CLASSLESS AND FREE

My daughters do respect [Ali's] stance against the draft, but only in the light that Ali was a more honest and sincere draft dodger than Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others. He couldn’t duck into the National Guard and have a good chance of avoiding altogether going over to Vietnam (many state National Guards weren’t even integrated in the 1960’s); couldn’t hide out in college and get student deferments (he was too poorly educated and boxing was not a college scholarship sport); and couldn’t run off to Canada (he loved living in America too much to do that). As a noted military historian once told me, the Vietnam War draft was designed to protect from combat the people society most valued. One way of looking at this, as my daughters analyzed it, was that our country thought that Joe Namath, who was classified 4-F because of a bum knee but could still play football every Sunday, was more important than Muhammad Ali. Actor George Hamilton, then dating President Lyndon Johnson’s daughter, was given a hardship deferment to support his socialite mother.