SHORTLY BEFORE 1:30 P.M. on Thursday, January 6, 1949, on a cold, sunny winter’s day, 2nd Lt. Brent Scowcroft almost died. Shortly after he’d taken off from Grenier Field to rendezvous with other pilots for a dogfight training exercise in the skies over central New Hampshire, another pilot jumped Scowcroft’s F-51H Mustang, quickly bearing down on him from behind. Scowcroft throttled up his aircraft, only to watch the propeller speed run past the red line. Although he didn’t know it at the time, the engine governor had given out, causing the propeller to rotate too fast and breaking a connecting rod. Coolant was leaking from his dead engine and he was rapidly losing airspeed.70
He turned his F-51 back toward the base and desperately tried to nurse the engine to life, but to no avail. And without power, the F-51 glided “like a rock.”71 Scowcroft had to make a snap decision: he could either bail out or attempt to make an emergency landing. Only two thousand feet off the ground, he immediately realized he didn’t have enough altitude or time to use his parachute, and so he began to look for a suitable clearing in which to crash-land the aircraft. Spotting an open area, he used the little speed he had left to make it over a stand of trees. He retracted the landing gear, tightened his safety belt, and started to bring the plane down. The last thing he remembered was a feeling of relief that’d he made it to the clearing.
Scowcroft regained consciousness later that day in a hospital bed. He’d hit the ground at 100 mph after first skimming the trees and then hitting some telephone cables—tearing a few loose in the process—before passing under some streetlight wires. Once the aircraft hit the ground, it bounced into a small stone bridge, with the collision knocking the engine off the fuselage. The F-51 came to rest in a shallow frozen marsh near Route 28, just north of the town of Londonderry, about five miles southeast of downtown Manchester.
Scowcroft was lucky to survive. His plane could have easily caught fire or exploded upon crashing, and he missed by barely a hundred yards colliding with a Boston & Maine passenger bus with twenty-one people on board. Because he’d been in constant radio contact with the Grenier control tower, emergency crews arrived at the crash site within minutes. They rushed him to the base hospital, where doctors found a broken vertebra in Scowcroft’s middle back and a chipped vertebra in his lower back. The crash also left Brent with a three-and-a-half-inch gash in his scalp and cuts and bruises on his face, arms, and chest. Lt. Scowcroft “miraculously escaped death,” the Manchester Union Leader reported the next day.72
Scowcroft had been assigned to the 97th Fighter Squadron of the 82nd Fighter Group and was training as a “fire wing,” tasked to protect a Strategic Air Command bomber. Scowcroft’s billet at Grenier Air Force Base followed nine months of basic flight training (October 1947 through June 1948) at Randolph Field in San Antonio and three months at Williams Field in Chandler, Arizona (July 1 through October 8, 1948), where he earned his pilot’s rating (and remembered getting up at 4 A.M. to fly liquid-cooled engines because it was “hot as hell”). Because he graduated into the Army Air Forces several months before the next pilot training course started at Randolph, he spent the months from July to October at Lackland Air Force Base outside San Antonio, helping teach Air Force basic training to new recruits.73
Scowcroft had loved flying. Even the training exercises were fun and exhilarating, especially by comparison with the drudgery of West Point. Now the crash and the ensuing twenty-five months would reshape Scowcroft’s life.
Within twenty-four hours, Air Force authorities transferred Scowcroft to Murphy Army Hospital in Waltham, Massachusetts, and put him in a plaster jacket that required that he be manually turned over every six hours. Doctors told him he’d never be able to fly again, and the Air Force suspended Scowcroft’s pilot’s wings indefinitely—standard practice following a crash, though it angered Scowcroft.74
Scowcroft’s career as a pilot had come to an abrupt end. He wouldn’t be able to fly in Korea or later in the Cold War. Worse still, the crash threw his military career and his own life plans into a spin. Scowcroft hadn’t previously given his career much thought. He enjoyed the discipline and camaraderie of military life, and loved to fly. But he figured he’d sooner or later return to the family business, since he knew he’d be warmly welcomed back at Scowcroft & Sons (although he and his father had never directly broached the subject).75 Now, however, Scowcroft realized he wasn’t all that excited about investing his energy in and devoting his life to the wholesale food business. He wasn’t sure what he would do. Too quickly, everything had become very serious.
