Interview with Major General John L
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Interview with Major General John L. Borling Interview # 9: October 27, 2014 VRV-A-L-2013-037.09 Interviewer: Mark DePue COPYRIGHT The following material can be used for educational and other non-commercial purposes without the written permission of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. “Fair use” criteria of Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976 must be followed. These materials are not to be deposited in other repositories, nor used for resale or commercial purposes without the authorization from the Audio-Visual Curator at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, 112 N. 6th Street, Springfield, Illinois 62701. Telephone (217) 785-7955 Note to the Reader: Readers of the oral history memoir should bear in mind that this is a transcript of the spoken word, and that the interviewer, interviewee and editor sought to preserve the informal, conversational style that is inherent in such historical sources. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library is not responsible for the factual accuracy of the memoir, nor for the views expressed therein. We leave these for the reader to judge. DePue: Today is October 27, 2014. This is Mark DePue, Director of Oral History with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Today I’m in Rockford for my ninth session with General John Borling. Good afternoon, General. Borling: He must be a verbose SOB [son of a bitch]. DePue: I try not to be. Borling: I was referring to me. DePue: I was trying to be kind. Last time we talked quite a bit about your experiences at National War College. I only had one or two more questions, and it’s really more about that time in American history than anything else. One specific question is, where did your family live during the time you were there? I think I know. Borling: We had come up from Langley and found a house at a place called Hallowing Point River Estates in Lorton, but they preferred for snooty purposes to call it Mason Neck. It was the peninsula south of Belvoir. There was a waterfront community out there on the Potomac. We got lucky, based on the fortuitous sale of a home at Langley and were able to get a modest home on a great piece of property, right on the Potomac. John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09 DePue: Well, now that I’ve mentioned that, I know that you talked quite a bit about that last time. Let me apologize and then move right into the timeframe when you’re there. You’re building up to the presidential election in 1980. What I wanted to start with, perhaps, was how you and your fellow officers viewed that particular campaign and your opinion of the job that [President Jimmy] Carter had done and your hopes for maybe a different administration. Borling: Well, I think there was general dissatisfaction in the country, given—what was the famous term—the malaise? As colonels…The majority of National War College folks were competitive for general officer, but only a small percentage would make it, but all were competitive. This is kind of the House of Lords thing. There was a general sense that [Ronald] Reagan ought to be the guy. You’d be surprised how apolitical the military is; it’s inbred, but there was a sense that we needed to do something about Iran and about the hostages and about the terrible shape of the economy. All this gave a general sense that Reagan would be preferable. I think the focus of National War College was more on a geopolitical, international thing than domestic, political circumstances, especially for all of us, who were Vietnam experienced, if you will, and inclined to what I’ll call decisive warfare. We didn’t make any signs in the basement and go marching around Fort McNair or any of that stuff. I think we were much more interested in training for the marathon, which a number of us ran down the Patuxent River, after going out on noontime runs for long miles and stuff. I hope that’s not a disappointing answer. DePue: No, not at all. The military has always had the reputation of being apolitical, at least on the— Borling: Yeah. In fact for us, is was encouraged…not even encouraged to vote, as recently as ’80 or even ’90. It was somehow viewed as not right. You didn’t write your congressman, and you didn’t do those kinds of normal citizen things, because you were in a specialized segment of the population, and you were expected to act accordingly, especially the officer corps. DePue: When you say, “It was viewed as not right,” in what respect? Borling: Disloyal, that if you were to take something outside of military channels, that it would be viewed as not proper. Let me rephrase that, proper yes, disloyal. Disloyal would be the big word, that somehow it was “not fittin’.” DePue: Now you’re a long way from the position where you might be considering doing this, but if you were a general officer, fairly high ranking, and you 369 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09 disagreed strongly with the administration’s policy, would it be okay to resign and publicly make a statement after the fact? Borling: I would say, yes. Anybody at senior ranks, colonel and above, is going to find themselves at odds with a particular policy. There’s just too many things and too big an organization, and there’s any number of short swords on which you can impale yourself. But at the end of the day… It takes some cojones to go in, and you’re staffing a paper, and the position is one that you don’t agree with, so you tell your boss that this is a difficult issue for you to staff and that you see it from a different perspective, and you spell out that perspective. You would hope that it would be compelling and would cause the paper’s emphasis to shift. Your boss can either accept that and accept your good thinking, or he can be narrow and thin-skinned, as so many bosses are, and throw you in the hall and say, “Go do it,” at which point you have a choice. As you indicate, you can go public then…As a matter of fact, the political tides have changed. While there’s still this “keep it in-house,” there are dissent in-house, much less quit-and-dissent out of house. The difficulty with the military is it’s an economic decision. If you’re a colonel or general, you’re at a point in your life where your economic demands are as high as they would ever be, kids entering college; you don’t make a lot of money in the military, or at least you didn’t used to make a lot of money. Now, it’s pretty lucrative, frankly, into the all-volunteer force and all the incentive things that have been factored in. I would like to say—and they’ve talked about this—more senior officers have their careers end in tatters, because of their resistance to what they perceive to be dumb or wrong or injurious things for the country. I speak a little pridefully but believe that would benefit us as a nation. We don’t have enough of it. More generals can quit, as a matter of principle over issues that really matter, than just go along. DePue: That that’s what we don’t have enough of? Borling: We don’t have enough guys saying, “We need to alter course on this one, or I’m going to cut the cord and be vocal about it.” DePue: At the end of that National War College…I’m sure in the midst of it, you were looking around— Borling: It’s an ethical consideration, and we talked a lot about that at National War College. How many followed up on it? We all took a pretty hard line that, yeah, you had to fight for what was right. Now, again, you’ve got to pick your fights, but when you hit for something that was central, key, then it was a sense that you didn’t worry about careerism; you worried about doing what was right. Easy to say; hard to do. 370 John Borling VRV-A-L-2013-037.09 DePue: Were you already, at that time, at twenty or over twenty, so you could legitimately retire if that was the— Borling: No, no. I made colonel way early. I made colonel at sixteen, so I was not eligible for retirement. I will tell you, that’s a major consideration too. Although, as I remember in that timeframe, I don’t think I was faced with any earthshaking, major deals, where it was going to go down with the ship kind of thing. [I] had a couple jobs following the War College, the Pentagon, where I could have pretty free expression, very free expression and had the support of immediate general officer bosses, who were…I thought it was an amazingly intellectual climate that was created or a climate conducive to honest exchange of views, at the Pentagon and the Air Staff anyway, in the 1981, ’82 timeframe. Then I went to Germany and got transferred from the job I really wanted, to a job I really didn’t want, but that’s just the way it goes. So, you go and do the best you can. DePue: At the National War College, what was the job that you wanted to get? Borling: Oh, I had to go to the Pentagon; I knew that.