8. A Government’s Dilemma to Round Up Recruits for an Unpopular War
By 1966, America was getting sucked ever deeper into a bottomless quagmire in Vietnam. When President Lyndon B. Johnson assumed office after JFK’s assassination in 1963, the US had 16,000 troops in Vietnam. The next year, the figure grew to 23,000. In 1965, however, in response to requests from American commanders in Vietnam for ever more US troops, the figure mushroomed to 185,000. It would more than double again in 1966, to 385,000. That insatiable and growing demand for ever more troops put the LBJ administration in a bind: where to get enough recruits, without a public backlash? The way the draft system was set up back then, college students got deferments. Ending college deferments would have furnished enough recruits.
The hiccup was that college students were predominately the kids of the middle and upper classes. That is, the people whose opinion counted the most with Congress and the media. Without their support, or at least acquiescence, American involvement in Vietnam could not continue. Such support or acquiescence would not last long if their kids’ student deferments were cancelled, and they were drafted and sent to fight and die in a far off country most Americans could not place on a map. An alternative was to mobilize reservists to furnish enough bodies. However, that posed a similar dilemma: the reserves and National Guard were overwhelmingly filled with the children of the well off and connected. Sending the sons of the rich and powerful to Vietnam would also produce a fierce backlash. The solution, as seen below, was awful.