The corridors in Army, Navy, and Air Force country were decorated like mini-museums, while the Eisenhower Corridor was hung with a few pictures. Ike’s hall, I believed, should honor his memory more dramatically. Weinberger, a lover of history and tradition, concurred. Doc Cooke was the man I went to see to push through my plan to remake the corridor. Doc found the money in some budgetary cookie jar, gave me his talented staff artist, Joe Pisani, and we went to work. For months, the corridor, draped with drop cloths, looked like a Jackson Pollock retrospective. The hammering and sawing seemed to go on forever.
Midway through the project, Marybel Batjer dragged me out into the hall. Were we opening a bordello? she wanted to know. The corridor commemorating the architect of victory in Europe was being painted fingernail pink.
“Does this look right to you?” I asked the foreman.
“We don’t pick ’em, General,” he said. “We just slap it on.”
It turned out the paint number had been transposed on the work order, and the hallway had to be redone. In the meantime, some wiseacre hung a sign in the corridor: “Powell’s Pizza Parlor, Opening Soon.”
Nine months after the work first began, John D. Eisenhower, the late President’s son, presided over the dedication of the refurbished corridor. We had found an old sign reading “Buying Station—The Bell-Springs Creamery,” from the creamery where Ike worked eighty hours a week as a boy. We displayed his West Point yearbook, opened to his photo with the inscription “Daredevil Dwight, the Dauntless Don…. He’s the handsomest man in the Corps.” Among the glass display cases were mementos of the military career of the Allied leader who gave the fateful “go” for the invasion of Normandy. From the exhibits you could trace Ike’s life from Abilene, Kansas, to the White House. The corridor today is an attraction on the Pentagon tour and a lasting source of pride to me.
On March 25, I sat with Alma in probably the most stately setting in all Washington, the Diplomatic Reception Room at the Department of State, which Weinberger had borrowed for my farewell dinner. I accepted the tribute as a mark of friendship and the almost sonlike relationship I enjoyed with Weinberger. The next day, Cap personally presented me with the third star that went with my new job as a corps commander.
My breaking away had required the intercession of Will Taft. After all my pleading failed, Will had gone in and finally persuaded Weinberger to sit down and pick a replacement for me. Weinberger’s new military assistant was to be Vice Admiral Don Jones. By this time, I did not care if they picked Beetle Bailey. I just wanted out.
Faithful John Wickham proved as good as his word. I was off to command V Corps in Germany. The assignment stirred powerful emotions in me. I was returning to the place where I had begun my military career commanding forty troops; I was now to command 75,000.
As an additional farewell treat, Weinberger took me along on Air Force One when President Reagan went to Grenada to receive the thanks of the island’s people for the October 1983 U.S. invasion that threw out the communists. It was my first trip with the President, and as I sat in the rear of the plane, with stewards passing drinks and snacks, watching my individual TV screen, I thought, this is a pleasant way to travel. Later, Weinberger took me forward to the private cabin for a photo op with the President. Ronald Reagan’s greeting was so cordial that I could not tell if he actually remembered me or if I was experiencing the standard Reagan seduction. The President was wearing the customary snowy white shirt and perfectly knotted tie. But his jacket was hanging up and he wore jogging pants to save the crease in his trousers.
I have never witnessed an outburst of mass emotion to match the President’s welcome in Grenada. The island’s population was about 84,000 people, and all of them seemed to have been packed into the sports stadium. Ronald Reagan was introduced as the liberator, the Messiah, the savior, and the crowd went wild. He gave a masterful speech, greeted by a thunderous ovation. Yet, I observed what I had noticed in him before, a certain professionalism, as if the directions read, “Crowd cheers,” and he accepted it as part of the script.
