The publicity from the Herndon case was so extensive that it’s fair to say Safe Return was fully and successfully launched, and the work of CCI, if not forgotten, consigned to the archives of history¹. Almost immediately we began to receive queries from other deserters and their families. One walk-in had particular appeal, a Franco-American Vietnam vet named Tommy Michaud who’d come down from New England after reading a news account of John’s dramatic reentry. Home from the war, Tommy deserted the Marine Corps and wandered no farther from his state-side billet than a New Hampshire village, where, for almost three years, he’d been hiding out in the bosom of his family. Tommy was as quiet and non-verbal as John Herndon was chatty and brash. Even now when I think of Michaud, my imagination leaps to Melville’s celebrated tongue-tied innocent, the handsome, stalwart Billy Budd. Tommy, too, was manly enough, but, like Melville’s character, utterly lacking in surface aggression, certainly of that chip-on-the-shoulder variety routinely produced by the United States Marines.

Tommy Michaud was disturbed by his service in Vietnam, and had come to oppose the war. But like John Herndon, he was not by nature or inclination a political animal. Where Michaud differed from Herndon was in the capacity to dissemble that covered John’s desertion with a patina of public validation, at least among liberals. Both Tod and I quickly realized that we couldn’t depend on Tommy to fend for himself in the public arena. We would have to create a forum that would allow this sympathetic young man to be viewed, but relieved of the pressure to perform. Four months later, we would satisfy these conditions in the most spectacular way.

In the meantime, as we plotted a suitable scenario for the ‘safe return’ of Tommy Michaud, we still had John Herndon awaiting trial in a Ft. Dix, New Jersey stockade. Tod and I spent long hours at Safe Return’s office on lower Fifth Avenue crafting a campaign to simultaneously protect John and propel the amnesty issue. To generate support, we traded the sole species of capital in our possession at that stage—publicity—by duplicating in bulk, and mailing out, every news article featuring our work, along with exhortatory political flyers and press releases—everything stamped in block lettering, “Free John Herndon.”  In response to requests for information, we produced a handsome but wordy two-color Safe Return brochure detailing the goals of our campaign, along with answers to the anticipated objections of our adversaries. The brochure also listed the two score well-known celebrities and public figures who endorsed us, from Bela Abzug to Peter Yarrow.²  A targeted fund appeal to a list of pre-addressed envelopes from RESIST, the activist collective in Cambridge, Mass., brought in a steady trickle of individual donations allowing us to stay afloat from one billing cycle to the next. I lived on my disability check, and Tod received a weekly salary of $45. The copies of invoices in our archival record show that our major outlays at that time went to the storefront offset printer a block from our office.³

Experiences from Tod’s background were essential to our working style. The professional appearance of our materials owned much to Tod’s part time work as a boy in his Dad’s print shop back home in Battle Creek. In the process of selling ads for an annual “friendship book” the Ensign shop printed on behalf of the local AFL/CIO, Tod had also canvassed in the field with an itinerant duo of telephone solicitors, an ad-selling technique already then in use five decades before telemarketing would become as common as roadside billboards. This work was a hard drinking romp, as Tod described it. Their threesome would take up residence in a small town hotel room, set up a phone bank, and shake down local businesses, especially non-union shops willing to pay protection to keep giant Labor off their backs and their shops unorganized. With every sale Tod would be dispatched in the team’s Cadillac convertible for immediate collection. Within a year, we would hire our own telephone fund raisers to follow-up on donors who came in “cold” through direct mail solicitations. Without these skills that Tod brought to the table, it’s hard to imagine how Safe Return could have been established as a viable undertaking.

The pace of communications was palpably slower than what we experience as this account is being reconstructed. Long distance calls were costly and kept to a minimum, except for raising funds, media contacts and the occasional conversation with some staff member of a Congressional sympathizer in D.C. That said, the ‘Steal This Book’ ethos in full sail by the early ‘70s offered several inventive ways to rip off Ma Bell.⁴ You could rig those clunky desk-top dial phones with black boxes to by-pass billing for trunk calls, while the telephone credit card numbers of the rich and famous circulated sub rosa throughout the Movement, or openly in a communication’s black market courtesy of the hippie press . . . and we took advantage of all of them.

We depended on the mails in a way that is no longer imaginable. Safe Return’s monthly correspondence files were inches thick, in-coming and out-going.  Every day we received and dispatched real letters. A reading of our correspondence from the period reveals, on balance, a persistent fraternal civility, often warmth, and whether we were advocating, or stating differences, we did so predominantly in a tone of measured persuasion. The primary short term goal was to assemble a credible coalition representing every corner where U.S. resisters, particularly deserters, lived in exile. In pursuit of this end, we maintained political correspondences with any number of groups and individuals inside the Movement.
One on-going exchange with several close comrades in San Francisco, led by our friend Steve Rees, lasted for years. Their group [name TK Bay Area Military Study Project???...] put out a paper called The Bulkhead and organized among active duty GIs. They also generally shared Tod’s and my anti-militarism, focus on the war, and strategy around amnesty. Our back and forth dialogs, rich in analytical and polemical detail, sought nothing less than to clarify the moment in which we were trying to intervene. There were enough shadings of difference among us to give these bi-coastal communiques a critical, thought-provoking edge. And we could therefore claim with some justification to be acting as intellectuals as well as political agitators.

