On the day that General Maxwell R. Thurman retired, Sonny Montgomery wrote him a note. Thurman, who had recently been diagnosed with leukemia, was at the end of a storied Army career. Most recently, he had commanded United States Southern Command, where he had led the invasion of Panama that deposed Manuel Noriega. That had been his third four-star command. Prior to that, he was commanding general of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, and from 1983 to 1987, he had been vice chief of staff—the Army’s second in charge. In 1987, he was one of two finalists to be chief of staff, and the year prior, the Army Times identified him as one of three likely finalists for vice chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.Footnote ¹ But even in that article, Thurman’s “reputation as … an expert in personnel matters” dominated.Footnote ² He had first come to national attention in 1980, when as commanding general of the Army’s Recruiting Command, he had helped salvage the All-Volunteer Force after the nadir of the 1970s through initiatives like the “Be All You Can Be” advertising campaign.Footnote ³ In his subsequent roles, his interest in personnel never waned, and to some extent that assignment remained his favorite. After one visit to Recruiting Command Headquarters at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, as vice chief of staff, Thurman watched the skyline of Chicago disappear as his plane ascended from the Chicago Naval Air Station before remarking to his aide, “I’d take a two-star bust to have that job again.”Footnote ⁴

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Montgomery singled out that aspect of Thurman’s career. “Today, in large part due to your foresight and ingenuity,” he wrote, “we have the brightest, best trained, most motivated and ready Army that this country has ever seen.”Footnote ⁵ More surprising, however, is that Montgomery credited Thurman with a consequential role in the Congressman’s signature achievement. “In the early 1980s, when everyone in the Pentagon was opposed to the GI Bill,” Montgomery wrote, “you were the one shining light in the dark who saw the wisdom of a comprehensive educational benefits program… . The success of the GI Bill is due in large part to the Army, your direct involvement on the development and implementation of the program. Without you and the Army, we would never have gotten off the ground with it.”Footnote ⁶

What eventually became known as the Montgomery G.I. Bill is a landmark piece of legislation. Whereas earlier legislation, like the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944—the original G.I. Bill—provided benefits to veterans who had served in wartime, Montgomery’s legislation was the nation’s first peacetime G.I. Bill. Although much has been written about the 1944 legislation and some has been written about the post-Vietnam G.I. Bill, the history of Montgomery’s law, passed in 1984 and made permanent in 1988, has received comparatively little attention.Footnote ⁷ Even Bernard Rotsker’s otherwise thorough history of this era provides brief discussion of and few details on the Army’s efforts on behalf of this legislation.Footnote ⁸

The history of the Army’s involvement in its passage, however, reveals much about the nature of civil-military relations in the 1980s. That the leadership of the United States Army was supportive of the GI Bill is hardly surprising. As historian Jennifer Mittelstadt has written, “the new Montgomery GI Bill of the 1980s …aimed to help the army as much or more than the veteran. It aimed to lure back to the army the demographic that disappeared with the end of the draft—upwardly aspiring, college-bound youths, young people perhaps whiter and more seemingly middle class than those the army of the 1970s had attracted”; General Thurman in particular, embraced the notion “that a GI Bill—some kind of educational incentive program—was necessary to accomplish that goal.”Footnote ⁹ However, the intentionality with which Army leaders and Montgomery collaborated to ensure the G.I. Bill’s passage has not been studied.Footnote ¹⁰

The G.I. Bill’s success resulted from nearly a decade of sustained close collaboration between Montgomery and Thurman, both of whom understood the legislation as essential to perpetuating the All-Volunteer Force. Each recognized in the other a powerful ally. In Montgomery—the chair of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee—Thurman found a savvy and tireless political operator who would press the Army’s case. In Thurman, Montgomery discovered a general officer who had built a powerful research operation and who had an unimpeachable reputation on Capitol Hill that could cultivate legislative deference.Footnote ¹¹ Thurman and Montgomery regularly met to strategize about the bill, Montgomery and others regularly quoted his remarks, and at key moments the congressman called on Thurman to publicly defend the proposed legislation. Behind the scenes, their staffs were in regular contact, and Thurman’s—and later, that of Lieutenant General Robert M. Elton, his successor as Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel—routinely provided Montgomery’s office with data that would make the case for and shape the legislation. Their interactions were consistent over nearly a decade, but they were most pronounced at three critical moments: when the legislation was in development prior to its 1984 passage; in 1985, when opponents on the Senate Armed Services Committee sought to alter it; and a year later, when the Reagan administration sought to terminate it at the end of the three-year period established in the initial law.

This essay thus adds to the literature on civil–military relations by highlighting a particularly instructive example of how military leaders and legislators collaborate to achieve shared policy goals. My argument builds on the notion of what political scientist James Lindsay terms “informal oversight,” which includes “the unofficial communications legislators have with executive-branch officers.” As he points out, “Many members of Congress … have well-established ties with individuals in the executive branch, and they use these ties to solicit information and to send messages about administrative performance.”Footnote ¹² Lindsay’s assessment focuses on the challenges of congressional oversight of the DOD and perceives a mostly antagonistic relationship between the two entities, and relatively little has been written on the informal networks and personal relationships that enable legislators and military leaders to cooperate on steering legislation through the policy process.

