Name: George W. Bush, Jr.
Job: President, Commander-in-Chief
Year Born: 1946
War Avoided: Vietnam
Reason: Deferment, Texas Air National Guard

Impatient to invade Iraq, George W. Bush was equally impatient to avoid Vietnam. He leapfrogged over thousands of others in 1968 to join the Texas Air National Guard. With only 12 days left on his student deferment, Bush was sworn in the same day he applied. Why the National Guard was so anxious for Bush to join is a mystery; he received the lowest score possible on the aptitude test. Not only impatient, Bush also marked his time in the National Guard with laziness. He was grounded for not taking his physical, he was absent from many required drills and he actually went AWOL for six months.

Colin Powell had a comment on this:

“I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well-placed… managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units…Of the many tragedies of Vietnam, this raw class discrimination strikes me as the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country.” (Colin Powell’s autobiography, My American Journey, p. 148)

Name: Dick Cheney
Job: Vice-President
Year Born: 1941
War Avoided: Vietnam
Reason: “had other priorities”, “too busy in the sixties”

Spending 1959-1965 in college and grad school, Dick Cheney had a total of four student deferments by the time he graduated. By this time, he was married to his ultra-conservative wife, Lynne, the marriage also keeping him away from Vietnam. In October 1965, selective service changed the draft status of childless married men, equating their eligibility with single men. Just one month later, Lynne Cheney was expecting a bundle of joy; in January 1966, Cheney received 3-A status. It was a rare occurrence of Dick Cheney making love and not war.

Name: John Ashcroft
Job: Attorney General
Year Born: 1942
War Avoided: Vietnam
Reason: “held critical job”

Ashcroft’s “critical job” was teaching business law at Southwest Missouri State University. After repeated student deferments, Ashcroft graduated from law school in 1967. A family friend set up the teaching gig for him, somehow deemed “critical” when only 264,000 out of 35 million draftable men were granted such status.

Name: Donald Rumsfeld
Job: Secretary of Defense
Year Born: 1932
War Avoided: Korea
Reason: student deferment

Rumsfeld holds the distinction of being the both the youngest and the oldest Secretary of Defense having held the position under both Presidents Ford (1975-77and Bush Jr. (2001-?). However, he has never seen combat experience.

Born in 1932, Rumsfeld was an undergraduate at Princeton while the Korean War raged from 1950-53.
While “Rummy” pursued his studies inside Princeton’s ivy-covered walls, 5.7 million Americans served in
Korea. 36, 516 were killed and another 103,284 were wounded in the conflict. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld received student deferments. He later served as a naval aviator from 1954-57 before beginning his rise to power.

Name: Paul Wolfowitz
Job: Deputy Secretary of Defense
Year Born: 1944
War Avoided: Vietnam
Reason: Student Deferment

This arch-hawk is the #2 man at the Pentagon and a leading proponent of “regime change” and “pre-emptive strikes.” Wolfowitz, 58, graduated from Cornell in 1965 with a degree in mathematics and received a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago in 1972.

“Student deferments kept him out of the military draft during the Vietnam War,” notes the New York Times, “and he looks back on that war with a kind of scholarly detatchment.”

Name: Rush Limbaugh
Job: Radio “Personality”
Year Born: 1951
War Avoided: Vietnam
Reason: Various butt problems

No wonder the zaftig GOP darling sounds so cranky all the time. He’s had a life of major problems in the posterior. Different sources list different causes for Rush’s medical deferment; either it’s “ingrown follicles on his bottom” or the more forward “anal cysts.” Limbaugh, it seems, has always been a pain in the ass.

from a forum post, and cross referencing with Slate and Lexis-Nexis

Posted on Friday, February 6th, 2004 in Current Affairs, Politics, USA.