He didn't know the half of it.
Posted on 06/06/2013 4:46:53 AM PDT by Kaslin
Over the last seven decades, 115 veterans of World War II have served in the United States Senate. This week, the last of them, Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, died.
Two World War II veterans still serve in the House -- Ralph Hall of Texas, who was a Navy pilot, and John Dingell, who joined the Army at 18 and was scheduled to take part in the planned invasion of Japan.
There aren't likely to be any more members of what Tom Brokaw labeled the Greatest Generation to serve in Congress. All surviving World War II veterans (except a few who lied about their age) are at least 85 years old.
In the 68 years since World War II ended, veterans of the conflict have played an outsized role in American politics -- more than veterans of any other conflict since the Civil War.
No one paid much notice when Barratt O'Hara, the last Spanish-American War veteran in Congress, died in 1969.
Nor did anyone direct much attention to the retirement from Congress of the last two World War I veterans in the 1970s -- Sen. Mike Mansfield of Montana (who lied about his age to enlist) and Sen. John Sparkman of Alabama (who served in the Students Army Training Corps).
In contrast, World War II veterans made a big splash in politics starting shortly after the war ended. Dozens of young veterans were elected to Congress in 1946, including future Presidents John Kennedy and Richard Nixon.
The two had offices near each other and, as Christopher Matthews chronicled in his 1996 book "Kennedy and Nixon," were on friendly terms until they became political rivals.
When they ran for president in 1960, both were in their 40s -- a vivid contrast with the much older presidents of the previous two decades.
From Kennedy's victory that year until George H.W. Bush's defeat in 1992, a period of 32 years, every president served in the military during World War II, although Lyndon Johnson's service was brief and Jimmy Carter did not graduate from the Naval Academy until after the war was over.
Many other members of the Greatest Generation entered politics early and made a mark. Lloyd Bentsen, first elected to Congress in 1948, and George McGovern, first elected in 1956, were both bomber pilots, an extremely hazardous duty.
Three future senators -- Philip Hart of Michigan, Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and Bob Dole of Kansas -- first met in a rehabilitation center in Battle Creek, Mich., where they were recovering from serious wounds.
More than 400,000 American servicemen died in World War II -- 100 times the American death toll in Iraq -- and the lives of millions were disrupted. But wartime service also opened up opportunities for many.
One of them was Frank Lautenberg. His prospects seemed dim. His father died when he was a teenager, and his mother ran a sandwich shop. But thanks to the G.I. Bill of Rights, he was able to attend Columbia University.
Most big corporations in those days did not hire Jews for management positions, but Lautenberg was able to get in on the ground floor of a startup company called Automatic Payrolls Inc.
Automaic Payrolls filled a niche created by the wartime institution of income tax withholding. Businesses needed someone to do the paperwork, and Lautenberg was hired as a salesman by the firm's founders.
Soon he became head of the renamed Automatic Data Processing (ADP), and under his leadership it processed paychecks for about 10 percent of the national workforce. With the fortune he made, Lautenberg was able to pay for his first Senate campaign in 1982.
Like many but by no means all World War II veterans, Lautenberg was a liberal Democrat, a fighter unafraid of navigating the sometimes troubled waters of New Jersey politics.
He retired from the Senate in 2000 but was happy to be called back by Democratic politicos to replace his scandal-struck colleague Bob Torricelli, with whom he had a stormy relationship, on the 2002 ballot.
The Greatest Generation has had a long and sometimes stormy run in American politics. Lyndon Johnson was tripped up by Vietnam, and Richard Nixon by Watergate.
Ronald Reagan did much to restore the faith in institutions that seemed so strong in what his generation always called The War.
Now, with just two World War II veterans in the House, the Greatest Generation is finally passing on into history.
I was thinking the other day about recent US Presidents who were veterans. Harry Truman was a WW-I vet, but Eisenhower, JFK, Nixon (USN), LBJ (USN) and Bush 41 were all WW-II veterans. Jimmy Carter served in the Navy and Bush 43 was in the National Guard and was a fighter pilot. Only Clinton and Obama have had no military experience whatsoever.
The perfect examples of WW II “Greatest Generation” politicians are the Kennedys. They thought America could do anything. Win wars, fight for democracy abroad, eliminate poverty and hunger. So the established programs and followed policies to do these things. Well, guess what. America can’t do everything. The idea that poverty and hunger can be eliminated is a dangerous fantasy. It set us up for where we are now — half the country paying no taxes and expecting a bunch of government benes to be paid for by the “rich.”
I was not referring specifically to Lautenberg.
No disrespect, but WW II vets should have made their exit from politics a long time ago.
Haven’t we learned our lesson from allowing guys like Robert Byrd to hang around and hold seats of power when they are in a semi-vegetative state?
He didn't know the half of it.
Good point. I read an interesting article about that very same thing. The author said that it was, in a way, unfortunate that the US won WW II as decisively as it did.
Because WW II gave the US the foolish belief that it simply could not fail at anything it attempted to do.
From unionizing government, to Vietnam, to the 1965 Immigration Act, JFK was the end of us.
“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s. In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960. In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin. After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”
Isn’t though about one fourth of the military hard-core leftist?
Many good comments posted here. Perhaps some of our best from the Greatest Generation are not the ones that returned but the ones that didn’t, the ones that gave it all. Who knows what our country would have looked like if most of those 400,000 had not had to die. I think it will be up to future generations or historians to pass more unbiased judgement on the so called Greatest Generation. I know I have had mixed feelings about them like many have expressed here. One thing from a spiritual perspective is that God tends to use wars to discipline nations. The 20th century was a disaster for America. I wonder if we responded appropriately to his warnings to us. In many ways it looks like we never really recovered from the Civil War and things just went down hill ever since. You have to go back to almost the beginning of the 1900’s to find one of the great revivals in America that tended to change the culture of the day. I think it was around 1914 that there was a religious revival of such intensity that all business in Chicago shut down for an hour at noon so all the employees could go to their respective places of worship to pray. Can you even imagine that happening today? We seem to have gotten more and more godless and our government seems to have grown ever larger and our morality has sank to the point of where it is today - nonexistent. Great article posted today by Larry Elder on the decline of the family and out-of-wedlock birth rates. Since the late 50’s the family in America has all but been destroyed. I both grieve and fear for our once great nation. Whatever your persuasion, it seems we can not go on the way we are. There will be some kind of correction and I think we all know it won’t be good.
Bob Dole made this point in his “debate” in Houston with Walter F. Mondale in 1976, and the argument was repudiated by the American people. Dole had to apologize and admit that FDR was one of “my heroes”.
Arguably, WW2 was also cleaned up by a Republican - General Eisenhower, before he was in office.
It is no coincidence that Clinton and Obama have shown the greatest contempt of those who serve of any U.S. Presidents.
Well played, m'lady. :)
How are you doing? Hope all is well!
Had Romney won he would have had no military experience either. It's very likely that we've seen our last veteran president from either party, certainly for the foreseeable future. I can't think of any of the current crop of GOP potential candidate who served. And certainly none of the Dems.
Hey, don’t come after me because you had problems with your daddy. My father was a Republican, anti-Communist Conservative Catholic who did time in a Japanese prison of war camp. A great guy who I miss more every day.
Better than I can stand. It's proof you can eak out a happy existence even in a neo-socialist fascist police state. lol
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