While Scowcroft was recuperating at Murphy Army Hospital and still thinking about his military career and life goals, he received some good news. On February 8, he discovered he was to be promoted to first lieutenant. Four days later, that bit of welcome information lost all significance: on February 12—barely a month after the crash—Scowcroft learned his father had died of a heart attack.
Jim Scowcroft had suffered from chronically high blood pressure and had had other health problems as well, including a case of dysentery contracted decades earlier during his Mormon mission in Japan. And the year before, he’d had a small stroke. Even so, Scowcroft, his mother, two sisters, and extended family were hardly ready for James Scowcroft to pass away at the age of fifty-seven.
And Brent, encased in a plaster cast that covered his whole upper body, was hardly ready to travel to Ogden. The Air Force flew him out nonetheless, so he could attend his father’s funeral—an extremely cold and uncomfortable trip in a military transport plane. Scowcroft remained in Ogden for a month, grieving with his mother, sisters, and other relatives and settling family affairs. The plaster cast allowed him to walk around, but since it was winter, he mostly stayed indoors. He and his mother, sisters, and other members of the extended family tried to comfort each other as best they could as the days passed and the pain slowly subsided.76
Brent’s mother was “unbelievably devastated” by her husband’s death, her son said. Lucile Scowcroft never recovered from the loss, remaining depressed for the rest of her life. She kept the family home after her husband’s death and lived there until 1968, when at the age of seventy-six she moved into a nearby condominium.77 Brent stayed in close touch with her over the years and called, wrote, or visited whenever his intense schedule permitted.
Neither Lucile nor her children inherited much. Jim had borrowed money in the 1940s to buy out the shares of Scowcroft & Sons held by other members of the Scowcroft family, and when he died he still owed money to other family members—debts that his estate then had to settle. Jim’s older cousin Fletcher Scowcroft took over the management of Scowcroft & Sons until the business was sold, nine years later.78
In March 1949, after a month in Ogden, Scowcroft headed back to Murphy Army Hospital. On his way back east, flying via New York, he suddenly experienced nausea and intense abdominal pain. The Army immediately moved him to Fort Jay Army Hospital on Governors Island, where he was diagnosed with appendicitis and operated on. A week later, while recovering from the appendectomy, Scowcroft once again felt severe nausea and began to take on a jaundiced appearance. This time Army doctors diagnosed him with hepatitis, apparently contracted from a blood transfusion given immediately after the crash. The appendicitis, it so happened, was an early indication of hepatitis B.79
Scowcroft stayed at Fort Jay Army Hospital until April, when Army doctors removed his body cast and put him in a back brace. They then transferred him to the Hepatitis Center at Valley Forge Army Hospital—the largest Army hospital in the United States at the time—in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, five miles west of Valley Forge National Historic Park.80
While at Valley Forge and while still in his back brace, Scowcroft received more news—this time good news. He received a letter from Col. Herman Beukema, the head of the Department of Social Sciences at the US Military Academy, inviting him to return to West Point to teach economics.81
Colonel Beukema, who was a tall man with a long, lean face, prominent cheekbones, and light-colored eyes, had spent thirteen years as a field artillery officer when the Army asked him to teach at the US Military Academy. He was an extremely committed teacher whom the Army promoted to full professor after only two years of teaching; he had a first-class intellect, and he was a superb administrator. Thanks to his extraordinary ability, he’d been chosen to run the Army Specialized Training Program (1942–1944), which educated 140,000 men at thirty-six US colleges and universities in engineering, medicine, foreign languages, dentistry, veterinary science, and other specialties desperately needed by the Army and Army Air Corps.
