Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [55]
Many arguments were offered to bolster both sides of the issue. Some contended that without the draft we would not be able to recruit enough troops. My view was that in every other activity in our society, in both the public and the private sectors, we were able to attract and retain the personnel needed without resorting to compulsion. It was done simply by paying them a competitive market wage. The critics also contended that it would be too expensive to pay the men and women in the U.S. armed forces what would be paid in the private sector. My response was why should government pay those serving in our military less than a competitive wage, namely, what the market says they are worth? specifically, why should government draft only some and then say, in addition, we will pay you only 50 percent or 60 percent of your worth? No one ever had a good answer to those questions.26
As members of the Joint Economic Committee, Tom Curtis and I proposed and held a hearing on whether or not the military draft was still necessary and whether a volunteer military was or was not economically feasible. One Pentagon official testified that the Department of Defense had as its objective “to obtain as many or all of its personnel through voluntary means.”27 But that wasn’t what was happening in practice, and they knew it. I tried to test the willingness of members of Congress to study the feasibility of ending the draft by offering a nonbinding resolution. The resolution stated simply that it was “the sense of Congress” that the draft should be enforced “only when necessary to insure the security of this Nation.”28 With bipartisan opposition, I was not able to get it considered—it later fell to the Nixon administration to pursue the issue.
I came to believe it was only a matter of time before the federal government and the country would have to take the idea of an all-volunteer military seriously. I was convinced then, and remain convinced now, that if the country had had a volunteer system in place during the Vietnam War, the level of violence and protest across the country would have been considerably less.
The conventional wisdom is that because of the opposition to the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson’s political fate was sealed by early 1968. In fact, at first things were looking pretty good for President Johnson. Though later changing his mind, one of LBJ’s chief rivals for the Democratic nomination, Robert F. Kennedy, had announced he would not challenge Johnson in the Democratic primaries. The nature of some of the more radical antiwar demonstrations seemed to have increased sympathy for Johnson across Middle America, and he was holding steady in the polls. Like many, I was amazed to see pictures of American celebrities, such as Jane Fonda, expressing solidarity with the North Vietnamese. It is one thing to oppose a war policy. It is quite another to support the enemy. Indeed, even though I thought President Johnson brought some of his problems on himself, I didn’t like to see any president so hounded, and I certainly did not like to see our troops besmirched.
Then, in January 1968, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces broke a truce during their country’s Tet holiday. Their surprise offensive consisted of assaults on more than a hundred cities across South Vietnam. In military terms, the Tet Offensive was not a victory for the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. But military victory was not the enemy’s intent. Their effort was targeted at war-weary Americans watching the bloodshed on their TV screens. And the message was unmistakable. The enemy was telling the American people, “We will never give up.” Toward the end of the Johnson administration, I had mistakenly accepted as credible the certainty in the media that the 1968 Tet Offensive had been a defeat for America and the South Vietnamese. But,