ARMED FORCES: Everyone Should go

In all the hustle of his busy Washington schedule, General Eisenhower found time for a visit to Senator Lyndon Johnson’s Armed Services Subcommittee. There, speaking both as a general and a college president, Eisenhower came out foursquare for George Marshall’s manpower program —the drafting of 18-year-olds, extension of the draft service term to 27 months, deferment of 75,000 bright young men until they get college training.

In its vote-conscious efforts to put off the 18-year-old draft as long as possible, the subcommittee had swung to Chairman Johnson’s idea of writing priority into the legislation: 1) 100,000 reclaimed 4-Fs and about 290,000 married men between 19 and 26 with no previous military service; 2) 18-year-olds approaching 19; and 3) the rest of the 18-year-olds. Shouldn’t those husbands be drafted, Eisenhower was asked.

Sure, replied Ike. Everyone should go. But the big thing was to get young men into uniform and train them. “Train a man because he deserves it … We all worry about how we are going to train a young man for his job and his place in society,” he declared. “But nobody has ever worried about training them to fight. We have sent men overseas without one blankety-blank bit of training. There are more graves overseas for that reason than any other I know of.

“Every generation in the history of this country has had to go to war,” added General Eisenhower, almost vehemently. “And nobody has ever bothered to train them for it.”