The man who would become a journalist was known to advocate resistance, urging students to return draft cards to the government in protest.
David Harris, an 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 Monday at his home in Mill Valley. He was 76.Harris was an unlikely avatar of the anti-war movement.
“I dodged nothing,” he wrote in a guest essay for The New York Times in 2017. “I courted arrest, speaking truth to power, and power responded with an order for me to report for military service.” He was released in 1970, but life out of prison was a tough adjustment for him, both personally and professionally. The war was beginning to wind down, as was the anti-war movement. He and Baez divorced a few months later, though they remained close friends the rest of his life.
His journalism often mined the legacy of the Vietnam War and the social tumult of the 1960s. It included a searching piece about one of his Stanford mentors, liberal activist and politician Allard K. Lowenstein, who in 1980 was murdered by Dennis Sweeney, another former Stanford student and a friend of Harris.
He lived in the same dorm as Mitt Romney, the future Republican presidential candidate, though their social and political paths rarely crossed. The experience electrified him. He returned to school later that autumn and immersed himself in Stanford’s nascent movement against the Vietnam War. He spent long nights in his room with his dorm mates, listening to music and debating the morality of America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia.
A gifted orator, Harris was soon in demand as a speaker at anti-war rallies across California. Along the way, he encountered Baez, who had founded an organization called the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, in Carmel. One day, Harris drove down there looking for grant money.
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