AT THE AGE of twelve, Brent Scowcroft read the book West Point Today. Its detailed, flattering, and amusing account of the culture and challenges of cadet life seized Scowcroft’s imagination. He dreamed of attending the US Military Academy with its tight discipline, its singular community, and “the air in general.”33
The following summer, Brent’s parents took their thirteen-year-old son east to visit West Point, where their older daughter Janice’s fiancé also happened to be a cadet. Brent once more fell in love, this time viscerally, with the imposing campus, the fortress-like granite buildings overlooking the Hudson, and the mess-hall lunch, courtesy of a tour offered by his future brother-in-law. In his book Absolutely American, David Lipsky captures the timeless image that has captivated generations of cadets:
You enter the Academy through a Military Police checkpoint and pass rows of stately granite buildings until you’re on a green hill above the river. On a clear spring day you can look across to the rolling treetops of the Hudson Valley . . . and feel that God himself has issued you a uniform and notebook and sent you to one of the most crisply beautiful places on earth to study the practice of war.34
Young Brent caught the bug. Even though his parents also took him to see Princeton, Swarthmore, and Harvard on their trip, he remained intent on going to West Point, becoming an Army officer, fighting for his country, and “being a part of something bigger than you are.”35
It would be hard to overstate how much the Second World War influenced Brent. He was in the ninth grade when the war began in Europe, and he remembered sitting by the radio with his mother and father two years later when they heard the news about Pearl Harbor. The fighting continued throughout his high school years, pervading virtually every aspect of American society, and affected Ogden especially because of the large number of troop trains passing through and the huge increase in rail freight. For a boy of Brent’s interests and ideals, the war and its corollary, military life, became an overwhelming reality. He joined the Ogden High School Reserve Officer Training Corps and dedicated himself to drilling exercises and classes in military science and tactics. He was a captain of the Ogden High School ROTC his junior year, and as a senior he was picked to be “cadet colonel”—the ROTC regimental commander in charge of inspecting and reviewing the five-hundred-student regiment (which included students from other high schools). World War II “very much changed my perspective,” Scowcroft allowed, and it probably “enhanced the appeal of West Point.”36
An essay Brent wrote in the fall of 1939, following his trip east with his parents, signaled the intensity of the young teenager’s focus on military affairs and suggested his patriotic sentiments:
I think every American citizen should be thinking how thankful they ought to be. We life in a land where we are not afraid that our neighbor will shoot us in the back. We are about three thousand miles from the nearest hostile nation in any country.
We have very peaceful neighbors. Take the boundaryline between the United States and Canada. The only way anyone can tell he has crossed the boundary is a stone monument by the roadside. Now go over into Europe. Take the boundary between France and Germany. There are thousands of soldiers there. Hundreds of outposts, forts, and underground strongholds.
Also the United States is free from fear of any other nation pouncing upon it without a minute’s notice. We are not living in fear of any enemy bombers coming over here and bombing our strongholds and flying over the cities dropping their messages of death upon the citizens.
I think that especially now in this great European crisis every American should be very happy and thankful that they live in America.37
The essay’s comparison of North America with Europe and its assessment of the threat of foreign attack point to Scowcroft’s analytical abilities, even as a ninth grader. Its references to “boundaryline,” “strongholds,” and “enemy bombers . . . dropping their messages of death” indicate his deep interest in strategic issues. And the title, “Our America,” signals his strong identity with the United States. The essay underscores, too, just how utterly shocking the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would be for him two years later.
Although Jim Scowcroft didn’t want his son to join the military—certainly not with World War II raging—he never let Brent know of his reservations or tried to dissuade him.38 In early 1943 Brent applied to the US Military Academy with a letter of endorsement from Utah senator Elbert Thomas, and was accepted. However, the appointment arrived just two days before the USMA admissions office was supposed to receive Scowcroft’s grades and application materials. Not having his grades in hand, the Army required that Brent take the full written exam, which had an English section, a mathematics section, and a new West Point Aptitude Test. Scowcroft was still taking his high school solid geometry course when he sat for the test, however, and so he failed the solid geometry and algebra portion of the admissions exam. Written petitions by Senator Thomas and his father failed to get the Army to budge.39
But when Brent turned eighteen in March 1943—four months after Congress lowered the draft age to eighteen—Uncle Sam came calling. Scowcroft was drafted and given five months to report. On August 5, 1943, he enlisted as a reservist, and on August 20 he began US Army basic training at Fort Douglas, on the eastern edge of Salt Lake City, next to the University of Utah campus. Less than two weeks later, he learned that he’d been admitted to West Point through its college preparatory program.40 He accepted, turning down offers from the University of Utah, the University of Colorado, and Stanford.
