All In

by Paula Broadwell

  “RESULTS, BOY!” his father used to say. He was not interested in excuses. The preternaturally gifted young David Petraeus delivered. Whether it was by winning the newspaper boy delivery contest as an adolescent, scoring the winning goal in a critical high school soccer game, or becoming the head of the ecumenical religious youth groups in Cornwall, New York, just seven miles from West Point, Petraeus displayed his drive early. The “no-excuses” attitude Sixtus Petraeus displayed with his son came from his own experience as an officer on a Dutch ship and then as the captain of a U.S. Merchant Marine ship in World War II. Sixtus allowed little room for error in the younger Petraeus’s performance in school, in sports, or at home, in part because of these high standards. A desire to please his father would, in great part, shape Petraeus’s desire to excel. His father was an austere perfectionist who would do anything for his son but who dispensed his affection in the form of “gruff love,” as Petraeus describes it. Still, he respected his father and relished hearing stories of his time in the military.

  Petraeus’s father had been at sea with a Dutch ship when Germany invaded Holland in May of 1940. According to Petraeus’s only sibling, his older sister, Carol, their father’s ship had just arrived in New York City when he received the news that the Netherlands had been overrun. There was no way he could return to Holland. He found himself and his crew welcomed in New York at a soldiers-and-sailors event in a local auditorium in the Seamen’s Church Institute. One of the event coordinators he met was the petite and pretty Miriam Howell, a librarian who had attended Oberlin College, in Ohio. Sixtus and Miriam were married in April 1941 in the Ocean Avenue Congregational Church, in Brooklyn, New York. Soon after, Sixtus and most of his shipmates signed on with the U.S. Merchant Marine, and ultimately he became a U.S. citizen.

  Born near Rotterdam, Sixtus and his family were originally from the Friesland area, in the northern part of Holland. This area was distinct from the country’s eleven other provinces, with its own dialect, its dense agricultural production and its heavy presence of windmills. “I’m not Dutch; I’m Friesian,” Sixtus would sternly tell his new friends in the community, in his thick accent.

  On his mother’s side, David Petraeus was English. Miriam Howell’s great-great-great-grandfather was a lord of Westbury Manor, where his son, Miriam’s great-great-grandfather Edward Howell, was born in 1584. Edward Howell’s family emigrated to New England as part of the “Great Migration” of the English Puritans, landing in Lynn, Massachusetts, in the 1630s.

  After gaining his citizenship, Sixtus quickly found a new home. The U.S. Merchant Marine was desperate for experienced sailors. It was losing sailors faster than they could be generated. With his experience and English skills, Sixtus was promoted in the subsequent years and quickly rose in rank, eventually becoming a captain in 1945. He was one of a corps of decorated Merchant Mariners whom the Russians would later recognize with a medal of achievement—in part for having survived a convoy to Murmansk, an extremely dangerous mission in which numerous ships typically were sunk by German U-boats operating from Norwegian fjords.

  After the war, Sixtus and Miriam moved to Cornwall-on-Hudson, a “Norman Rockwell community” along the Hudson River with a little white church and steeple on the village’s Main Street. The two were active in their church, paid cash for everything they bought, including their house, and kept a low profile in local politics.

  Sixtus’s career at sea meant that he and Miriam, a town librarian, wouldn’t have children until later. Carol was born in 1947, David in 1952. Their simple life in Cornwall consisted of few faraway adventures but plenty of East Coast ski trips (Sixtus remained a member of a downhill ski club into his seventies), camping trips in local state parks, and trips to historical sites in New England—visiting Concord and Walden Pond and beyond and reading excerpts from history books and relevant literature along the way. The Petraeuses’ backyard had ropes for climbing, a pull-up bar, a baseball backstop, a basketball hoop and various sports equipment; there were always soccer balls and baseball bats lying around. The simple two-story, one-and-a-half bathroom, four-bedroom house was rich with books and newspapers. Petraeus’s mother was, at times, overly attentive and prone to worrying, but she adored her children and, as a librarian and a lover of Charles Dickens and other classics, took great care in Petraeus’s intellectual development. Miriam wanted her son to go to Oberlin College, where she and all her cousins had received their degrees. But for a boy growing up seven miles from West Point, the allure of the U.S. Military Academy was irresistible.

