JONESBORO, Ga., Oct. 1 (UPI) — Gen. John R. Galvin, 86, the Cold War’s last NATO supreme commander, died at his Jonesboro, Ga., home.
He died Friday of causes linked to Parkinson’s disease, he daughter said.
Galvin was regarded a prototypical warrior-intellectual, a West Point graduate and a Princeton University Ph.D. with a great influence on the generation of American officers who followed him.
He earned medals for valor in Vietnam, refused a superior officer’s order to inflate a body-count of enemy casualties, helped write the official “Pentagon Papers” account of the war and helped reshape the Army in the post-Vietnam era. He wrote influential papers on counterinsurgency strategy and guerilla warfare which influenced the Army’s actions in the Middle East after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In 1987, Galvin was appointed NATO’S supreme allied commander in Europe, witnessing the downfall of the Soviet Union. Until his 1992 retirement, he moved NATO strategy from concentrating on bilateral defense to small-conflict peacekeeping, advocating a “fire brigade” approach to containing conflicts. The approach anticipated ethnic conflict, and NATO’s involvement in peacekeeping, in Yugoslavia in 1992.
Galvin began his military career in 1948, joining the National Guard to help pay for art school to advance his intended career as a cartoonist. Along the way he graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1954, the Army’s Ranger School and Columbia University, where he received a master’s degree in English. Among the books he wrote are a history of the Revolutionary War and a memoir of his Vietnam service. He moved to Georgia after serving as the dean of Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Massachusetts.