Certainly, there are other examples of military leaders cultivating and collaborating with congressional allies.Footnote ¹³ The relationship between Thurman and Montgomery, however, offers a particularly vivid example of such collaboration. In the face of significant opposition from many quarters, their partnership created the conditions through which political support for legislation critical to the All-Volunteer Force’s survival could be cultivated and opposition quieted. This history thus reveals at least two critical facets of post-Vietnam US military history and public policy. First, Army leaders remained deeply concerned about the viability of the All-Volunteer Force well into the 1980s, even after the so-called recruiting renaissance that Thurman helped engineer, and they worked assiduously to promote policy that was directed at ensuring its survival. Second, they did so by cultivating close, collaborative relationships with key legislators. This history emphasizes that civil-military relations are far more complex, and much more personal, than one defined by testifying at hearings, submitting budget requests, or offering their best military advice; rather, military leaders and legislators cultivate and leverage personal relationships to further their policy goals. Unfolding this history thus provides a more detailed account of the Army’s role as a social institution deeply embedded in the American political process.

In the spring of 1981, the survival of the all-volunteer Army was by no means assured. Fiscal Year 1979 had been a low point for Army recruiting, which fell 17,000 soldiers short of its goal—the equivalent of an entire division—and led the Army to assign Max Thurman to replace Commanding General, William Mundie.Footnote ¹⁴ Advocates of a return to conscription argued that this failure augured that it was time to end the experiment with an all-volunteer military.Footnote ¹⁵ Under Thurman’s leadership, the Army met its recruiting goal in Fiscal Year 1980, but it still lagged in recruiting the people it most wanted, high school graduates whom the Army categorized as in mental category “I-IIIA,” meaning that their scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test ranked them as in the top half of test-takers and having “Very High,” “High,” or “High Average” ability.Footnote ¹⁶ The Army focused on these people for several reasons. A sustained period of modernization required soldiers who could operate more sophisticated equipment.Footnote ¹⁷ These soldiers also caused fewer discipline problems and tended to complete their tours; what the high school diploma most indicated was that a recruit could see a challenge through to completion.Footnote ¹⁸

The young people the Army was most interested in were not, however, interested in the Army. Only about one in five Americans between the ages of seventeen and nineteen—about 800,000—were potentially recruitable, meaning that they met military recruiting standards, weren’t enrolled in postsecondary education, and weren’t already serving.Footnote ¹⁹ Only about 210,000 of those responded that they would “definitely” or “probably” join the military, and for that group the Air Force and the Navy seemed better options.Footnote ²⁰ Adding to the challenge was that the number of eighteen-year-olds in the United States was declining.Footnote ²¹

Even as the Army began to make its numerical goals, then, leaders foresaw persistent recruiting challenges and sought to create the conditions that would enable the Army to recruit the brightest young Americans.Footnote ²² Educational incentives emerged as a primary mechanism for doing so.Footnote ²³ By 1980, research had made clear several realities that shaped Army leaders’ thinking. First, the downturn in Army recruiting had begun in 1977. This coincided with the end of the Vietnam-era G.I. Bill in 1976, and although correlation is not causation, it was also hard to write off such a steep decline in high school graduates recruitment as a coincidence.Footnote ²⁴ Second, the Army was recruiting people who were the least qualified Americans in the overall labor pool.Footnote ²⁵ Third, many young people sought more education.Footnote ²⁶ Third, enrolling in higher education was one of the most common reasons that a person who considered enlisting in the Army chose not to.Footnote ²⁷ Fourth, the Veterans Educational Assistance Program (VEAP]) that had replaced the G.I. Bill had limited appeal. The program required soldiers to contribute at least twenty-five dollars per month to the program and the government contributed twice the service member contribution.Footnote ²⁸ That requirement, however, meant that many soldiers who had other financial pressures, often a family, withdrew from the program as soon as they were able and often asked for their money back.Footnote ²⁹ A 1980 survey found “that VEAP alone is not a ‘major’ enlistment incentive” and that “the great majority of respondents felt that VEAP was not as good as the ‘old GI Bill.’”Footnote ³⁰

Better educational incentives thus appeared to be a key tool in the Army’s recruiting efforts.Footnote ³¹ However, that in the ninety-sixth congress legislators introduced thirty-eight bills dealing with the topic reveals that it was far from clear what the legislation should look like.Footnote ³² At a June 1980 hearing on the topic, witnesses on both sides of the issue raised a plethora of questions. The tenor of that debate was aptly summarized by Guy H. McMichael, the general counsel of the Veterans’ Administration, who spoke against the legislative proposals because

Others were even more clear in their opposition.Footnote ³⁴ Fiscal conservatives and deficit hawks saw educational incentives as “too expensive.”Footnote ³⁵ Others argued that since recruiting was improving, the program was unnecessary.Footnote ³⁶ Others questioned whether bonuses were better solutions.Footnote ³⁷

The Army’s position, however, was clear: A noncontributory, widely available, and permanent G.I. Bill was essential.Footnote ³⁸ At the June 1980 hearing, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army Sue Dueitt argued that unlike the other services, “we have many combat arms specialties that are not readily transferable to the civilian community. Therefore, the Army needs a more attractive education program to help these individuals who return to civilian life.”Footnote ³⁹ In January 1982, the Army Times called such benefits “the AVF’s best chance for success,” arguing that “only with a generous, non-contributory GI Bill-style educational benefits program will sharp high school graduates consider military service.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Fourteen months later, a cartoon in that paper portrayed the GI Bill as the cavalry coming to rescue a besieged Conestoga wagon labeled “U.S. Army Recruiting.”Footnote ⁴¹

Passing that legislation in the face of stiff opposition would be a challenge, however. To do so, Army leaders were going to have to build and leverage personal and professional relationships, and none of those relationships was as important as the one that developed between Max Thurman and Sonny Montgomery.

