John Leo thinks college kids need WWII spirit

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New York Daily News Oct 22, 2001

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College Kids Need WW II Spirit Again

During the go-go '90s, anybody who was anybody went into finance, entertainment, media or law. Those fields are bloated with talent. We will never run out of people eager to amuse us or to help us sue our neighbors. Other jobs, including just about everything in the public sector, were left for those lower down the food chain.

Now it's time to alter these priorities. We need our best young people to enter the fields that protect us from terrorism. Those fields are the ones looked at with indifference, if not disdain, by our chattering and scribbling classes: public service and national security, including the FBI, CIA and military.

Change is coming. The president of Harvard said the other day that a career in the military is a "noble" calling. Stop the presses! He said this because his university's tradition of looking down its nose at the armed forces is under mild attack from alumni. Some 900 Harvard graduates want the university to allow the Reserve Officers' Training Corps back on campus. Like many elite universities, Harvard threw the ROTC off campus during the turmoil over Vietnam.

The problem is obvious: On a great many campuses it is still 1969, and a generalized contempt for the armed forces is still fashionable. Americans of all classes and backgrounds, including Jack Kennedy and George Bush the First, rushed to sign up for World War II. The day after Pearl Harbor, according to the late columnist Rowland Evans, the line of Yale students waiting to enlist stretched around the block.

But the elites sat out Korea and Vietnam. Columnist Jim Pinkerton reports that Princeton lost 353 men in World War II but just 24 in Vietnam. This tradition continues: Princeton's Army ROTC graduated a grand total of two people last May.

The elites think of the military as a source of awful regimentation and oppression. They don't serve, and usually they don't even know anyone who does. A similar pattern holds at the CIA. The agency was created after World War II almost wholly by elites who felt the strong pull of patriotism and national service.

The elites of the next generation felt differently. In recent years, the CIA recruited heavily among top collegians, but had much more success at Big Ten and Big Eight schools than at places such as Harvard, Yale or Stanford. The elites came to see the CIA as a grubby cloak-and-dagger operation unworthy of a high-minded nation. One result is that the CIA was effectively banned from recruiting unsavory characters to penetrate terrorist cells. That disastrous rule has been repealed, but we still don't know how much damage it caused.

America does not like to think of itself in terms of social classes, but there are elites, and these elites sometimes seem to be holding themselves aloof from the work of defending the nation at time of great peril.

The first step should be to shed the old Vietnam-era hostility toward the armed forces and security personnel in general. The next step is to respond to the call.

There are some good signs. A CIA spokesman said the agency was getting 500 to 600 resumes a week from college students around the country before the Sept. 11 attacks, and is now getting 10 times that number. At some colleges there were even long lines waiting to see CIA recruiters — a welcome echo of the line of enlistees from Yale on Dec. 8, 1941.



-- Lars (lars@indy.net), October 23, 2001

Answers

WWII was 60 years ago, shit-for-brains.

-- (get@brain.dork), October 23, 2001.

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