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PERRY FINELLI: 6 minutes past 12 noon. You are listening to Midday on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Perry Finelli. This hour, we are going to hear two interviews from our Voices of Minnesota series, former Minnesota Governor Orville Freeman and later General John Vessey, retired Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman.

America was bursting at the seams with surplus food when Orville Freeman became Secretary of Agriculture for President John Kennedy. Before he went to Washington, Freeman was Minnesota's governor for six years. None of the ups and downs of politics, though, could match what Freeman faced as a Marine Lieutenant in World War II, island hopping in the South Pacific. A bullet in the head shattered his jaw, nearly killing him.

Orville Freeman grew up in Minneapolis, becoming a football star at the University of Minnesota, where he met his lifelong friend and political protege, Hubert Humphrey. Freeman told Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson it was Roosevelt's New Deal that made college possible, a distant dream during the Great Depression for a young man whose father owned a menswear store on Lake Street in Minneapolis.

ORVILLE FREEMAN: My first memory of him really is there and worrying whether the store was going to make a go of it because those were tough times during the Depression. And I grew up, you could say, in a depression gear. And my father was not a Republican. He was not a Democrat. Politically, he was nothing. And so I shouldn't say he was nothing, but he was not an active participant at all. And the subject matter very seldom came up in our household at all.

DAN OLSON: So you didn't get the political bug from your father. Did you get it from your mother?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: No, I didn't get it from my mother. I got it-- [COUGHS]. Excuse me. A guy by the name of Hubert Humphrey.

DAN OLSON: All right, we'll get to Hubert, and we'll talk about Humphrey in a little while. So what was life like growing up in Minneapolis as a school kid? Did you get in any scrapes?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: No, I think I was pretty well disciplined. No, I don't recall getting in any scrapes over now and then. I get in a fist fight. I can remember a couple of things like that.

DAN OLSON: Was it at the U met Humphrey?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: Well, yeah, in a classroom. He was 10 years older than I was, and we were strong Democrats and supporters of Roosevelt.

DAN OLSON: I hadn't heard of the NYA program. Was that a Roosevelt New Deal program?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: Yeah, that was a New Deal program that provided opportunity to work of various kinds.

DAN OLSON: Would you have been able to afford to go to college otherwise?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: No, no, that was instrumental in my being able to do so. I worked in the summertime, went down on the farm, and stuff like that. But I didn't have. And my folks, of course, I could stay at home. So they were taking care of that. But the rest of it, I had to do myself.

DAN OLSON: So the times that I have heard described with the young Hubert Humphrey were pretty intense. He was already very interested and focused on politics. Is that right?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: Yes, very much so. And we ended up in this first class with a discussion in some depth and with some differences of opinion and walked out of the class arguing about something. I don't even remember.

DAN OLSON: You and he had a difference of opinion?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: Yeah, it was just not a basic one, but it was a question of who does the most and are the better citizens if they come from the northern part of the country or from the southern part of the country.

DAN OLSON: So you guys were-- you already had strong opinions even at that age, and you were inclined to voice them?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: We were. And Humphrey, in particular, was so well-informed and such a dynamic personality. Then I was in law school, and I didn't see quite as much of Humphrey then. But he had gone down to Tulane. And got his master's degree in Tulane.

And he came back, and tough times going through school there. He really had a tough time. He made sandwiches and sold them to the kids. That's how tough it was. And when he came back, he just literally didn't have any money. He got a little bit of a teaching assignment at the university, but nothing of any great significance.

And he was just we were-- by that time, we were good friends. And we'd come back, and I talked with him about it. And he just said he had to go. The only thing he could do was to be a pharmacist. And I thought, that's damn foolishness.

The job I had in the hospital, the janitor job, I was able to be converted into a regular janitor job that paid pretty good money. And then I also got a job with a chamber here. And from 10 o'clock until-- no. From 9 o'clock until midnight, I would walk the streets in a colored uniform, colorful thing, and guide tourists as a tourist guide. So I had those two jobs. And I came out of and I had saved $500. And that was a big amount in that case.

So Humphrey got an offer, the job with the Workers' Education Program of the WPA. But he had to have a car. He didn't have a car, and he didn't have any money. And so I loaned him the money to buy the car so he could start and run that program.

