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It was in the spring of my third year in law school. And I'd been sharing a house with a gay classmate that third year of our incarceration, after introducing quite a few of my classmates to the pleasures of smoking marijuana for two years.
I'd also been contemplating the possibility of being shipped to Vietnam. Students up the peninsula and across the Bay were already listening to the wind saying "Turn on, Tune in, and Drop out" but Stanford was a long way from Berkeley and with my credentials, it hadn't occurred to me that I could. (In fact, turn on, tune in, and drop out is exactly what I did do, over a period of about five years beginning that spring of 1966, but I didn't even understand I'd begun the journey at the time. What I did understand was that I did not want to practice law, and I did not want to go to Vietnam. And if I joined the CIA, I could stay stateside with a job which my family wouldn't consider dishonorable.)
Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out, at Wikimedia
So there we were. My gay housemate along for psychological support, and me, waiting in one of those ubiquitous pavilions at Stanford, outside an office and next to a plain sign saying "Interviews 2 pm".
I remember walking into the interview room, seeing a man behind a desk, and sitting down. But that's it. My memory's a blank concerning the interview itself. Later in the afternoon, I remember telling my gay roomie that the absurdity of my being there had turned every word in my head to water. I thought that the interviewer expected me to tell him the truth, and the truth was that I was sharing a house with a homosexual and breaking the law against possession of marijuana every day.
Interview With The Moon, by Rebecca L. Daily at Flickr
Maybe I just got up after looking at the man for a while, and walked out.
The next year or sometime during the next ten, as I drifted undrafted around California and the American Southwest and dropped farther ever farther out, it dawned on me that: (1) Getting military and CIA recruiters off campus at UC-Berkeley was a big part of what got the Free Speech Movement rolling in 1964; and (2) most interviewees with CIA recruiters in 1966 probably lied, and the recruiters expected it, and the interviewees simply were worldly-wise enough to not give a damn. They knew that no legal consequences would follow telling lies to a CIA interviewer. Because, well because....it was a far, far different world back in 1966.
