the vietnam war provided the next significant test for the air national guard. however, for largely domestic political reasons, president lyndon b. johnson chose not to mobilize most of the nation's reserve forces before 1968. his reasons for not mobilizing reserve forces were many. primarily, he did not believe that the war in vietnam justified the dramatic act of mobilizing reserve and national guard forces. he accepted the need to fight the war, but he wanted to prosecute it as quietly as possible, not attracting too much attention at home and risk jeopardizing his domestic programs. he also wanted to avoid drawing the communist chinese into the war or the attention of the soviet union, the latter which might view the mobilization of reserve and national guard units as "escalatory" within a larger cold war context. moreover, recalling reservists' complaints of inactivity following the berlin mobilization of 1961, he was also reluctant to recall reservists and national guardsmen without the assurance that their employment would significantly affect the course of the war, an assurance no official in his administration could provide. as a result, even though still populated by many world war ii and korean war combat veterans, the reserves and the national guard acquired ill-deserved reputations during this period as havens for relatively affluent, young white men with no prior active duty military service to serve as officers or enlisted personnel as a means to avoid the draft into the active duty u.s. army in an enlisted status.