Indicative of Beukema’s standing in the Army was his handling of Maj. Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor. Taylor, who was USMA superintendent from 1945 to 1949, turned out not to be a good fit with the West Point faculty and staff, and soon wore out his welcome. So Beukema told Eisenhower, Beukema’s former classmate and Army chief of staff at the time, “You tame him or we will.” Taylor was transferred.82
At West Point, Beukema began an extensive effort to reform the education of US Army officers. He wanted faculty members in the Department of Social Sciences who would broaden the cadets’ horizons and prepare them to be effective leaders under the new conditions of the postwar world. So he needed more than academic achievers on his faculty; he sought men of character (they were all men at the time, of course), leaders who could serve as role models for the cadets and inspire them. Despite Scowcroft’s undistinguished grades, he had impressed Beukema and Colonel George “Abe” Lincoln, the deputy department head.
Part of what Beukema did as department head was to keep tabs on those cadets who met his criteria for serving as potential teachers of economics, political science, history, or geography. He then had First Classmen fill out a form asking if they’d like to come back as instructors. After the cadets graduated, Beukema and his successors as department head would gauge officers’ level of interest, their individual strengths, and the department’s needs, and might then invite a selected few back to teach.
Scowcroft had expressed interest in coming back to teach on the department’s questionnaire. Beukema, in turn, had been impressed by Scowcroft, and he and Col. Lincoln wanted the young officer to return.83
Scowcroft would also be admitted to graduate school under an informal arrangement the Army had established with a handful of elite universities. The promising officers selected for this program were admitted without having to apply formally, and the Army paid for their education. The officers would then return to West Point for three-year teaching rotations before heading back into the Army—or, in Scowcroft’s case, back to the Army Air Corps.84
If teaching economics didn’t much interest Scowcroft, going back to West Point to teach did—whatever the subject. While he was lying in the Murphy, Fort Jay, and Valley Forge hospitals for hours, days, and weeks on end, Scowcroft had come to realize that he wanted to learn about military strategy, planning for war, intelligence, and other dimensions of US national security.85 Going to graduate school and teaching at West Point would help him achieve these goals, which were also consistent with his father’s wish that he be an intellectual.
Scowcroft’s transfer to Valley Forge Army Hospital in March 1949 had another life-changing consequence. Among those caring for him was 1st Lt. Marian Horner, a pretty, petite, outgoing, dark-haired, and dark-eyed Air Force nurse who was known as “Jackie” to her friends (who couldn’t resist the wordplay evoking the nursery rhyme). Jackie was two years older than Brent, a Roman Catholic from Syracuse, New York, and a graduate of the St. Francis Hospital School of Nursing in Pittsburgh. She had joined the Army Nurse Corps in 1945, was transferred to the Army Air Forces shortly thereafter, and then began working at Valley Forge. The Army Air Forces had named her “Outstanding Nurse” at Valley Forge Army Hospital, an honor indicative of her great competence, positive attitude, and strong work ethic.86
Brent found Jackie immensely attractive, and she began to visit Brent whenever she could. Her vivacity complemented and leavened his reserve; he respected her abilities—he assumed she’d eventually become a medical doctor—and admired her character. Although Scowcroft recognized he “was more hard-driving” and “much more of an outdoors person than she was,” he found her to be a “really good” person, and they fell in love.87
In July 1949 Army doctors judged Scowcroft’s prognosis to be “excellent” and predicted he would be out of the hospital in three months’ time. But Scowcroft’s back failed to heal, so in January 1950 Army surgeons fused together three of his lower vertebrae as a substitute for the single crushed vertebra. Five months later, in May 1950, he still hadn’t recovered from the surgery and continued to have a stiff back, making it difficult for him to bend forward and even more difficult—and painful—to bend backward.88 And because the Army was scheduled to close its Valley Forge hospital in 1950 (it actually stayed open because of the Korean War and would remain in service until 1975), Scowcroft was transferred to St. Albans Naval Hospital on Long Island, about two miles north of what is now John F. Kennedy International Airport.