It’s not clear precisely when the two men met. Montgomery became chair of the House Veterans Affairs Committee about eight months before Thurman was promoted to deputy chief of staff for personnel, after Thurman had run recruiting for eighteen months. Sometime during that period, Montgomery read some of the general’s testimony about the Army’s need for enlistment and reenlistment bonuses and asked for a meeting.Footnote ⁴² From then on, Montgomery became a key ally. Thurman would tell aides that there was “a hierarchy” of where good ideas should go, aide Tom Fagan remembers, “He would say, ‘If you have a great idea, give it to a general. If you have a really great idea, give it to Secretary Marsh. And if you have an idea that’s going to change the world, give it to Sonny Montgomery.’”Footnote ⁴³

Underlying their shared interest was a genuine friendship. “Sonny was an older guy, but he was a soldierly kind of guy,” Fagan recalls, “and Max got along with him.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Born a decade apart, they shared much in common. Both were Southerners; Thurman grew up in High Point, North Carolina, and Montgomery hailed from Meridian, Mississippi. Both were ROTC graduates of large, land grant universities—North Carolina State and Mississippi State—who eventually became general officers, Thurman in the regular Army and Montgomery in the Mississippi National Guard. Both were lifelong bachelors and formidable tennis players.Footnote ⁴⁵ They became so close, in fact, that when Thurman was took command of US Southern Command in 1989, Montgomery flew with him on the plane to Panama.Footnote ⁴⁶

That close relationship facilitated the sharing of information between Thurman’s staff and Montgomery’s. By the time the legislation for the “New GI Bill” was on the verge of passing in the fall of 1984, arguments about the need for such legislation had been circulating for years.Footnote ⁴⁷ Montgomery proposed similar legislation on January 23, 1981, a few days after Ronald Reagan took the oath of office.Footnote ⁴⁸ Max Thurman had been thinking about the need for an educational benefit at least since taking over recruiting command, a period when he encountered the ideas of sociologist Charles Moskos and the work of a lieutenant colonel named Bob Phillips, who had developed the idea for what became the Army College Fund.Footnote ⁴⁹ By the summer of 1980, Thurman was publicly advocating for a new G.I. Bill as a critical to avoiding a return to the draft.Footnote ⁵⁰

To help make the case for the legislation, the Army—largely under Thurman’s auspices—conducted or contracted out a tremendous amount of research that soon validated the power of educational benefits. Thurman was data driven, and his approach to managing recruiting was to build a robust research enterprise inside the U.S. Army’s Recruiting Command [USAREC].Footnote ⁵¹ “I had 15 guys from my PA&E [Program Analysis and Evaluation] shop, all of whom had graduate degrees in operations research,” he would recall. “We could out analyze anybody, out analyze the Congress, out analyze the Department of the Army, out analyze OSD, you name it.”Footnote ⁵² In Fiscal Year 1981, Congress authorized the Department of Defense “to test the effectiveness of various incentives in attracting high quality enlistees.”Footnote ⁵³ These included the Super VEAP, which offered an additional $2,000 to $6,000 to the standard Veterans Educational Assistance Program and was available “in most of the country.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The Ultra VEAP offered far greater benefits—$8,000 for a two-year enlistment, and $12,000 for a three- or four-year one—but would only be available in ten locations, including Newburgh, Sacramento, Atlanta, and Cincinnati.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Army also tested the benefit structures of the some proposed GI Bill legislation. A House version, which offered up to $15,600 in benefits, was tested in places like Beckley, West Virginia, Louisville, and Jackson, Mississippi.Footnote ⁵⁶ A Senate version, offering up to $14,100, was tested in places like Milwaukee, Oklahoma City, and Raleigh.Footnote ⁵⁷

Much of the Army’s analysis on educational benefits was likely designed by Tom Fagan, a 1969 West Point graduate who had earned a Silver Star in Vietnam and a graduate degree in economics at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School.Footnote ⁵⁸ Fagan was teaching at West Point, but when Thurman took over recruiting he volunteered to help crunch data during his summer breaks. Thurman outfitted him with state-of-the-art computers into which he fed a plethora of regionally specific demographic data on American youth—information on education, racial makeup, wages, and more—that he had brought with him to Fort Sheridan. That data shaped where the Army tested each benefit scheme, and the results were instructive. “If you target the counties that are poor but have great education with incentives,” Fagan explains, “you can change who you get.”Footnote ⁵⁹

As Thurman explains, these early studies set the stage for what came in the 1980s: “We began to see whether or not an education aggrandizement did make a dent in trying to bring more high quality people into the Army. And the answer was, sure enough it does.”Footnote ⁶⁰ By the end of 1980, educational benefits were available across the country, offering soldiers who served for two years $15,000 in tuition benefits; a year later, this became permanent, renamed The Army College Fund.Footnote ⁶¹ “It was targeted on 1 to 3A high school diploma grads,” Thurman would explain years later. “That’s the way you got them. That leads later into a rejuvenation of the GI Bill.”Footnote ⁶²

As Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, Thurman brought his research capacity to the Pentagon in August of 1981, creating the Personnel Programs Analysis Office (PPAO).Footnote ⁶³ The new entity expanded on Fagan’s work at USAREC. Fagan recruited Chip Leonard, another West Point instructor with a graduate degree from Princeton, to join two other officers, Ron Johnston and Joe Selman, to model the effects of various educational benefit incentive programs.Footnote ⁶⁴ At the Army Research Institute, an economist named Curt Gilroy was running similar studies.Footnote ⁶⁵ At USAREC, other studies showed that smarter soldiers were more effective tankers or infantrymen.Footnote ⁶⁶ Thurman was deeply interested in this work, checking in several times a day.Footnote ⁶⁷ The results validated what he and others expected. Education benefits were critical to getting highly qualified youth to join the Army and particularly the combat arms.Footnote ⁶⁸

As Mittelstadt notes, “the Army took the evidence from its test cases to Congress to press for a fully funded new GI bill, where “it found a largely receptive audience,” particularly with Montgomery.Footnote ⁶⁹ His office was a primary conduit through which that information passed, and the flow was considerable. Data on the FY81 study had made its way to Montgomery’s office by St. Patrick’s Day 1981. Staffers also read a RAND analysis of the 1981 studies showed that the Army College Fund led to a nearly 30% increase in enlistment, but that nonetheless “the Army may need competitive advantage” to draw enough recruits away from the Navy or the Air Force.Footnote ⁷⁰ They read Gilroy’s 1982 paper “The Effect of the Business Cycle on the Size and Composition of the U.S. Army.”Footnote ⁷¹ By 1984, they were reading a Heritage Foundation Report written by Lieutenant Colonel Robert P. Griffith, the head historian at the Army’s Military History Institute, which argued that “The AVF must tap the college-bound market of high-quality youths on a regular basis” and singled out the Army College Fund while also arguing for a “return to a nonparticipatory GI Bill.”Footnote ⁷²

Other materials arrived even more directly, and it is clear that Thurman’s staff regularly briefed congressional staff. In 1984, staffers learned from Army slides, for example, that potential recruits who wanted to go to college were “virtually insensitive to pay and bonuses” but were “sensitive to education benefits” and that “education benefits expand this market.”Footnote ⁷³ Another slide, titled “The Power of Incentives,” showed that since 1980, the number of high school graduates in the combat arms had more than doubled, from 40.6% to nearly 94%.Footnote ⁷⁴ More than three quarters of soldiers joining the Army Rangers in 1984 were taking advantage of the Army College Fund.Footnote ⁷⁵ Modeling using Army data also predicted that a version of the GI Bill that combined elements of one that Montgomery had proposed with one proposed by Senator John Glenn (D-OH) would yield “6,000 to 8,000 additional NPS [non prior service] male CAT I-IIIA Army accessions each year.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Other briefings emphasized the importance of those troops’ intelligence.Footnote ⁷⁷

There was thus a steady flow of information from Thurman’s orbit to Montgomery’s. But there was also an enduring relationship between the general, the congressman, and their respective staffs. “It took a couple of years to disseminate all this stuff,” Fagan explains. “The staffers knew not only the program numbers—enlistment, reenlistment, the end strength numbers—but the staffers knew the money. And the only guy in the Army who knew both the program and the money was Max. So he was chatting with them all the time, getting them through how much we knew. And Sonny’s staff was willing to take all that on board and run with it.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Handwritten notes from Montgomery’s staffers suggest the nature of Thurman’s input. Staffers learned from Thurman, for example, that the legislation “will bring in more quality + have a retention factor.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The number “6,000” and the phrase “best and brightest” also appear next to Thurman’s name in staff notes, as does the phrase “someone must stick their neck out.”Footnote ⁸⁰ These note are undated, and whether they came from a meeting or from efforts to distill down earlier testimony is not clear. But what is clear is that Thurman’s thinking was informing their preparation.

If Thurman saw in Montgomery an ally who could help him achieve the vision of an educational benefit that would stabilize recruiting, the congressman saw in the general a widely respected voice he could cite to defend the legislation. Thurman had appeared before Congress as early as 1982 to support educational incentives, and Montgomery and others began citing him with some regularity.Footnote ⁸¹ In February 1983, Montgomery introduced HR 1400, the Veterans Educational Assistance Act of 1983, a version of what would eventually become law. It proposed a noncontributory program that offered “a basic educational benefit of $300 per month for three years of service and an additional $300 per month for 5 more years of service,” and included transferability provisions.Footnote ⁸² On February 24, he noted Thurman’s earlier testimony that “One of the things that is essential is that we get a long-term educational incentive program… . We need a GI Bill, and many of the features of H.R. 1400 are similar to the features that we perceive.”Footnote ⁸³ In the Senate, Colorado Republican William Armstrong also approvingly quoted Thurman’s support for a GI Bill.Footnote ⁸⁴ Thurman himself appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee three days later, arguing that “because we are committed to building an Army in which the Nation can take pride, we find no way to shirk from the fact that it can only be built with incentives to attract and retain quality people.”Footnote ⁸⁵