And then when he had a seminar training, he had several seminar training units, why he hired me to go and work teaching and lecturing to these WPA people who were academicians, most of them getting refresher courses as a part of that program.

DAN OLSON: So among other claims you can make is were Hubert Humphrey's first benefactor?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: He could say that. I think if he were here, he'd agree.

DAN OLSON: And then war did break out. And then did you make the decision to enlist in the Marines or were you drafted into the marines?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: I made the decision to enlist in the Marines. I knew. I don't know exactly where I knew that the Marines were a tough, hard fighting outfit. And somewhere I had run across that statement that the Marines never leave their wounded.

DAN OLSON: And pretty much shipped instantly off to the South Pacific, which is where you serve most of your time?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: Yeah, but not instantly. I had some training. I went to Quantico, and then we shipped out initially to New Zealand. And then we went and did some training in New Zealand and made some practice landings, and we went up to Guadalcanal.

And we were on Guadalcanal at the later aspect of that when we cleaned them out, when what was left on Guadalcanal patrolled that whole island. And then we went up and made the initial landing in Bougainville. And I got ashore all right, but we lost quite a bit. They had coconut log dugouts as we came in, and we were sitting ducks.

But I got across the beach and the Jap Zeros were coming, and it was a foot race, whether I could get there faster than they could come. And I could hear the bullets slapping in the water in the sand behind me when I dove into the jungle. And then we fought our ways and established a beachhead line.

And we were there for-- well, I was there until I was wounded. And I went out on a patrol, and we'd been there about three days and three nights. And we were getting pretty tired and ran out of food and all the rest. So I gave the order to start back. So we went back maybe 5 miles down.

The Japanese had come in while we were up in the mountains, and they had taken that over and started up their trail. And all of a sudden I just looked ahead and here there were Japanese everywhere. So we got in a good, strong firefight right there.

And I can remember hitting one very well. And then something hit me, and I was laying across the big log. And the next thing I knew, I was waking up. I was unconscious. There was a bullet that went through here. It went through my jaw, went through my neck, and came out on the right side and went between the jugular vein and the carotid artery.

And how in the hell I ever got through there, I'll never know. Corman made a mistake and gave me an injection of morphine, which was just the wrong thing to do. And I went into shock. And I passed out and came back and passed out and came back.

In the meantime, our guys were fighting and a firefight going back. And they came up to get me. And they dragged me. And I told them, I said, look, you guys never get out of there. I go, get out of here now. Get the hell out of here. I can't make it. We sat. I just laid. We swam up to here the whole night long.

And come daylight, I came too. And I felt reasonably good. And I was able to get up and take command of that group. And then we set an azimuth compass course in deep jungle and cut our way through hoping that we were accurate enough that we would hit our beachhead line.

If we had missed and gone further to the north, we had to walk 100 miles which, of course, we never made, but we got back then to our own lines on Bougainville. I went in the field hospital, went to sleep. And when I woke up, I was laying in a slit trench and the Japanese were bombing us. And their bombs were falling all around, but they didn't hit us. So there was no great harm done.

So I don't remember. Maybe it was a better part of a week I was there. And APD came in. And I got in that, and they took me back to Guadalcanal. In Guadalcanal, I got to the hospital. And right off the bat, the first doctor said, we got to get that bullet out.

I said, what do you mean? What do you mean getting that bullet out? And he said, here, let me show you. He took my hand, and he put it right back there and there, under the skin like a great big sliver was a bullet. And he just took a scalpel and slid it a little bit, pinched it, and ping. A bullet popped out and rolled across the operating room floor. And I said, hey, give me that. I want that. So that's my chief souvenir.

DAN OLSON: Your survival is a miracle. It's just a miracle that you--

ORVILLE FREEMAN: It was just a miracle. You're absolutely right. It was a miracle. The sequence of events is really intriguing because one of the factors that I chose, the Marine Corps paid off.

PERRY FINELLI: Former Minnesota Governor Orville Freeman talking with Dan Olson. You're listening to our Voices of Minnesota interview series on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Perry Finelli. We'll hear more from Orville Freeman in a moment. And then later in the hour, a conversation with General John Vessey, retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman.

Well, Freeman was Minnesota's 29th governor, serving three two-year terms from 1954 to 1960. He had to try to settle a potentially violent strike by meat packers against the Hormel company in Albert Lea. Then Minnesota Lutherans reacted to Freeman's nomination of John Kennedy, a Catholic for president. Let's return to Freeman's conversation with Dan Olson.

