Word: draft
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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More and more young Americans are being rejected for the draft on physical or mental grounds. From 29.9% two years ago, the turndown rate jumped to 46% last July. Is the new generation declining in body and mind...
Hardly. The young have simply faced up to the cutoff in job and graduate-school deferments and instead have mastered the art of beating the draft with medical or psychiatric excuses. Moreover, they are getting crucial help from a growing number of psychiatrists and other physicians who write letters attesting to ailments that disqualify the registrants for military service...
...military duties. Selective Service physicians now recognize and ignore her recommendations. Several authors of equally dubious letters have been reported to the U.S. Army Surgeon General, though it is questionable whether he has any authority to act against them. The Justice Department could prosecute such doctors for impeding the draft or making fraudulent statements to the Government, but proving the charges might be difficult. Local medical societies can also suspend an errant member, a crushing professional blow, but much the same effect can be achieved by his colleagues' consensus that he is unreliable. Writers of truly fake statements...
Beyond Letters. Many doctors are particularly disturbed by the inability of the poor to obtain exemptions on psychiatric grounds. "Draft evasion is a middle-class activity," says Dr. Peter La Valle, a San Francisco psychiatrist. "Poor people aren't allowed to be officially neurotic in this country." To eliminate this inequity, many physicians have started organizations like the Medical Committee for Human Rights, which has chapters serving youths in 30 cities across the country. Says Dr. Eli Messinger, a Manhattan psychiatrist who chairs the committee: "We feel that draft physicals are too rapid, and that as a consequence many...
First he was Cassius Clay, the lovable loudmouth who was going to "whup the world." Next he was the mysterious Muhammad Ali, spouting Black Muslim rhetoric. Then, slapped with a draft-evasion conviction and stripped of his title, he became the self-styled "champion of the people," a martyr to the black cause. Last week, 3½ years after his last professional fight, he was Cassius Clay again -at least in the ring where, shuffling, stabbing and slugging as of old, he pummeled Irishman Jerry Quarry into swift and violent submission...