Even before Pearl Harbor, Luther Gulick in FDR’s Washington was planning for the peace he knew would have to come someday — after the war that he was sure would embroil the US. With the coming of the war, Gulick worked on military production but never stopped thinking about the peace. In February 1943 he wrote a prominent Austin physician, C. Hansford Brownlee, some of his ideas about demobilization planning to re-employ and educate the millions of American soldiers who would be coming home. Brownlee knew that Glulick had been offered and turned down the presidency of the University of Texas and he passed Gulick’s ideas on to a man he knew well in Washington — Lyndon B. Johnson, then a young Congressman from Texas’s hardscrabble Hill Country.

Johnson wrote Gulick himself, showing him Brownlee’s flattering letter, suggesting he (LBJ) had also taken note of Gulick’s work.

Gulick then answered Johnson directly, suggesting that if the Congressman shared his concern about post-war planning he might get in touch with Charles Eliot of the National Resources Planning Board, grandson of the late president of Harvard.

This would all culminate, towards the end of World War II, in a landmark piece of legislation — the GI Bill.