Following Rules, Finding Advantage

By 1965, Bradley's senior year, Vietnam already was roiling Princeton's campus. During the same week in February that year, history professor Arno J. Mayer led a faculty protest against the war and visiting speaker John H. Rousselot of the John Birch Society denounced "known communist sympathizers" who were agitating against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Rival demonstrators clashed, with Ivy League restraint, on Nassau Street.

On Feb. 25, 1965, Bradley and roommate Dan Okimoto walked to McCosh Hall, one of Princeton's grand old Gothic structures, to hear the diplomat and historian George F. Kennan describe the Vietnam War as strategic folly. Okimoto, who became a lifelong friend, now believes Kennan's view became Bradley's in the end.

But Bradley was still years away from expressing any direct view on the war, and he was absorbed more than ever in basketball. That winter, he led Princeton to its historic zenith in intercollegiate basketball--the NCAA semifinals--while setting an all-time individual scoring record of 58 points in a game.

Bradley already had won his Rhodes scholarship by then, which enabled him to leave Princeton without appreciating fully "how much this war would affect me," he wrote in his 1996 memoir, "Time Present, Time Past." But after he passed the halfway mark at Oxford, he began to think more personally about Vietnam, and he says the war "transformed me into a citizen of the world."

Billy Kingston, his Princeton roommate and basketball teammate, toured with him through Italy in summer 1966 and recalls the war as "a definite issue we talked about." Kingston, then serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia, was exempt from conscription. Bradley was leaning toward law. "I don't think he was keen on going to Vietnam," Kingston said.

As he had done at Princeton and would do again after his 1970 championship season with the Knicks, Bradley, in the fall of 1966, prepared applications to law school. He assumed that going to law school would bring him another three years' deferment from the draft. After that he would be 26 and, Kingston said, "out of the woods."

Bradley soon learned otherwise. On Aug. 16, Draft Board 54 of Jefferson County, Mo., renewed his 2-S status, deferring him from conscription as a graduate student. But according to the letter he wrote Link in October, Bradley also heard--exactly how he did not say--that he could not expect another deferment for law school.

The five members of the draft board included Alex Maul, who had built Bradley's first backyard basketball hoop. Maul served as a trusted employee of the Crystal City State Bank, where Bradley's father, Warren, was president. Other board members knew the local hero almost as well, but in the small town where Bradley grew up informal advice from the draft board was commonplace.

Tom Haley, Bradley's best friend in childhood, remembers a telephone call from Thelma Fortney, the board's executive secretary, warning that he "was going to get my orders in February of 1964 and, 'If you want to join the National Guard or anything, you better get your ass in gear.' "

Bradley and Fortney, the draft board's only surviving member, both said categorically in initial interviews that he had no contact with the board except to register for the draft in 1961 at age 18. After the letter to Link came to light, both said they recalled nothing that could explain its reference to what "my board has told me" about an additional deferment.

West Point Declines Teaching Offer

Bradley's October 1966 letter to Link found his undergraduate mentor in the hospital, recovering from acute pancreatitis. Link sat down to reply on his first morning back at work in Princeton's Dickinson Hall.