  Petraeus’s soccer coach had been captain of the West Point team, and his math teacher had taught at the academy. The director of admissions lived right around the corner—Petraeus delivered his newspaper. During high school, Petraeus dated the daughter of an Air Force officer in the town and was influenced by her father’s demeanor. It was almost preordained that he would become a cadet.

  David Petraeus got in the family car with his parents on July 1, 1970, and drove the seven miles from Cornwall to West Point for “R-Day,” reception day for the incoming class of new cadets. He was assigned to Company C-1, “Charging Charlie.”

  Although known as fun-loving by his peers, Petraeus was also driven to excel. His roommate, Chris White, had decided to pursue the pre-med track, one of the most demanding academic programs at West Point, which gave medical-school scholarships to around ten top graduates. The hypercompetitive Petraeus decided to join him—not so much because he wanted to be a doctor, he later realized, but because he found the competition irresistible. “It was the Mount Everest of academic tracks,” he recalled. Petraeus rarely stayed up past the 11:30 P.M. lights-out curfew; the pace of the West Point day, which for him included competing on the intercollegiate soccer and ski teams, rendered him exhausted and in bed by lights-out.

  By the time he was a firstie, as seniors are called, Petraeus had risen to the top 5 percent of his class based on his performance in leadership, athletics and academics—the three areas in which cadets are ranked against their peers. He and White, his roommate again during the last semester of firstie year, were known as the most focused students in their company. “I think every cadet questions the discipline at West Point at one time or another during his years here,” Cadet Petraeus said at the time, grinning. “But in the long run the imposed discipline brings out self-discipline in each cadet, and I think that’s very beneficial.”

  While White remained intent on becoming a doctor, Petraeus realized that what he really wanted to do “was to lead folks in service, to serve in the essence of the military organization, that of a combat infantry unit.” He would impose discipline on himself to be the best in the infantry, and he later told his former girlfriend from Cornwall, Ellen Smitchger, that he “wanted to lead the Army” someday.

  This inspiration to join the infantry came in part from a favorite West Point expression: “Much of the history we teach was made by people we taught.” Many of those heroes he had studied in his military history classes—MacArthur, Eisenhower, Ridgway and Galvin among them—came from the infantry. Infantrymen often rose to the top of the Army. At the time his class selected their branch choice and assignment, he knew he wanted to earn a Ranger tab, become an Airborne trooper and serve abroad. He knew his place at the top of the class would allow him to begin his career on the most likely path to the top. In time, Petraeus would be first in his Ranger School class and would command multiple airborne units.

  White was prophetic in the description he wrote of Petraeus for the 1974 West Point yearbook, using the nickname that had stuck with Petraeus since Little League: “Peaches came to the Mil Acad with high ambitions, but unlike most, he accomplished his goals. A striver to the Max, Dave was always ‘going for it’ in sport, academics, leadership, even his social life. This attitude will surely lead to success in the future, Army or otherwise.”

  The reference to his social life was a nod to his engagement to Hollist
er Knowlton, the daughter of West Point’s superintendent, a military intellectual who had distinguished himself on the battlefield in World War II and Vietnam. In the fall of 1973, “Holly” Knowlton was a senior at Dickinson College, a beautiful, smart and witty young woman who wrote her senior honors dissertation on François Mauriac, a French novelist who had been awarded the Nobel Prize. On a visit to West Point one football weekend, a friend of the family hoped to fix her up with a certain cadet to take her to the game. But when he was otherwise engaged, a call was placed to the cadet brigade headquarters to find a replacement, the assistant brigade adjutant on duty: David Petraeus. Not knowing who his blind date was, he agreed to take on this potentially sensitive mission. Soon, the two would find themselves commuting to each other’s colleges whenever time allowed, sometimes braving fierce New York snowstorms to spend time together. Petraeus would sneak in the side door of the superintendent’s home aside the Plain, the academy’s parade field, to visit Holly when she made the trip back to West Point. Both maintained their first priorities of graduating at the top of their classes, and both did: Petraeus graduated fortieth in his class, a “star man,” signifying top 5 percent, cadet captain and varsity letterman, while Holly was summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with honors in both French and English. The two were married on July 6, 1974, at the Cadet Chapel on West Point’s campus a month after Petraeus received his commission from Lieutenant General Knowlton as a 2nd lieutenant in the infantry.

