. . . which would suggest that he graduated from college in 1963--the year after I, two years his senior, graduated from a 5-year college program. In those days Vietnam was still a sideshow; we were not well and truly committed to Vietnam until the assassination of President Diem of South Vietnam--which occurred only a month before the assassination of President Kennedy in October 1963.The (secretly) Kennedy-approved overthrow of the government of S. Vietnam because Diem was not considered to be the second coming of George Washington meant that the US was morally committed to giving S. Vietnam a better government than Diem's. LBJ picked up the ball and before you knew it we had 500,000 troops there instead of maybe 500 military "advisors" supporting S. Vietnamese troops when Kennedy took office. So if you applied for a draft deferrment in mid 1963 there was not that big an implication that you were "avoiding Vietnam."
In any event history shows that the Johnson Administration was incompetent, micromanaging military leadership, and that has not been the course of wisdom to volunteer for service under any post-Eisenhower Democratic Administration. Johnson honored the troops but mishandled his CIC role, and subsequent to that it was the rare Sam Nunn or Scoop Jackson Democratic leader whose interest lay in boosting military preparedness and military pay.
And John Kerry lead in the development of the post-Vietnam (actually post-Tet) Democratic tradition of self-righteous pacifism which destroyed the Johnson and Nixon Administrations and assured the futility of the commitment to Vietnam which Kennedy and Johnson made and which Nixon tried to redeem. The failure of which led to the killing fields of Cambodia and the deaths of a great many thousands of South Vietnamese is reeducation camps or in small boats at sea in the open Pacific Ocean.