The Commander: Stormin' Norman On Top

By Jesse Birnbaum

When I peruse the conquered fame of heroes and the victories of mighty generals, I do not envy the generals.

-- Walt Whitman

It may come to pass that when the story of the gulf war is sifted and studied, the achievements of four-star Army General H. (for nothing) Norman Schwarzkopf will rank with those of Montgomery and Eisenhower and Alexander the Great -- or George McClellan and William Westmoreland. It is too early to predict how well or badly the war may go. Many battles are yet to be fought; many men are yet to die; thousands of innocent people are yet to suffer; a sure peace is yet to be forged.

What is known now is that the man who commands the vast military might of the allied coalition has prepared all his professional life for his role. Fortunately, he is by all accounts a passionately engaged leader of considerable talents and, what's more, possessed of a startling, prophetic mind.

As long ago as 1983, Schwarzkopf foresaw the possibility that the U.S. might one day find itself at war in the Middle East if an unfriendly nation succeeded in taking over a neighbor. Two years ago, as boss of the U.S. Central Command (which covers some North African countries and areas farther east), Schwarzkopf set out on his own to design a contingency plan. "He always believed that the big eruption would come in the Middle East," says his sister Sally. "He took the job at Central Command with the idea that he might well have to fight." Five days before Saddam Hussein launched his invasion, Schwarzkopf and his staff happened to be running an exercise predicated on the possibility that Iraq might overrun Kuwait. All that was necessary after that was for Schwarzkopf to polish his plan. It became the model for Operation Desert Shield.

Now that the shield has become a storm, Schwarzkopf is running the show as commander of the allied forces. Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson, fancying themselves cunning battlefield tacticians, liked to direct their generals hither and thither. George Bush, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell know better. Desert Storm, says Cheney, "is basically Norm's plan. It's fundamentally Norm's to execute."

And so he does. After directing -- on perilously short notice -- the biggest buildup of U.S. forces since Vietnam, Schwarzkopf is orchestrating a complex war machine comprising forces from 28 allied nations totaling 675,000 troops, hundreds of ships, and thousands of airplanes and tanks, all fully equipped and operating, says the Pentagon, right on schedule.

At the same time, Schwarzkopf has demonstrated the talents of a first-rate - diplomat, achieving cohesion not only among the traditionally rivalrous U.S. military services but also among the Arab and Western allies with all their conflicting interests. He is especially careful in his dealings with the Saudis. Only last week King Fahd, worried about an attack on Riyadh, wanted reassurance from the top. Schwarzkopf went to the palace and advised Fahd that his main concern was the possibility that Saddam could fire Scud missiles with chemical warheads at the capital. That was not much in the way of reassurance, but at least the King got straight talk.

Most of the straight talk takes place daily in Schwarzkopf's war room in his Riyadh compound. Having designed his battle plans with the help of top alliance commanders, the general delegates day-to-day operations to his flag officers. He is not a micromanager but a resolute overseer, who runs his campaign 18 hours a day. "I started out with what I thought was going to be a very orderly schedule," he says. "A 7 a.m. staff briefing, a 10 a.m. coalition briefing, then a 7 p.m. briefing with the component commanders. Boy, it looked like it was great. But I've got to tell you, more often than not the 7 a.m. meeting has not come off because everybody has been up so late at night."

His colleagues find it easy to forgive him. "Initially," says a British commander, "we were taken aback by his gung-ho appearance, but in a very short time we came to realize that here was a highly intelligent soldier -- a skilled planner, administrator and battlefield commander."

That judgment comes as no surprise to Schwarzkopf's old friends, who regard him with unalloyed admiration if not outright idolatry. Retired Army General Ward LeHardy, who was Schwarzkopf's West Point roommate, insists that "Norm is this generation's Doug MacArthur. He's got the tactical brilliance of Patton, the strategic insight of Eisenhower and the modesty of Bradley."

Many people might quarrel with the modesty part. Schwarzkopf can be charming, but he also possesses the ego -- and petulance -- of a field marshal. He has been known to pore over his press clippings, underlining criticisms or perceived slights and flogging memos about them to his subordinates. He has epic temper tantrums. When these erupt, says a senior Joint Chiefs of Staff officer, he starts "yelling and cursing and throwing things." What is most striking about Schwarzkopf, however, is his abiding certitude, a bristling self-assurance, the kind that many Army brats acquire with their first pair of long pants.

Schwarzkopf's father H. Norman Sr. was also a West Pointer who became a general. At one stage in his career, Norm Sr. left the Army to enter civic life. As head of the New Jersey state police, he led the investigation of the sensational Lindbergh baby kidnapping. For a time, he was a radio star, narrating a shoot-'em-up crime series.