DAN OLSON: One of the challenges apparently was the meat packers strike in, was it Albert Lea?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: Yes, indeed.

DAN OLSON: What happened there?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: Well, the company was intolerable in that strike. And tensions ran high. We don't have time here, and I don't have them with me. But I have the list of abuses that were taking place.

DAN OLSON: This was Hormel?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: This was Hormel. And the County attorney was a good friend of mine from law school days. And I told him-- he told me that this is getting very bad. Their picket lines are threatening. And he said if this goes on for very much longer, he said, well, somebody is going to get killed.

They were picketing. They were picketing, and they were closing the line, and they were weren't letting the cars through and all the rest. And the company was giving them the back of their hand and taking away their jobs and taking away their pensions, taking away their retirement. It was a nasty, bitter strike.

It was the toughest decision I had to make during the time that I was governor. What do you do? There was only one thing I could do, and that was close the plant. And that meant calling out the National Guard. And I just-- I couldn't even talk to anybody.

Nobody is there to advise me on it. And I said, how long will it take you to get to Albert Lea? He said, it'll give me about three hours to get these troops out and be down there. I says we'll get them out as fast as you I can. Go down there and close that plant.

And he said to me, he said, well, governor, you can't do that. And I said, general, god damn it, I didn't call you up to ask for your advice. Now get down there and close that blankety blank plant. And yes, sir. And he got down and closed the plant.

Well, boy, then what, hit the fan. And then I for a while, I was able to stay on top of the situation because people recognize that this was a-- many people recognize that this was a very volatile situation. And furthermore, when Floyd Olson was governor, there was a Munsingwear strike, and he did the same thing and called out the Guard.

And this went to the court. And the court employed Olson's case, sustained him under the police powers for not having exceeded the powers of his office. In this instance, the court, the same court censored me and said I'd overstepped my-- as governor, I exceeded my authority.

DAN OLSON: Did they have to-- did they force pulling the Guard back?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: No by that time, the guard was out of there altogether. But the company pursued this because they wanted to get a ruling out of the court. And they got a ruling over the court. But it was a problem then, of course, for me from then on out and was a factor in my judgment on any question and in that election, which I lost.

DAN OLSON: You were raised, I think, a Lutheran boy in Minnesota. Is that right?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: That's correct.

DAN OLSON: Here came this man, John Kennedy, who wanted to be president of the United States. He would become the first Catholic to be president of the United States. I believe that it was who stood up at the convention where he was nominated and gave the nominating speech. Is that right?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: I gave the nominating speech. Yes. He asked-- there was a message that I should seek-- he wanted to see me. And I went up to his suite, and we sat there. And he said to me, now, Orville, what goes on here? He said, you and I and Hubert, we have the same philosophy of government, of public service.

And he said, and in Minnesota, I'm having problems in connection with getting support. And I go in to New York and Chicago and battle within the party to get support there. But you and I and Humphrey, we think the same things. We believe in the same things. We should be working together here. What's the problem? And I said, well, Jack, you know what the problem is. This is a religious problem.

Minnesota is a strong Lutheran state and a lot of people feel very much that, in effect, that if there's a Catholic president, the Pope will run the country. And I said that's a problem. I said, but we're working on that. And in due course, I think we can work that out. But it's not easy.

DAN OLSON: Why was John Kennedy even interested in what Minnesotans would think about his religious affiliation? We were a state with a very small population, not many electoral votes. Was it because of Freeman and Humphrey and the leadership that he cared about Minnesota?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: Well, you said it. I didn't. I never said, why are you looking for our support. But it was clear Humphrey was a dominant figure, and I was beginning to come more and more on the public scene and had good personal relationships with him. We really got together very early in some of the people on his staff.

DAN OLSON: How did you come to know John Kennedy?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: Well, when I was the-- governors have access to the Senate floor. And when I was governor and he was in the Senate and Humphrey was in the senate, I had occasion to go on the floor and had met him and we got acquainted.

DAN OLSON: What did you think personally of the notion of the prospect of a Catholic becoming president of the United States?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: That didn't concern me in the least. And I was also at that time the master of the Masonic Lodge and hardly a Catholic institution. So, no, as a matter of fact, I went on television in response to some of the hate mail that I was getting that I felt was really terrible.

