Robert Shapiro Quotes

I was terrified of the Vietnam War when I was 13. I thought I was going. The draft was such an ominous thing, I felt as if it was going to trickle down to me.

Lyndon Johnson may have escalated the war, but when I was drafted and shipped off to Vietnam, the signature on my orders was Nixon's.

I was later to receive an excellent first two years' graduate education in the same University and then again was able to pursue my studies in the U.S. on a fellowship from the aforementioned fund.

When it came time to go to the University, it was during the war.

I'd been going to college for nine years, and before I completed my dissertation, I quit.

The poor are fighting this war and the middle class and rich are getting deferments. We must end the graduate school draft exemption.

Resistance to conscription [in WWI] was quite strong. By the end of the war, the ranks of noncooperators were stunningly large. Roughly 3 million eligible men never registered, in violation of the law — compared with the 24 million who did. And some 338,000 who did register either failed to obey an induction notice or deserted after they joined the ranks .... Altogether, a higher percentage of American men successfully resisted conscription during World War I than during the Vietnam War half a century later.

In some ways I've gone to Cash and Carter graduate school.

I was kind of confused. I thought, Well, if I get drafted, I'll go. Everybody was very concerned with it. I had friends who went. Some that came back and some that didn't.

In the war, most young men were inducted into the armed forces at the age of 17. A group of students was permitted to attend university before taking part in wartime research projects.

Which I would've done 'cause I volunteered for the draft which meant that I only had to do two years. But when the Cubans had missiles in the Canal and Kennedy made the extension, I was one of the ones who had enough time to be extended.

Doctoral training is devoted almost entirely to learning to do research, even though most Ph.Ds who enter academic life spend far more time teaching than they do conducting experiments or writing books.

I remember the day I found out my draft status. I was really floored and kind of staggered around in a daze. It just hadn't occurred to me that I could end up in Vietnam.

When we went into World War II, I was a tractor driver then. I drove tractors on the plantation. So when they start calling people my age, 18, up, I was one they called.

My real education began when I entered the University of Chicago in September 1951 as a graduate student.

My graduate study was interrupted, like that of many others, by World War II.

So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.

One of the problems we currently have is there hasn't been in the population any serious engagement with the ethics of war because we have an all-volunteer army. I would think the return to the draft would be an intervention that would require discussion that might be more helpful in terms of our ability to limit war.

The war in Vietnam I thought a dreadful mistake.

I had a very strong feeling about the Vietnam War, and I had a strong feeling about participating in it. The military draft was in place, I was summoned for a physical exam, and I was either going to be classified as fit for military service or make my objection to it. So I made my objection to it.

In 1975 I decided that there was no future in flying (airline jobs were impossible to get, and who wants a job where you are judged only by seniority?) and headed off to grad school.

Nothing drew me to the film business. I was propelled by the fear and anxiety of Vietnam. I had been drafted into the Marines. My brother was already serving in Vietnam. I bought, if you will, a stay of execution - both literally and figuratively - and went on to graduate school of business from the law school that I was attending.

A couple of years I taught in graduate programs at NYU and Columbia, in the early eighties.

I took an interest in the Civil Rights Movement. I listened to Martin Luther King. The Vietnam War was raging. When I was 18, I was eligible for the draft, but when I went to be tested, I didn't qualify.

My father is American and deserted the Vietnam War.