Did George Patton think that way? Did Rambo? Forget it. But Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf does, and it has made him the military hero the United States has yearned for ever since Vietnam. Briefing the country on television last week, he stood 6 feet 3 in his desert fatigues, a Combat Infantryman’ s Badge and paratrooper’ s wings on his barrel chest, four stars on his rumpled collar. He talked morals and character along with strategy and tactics, the just cause as well as the will to power. At 56, and 240 pounds, he looked like a fatherly meatpacker, a dangerous man to annoy; but he came across as a warrior with a soul, not a dour martinet like William Westmoreland or a media slicker like Alexander Haig. Outfoxing Saddam, he’d kept allied casualties during a Normandy-scale invasion to fewer than those from one bad week in Vietnam. “He’d make a great candidate for president,” said Stephen Ambrose, the historian. “He’s our first victorious general since MacArthur and Ike.”
In the euphoria of the moment, such comparisons were inevitable, if a bit extravagant: Grenada, Schwarzkopf’s last zone of battle, was hardly the Philippines, and Iraq wasn’t the Third Reich. But the country badly needed a victory and he had delivered it, playing Omar Bradley, the soldier’s soldier of World War II, to Colin Powell’s Eisenhower. He did have a flaw or two, including a hair-trigger temper and a thin skin for bad reviews. An old paratrooper’s injury gave him chronic back pain, and until he closed with Saddam, there were those who wondered whether someone leaner and younger might have been better fit to command. What they forgot was his 170 IQ, his three Silver Stars for valor and his reputation for risking his own life to help soldiers in danger of losing theirs. Taking over CentCom two years ago, he whipped a Sleepy Hollow headquarters into fighting trim. The Middle East was his area of operations. He believed this theater would produce the next war. Saddam obliged him.
Schwarzkopf may have the gut of a middle linebacker, but he has a quarterback’s brain. On an office wall map in Riyadh, he plotted the deepening and hardening of the Saddam line. When he saw that the dictator wasn’t extending his defenses westward, he drew a line through the Wadi al-Batin down to Hafar al-Batin and said, “That’s it.” Then he went out there. Poking the desert with his foot, he discovered that it could support trucks as well as tanks and he got to work deploying his assets. Saddam might have hurt him by using chemical weapons to choke off the supply port of Dhahran. Three Iraqi fighters could have made junk of the planes jammed nose to tail on the airfield at Riyadh. Night after night Schwarzkopf badgered Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Horner (“They can’t get through. You’re guaranteeing me that, right?”). The day the air war began and Saddam lost control of the skies, he thought with relief, “We’ve got them.”
The conviction sprang from Schwarzkopf’s certainty that Saddam could no longer escape, not from his love for rival services. In Schwarzkopf’s briefing, he praised Horner, the Marines, the Special Forces, allies and just about everyone else involved in whipping Saddam; but he remained Army Green right down to his combat boots. He had counted on planes to maul Saddam’s defenses, play hell with his command-and-control network, savage his Air Force and artillery, neutralize his chemical weaponry. But he knew air power alone could not win the war. Part of the problem was tactical, part political. At the back of his mind he wondered, “How long would the world stand by and watch the United States pound the living hell out of Iraq without saying, ‘Wait a minute - enough is enough’.” He itched to send ground troops to finish the job.
His deeper concern was to reverse the damage Vietnam had done to the Army’s morale and the country’s self-esteem. After serving two tours in that quagmire, he emerged with scars to match his war medals. He told C.D.B. Bryan, author of “Friendly Fire,” that after he came home as a lieutenant colonel in 1970, it shook him to find Americans spitting on soldiers as napalm addicts and baby burners. According to Bryan’s account in The New Republic, Schwarzkopf thought for a time he would quit, retreat to the woods. One day when his sister Sally defended the peace movement, he blew up and threw her out of his house. Then, to his amazement, he burst into tears. For years he didn’t know whether he had Vietnam out of his system. He knew one thing: if it ever came to a choice between compromising his moral principles and performing his duties, he would resign his commission, hang up his uniform and go with his principles.