And in effect, I lectured the people of the state of Minnesota and said, we are a Democratic country and our religion, we all treasure and properly so, but our religion doesn't carry into the political arena.

DAN OLSON: What was the hate mail about?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: About the fact that here was a man who might be president, who was a Catholic.

DAN OLSON: And what were the people saying in this hate mail?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: Saying that the Pope would run the country. It was just nasty stuff. And I sure didn't deserve a response. But I responded, and I said we ought to be ashamed of ourselves on that now. And this is a Democratic country and each man's religion is his own business. And it's not something in the political arena. And, well, people didn't like to be lectured. And so that didn't help me one bit.

DAN OLSON: Really you think that standing up like that hurts you politically?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: Yes, I'm sure it did, because it was that election in 1960 that I lost. And I was elected in '54, re-elected in '56 and re-elected overwhelming in '58. And then I lost in '60. And I was the only one on the ticket who didn't win. And that was a low point, I think probably in my life.

DAN OLSON: President Kennedy did not forget his friend Orville Freeman. And I believe that's when you were appointed Secretary of Agriculture, is that right, in the Kennedy Administration?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: Yeah, that's right. He, President called me the day after the election, the morning to thank me for what he said I had done for him in the election. He said, I hope that I would join him in Washington. And I said, I would like that. But I said at that time anything except Secretary of Agriculture because I knew what a mess agriculture was in and what the Republicans frankly had done.

And we were piled up with surpluses. Even the mothball fleet was full of wheat. We had no place to put it, and there was a dead end. And it was really a tough circumstance. And so he laughed and let that go then and went about his business.

And we had found that there was a group of Governors touring Latin America, and we decided we needed a break, and we didn't have a job anyway at that point. And so we went on this tour and gave us a chance to think, what do we want to do with our life now from here on out.

I had no particular desire to go back to law practice, and we talked about what we might do that could be useful and constructive. And we came back to the question of food and people. And in fact, what I call the greatest paradox in the world is a world full of food and full of starving people.

DAN OLSON: I wonder what the lesson is about public policy and farming in the United States. The government, of course, from the point of view of the farmers, has been perpetually interested in what many farmers call a so-called cheap food policy. Keep farmers growing a lot so that consumers don't have to pay very much for food. Has that been an accurate analysis, in your opinion?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: Yes, I think that's been an active analysis. It was not one that I followed. In our administration, what we did is to move land into soil conserving uses and pay farmers for not producing for a while till we got a balance between supply and demand and could get a reasonable return in the marketplace. And that was in a few words.

We had to get legislation through Congress in order to do that. There's a letter here from a man who was of great importance, who was the--

DAN OLSON: Allen Ellender,

ORVILLE FREEMAN: Allen Ellender, the Senator from Louisiana, who was the chairman of the Agriculture Committee in the Senate. And I'll tell you a quick story about him. He was-- he terrorized the Foreign Service around the world.

And he was a tough talking guy. So when I came in as secretary, I was named. Well, the first thing I did-- want to go around to the committee people. And he was the chairman of this committee. And he with the senators would have a little hideout, someplace they'd have a little kind of private office.

And so I went in. And I remember I knocked on the door, and he had a very gruff voice. He says, who is it? And I told him. He says, come in. I walked in. And there was a couch there in the side. He was at his desk. He pointed his finger. He said, sit down.

I sat down totally terrorized. And he went back to his desk. And finally, he looked up and he said, and what's your plan for agriculture? And I said to him, well, senator, I don't have one. I came to hear yours. And he kind of laughed.

And from then on, we got along great. But I did something then that you don't do very often, and that I regret it and I don't now. But we had a Farm Bill. He didn't like it. And he was not going to report out of his committee.

And I got it out of his committee and took it to the floor and passed it. And the chairman of the committee, Allen Ellender was against it. And I felt terrible because it was humiliating for him. And I had come to be very fond of him, and we'd worked together very well.

And so that was a bad experience. But I had heard that he was moving his apartment. And so I had an idea. So I went to his apartment, and I punched the bell. And he came in the bed. And he said, who is this. And I told him. He said, what do you want.

And I says, well, Mr. Chairman, I understand you're moving. And I thought someone with a weak mind and a strong back might be useful. Can I help you? Silence. Bing, come on up. So I spent the day moving furniture, and that's the way we got that Farm Bill out of committee and passed it on the floor.

