Who’d have guessed it, but the Vietnam War draft could become a political issue again given the pattern of evasive answers by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The New York billionaire, who was a genuine student-athlete in his youth, came away with a medical deferment in 1968 owing to bone spurs in both heels, according to his latest explanation. But in seeking to downplay that exemption as “minor” and “short-term,” Trump’s campaign raises more questions than it answers as to how he sidestepped military service during the war.


This is not a new controversy for the wealthy New Yorker. But this weekend, Trump made himself more of a target with his attacks on Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a Navy veteran who spent years as a POW in Hanoi. And much as Trump insists that the decisive factor was his high number in the December 1969 draft lottery, the real question is how he stayed out of the draft for the nearly 18 months before.

Like politics itself, timing was everything in that crucial period of 1968 and 1969, when the Army was running out of volunteer replacements and more and more draftees were needed to man infantry units in Vietnam. Draftees represented an ever larger percentage of those Americans killed in action in 1968 and 1969, and college graduates born, like Trump, in 1946 or 1947 became a target for draft boards across the country.

Having enjoyed four years of student deferments, the name of the game for many was to find a new way to stay out of the war. National Guard slots were coveted as a safer alternative to Vietnam. Others got married, had children or found jobs, such as teaching, that might keep the draft board at bay.

Most important, when the new-styled lottery was announced in 1969, it changed the rules so a young man’s birth year meant less in the order of the draft. Everything now rested instead on what day he was born. A high number for that day became the “home free” ticket for those 1946-47 babies who had avoided being drafted until then.

In this same period, Bill Clinton famously posed as a future ROTC officer candidate at the University of Arkansas, until his high number came in and he was off the hook. George W. Bush and Dan Quayle opted not to wait and found places in their states’ National Guard.

Trump’s medical deferment for bone spurs was just as timely. The process may have been perfectly in order, but he continues to act embarrassed by the fact and is murky about the details.

Indeed, for many years, Trump — who was born June 14, 1946 — never mentioned his medical deferment, and Saturday’s explanation from his campaign again downplayed its import.

“While attending the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School of Finance, Mr. Trump received a minor medical deferment for bone spurs on both heels of his feet,” the statement reads. “The medical deferment was expected to be short-term and he was therefore entered in the military draft lottery where he received an extremely high number, 356 out of 365.

“When the draft occurred, they never got near his number and he was therefore exempt from serving in the military,” the statement continues. “Although he was not a fan of the Vietnam War, yet another disaster for our country, had his draft number been selected he would have proudly served and he is tremendously grateful to all those who did.”

In an interview Sunday on ABC News “This Week” Trump stuck to this account, saying the medical deferment was “minor” and insisting that the lottery had been the deciding factor.

“I had a minor medical deferment for feet, for a bone spur of the foot, which was minor,” he said. “I was fortunate, in a sense, because I was not a believer in the Vietnam War…But I was entered into the draft and I got a very, very high draft number.”

In fact, a summary of Trump’s draft record — from the National Archives and Records Administration in Missouri and first published by the The Smoking Gun website in 2011 — tells a different story.

Trump’s medical deferment is listed for October 1968, months after he had left Wharton. And despite the campaign’s statement that it was “expected to be short-term,” there is no evidence in the records of it being dropped before the draft lottery in 1969.

The dates suggest the deferment stemmed from a Sept. 17, 1968, draft physical at the Armed Forces Center in New York described in a 1992 book on the businessman by veteran journalist Wayne Barrett. “The baseball-tennis-squash star qualified for a medical deferment,” Barrett writes, but no explanation is given of the cause.

Various news accounts in 2011 also stopped short, and the first mention of bone spurs appears to have come from Trump this past weekend.

The fact that Trump was called for a physical within months after graduating indicates that there was a very real threat of him being drafted — long before the December 1969 lottery. Any deferment was more than “minor” then. And one big question is whether Trump actively sought the deferment by bringing a letter from his own doctor to the physical citing the bone spur problem.

Young men with access to friendly family physicians had this advantage at the time in dealing with draft physicals. Lower-income individuals, with no doctor but health issues bigger than bone spurs, could find themselves approved for military service.

POLITICO asked a Trump spokesperson Saturday about such a letter but the only response as of Sunday afternoon was the more general campaign statement.

“Many years later, Mr. Trump was responsible for the building of the beautiful Vietnam War Memorial in lower Manhattan, for which he contributed a tremendous sum of money,” that statement concludes. “He was also responsible for bringing back the New York City Memorial Day parade in 1995, after our military was embarrassed by the previous year’s parade where almost nobody showed up. Mr. Trump’s parade was one of the largest parades ever held. Today, he remains committed to helping and honoring all of our Veterans.”