NATIONAL DEFENSE: A Career for Young Men

There'd be no war today,

If mothers all would say

I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier.

Thus, in 1915, Tin Pan Alley put to banal words & music the peacetime U.S. revulsion against soldiering. The words, if not the tune, still rattled around in the heads of U.S. military leaders. They wondered how soon after the Korean job was finished they would begin to hear the refrain again. For that reason, and because it was unwise to unfold all the facts of an unpleasant situation just before an election—and because no one had any clear-cut plan anyhow—the Administration...