DAN OLSON: You were told no free time for the Secretary of Agriculture. And this was a time when your family was growing up. Your wife, Jane Freeman, wife of a cabinet member in Washington, DC. This place is extraordinary demands on a family when the father and the husband is out and about.

ORVILLE FREEMAN: My wife was a real partner in all of this. She's very good at it. She had a program Mrs. Freeman Reads Her Mail. And she and Muriel Humphrey set an example of women in politics. Instead of going out and sitting on a platform and looking pretty, they went out on their own and went out and attended various events around and made speeches around and mixed with women's organizations around and really just campaigned.

She enjoys it now. She's up to her eyeballs in Mike's campaign and going out and raising money and speaking and doing all kinds of things. And she's been very active on care and a number of such kinds of organizations. And she was the president of the Girl Scouts of America for six years.

DAN OLSON: Here's a photograph of Orville Freeman talking with Indira Gandhi. Here's a photograph of Orville Freeman talking with Nikita Khrushchev. Who among those leaders, Nikita Khrushchev, Indira Gandhi, any of the others you met made the biggest impression on you?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: Castro did.

DAN OLSON: Did you like him?

ORVILLE FREEMAN: Very likeable. He reminded me of Humphrey. And then when he put on reception for these officers I brought in, well, he circulated among those guys gladhanding. And like a Hubert Humphrey, he was very personable and very outgoing.

DAN OLSON: Governor Orville Freeman, thank you very much.

PERRY FINELLI: Dan Olson talking with former Minnesota Governor Orville Freeman. You are listening to our voices of Minnesota interview series on Minnesota Public Radio. Well, General John Vessey's military career began with the National Guard back in 1939. He was only 16 and lied about his age to join.

The Minnesota native, spent most of World War II in North Africa and Italy. He stayed in the military, serving in Korea and Vietnam. President Carter considered naming Vessey the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But Vessey guesses, he failed his orals with Carter.

Vessey lives in Garrison, Minnesota. He told Minnesota Public Radio's Rachel Reabe he was getting ready to retire from the military when the call came from the Reagan administration.

JOHN VESSEY: I was in Punta del Este on the Eastern tip of Uruguay on a Saturday afternoon. And I got a message saying, the Secretary of Defense wants you to call him at the White House immediately. I thought, oof-da, what is that!

RACHEL REABE: Now, that was a Minnesota reaction.

JOHN VESSEY: Right. So I finally got it into a phone booth in Punta Del Este and got hold of Mr. Weinberger. And he said, can you talk secure, meaning can you talk on a scrambled system?

And I said, no, I'm in Punta del Este and 100 miles from the embassy. We got back late Sunday, back to early Monday morning, and I didn't think it was appropriate to call the Secretary of Defense at 1 o'clock in the morning. So I called his military assistant. And he told me to come in at 8 o'clock in the morning.

I finally was ushered into the office. And Mr Weinberger was putting on his coat. And he said, come on, we have an appointment with the president in 5 minutes. And we got in the elevator on the way down to his car. And he said, the president wants to settle this business of who's to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And he said, you're fairly high on a shortlist.

So I said, whoa. I said, I can't go over there. I said, my retirement papers are in. I promised my wife that we'll be in Minnesota this summer. We're building a new house. I have a 19% construction loan from the bank in Brainerd, and it's a suction pump in my bank account. Of course, that was when interest rates were astronomical.

And he said, well, you'll just have to tell that to the president. And was left alone with him for about an hour. And we talked to military strategy and national strategy, what to do about the Soviet Union, arms control, and a whole bunch of other things.

So I went through my little speech with the president about my promises to Avis and my house problems. And well, he said, you go talk to her. So I went over to Fort McNair where the vice chief lived, and he was working in the flower garden.

I told her what had happened and tears came down her cheek. And I put my arms around her. And I said, how do we get into things like this? And she said, you lied about your age to get into the National Guard and God is punishing you.

RACHEL REABE: Was it a long discussion with her? Did you turn it over and over or when the invitation was extended, did you know that you had to take it?

JOHN VESSEY: Well, that's what Avis said. You have to take it.

RACHEL REABE: And did you sleep that night?

