Certainly, President Lyndon Johnson did not understand. When draft resisters showed up in Washington on Oct. 20 with nearly 1,000 draft cards collected from all over the country and turned them in at the Justice Department, he was furious. Johnson raged privately about whomever “the dumb sonofabitch was who would let somebody leave a bunch of draft cards in front of the Justice Department and then let them just walk away,” and ordered the attorney general, the F.B.I. and the Selective Service to investigate.

If the president had been better briefed, he would have known that the week’s theme of moving “from protest to resistance” came in large part from the expectation that thousands of draft-age men would deliberately defy draft laws. And he knew enough about the draft that he should have seen these protests coming.

By 1967, it made sense for protesters to target the Selective Service System. Nearly everyone agreed that the draft did not operate fairly. Since the 1950s, the government faced a fundamental problem administering a peacetime system of conscription: The baby boom produced too many draft-age men. Even during the Vietnam War, the military enlisted or drafted fewer than 11 million draft-age men out of a pool of nearly 27 million. Under the direction of Gen. Lewis Hershey, the Selective Service fashioned a system of deferments and exemptions that local draft boards awarded to registrants for pursuing certain activities outside the military, such as going to college or medical, dental or divinity school; serving in the reserves; or working for a defense contractor.

By 1966, as draft calls increased dramatically, the system of deferments came under intense criticism. In response, President Johnson appointed a commission that confirmed the inequities of the system. In effect, the draft turned the Vietnam War into a “working-class war,” as the historian Christian Appy has labeled it, with disproportionate numbers of the poor and working-class sent to Vietnam while everyone else seemed to go off to college.

Meanwhile, revelations from a 1965 Selective Service training kit exposed the draft not only as unfair, but as a vast social engineering project. In the so-called “channeling memo,” first published in New Left Notes in January 1967, General Hershey wrote to draft board officials that the process of delivering a few thousand men to induction centers “is not much of an administrative challenge,” Rather, General Hershey declared, “it is in dealing with the other millions of registrants that the System is heavily occupied, developing more effective human beings in the national interest.” Too bad no one told the American public that the real point of the draft was to develop “more effective human beings.”