... that being the Vietnam War and resistance to it. Attorney Ray Elliott is heavily involved in representing clients who are resisting the draft, not by running to Canada, but by staying and fighting legally. A prosecutor wants to make an example out of Elliott and initially is going to prosecute him for some kind of conspiracy because helping these "draft dodgers" as they called them at the time, seems to be his main business.
But then the troubled young man he is currently helping, Barry Thurston, self-immolates during an anti-war demonstration and dies as a result. The prosecutor weirdly decides to prosecute Ray Elliott for first degree murder. Is he just after this guy or does he have something up his sleeve?
This aired originally in September 1968, just months after Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, just after the riots at the Democratic National Convention, just before a three way race for president that had Nixon V. Hubert Humphrey V. George Wallace, so it was a very volatile time.
The older folks - by that I mean people who fought in WWII - remember how everybody pitched in to win that war, and don't understand the younger people who have nothing against the VIetnamese and feel that this is not their fight. At the time, if you fled to Canada to avoid the draft, you could never come back without risking imprisonment, so this was a big decision. Also, you could avoid the draft by staying in college. So, if you were white and had the money to stay in college, you could stay out of the war indefinitely at this time.
All of this is discussed during this episode, but without knowing some of the things I am saying here you might miss the context. I do appreciate how it avoids making all of the younger people seem like drug addled hippies. Unfortunately, Carl Betz (Judd in this show) makes an appearance in just such a made for TV movie "In Search Of America" (1971) which is so bad - and dated - that it is good.