Word: laird
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Secretary of Defense. Old Soldier Eisenhower stripped the individual service secretaries of their power to deploy troops. Later, the exigent Robert McNamara took command of all departmental decisions by unifying military-budgetary decisions through the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Last week Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, introduced his three service secretaries; all fit the pat tern of administrator now prescribed...
...Laird reappointed Stanley R. Resor, 51, who has been Secretary of the Army since 1965, in order to provide experience and continuity in the upper echelons of Defense. A suave New York lawyer, polished at Groton and Yale, he is the son of the late Stanley B. Resor, the famed advertising man who headed J. Walter Thompson from 1916 to 1961. He came out of World War II a major with silver and bronze stars won in the Battle of the Bulge. A Republican, he has influential friends in both parties. Negotiator Cyrus Vance was his roommate at Yale...
Unlike the Navy and Army bosses, the Air Force Secretary should ideally be a specialist, firmly grounded in the intricacies of engineering technology. In NASA's former Deputy Administrator Robert C. Seamans Jr., Laird has a skilled executive with firsthand knowledge of the multi-billion-dollar Air Force projects that range from the newest supersonic planes to the manned orbiting laboratory. Before leaving NASA a year ago and returning to a teaching position at M.I.T., he was responsible for everything from budget planning to maintenance of the worldwide system of tracking stations...
Wisconsin's Melvin Laird, the incoming Secretary of Defense, knows the Pentagon well. For 14 of his 16 years in the House, he served on the appropriations subcommittee handling military spending, and he has shown familiarity with national-security issues as a frequent critic of Democratic defense policies. The chink in Laird's armor is his lack of administrative experience, and last week he moved to close it with an impressive appointment. As his Deputy Secretary of Defense, No. 2 man in the Government's biggest department ($80 billion a year, a military and civilian personnel...
Seamans has twice met personally with Laird in addition to having several telephone conversations with him. Seamans has not yet met Nixon or even talked...