Two years and ten months—and a lifetime had passed. I left the Pentagon with the warmest feelings toward the man I had served. Cap Weinberger had his little quirks, but at the core, he was a great fighter, a brilliant advocate, a man who, like his President, set a few simple objectives and did not deviate from them. He projected strength, unflappability, and supreme self-confidence. Yet I will never forget a revealing moment in a near-empty 707 in the dark of the night somewhere over the Mediterranean. It happened in October 1984 on the final leg of one of those draining capital-to-capital marathons. We had done business in Italy, Tunisia, Israel, and Jordan. In the Sinai, we had been caught in a lung-infecting mist that frequently blankets the area. None of our party was feeling well, least of all Weinberger. Sitting in a cabin up forward were Rich Armitage and I on one side and Weinberger on the other. We could barely see in the dark. We thought he was asleep. But then that deep voice broke the silence. We always looked on the Secretary as unshakable. Yet, he was saying, to himself, it seemed, “This is a lonely life. You make real enemies but few real friends. It exhausts a man in body and spirit. I try to serve the President as faithfully as my strength permits. But gratitude does not always come easily to him or his wife.” He paused for a moment as though he suddenly realized how nakedly he had revealed himself to us. He went on, “I can speak to you two. I trust you.” Finding that this seemingly indomitable man shared the same anxieties as the rest of us made him more, not less, admirable in my eyes. But this was a face we were permitted to see only on that one occasion.
Weinberger’s more customary dogged certainty was both the man’s strength and his weakness. During his years in the Pentagon, the world had shifted, but Weinberger had not. His calls for ever-increasing defense spending started to sound like a stuck whistle. And he eventually lost Congress’s attention. He hated to let go of the “evil empire,” even as it was starting to dissolve before our eyes. Yet, when he was right, it was at precisely the right time. To Weinberger and Reagan we owe the resurgence of the United States as a respected and credible military power, after the debacle of Vietnam and the fiasco of Desert One. I readily give credit to the Carter-Brown era for getting much-needed modern weaponry on the drawing boards. But had it not been for the Reagan-Weinberger buildup, that is where most of those weapons would have wound up—on the drawing boards. Possibly the greatest contribution the Reagan-Weinberger team made was to end the long estrangement between the American people and their defenders. During this time, the rupture was healed, and America once more embraced its armed forces.
On March 16, I left the Pentagon to prepare for my new assignment. I saluted as I passed the sentinel in front of Weinberger’s office (whom I had never managed to dislodge). I turned in my true badge of status, my River Entrance parking permit. I have never felt anything but pride at serving my country. This day, I walked taller than ever. And it may have been my imagination, but it seemed to me that during the Reagan-Weinberger years, everyone in the military started standing taller too.
Thirteen
“Frank, You’re Gonna Ruin My Career”
I FACED TAKING OVER V CORPS WITH CONFIDENCE TINGED WITH A TOUCH OF anxiety. It was ten years since I had been in command of the 2d Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, at Fort Campbell. In my previous field assignment, I had been an assistant division commander under Jack Hudachek, where I had not exactly emerged as George Patton. And I still felt uneasy about skipping a division command and going directly to a corps. I was determined to prove that I was an able commanding general and not a Pentagon-bred political general.
I had hoped to assume command in April, but the officer I was replacing, Lieutenant General Robert L. “Sam” Wetzel, was in no hurry to cut short his own tour, since after this command he would be retiring. I therefore did not report to Germany until June 1986. I spent the intervening months getting back up to speed at combat schools. Alma and I also studied German eight hours a day
, five days a week, for three weeks. I had a slim edge over her, a C and a D in the language at CCNY, and my earlier tour in Germany, where I picked up a vocabulary consisting mostly of Bier und Schnitzel. German irregular verbs did not entrance Alma, and I practically had to hold a gun to her head to get her to go to class.
Worse was yet to come. Because of the terrorist threat in Germany in those days, we both had to take a course called Defensive Driving, at a stock-car track in West Virginia. They had us barreling around the track taking curves at eighty-five miles an hour, practicing how to elude terrorists. We were taught how to spin the car around at breakneck speed and wind up going in the opposite direction, like a Mafia getaway driver. The final test involved ramming a car blocking a road. You had to hit it just right to knock it out of the way without destroying your own car or killing yourself. Alma did not graduate with honors and did not much care.
I went to West Germany first, and shortly afterward, Alma, Linda, Annemarie, and our cat, Max, flew into the Rhine-Main airport to be met by Second Lieutenant Michael Powell. While in ROTC, Mike had gone through jump school and air assault school, just as I had, though he wound up as a tanker rather than an infantryman. He was now on active duty serving as scout platoon leader, 2d Armored Cavalry Regiment, VII Corps, stationed in Amberg.