The Army assigned Scowcroft to the United States Military Academy preparatory school at Lafayette College, a private four-year liberal arts and engineering school in Easton, Pennsylvania. The purpose of the one-year USMA preparatory program is to train promising high school graduates—all have to be enlisted personnel who, for one reason or another, did not qualify for direct admission into West Point—in the necessary physical, academic, and military skills to qualify for subsequent admission to the USMA.41
Before leaving Utah, Scowcroft was made a Mormon elder. The status of “elder,” the higher-order Melchizedek priesthood, is conferred on young men leaving for missionary work or military service. All young Mormon men are eligible to hold the priesthood in their church, and about 80–90 percent of observant Mormon youth and 40–50 percent of all Mormons go on missions. (Scowcroft admitted that the idea of a mission didn’t appeal to him then, and that had he stayed in Utah or had he attended a regular four-year college, he wouldn’t have gone on one.42)
In late August, Scowcroft took a troop train east, accompanying soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division, and on September 1, 1943, he started classes at the USMA preparatory program at Lafayette College. He and the other students lived in crowded converted fraternity houses, since the war had depleted Lafayette of most of its male students. (Most of the young women enrolled at Lafayette College stayed on during the war, as they did in other coed colleges and universities across the country.) Reveille for the USMA prep students was at 6:00 A.M., followed by a completely prescribed curriculum of coursework, extensive military training exercises (including marching drills in the snow), and demanding physical and athletic activities. Only about a third of the 250 candidates finished the program.43
Despite the busy routine, the high female-to-male ratio at Lafayette helped keep the USMA prep students’ morale high. On weekends, prep students in good standing were given Saturday afternoons and Sundays off, and Scowcroft would hitchhike a ride to New York City, “prowl around” with his friends, and often attend plays and musicals (including Othello and Oklahoma!). And he went out with Vickie, an attractive brunette. In the description of Edwin Robertson II, one of Brent Scowcroft’s classmates and friends who was also in the USMA class of 1947 (and was later promoted to major general), it was “a pretty relaxed year.”44
Scowcroft’s time at Lafayette coincided with that of two other young men who would later play important roles in his life. One was Frank Church, the future Democratic senator from Idaho and chairman of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, better known as the Church Committee. The other was Henry Kissinger, who was studying basic engineering. (He “ate books,” his roommate recalled, mumbling criticism—“rumbling” criticism might be more apt, given Kissinger’s basso profondo—as he read. He would then explode with an outraged, German-accented “BULL-SHIT” and tear the author’s reasoning apart.)45
Both men were in the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), as the US Army had contracted with Lafayette, along with thirty-five other US colleges and universities, to train tens of thousands of enlisted men in engineering, medicine, foreign languages, dentistry, veterinary science, and other specialties that the Army and the Army Air Corps desperately needed. Overseeing the 140,000 men in the three-dozen ASTP programs around the country was Colonel Herman Beukema, the head of the Department of Economics, Government, and History at West Point. Beukema, too, would later play a significant role in Scowcroft’s life.46
In March 1944, Scowcroft retook the US Military Academy’s entrance exam, and this time passed the math and English portions and did well on the new West Point Aptitude Test. He completed his prep program at Lafayette College on June 19, 1944.
On July 1, after a two-week leave, he began life at the US Military Academy, where “every new arrival, without distinction, is dumped unceremoniously into the hopper of the West Point machine that four years later grinds him out as the finished product,” Kendall Banning writes in West Point Today. “Those four years are, without much doubt, the toughest four years to be found in any educational institution in the world. Tough not only in the academic requirements but more particularly in the uncompromising and unceasing discipline. . . . The toughest period of all covers the first two months.”47 Scowcroft’s time there was no exception.
