Rudy Giuliani gave a speech yesterday at The Citadel in South Carolina and proposed expanding the US Army by an additional 35,000 troops.
Giuliani won cheers from the cadets telling them the military needs more resources to get the job done and criticizing past practices of cutting military strength after wars.
What the students at the Citadel don't know -- who would burden them with this information? -- is Giuliani's own peculiar history with the military. Like most leading Republicans, Rudy hid out somewhere during the war in Vietnam. But Rudy's excuse was a gem.
He had gotten out of college and law school, and uh-oh, the damned war was still dragging on. Young Giuliani obtained a coveted position clerking for a federal judge in New York, but with his deferments exhausted, the draft board started getting close.
The great Jimmy Breslin told the tacky story in a column in Newsday in October 1989, when Giuliani was running a very nasty, and ultimately losing, campaign for mayor against David Dinkins. As Breslin put it:
Giuliani did not attend the war in Vietnam because federal Judge Lloyd MacMahon wrote a letter to the draft board in 1969 and got him out. Giuliani was a law clerk for MacMahon, who at the time was hearing selective service cases. MacMahon's letter to Giuliani's draft board stated that Giuliani was so necessary as a law clerk that he could not be allowed to get shot at in Vietnam.
Giuliani's campaign spokesman, Charlie Perkins, called it "a standard deferment that was automatic for law clerks."
That statement was utter nonsense and also was delivered with the kind of haughtiness that gets you maimed in an election.
The halls of justice sure wouldn't have collapsed if Giuliani took two years out for military service. At that time, at age 24, he would have been taken quickly. Many were being killed in Vietnam - 14,589 Americans died in 1968 alone.
Yesterday the guy who weaseled out of Vietnam with the help of a friendly federal judge said we have to find 35,000 more Americans to join the ranks.
"I believe America needs at least 10 new combat brigades above the additions that are already proposed by President Bush and are already in the budget," Giuliani said.
At one time Rudy had a great opportunity to make the Army bigger. And it looks like his natural inclination was to pull strings in the courthouse halls to make sure the fix was in.
If one of his campaign themes is going to be a call for a bigger Army, perhaps the media in this country should start looking into Rudy's own history. Then again, the actors and actresses who play journalists on television have turned a guy who held press conferences into the "Hero of 9/11," so we really shouldn't expect anything sensible.
A safer bet will be all the usual suspects gushing over how "tough" and "macho" he sounds tossing around terms like "combat brigades."
Crossposted from
Snaking the Drain