50 years after the end of the Vietnam War, meet an iconic but unknown Jewish activist

NEW YORK — Calling themselves “The Resisters,” a cluster of young men stood in front of the federal courthouse in Foley Square. It’s unknown who among them was the first to burn their draft card on that chilly afternoon in November of 1967, but it was a bespectacled Robert “Bob” Allen Simon whose image appeared in The New York Post the following day.

Now, as the United States marks 50 years since Saigon succumbed to advancing North Vietnamese troops on April 30, Simon’s story still resonates. While his gesture was symbolic, it was emblematic of the shifting American attitudes toward the war.

The Times of Israel recently visited the New York-based American Jewish Historical Society, which holds a fascinating trove of Simon’s documents in its archives, to speak about his legacy.

“He reflected the growing antiwar sentiment. What’s exciting about the collection of his papers is that they show the impact ordinary civilians can have on the smaller circles around them,” said Gemma Birnbaum, the society’s executive director.

The collection, which includes newspaper clippings, personal papers, and Simon’s own articles, speaks to the role young Jewish Americans played in liberal causes. It also traces the Simon’s evolution from eager Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) recruit to avid anti-war demonstrator.

Simon’s propensity for civic engagement was evident in his 1955 bar mitzvah speech.

“Our Heavenly Father, on this day of my bar mitzvah, bestow in me sound thought and judgment to do my part as a Jew and as an American citizen. This country of my birth; this true haven of democracy: America, bless it also and let your love, mercy, guidance and bounty cover this land from sea to sea. Bless its inhabitants, but above all this, give the people of this country the strength to know the principles of democracy and by knowing these truths let I and every other person land remain free,” he said from the dais of the Israelite Center in Miami.

Three years later, he would seek to make good on his promise to do his part as an American citizen through military service.

In 1958, Simon, then 16, attended a program for early admission at Stetson University in Florida. A letter to his parents shows how keen he was to button the jacket of his ROTC uniform and tie the laces on his polished shoes.

“I start R.O.T.C. Monday. I can’t wait. The Major (our pot-bellied leader) told us that if we were good students, we would get to fire the 75 mil recoilless rifle our very first year. My wildest dreams have become flaming reality. I’m overjoyed,” he wrote to his parents.

Simon withdrew from Stetson, citing personal reasons, and then applied to several schools, including New York’s Bard College. As part of his application to Bard, he wrote about his involvement with the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization.

In the application essay, Simon shows a growing disaffection for authority.

“These years have been a revelation of how individuals use a group to fulfill their own needs,” he wrote, noting that he was “bitterly disgusted at the apparent apathy about social action that gripped the people I addressed. This disgust has also been an education, a temperance of optimism and a source of concern to me.”

“His involvement in B’nai B’rith was very formative for him. It showed him the difference between an individual and an organization — and here he started to question the authority around him,” Birnbaum said.

Instead of attending Bard, Simon matriculated at the University of Miami in 1959, where he studied English literature. He also wrote for the student magazine Tempo and was a film, drama and literature critic for the university newspaper The Miami Hurricane.

It was while writing for the paper that his views against the war and American involvement in Vietnam further crystallized.

In “Vietnam War Gets Hotter,” written after the South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam ousted president Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu from power and executed them in a CIA-backed coup, Simon criticized the United States and South Vietnam. He was chagrined that “charges of corruption, official brutality, inefficiency and a lack of vigor in prosecuting the war have all been leveled” at the South Vietnamese government by the US and called for “vast changes in official policy by both American military advisors and the State Department.”

Simon ended his stint at the University of Miami before he earned a degree.

“Like a lot of students, he hopped around trying to find his footing,” Birnbaum said.

Like-minded refuseniks

It appears Simon finally found his footing at the New School for Social Research, where he befriended like-minded students with whom he began demonstrating against the war.

“I know we were speaking with our whole lives to the American people and saying…[D]o you want this war? — do you want to include us in the price?” Simon would later write.

By the time The Resisters gathered before 100 onlookers to burn their draft cards, 15,058 US troops had been killed and 109,527 wounded. Ultimately, 58,220 Americans were killed during the Vietnam War.

In 1995, the Vietnam government released its official estimate of war deaths. According to the government at the time, as many as 2 million civilians on both sides, as well as 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters were killed. Between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese allied soldiers were also killed, according to US military estimates.

As the casualties mounted support for the war fell.

In August of 1965, nearly a quarter of Americans said it was a mistake to send troops to Vietnam, according to the Pew Research Center. Two years later, that figure rose to just under one-third. By 1968, nearly half of all Americans (46%) were against sending soldiers to fight in the war.

Meanwhile, the number of draft resisters climbed. It’s estimated that between 30,000 and 50,000 men fled to Canada between 1964 and 1975 to avoid the draft.

It was a risky proposition. Anyone caught evading the draft or burning their draft card faced up to five years in prison and/or upwards of $250,000 in fines. Simon decided his principles, now solidly anti-war, demanded he risk arrest.

In the end, the 25-year-old, who had been declared 4-F (unfit for service due to eyesight), actually burned his classification card instead of his actual draft card. Nevertheless, it was a criminal act and a jury found him guilty as charged. He was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment. The judge ultimately suspended Simon’s sentence for two years and placed him on probation.

In the months that followed the demonstration, Simon visited colleges and universities and spoke about his act of civil disobedience.

Simon’s activism was cut short on August 29, 1969, when he and two other classmates were killed in a car accident in Massachusetts.

Although he never became a household name like anti-war activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, Simon made a difference nonetheless, Birnbaum said.

“History is made by people who aren’t always well known, not only by people who are well known, or who, like some of the activists of that era, knew how to get on television. Simon’s symbolic burning of the card carried real world consequences. Bob wasn’t a trend setter, but he made a difference,” Birnbaum said.

Indeed, in Simon’s “Letter to a Judge,” which he used in defense at his trial and which the New School published on November 30, 1969, he wrote: “As an adherent of democracy, I was extremely pessimistic about the response, but it seems that we have played a minor, yet persistent and recognizable part in the growing repudiation of both this war and future imperialistic adventures.”