THE NATION: Generation in Uniform

The draft was in trouble, and tough-talking Director Lewis B. Hershey was fed up. If the nation was going to have the expanded defense establishment that it needed, somebody’s mother’s son was going to have to serve in it.

General Hershey was tired of objections, foot dragging, and comfortable talk of deferments. It seemed, he said bitterly last week, that “everyone has the idea no one can make a contribution unless the country can use him in his own peculiar profession, trade, or specialty.” Snorted Hershey: “I haven’t seen a draft questionnaire yet in which the guy said he shot people for a living.”

“Never Enough.” As boss of Selective Service, Hershey was charged with providing manpower for a 3,000,000-man defense establishment from a theoretical 8,300,000-man pool of 18-to-26 year olds. But a tenderhearted Congress, a solicitous Administration and local draft boards had provided deferment for a round 80% of the manpower pool—as veterans, as husbands and fathers, as farmers, as medical students, as scientists and apprentice scientists. “Sure, we don’t have enough scientists,” snapped Hershey. “We’ve never had enough—but we’ve never had enough fighting men either.” As a beginning, Hershey wanted to draft veterans (“Those veterans still within the draft age couldn’t have seen much service,” he noted) and young married men without children.

Hershey was facing an uncompromising set of facts. Once they reached the 3,000,000-man level the armed forces would need 750,000 men a year to stay there. Every year, only 1,100,000 turn 18, and 30% of them are predictably physically unfit. Left to the draft: an annual crop of approximately 800,000 boys from which to raise the 750,000 needed.

In such a brutal squeeze, what boys are to be deferred to continue their education? Last week a group of top educators and professional men, appointed by Hershey to make a two-year study, uncovered their answer: defer the bright boys. The plan had Hershey’s firm endorsement.

Study or Serve. Under the plan, every student in the U.S. would take an aptitude test. In practice, if a high-school student scored in the upper 25%, he would get deferment and qualify to go on to college. To avoid favoring the sons of the well-to-do, the educators recommended that federal scholarships be provided for poor boys who qualified. In college, the student would have to keep his grades high each year, or the draft would get him.

Hershey’s educators wanted to make sure that not only scientists and technicians, but the best qualified students in the humanities were spared, on the grounds that a healthy society needed them too. But there was a catch. If a bright boy wanted to stay deferred after college, he must work at the calling for which he trained, in a job that is “essential to the national health, safety, or interest.”

The problem was one that the U.S. had never had to face before: how to keep up a big standing army for a crisis that had no predictable end. Said Lewis Hershey: “Whatever we do, we will not escape being unjust. There is no justice in taking the boys between 18 and 25 to save the nation. That is just necessity.”