JOHN VESSEY: I spent a lot of time thinking about What did I need to do to learn a whole lot of things that I did not at that time. I knew a lot about the armed forces and a lot about national strategy and building defense budgets and things like that.

But there are a whole bunch of things that only the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff does that I knew only sort of intellectually. So you could give a lecture to the Staff College on what the chairman is supposed to do, but you didn't have the foggiest notion of how to get it done.

RACHEL REABE: The major challenge in that job during your time under Reagan was what?

JOHN VESSEY: Well, that was the denouement of the Cold War. The Soviet Union was making its-- what turned out to be its last major effort to roll NATO over. It included times when the Soviets were dabbling in the political process in Europe, certainly in the elections in Germany and in the Netherlands, deploying their SS20 intermediate range nuclear missiles, sponsoring a lot of trouble through Castro and in Central and Latin America.

And most importantly, adding more intercontinental ballistic missile warheads to their arsenal each year than we had in our arsenal.

And the question was, were we going to answer the challenge? And we did. NATO hung together through tremendous effort by the president, by "Cap" Weinberger, Secretary Shultz, the efforts of the people of the United States to build the Pershing II, and the Ground Launched Cruise Missile, and the efforts of all those leaders, plus some of us spade workers to work with the NATO allies to get those things deployed to strengthen our commitments to NATO in a number of ways making it clear that we would not be on the losing side.

RACHEL REABE: What kind of a commander in chief was President Reagan?

JOHN VESSEY: Well, from the armed forces point of view, he was a good commander. He had a great deal of respect for the armed forces. And he enjoyed being around people in the armed forces, not only senior officers, but enlisted people or whatever it was.

If we were giving them a Medal of Honor to some sergeant that deserved it from some time back in history, whether it was Vietnam or whatever it is, the president would always come and take part in those ceremonies. He also grasped the strategic principles.

And one of the things that we did is we met regularly with him, which was different from other presidents, different from Carter, Ford, Nixon that I know of. And it was one of the things that I suggested to President Reagan. I told him that, I don't know where past presidents have all gotten their military advice. And you can get it from any place. You can get it by reading Beetle Bailey, if you want to.

But the law says that your principal military advisors are the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And I suggest to you that you meet regularly with the Joint Chiefs. Now, the president, every president meets with the chairman quite regularly because the chairman sits in on the National Security Council meetings. But it's not often that presidents in the past met regularly with the Joint Chiefs as a body.

And the other thing that made him an effective commander in chief is that he could delegate. He didn't dabble in the details. And perhaps some will point to some of the things that happened during the Reagan administration and say, well, that was a weakness.

And certainly there were some details that-- some of the Iran-contra things that he'd have been better off if he had dabbled in the details a little more. But just to cite his ability to delegate, the night before the Grenada operation, we were convoked to the White House late in the-- it was early in the evening.

RACHEL REABE: Were you quite confident that you could persuade him?

JOHN VESSEY: I wasn't trying to persuade him. The military leaders weren't pushing for the invasion of Grenada. It was an issue where there were American lives at stake or thought to be at stake and the students that were there. And we told the president what we could do. We would like to have had time to rehearse it to make sure it was as smooth as possible. But we didn't have time. We had only about 48 hours to prepare the plans for the operation.

So then he asked, well, when could he call it off. And I explained how late he could call the thing off and then told him what the penalties were of calling it off in terms of doing it again. That is, if he called it off early, we could do it the next day. If he waited after, say, 10 o'clock at night, it would take two days for us to reconstitute it. And if he called it off at 5 o'clock in the morning just before they were going to land, it would take us three days to reconstitute it.

So the president said, all right, go ahead. General, what are you going to do? I said, Mr. President, I'm going home and go to bed. I said, you've approved a plan that we in the Joint Chiefs have looked at. And we think it is probably the best plan we could construct in the time available.

We have competent Commanders who are ready to carry it out. And there's not much I can do between now and the time that the troops land. So I'm going home and go to bed and come in probably about 2 hours after the first part of the operation has taken place and find out what's happened. The president said that sounds like a good idea. He said, I'm going to go to bed too. Why don't you call me after you find out what happened and let me know.

RACHEL REABE: Those three years were you almost living at the White House? Was it a very intense day and night kind of experience?

