Michael K. Ferber is a young foot soldier in the fight against the war in Vietnam. When the Justice Department last Friday indicted the generals--including Dr. Benjamin Spock and William Sloan Coffin Jr.--for conspiracy against the draft laws, it picked Ferber out of the ranks to join them. Despite the prospect of a five-year prison sentence for his October anti-draft sermon in Boston's Arlington Street Church, Ferber last night committed what the Attorney General might consider a similar "offense" in speaking at Harvard's anti-war, anti-draft Teach-In.

In a press conference Saturday, Ferber said that the only appropriate response to the indictments is to redouble anti-draft activity across the country. In face of the indictment, he plans to continue "teaching, preaching, and speeching" against the draft--just as before. It's the kind of thing that people have come to expect from him.

Ferber once described himself as a "child of the New Left." If he is that, he is also a product of the government's treatment of dissenters characteristic of the post-McCarthy period. He once said that he imagined that the current crop of war resistors probably started out being "nice, sincere, honest, strictly legal, thoughtful guys who never dreamt of being radical or of taking a step that would put them in prison." He might as well have been describing himself.

Now 23, Ferber has all the superficial characteristics that most college students have come to associate with New Left people. In private conversation, he speaks softly, slowly, locking eyes with his listener. In public speeches, he's forceful, fiery, even dramatic. His conversation is sprinkled with phrases like "doing their own thing" and "friction in the machine"; he quotes Stokely Carmichael and Paul Goodman.

No Cubbyhole

But if one resists the temptation to slip him into the New Left cubbyhole and looks beneath the superficialities of speech and manner, Ferber comes forth as a complex, contradictory blend of the pragmatist and idealist, religionist and radical idealogue. His belief in non-violence is firm. His sense of perspective and grasp of social realities make him an exceptional even atypical, member of the New Left. If the government jails him, he just may have the entire prison organized before he leaves.

At the press conference, one reporter asked him whether he considered resistance to authority a "healthy" thing. Ferber's friends erupted in laughter, knowing that that's not the kind of question he usually answers in two minutes. Later he elaborated:

"I would agree with the whole tradition that really is as old as the Greeks about what's a just and an unjust law. And I think one breaks unjust laws, even if it's a traffic law. In a way it's purely logical: that if one is morally opposed to a law, then it is one's moral obligation to break it.

"Now that doesn't mean everyone should go about breaking all the laws that one wants to break. I didn't say 'want,' I said 'morally convinced is wrong.' If you were thoughtful, you would probably agree with most laws and obey them. Certainly traffic laws should be obeyed; it's stupid to break those.

"For thoughtful people, the first term in any major premise is not the government's wishes. I get a lot of silly arguments from people who say the laws come first, and your morality sort of works itself out in between them. That's a morally bankrupt position.

"Anyone who understands the logic of moral thinking must conclude that laws--like everything else--are subject to ethical consideration. Once you've thought it out and consulted yourself and you've concluded your moral obligation to think and decide, then it's your moral obligation to act. Unless it's purely suicidal, in which case you haven't thought it through right. In other words, you've got to think. And all laws are fair game."

Nothing New

Ferber has broken quite a few laws in the last several years. He spent most of his spare time as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College working in the civil rights movement in Chester, Pa., through the then embryonic Students for a Democratic Society. Their goal was to clean up some of the "wretched conditions" in some of the city's nearly all-Negro public schools.

Ferber thinks they achieved the "only complete victory in the history of the civil rights movement" there. They closed down an elementary school, the city hall, and the town's switchboard through massive sit-ins. "We had the city virtually paralyzed."

He and the other Swarthmore students were jailed, but soon released with the local administration's assurances that changes would be made. Nothing was done, and they took to the streets for days of demonstrations until the state troopers were called in.