ick Cheney and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman have something in common beyond their hope to become vice president.
Like Cheney, Lieberman received a deferment from the draft during the Vietnam War, because he was a father. And like Cheney, Lieberman, under rules in effect at the time, received the deferment before the child was born.
According to Selective Service records, Lieberman held a student deferment from 1961, when he was a freshman at Yale, until May 24, 1967, as he was preparing to graduate from Yale Law School.
On that date, Lieberman was granted a 3-A deferment, meaning he could not be drafted because he was a father. His first child, Matthew, by his first wife, was born Aug. 16, 1967.
Cheney, who was also a graduate student in the 1960s, was granted the same kind of deferment in January 1966, about 10 weeks after his wife, Lynne, became pregnant, and just after the Selective Service made childless married men as vulnerable to the draft as single men.
Cheney would have remained protected from the draft even without the fatherhood deferment, because he remained in school until after he turned 26, when men became exempt from conscription.
But because Lieberman was finishing law school, he would have been subject to the draft almost immediately without the 3-A deferment, according to a Selective Service spokesman, Richard Flahaven.
Lieberman did not turn 26 until Feb. 24, 1968. Flahaven said that under Selective Service rules, the oldest eligible men were drafted first.
Lieberman and Cheney were more typical of their generation than those who ended up in Vietnam, according to government data: The number of men who were exempt from the draft because they had children exceeded, by nearly a million, the 2.6 million men and women who served in Vietnam from 1964 to 1973.
