It’s such an amazingly consistent pattern, isn’t it? Republicans who talk the tough talk on war and related issues somehow never seemed to walk the walk — the big exception of course being John McCain, who assuredly did walk the walk but whose presidential campaign appears to be fading for unrelated reasons.
Salon has an excellent piece up today on Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, two Republican presidential wannabes who, despite their present tough talk, took full advantage of the misguided loopholes in the Vietnam era draft regulations to avoid serving in the military back then.
On Rudy:
But he has always confined his enthusiasm for war to podium speeches and position papers. Born in 1944, young Rudy was highly eligible for military service when he reached his 20s during the Vietnam War. He did not volunteer for combat — as Kerry did — and instead found a highly creative way to dodge the draft.
During his years as an undergraduate at Manhattan College and then at New York University Law School, Giuliani qualified for a student deferment. Upon graduation from law school in 1968, he lost that temporary deferment and his draft status reverted to 1-A, the designation awarded to those most qualified for induction into the Army.
At the same time, Giuliani won a clerkship with federal Judge Lloyd McMahon in the fabled Southern District of New York, where he would become the United States attorney. He naturally had no desire to trade his ticket on the legal profession’s fast track for latrine duty in the jungle. So he quickly applied for another deferment based on his judicial clerkship. This time the Selective Service System denied his claim.
That was when the desperate Giuliani prevailed upon his boss to write to the draft board, asking them to grant him a fresh deferment and reclassification as an “essential” civilian employee. As the great tabloid columnist Jimmy Breslin noted 20 years later, during the former prosecutor’s first campaign for mayor: “Giuliani did not attend the war in Vietnam because federal Judge Lloyd MacMahon [sic] wrote a letter to the draft board in 1969 and got him out. Giuliani was a law clerk for MacMahon, who at the time was hearing Selective Service cases. MacMahon’s letter to Giuliani’s draft board stated that Giuliani was so necessary as a law clerk that he could not be allowed to get shot at in Vietnam.”
His clerkship ended the following year but his luck held firm. By then President Nixon had transformed the Selective Service into a lottery system, and despite Rudy’s renewed 1-A status, he drew a high lottery number and was never drafted.
An “essential” civilian employee. Please. I was a law clerk to a couple of federal judges, and I can tell you with confidence that for every law student lucky enough to get a clerkship, there are two top-flight law students who could easily replace him or her. The law students who get these jobs (and I include myself in this generalization) get them in part because of credentials, in part connections, and in part luck. No way was Rudy Giuliani so “essential” to Judge MacMahon that he should have gotten out of the draft.
As for the Mittster:
Like Giuliani and millions of other young American men at the time, Romney started out with student deferments. But he left Stanford after only two semesters in 1966 and would have become eligible for the draft — except that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Michigan, his home state, provided him with a fresh deferment as a missionary. According to an excellent investigative series that appeared last month in the Boston Globe, that deferment, which described Romney as a “minister of religion or divinity student,” protected him from the draft between July 1966 and February 1969, when he enrolled in Brigham Young University to complete his undergraduate degree. Mormons in each state could select a limited number of young men upon whom to confer missionary status during the Vietnam years, and Romney was fortunate enough to be chosen. (Coincidentally, or possibly not, Mitt’s father, George W. Romney, was governor of Michigan at the time.)
Now Romney echoes Giuliani by asserting that if he had been called, he would have served. “I was supportive of my country,” he told Globe reporter Michael Kranish. “I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there and in some ways it was frustrating not to feel like I was there as part of the troops that were fighting in Vietnam.” Perhaps. But it is hard to blame Romney for choosing missionary work over military service. After all, the Mormons didn’t send him to proselytize in the slums of the Philippines, Guatemala or Kenya.
They sent him to France.
One can imagine the youthful Romney “longing” to be serving in the jungles of Vietnam as he sips a lemonade in an outdoor café, taking a well-deserved breather from an exhausting day of trying to talk the French into joining his church.
Let us also recall Romney’s words from 1994, which are, shall we say, in tension with his current story that he was “longing” to serve:
Romney, however, acknowledged he did not have any desire to serve in the military during his college and missionary days, especially after he married and became a father. “I was not planning on signing up for the military,” he said. “It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam, but nor did I take any actions to remove myself from the pool of young men who were eligible for the draft. If drafted, I would have been happy to serve, and if I didn’t get drafted I was happy to be with my wife and new child.”
We’ll leave it to you, gentle reader, to determine whether taking a deferment based on “missionary” status qualifies as “taking any action” to remove himself from draft eligibility.