As field commander in the gulf, Schwarzkopf replaced the phased escalation of the Vietnam era with a single, overwhelming application of force. Between August and March, he passed a number of milestones: the meeting after Iraq invaded Kuwait when Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd said to him, “Come”; the successful defense that pinned Saddam down; the recognition that the only way to get him out of Kuwait was to eject him; the decision to begin the air campaign. Then there was Saddam’s forlorn attack on Khafji, when he began to think, “We are going to kick this guy’s tail.” The moment Saddam’s highly vaunted Fifth Division came under fire, it broke and surrendered en masse. Saddam might have a 700,000-man Army, but when Schwarzkopf looked at what it could do, he thought, “This was a lousy outfit. Lousy.” At that moment, his own troops were honed to perfection–and ready for the kill.
Schwarzkopf’s military philosophy turns on his regard for the arts of war and his respect for the lives of ordinary soldiers. When a reporter asked him what he thought of Saddam’s leadership, he said, “Hah.” Ticking off his contempt on the fingers of his left hand, he noted that Saddam was “neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational art, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier.” Having run out of fingers, he said, “Other than that, he is a great military man.” Schwarzkopf was disgusted with Saddam’s elite Republican Guard. They were better trained, better paid, better fed, and, “Oh, by the way, stationed well to the rear so they could be the first ones to bug out,” while ordinary soldiers who had been lied to, badly equipped and fed were left to bear the brunt of the allied assault. To keep his men in the trenches, Saddam had sent execution squads into Kuwait. “I gotta tell you,” Schwarzkopf said, “a soldier doesn’t fight very hard for a leader who is going to shoot him on a whim.”
The general’s media blitz lifted a news blackout that had darkened relations between the military and the media. Jabbing a red-tipped pointer at his color-coded maps, talking lucidly, quickly (“Next chart, please”), he disposed of Saddam as easily on the air as he had done on the field of battle. He didn’t gloat, and he spoke English, not militarese. Explaining his surprise flanking attack, he said, “Once we had taken out his eyes, we did what can best be described as the Hail Mary play in football”: the receivers went down one side of the field, the quarterback lobbed the ball and everyone prayed. He talked up the righteousness of the mission; and he showed compassion for the dead and wounded. The small number of casualties had been a miracle, he said. “But it will never be miraculous for the families of those people.” And he called the deaths by friendly fire “a terrible tragedy.”
Other military briefers had ham-handedly sparred with reporters; Schwarzkopf juggled toughness with humor. Someone asked him if the allied advance to within 100 miles of Baghdad might have encouraged Saddam to think the coalition was going all the way. “I wouldn’t have minded at all,” he said, adding, “Frankly, I don’t think they ever knew [we] were there until the door had already been closed on them.”
Schwarzkopf has great physical courage; armchair tacticians irritate him. His mouth pursed tightly when a reporter asked if Iraqi fortifications might have been less formidable than everyone had been led to believe. “Have you ever been in a minefield?” he snapped. Well, no, the reporter replied. Schwarzkopf won his third Silver Star for inching across a minefield in Vietnam to lead a panic-stricken company to safety. Three of his men were killed and one had a leg blown off when they triggered a mine as they tried to cut a splint for a wounded comrade. When asked if a cease-fire would keep him from completing his job, he said, “We’ve accomplished our mission. When the decision makers come to the decision that there should be a cease-fire nobody will be happier than me.”
If anything, peace should find Schwarzkopf more than ever in demand. The Wall Street Journal sent a reporter out to look into his future and found entrepreneurs of every corporate stripe eager to offer him jobs in the $300,000 to $1 million-a-year bracket, seven-figure book advances, college presidencies. With 35 years on active duty, he faces mandatory retirement next summer. But four-star generals serve at the pleasure of the president, and gossip at the Pentagon now touts him as successor to Gen. Carl Vuono as Army chief of staff or supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe. Whatever he does, he won’t just fade away. As a grateful President Bush put it last week, Stormin’ Norman has become big enough to do anything he wants to do.
What’s your overall opinion of the following (percent saying favorable)?
93% Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf 86% Gen. Colin Powell 87% Dick Cheney 84% James Baker
For this NEWSWEEK Poll, The Gallup Organization interviewed a national sample of 769 adults by telephone March 1, 1991. The margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points. Some “Don’t Know” and other responses not shown. The Newsweek Poll c 1991 by Newsweek, Inc.
The gulf war’s brightest stars may soon rise even higher. Last week there was new speculation that Gens. H. Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell, Joint Chiefs chairman, would add a fifth star to the constellation on their epaulets. Since the rank was created in 1944, only World War II heroes have been so honored: George C. Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Henry H. Arnold and Omar N. Bradley. No one has been accorded the rank since Bradley’s promotion in 1950.