THE WAR RAGING in western and eastern Europe, in North Africa and the Middle East, and in the Far East and southwest Pacific transformed the United States of Scowcroft’s childhood. The astounding mobilization of resources and personnel, the great internal migration within the forty-eight states, the tremendous advances in science, industry, and technology, and the many new public policies instituted by Congress and the Roosevelt administration profoundly changed the national economy, the federal government, and American political culture.48
By contrast, the serene and postcard-perfect West Point campus appeared fixed in time. The imposing stone and red-brick buildings, the monuments and memorials, the impeccable grounds sloping down to the broad Plain (the parade grounds at the center of the USMA campus), and the time-honored customs and rituals of West Point all continued seemingly undisturbed. The cadets still ran across campus between classes. They still turned out en masse, impeccably dressed and arrayed in rows and lines, to march in the scheduled parades. They were still almost all Caucasian and almost all from the middle or upper middle class. West Point carried on its love affair with Army football, rendezvousing each Saturday in the fall. And the campus still had horses and stables in a world where armor reigned supreme. As one common saying had it—only partially in jest—West Point represented two hundred years of tradition unimpeded by progress.49
But appearances may deceive. West Point’s venerable traditions obscured the drastic changes being forced upon it by the Second World War. In mid-1942 Congress legislated an increase in the size of the student body to almost 2,500 cadets—a 37 percent increase—and Congress further stipulated that all cadets were to graduate in three years’ time, effective beginning in the fall of 1942.50
With thousands of cadets already enrolled at West Point, Army officials had to find ways to collapse the four-year curriculum into three years. They decided that the original class of 1943 would graduate a semester early, that the original class of 1944 would take abbreviated versions of Second Class (junior) and First Class (senior) courses, and graduate a year early, and that the remaining underclassmen and subsequent classes of cadets would simply graduate in just three years (since Army officials also determined that cadets now needed fewer course credits with which to graduate). The Second Class (or junior year) was effectively eliminated. The Army cut back, too, on classes in English, social science, and military history—although it did offer more classes in Russian and Portuguese, since the Soviet Union and Brazil were now US allies. And the cadets had to be in class more days each year, with fewer days allotted for their winter and summer furloughs.51
Before World War II, West Point didn’t separate its training of cadets for the Army proper from those going into the Army Air Corps (with the Army Air Forces officially replacing the Army Air Corps in 1941, although the Air Force personnel continued to be referred to as the Army Air Corps). Beginning in 1942, however, the Army made Third Class cadets (sophomores) choose between being “Air Cadets” or “Ground Cadets”—up until then, all cadets were educated as Ground Cadets, without being labeled as such—thus splitting each class in half after the Fourth Class (the plebe or freshman year). Both the Air Cadets and the Ground Cadets would finish in three years, but the former would be able to graduate as accredited pilots, which involved many extra hours of special courses, flying lessons, and summer training.52
Making this new and intensive Air Cadet program possible was the construction of Stewart Field, which was dedicated on August 25, 1942. Stewart Field was a former dairy farm located eleven miles northwest of West Point and outside of the town of Newburgh, and it served as a second West Point campus for all intents and purposes, complete with barracks for the Air Cadets and the Women Air Cadets, officers’ quarters, classrooms, a library, a hospital, aircraft hangars, radio facilities, a motor repair shop, roads, walkways, and dozens of other buildings.
The war also caused West Point to expand its training facilities for the Ground Cadets. Congress authorized money for the Army to buy 10,300 acres around Popolopen Lake, immediately west of and adjacent to the West Point campus, and the new land provided extensive areas for artillery training and for rifle, pistol, and machine gun ranges. The Popolopen Lake tract further ensured an adequate water supply for West Point, supplementing Lusk Reservoir. In fact, in 1945 and 1946 part of the new Popolopen Lake tract housed a German POW camp.53
Once the war began to wind down, the Army began to reverse West Point’s wartime changes. In the summer of 1944, the USMA stopped dividing the corps into Air and Ground Cadets, discontinued its program allowing cadets to graduate as certified pilots, and returned to its usual four-year curriculum. But with the war still going in mid-1944, the Army kept its accelerated, three-year curriculum for one-half of the new class arriving in July 1944. Half were to graduate in June 1947, and the other half in June 1948. Brent Scowcroft and his most famous classmate, Alexander Meigs Haig, were both in the three-year cohort.54
The nineteen-year-old Brent Scowcroft arrived at West Point on July 1, 1944. His open face had a ruddy complexion, a domed forehead, well-spaced and deep-set brown eyes, wide cheeks, a narrow nose that widened to the nostrils, a flat mouth with thin lips, and a square jaw. The Army’s medical records listed him as standing 5′7¾″ in his socks and weighing 140 pounds.55 And because cadets were sorted into their companies by height (a practice since discontinued), Scowcroft was assigned to Company B, Regiment 2 (B2), which had cadets between 5′8″ and 5′9″ tall.
