May 17, 2023 in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
WASHINGTON – When Mike Gallagher leads his next congressional hearing as head of the House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, the gavel in his hand will be symbolic in more ways than one.
Of course, it represents his authority as chairman of the committee, a position that allows Gallagher to shape the panel’s agenda and goals and gives him subpoena authority to compel officials to answer his questions.
But the engraved, two-toned wooden mallet Gallagher will wield for the first time at a hearing Wednesday evening also has Wisconsin history: It belonged to former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, who represented Wisconsin’s 7th Congressional District in Congress from 1953 to 1969.
That history is significant for the Green Bay Republican who is now leading Congress’ probe into what he calls the growing threat from China and has warned of a new Cold War with the country. In some ways, Gallagher has echoed Laird’s foreign policy strategy from Laird’s time leading the Pentagon in the Nixon administration, during which he worked to pull U.S. troops out of the Vietnam War in a period of anti-war fervor and influenced the country’s aggressive posture toward the Soviet Union in the early 1970s.
“I’ve always felt that Laird was this — not forgotten — but this titanic figure in the old Cold War from Wisconsin,” Gallagher recently told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “It’s always fascinated me.”
Gallagher’s interest in Laird, who became the first member of Congress to be appointed secretary of defense, dates back to his postgraduate research in the 2010s and his focus on the Cold War following seven years as an intelligence officer in the Marine Corps.
In his 2015 Ph.D dissertation, he referenced Laird’s efforts to strengthen the military in the face of defense spending cuts. And he later wrote a chapter for an unpublished book in which he argues for a renewed focus on defense — using Laird’s actions as secretary of defense to draw parallels to today’s competition with China and his own calls for the use of hard power and deterrence.
His interest in Laird only grew during his first campaign for the 8th Congressional District in 2016, shortly before Laird died the same year. Gallagher received two hand-written letters from the Marshfield Republican. One included a chapter from a Laird biography about how Laird played a role in helping the Green Bay Packers remain a viable professional football team and another had an article that ranked the country’s best defense secretaries. Laird, Gallagher recalled, was ranked second or third.
“For me, it was like, woah,” Gallagher said of receiving the letters. “I think he just found out that I was running and that I had an interest in defense and foreign policy. It was very, very nice of him. I never got to meet him in person, but I’ve always admired Mel Laird.”
As head of China select committee, Gallagher sought connection to Laird
So when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy appointed Gallagher chairman of the select committee on China this year, Gallagher wanted to find a gavel with a connection to Laird instead of the generic gavel given to committee chairs.
That led him to the Marshfield Clinic’s Laird archives, a museum near the clinic’s medical library that includes a replica of Laird’s Capitol Hill office and artifacts like Laird’s Purple Heart and Presidential Medal of Freedom, a green jacket from the Augusta National Golf Club and a rocking chair made for former President John F. Kennedy, among other Laird possessions.
(In addition to defense, Laird had an outsized influence in healthcare and played a role in expanding agencies like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He helped the Marshfield Clinic secure its first medical research grant.)
The Marshfield Clinic earlier this month loaned Gallagher the gavel — a mallet with a thin, light brown handle and dark brown head with a horizontal light stripe. A silver metal band wraps around the head of the gavel with the inscription: “The Honorable Melvin R. Laird 1959.” The gavel had been snapped in half near the top of the handle but has since been glued back together. The head does not show signs of heavy use.
Still, the exact origin of the gavel is unknown. Brian Finnegan, who oversees the Marshfield Clinic’s archives, said archival documentation suggests the gavel was “used by Congressman Laird in the U.S. House of Representatives 1959,” but the clinic has no additional information.
Laird sat on the powerful Appropriations Committee in 1959, according to the Congressional Record, though Republicans were in the minority in both the House and Senate for all but Laird’s first two years in Congress, meaning Laird would not have held a chairmanship that year. He eventually served as chairman of the House Republican Conference from 1965 to 1969.
In an interview in his Washington office, Gallagher joked that he was pretending the gavel was used for a “super intense, important purpose” as he told stories of Laird and his fraught relationship with then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger.
At one point, Gallagher pulled Richard Hunt’s “Melvin Laird and the Foundation of the Post-Vietnam Military 1969–1973” from his bookshelf and later opened his laptop and began reading from his dissertation and the book chapter he wrote that became the basis for a 2021 speech he gave at the Nixon Library.
“I gotta do this quote from Kissinger here. OK. This is Kissinger,” Gallagher interjected when talking about the gavel, reading a quote in which Kissinger said Laird “did not believe in fighting losing battles” and described Laird as “magnificent” in crises and “strong, loyal, daring and eloquent in defending presidential decisions.”
An aide later said that he had not seen Gallagher more animated than when he spoke of Laird.
Gallagher praised Laird’s ability to make investments in the country’s defense through new weapons systems at the same time defense spending was seeing cuts, touted Laird’s role in the creation of the all volunteer military and highlighted Laird’s “Vietnamization” policy, which eventually ended U.S. involvement on the ground in Vietnam by attempting to help the South Vietnamese take the lead in their own defense.
(The South Vietnamese were eventually overrun after the U.S. withdrawal, but Laird maintained the effort was doomed by the 1975 congressional cutoff of funding to South Vietnam.)
Laird helped shape the Nixon Doctrine
The policy’s emphasis on partnership became one of the pillars of the Nixon Doctrine, which Gallagher quipped “was really the Laird Doctrine before it was the Nixon Doctrine.”
“It echoes in the present day with this obsession with, how do we develop more lethal allies and partners who are able to take charge of their own defense so we don’t have to shoulder the security burden for everybody?” Gallagher said.
And while Gallagher emphasized there are “meaningful differences” between the Cold War and what he now calls the new Cold War — notably, the U.S. has strong economic ties with China that it didn’t have with the Soviet Union — he said there are “lessons we can learn… from Laird and the old Cold War and apply to the present day.”
Over the past several months, he’s emphasized the need to arm Taiwan in advance of a potential invasion by the Chinese Communist Party and build up the U.S.’s own military presence in the Indo-Pacific as part of an effort to deter CCP President Xi Jinping from launching an attack.
“It’s an imperfect parallel, right?” said Gallagher, sitting in his office with the gavel resting on a table made from a Door County Brewing Company keg. “Because they were at a much later stage of the old Cold War. And I think we’re in the early stage of a new Cold War. But certain things are obvious. Hard power is what deters.”
Asked about the gavel, Gallagher said he would be “channeling (Laird’s) power so we can similarly reinvest in the sinews of strength in the present day — at a time when the mood seems to be going against defense spending.”
But he downplayed his own role as the next Wisconsinite to become a major player in foreign affairs and defense in a list that includes George Kennan, a Milwaukeean who championed the policy of containment during the Cold War, former congressman and Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and Lawrence Eagleburger, a career diplomat and former secretary of state. More recently, Mark Green represented Gallagher’s district before serving as ambassador to Tanzania and head of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
“I think we can do a lot of good and do a lot of bipartisan good,” Gallagher said of his select committee on China, repeating his concern that the struggle with China’s communist government is existential. “I’m hoping to play a constructive role, but I think Laird’s experience shows just how contingent it all is, right? You study history, you just gain a respect for contingency…”
“So you just do the best with the opportunity you’re given,” he added. “My opportunity right now is I have the gavel for this China committee.”
In the meantime, Gallagher has Laird’s gavel and his own words about the Marshfield congressman to reflect on.
“To win the New Cold War,” Gallagher concluded in his 2021 speech, “we must learn from Mel Laird and make a new (and old) case for defense.”
Lawrence Andrea 