A Review: Performin' Norman at Center Stage

By RICHARD CORLISS

He lacks the heroic mien -- steel forged in Camelot -- of central casting's great military strategists: Wellington, MacArthur, Cordesman. His stare, which can be ferocious, is undercut by a fretful brow; the small, almost gentle features are stranded in his moon of a face. And no fellow shaped like a nose tackle is going to cut a chic figure in those desert jammies. You look for John Wayne, and you find Jonathan Winters crossed with Willard Scott: a lunch- pail lug who should be shambling into the Cheers bar to a chorus of "Norm!" Norm? Is that any name for a general? And is it absurd or poetic that the successor to Arnold Schwarzenegger as America's favorite macho man should be H. Norman Schwarzkopf?

Poetic will do. For in his briefing last Wednesday, the coalition commander showed Americans not their handsomest face but their best one. Gruff and compassionate, speaking in flinty, illuminating sentences, Schwarzkopf made sense of the battle plan in its grandeur and awful human cost. Though he is the first U.S. general since Ike to earn gloating rights, he refused to preen. Perhaps he tacitly recognized that Iraq was not the most formidable foe -- closer to Grenada than to Nazi Germany in war-making savvy and casualties inflicted. But one suspects that this man's tone would be the same at the end of any war: a powerfully plainspoken mixture of triumph, requiem and relief.

For 57 minutes, without toupee or TelePrompTer, Schwarzkopf displayed all the seductiveness of the performer's art. He prowled like a stand-up comic, permitted himself the occasional thin smile, inflected his stats with Bob Hope-style throwaway lines ("But I gotta tell ya . . . "). When asked to appraise Saddam's soldiering skills, he snorted a "Ha!," then launched into a catalog of caustic irony. He tamped his rage into questions intimidating ("Have you ever been in a minefield?") and rhetorical ("Do I fear a cease-fire?"). But the most moving moment came when he caught himself describing the low allied casualty rate as "miraculous." Then his emotions briefly stumbled over his eloquence. "It will never be ra . . . miraculous to the families of those people," and here he drew in a taut breath, "but it is miraculous." He was the grieving father to every lost allied soul.

Americans, it is said, insist on reducing politics to show biz. And in the gulf, the theater of war was also, maybe mainly, a theater. As the New York Times's Malcolm Browne notes, "This war seemed to smell more of greasepaint than of death." In time, other odors may rise, as the nation weighs the war's cost in American dollars and Arab lives. But last week Schwarzkopf gave the U.S. a warrior to be proud of. Others might see glamour in the allied victory; he would carry the memory of the dead on his burly shoulders. His Great Performance was so convincing, not because he knew it would be the finest speech of the war, but because he hoped it would be the last.