'Fortunate Sons' Should Have to Serve

Last week, the Supreme Court decided unanimously that colleges receiving federal funding could not bar the military from recruiting on their campuses. For the vast majority of colleges in the United States, this will make no difference. But for a handful of elite colleges — including Harvard, where I work — the decision will, I hope, mark the beginning of the end of the absence of America's upper classes from military service.

That story is told in a forthcoming book: "AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from Military Service — and How It Hurts Our Country."

The authors, Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer, never thought they'd find themselves part of the extended American military family. Roth-Douquet lived a privileged life at the top of American society. She went to an elite college, worked in the Clinton White House and then worked in Manhattan, where she had a glamorous job helping rich people give away their money. Schaeffer is a self-described "bohemian Sixties type," the product of a British boarding school and an artist, moviemaker and novelist who lives outside of Boston.

Before Roth-Douquet fell in love and married a Marine, the closest she'd come to the military was getting arrested at a protest at an Army Depot. Schaeffer's youngest son enlisted in the Marines. Both men served in combat, and along the way their loved ones learned that being part of the military is an experience increasingly foreign to the most wealthy and educated American families.

"Not so long ago," they write, "the sons of presidents, bankers and oilmen regularly served. ... Now, however, not one grandchild from those powerful dynasties [the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, the Sulzbergers, the Bushes] serves."

In 1956, 400 out of 750 in Princeton's graduating class went into the military. In 2004, it was 10 out of 1,100. And Princeton led the Ivy League. Only 5 percent of today's Congress are veterans, and only seven have a child serving in the military.

The gap between those who serve and those who don't has its roots, of course, in Vietnam and the draft. When those two issues were gone, opposition to the military on elite college campuses morphed into opposition to the "don't ask, don't tell" policy the military held toward gays.

But this is a fig leaf for deeper prejudices. At Harvard, where ROTC was banned from campus, the Roman Catholic Church — also not big on homosexuality — has two chaplains, a kitchen, meeting rooms and a place on the list of campus activities. No one suggests banning the church from campus.

As Roth-Douquet and Schaeffer point out, much of the upper class in America believes that service is not for "our kind." A wealthy friend of Schaeffer's told him, "I'd be horrified if my son volunteered."

In contrast to Vietnam, Americans of all classes profess great trust and pride in their military, even as they've soured on the current war. But that doesn't mean that they'd serve. I know. I, too, became a member of the military family when my son became an officer in the Navy. When he applied to the ROTC, a friend said to me earnestly, "Can't you stop him?"

At a dinner party last year with some of America's wealthiest families, the talk turned to whether the United States would ever have to protect Israel militarily. One woman, whose family are huge supporters of Israel, said adamantly, "Not my son." Well, it would be mine, I said, stopping conversation.

But nothing pointed out these attitudes as much as the time I was told that a young man who'd joined the Marines "hated his mother" — why else would a wealthy guy with plenty of options go into the military?

There is no doubt that the all-volunteer military has been a vast improvement over the draft. Contrary to impressions that still remain from Vietnam, those who serve are highly qualified and highly motivated. With the draft gone, we will never have the participation rates in the military that we had in the past. But the decisions, implicit and explicit, of those in the upper classes to protect their sons and daughters from even the choice of military service is inexcusable.

And the consequences are real. As the "AWOL" authors point out, the unarmored Humvees that patrolled the streets of Baghdad and caused so much death and injury to the troops would likely have been replaced quickly with armored cars designed to patrol insurgent territory if "the daughters of, say, President Bush and Bill Clinton had been patrolling the streets of Baghdad with, say, the son of the CEO of the New York Times."

Those with the most need to come back to the American military.

Elaine Kamarck is a lecturer at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and was a senior adviser to Vice President Al Gore.