Even as John Kerry lapses into pacifist rhetoric — describing
the military under President Bush as a “back-door draft” is a scare
tactic from his anti-war days — Kerry casts himself as strong on
national defense. To appear sufficiently militaristic in the eyes
of the moderates he needs to win, Kerry cobbled together a board of
military advisers this week. Kerry is turning for advice to, among
others, Claudia Kennedy, the first female three-star general — a
feminist famous during the Clinton years for charging a fellow
general (whose advancement she hoped to stop) with “inappropriate
touching.”
Kerry’s selection of Claudia Kennedy to his board of military
advisers is illuminating: he is now taking advice on how to
strengthen the military from feminists intent on weakening it.
Claudia Kennedy once bragged to West Point cadets that “this is not
your father’s Army anymore!” As the press reported in the 1990s,
Kennedy didn’t like the word “enemy”; she relied instead on the
term “peer competitor.”
Hillary Clinton was so impressed with Kennedy’s political
correctness she named Kennedy her “favorite general.” While Kennedy
never received a Purple Heart from Bill Clinton for getting chased
around a desk, she received many honors and served in important
posts. One of her more noteworthy contributions was her launching
of the “Consideration of Others” (COO) training program.
People magazine reported that Kennedy entered the
military after filling out an Army enlistment coupon in
Cosmopolitan magazine. She had hoped to feminize the
military and did. But not all of her subordinates appreciated her
vision for a softer military. The press reported their criticism of
her for “giggling” at an intelligence conference.
After she lectured them on the need to conduct Consideration of
Others sessions, one complained to the press: ”The general,
wearing spit-shined paratrooper boots that came up to her knees,
spent 15 minutes discussing our mission. And then, for the next 40,
she stressed the need for equality and sensitivity and
understanding of others…I couldn’t help wondering if this was
some event sponsored by the YWCA instead of the U.S. army.”
Kerry’s comment about Bush’s “back-door draft” is curious given
that he is taking advice from feminists who have long thought that
women should be exposed to a draft. After all, equal rights means
equal exposure to the draft. Claudia Kennedy thought it only fair
that she enter the military if men were entering it. As she writes
in her memoirs, “In 1969, America was at war in Vietnam, and
although some of my sorority sisters … were bemused when I told
them I was joining the Army, young men were being drafted and I
didn’t think it was fair for them to shoulder the entire burden
when women were exempted. I also didn’t believe women could claim
equal privileges of citizenship without understanding and accepting
the equal responsibilities of a citizen.”
Imagine what America’s draft policy would be like under a Kerry
administration if Kennedy were the head of the Joint Chiefs, with
Hillary chipping in from the Armed Services committee (where she
now sits). We might have a Kerry kitchen-door draft. The military
already dragoons single mothers from the reserves into service (on
the principle that deployment policies must be gender-neutral and
leaving orphans behind is a price an enlightened society must pay
for the progress of women in combat). In the Iraqi conflict, at
least 20 women have died, several of them mothers. The first woman
killed in combat in Iraq was Lori Piestewa, a single mother with
two preschoolers.
A few more years of gender engineering ramped up under a Kerry
administration, and Claudia Kennedy would be able to say: This is
your mother’s army.