JOHN VESSEY: It's a small part of the day. And the rest of the day is spent with the hard parts, how to stick 10 pounds of defense into a 5-pounds budget bag, which is the real challenge for military leaders always and always has been the case.

Then at that time, we had forces deployed all around the world in East Asia and Latin America with operations where we were trying to at least give some counsel and support to countries there, to Honduras, and El Salvador, in Europe. So something happening in NATO all the time. So it's a 24-hour a day job.

I think the first night we were back here in Minnesota, Avis said next morning, do you realize that this is probably the first night in the last three years that you haven't had a telephone call between midnight and 6 o'clock in the morning? So it's full time work. It's a job that requires a lot of time and attention.

PERRY FINELLI: General John Vessey talking with Rachel Reabe. You are listening to our Voices of Minnesota interview series on Minnesota Public Radio. Ultimately, Vessey retired, or so he thought. Another call came from Washington. He was asked to start negotiations with the government of Vietnam to account for Americans missing in the war and possibly still held prisoner.

The assignment, which was to be three months long, lasted more than six years. Let's return to Vessey's conversation with Rachel Reabe.

RACHEL REABE: Are you satisfied after those 6 and 1/2 years of discussing prisoners of war and missing in action that the accounting is taken care of, that there are no more Americans in Vietnam?

JOHN VESSEY: Today, I think the number is about 90% of the cases that we thought had much of any chance of being alive have all been investigated and have been resolved. And the people are not alive. So I don't think you can ever answer the question categorically.

There are no live Americans from the war in Vietnam. It's not possible to prove a negative. But I think that one thing you can say is that we have investigated the cases of the people that we thought had the best chance of being alive. And all the evidence points to their being dead.

Additionally, that there is no new evidence has been uncovered to show that they are alive or might be alive. And that work continues to go on. That's the one important thing, pledge, we got from the Vietnamese, that we would continue to do that work. So that work continues to go on.

RACHEL REABE: Do you think they are surprised, the Vietnamese, about our determination, some would call it an obsession?

JOHN VESSEY: They look out at 300,000 people missing. And they wonder about our dedication to finding 2,000 missing. But they continue to cooperate, whether they understand it or not. I think that culturally, it's not easy for them to understand our determination to resolve this issue.

RACHEL REABE: Let's shift from the Vietnam War to the Persian Gulf War, the first conflict in 50 years that you had not been actively involved in. What was it like to sit on the sidelines?

JOHN VESSEY: When I was vice chief of staff of the Army, one of my principal tasks was getting into production the modern equipment systems, the Patriot missile, the Abrams tank, the Bradley fighting vehicle, the multiple launch rocket system, the Apache helicopter, the Black Hawk helicopter.

And I considered myself the grandfather of those things. And then, of course, the great controversies that had taken place in the Washington Post writing an article a week before the ground attack was to take place, saying that the Bradley fighting vehicle was a death trap for our men and its transmission wouldn't work and so on and so forth.

And so you had all the emotional aspects of realizing that if these things didn't work, you were going to be found out that-- I remembered all my arguments with the congressmen over-- with the Congress over things like the Apache and the bitter fights we had to get the Abrams tank into our armed forces and the battles we had to get the National Training Center underway to take all the bang bang, you're dead out of military training. And we would find out whether or not that worked. And then, of course, to watch it work in spades.

And that those Bradleys not only didn't become death traps, they made it all the way across that desert in a march. And not only did they work, none of them broke down. They worked superbly.

And the Apache helicopter knocked out the key air defense radars as the first shot of the ground war and a daring raid that proved its capabilities that those of us who had spent what seemed like half our lifetime trying to make sure that the American armed forces were equipped with modern equipment, and that equipment was manned by well-trained soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, that it was done. We did it.

RACHEL REABE: With the media coverage, it was perhaps a good war to be on the sidelines. And you really felt like you were there, I'm sure, as we all did.

JOHN VESSEY: Well, right. And that's another aspect of it, is that it we have gone from World War II where we had reporters, we had Ernie Pyle, who marched along with our outfit during the war, and he wrote his little pieces. And a couple of weeks later, they got printed in the newspapers back in the United States.

Now we've gone to one where if there's an invasion, likely the CNN cameras are likely to be sitting on the beaches waiting for the Marines to come ashore. And it's a completely different world. And we're still learning how to operate in that world.

