Lewis B. Hershey

Turning from hand to hand at a crowded reception, the General pours out conversation--his lower chin ripples, his legs spread wide apart to support his heavy frame, and a broad smile sends the deep wrinkles in his face scattering under his white hair. The voice rises from a point near the bottom of his chest where the bands of medals end. "I'm one of those fellas," he says, "who always wanted to be a lawyer and never got to be. In my day bein' a lawyer meant bein' a politician--but I guess I'm pretty much in the thick of things right now."

For more than a quarter of a century, Lewis B. Hershey has directed the largest and most unpopular employment bureau in the world. During World War II, he drafted more than 10.1 million men; when the war ended, "no one else wanted the job, so I stayed on." Hershey's philosophy is simple: "We count 'em, cart 'em and send 'em." He has spent most of his career supplying manpower to the military, but he thinks himself as much a politician as a soldier. And he has enormous faith in the wisdom of his "constituents" -- the 4,000 local draft boards that classify 1.4 million men accross the country every year.

"These people have been at it for years," says the General. "They've heard every conceivable lie and they know how to get the truth. You intellectuals always seem to underestimate the people in this country. I think the autonomy of the local boards is the best thing about the present system."

The present system, Hershey admits, may lack uniformity; it may be on occasion inconsistent, arbitrary and even inequitable. But further centralization and stronger national directives, he claims, would only compound the problems by making the entire process less democratic.

"I don't apologize for the lack of uniformity. I never knew a judge that sentenced everyone the same. Centralization is a beautiful thing when you control everything and you're right, but it's a terrible thing when you're wrong." The General believes in "concurrent experimentation," and in "delegating responsibility widely."

Those who favor stricter national guidelines, Hershey says, are in fact only advocating more lenient deferment standards for students. Hershey believes that "real students" should be deferred. "But there are a lot of young men just hanging around who'd be better off in the service. These people are allegedly getting an education and are allgedly going to be more valuable when they get out. But I don't grant either. The question so far as I'm concerned is: do you let them piddle around, or do you take them."

To distinguish the piddlers from the real students, Hershey believes that it may be necessary to return to the system of national examinations and class ranking used during the Korean war. But he would rather see the colleges "clean their own stables." Although he is a trustee of his alma mater, Tri-State College, Hershey's philosophy of education was influenced more strongly by his early life on an Indiana farm and his long career in the army, than his days in the classroom.

He applies a strong dose of self-styled Midwestern common sense--"a big grain of salt"--to the mystique of higher learning. People who are "all loaded up with knowledge," he says gruffly, "can't tie it up in packages, can't put it to work, because they lack understanding."

Hershey praises the Peace Corps and similiar civilian organizations, but he believes that any proposals which made them substitutes for military service would be opposed by Congress. The law which established the Peace Corps specifically states that service in the Corps should not be regarded by local boards as grounds for exemption. "Until recently," says the General, "we've been able to give these Peace Corps people deferments only because we've been careful to tell Congress exactly what we've been doing and convince them we're not putting anything over on them. The rising quotas are making it more and more difficult to give deferments. We've got to live with Congress."

For the soldier-politician, living with Congress covers a variety of sins. In the course of a typical afternoon, Hershey tells a member of the Armed Services Committee that his constituent cases will receive special attention; attempts to persuade a local board member that participation in a March to protest the War in Vietnam is not evidence of a "draft evasion mentality" or reason for induction; and cautiously advises a nervous law school student on his "legal rights"; that's all I can give you under oath, but I'll tell you frankly son . . ."

The General has lived with the present system for most of his 72 years. I "know it has weaknesses," he says, "but everything does. And I never expected the world to be ideal. I'll leave the work of making it perfect to my successors--the boys with the computers."