Chickenhawk (politics)


Chickenhawk is a political term used in the United States to describe a person who strongly supports war or other military action, yet who actively avoids or avoided military service when of age. Generally, the implication is that chickenhawks lack the moral character to participate in war themselves, preferring to ask others to support, fight, and perhaps die in an armed conflict.

Origin of the term

In political usage, chickenhawk is a compound of chicken and hawk.
On one episode of the American television show Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In that aired in 1970, Dan Rowan made the following joke:
The 1983 bestselling book Chickenhawk was a memoir by Robert Mason about his service in the Vietnam War, in which he was a helicopter pilot. Mason used the word as a compound oxymoron to describe both his fear of combat and his attraction to it, a slightly different use of the term which nonetheless might have inspired the current usage.
Previously, the term war wimp was sometimes used, coined during the Vietnam War by Congressman Andrew Jacobs, a Marine veteran of the Korean War. Jacobs defined a war wimp as "someone who is all too willing to send others to war, but never got 'round to going himself".
Donald Trump has been used as a modern example of a chickenhawk.