MADISON, Wis. -- Melvin Laird, a former Wisconsin congressman and U.S. defense secretary during years when President Richard Nixon struggled to find a way to withdraw troops from an unpopular war in Vietnam, died Wednesday, his family said. He was 94.
His grandson, Raymond Dennis Large III, said Laird died in Florida.
Laird left a legacy that included a telephone call that eventually played a role in one of the biggest political stories of the century -- the Watergate scandal that drove Nixon from office.
Laird was Nixon's counselor on domestic affairs in October 1973 when Nixon had to replace Vice President Spiro Agnew, who had resigned in scandal of his own. Laird called his good friend, Michigan Rep. Gerald Ford, to ask if he would be interested in replacing Agnew.
Ford accepted. About a year later, Nixon resigned because of Watergate and Ford became president. Ford pardoned Nixon, and two years later, Ford lost the presidential election to Jimmy Carter.
"I thought Ford was the right person to bring the country together after the Watergate fiasco," Laird once said, taking credit with Bryce Harlow for persuading Nixon to pick Ford.
His grandson Large, who is the son of Alison Laird Large, called his grandfather "one of the lions of our republic."
"He truly was someone that worked across party lines," Large said. "He was a very dedicated Republican but he was able to see the human in everyone. His work speaks for itself."
Laird, the son of a Presbyterian minister, was born in Omaha, Neb., on Sept. 1, 1922, and the family moved to Marshfield, Wis., when he was a young child. He graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota and served aboard the Navy destroyer USS Maddox in the Pacific during World War II.
He was elected to his first political office in 1946, when he succeeded his late father, Melvin Sr., as a state senator in the Wisconsin Legislature. At the time, Laird, only 23, was the youngest state senator in the United States.
Laird was 30 when he was elected to the U.S. House in 1952. He represented Wisconsin's 7th Congressional District -- mostly dairy-farming or lumber-producing counties in central Wisconsin -- for nine terms, and was credited with helping spearhead the vast expansion of medical research and health facilities in the U.S.
Nixon appointed Laird as the nation's 10th defense secretary in 1969 and the first to come from Congress. The Vietnam War raged with no end in sight for the 550,000 troops stationed in the Southeast Asian country as America lost its resolve for the fighting.
Laird coined the term "Vietnamization" to describe Nixon's policy of assigning an ever-increasing combat role to South Vietnamese troops, allowing the pullout of U.S. forces.
When Laird stepped down as defense secretary in January 1973, there were about 69,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam.
However, Saigon fell under communist control in 1975. But the problem, Laird wrote later, was not Vietnamization but the United States' failure to provide continued financial support while the Soviet Union was sending Hanoi far more than the agreed-upon limit on aid.
"We grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory ... when Congress cut off the funding for South Vietnam that had allowed it to continue to fight on its own," he wrote in 2005 in the publication Foreign Affairs.
While at the Pentagon, Laird ended the military draft and established the all-volunteer force. "It's been a very successful program," he said in 1997. "I am very proud that I was there as secretary of defense to start it."
Former Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, is married to Laird's niece, Jessica. He said Laird remained engaged with public matters until the end of his life.
Doyle said Laird will be viewed "through the crucible of Vietnam," but it shouldn't be lost on people that he ended the draft. He was also proud to be a politician and viewed it as an honorable profession, Doyle said.
"He was a Republican that really believed government was a worthy cause, that politics was a worthy effort," he said.
A Section on 11/17/2016