Mitchell Goodman was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1923. His parents, Irving and Adele, were first and second generation Jewish immigrants and were well off until Irving lost his clothing store in the
Great Depression. Goodman was given a scholarship to Harvard and was at college when the U.S. entered World War II. He was trained as a Second Lieutenant forward observer in an artillery battalion, but was not deployed overseas. He traveled to Europe following the war, where he met the poet
Denise Levertov. The two were married in 1947 and continued to live briefly in France and Italy before moving to the U.S. to
Greenwich Village in 1948. A son was born in 1949. These experiences informed his vivid 1961 anti-war novel
The End of It, which focuses on an American soldier's experience in the Italian campaign. The book received a positive reception from critics and prominent literary figures such as
William Carlos Williams, and
Norman Mailer. In March 1967 Goodman led a walkout during Vice President
Hubert Humphrey's address at the National Book Awards, in which he shouted, "Vice President, we are burning women and children in Vietnam, and you and we are responsible!" The quote was carried in newspapers nationwide. Later that year, as described in the opening of
Norman Mailer's book
The Armies of the Night, Goodman helped organize the anti-Vietnam war demonstration at the Pentagon in October 1967, the first national protest against the war. As part of the planning for this event, he circulated a pamphlet stating: We are planning an act of direct creative resistance to the war and the draft in Washington on Friday, October 20... . We will appear at the Justice Department together with 30 or 40 young men brought by us to Washington to represent the 24 Resistance groups from all over the country. There we will present to the Attorney General the draft cards turned in locally by these groups on October 16... . We will, in a clear, simple ceremony, make concrete our affirmation of support for these young men who are the spearhead of direct resistance to the war and all of its machinery... . [Signed] Mitchell Goodman,
Henry Braun,
Denise Levertov,
Noam Chomsky,
William Sloane Coffin,
Dwight Macdonald. Prior to the protest, Goodman was one among the writers of "A Call To Resist Illegitimate Authority"; he became a member of the steering committee of the anti-war group Resist, which emerged from that Call. The "Call to Resist" expressed moral and religious outrage against the war in Vietnam, its unconstitutionality, war crimes, and the forced military service of conscientious objectors. It concluded by committing its signers to continue to provide material and moral support to draft resisters. The "Call" was published in the
New Republic and the
New York Review of Books with over three hundred signatures of prominent writers, activists and clergy on October 12, 1967. These documents and his protest actions led to his indictment for conspiring to counsel, aid and abet violations of the Selective Service law and to hinder administration of the draft. He was indicted for conspiracy alongside
Benjamin Spock, a famous doctor and author,
Marcus Raskin, leader of a Washington
think tank, Rev.
William Sloane Coffin, chaplain at Yale, and
Michael Ferber, a graduate student at Harvard, in what became known as the "Boston Five" conspiracy trial. The defendants stood by their support of draft resisters, but denied the conspiracy charges. The defendants and others in the resistance movement had hoped to put the morality and legitimacy of the war on trial, but this was largely prevented by Judge Ford, who was widely seen to favor the prosecution. Nevertheless, the defendants' principled stand and stature as professionals was seen by many as lending mainstream legitimacy to the actions of youthful draft resisters. Spock and Ferber were acquitted by the appeals court, which ruled that their actions were covered by the right to free speech in the First Amendment. However, Goodman and Rev. Coffin were ruled to have been more closely involved with the illegal acts in the draft card protests, and so were to be retried in the Federal District Court. The Justice Department declined to pursue the case, stating that a conviction for conspiracy would be too hard to win given that three of the original conspirators had been acquitted. Others believed that the Justice Department did not want to give further publicity to the case. Although out of print today, it remains a monumental assemblage of first hand cultural references from the radical movements of the 1960s. In his later years, Goodman resided in
Temple, Maine where he wrote poetry and took part in local politics, including standing in solidarity with the workers in the
International Paper strike in Jay, Maine. He and Denise Levertov divorced in 1975. He died in 1997, months before Levertov. ==Partial bibliography==