Although Rudy Giuliani opposed the Vietnam War and took steps to avoid the draft in the late 1960s, he spent several years in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps earlier that decade.
Giuliani joined the Air Force ROTC when he enrolled in Manhattan College in the Bronx in 1961, the year President Kennedy sent 1,300 advisers to South Vietnam. Giuliani left the program in 1963, just as American involvement in Vietnam was starting to escalate.
“I got washed out of flight training because when I was young, I punctured two eardrums,” Giuliani told New York Magazine in 1987. “It caused a minor hearing problem. I was very disappointed because I wanted to fly.”
Giuliani graduated from Manhattan College in 1965 and spent the next three years at New York University Law School. Upon graduation in 1968, he became a law clerk for federal judge Lloyd MacMahon of the Southern District of New York.
The 24-year-old clerk applied for an occupational deferment but was turned down by the draft board. Giuliani appealed the decision, which was overturned with the help of a letter of recommendation from MacMahon.
But the deferment expired in 1970, and Giuliani found himself again facing the prospect of being drafted. It is not clear whether his hearing problem would have persisted from seven years earlier.
“I had student deferments during school, and then when I entered the draft lottery, I pulled number 300, 306, something like that,” he told New York.
The number was actually 308. Giuliani said he would have gone to Vietnam if he had pulled a lower number.
“Oh sure, if I had to, even though I disagreed with it,” he told the magazine. “I would have gone because it was my duty to go.”
