Memorial Saturday in Tacoma for Gen. John Shalikashvili
Published 1:40 pm Friday, August 5, 2011
TACOMA — Hundreds if not thousands of people are expected at Saturday’s memorial service for Army Gen. John Shalikashvili, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who died July 23.
He had retired in 1998 near Joint Base Lewis-McChord and had many friends in the community as well as
the military, said I Corps spokesman Lt. Col. Gary Dangerfield.
A 90-minute service is scheduled at the Greater Tacoma Convention and Trade Center.
Shalikashvili died at Madigan Army Medical Center of complications of a stroke. He was 75. He’ll be buried Oct. 7 at Arlington National Cemetery.
The native of Poland was the first foreign-born top leader in the Pentagon. He served the Clinton administration from 1993-to-1997. He oversaw more than 40 operations, including Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Persian Gulf.
In a farewell interview with The Associated Press in 1997, Shalikashvili said American military and civilian authorities need to cooperate more when they decide to get involved in such trouble spots, because so much of what the military is asked to do involves humanitarian or peacekeeping operations.
Shalikashvili was head of the Joint Chiefs when the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gays in the military was adopted. He had argued that allowing homosexuals to serve openly would hurt troop morale and undermine the cohesion of combat units. Years later, though, he said that he changed his mind on the issue after meeting with gay servicemen.
Shalikashvili was born June 27, 1936, in Warsaw, the grandson of a czarist general and the son of an army officer from Soviet Georgia. He lived through the German occupation of Poland during World War II and immigrated with his family in 1952, settling in Peoria, Ill.
He learned English from watching John Wayne movies, according to his official Pentagon biography, and he retained a distinctive Eastern European accent.
Shalikashvili, who studied engineering at Bradley University in Peoria, enrolled in the Air Force Reserve ROTC, but his eyes were not good enough to be a pilot, according to a Defense Department biography.
He became a U.S. citizen in 1958 and was drafted months later. He was the first draftee to rise to the top military job at the Pentagon, the Defense Department said.