Toward the other players in resistance circles, both at home and abroad, we tailored more functional forms of courtship. The cultivation of such alliances around joint initiatives of choice were what powered Movement activism day to day. But the alliances often proved delicate and labile. Quite suddenly they could become fractious as political differences emerged, or, more likely, from the loud clang of egos clashing. One dimension of our leftwing political culture that did not deter activists like Tod and I were the opportunities for scheming and edgy competitiveness, typically in personal encounters. It’s not as if we hadn’t been through a number of sectarian squabbles over the past two years. We were therefore well-steeled for the in-fighting when, over time, Safe Return became the target of criticism from two opposite tiers of the coalescing amnesty forces. There were the established liberal groups and institutions I mentioned above, who wished to dictate amnesty’s public message and steer its course politically in more conventional channels, and therefore restrain the independence and national influence of a couple of enterprising upstarts who refused to play by their rules. And there were the purer-than-thou’s at the grassroots, some true Jacobins among them, who—inflamed by feelings of resentment—trashed Safe Return, not for its politics, but for its slickness, having deduced that only through abject venality and ill-gained filthy lucre could we have assumed such prominence in the media.

There’s no doubt that Tod and I were both driven in the manner of classic entrepreneurs, or more precisely, impresarios, guided by innovation—and alienated from the conformist career models we’d grown up with in the Fifties. But we had hardly created Safe Return—a public campaign to support deserters for christsake—for the money. Whatever money we raised, and it would be a considerable amount in the years ahead, went directly into our program. Our behavior could be competitive, but our zeal for a politics of demilitarization and economic justice was no less sincere for that. What we had, and our competitors often lacked, was not just a penchant for showmanship, but the level of organization and self-discipline to carry it off. Indeed—the slick part at least—was exactly how Tod and I, despite working out of a cigar box, hoped to project ourselves from inside the Movement to the mainstream.

As for working alliances, we immediately forged a dynamic link with AMEX-Canada, a small magazine collective in Toronto reporting on the resister community from within, and espousing politics on amnesty close to our own. Like Safe Return, AMEX was essentially a two-man operation, a draft dodger with some journalism skills named Dee Knight, and an active duty lieutenant, Jack Calhoun, who had deserted the Army rather than serve in Vietnam. Calhoun was also a doctoral candidate mentored by the well-known leftist historian, Gabriel Kolko, at Toronto’s York University. Knight and Calhoun’s partnership, like Tod’s and mine, was productive. The magazine appeared regularly, was intelligently written and competently managed, while operating on a shoe string budget and an uncertain cash flow. When we had first learned of AMEX just before retrieving John Herndon from Paris, Tod traveled to Toronto and briefed Dee and Jack on our general strategy. When we actually got John home, and made a big splash in the media, the AMEX duo weren’t the only ones in the exile communities who stood up and took notice; this recognition would undergo a multiplier effect with the rapid and surprising resolution of the Herndon case that would quickly follow.⁵

Throughout the resistance movement generally our “big splash” met with positive to mixed reviews, raising our stock rapidly in some quarters, while in others, signaling dissent, if not outright disapproval. I pleasantly rediscovered when consulting the record the many messages of unqualified solidarity. A small sampling of those offering kudos would include, the Shelter Half GI coffee house in Tacoma, Washington; Rita-Act, the long standing GI paper and project in France and Germany, creature of one Max Watts, an eccentric Austrian physicist and Leninist scold who tutored and succored half the U.S. deserter community in Europe;⁶ and even several chapters of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), our erstwhile nemesis from CCI days, most notably the supportive letter from the New Haven chapter’s Jack Smith.  A decade later, Jack Smith, by then a veteran services advocate, helped establish PTSD as a war-related anxiety disorder within the American Psychiatric Association, which, in turn, lead to PTSD becoming a service connected disability compensated by the Veterans Administration.⁷

There were less rosy notices as well, some merely bothersome. A lone wolf deserter in Sweden who fancied himself a revolutionary of uncommon purity wrote long, incoherent diatribes sprinkled with quotations from the Leninist canon, whose precepts we were accused of having wantonly abandoned. We actually engaged the guy with a couple of letters, but desisted when it became clear we were dealing with a sectarian madman. A more reasonable kind of tension attended our contact with GI organizers at the grassroots, who often misread our flashy style for a cavalier lack of seriousness.

