Association of the United States Army (AUSA) Book Program
General Jack Vessey (1922–2016), tenth chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was one of the longest-serving soldiers in the U.S. Army. John Morris chronicles the extraordinary career of a man who joined the Minnesota National Guard as a seventeen-year-old private and went on to hold every rank in the army of his day.
The fact that the United States won the Cold War is both an accepted fact and an often overlooked accomplishment. It was not inevitable. It was engineered by heroic men and women with iron wills and steely determination. One of those heroes was the quiet, self-effacing General Vessey. His rise from private to chairman of the Joint Chiefs is an inspirational story. His focus on rebuilding a “hollow military” and defeating the Soviet Union, at a time when many accepted the superpower status of the USSR as an eternal fact, is informative for those attempting to do the same in the face of rising Chinese power today.
From General Vessey’s remarkable five decades of service in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and the War on Terrorism in the 1980s to his most difficult mission, that of accounting for prisoners of war and those missing in action from the Vietnam conflict, Morris highlights Vessey’s stellar character along with his moral and physical courage in the most challenging times of his generation.