pms <laflame at mindspring.com> wrote:
>And I saw the Vietnam thing in a whole different light.
>BTW, I wonder who started the push for a draft back then? Could they have
>considered that that would be the beginning of the end? Of course, they
>couldn't have considered Henry Kissinger's career ambitions.
A short (and oversimplified) account: The modern form of the draft was enacted in 1940, after WWII had broken out but before the US was formally at war. It was allowed to expire in 1946 but the Selective Service System was kept in place at least as an organizational skeleton. The combination of the post-war boom and tight labor markets plus the onsent of the Cold War and the realisation that the US occupation of Germany, Japan, etc. was likely to be of long duration prompted the powers that were to reinstitute the draft in 1948 in a bill that provided for a draft for only two years. There was quite a bit of complaining by the citizens and it seemed likely in early 1950 that the draft would be allowed to expire (in fact, no one had actually been drafted for several months in anticipation of this) when the Korean "Police Action" happened and Congress changed its mind and reauthorized the draft. After the truce that more-or-less ended the Korean war, the military-industrial complex had relatively little trouble getting Congress to keep the draft in place. Nobody really liked it but since no GIs were getting killed in action during most of the 1950s and early 1960s there was really not much opposition, even though a "peacetime" draft was a complete break with all earlier US practice.
Nixon finally decided to do without the draft as part of his "Vietnamization" plan, and did have some success in dampening anti-war action. Henry the K helped his career with this move.
K.Mickey