Finally, it cannot go unmentioned that Romney’s enthusiasm for sending more troops into the current war does not extend to his family’s serving in it. From a Herald story in 2005:
Gov. Mitt Romney, who has comforted the grieving loved ones of soldiers killed in Iraq and promoted National Guard recruitment, yesterday said he has not urged his own sons to enlist – and isn’t sure whether they would…. “No, I have not urged my own children to enlist. I don’t know the status of my childrens’ potentially enlisting in the Guard and Reserve,” Romney said, his voice tinged with anger.
Massachusetts residents can enlist in the National Guard up to age 39. Romney’s five sons range in age from 24 to 35.
Lately, when asked about the same issue, he has noted his sons’ two-year stints as Mormon missionaries. Apparently, that’s good enough for him — why should they serve in the military, having sought to increase their church’s membership? Seems like a bit of a non sequitur to me.
France. Too damn funny.
Can’t talk chickenhawks
Without a peep o’ the li’l squawks!
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Have a gander
It’s another series of examples of revisionist history, the writing of which is a specialty of modern Republicans.
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The Globe series on Romney was fascinating. When I think of it, though, I immediately remember the portion about tying the family dog on the top of the car for the duration of a long drive to their vacation home. But wait! Dad was such a good guy that he made the dog a windshield so he’d be more comfortable. And at least he hosed down the dog after the poor thing lost control of his bowels, right? Before hopping on the road again?
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Horrifying. I can’t tell if it’s worse that this happened back then or that Mitt and family today didn’t see how gruesome and abusive that was and actually talked about it. Horrifying. But I digress.
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It’s quite a double standard at play when John Kerry, who honorably served his country in Vietnam, got slammed in the presidential campaign for later speaking out against the war, but the vigorous efforts of Romney, Giuliani, and others to avoid service completely don’t get as much attention.
Like every other pinko peacenik, Romney and Giuliani were obviously soft on the communists. Romney was apparently so pro-communist, he went so far as to assume the missionary position to facilitate their penetration of the free world. Now there are two men this queer can get behind!
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This message approved by Queers for a United Romney/Giuliani Ticket (URGT).
One of the important takeaways from the Globe feature on Romney (for me) was that during exactly the years when his peers were engaging in the dialog that transformed the country’s attitude towards war, Mitt was out of the loop.
Bill Clinton didn’t serve in the military, either, but at least he didn’t miss the point of Vietnam. Haven’t we had enough of Commanders-In-Chief who were AWOL when it mattered?
How many commenters have served in the miltary?
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Ok—to further refine the interrogatory, folks who served in actual combat, as in having an opposing party trying to kill you with direct and indirect fires ( rifle fire or mortars/rockets) raise you hand.
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Personally, I think that anyone who didn’t serve during Vietnam ( that was physically able) is a draft dodger.
And please don’t raise the spector of Bill Clinton or George Bush. They were both draft dodgers.
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Yes, your comments are likely very accurate. People like Guliani and Romney who now allege to be in favor of a strong military who thirty or so years ago found military service inconvenient. I despise John Kerry, but kerry served, although he learned how to scam the sytem after only a few days into his military venture. Al Gore had a bodyguard in RVN when he was an alleged combat journalist. The closest he came to combat was war stories at the E club.
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It’s really sad, how American politicians harbor such quiet disdain and loathing for our young men and women who cheerfully set aside their lives and often give their lives or body parts for a patriotic ideal. Since 1776 we have had citizens who rose to the occasion,the few protecting and safeguarding the lives and liberties of the many, to what end.
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America will undoubtedly reap what it has sown after these four score years.
It is my understanding (yes, I was a sentient being at the time) that the draft exemptions starting in the 1940s were initially intended to allow college students who might be useful in the war industry (engineers and scientists, primarily) to complete their studies so that they might become useful in the war industry. Why the deferments were thereafter broadened (in the 1960s to other fields, such as the seminary, I can never understand. Seminarians never won a war, and they never prayed a war away. George Will notwithstanding.
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Actually I can understand the later broadening–it was a matter of exempting children of upper and middle-upper class people from the draft, leaving the draft primarly to the lower classes. That became obvious to me over time, but it was not obvious to me at the time.
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I’ve never understood the Republican enthusiasm for McCain. He sat on his ass in a NVietmese prison camp for a few years, after having been shot down over NVietnam, without allowing himself to be repatriated. If he had been repatriated, he might have run a couple of other bombing runs over NVietnam–before he was again shot down and again put into prison camp. The man was and still is an idiot. He could have killed a few NVietnamese after he had been repatriated.
For John McCain, a man who actually suffered and bled so that a faux intellectual google monkey-cum-self-styled Renaissance man can question the decisions he made while in ‘Nam, just “sitting on his ass” “for a few years” being beaten, deprived and tortured.