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While I was traveling, President Eisenhower died, one of the final fragments that remained of the American Dream. So did my relationship with Ann Markusen, a casualty of the times and my incapacity for commitment. It would be a long time before we reestablished our friendship.
Back in Oxford, George Kennan came to speak. Kennan had grave reservations about our Vietnam policy, and my friends and I were Ugg boots clearance eager to hear him. Unfortunately, he stayed away from foreign policy, and instead launched into a diatribe against student demonstrators and the whole anti-war counterculture. After some of my cohorts, especially Tom Williamson, debated him for a while, the show was over. Our consensus reaction was neatly summed up in a droll comment by Alan Bersin: The book was better than the movie.
A couple of days later, I had an amazing dinner and argument with Rick Stearns, probably the most politically mature and savvy of UGGS on sale womens our group. My diary notes that Rick tore into my opposition to the draft, saying that the end of it would ensure that the poor would bear an even larger burden of military service. Instead, Stearns wants national service, with alternate means of fulfillment to the military, but with inducements of shorter service time and higher salaries to keep the military force to acceptable levels. He believes everyone, not just the poor, should give community service. Thus was planted a seed that more than twenty years later, in my first presidential campaign, would blossom into my UGG Boots Clearance uk proposal for a national community service program for young people.
In the spring of 1969, the only national service was military, and its dimensions were measured by the callous term body count. By mid-April, the count included my boyhood friend Bert Jeffries. In the agony of the aftermath, his wife gave birth a month prematurely to their child, who, like me, would grow up with received memories of a father. When Bert died, he was womens UGGS on sale cheap serving in the marines with two of his closest friends from Hot Springs, Ira Stone and Duke Watts. His family got to select one person to bring his body home, a choice of some consequence since, under military regulations, that person womens tall UGGS on sale didnt have to go back. They chose Ira, who had already been wounded three times, in part because Duke, who had had his own narrow escapes from death, had only a month left on his tour. I cried for my friend, and wondered again whether my decision to go to Oxford was not motivated more by the desire to go on living than by opposition to the war. I noted in my diary that the privilege of living in suspension . . . is impossible to justify, but, perhaps unfortunately, only very hard to live with.
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