Word: laird
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Less visibly, in his Pentagon office 3-E880, where he sits at a desk that once belonged to General Pershing, Laird was preparing his recommendation to Richard Nixon for the second withdrawal of American troops from Viet Nam. The announcement was originally expected this week, but the decision was made more difficult by the upsurge in Communist aggressiveness, which brought U.S. deaths for the most recent week to 244 v. 96 the week before. Ideally, the Administration would like the next announced withdrawal to be larger than the first one of 25,000 last June. That would maintain the sense...
...would anyone want Laird's job? Laird certainly did not. In fact, he asserts with feeling that he "wanted no part" of it; he accepted, loyal partisan that he is, only because Nixon had run out of alternative candidates. Politics, particularly the politics of the House of Representatives, where he has served from Wisconsin since 1953, is Laird's passion. He is good at the craft. His ready informality, which encourages even the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other senior men at the Pentagon to call their boss "Mel," fits the vocation. So do his competitiveness in debate...
There is nothing innocent about Melvin Laird. The sleek, expensive wardrobe, the thin cigar, the grim scowl when offering some dire pronouncement, the somehow roguish smile when lighthearted, make him easy to caricature, easy to suspect of ulterior motives. As a Congressman, he could be sly in good causes and in partisan ones. When he overthrew Charles Halleck as House minority leader, he managed to create the impression that he and Gerald Ford had split the rebel forces. Actually, they were united, and the putative split was a ploy. Once, just after Minority Leader Ford and his eminence grise. Laird...
Whatever he is doing, he is well aware that he is a man leaning into stiffer gales of controversy and challenge than any of his nine predecessors. For all his problems, Laird is remaining remarkably vertical. He has made tactical errors in hard-selling his views, but the Administration won the Senate vote on the antiballistic-missile program, an issue on which he staked his personal prestige. Two of the most antimilitary Democratic Senators, Gaylord Nelson and William Proxmire, praise the Republican Secretary's toughness and intelligence. "Most important," says Proxmire, "is that he does not stand...
...Laird carries a hawkish reputation, based partly on a book published seven years ago, A House Divided: America's Strategy Gap, which laid out an explicit better-dead-than-Red line. He still boosts the brass, as in his speech last week to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Skirting the invidious "militaryindustrial complex," usage, he said: "The military-industrial-labor team is a tremendous asset to our nation and a fundamental source of our national strength." Meanwhile he is actively engaged in putting the "team" on a slenderizing diet and preventing contractors from abusing the bidding process that has inflated...