Company B was notoriously tough on plebes, with one of the worst reputations for hazing. After “Beast Barracks”—the grueling, spirit-breaking six weeks of basic training, an almost nonstop regimen of calisthenics, rifle instruction, lessons on the honor system, athletics, and other required introductory exercises—regular classes began. The challenges Scowcroft now faced were ones he was less prepared for, more psychological than physical or academic. “It was, well, a bit like I imagined hell was,” Scowcroft told an Army interviewer in 2012. “It was a really transforming experience. I had never gone through anything like this before, and I hardly knew what was happening.”
One of Company B’s favorite kinds of hazing was “clothing formation” (which was also practiced by other companies). Plebes, who lived on the fourth floor, had to assemble on the first floor. They were then sent back upstairs to change into new uniforms and come down for inspection. They were then ordered back upstairs to change their uniforms once again and immediately reassemble on the ground floor, and so on, for a total of five or six changes of uniform. For forty-five to sixty minutes, depending on how fast the plebes were and how merciless the upperclassmen felt, Scowcroft and his fellow B2 plebes had to race up and down the stairs at breakneck speed and repeatedly change into and out of their various uniforms—full dress, regular dress, athletic dress, evening dress (complete with white collar and cuffs), and others—in no particular order. These and other humiliations were standard fare for “Hell on the Hudson,” or what West Point cadets in later years crudely described as “a $50,000 education, shoved up the ass a nickel at a time.”56
Scowcroft found this and the other forms of hazing “extremely uncomfortable” and “humiliating” (although none involved physical contact). The upperclassmen, he said, “made life miserable.” But at the time, he mainly thought about how he could survive, get along, and do well. Decades later, Scowcroft was philosophic about the “traumatic” West Point introduction. It was, “in retrospect, a useful experience because it pulled me out of a privileged environment in which I had been raised with loving parents and threw me into an environment where I was overstressed constantly and just struggling to keep my head above water.” It taught Scowcroft how not to lose control and be self-disciplined. “It was a tremendous lesson,” he said, “one of the most valuable,” and it marked his “transition to a very different kind of life.”57
As a Fourth Class and then Third Class cadet, Scowcroft was under constant scrutiny from the First Class cadets. Upperclassmen could enter cadets’ always-unlocked rooms for inspection at any time, without knocking, and they monitored underclassmen in the halls, during meals, in chapel, and at other times. If the inspections turned up anything irregular, then the cadet received demerits. Scowcroft received demerits for a number of infractions, among them ones for not properly shining his shoes to a glistening sheen (four times), leaving lights burning unnecessarily (three times), not caring properly for the butt, bore, and operating rod of his rifle (once each, respectively), leaving the top of his locker dusty (twice), talking before “Take Seats” at dinner (twice), wearing his trousers too long (twice), sleeping without pajamas (twice), and having his collar unattached at breakfast (once).58 However, because Scowcroft received relatively few demerits, he never had to march in the courtyard or face more extreme punitive measures.
The single exception came in Scowcroft’s senior year at West Point, when he was confined to the campus from noon on May 15, 1947, until 9:00 P.M. on May 27. The charge was hazing: that on the evening of December 20, 1946, he didn’t sufficiently supervise the plebes under his charge. The fact was that Scowcroft was giving a party for the First Class cadets in the company, and to introduce the party he made it appear as though the plebes were in a hazing formation. This was what he was penalized for. But rules were rules, and the tactical officer overseeing the company was charged with enforcing them. Fortunately, the punishment was meted out informally: Scowcroft was never brought before a disciplinary board, never charged with any infractions, and received no demerits for the incident.59
Helping Scowcroft overcome his loneliness and survive the upperclassmen’s cruelties were his weekly letters home to his parents (which all cadets were expected to do and which, Scowcroft added, was “a lot for me”) and his attendance with a handful of other cadets at the Sunday afternoon Latter-day Saints church services held in the basement of the Protestant chapel at West Point. The LDS chapel group formed what was in effect a small support group, allowing him to meet six to eight other cadets of a similar religious background, “let his hair down,” and escape from the harassments of plebe life. For example, Scowcroft got to know fellow Mormon Amos “Joe” Jordan, who was a year ahead of him and ended up following a career path somewhat parallel to his own—named a Rhodes Scholar, receiving a PhD from Columbia University, teaching for twenty years at West Point, and serving under defense secretaries James Schlesinger and Donald Rumsfeld in the mid-1970s.60
