Gen. John R. Galvin, who began his improbable military career as an aspiring cartoonist and went on to be the last Cold War supreme allied commander in Europe, died on Friday at his home in Jonesboro, Ga., near Atlanta. He was 86.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his daughter Kathleen M. Galvin said.
As a young man, in 1948, General Galvin was encouraged by a friend to join the National Guard to supplement his tuition and finish high school before being drafted. Taking that advice, and putting off his cartoon-drawing ambitions, he was assigned to be a medic. Soon he was stabbing grapefruits as practice for administering vaccinations.

Later, in 1950, a sergeant in the Guard steered him to West Point. It became the springboard for a 44-year military career, which included two tours in Vietnam, Army commands in Latin America and Europe, and, eventually, an appointment as NATO supreme allied commander in Europe.
General Galvin oversaw the North Atlantic military alliance for five years, from 1987 to 1992, retooling it into a more mobile, flexible multinational force after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting deep reductions in NATO’s conventional and nuclear arms.
With his forces no longer facing the German-Polish border, General Galvin won the confidence of former Soviet satellite nations in Eastern Europe as they sought to join the alliance.
When General Galvin retired in 1993, Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Washington Post, described him as “arguably without peer among living generals” and “a man who anticipated and helped shape a new era.”
“He is leaving as a consummate diplomat,” Mr. Gellman wrote in The Post, “who more than any other Westerner gave Moscow’s generals the confidence to let their war machine unravel.”
General Galvin was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit and the Distinguished Flying Cross. He was also inducted into the United States Army Ranger Hall of Fame.
After retiring, he assisted with negotiations for a cease-fire in Bosnia and served as dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University until 2000.
John Rogers Galvin was born in Melrose, Mass., on May 12, 1929. He studied at Boston University; Merrimack College, in North Andover, Mass.; and art school before joining the National Guard. When he graduated from West Point, he was the first in his family to earn a college degree.
During his military career, General Galvin took part in the research for the government history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers, as well as in the Patriot missile defense of Israel and the rescue of Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq during the Gulf War.
He earned a master’s degree in English at Columbia University, was fluent in Spanish and German, and taught national security at West Point.
In his book “Fighting the Cold War: A Soldier’s Memoir,” published this year, General Galvin described four essential elements of leadership, which, he acknowledged, he did not always successfully practice: “self-awareness, teamwork, communication and sensitivity to change.”
In addition to his daughter Kathleen, survivors include his wife, the former Virginia Lee Brennan; three other daughters, Mary Jo Schrade, Beth Galvin White and Erin Scranton; five grandchildren; a brother, James; and a sister, Nancy Galvin.