David Harris (protester)
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David Harris (born 1946 in Fresno, California) is an American journalist and author. He is known chiefly for his role as an anti-war activist during the Vietnam War, most notably as a leading opponent of the Draft.
[edit] Biography
After graduating from Fresno High School as "Boy of the Year" in 1963,[1] Harris enrolled in Stanford University. He soon became involved in the Civil Rights movement, travelling through the Deep South to join other students in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's Freedom Summer voter registration campaign in Mississippi. In 1966, he was elected student body president at Stanford, serving a one-year term.
The following year, he founded an organization called the Resistance, which persuaded young men of draft age to refuse to be drafted and to work together against the Vietnam War. Within a few years, the Selective Service System discovered, to its dismay, that only about half of the men sent draft notices actually showed up for their draft physicals. In due course, Harris received his draft notice, and didn't show up. Unlike most such malefactors, he was arrested and convicted of draft evasion, a federal felony. He was sentenced to a term in Federal Prison: he served about 18 months in various minimum-to-medium-security prisons; he was released on parole in 1971. After his release, he gave talks about the experience; he said: "In prison, I lost my ideals, but not my principles."
From 1968 through 1973, Harris was married to folk singer Joan Baez. Baez related the amusing story of his arrest to the audience during one of her performances at the Woodstock Festival, in which, while Harris was being arrested, anti-Vietnam-War protestors were pasting a "resist the draft" bumper sticker on the police car. Imprisonment didn't improve the marriage; after Harris returned, they decided that both had changed in ways that made them incompatible and filed for divorce. Harris and Baez had one son together, Gabriel Harris. Gabriel attended the private Peninsula School, which his mother had attended before him as well. Gabriel and his mother also both attended public schools in the Palo Alto area.
In 1975, Harris ran as a Democrat for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from a district that included the northern part of Silicon Valley. He was not elected.
Harris was married to author and New York Times reporter Lacey Fosburgh from 1975 until her death in 1993. Harris and Fosburgh had one daughter together, Sophie Harris.
At Stanford, Harris was a protégé of Allard K. Lowenstein, a political organizer and later one-term Democratic congressman from New York. In March 1980, Lowenstein was shot to death by Harris's onetime friend Dennis Sweeney, another Lowenstein protegé. Two years later, Harris wrote the book Dreams Die Hard about his experiences throughout the 1960s and 1970s with Lowenstein and Sweeney and about the events leading up to the shooting. He has written several other books, as well as many articles for the Rolling Stone, the New York Times Magazine and other periodicals.
On October 27, 2004, Harris published a new book which draws on rare interviews with American, Iranian, and European participants in the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, called The Crisis: The President, the Prophet, and the Shah - 1979 and the Coming of Militant Islam. In it, Harris tells the story of the 444 days from an insider's perspective.
[edit] References
- ^ David Harris, Our War: What We Did in Vietnam and What It Did to Us, Random House, New York, 1996, p.34