  David’s roots stood in sharp contrast to his bride’s patrician-military upbringing. To Petraeus, the stature of Holly’s family was intoxicating. He loved becoming a part of it. Holly’s well-connected and accomplished grandparents had a large compound in West Springfield, New Hampshire, with a boathouse on a nearby lake that they would visit often. Holly’s father, Lieutenant General Knowlton, came from a prominent and well-to-do Massachusetts family and had graduated seventh in his class at West Point. He fought in four campaigns during World War II, beginning in Normandy. In the last weeks of the war, he was awarded a Silver Star for leading a reconnaissance mission deep behind German lines to make one of the first contacts with the Soviet forces north of Berlin. After the war, as the Cold War lines hardened, he was one of a handful of officers selected to help General Eisenhower establish the new NATO headquarters in Paris. Knowlton later served two years under General Westmoreland in Vietnam, where he visited every province as a senior official in the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program and commanded combat forces in the Mekong Delta. When he returned to the Pentagon, Knowlton pushed to conduct a serious investigation of the My Lai massacre. Promoted to three stars at West Point, he retired three tours later as a four-star general. He would become Petraeus’s “military father,” according to Knowlton’s wife, Peggy. Petraeus would be their “fourth son,” and General Knowlton would pass on to him tales of his fights against the Nazis and the Vietcong after Petraeus had proven himself as a cadet.

  Petraeus was eager to fight and win the kinds of wars Knowlton described during dinners at the superintendent’s house, Quarters 100—one of the most distinctive buildings at West Point. Sitting at the long rectangular dinner table in the historic supe’s house was an honor afforded to the academy’s rising stars. The dinner was always a cut above the mess hall. Petraeus’s early interest in the topic of “uncomfortable wars” began at West Point—at these dinners. There were no mandatory classes on counterinsurgency warfare at West Point at that time.

  Life at the academy generally shielded cadets from the antiwar sentiment that prevailed at the time, and Knowlton tried to inculcate in the cadets the virtues of the profession of arms, even while the Army was approaching its post-Vietnam nadir. In his oral history, Knowlton later reflected that he was the “commander of a stockade surrounded by attacking Indians.”

  Knowlton served as the academy’s forty-ninth superintendent. He was involuntarily ordered to West Point on twenty-four hours’ notice by Westmoreland after the departure of Major General Sam Koster, whose record was tainted because of his association with My Lai. Westmoreland wanted Knowlton to establish some “consistency” and improve communications between the Pentagon and the nation’s oldest military academy, especially as the Army began to resurrect itself after the morass of Vietnam. The rapid turnover in superintendents and the frequent personality clashes between them and the Army chiefs of staff had not been healthy for the Corps of Cadets; Westmoreland thought that if Knowlton stayed for four years, he could help stabilize important leadership initiatives in this time of transition for the academy. Westmoreland himself had served as superintendent and had a soft spot for the Corps and a burning interest in everything that went on at West Point.

  Knowlton was determined to run West Point differently from his predecessors. From the time he arrived, he would write long memorandums to the Pentagon, sometimes every day. In the memos, he didn’t ask for permission to conduct affairs the way he saw fit. Rather, he explained the critical issues facing the school and described how he planned to deal with them. Petraeus began drafting the same sort of “commander’s update” for his boss when he was in Bosnia and carried the tradition with him to Iraq, Central Command and Afghanistan.

  Knowlton buffered the cadets from the negativity surrounding Vietnam in part by sharing stories about his own positive experiences there. The Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) initiative was the main U.S. pacification program. The mission of CORDS was threefold: providing security for the local population, destroying insurgent infrastructure and building Vietnamese government capacity—and doing all of this on a scale large enough to be decisive. These concepts would later become part of Petraeus’s strategy for the surge in Iraq.

