Chairman of joint chiefs of staff oversaw 1980s military buildup
JOHN W. VESSEY | 1922- 2016
MINNEAPOLIS — Retired Army Gen. John W. Vessey, who rose through the ranks in a 46- year military career to become chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and help oversee President Ronald Reagan’s military buildup, has died. He was 94.
Mr. Vessey enlisted as a private in the Minnesota National Guard in 1939, fought in World War II and Vietnam, and was the nation’s top military officer when he retired to his home state of Minnesota in 1985. He died Thursday evening, his daughter, Sarah Vessey, told The Associated Press. He was surrounded by family and died of natural causes, she said.
After being named chairman of the joint chiefs in 1982, Mr. Vessey helped oversee the military expansion that Reagan championed when he took office just over a year earlier.
“It was probably the greatest peacetime modernization of the American military establishment that ever took place,” Mr. Vessey recalled in a 2004 interview. “We improved every facet of the armed forces, from the recruiting and retention, the selection of individuals, to the way they lived, but most importantly to the way they fought.”
Mr. Vessey said the Soviet Union had been making a “big push” to solidify its position in Europe, deploying SS20 intermediaterange nuclear missiles and strengthening its ground forces in East Germany, “dabbling” in West European elections at a time when NATO was shaky, and stepping up its espionage.
By the time Mr. Vessey retired in 1985, he said, NATO was strong once again, the United States had deployed Pershing II and cruise missiles in response to the Soviet SS20s, and negotiations with the Soviets to eliminate each side’s intermediaterange missiles were just about complete.
“He was smart and combined good common sense with good military judgment, and he knew how to get things done,” Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank, said in a 2006 interview. Korb worked with Mr. Vessey while serving as an assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985. “He was a person of integrity.”
Even in retirement, Mr. Vessey heard from presidents and the Pentagon looking for help.
Reagan sent Mr. Vessey back to Vietnam in 1987 to account for Americans missing in action and bring back any still alive. His other tasks included reuniting separated families and getting former South Vietnamese leaders out of prison camps, Amerasian children out of Vietnam and the Vietnamese out of Cambodia.
“In typical Ronald Reagan optimistic fashion, he said, ‘ Well, it ought to take you about three months,’” Mr. Vessey recalled with a laugh. “Six years later I told Bill Clinton that I had checked off all of those things and would like to be relieved.”
While Mr. Vessey generally wielded his influence in military and foreign policy circles away from the public spotlight after he retired, he made news in 2006 when he spoke out against a push to weaken protections under the Geneva Conventions against torture of prisoners, particularly as they applied to suspected terrorists.
Mr. Vessey was born in Minneapolis in 1922. He enlisted in the Minnesota National Guard at age 17, when the threat of Nazi Germany was looming over Europe. He was called to active duty and fought in Northern Africa and Italy, where he received a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant at the battle of Anzio in 1944.
He married his wife, Avis, right after he shipped home. He made the Army his career, serving mostly in field artillery units stateside and abroad. His postings included several in West Germany.
During the Vietnam War, Mr. Vessey was a lieutenant colonel in the battle of Suoi Tre, where U. S. forces held off a fierce attack from a much larger North Vietnamese and Viet Cong force in 1967. Mr. Vessey was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second- highest medal, and his unit received a Presidential Unit Citation.