Came the day for the change of command, July 2, 1986. V Corps assembled on the headquarters parade grounds with American and West German government and military officials on the reviewing stand. The Wetzels, Sam and his wife, Eileen, arrived, and we exchanged a few words of greeting. Wetzel and I inspected the troops, the V Corps colors were turned over to me, and command formally changed hands. The king is dead. Long live the king.
In one sense, not much had changed in the quarter century since my last West German tour. When I had first arrived in Gelnhausen in December 1958 as a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant, Dwight D. Eisenhower was President of the United States and Nikita Khrushchev the Soviet premier. Twenty divisions of Soviet and communist-bloc troops faced five U.S. divisions, plus our Allies’ forces, across the border between East and West Germany. Two years before, the Soviets had crushed the freedom fighters in Hungary. One year after my departure, they had put up the Berlin Wall, and subsequently they stamped out bids for freedom in Czechoslovakia and Poland. East and West then stood virtually warhead to warhead. As I took over V Corps, in 1986, four American divisions and nineteen Soviet divisions still confronted each other over a border bristling with even deadlier weaponry. On our side, we had replaced old M-60A3 tanks with sophisticated M-1s, obsolete M-113 personnel carriers with new Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and aging tactical nukes with more accurate and devastating models.
Yet, much had changed. For the past two years, Mikhail Gorbachev, a new Soviet man, age fifty-four, energetic, dynamic, preaching the openness of glasnost and the reforms of perestroika, had ruled the Soviet Union. Margaret Thatcher, no pushover, had said that Gorbachev was a chap we could do business with. The previous November, President Reagan and the Soviets had held their first summit at Geneva. Reagan had annoyed Gorbachev by insisting on pressing ahead with SDI. Still, they were negotiating arms reductions and trying to reduce the possibility of nuclear annihilation.
I was, however, a soldier, not a politician, and my present mission was to be prepared to engage Soviet forces the instant they advanced across that weave of valleys forming the Fulda Gap, the same role I had had as a young lieutenant a quarter of a century before.
V Corps headquarters was located in Frankfurt and occupied one of the largest buildings in all Europe, the Abrams Complex, named in honor of the late Army Chief of Staff General Creighton W. Abrams, whom I had briefed long ago in Vietnam. It had been constructed in the 1920s by the renowned German architect Hans Poelzig, to house the main office of the I. G. Farben Petrochemical Company. For a time after World War II, General Eisenhower ruled as Supreme Allied Commander Europe from the suite I was to occupy. The building’s lobby was an art deco masterpiece, mucked up, however, by a greasy snack bar and other commercial concessions. At the time of my arrival, magnificent leaded glass windows were about to be taken out to vent the hamburger grill.
As I moved into my new office, a Gothic cavern, the first thing I did was set on my desk a photograph of a man in his mid-forties with a broad smiling face and wavy hair, wearing army fatigues. He looked like a steelworker, the kind of guy you might want to have a beer with in a Pittsburgh tavern. I wanted his picture before me because this man was my opponent, General Colonel Vladislav A. Achalov, commander of the Red Army’s eighty-thousand-man 8th Guards Army, positioned across the Fulda Gap.
… … …
My division commanders were older than me and had more time in service. Major General Orren R. “Cotton” Whiddon ran the 8th Infantry Division, which had almost been mine the year before. Whiddon was a lanky, self-confident Texan who knew his business. The 3d Armored Division was commanded by Major General Tom Griffin, who went way back with me to the Infantry Officers Advanced Course at Fort Benning. Backing me as deputy corps commander was my National War College classmate Major General Line Jones. Colonel Thomas White, an architect of post-Vietnam fighting doctrine, had also just joined V Corps, commanding the nth Armored Cavalry Regiment. And I had a crack chief of staff in Brigadier General Ross W. “Bill” Crossley. I had brought from the States Sergeant Major William Nowell, as command sergeant major, the senior noncommissioned officer in the corps. I was counting on Nowell to serve as my pipeline to the morale and needs of the troops.
