the war at every point through Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.

At every one of those points was the prospect that escalation would cause an even much, much larger movement.

There would have been massive escalation over what there ever was in the war.

♪♪ -Virtually everything that people did had some impact at some time.

Whether it's a large demonstration or a civil-disobedient activity, or whether it's burning their draft cards.

-And that's where social change comes from, is when I step outside of my usual boundaries and start to take some kind of further action.

There are people watching me and they might take the same action.

-Has it been worth it?

-Well, yes.

I mean, I haven't really lost nothing.

Many people are doing what I did and they going to jail for it.

And you don't read about them.

At least I was a case that the world watched.

But what about the people who nobody knows and they're doing it?

So I look at them as being more great, I would say, than I am.

-I think it took some bodies in prison paying the price, you know, to -- to make it all real and doing a little bit of time was nothing.

[ Helicopter blades whirring ] [ Indistinct yelling ] -I think obviously we were not successful in ending the war the way we wanted to.

We wanted it ended on a moral decision.

That's not what happened.

What happened was the government said, "This is unwinnable and we got to extricate ourselves from it."

-A ceasefire, internationally supervised, will begin at 7:00 p.m. this Saturday, January 27th, Washington time.

All American forces will be withdrawn from South Vietnam.

-Refusing to cooperate with the war machine was one of the most effective things we could do to slow and eventually stop the draft and the war.

♪♪ -Make a difference.

Change.

Don't stand back and -- and just wish you could step out on the pages of history.

There are times when you have to fight.

-You know, I had the choice to make.

You had the choice to make.

You made your choice.

I made mine.

But I didn't run from it.

I mean, you know, it moves me to think about it.

-♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ What you say, what you say ♪ ♪ I support you, I see you, you know what?

♪ ♪ You gotta resist versus don't toe the line nor be unkind ♪ ♪ Stand up and shout, stand up and shout ♪ ♪ Don't let yourself be taken out ♪ ♪ Arrive alive, arrive alive, arise ♪ ♪ Resist, insist, you gotta persist ♪ ♪ Now, don't bow down, no, I won't bow down ♪ ♪ You got to shine ♪ ♪ And don't resign yourself to mediocrity ♪ ♪ Meet the world with your alacrity ♪ ♪ Be audacious, be bold ♪ ♪ Don't let your soul get bought and sold ♪ ♪ Don't let your soul get bought and sold ♪ ♪ Resist, persist, insist ♪ ♪ Resist, persist, insist, say no ♪ ♪ Say what?

Say no, say what?

Say no ♪ ♪ Say what?

Say no, say what?

Say no ♪ ♪ Say no ♪ -♪ Say no ♪ -♪ Say no ♪ -♪ Say no ♪ -♪ Resist ♪ -♪ Resist ♪ -♪ Persist ♪ -♪ Persist ♪ -♪ Resist ♪ -♪ Resist ♪ -♪ Say no ♪ -♪ Say no ♪ -♪ Say no ♪ -♪ Say no ♪ -♪ Say no ♪ -♪ Say no ♪ -♪ Resist ♪ -♪ Resist ♪ -♪ Persist ♪ -♪ Persist ♪ -♪ Resist ♪ -♪ Resist ♪ -♪ Say no ♪ -♪ Say no ♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