On Jan. 27, 1973, Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird announced the end of the military draft, bringing relief to young U.S. men but creating a rift with those who'd been called to serve.
The announcement, 50 years ago Friday, brought immediate relief to American men ages 19 to 25, who were eligible to be drafted during the war. It also created an arbitrary but lasting divide between the nearly 2 million men who had been drafted and those who would avoid conscription by celebrating their 19th birthdays after January 1973.returned home from his honeymoon in late 1966 to news from his mother. “There’s a letter from the president,” she said.
He traveled home in uniform. At the Seattle airport, protesters shouted, “How does it feel to be a murderer?” Some men who served said they bear no animosity toward those who avoided the draft because the rules changed; Prater said he reserves his negative feelings for people who dodged the draft before 1973. But Richard V. Reeves of the Brookings Institution, author of the 2022 book “Advertisement
The state of the labor market didn’t help. “The large numbers of baby boomers, the oil shock, and unexpectedly and unacceptably high inflation depressed the job market,” said Federico Mandelman, a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. At the first draft lottery in December 1969, Leepson drew number 360. The stakes were low for him, since no veteran would have been required to serve a second time. Still, it made him laugh. “If I had avoided the draft till then, I never would have been taken,” he said.
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