Immediately after the change of command ceremony, I had Bill Crossley gather the team together at the V Corps officers’ club, once the I. G. Farben workers’ canteen. I knew that whatever I said this day would reverberate over the corps telegraph before sunset, and that this first impression of the new corps commander would stick. I told the commanders that I had two top priorities—war-fighting and stewardship. V Corps’ reason for being was to whip Achalov’s 8th Guards Army, if and when the time came. Every scout on the front line and every mechanic in the rear was here for that purpose. As for stewardship, the word had an almost holy ring for me. The American people had spent a lot to make the corps combat-ready. We had to make sure that not a dollar was wasted. They had also entrusted their sons and daughters to our care. The one thing that would guarantee trouble for a commander, I promised, was not tending to the well-being of soldiers and their families. What I had to say this day did not differ from what I had been taught at Fort Benning over a quarter of a century before: accomplish the mission and look after the troops. Back in the States, the night before my son, Mike, had shipped out for Germany, I had leaned over him after he had gone to bed, given him a fatherly kiss, and told him to look out for himself and to take care of his soldiers.
I also wanted to give the commanders some understanding of the kind of leader I was. “I fit no stereotype,” I said. “I don’t chase the latest management fads.” Vogue phrases such as “power down” and “centralized versus decentralized management” were not part of my vocabulary. I would give each of them whatever help was needed to get the job done. Sometimes I would hover over them; at other times, I would give them a long, loose leash. One technique was not right and the other wrong. The situation would dictate which approach would best accomplish the team’s mission.
Command is lonely, I said, and that was not just a romantic cliché. Sharing a problem with the boss, in this corps, would not be seen as weakness or failure, but as a sign of mutual confidence. On the other hand, they did not have to buck every decision up to me. “I have a wide zone of indifference,” I said. “I don’t care if you hold reveille at five-thirty or five forty-five A.M. And don’t ask me to decide.”
I explained my idea of loyalty. “When we are debating an issue, loyalty means giving me your honest opinion, whether you think I’ll like it or not. Disagreement, at this stage, stimulates me. But once a decision has been made, the debate ends. From that point on, loyalty means executing the decisio
n as if it were your own.”
This particular emperor expected to be told when he was naked. He did not care to freeze to death in his own ignorance. “If you think something is wrong, speak up,” I told them. “I’d rather hear about it sooner than later. Bad news isn’t wine. It doesn’t improve with age.” I would not jump in too early if they could still handle a problem. But I did not want to find out when it was too late for me to make a difference. “And if you screw up,” I advised, “just vow to do better next time. I don’t hold grudges. I don’t keep book.
“I will give you clear guidance as to what I want,” I continued. “If it’s not clear, ask me. If after a second and third explanation you still don’t get it, there may be something wrong with my transmitter, not your receiver. I won’t assume you are deaf or stupid.” The worst thing was for subordinates to labor in ignorance in order to conceal their confusion and wind up doing the wrong thing. “If you ever leave my office and don’t understand what I want, just march right back in and ask,” I said.
I told them that I would fight for everything they needed to perform the mission. “If we don’t have it in Frankfurt, I’ll go to USAREUR”—U.S. Army Europe. “If they don’t have it, I’ll go to Washington. But I will back you all the way.”
I told them that if, as commanders, they found themselves in a fight with my staff, I was predisposed to take their side. The staff existed to serve them. “If, however, I find that any of you are dumping on my people without good cause, you can bet I’ll come to their rescue.”
I explained that during these first few weeks, I expected to visit all ten West German communities where the corps was stationed. “You’ll be advised the first time I come, since I’ll want to meet your senior officers, the Bürgermeister, and other local officials. My wife will visit clinics and child-care centers and get to know your wives.” But after that first round, my visits would be on short notice, “just enough time to let you get the coffee table dusted and the underwear picked up. I’m not trying to play ‘gotcha.’ But it’s the only way for me to learn what’s really going on.” I was reflecting my continuing distrust of the Annual General Inspection syndrome of preparedness. I knew that planned visits always produce a flurry of wasted effort: “The smell of fresh paint and the sight of whitewashed walkways is a sure sign of an insecure commander,” I told them.
My American Journey Page 39