A sheaf of letters from Tod to a chap named George Smith, whose Chicago Area Military Project—CAMP—agitated among sailors at the Great Lakes Naval installation, demonstrates our persistent efforts to convince skeptics in the GI movement, not only of Safe Return’s political bona fides, but of amnesty’s uncompromisingly radical content. Working day to day at close quarters with low ranking enlisted personnel subjected to relentless forms of command repression for every act of non-conformity, much less expressions of genuine political resistance, bred a kind of by-the-numbers orthodoxy in how these organizers dealt with the brass in supporting and defending the dissident GIs. Whereas Tod and I were under no such restraints as we escalated the pacing of the issue, and sought to convince our grassroots’ comrades—especially among the draft and GI counselors—that our confrontational way of projecting amnesty nationally, was complementary, not injurious, to their own efforts in legitimizing the resistance. We held our own, but never won this debate.

Closer to home the seed of a more damaging rift had begun to germinate three floors below our office where the ACLU staffed its national headquarters, and decided to launch an Amnesty Project of its own. The office was headed by a human rights activist named Henry Schwarzschild, who would in subsequent years until his death run a much more visible ACLU campaign opposing capital punishment. It was Henry’s role to assemble the coalition of liberal institutional forces which would, in time, collide head on with Safe Return. Henry loved to shmooze, and in the beginning he and I cordially debated amnesty politics almost on a daily basis in his office. Henry, full of flattery over Safe Return’s brassy initiative, while urging us to work within the system, memorably advised me to “think of it as buying in, not selling out.” It wasn’t long before Henry played his true hand toward Safe Return with considerable indiscretion.

Jim Reston was known beyond his association with Safe Return as a writer who had independently championed the amnesty cause, so it was not surprising that Henry Schwarzschild would attempt to draw him into the ACLU orbit. Toward that end, Henry wrote Reston in early April that, “I am not happy with the Safe Return approach, Jim. I wish you would tell me why you are.” To which Reston replied somewhat tartly, “this [the Herndon case] may not be a legal precedent, but it surely is a political one. I would urge you to put aside your organizational rivalries.” Schwarzschild had clearly underestimated Jim’s invested interest in the Herndon case, but also his loyalty. Reston’s note to us not only confided his exchange with Schwarzschild, but emphasized his solidarity with Safe Return in glowing terms. “I want to say while the memory is still fresh how much I enjoyed that week in Paris, and what a joy it was to work with you guys.”⁸ Following-up some days later Reston would write that Henry had answered his letter “in a much conciliatory tone.” To Tod he added, “I hope your lunch with him was productive.” It was, Tod responded, “uneventful. He’s not a good listener.”

I’m certain that Tod and I reacted to Henry’s faux pas privately with many gleeful asides. But given that all the momentum was in our hands, we didn’t see his undermining tactics as a threat to Safe Return’s poll position on the issue. Besides, our immediate attentions were elsewhere. For those of us directly involved in John Herndon’s short term welfare—Tod and I, John’s parents, and our local support network—not least our girlfriends—there was considerable suspense as we awaited the Army’s every move. John in the meantime acted the minor celebrity before his guards and fellow inmates in the stockade. One morning, he loudly refused to participate in a daily work detail, and the ready acquiescence of the guards to this defiance signaled to all and sundry within earshot that John David Herndon was, for the moment, an untouchable. On a flyer distributed at a rally we organized outside the main gate at Fort Dix we characterized John as a political prisoner. The handout lionized John’s on-going refusal “to make a deal with the Army . . . an individual solution that would deny the political nature of his decision to retire.” But it was John’s voice that capped the flyer’s copy, disdaining amnesty with the now familiar resister refrain,“if it means asking for forgiveness. I don’t need to be forgiven by this government; the question is, will I forgive them?”

In the interim, Tod and his co-counsel prepared a defense which combined our Vietnam war crimes agenda, grounded on the principles of Nuremberg and the other conventions of war, with more practical arguments adapted to the military’s own convoluted legal system. A couple of letters traveled back and forth between John and ourselves, with John, still carrying a torch for his Parisian girlfriend, Jeanette, asking Tod for her new address. We in turn wrote John with optimistic reports of our efforts to get the word out on his case, addressing a convention of radical Asian scholars one weekend, heading for Harrisburg, PA to attend a rally outside the trial of Dan Berrigan, the next. The prosecutor’s office at Ft. Dix would communicate nothing of the Army’s plans for John’s trial, and then, Tod discovered one morning that the stockade commander had issued an order to block Tod’s access to his client. This was typical petty command harassment, since Tod had no difficulty in establishing his relationship as John’s legal counsel, but it meant raising hell in Washington to put some smoke under the appropriate officer’s fanny.