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Melvin Laird. Melvin Robert Laird Jr. (September 1, 1922 – November 16, 2016) was an American politician, writer and statesman. [2] He was a U.S. congressman from Wisconsin from 1953 to 1969 before serving as Secretary of Defense from 1969 to 1973 under President Richard Nixon. Laird was instrumental in forming the administration's policy of ...
Massachusetts v. Laird, 400 U.S. 886 (1970), was a case dealing with the conscription aspect of the Vietnam War that the Supreme Court declined to hear by a 6–3 vote. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts challenged the constitutionality of the war. It passed a law stating that no resident of Massachusetts "shall be required to serve" in the ...
The United States secretary of defense (SecDef) is the head of the United States Department of Defense, the executive department of the U.S. Armed Forces, and is a high-ranking member of the federal cabinet. [ 5 ][ 6 ][ 7 ] The secretary of defense's position of command and authority over the military is second only to that of the president of ...
Defense secretary Melvin Laird meets with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in January 1973. Clockwise from left: Moorer, Abrams, Zumwalt, Cushman, Ryan, and Laird. After World War II, four-star appointments were governed by the Officer Personnel Act (OPA) of 1947 until the passage of the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act (DOPMA) in 1980.
Melvin Laird played a key role in the build-up to a U.S. ban on biological weapons.. When Richard Nixon selected Melvin Laird as his Secretary of Defense in early 1969, Laird directed the Department of Defense to undertake a comprehensive review of U.S. biological warfare (BW) programs. [1]
Laird v. Tatum, 408 U.S. 1 (1972), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court dismissed for lack of ripeness a claim in which the plaintiff accused the U.S. Army of alleged unlawful "surveillance of lawful citizen's political activity." The appellant's specific nature of the harm caused by the surveillance was that it chilled the First ...
After the failure of the "linkage" attempt, Nixon became more open to the alternative strategy suggested by the Defense Secretary Melvin Laird who argued that the burden of the war should be shifted to the South Vietnamese, which was initially called "de-Americanization" and which Laird renamed Vietnamization because it sounded better. [27]
Kennedy wrote to Nixon's new Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, challenging the program. [47] Kennedy's letter sparked off a huge debate on the topic in Congress on 4 February. [41] Laird initially ignored the issue, but opposition in Congress quickly grew, along with plans to cancel funding for land purchases for the program.