Martin Anderson on Nixon and the Draft

Nixon quickly adopted Anderson's view.

I give a talk annually to two classes at the Naval Postgraduate School that are taught by my friend Ryan Sullivan. My topic is always the same: “How Economists Helped End the Draft.”

Many people know the role that Milton Friedman played as an opponent of the draft and as a member of the President’s Commission on the All-Volunteer Force. Fewer people know about the important role my late Hoover colleague Martin Anderson played. I always tell the students about his role in persuading Richard Nixon, in 1967, to oppose the draft.

Each year I add new material that I’ve discovered. Yesterday I discovered more.

I came across a long transcript of an in-depth interview of Marty by Jim Young, Stephen Knott, and Allison Archer.

The whole thing is fascinating and I recommend it.

Here’s the part about the draft. It’s at the start.

In late 1966, I was a professor at Columbia and one of my colleagues, by the name of Zwick, invited me and my wife to dinner one night over at his house. He and his wife had a friend in town and I think they had been in the same class at Harvard Business School. So, we went over and it was fun. There were six of us having dinner. We were talking and talking about a lot of different things. We were talking about politics and we got into a huge argument and toward the end of the evening, around 9 or 10 o’clock, this fellow—I don’t remember his name, but I have it written down somewhere—looked at me and said, You know, with goddamn views like you have, you ought to be working for my boss instead of me. And he was a young lawyer at Nixon, Rose, Mudge, Guthrie down on Wall Street. So we laughed about that.

He evidently went back to his office the next day and told the people who he had dinner with. A couple of weeks later I got a call from Len Garment and basically he said, We hear there’s a crazy professor up at Columbia that likes Nixon, that thinks like Nixon. So I admitted to that and he said, Listen, would you like to come down? We’d like to meet you. So I took the subway down to Wall Street. I was invited to come down after work. When I got there, what I discovered was there was a small group—Len Garment, Pat Buchanan, Ray Price—and we were in a small room like this and I got introduced to them. They were planning the 1968 Presidential campaign.

So we talked a bit and they were kind of curious about me, I guess, was the word. So we went back and forth. I eventually got invited to go to all their meetings. I guess the first thing I did for them was, at one point the issue of the draft came up, the military draft. At the time Nixon, I believe, had supported universal military training because that’s exactly what [Dwight] Eisenhower supported when he was Vice President. It was becoming a very controversial issue. I probably suggested that the thing to do was to get rid of the draft and they were a little bit astonished at that. Anyway, one thing led to another and I went back home and it was the first paper that I wrote for Nixon, a long paper arguing that you could get rid of the military draft for two reasons: one, it would make the military much stronger, and two, it was the right thing to do. [DRH note: Marty gave me a copy of that paper.]

So that was given to Nixon. Then, during a period of months, I met him, talked to him a little bit, not a great deal, mainly worked with his staff. My recollection is that he took the paper and didn’t say anything. I found out later that he had taken the paper and had sent copies out—I don’t know, they said to 30 or 40 of his national security people—and I was later told that half of them thought it was a really interesting idea and they should do it. The other half thought it would destroy the country, would be terribly dangerous.

Anyway, nothing happened. I continued to go to the meetings and discussing a whole range of issues. Toward the end of this, I was asked basically to run the policy shop.

Young

When you first came, was Nixon announced at that time?

Anderson

No, no.

Young

Okay. Then you became sort of issues director?

Anderson

Let me just stop a minute because I think this is an interesting story, the other thing that happened in December of ’67. I was out traveling with Nixon—I forget where we were going, what we were doing—and a young reporter from the New York Times was on board the airplane, named Bob Semple. He was interviewing Nixon, and at one point he suddenly said, And what’s your position on the draft? And Nixon looked at him and suddenly said, Well, I’ve been busy. I’ve been thinking about this and what we need to do is get rid of the draft.… and he just laid out my whole position. Semple was stunned. It was a big story in the New York Times the next day. As far as I know, Nixon didn’t talk to anyone else. He just decided to do it, announced it to the New York Times, and that became the policy.

Then the next year I had a sabbatical coming up. My wife and I had plans to go to Europe. We were going to have a wonderful time, and instead we signed up for the campaign and I was the issues director.

By the way, here are two renditions of my speech on how economists helped end the draft. One is at Texas Tech in 2017. The other is at Middle Tennessee State University in 2012.