From Breach of Trust (Andrew Bacevich 2013) pp56-8
By the time Richard Nixon reclaimed center stage in American politics amid the serial detonations of 1968, questions regarding the army’s nature and purpose along with the ordinary soldier’s relationship to American society had acquired unusual urgency. The “issue of army service,” writes the historian Beth Bailey, served as a proxy “for some of the most important issues of the age.” When citizens and politicians directed their ire toward (or expressed support for) the army, they were actually arguing “over who belongs in America and on what terms, over the meaning of citizenship and the rights and obligations it carries, over whether equality or liberty is the more central of American values, and over what role the military should play in the United States, not only in times of war, but in times of peace?”
Nixon himself had no more than a peripheral interest in such lofty concerns. What mattered to him was power: gaining it, preserving it, and using it. As a presidential candidate, he had announced his own opposition to the draft, couching his argument in principled terms. “A system of compulsory service that arbitrarily selects some and not others simply cannot be squared with our whole concept of liberty, justice, and equality under law. . . . The only way to stop the inequities is to stop using the system. . . . I say it’s time we looked to our consciences. Let’s show our commitment to freedom by preparing to assure our young people theirs.”
Yet beneath the lofty sentiments was Nixonesque opportunism: promising to end the draft offered the prospect of peeling off some antiwar votes. Acting on that promise once elected by actually deep-sixing the draft just might induce foot soldiers in the antiwar movement to leave the streets and return to their classrooms, thereby allowing the new president greater latitude in formulating policy.
Soon after taking office, Nixon did follow through, convening a commission of wise men to evaluate the possibility of establishing an all-volunteer military. When that commission obligingly affirmed the feasibility of the president’s wishes, he wasted no time in moving to terminate conscription.
To a considerable degree, Nixon accurately gauged the effects of doing so. The antiwar movement did not disappear, but it lost steam. Americans as a whole greeted the end of the draft, one observer noted, with “a few boos, fewer cheers, and lots of apathy.” So although Nixon had run for the presidency vowing to end the Vietnam War, eliminating the draft permitted him instead to prolong it. Four full years later, with the war still in progress, he easily won election to a second term. Imagine Barack Obama, running for the White House in 2008 on the promise of ending the Iraq War, expanding it instead, and winning re-election in 2012 by a landslide. This describes Nixon’s feat.
Promising to end conscription had helped Nixon win in 1968; fulfilling that promise had given him a freer hand to govern while contributing to political victory in 1972. For Nixon and his lieutenants, that’s all that really mattered. In deciding to reformulate the character of the army and revise the relationship of soldier to society, the commander in chief acted in response to near-term political calculations. Long-term implications? Those were for others to worry about. Few did at the time. Someone like Joseph Califano, former White House aide to President Lyndon Johnson, might suggest that “by removing the middle class from even the threat of conscription, we remove perhaps the greatest inhibition on a President’s decision to wage war.” Yet conscription hadn’t dissuaded Harry Truman from intervening in Korea in 1950 or stopped Johnson from plunging into Vietnam in 1965, facts that sapped Califano’s argument of its persuasive power.
Someone like General Westmoreland might cling to the view that “deeply embedded within the American ethos is the idea that every citizen is a soldier.” Absent “the continuous movement of citizens in and out of the Service,” the old general fretted that the army could “become a danger to our society—a danger which our forefathers so carefully tried to preclude.” But Vietnam had destroyed whatever remained of that ethos along with whatever credibility the general himself may have once possessed. According to the historian Robert Griffith, other senior officers took a different view. “If the dissent, undiscipline, and drug and alcohol abuse were indeed imports from society, they reasoned, reduced reliance on the draft and unwilling draft-motivated volunteers might offer a way for the Army to solve some of its own social problems. In a smaller post-Vietnam Army of true volunteers, professional standards could be established and dissidents, malcontents, and misfits weeded out.”
Westy might wax nostalgic about “an army of the people . . . directed by the people” through their elected representatives.” But that army had ceased to exist. So, too, had those people. Reluctantly or not, most generals accepted that verdict.
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