Vessey, John W., Jr. (1922–2016)

From his teenage enlistment in the Minnesota National Guard through his retirement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff forty-six years later, John W. Vessey Jr. served his country through several wars and many peacetime assignments. After retiring from the Army, he was appointed as envoy to Vietnam to resolve issues about missing American military personnel.

Vessey, the oldest of six children, was born in Minneapolis on June 29, 1922. His family then lived in Lakeville, Minnesota. His father, a World War I veteran, was a railroad station agent. In 1936, he moved with his family to Minneapolis; he graduated from Minneapolis’s Roosevelt High School in 1940.

Lying about his age, Vessey enlisted at sixteen in the Minnesota National Guard in 1939. (The minimum age for enlistment was eighteen.) He joined the guard’s Thirty-fourth “Red Bull” Infantry Division as a motorcycle rider. In February 1941, the Thirty-fourth Division was mobilized for active duty.

During World War II, Vessey fought with the Thirty-fourth Division in North Africa and Italy. When the Japanese surrendered on September 2, 1945, he was training for the expected invasion of Japan. By the end of the war, he had been promoted to second lieutenant.

On July 18, 1945, Vessey married Mavis Claire Funk, whom he had met in high school. They had three children; their marriage continued until her death in 2015.

After World War II, Vessey moved from the national guard to the regular army, where he spent the remainder of his military career. Between World War II and the Vietnam War, he was, among other things, a student at artillery and command schools, a battery officer, and an artillery instructor. He also held several command and liaison positions in Europe and Korea.

During the Vietnam War, Vessey served as commander and chief of staff of an armored division in Europe, as an artillery unit’s executive officer in Vietnam, as commanding general of the support command in Thailand, and as coordinator of operations in support of the war in Laos.

From 1976 until 1979, Vessey was commander in chief of the United Nations Command in Korea. In 1978, he also was appointed commander in chief of the US–Republic of Korea Combined Forces Command. He received his general’s fourth star in 1976.

In 1979, Vessey was appointed Army Vice Chief of Staff in Washington, DC. He planned to retire on his sixtieth birthday in 1982, but President Reagan persuaded him to become the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As chairman, Vessey strengthened the role of the joint chiefs as the primary military advisors to the president and the secretary of defense. Modernizing the armed forces in the post-Vietnam era was an important project during his tenure.

In October 1983, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger gave Vessey command of the US invasion of the Caribbean nation of Grenada in response to a coup that endangered American students there. Another significant event that unfolded while Vessey was chief was the October 23, 1983, bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in which 241 American military personnel were killed. Vessey and the other joint chiefs had advised against stationing US troops in Lebanon because they feared entanglement with the other powers involved there.

On September 30, 1985, Vessey retired from the army. As of that time, he had served longer than anyone else on active duty then in the army. He and his wife left Washington, planning to spend their retirement years at their lake home near Mille Lacs Lake in Minnesota. However, in 1987, President Reagan appointed him presidential envoy to Vietnam for POW and MIA affairs. Vessey served Presidents Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton in that role and finally retired in 1993.

As envoy, Vessey went to Vietnam six times to meet with Vietnamese officials about American military personnel who were still missing at the end of the Vietnam War. He established a procedure for American representatives to search for remains. Vessey also helped arrange for former South Vietnamese military and political officials and the children of American servicemen (and the children’s mothers) to come to the United States.

Vessey died on August 18, 2016, at his home in North Oaks, Minnesota.