Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,791

This is the grave of Melvin Laird.

Born in 1922 in Omaha, Nebraska, Laird grew up in Marshfield, Wisconsin and attended high school there. He came from Wisconsin Republican royalty. His grandfather had been state lieutenant governor in the late 1900s and his great-grandfather had been in the state assembly. So there wasn’t any question that our young man here was going to be a Republican too. He went to Carleton College, graduated in 1944, and had joined the Navy before that, in 1943. He was commissioned as an ensign and assigned to the USS Maddox. He won a Purple Heart too, though I am not real sure of the details of combat.

Laird left the Navy in 1946 and immediately ran for the Wisconsin senate as a Republican. He won that fall, only 24 years old. That was a great Republican year of course and he rose quickly in the state’s Republican Party. In 1952, he ran for Congress and won that too. Early on, he was far right figure, supportive of Joe McCarthy, and became close to Barry Goldwater. He became one of Goldwater’s biggest supporters in Congress and supported his 1964 run for the presidency. In fact, he chaired the Platform Committee for the RNC that year. But he moved toward the center on policy issues in the 60s.

Laird figured that the Johnson administration was not fighting the war in Vietnam hard enough. He liked publicity and the way he got was accusing Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara of being soft of the commies. He wanted more troops, faster engagement, quicker reactions, and lots of press conferences to tell that story. He accused the administration of delaying ground operations until after the 1966 midterms in order to gain political support. There were two things not terrible about Laird. The first was his solid support for civil rights legislation and he voted for all the major bills around this. The second was advocacy for federal investments in health care, which was quite impressive, especially for a Republican.

Laird wasn’t that thrilled to leave Congress when Richard Nixon nominated him to be Secretary of Defense in 1969. He had a lot of power on Capitol Hill. But he agreed with the stipulation that at the very most, he would stay in the position for four years. He immediately faced a major problem–Henry Kissinger. It took Laird about five minutes to realize who would really be running the Vietnam War in the Nixon administration and it very much was not going to be him. He and Kissinger clashed constantly, primarily over what access Laird would get to meet with Nixon. Kissinger of course wanted Laird (or anyone else in traditional positions of defense policy or foreign policy) from having any sway with Nixon at all. The truth was that Laird was not going to win that battle and felt himself pretty isolated when he was at Defense.

For example, Laird did believe that the U.S. needed to reduce troops in Vietnam and pushed Nixon to live up to campaign pledges on Vietnam. That also meant not overly antagonizing the North Vietnamese and keeping them at the peace table. This Nixon really did not want to do. Nixon really wanted to resume bombing North Vietnam. Laird told him that if he did this, he would be blamed for destroying any chance of peace in Vietnam. So Nixon and Kissinger came up with another idea–bombing in Cambodia. Laird was not happy. He opposed this too and told Nixon that the American people would be outraged if they found out. But Laird was a company man and he worked to keep the bombings secret. He made sure that reports on the Cambodia bombings went through secret channels to keep them out of regular Pentagon communications and away from the media for as long as possible. All of this was completely illegal and made Laird a war criminal.

Still, Laird was about as unterrible as anyone in the Nixon administration on Vietnam. In fact, it was he who coined the awkward term “Vietnamization” to describe what administraiton policy should be to get American troops into a support role instead of taking so many casualties. Laird also used his knowledge of the budget process to force Nixon’s hands here too. Since Democrats controlled Congress, he could provide low budget estimates that Congress would pass and that would tie Nixon’s hands into lowering costs by reducing American troop deployments. Of course, Kissinger despised Laird for this but occasionally Nixon would listen to Laird instead of his bloodthirsty German advisor. For example, when Kissinger pushed his Operation Duck Hook idea to drop a record number of bombs over North Vietnam, Laird convinced Nixon that the endless amount of death this would cause would also not help the Americans win the war.

Laird’s son John protested against the Vietnam War and was interviewed at the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. This led Nixon and Kissinger to call in Laird after a meeting and berate him for raising a commie wimp for a son and telling him to be a man and put his son in his place. Laird basically told Nixon and Kissinger to shut the fuck up and never speak of his son again and he actually intimidated Nixon on the point, who never brought it up again. Laird also attempted to get Nixon to accept the reality of the Pentagon Papers and not go after Daniel Ellsberg. Let’s just say that Dick wasn’t listening on that one. Laird had told him though that the court case was ridiculous and a complete loser, which of course was true.

As he promised, Laird stepped away when Nixon was reelected. He was pretty happy to do so. Laird remained a major insider. It was he who leading Republicans tasked with convincing Spiro Agnew to accept the reality that he would have to resign as VP for his corruption. Then he was an important figure in the choice of Gerald Ford to replace Agnew. He did some legislative lobbying for the administration as well. Laird did an excellent job of avoiding any connection to Watergate.

Later in life, Laird became a health care lobbyist. Big investments in health care had always been a part of his legislative record and he embraced this side of his interests after he left Nixon. In fact, in Congress, he was a major player behind the build up of the National Institute of Health.

Laird also tried to influence Republicans to not invade Iraq in 2003. As you may recall, it was Brent Scowcroft who took the heat by publishing the famous op-ed representing old school Republicans in telling George W. Bush and Dick Cheney that invading Iraq was a horrible idea. Laird worked on it with Scowcroft. After the war went south, Laird was pretty public in criticizing his fellow Republicans in the Bush White House. He said of Bush, “His west Texas cowboy approach – shoot first and answer questions later, or do the job first and let the results speak for themselves – is not working.” You think?

Laird died in 2016, at the age of 94. He was the last surviving member of the 83rd Congress.

Melvin Laird is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other Secretaries of Defense, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. James Schlesinger is in Springfield, Ohio and Frank Carlucci is in Arlington as well, but I’ve never gotten to him. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.