David Jones

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Jones, David (1921–), air force chief of staff and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).Jones was born in South Dakota and grew up in North Dakota. He received a commission in the Army Air Forces in 1943 and followed a career as a bomber pilot. He led a squadron during the Korean War, and later commanded the U.S. Air Forces in Europe. Becoming air force chief of staff in 1974, he made substantial reductions in headquarters staff and reorganized the air force hierarchy. Support for the Panama Canal Treaties and cancellation of the B‐1 bomber earned him congressional criticism.

PresidentJimmy Carter appointed Jones the ninth chairman of the JCS in 1978. Jones's support for the SALT II agreement in 1979 and the failed Iranian hostage rescue in 1980 brought further congressional hostility and some initial opposition to his reappointment as chairman in 1980. After eight years as a JCS member, Jones recommended major changes in the joint system in 1982. He found JCS advice to the president untimely and diluted by interservice compromise, and he criticized the chairman's lack of authority. He proposed making the chairman the principal military adviser to the president instead of the corporate JCS, placing the chairman alone in the chain between the secretary of defense and the major com manders, and giving the chairman a four‐star deputy. Neither the Reagan administration nor the other chiefs proved receptive, and no immediate action resulted. In 1986, however, the Goldwater‐Nichols Act included all of Jones's recommendations.
[See also Defense, Department of; SALT Treaties.]

Bibliography

U.S. Air Force Biography, General David C. Jones, 1978.
Willard J. Webb and and Ronald H. Cole , The Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1989.

Willard J. Webb

Jones, David (b Brockley, Kent, 1 Nov. 1895; d Harrow, Greater London, 28 Oct. 1974). British painter, draughtsman, printmaker, and writer. A convert to Roman Catholicism in 1921, he met Eric Gill in 1922 and under his influence achieved a sense of purpose (his studies at the Camberwell School of Art, 1909–15, had left him, as he said, ‘completely muddle-headed as to the function of art in general’). Gill not only introduced him to wood engraving, but also guided him in rejecting the current concern with formal properties in favour of an art that aspired to reveal universal and symbolic truths behind the appearance of things. Jones worked mainly in pencil and watercolour, his subjects including landscape, portraits, still-life, animals, and imaginative themes; Arthurian legend was one of his main inspirations. As a writer he is best known for In Parenthesis (1937), a long work of mixed poetry and prose on the subject of the First World War (in which he had fought). T. S. Eliot declared this to be a work of genius and it was awarded the Hawthornden Prize. After the Second World War Jones retired to Harrow and concentrated on calligraphic inscriptions in the Welsh language (he was of Welsh extraction).

Jones, David (1895–1974). British painter, draughtsman, printmaker, and writer. A convert to Roman Catholicism in 1921, he met Eric Gill in 1922 and under his influence achieved a sense of purpose (his studies at the Camberwell School of Art, 1909–15, had left him, as he said, ‘completely muddle-headed as to the function of art in general’). Gill not only introduced him to wood engraving, but also guided him in rejecting the current concern with formal properties in favour of an art that aspired to reveal universal and symbolic truths behind the appearance of things. He worked mainly in pencil and watercolour, his subjects including landscape, portraits, still life, animals, and imaginative themes; Arthurian legend was one of his main inspirations. As a writer he is best known for In Parenthesis (1937), a long work of mixed poetry and prose on the subject of the First World War (in which he had fought). T. S. Eliot declared this to be a work of genius and it was awarded the Hawthornden Prize. After the Second World War Jones retired to Harrow and devoted himself mainly to calligraphic inscriptions in the Welsh language (he was of Welsh extraction).

Jones, David (1921–) air force chief of staff (1974–78) and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1978–82), born in Aberdeen, South Carolina. As air force chief of staff, he reduced the size of the headquarters staff and reorganized the air force hierarchy. As chairman of the JCS, he proposed changes that increased the authority of the chairman and streamlined the chain of command, but these were enacted only well after his tenure, with the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986. During his term of office he encountered congressional hostility because of his support of the SALT II agreement (1979) and the failed Iranian hostage rescue (1980).