A year later, Senator John Tower (R-TX) was perhaps the most emphatic in his references to Thurman. Telling his colleagues that “I think the need for, and value of, a new GI Bill was emphasized eloquently by Gen. Maxwell Thurman,” he referenced the vice chief of staff’s testimony to the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee at length, quoting research from the Army Research Institute and unapologetically quoting Thurman at length.Footnote ⁸⁶ The next day, Tower’s Democratic colleague, Spark Matsunaga of Hawaii, devoted what amounted to two pages of the Congressional Record to summarizing Thurman’s testimony.Footnote ⁸⁷ He was immediately followed by Maine Republican William Cohen, who, perhaps reading the room, told his colleagues that he had read Thurman’s testimony but would “not take the Senate’s time this afternoon to repeat or, indeed, expand on them.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Montgomery’s citation of Thurman continued into the next year. When in June 1984 the Congressional Budget Office determined that the G.I. Bill would require an expenditure of over $110,000 per recruit, Montgomery pushed back with a statement that

This statement clearly echoes some of the slides that the Army had provided—the language about college-oriented youth responding to educational benefits is taken nearly verbatim from an Army slide—and the comment on market saturation also appears in handwritten notes in Montgomery’s papers, but without any attribution.Footnote ⁹⁰

But it was not only Thurman who helped get shape and build support for this legislation. His staff did as well. Around the same time that his boss was being quoted with such approval in the House and Senate, Joe Selman sent Montgomery’s staffer Jill Cochran data on the Army’s delayed entry program and explained why it is an indicator of the overall health of Army recruiting. When the Army struggled to recruit high school seniors and recent graduates, he explained, the Army had to recruit more people in the fall and winter. Typically, those were “youths who have not been able to find jobs” who were not “quality.”Footnote ⁹¹ He concluded that “when we are not meeting our goals for contracts, we are creating a possibly severe problem for the future” before making a larger point about the need for a G.I. Bill: “It is important for you to understand, when I say ‘we are creating,’ I mean we as a nation. If the recruiters do not have something to offer the soldiers of tomorrow, those people—particularly the good ones—will find something else to do with their lives.”Footnote ⁹²

The efforts of Thurman and his staff paid off. In September 1984, Congress incorporated the “Veterans’ Educational Assistance Act of 1984” as a new chapter—Chapter 30—of the section of U.S. law that deals with veterans benefits; however, the new program was not permanent; the legislation created “a three-year test program [to] determine whether such benefits can attract high quality recruits.”Footnote ⁹³ Nor was it quite the legislation that Montgomery had introduced, which promoted a noncontributory benefit, but it was an improvement over the VEAP. In the final law, people who served either two or three years, depending on their contract, would contribute $100 per month during their first year of service and would in turn be eligible for one month of tuition assistance for each month of active duty service (The ratio was one to four for National Guard and Reserve troops), topping out at three years of benefits.Footnote ⁹⁴ A two-year tour earned $200 per month in benefits, and a three-year tour earned $100 more; people who signed up to serve in areas of critical need could earn another $100.Footnote ⁹⁵ It was not a noncontributory program, but it was a major step forward.Footnote ⁹⁶

Clearly, Montgomery felt that the bill’s success owed much to the efforts of Thurman and his staff. Even before Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law, he sent Thurman a thank-you note, telling him that although “it took longer than I would have wished” to pass the legislation, “your efforts … have been monumental and … invaluable.”Footnote ⁹⁷ [Fig. 1] Significantly, those were not Montgomery’s only thank-you notes; he also wrote Thurman to thank him for the work of each of the primary PPAO analysts working on the G.I. Bill, noting that they were “always most willing and helpful whenever we called on him for information and background” and that their “patience and prompt responses to our endless queries enabled us to present, in my opinion, an inarguable case.”Footnote ⁹⁸

Figure 1.

GEN Maxwell R. Thurman and Rep. G.V. “Sonny” Montgomery at a celebration of the passing of the New GI Bill, October 3, 1984. Box 1, folder 9, Maxwell R. Thurman Photograph Collection, Maxwell R. Thurman Papers. U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, PA [USAHEC]

The fight for the GI Bill was far from over, however, and the Army remained Montgomery’s key ally as he sought to preserve the legislation. In February 1985, Montgomery’s aide Mack Fleming wrote to tell him of several amendments proposed by the Department of Defense. These included one that would “maintain the VEAP lump-sum option” and that Fleming believed would “breathe life back into the VEAP program” and another that “recommends giving an individual eight months after enlisting to decide if they want to go into the [G.I. Bill] program,” which Fleming declared “would be contrary to the recruitment purpose of the legislation.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Both seemed an effort to cut costs; a service member who did not enroll right away would be hard pressed to opt in later and give up $100 per month, and the proposed amendments incentivized withdrawing participation with an immediate payout. Perhaps most troubling was an amendment that would open the legislation to recruits without a high school diploma so that they could complete high school, which Fleming noted subverted the law’s purpose.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

