I can’t resist telling you a little story that I’ve just told the Marine guard at the embassy. The story has to do with saluting. I was a second lieutenant of horse cavalry back in the World War II days. As I told the admiral, I wound up flying a desk for the Army Air Force. And so, I know all the rules about not saluting in civilian clothes and so forth, and when you should or shouldn’t. But then when I got this job and I would be approaching Air Force One or Marine One and those Marines would come to a salute and I — knowing that I am in civilian clothes — I would nod and say hello and think they could drop their hand, and they wouldn’t. They just stood there. So, one night over at the commandant’s quarters, Marine commandant’s quarters in Washington, and I was getting a couple of highballs, and I didn’t know what to do with them. So, I said to the commandant — I said, “Look, I know all the rules about saluting in civilian clothes and all, but if I am the commander in chief, there ought to be a regulation that would permit me to return a salute.” And I heard some words of wisdom. He said, “I think if you did, no one would say anything”.......Ronald Reagan 1986
https://taskandpurpose.com/mandatory-fun/vice-president-kamala-harris-salute/
That’s a great story, thanks! I never heard it explained like that. Gotta love the Gipper!👍
Y’all act like there’s an infallible order out there where every proper action is written down and every deviation from it is evil. Truth is the president could direct the military to salute squirrels with their left hands tomorrow and so long as it’s not illegal and the troops don’t rebel, it’s gonna happen, and the next time they revise the D&C code (and there are officers all the time doing nothing but looking at revising various regs), it might get updated to include it
The famed Green Berets were out of uniform when they performed some demonstrations for JFK in the early 1960s. They just thought the hat looked cool. JFK didn’t ask why they were out of uniform so they got to keep it and the regs got updated to allow it. Stuff like this is how personal preferences, superstitions, bad logic, and traditions get encoded into regs.