Also helping to alleviate Scowcroft’s feelings of isolation and easing his adjustment to cadet life was his affiliation with Army football. Immediately after arriving at West Point Scowcroft decided to try out for intercollegiate track and ice hockey, but he wasn’t good enough to make either freshman team. So he decided to manage the football C (plebe) squad.61 Although he loved football, he couldn’t play at the intercollegiate level because of his small size. Being the football team manager was the next best thing, and it gave Scowcroft another group of cadets to be around. Given the additional time and travel commitments that went with the position, being the football team manager spared him some of the routine and unpleasant jobs plebes normally do, such as guard duty at the barracks, the mess hall, academic buildings, and the camps they visited.62
In the summer after his plebe year, the summer of 1945, the war in Europe was over, but Scowcroft and his classmates were still fully expecting to be called into active service, since it wasn’t clear how much longer the war in the Pacific would last—and because war had been their reality since 1939. So it came as a shock when, in mid-August 1945, while Scowcroft was training with 81 mm mortars at Pine Camp in upstate New York (renamed Fort Drum in 1951) and about to enter the Third Class, he learned the war was over. He wondered if he’d made a stupid career choice: what was the point of being an Army officer and fighting for his country if there was no war?63
But Scowcroft had adjusted successfully to life at West Point. He’d become very good at learning how to divide his time among different activities and doing each of them extremely well. (In fact, it was in the ten-minute break between classes—assuming that the classes weren’t in buildings across campus—that he learned to take catnaps on the fly.64) He continued to apply himself to his coursework as a sophomore and then as a senior, and to manage the Army football teams. He also continued to play tennis, volleyball, soccer (center halfback), and water polo (“water soccer” at West Point, where he was goalie). And as a senior, or First Classman, he worked as a ski instructor on the new ski slope German POWs had built while they were incarcerated in the Popolopen Lake area in 1945 and 1946. Although he and his classmates knew the German POWs were being held nearby, neither Scowcroft nor his friends had any direct interaction with them.65
As a sophomore, Scowcroft managed the B squad football team, and as a senior—there was no junior year in the three-year curriculum—he managed the powerhouse A squad that went undefeated in the 1946 season, as it had in 1944 and 1945. This was the Army football team of “Mr. Inside,” Doc Blanchard, winner of the Heisman Trophy in 1945, and “Mr. Outside,” Glenn Davis, winner of the Heisman Trophy in 1946, the Associated Press’s 1946 Male Athlete of the Year, the Walter Camp Award, and the Maxwell Award. The 1946 Army–Notre Dame football game in New York—a 0–0 tie played in Yankee Stadium and a classic in the history of college football—was the only game Army didn’t win outright in its three-year run as an undefeated team.
Scowcroft admitted he did not work as hard as he could have. He fell in love with the game of bridge and spent most of his evenings as a First Classman playing cards with fellow students. He wasn’t used to intensive studying and didn’t feel compelled to do so at West Point. High grades had always come easy for him, and Company B “sort of looked down on high achievers.”66 Although he didn’t graduate in the top 10 percent of his class, he did well, earning his highest marks in social science (economics, international relations) and English (writing, public speaking, and research), and his lowest grades, Cs, in math and physics. Scowcroft’s single highest grade came in his physical education class during his last year, helped by the fact that he worked out in the gym each day after classes. He ended up graduating a respectable 87th out of a class of 310. Alexander Haig ended up 214th—and was the first in the class to make general. Their class of 1947 was the last class required to take equestrian training; after they graduated, West Point’s hundreds of horses were auctioned off, and the stables were cleared out except for a handful of mascot mules.
Scowcroft’s relatively high academic rank meant that he could join almost any branch of the Army he wanted. Engineering had the highest prestige, but it held little appeal for him. Although he considered artillery and infantry, he and several close friends—along with a third of their classmates—decided to join the Army Air Corps. He’d go to flight school and become a fighter pilot.67
On the morning of June 3, 1947, Scowcroft was commissioned a second lieutenant in the US Army. A few hours later, he received his United States Military Academy diploma from Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of his heroes; this would remain one of the proudest moments of his life.68
Scowcroft assumed he would put in his four years in the Army Air Corps—the five-year obligation for service academy graduates didn’t go into effect until 1964, with the class of 1968—and then go back to civilian life, to Ogden, and to Scowcroft & Sons.69
That was not how things worked out.