Boston Globe: About Bush's Statement that 20 Presidents Have Served in the National Guard

Lisa Daniel, in he Boston Globe (Sept. 24, 2004):

Harry S. Truman was in no position to fight when Congress declared war on Germany in 1917. He was 33 and had been out of the National Guard for six years. His vision was terrible, and he needed to keep his family farm afloat to support his sister and widowed mother.

Yet Truman reenlisted in Missouri's National Guard and volunteered for overseas deployment. He was given command of a field artillery unit that arrived in Europe in 1918 and spent several months in combat, including the Meuse-Argonne offensive in France, at the time the largest attack the US military had ever launched.

Truman was the last president to have served in the Guard before President Bush. Last week, speaking to the National Guard Association in Las Vegas, Bush said he was one of 19 presidents who served in the Guard and was proud to be among the "many famous Americans in your ranks, including men named Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, and Truman."

But Bush's service in the Air National Guard stateside during the Vietnam War contrasts with the experience of his predecessors: Most served in combat, either in the Guard or regular units, and all entered the Guard or its historical equivalents when they were not an alternative to being drafted. None later faced questions, as Bush has, about whether they had fulfilled their commitments as citizen soldiers.

The National Guard Bureau has counted 20 presidents who served in the Guard, state militias, or volunteer state units. Of those presidents, at least 13 served in combat, including such military heroes as George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Theodore Roosevelt. Six citizen soldiers, like Bush, did not see combat and later became president: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James K. Polk, Abraham Lincoln, and Chester A. Arthur.

   Retired Colonel Leonid Kondratiuk, a Massachusetts National Guard historian who compiled the first list of presidents who served in the Guard, argued that more was required of Bush than members of state militias in the nation's early years.

"You can't equate being in the militia in the 1700s to being in the Air National Guard in the 1960s," Kondratiuk said. He said members of the modern Guard have greater responsibilities and higher preparedness. Militiamen had to train once a year, for instance, compared to the two days a month for Guard members.

   It was not until the Vietnam era that the Guard became a route to avoid combat. State militias and state-organized volunteers were the primary sources of combat soldiers from Colonial days through the Spanish-American War and have been heavily used in every war since then, except Vietnam. Of about 450,000 National Guard members during the Vietnam War, only about 20,000 deployed, according to Michael Doubler, author of "Civilian in Peace, Soldier in War." In contrast, 103,731 were killed in World War I and 125,630 during World War II.

President Lyndon Johnson decided not to use the Guard more in Vietnam, for fear it would signal an escalation of the war, and that caused the Guard "to become an escape route" from combat, said Thomas Alan Schwartz, a history professor at Vanderbilt University and author of "Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam."

"The National Football League tried to get its players into the Guard. The National Guard during Vietnam was a privilege," Schwartz said.

Historians point out that privileged men have always found ways out of combat. At least through the War of 1812, men were required to register with militias, but their service was not tightly controlled. The mandatory registrations of at least two presidents John Adams of Massachusetts and James Buchanan of Pennsylvania apparently are missing from official records, historians say....