page_title: L. Mendel Rivers
section_title: House Armed Services Chairman
hierarchical_section_title: L. Mendel Rivers / Congressional career / House Armed Services Chairman
caption_attribution_description: L. Mendel Rivers, Congressman (D-South Carolina, 1941-70)
context_page_description: Lucius Mendel Rivers was a Democratic U.S. Representative from South Carolina, representing the Charleston-based 1st congressional district for nearly 30 years. He was chairman of the House Armed Services Committee as the U.S. escalated its involvement in the Vietnam War.
context_section_description: Rivers became the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee in 1965 following the retirement of Carl Vinson. Upon moving into the Rayburn House Office Building, Rivers placed a plaque of Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution that specified the role of the legislative process with the military. He felt that the Congress should not delegate its powers to the President nor the Secretary of Defense and that a vigorous Congress would make the President perform his job better. As Rivers inspected the committee room, he became incensed when he discovered cloakrooms adjoining the chamber for the Democratic and Republican Party members to discuss strategy. Rivers viewed national defense as a non-partisan issue and had the cloakrooms turned into offices.
  By the time Rivers became the chairman, he was well known for being a strong supporter of the American military in general, and of enlisted military service members in particular. In 1963 he established, through the vehicle of the House–Senate Conference Committee, the principle of linking military retired pay to increases in the Consumer Price Index, similar to the practice for retired federal civil servants. In 1964 he championed the cause of "hospital rights," guaranteeing medical care in military hospitals for military retirees and their dependents. After becoming chairman, he helped secure the first military pay raise since 1952 in 1965 despite opposition from the Secretary of Defense McNamara and President Johnson. Rivers was instrumental in establishing the additional enlisted pay grade of E-9, and he helped secure mobile home allowances and cheap air fares for soldiers returning from Viet Nam.
  Rivers strongly supported the constant upgrading of US military preparedness, regardless of the cost. He supported making all US Navy ships nuclear powered, and he championed development of the US Air Force's C-5A Galaxy military airlift jet, despite huge cost overruns. In his last speech to his colleagues in the US House of Representatives on December 7, 1970, delivered just before he departed for Birmingham, Alabama to have heart surgery, he stated, "While we debate the question of maintaining our military capability, the Soviet Union forges ahead. We seem hell-bent on national suicide....We cannot as a nation afford to spend one penny less on national defense than that amount which is required to insure that you and I, and our children, can convince the Soviets they dare not pull the trigger when a Soviet gun is placed against our heads."
  In that same speech, he delivered the quote for which he is best remembered: "The final measure of our ability to survive as a nation in a hostile world will not be how well we have managed our domestic resources and domestic programs, but whether or not we have avoided and frustrated the forces of evil which would draw us into the crucible of war with the Soviet Union. If we fail in that endeavor, we will have failed in everything."
  Rivers died of heart failure in Birmingham, Alabama on December 28, 1970, 17 days after undergoing surgery to replace a leaking mitral valve at the University of Alabama Hospital. Almost two months earlier, he had been elected to a 16th term in Congress. He was buried at St. Stephen Episcopal Church Cemetery in St. Stephen, South Carolina.
caption: L. Mendel Rivers at the White House, March 7, 1968
exif: {"Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "44", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6059"}