s exactly what I did do, over a period of about five years beginning that spring of 1966, but I didn't even understand I'd begun the journey at the time.  What I did understand was that I did not want to practice law, and I did not want to go to Vietnam. And if I joined the CIA, I could stay stateside with a job which my family wouldn't consider dishonorable.)
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So there we were. My gay housemate along for psychological support, and me, waiting in one of those ubiquitous pavilions at Stanford, outside an office and next to a plain sign saying "Interviews 2 pm".
I remember walking into the interview room, seeing a man behind a desk, and sitting down. But that's it. My memory's a blank concerning the interview itself. Later in the afternoon, I remember telling my gay roomie that the absurdity of my being there had turned every word in my head to water. I thought that the interviewer expected me to tell him the truth, and the truth was that I was sharing a house with a homosexual and breaking the law against possession of marijuana every day.Â
Maybe I just got up after looking at the man for a while, and walked out.Â
The next year or sometime during the next ten, as I drifted undrafted around California and the American Southwest and dropped farther ever farther out, it dawned on me that: (1) Getting military and CIA recruiters off campus at UC-Berkeley was a big part of what got the Free Speech Movement rolling in 1964; and (2) most interviewees with CIA recruiters in 1966 probably lied, and the recruiters expected it, and the interviewees simply were worldly-wise enough to not give a damn. They knew that no legal consequences would follow telling lies to a CIA interviewer. Because, well because....it was a far, far different world back in 1966.Â
