Former defense secretary Melvin Laird dies

Former Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird, a onetime Navy officer from Wisconsin who survived a Kamikaze attack and went on to oversee the drawdown of American troops in Vietnam, died Wednesday at 94.

Laird served on the destroyer USS Maddox in the Pacific in World War II and carried shrapnel from the crash of the Japanese plane until his death of respiratory failure in a Fort Myers, Fla., hospital. For all his life, Laird remained both a strong advocate for national defense and skeptic of sending American troops into long wars in Asia and the Middle East, eventually helping to end the Vietnam-era draft.

"He came back with a different view of war and a different set of priorities and we're all better for it," said his son, David Laird, a real estate developer in McLean, Va.

Bob Williams, a friend and former campaign aide to Laird, said the former Pentagon head had been thinking recently about ways to ensure that either President-elect Donald Trump or his losing opponent, Hillary Clinton, picked a capable secretary of defense to lead the nation's military.

"Oh my, yes, he took that so seriously because of the power you had and the power to influence the president," Williams said of the defense appointment.

Laird served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and received the Purple Heart. Back in Wisconsin, he served in the state Senate and represented the 7th Congressional District for nine consecutive terms, helping to build up the Marshfield Clinic and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As the top defense appointee for President Richard Nixon, he presided over the withdrawal of a half million troops from Vietnam and the establishment of an all-volunteer army.

He helped select two vice presidents; guided a young army officer named Colin Powell to a White House assignment in the early 1970s; and even had a young intern in the 1960s who was then named Hillary Rodham.

"He was a Washington grownup," Gerald Whitburn, a University of Wisconsin regent who served as an assistant to the secretary of the Navy while Laird headed the Pentagon.

In an authorized biography by Dale Van Atta published in 2008, "With Honor: Melvin Laird In War, Peace and Politics," Laird is lauded for attributes — bipartisanship and pragmatism — that are often perceived as lacking in Washington today.

Jessica Doyle, the wife of former Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, is Laird's niece and he counted U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the Democrat who succeeded him in his northern Wisconsin district, as a friend.

"He was a Republican to the core, but he was a Republican that really believed government was a worthy cause," Jim Doyle said.

But Laird was also once described by The Wall Street Journal as "a kind of unguided missile within the Washington establishment, leaving intrigues, strategies and inside information in his wake."

In the Nixon administration, Laird tangled constantly with national security adviser Henry Kissinger, who resisted Laird's push for faster withdrawals from Vietnam.

Once, when Kissinger was planning a top-secret trip to Beijing to lay the groundwork for Nixon's opening to China, Laird added a fake Taiwan visit for the same dates to his own public schedule and then called off the sham trip a few days later.

"I did things like that to Kissinger all the time. He'd go wild," Laird said during a 2009 interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "You have to have a little fun."

Speaking later of Laird, Kissinger joked that "it is much less painful to do what he wants."

"When he says, 'You know what I mean,' there is no conceivable way you could know what he means," Kissinger said. "And...when he calls to complain about a newspaper story, you know he has put it out himself."

As defense secretary, Laird imposed troop withdrawals from Vietnam faster than either Nixon or Kissinger wanted, leaking his plans to the press so it would be harder for the White House to modify them.

In Congress, Laird took an interest in health and helped expand agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The Wisconsin congressman even played a role in the rise of the NFL, according to Van Atta's book. He helped secure an anti-trust exemption in Congress that made revenue-sharing possible (and allowed the Green Bay Packers to compete with far larger cities).

After the Defense Department, Laird moved into a position as a White House adviser during the unsettled time of the Watergate investigation.

Laird helped steer Nixon into picking Gerald Ford as his new number two, believing he had the integrity and standing with Congress to pick up the pieces after Watergate. Laird also helped persuade Ford to pick Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president, rejecting entreaties from Ford about taking the job himself.

Laird was skeptical of American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, but argued for a phased drawdown of American forces rather than a hasty action. Of war, Williams said that Laird often mentioned the attack on the Maddox and the unexpected trials that American soldiers can face serving their nation.

"Wars are very easy to get into," Laird said in 2009, "but they're awfully hard to get out of."

The Associated Press contributed to this article.