  While on Westmoreland’s staff, Knowlton had made it a goal to visit as many of the districts in Vietnam as he could, to gather local knowledge and perspectives from the detachment teams. He went into the countryside to show the interest of the central government in the life of his teams and the people in the area. These teams would gather “atmospherics” and then initiate locally requested projects to improve standards of living, which included building medical facilities, schools and bridges. This level of understanding of local socioeconomic factors helped Knowlton to establish the Hamlet Evaluation System, an initiative to capture metrics for levels of security throughout the sub-provincial geographic areas.

  But metrics in counterinsurgency are messy, as both Knowlton and Petraeus learned in their respective military commands.

  WHEN HE ARRIVED IN Afghanistan, Petraeus, who had gone on to study advanced economics and international relations at Princeton, devoured statistics and data to help him understand the state of the war. He also knew that a commander could improve “situational awareness” and his understanding of the circumstances in various locations by reaching out to those in the field. He’d been schooled in techniques for achieving situational awareness by Knowlton and other early mentors, and now he worked to gain it by dint of his own eighteen-hour days, part of which he spent communicating directly with soldiers, scholars and journalists in the field, in locations ranging from the desolate outposts in Kunar and Nuristan provinces, on the Pakistan border in northeastern Afghanistan, to the main fighting effort in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, to the southwest.

  He was painfully aware that he didn’t know Afghanistan nearly as well as he had known Iraq when he assumed command of the surge in Baghdad in 2007. Others noticed it as well. In Iraq, he had already had nearly two and a half years on the ground when he arrived to command the surge. He’d had an inner circle team that was familiar with Iraq, too. This was, by contrast, his entry-level position in Afghanistan. He’d visited the country many times but he’d never lived there. Other than his military aide, no one on the small team he brought with him from Central Command had deployment experience there, either: not his executive officer, Commander’s Initiatives Group director, personal security detachment com
mander or personal public affairs officer. Petraeus valued their loyalty and their ability to interpret his vision more than their specific expertise. They would all gain that in time, he thought, and in the interim they would rely on the subordinate commanders and the personal and headquarters staff with Afghan experience whom he had inherited and would also reach out to his “directed telescopes.”

  In the meantime, he set out immediately to build what were perhaps his two most critical relationships. The first was with Ambassador Eikenberry, with whom there had long been some professional tension with the military in Kabul. Eikenberry had been in the news most recently for feuding with McChrystal. The second was with President Karzai, whom Petraeus had met a number of times in person in Kabul and Washington and with whom he had communicated periodically by telephone from the States.

  Petraeus had more than a little in common with Eikenberry, a retired Army lieutenant general who had graduated from West Point and Ranger School. They weren’t close friends, but they weren’t rivals, much less enemies. Petraeus had worked well with Eikenberry in past years, and he respected Eikenberry’s long service in, and knowledge of, Afghanistan. One Petraeus aide said the two men were determined to work together and put the past civil-military tensions behind them. Petraeus had invited Eikenberry to fly into Kabul from NATO headquarters, in Belgium, with the team. “It’s about creating a culture of teamwork,” the aide recalled. “He was setting a tone: We’re going to work together.’”

  After Eikenberry’s cables critical of Karzai were leaked in 2009, Eikenberry became the focus of complaints from Karzai. The Afghan president would repeatedly bring up the cables and also Eikenberry’s supposed interference with the presidential elections in 2009 with visiting officials, including Petraeus, over the course of the next year. Although Petraeus and the ISAF staff had a good partnership with the embassy, Petraeus found that Karzai’s visceral reaction to Eikenberry prevented the general from operating the way he had with Ambassador Crocker in Baghdad. There, Petraeus and Crocker attended all meetings with Iraq’s Prime Minister Maliki together to present a united front. Ultimately, Petraeus stopped including Eikenberry in most of his personal meetings with Karzai because of the unhelpful atmosphere generated by his presence, according to Petraeus’s aides. Over time, Petraeus found that one-on-one meetings with Karzai were the most productive.