And, of course, in my time, the Grenada operation and our not taking the press into Grenada which I might say is probably the dumbest mistake I ever made. Grenada got a lot of bad publicity.

There was a lot of, well, they were talking about all the mistakes when actually it was a superb military operation. And had we had some reporters that would have jumped in with those rangers and shown with some cameras the extraordinary feats of those rangers, the armed forces would have been miles and miles ahead in the hearts of the American people. But unfortunately, we didn't do that. And I'm guilty of making that mistake. And it was a dumb mistake.

RACHEL REABE: And so the media coverage of the Persian Gulf War, in your mind, served to energize the American public to gain their support for the operation?

JOHN VESSEY: I think that President Bush and Secretary Cheney and Chairman Powell have to really be given high marks for getting the support of the American people for the operation.

One of the things that they did that we recognized after or during the Vietnam War, certainly, and after the Vietnam War, is that the United States should never go to war again, even for a short one, without calling on the reserves and the National Guard.

By that time, we had structured the force so that you couldn't do it so that no president could go to war as President Johnson did with the Vietnamese War, guns and butter, while it's just a little thing happening over here and just the regulars are doing this. And it's not necessary for the country to mobilize.

RACHEL REABE: Do you feel like the media coverage of the Persian Gulf War turned some military commanders into possible political figures? Certainly the draft, Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell. Is that a natural jump from a military victory into "you did a great job, now let's come lead the country"?

JOHN VESSEY: I don't know. That's not unique to the Persian Gulf War. George Washington had it happened to him and Ulysses Grant did, Andrew Jackson did. So it's not unique to this particular time for the citizens to ask military leaders to lead the country. And I want to say that I am not disposed to that. I'm against former military people going into politics.

RACHEL REABE: Why?

JOHN VESSEY: Well, one of the great benefits that this country has had is that the military forces have been apolitical through the years. And we have served administrations of that run the scale of American politics and observed all of them well and loyally.

We've never had the hint of a military coup in this country. And I think that even though we have military people who could certainly be effective politicians, and many have, as a general rule, I'm against it. Certainly there are exceptions. If Colin Powell were to run, I'd get out and beat the drum.

RACHEL REABE: Do you think a cataclysmic war is inevitable? Is it just a matter of time or will you not accept that?

JOHN VESSEY: No, I do not accept that. I not only do not believe it's inevitable, I believe it is preventable. I don't believe that wars themselves are preventable. We will have wars but I think that if we have a cataclysmic war, it is because we've not paid attention to what needs to be done to prevent it.

One of the more exciting things that I'm involved in now, I chair the board of an outfit called The Center for Preventive Action, which is an arm of the Council on Foreign Relations, and its mission is to identify potential trouble spots of the world and then engage non-governmental experts to try and construct a roadmap out of the swamp that will not involve war massive human suffering.

We've taken on some challenges that they're already beyond what we had intended. We were intended to look at places where there was only a spark of trouble, but we've been involved in Rwanda, Burundi, and the South Balkans, and Kosovo, Macedonia area, and Nigeria. We've got a Fergana Valley, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan project going on, Kyrgyzstan

There are a lot of people out there who are willing to work hard to try and make the world a better place. It's exciting to rub elbows with them.

RACHEL REABE: General Vessey, thank you so much for your time today.

JOHN VESSEY: Well, thank you.

PERRY FINELLI: General John Vessey talking with Main Street Radio's Rachel Reabe at Vessey's home in Garrison, Minnesota. Our Voices of Minnesota interview series is produced by Dan Olson with help from Sasha Aslanian and intern Becky Sisko. By the way, we'll repeat the interviews with Orville Freeman and John Vessey tonight at 9 o'clock right here on Minnesota Public Radio.

Minnesota Public Radio operates in association with the following institutions, Saint John's Abbey and University, Collegeville; Concordia College, Moorhead; Luther College, Decorah; the College of Saint Scholastica, Duluth; Michigan Technological University, Houghton; Gustavus Adolphus College, Saint Peter; the College of Saint Benedict, Saint Joseph, and Bethany Lutheran College of Mankato.

Midday's executive producer is Kate Smith. Our producer is Sara Meyer with assistance from Mike McCall-Pengra. I'm Perry Finelli. Gary Eichten is back. On Monday, we continue our series on the history of Black Radio. Black Radio, Telling It Like It Was.