A Personal Glimpse of General Hershey

SELECTIVE Service Director General Lewis B. Hershey is no ogre. Washington reporters consider him one of the nicest and most accessible high federal officials in town. He is the one man they know will never refuse their late Sunday evening telephone calls to his home for reaction quotes. At 74, he remains quick, articulate, and frighteningly well-informed. Just about the only thing distinguishing him from your kindly grandfather is that he is in charge of the draft and really likes his job.

Like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the General is something of a Washington institution. He has been associated with the Selective Service System since its infancy in 1936. In fact, he was promoted to brigadier general in 1940 for his work in planning the system. He is the modern system's first and only director.

Over all those years, none of his actions has received the violent criticism that followed his October letter to local boards directing them to induct war and draft protestors. Hell broke loose all around him, with newspapers, educators, and civil libertarians across the country demanding his retirement. His directive was also strongly attacked on the Senate floor, but not one word was said there against him personally. Senior and junior congressmen alike are deferent to him in committee hearings.

HE is virtually an independent agent, able to defy the President and the Attorney General on such matters as his directive. His loyal supporters in the House and Senate Armed Services Committee are unshakeable. As with Hoover, to challenge the General, is to challenge many powerful and influential Congressmen. Such is the power of a Washington institution.

The General occupies a top floor office in a slightly run-down Washington office building. But his Lamont-smoking-and-typing-room-sized office is immaculate with more than a hundred batallion and regimental flags lining three walls. The man behind the desk, however, doesn't wear a uniform, just an ordinary business suit. Everything about him physically is old, but the things he says deny his years.

Hershey is an intensely practical, no-nonsense man, without any delusions about the draft. He admits the system is unfair, inequitable, and coercive, but justifies sticking with it because he lacks a better one that works. Although he originally opposed a random-selection draft system, he new favors it and views with dismay those Congressmen "too set in their old ways to accept a new idea on its merits." He is disappointed that the Marshall Commission's reform package was "broken up by Congress and left a grotesque thing that doesn't make sense."

HIS 30 years of dealing with men in monthly quotas, age groups, and lots of a thousand have left their mark. Describing how the older men are "no damn good" to the Army, Hershey said, "When you're selling, you've got to sell what people want to buy. And the Defense Department just doesn't want to buy older men from us now."

Senility was not behind Hershey's directive, as one critic implied. The General has spent nearly half his professional life in the Selective Service and has come to view it as a separate social system that must independently punish its own miscreants. This view--and not dim-wittedness--made him insist that there was nothing wrong with his directive, that it merely presented an alternative method of handling "illegal" protestors. The newspapers railed him for his "inability to understand the larger issue."

Hershey should retire, but not as a man grown feeble-minded with age. The General has just been at his job much too long.