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July 14, 2009 at 22:52:52 Permalink Promoted to Headline (H4) on 7/15/09: My Non-Interview with a CIA Recruiter in 1966 Diary Entry by GL Rowsey (about the author) |
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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". :::::::: 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.)
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.
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. 
Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out, at Wikimedia 
Interview With The Moon, by Rebecca L. Daily at Flickr
"How could I fail to speak with difficulty? I have new things to say."
I graduated from Stanford Law School in 1966 but have never practiced. Instead, I dropped back five years and joined The Movement, but it wasn't until the 1970's that I (more...)
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