At the outbreak of World War II, he rejoined the Army. From 1942 to '48, he led a mission to Iran, where he organized the nation's imperial police force. According to some historians, he returned to Tehran in 1953 to play a key role in the CIA operation that overthrew nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and installed the Shah of Iran.

Norm Jr., who was born in Trenton, began looking to his father's stars at an early age. When photos were taken for the yearbook at Bordentown Military Institute, near Trenton, 10-year-old cadet Norman posed for two pictures, one smiling, the other grim-faced. His mother preferred the smiling version, but little Norm hung tough. "Someday," he explained, "when I become a general, I want people to know that I'm serious." He wasn't kidding.

His first overseas posting, at 12, was to Tehran with his father, and the exposure to the exotic ways of the Middle East was to have a lasting impact on his sensibilities. After a year, he was packed off to European schools, where he learned German and French and dreamed all the while of a military career.

At West Point, the young plebe was known variously as Norm, Schwarzie, Bear and, in recognition of his notorious temper, Stormin' Norman. Nobody ever called him Herb; Norm's father, who detested the name Herbert, refused to inflict it on his son but gave him the H.

Looking back on the West Point years, Norm's old friends still marvel at his single-minded ambition. "He saw himself as a successor to Alexander the Great, and we didn't laugh when he said it," recalls retired General Leroy Suddath, another former roommate. "Norm's favorite battle was Cannae," says Suddath, in which Hannibal in 216 crushed the forces of Rome. "It was the first real war of annihilation, the kind Norman wanted to fight." He desperately wanted to lead his country's forces into a major battle. "We'd talk about these things in the wee hours, and Norman would predict not only that he would lead a major American army into combat, but that it would be a battle decisive to the nation."

Suddath claims that Schwarzkopf, with a reported I.Q. of 170, could easily have graduated first in his class of 480, instead of 43rd, "but he did a lot of other things except study." He wrestled and played a bit of tennis and football. He sang tenor and conducted the chapel choir and loved listening to what Suddath calls the "uplifting" martial music of Wagner and Tchaikovsky's cannonading 1812 Overture -- "the sort that makes you feel on top of the world."

After graduating in 1956, Schwarzkopf took on various Army assignments and later served two tours in Vietnam, first as a paratrooper advising Vietnamese airborne troops, then as commander of an infantry battalion. Twice he was wounded in action; three times he won a Silver Star. On one occasion, he tiptoed into a minefield to rescue a wounded soldier; it scared him to death, he told a reporter later. Says his sister Sally: "He went off to Vietnam as the heroic captain. He came back having lost his youth."

What he gained was the conviction that the Vietnam debacle resulted from a failure of public and political support for the military. Bitterly, he determined that the U.S. should never again engage in a limited war with ill- defined aims.

He has no such reservations about the gulf war; he wants only to win it fast and suffer the fewest casualties possible. Apart from that, Schwarzkopf is concerned that his long hours in the Riyadh war room prevent him from visiting his troops as often as he would like. When he does venture out, he is always accompanied by four military bodyguards in civilian clothes and armed with AR- 15 rifles. On a recent tour, Schwarzkopf gazed across the Saudi border into Kuwait and declared that it was the most peaceful moment he had had in weeks. Then it was the general speaking: surveying the vast expanse of desert, he pronounced it perfect for tank warfare.

In the war room as in the field, noncoms and enlisted soldiers are as devoted to Schwarzkopf as his officers. None seem overly intimidated by his gruffness, his size (6 ft. 3 in., 240 lbs.) or even his flare-ups. He is, after all, the Bear, whom some describe as only part grizzly and the rest Teddy. His wife Brenda and their three children know him as a pussycat: an outdoorsman, an amateur magician, a cookie muncher, a fellow who lulls himself to sleep listening to tapes of Pavarotti or the sounds of honking geese and mountain streams. So what if he likes Charles Bronson movies?

The truth, says Schwarzkopf's executive officer, Colonel Burwell B. Bell, is that the general "has a full range of emotions. He can get very, very angry, but it's never personal. He's extremely tough on people when it's necessary to get them to do something, but the next minute he'll throw his arm around their shoulders and tell them what a great job they're doing." If it were at all physically possible, Norm Schwarzkopf's troops would probably do the same to him. The outcome of the gulf war will tell if history wraps him in a similar embrace.

With reporting by A. Engler Anderson/Tampa, Dean Fischer/Riyadh and Bruce van Voorst/Washington