About Michael Foley's Dear Dr. Spock (New York University Press, 2005).

At the height of the Vietnam War, thousands of Americans wrote moving letters to Dr. Benjamin Spock, America's pediatrician and a high-profile opponent of the war. Personal and heartfelt, thoughtful and volatile, these missives from Middle America provide an intriguing glimpse into the conflicts that took place over the dinner table as people wrestled with this divisive war and with their consciences.

Providing one of the first clear views of the home front during the war, Dear Dr. Spock collects the best of these letters and offers a window into the minds of ordinary Americans. They wrote to Spock because he was familiar, trustworthy, and controversial. His book Baby and Child Care was on the shelves of most homes, second only to the Bible in the number of copies sold. Starting in the 1960s, his activism in the antinuclear and antiwar movements drew mixed reactions from Americans-some puzzled, some supportive, some angry, and some desperate.

Most of the letters come from what Richard Nixon called the "silent majority"—white, middle class, law-abiding citizens who the president thought supported the war to contain Communism. In fact, the letters reveal a complexity of reasoning and feeling that moves far beyond the opinion polls at the time. One mother of young children struggles to imagine how Vietnamese women could endure after their village was napalmed, while another chastises Spock for the "dark shadow" he had cast on the country and pledges to instill love of country in her sons.

What emerges is a portrait of articulate Americans struggling mightily to understand government policies in Vietnam and how those policies did or did not reflect their own sense of themselves and their country.

Responses to Dear Dr. Spock:

"From thousands of letters written to Dr. Benjamin Spock during the Vietnam War, Foley has carefully culled 218 missives from America's silent majority. . . . Many may find the frustration, fear and grief expressed here newly relevant." — Publishers Weekly

"These letters—with Michael S. Foley's astute and informed commentary—make clear why and how so many Americans trusted Benjamin Spock. The body politic sorely needs a Doctor Spock today." — James Carroll, author of Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War

"Foley has discovered a unique source on the American home front during the Vietnam War, a perspective that moves us past the usual images of angry polarization. These powerful letters help us to consider how war-times induce people to look with new eyes at their nation and their government." — David Farber, author of The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s

"Few documentary collections offer such an immediate connection to the years in which the Vietnam War was fought. Reading these letters now, when the U.S. is once again at war, is a profoundly moving experience." — Marilyn B. Young, author of The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990

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About Michael Foley's Confronting the War Machine (University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

Shedding light on an understudied form of opposition to the Vietnam War, Michael Foley tells the story of draft resistance, the cutting edge of the antiwar movement at the height of the war's escalation. Unlike so-called draft dodgers, who evaded the draft by leaving the country or by securing a draft deferment by fraudulent means, draft resisters openly defied draft laws by burning or turning in their draft cards. Like civil rights activists before them, draft resisters invited prosecution and imprisonment.

Focusing on Boston, one of the movement's most prominent centers, Foley reveals the crucial role of draft resisters in shifting antiwar sentiment from the margins of society to the center of American politics. Their actions inspired other draft-age men opposed to the war – especially college students – to reconsider their place of privilege in a draft system that offered them protections and sent disproportionate numbers of working-class and minority men to Vietnam. This recognition sparked the change of tactics from legal protest to mass civil disobedience, drawing the Johnson administration into a confrontation with activists who were largely suburban, liberal, young, and middle class – the core of Johnson's Democratic constituency.

Examining the day-to-day struggle of antiwar organizing carried out by ordinary Americans at the local level, Foley argues for a more complex view of citizenship and patriotism during a time of war.

Responses to Confronting the War Machine:

"We prepare for the future by understanding the past. Michael Foley's timely book, with lucid, original scholarship, tells the precious story of a time when America, following truly patriotic Americans, gave peace a chance." – James Carroll, author of An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us

"Exhaustively researched, thoughtfully argued, and cogently written, Confronting the War Machine is the best scholarly study of draft resistance during the Vietnam War. Foley has recovered an almost forgotten history that poses a striking contrast to many of the postwar stereotypes that portray antiwar activists as frivolous, cowardly elitists who sought only to save their own skins. Here we are introduced to a group of people who confronted some of the most difficult political and moral dilemmas of the entire Cold War period, and did so with seriousness, commitment, and courage." – Christian G. Appy, author of Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam

"Foley's meticulously researched and well-written study of draft resistance in Boston during the late 1960s describes sympathetically but quite objectively the always interesting and sometimes rather colorful activists who challenged the Selective Service System during the Vietnam War. It sheds new light on the motivations of those antiwarriors and how and why they fashioned their innovative strategies and tactics." – Melvin Small, author of Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America's Hearts and Minds

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