With Honor: Melvin Laird in War, Peace, and Politics

by Dale Van Atta, President Gerald R. Ford (Foreword by)

Overview

In 1968, at the peak of the Vietnam War, centrist Congressman Melvin Laird (R-WI) agreed to serve as Richard Nixon’s secretary of defense. It was not, Laird knew, a move likely to endear him to the American public—but as he later said, “Nixon couldn’t find anybody else who wanted the damn job.” For the next four years, Laird deftly navigated the morass of the war he had inherited. Lampooned as a “missile head,” but decisive in crafting an exit strategy, he doggedly pursued his program of Vietnamization, initiating the withdrawal of U.S. military personnel and gradually ceding combat responsibilities to South Vietnam. In fighting to bring the troops home faster, pressing for more humane treatment of POWs, and helping to end the draft, Laird employed a powerful blend of disarming Midwestern candor and Washington savvy, as he sought a high moral road bent on Nixon’s oft-stated (and politically instrumental) goal of peace with honor.
            The first book ever to focus on Laird’s legacy, this authorized biography reveals his central and often unrecognized role in managing the crisis of national identity sparked by the Vietnam War—and the challenges, ethical and political, that confronted him along the way. Drawing on exclusive interviews with Laird, Henry Kissinger, Gerald Ford, and numerous others, author Dale Van Atta offers a sympathetic portrait of a man striving for open government in an atmosphere fraught with secrecy. Van Atta illuminates the inner workings of high politics: Laird’s behind-the-scenes sparring with Kissinger over policy, his decisions to ignore Nixon’s wilder directives, his formative impact on arms control and health care, his key role in the selection of Ford for vice president, his frustration with the country’s abandonment of Vietnamization, and, in later years, his unheeded warning to Donald Rumsfeld that “it’s a helluva lot easier to get into a war than to get out of one.”
 
Best Books for Regional Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299226800
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	02/29/2008
Edition description:	1
Pages:	664
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Dale Van Atta is the author of TrustBetrayed: Inside the AARP and, with Jack Anderson, Stormin’ Norman: An American Hero. He lives in Washington, D. C.

Read an Excerpt

“[Laird] exemplifies a magical blend of principle and pragmatism that is sorely needed in our country today.”—President Gerald R. Ford

Table of Contents

Foreword   Gerald R. Ford     ix
Acknowledgments     xv
Prologue     3
The Man from Marshfield     7
Guns and Butter     25
A House Divided     45
Laird Also Rises     63
Cloud Riders     78
Into the Quagmire     94
Fight Now, Pay Later     108
The Resurrection of Richard Nixon     126
Looking for an Exit     147
Off the Menu     173
Going Public     201
Dueling Machiavellis     216
Ending the Draft     234
Objections Overruled     256
Black September     271
Friends in High Places     285
"Management by Walking Around"     305
Minority Report     323
The Secret War     338
The Hawks Have Flown     365
Withdrawal Symptoms     382
Easter Offensive     402
No Time for Quitters     419
Watergate     435
Picking a President     453
Kitchen Cabinet     467
A Second Career     483
War and Peace and War     500
Another Vietnam?     518
Epilogue     531
Notes     533
Bibliography     603
Index     615

Editorial Reviews

Watching Laird operate, I sometimes wondered if Nixon realized what he had gotten when he picked Laird.”— Bob Schieffer, commentator on CBS’s Face the Nation


“Of all the Cabinet officers who served in the first Nixon term, Mel Laird . . . was the most underestimated.”—President Jimmy Carter
 


“Historians, journalists, and other observers have become so entangled in debates about Kennedy and Johnson in the 1960s, and Nixon and Kissinger in the 1970s, that they have neglected the formidable role of Melvin Laird. This clearly written biography will rectify that oversight.”— Jeremi Suri, author of Henry Kissinger and the American Century

From the Publisher

The two key contenders for influence in the Nixon administration were "the equally matched Laird and Kissinger," writes Van Atta (Trust Betrayed: Inside the AARP). Today, Nixon's first-term secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, is the less familiar of the duo. Wisconsin's Laird entered Congress in 1952 and was instrumental there in the growing federal support for medical research. He took the defense post in 1969 and, according to Van Atta, was more responsible than Nixon or Kissinger for withdrawing U.S. troops through his "Vietnamization" policy. In this authorized biography, Laird also gets credit for ending the draft and, later, for engineering the choice of Gerald Ford for vice president and the appointment of Leon Jaworski as Watergate special prosecutor. Van Atta now works at Reader's Digest, where Laird has been a contributor since leaving politics. The length of this book will deter many readers, and its sunny style will put off some scholars. Still, in placing Laird at the center of the era, Van Atta has made a significant contribution. His research is based on hundreds of interviews with subjects including Kissinger and Laird's friend and political ally the late President Ford, who contributed the foreword. Recommended for larger academic and public libraries and essential for any Wisconsin library.
—Bob Nardini

Library Journal