During the summer of 1985, the debate over amending the legislation proceeded. Montgomery managed to pass the “New GI Bill Amendments of 1985” in March, a piece of legislation that moved the effective date of the benefits to the date of passage, rather than July 1, 1985—an effort to eliminate a decline in recruiting before the bill went into effect and a logjam in basic training immediately after—and made servicemember who were already serving on October 1, 1984, and who would serve at least twenty-four months eligible; it omitted the troubling DOD amendments.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The Senate was another story, however. The Senate Veterans Affairs Committee was amenable to Montgomery’s bill, favorably reporting it on June 26.Footnote ¹⁰² But the amendments had more support and seemed likely to pass.Footnote ¹⁰³ The Senate Armed Services Committee, in particular, posed a challenge. In April, Committee Chair Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) had written Montgomery that “there is less than universal support on this Committee for the three year test program of educational assistance” and that therefore he wanted his Manpower and Personnel Subcommittee to study it.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In June, language that would allow recruits four months to decide whether to choose the benefit and that would allow them to choose to leave and have their money refunded had made its way into the version of the NDAA that passed the Senate.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ These were not insignificant changes; as Alan Cranston (D-CA), the ranking member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, explained moments before the vote, giving recruits that option rather than automatically enrolling them “really guts the basic thesis of the program we engaged last year.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The same went for the refundability provision, he argued.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

In the wake of the bill’s passage, an outraged Cranston complained to Montgomery that “the Armed Services Committee leadership has effectively killed your bill, H.R. 752, over here.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Committee Chair Frank Murkowski (R-AK) felt similarly, writing that the amendments would “turn it into nothing more than a weak variation of the current … VEAP program, the shortcomings of which prompted” the G.I. Bill and “would greatly weaken the incentives for honorable service and for the completion of enlistments that the Congress deliberately built into the “New GI Bill” last year.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The Conference Committee reached a compromise, however, agreeing not to amend the legislation at all for a year.Footnote ¹¹⁰ It did so because Montgomery called Thurman. On August 12, the Army Times reported that the Army had withdrawn its support for the amendments, leading the conference committee to decide not to amend the legislation at all, and that Thurman was “The officer who swayed the vote” by “provid[ing] a Statement used in the conference by Representative G. V. Montgomery (D-Miss) that said the changes were not necessary.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Thurman’s statement, the Times went on, “was made in response to a plea for support from Montgomery” and “was given great weight by the conferees because the general had been one of the most vigorous among the many military officials who had testified in support of the New GI Bill.”Footnote ¹¹²

It is worth noting the dynamics at play here. For the vice chief of staff of one of the armed services to speak out against a provision that “the Defense Department and the services had supported” is not insignificant. Nor is it insignificant that Montgomery, faced with a compromise that might imperil his bill, turned to Thurman. Both speak to the role that personal friendship and Thurman’s credibility played in sustaining this legislation.

Moreover, it’s clear that Montgomery relied on Thurman’s advice throughout the debate. On September 3, the two met to discuss how to move forward. Thurman brought a gift—a framed GI Bill advertisement and an Army T-shirt. [Fig. 2] The notes from that meeting indicate that Thurman was shoring Montgomery up to resist the amendments; one note, for example, reads, “Give money back after 3 yrs might be mistake… reduce number of participants if give money back.”Footnote ¹¹³ The next day, Montgomery wrote to thank the general for the meeting, explaining that “Each time I meet with you to discuss the merits of this program I come out … with an upbeat attitude.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ He also noted that he was taking Thurman’s advice: “As you suggested, we will wait for additional data to see whether adjustments to the Act are necessary.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ He concluded on a personal note: “I value your friendship most highly.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

Figure 2.

General Maxwell R. Thurman presents Rep. Sonny Montgomery with an Army College Fund T-shirt (September 3, 1985), Maxwell R. Thurman Photograph Collection, box 1, folder 15, MRT Papers, United States Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, PA.

Because he became vice chief of staff in 1983, Thurman played a less visible role in the congressional debate over amending the legislation. That task fell instead to Lieutenant General Robert M. Elton, Thurman’s successor as deputy chief of staff for personnel. Under his leadership, the flow of information to Montgomery accelerated. In November 1985, Elton’s office provided data indicating that “77% of males sampled during September are participating in the new GI Bill” and that participation among African Americans was nearly universal. Jill Cochran wrote her boss that “this information … will be helpful at the oversight hearings on the new GI Bill to be held later this month.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

That hearing took place on November 19. Elton highlighted that the combination of the GI Bill and the Army College Fund allowed the Army to “be competitive with the other services,” and he drove a stake through the heart of any claim that the Army could functionally return to the VEAP:

The testimony was exactly what Montgomery was looking for; the congressman wrote Army Chief of Staff John Wickham a glowing letter later that day.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Forwarding the note to Elton, Wickham declared the performance “a home run.”Footnote ¹²⁰

Or perhaps not. Elton’s performance hardly ended the debate. As 1986 began, Montgomery and his allies in the Army were gearing up for the largest challenge yet—whether the GI Bill would survive the three-year trial period and become a permanent law. Cost remained the primary reason for opposition. The Reagan administration, arguing that “an early return to VEAP will allow us to maintain our high levels of recruiting, improve retention and achieve significant savings,” sought “to terminate the New GI Bill test program” more than a year early.Footnote ¹²¹ Initially, Montgomery seems not to have thought much of this threat.Footnote ¹²² By the end of the month, however, it was clear that there would be a fight. Goldwater wrote that although the legislation certainly encouraged recruitment, “the question that really needs to be answered is whether that form and level of benefits is the most efficient one … at this time when there are more and more calls for ending this level of defense spending.”Footnote ¹²³ Pete Wilson (R-CA) was even more direct. “I still wonder … whether it is the wisest use of Federal dollars in this time of budget deficits,” he wrote Montgomery.Footnote ¹²⁴

Montgomery found a reliable ally in Elton, who wrote him on February 18 that “I can assure you that the Army will continue to support and promote education for soldiers to the best of our ability. We cannot afford to do otherwise.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Over the next year, his office became both a reliable source of information for Montgomery’s committee and a critical surrogate in support of the Bill’s permanence.

