VIETNAM WAR RESISTERS

The Vietnam War is arguably the most recent case of a U.S. president using a mass pardon or amnesty for domestic political reconciliation as well as the only one in anyone’s living memory or that played out in part on television. More than a century after the Civil War pardons, two presidents once again sought to use a mass pardon to remove the taint of criminality and exclusion from another significantly aggrieved and alienated group within the national community: draft evaders and military deserters from the U.S. war in Southeast Asia. The American war in Vietnam essentially ended on August