The Draft: Gaseous Cassius

Insisting that he is not primarily a prizefighter called Cassius Clay but a minister of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in the Wilderness of North America (Black Muslims) named Muhammad Ali, the world's heavyweight champion last week climaxed his 14-round title bout with selective service by refusing to be inducted into the Army. Reclassified I A after the Army rejiggered its mental tests to a new low level last year, Clay has fought ever since to win draft exemption. After losing three separate petitions to the U.S. Supreme Court and endless other legal maneuverings, Clay, 25, showed up at Houston's induction center, dutifully submitted to preinduction tests with 35 others, and then refused to take the symbolic one step forward that signals induction.

"I am dependent solely upon Allah as the final judge of these actions brought about by my own conscience," Clay said in a prepared statement. In actuality, Clay's judges will be wholly sublunary. The Justice Department, for one, began legal proceedings that could result in a $10,000 fine and five years in prison. A less predictable magistrate was the World Boxing Association, which announced within hours that Clay was being stripped of the championship and that it was scheduling a world tournament to decide who should fight for his title.

Though such gaudy objectors to the draft as Cassius Clay and draft-card burners suggest that Americans in unprecedented numbers are resisting military service, statistics convincingly show that the opposite is the case. Americans evading the draft or deserting once they are inducted still number considerably less than in previous wars. Last year only 353 of 1,100,000 eligible men were convicted as draft dodgers compared with one-year totals of 8,422 in World War I, 4,609 in World War II and 432 in the Korean conflict. Similarly, the AWOL desertion rate for 1966 was .08 for every 1,000 draftees against 3.7 in World War II and .89 in Korea.