Lieutenant Colonel Al Bemis, an Army officer who in 1984 was assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel to work on enlisted incentives and eventually became the Army’s project manager for the G.I. Bill, managed that relationship and became the primary conduit feeding Army data to Montgomery’s office.Footnote ¹²⁶ Initially, he remembers, “I was told, ‘get this, do this, provide this’ … at the time, I don’t think I realized that it was going over to Montgomery until the bill passed.” Once it did, however, the relationship became more direct. “I was dealing with Jill [Cochran] probably more than once a week talking about what we were doing and what kind of things they needed,” he recalls.Footnote ¹²⁷ “Jill knew that if there was any information or data coming, it was going to come from me.”Footnote ¹²⁸

Army information regularly appeared in material that Montgomery’s office put out. Information from Army slides, for example, made it into a white paper, “We Need To Continue the New GI Bill.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Readers learned, for example, that “Army high quality recruits increased 10% during [the] first 12 months of [the] New GI Bill” and that “The Army estimates that the loss of the New GI Bill would result in annual loss of 6,000 upper half high school graduates.”Footnote ¹³⁰ A 1987 white paper made similar points, noting that “The Army estimates an annual cost avoidance of $234 million because they are recruiting brighter young men and women.”Footnote ¹³¹ These data also made it into Montgomery’s floor speeches. “More than 90 percent of the Army’s recruits today are high school graduates, up from 54 percent in 1980,” he told his colleagues, noting that “The percentage of Army recruits scoring in the upper half of the Armed Forces Qualification Test [AFQT] increased by 37 percent in the same period.”Footnote ¹³²

The relationship between Montgomery and Army leaders went further than requests for data. Elton’s office happily provided Montgomery with information to publicly promote the G.I. Bill and reached out to him when other legislative actions threatened it. In May 1986, it was Bemis who sent Montgomery’s office materials for a proposed G.I. Bill exhibit that would appear in the Cannon House Office Building.Footnote ¹³³ It was also Bemis who, a month later, called the congressman’s office to warn that the Senate Armed Services committee was contemplating a proposal to force recruits to choose between an enlistment bonus and G.I. Bill eligibility. A staffer’s underlined note that “Al emphasized that he didn’t call us and provide us with this report” reveals how deep the collaboration and trust between the two offices ran.Footnote ¹³⁴

Montgomery also drew on and leveraged his relationships with Thurman and Elton to draw public attention to the legislation’s value. This was particularly true at the “Birthday Bash” that Montgomery threw for the GI Bill on June 25, 1986. The invitation list, which included all of the members of the Armed Services and Veterans Affairs Committees of both the House and Senate, was obviously cultivated to build support for permanent legislation. So was the guest speaker. [Fig. 3] When Thurman stepped to the podium in the dining room of the Madison Library at the Library of Congress, he clearly understood the assignment. “One of the largest contributors to quality is the motivation of high school graduates to continue their education,” he told the audience… . Their ambition for the future and the GI Bill that helps them achieve it brings them into the Army.”Footnote ¹³⁵ He was unequivocal about the legislation, calling it “a resounding success” and calling Montgomery “a warrior—on the field of battle and in the halls of Congress.”Footnote ¹³⁶

Figure 3.

GEN Maxwell R. Thurman delivers remarks at a celebration of the New GI Bill’s “birthday” (June 26, 1986), box 52, folder 10, MRT Papers, United States Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, PA).

This wasn’t the only speech Thurman made defending the GI Bill, incidentally. He also spoke about it in November at the Civilian Staff College, where he was somewhat less politic. He complained that it was the reduction in recruiting incentives that had created the conditions that the Army faced in the early 1980s. Recalling the year that the G.I. Bill ended, he told the audience that “In 1976 they said things are going swimmingly. Therefore, shoot that dog,” he said, adding that “They did away with the GI Bill and put in the Veterans Education assistance Program, which is something that’s on the lips of every single person in America.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Among the factors that turned that situation around, he explained, was “We got a new GI Bill. And incidentally, it expires at the end of 1988. So we’re over there mightily struggling with the Congress and our champion, Sonny Montgomery, to make sure it stays on.”Footnote ¹³⁸ His point, he told the audience was that now “the personnel picture” was “the best we’ve ever had in the Army,” but nonetheless, “this is a very fragile business. We know how to do it in the Armed forces if we can just get the tinkerers out of it.”Footnote ¹³⁹ The tinkerers, it went without saying, were those who wanted to amend the bill or let it expire.

