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| David Harris (photo: Jason Henry) |
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David Harris, the activist and journalist "who in the late 1960s became a national figure for encouraging young men to resist being drafted to serve in the Vietnam War, and who went to jail after refusing the draft himself," died February 6, the New York Times reported. He was 76.
When Harris was drafted in 1968, he refused to report for induction and was almost immediately indicted by federal authorities. A few months after his indictment, he married singer Joan Baez, whom he had met through the antiwar movement. They had been touring the U.S. for 16 months, with Baez performing as a warm-up to his antiwar speeches.
Harris was convicted in 1969, sentenced to three years in federal prison, and served 20 months. After his release, he and Baez divorced, though they remained close friends for the rest of his life.
"There wasn't any question to me that this guy had enormous talent for speaking," Baez said. "We'd go around, do this dog and pony show, and I would open up for him, singing, and people would all get together to hear David Harris talking about how we're going to change the world."
Harris eventually wrote a letter to Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone magazine, offering to sell him a series of antiwar essays. Wenner suggested instead a profile of Ron Kovic, a Marine whose battlefield injuries in Vietnam had left him unable to use his legs, and who went on to be a prominent antiwar activist.
The article, "Ask a Marine," ran in 1973 and launched Harris's second career as a magazine journalist and author. He spent the next five years writing for Rolling Stone and in 1978 became a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. A decade later, he left the magazine to write books full time. Kovic would later write his own autobiography, Born on the Fourth of July.
Harris published several investigative books about sports, politics and the environment, including I Shoulda Been Home Yesterday: Twenty Months In Prison for Not Killing Anybody (1976); The Last Stand: the War Between Wall Street and Main Street Over California's Ancient Redwoods (1996); Our War: What We Did in Vietnam and What It Did to Us (1996); and, most recently, My Country 'Tis of Thee: Reporting, Sallies and Other Confessions 2020).
"The death of David Harris marks the passing of a hero who stood by his conviction that the Vietnam War was morally wrong," Book Passage bookstore, Corte Madera, Calif., noted in an e-mail tribute. "He strongly opposed the draft that fed so many young men into that conflict, and he never shrank from the consequences of his leadership against that war. Book Passage was honored to host Harris at events for each of his brilliant books. His last Book Passage appearance was in 2020 in an online interview with Peter Coyote during the height of the Covid pandemic."