David Harris, the activist and journalist "who in the late 1960s became a national figure for encouraging young men to resist being drafted to serve in the Vietnam War, and who went to jail after refusing the draft himself," died February 6 at age 76, the New York Times reported. When Harris was drafted in 1968, he refused to report for induction and was almost immediately indicted by federal authorities. He was convicted in 1969, sentenced to three years in federal prison, and served 20 months.
Harris eventually wrote a letter to Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone magazine, offering to sell him a series of antiwar essays. Wenner suggested instead a profile of Ron Kovic, a Marine whose battlefield injuries in Vietnam had left him unable to use his legs, and who went on to be a prominent antiwar activist. The article, "Ask a Marine," ran in 1973 and launched Harris's second career as a magazine journalist and author. He spent the next five years writing for Rolling Stone and in 1978 became a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. A decade later, he left the magazine to write books full time. Kovic would later write his own autobiography, Born on the Fourth of July.
Harris published several investigative books about sports, politics and the environment, including I Shoulda Been Home Yesterday: Twenty Months In Prison for Not Killing Anybody (1976); The Last Stand: the War Between Wall Street and Main Street Over California's Ancient Redwoods (1996); Our War: What We Did in Vietnam and What It Did to Us (1996); and, most recently, My Country 'Tis of Thee: Reporting, Sallies and Other Confessions (2020).