The fall of 1986 also revealed the length to which Elton, often assisted by Bemis, was willing to go to defend the legislation. In early October, he wrote Montgomery that “The Army has planted a stake in support of the GI Bill.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Concerned that “the winds are not blowing favorably,” he promised “major briefings to OMB and to the VA in the weeks ahead.” His worry, he wrote, is “that others will consider the investment too expensive.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Throughout the rest of the year, the Army mounted an all-out offensive to support a permanent GI Bill. Elton had written to Assistant Secretary of Defense William Taft on October 2, extolling the positive effects that the GI Bill had had on the Army and warning that “loss of the program will have a negative effect on the personnel readiness of the Army.”Footnote ¹⁴² On October 15, he wrote again, laying out a slew of statistics to show that “the New GI Bill has shown that it is the education incentive best able to attract quality recruits.”Footnote ¹⁴³ Just after Veterans Day, he wrote yet again, assuring the undersecretary that the Administrator for Veterans Affairs “is in complete agreement with the Army that the New GI Bill is a winner … and fully supports its permanent continuation.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ He then made a demand in surprisingly direct language: “With the unanimous support of all the services, the time appears appropriate to close ranks and support Congressman Montgomery,” adding that “The Army and the Nation can’t afford to have it killed.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Elton sent copies of these memos to the congressman’s office as well, assuring him in a note attached to the October 15 memo that “The Army continues to press the point that the GI Bill is the best program for our youth and our nation.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Elton was cultivating other allies as well. On the day of Elton’s last letter to Taft, Bemis informed Jill Cochran that he and Elton had been meeting with major veterans’ groups.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ “Not all share our belief that the new GI bill is a winner for the soldier, the Army, and the Nation,” Elton wrote to Vice Admiral Thomas Kilcline, the executive director of the Retired Officers Association, but “The loss of the New GI Bill would be a severe setback in the enormous personnel improvements made by the Army in the last few years.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Elton and his staff fanned out to at least a half-dozen similar organizations.

All of these efforts paid off. On February 4, 1987, Reagan’s Chief of Staff, Donald Regan, wrote Montgomery that “we do support the program—the President is proposing to make it permanent in his 1988 budget” and that “we would not want the new G.I. Bill to hamper the recruitment and retention efforts of our armed services.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The fight was over, and Montgomery and his Army allies had won. When Montgomery introduced the legislation to make the bill permanent, he had 174 cosponsors in the house. Unsurprisingly, he copiously cited Army statistics in introducing the legislation, before declaring that “The New GI Bill has played a major role in saving the All-Volunteer Force.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ As he thanked his staff and colleagues, he made a point of mentioning Bemis, Selman, and Johnston from Thurman’s PPAO and Elton’s office among the program managers from the Services.Footnote ¹⁵¹ On March 17, 1987, the bill passed the House by a margin of 401 to 2.Footnote ¹⁵² Two months later, eighty-nine senators voted in favor of it; the other eleven did not vote.Footnote ¹⁵³ On June 1, Ronald Reagan signed Public Law 100-48, The New GI Bill Continuation Act.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

The Montgomery G.I. Bill occupies a critical place in US military history. Its story is one of close collaboration between Army and congressional leaders and staffers. Both Max Thurman and Sonny Montgomery realized that in the other they had found a powerful ally, and Army staffers like Tom Fagan, Joe Selman, Chip Leonard, and Al Bemis played critical roles in developing the information that illustrated the value of educational benefits and ensuring that staffers like Jill Cochran made use of it. Army leaders like Thurman and Elton tirelessly lobbied both the civilian leadership of the Department of Defense and veterans’ organizations to build support for the bill and, often at Montgomery’s request, spoke in favor of it both publicly and privately.

This history also reveals that the Army remained deeply concerned about the fate of the All-Volunteer Force throughout the 1980s, even after recruiting improved.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ As Bemis explained, “keeping our head above the water with the recruiting agenda and the recession was a lot of hard work by a lot of people at USAREC and on the Army staff. It was not, ‘Okay, we got this now and we’re making the goals, and so we’re okay.’”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ This history also reveals that those efforts turned on close personal relationships between uniformed leaders and legislators and close collaboration between their staffs. It reveals that appreciating the dynamics of civil–military relations in the United States requires looking beyond what happens in hearing rooms or when Congressional delegations visit installation. It requires attending as well to informal networks and backchannel communications, to the individual actors and their relationships with one another, that play a fundamental role in developing, promoting, and defending public policy.

Montgomery hosted a celebration of what was now the Montgomery GI Bill on June 30. Thurman, having moved on to command the Training and Doctrine Command, sent his congratulations.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ In the run-up to the White House bill-signing ceremony, Bemis and Elton joked about whether the DCSPER would be invited. “I’ve got my invite and I’m working on yours,” Bemis wrote Elton, who replied “I’m not presumptuous enough to think Ron would invite me.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸ It was a time of transition for both men. Elton was set to retire, as was Bemis, who was headed for an encore career on Mongomery’s staff. Before they did, they appeared together at the reception. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs introduced Elton, who pinned a Meritorious Service Medal to Bemis’ uniform in recognition of his work on the GI Bill.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Bemis was surprised. The program managers from the other services were there, but he was apparently the only one awarded a medal. Elton had offered Montgomery the opportunity to present the award, Bemis remembers learning afterwards, but Montgomery demurred. “He said no,” Bemis recalls, because “This is an Army thing.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