Trump’s Vietnam draft past sheds light on ‘sacrifice’ debate
In truth, there were no clear-cut, moral answers for young men faced with the Vietnam draft in the 1960s. But one thing was certain: If you didn’t go, someone else like a Richard would effectively take your place.
It was never so openly transactional as the Civil War, when a future American president, Grover Cleveland, paid a Polish immigrant seaman to take his place in the ranks. But the end result was not so different. Time and again, working-class, high school graduates were sucked into the fighting, while the wealthy and more educated found a way to stay out.
.. the inequities of the Vietnam draft were a harbinger of the much larger divide now between an educated elite in this country and those workers left behind in the more high-tech and globalized economy.
.. “Vietnam represents a class transition,” Kevin Phillips, the conservative political analyst and historian, told The Wall Street Journal at the time. “It began with the elites who were sure they could pull it out. It ended with a younger version of the McGeorge Bundys and Robert McNamaras walking away from it.”