At St. Albans, Scowcroft slowly recovered, although he was temporarily set back in August 1950 with a kidney stone. He must have been feeling a little better, though, because in December 1950 he proposed to Jackie—who accepted.
BEUKEMA AND THE Air Force arranged for Scowcroft’s admission to graduate school at Columbia University for the study of economics, set to begin in January 1952. But because Scowcroft was released from St. Albans in March 1951, the Army assigned him to Mather Air Force Base, a bombardier training facility just east of Sacramento, for the ten-month interim. The plan was for Scowcroft to train student navigators and student bombardiers, which would also allow him to accumulate the necessary flying hours to requalify him for his pilot’s rating.89
Once Scowcroft was at Mather, however, the Air Force delayed his reappointment to flying duty until that November—a “dithering” and “wasting-away of time,” in his description—notwithstanding the fact that in May 1951 the medical examining board had cleared him to fly. So instead of flying, which he’d very much looked forward to doing, Scowcroft was assigned to assist the supervision of the bachelor officers’ and visiting officers’ quarters. Scowcroft was miserable. Worse, he and Jackie, who had been transferred to Walter Reed Army Hospital, were a continent apart, and their frequent telephone conversations offered little solace.90
When the Air Force finally allowed Scowcroft to again take up the controls, only a few months remained before he was to begin graduate school. He nonetheless relished being back in the cockpit. He flew whenever he could during his last few weeks at Mather, both single-engine planes and twin-engine propeller aircraft. But as much as Scowcroft loved flying, no longer did he view it as his career; it was now an enjoyable pastime, an avocation rather than his vocation. Neither did Jackie think Brent should make flying the center of his Air Force career.91
For all of Scowcroft’s frustrations while being stationed at Mather, his Officer Effectiveness Reports (the periodic evaluations that superior officers filled out to rate their subordinates; later called Officer Efficiency Reports) started to reflect the exceptional qualities Beukema and other West Point faculty had seen in him, and they suggested the new seriousness with which he pursued his career. Scowcroft’s supervisors gave him the highest ratings possible in several categories, among them “setting a good example,” “getting cooperation,” “giving instruction,” “taking responsibility,” “solving problems,” demonstrating “good judgment,” complying with orders, showing loyalty, and being “fair and scrupulous.” They judged him “open-minded and cooperative” and someone who clearly earned the “esteem and respect of his associates.”92
At the end of the year, Scowcroft would leave California for Columbia University and New York. But first, he and Jackie got married. With their tight schedules (and with Jackie’s parents both deceased), they didn’t consider a wedding in Pennsylvania or Utah. In September, he flew down to Sumter, South Carolina, where Jackie was stationed. The two were wedded on Monday, September 17, 1951, in a small Catholic ceremony. Scowcroft’s mother and two West Point classmates stationed at nearby Shaw Air Force Base attended the wedding. So did one of Jackie’s close friends, a nursing colleague, who served as her maid of honor. No notice of the mixed-faith wedding appeared in the Ogden Standard-Examiner—a reflection of how life’s pressures can disrupt the traditions of even a close-knit Mormon family such as the Scowcrofts.
In December, Brent and Jackie moved to New York, where they leased a small apartment in suburban Bronxville. Although Jackie resigned her Air Force nurse’s commission upon marriage—she’d earlier been promoted to captain and outranked her fiancé—she remained committed to nursing and began to take classes at Columbia University’s Teachers College toward a bachelor’s degree in nursing education. Every morning Jackie and Brent would take the train down into the city.93
The twenty-six-year-old first lieutenant registered for graduate classes in Columbia’s Department of Public Law and Government (as the Department of Political Science was then called) and dutifully enrolled in economics classes. But he also took courses in history, geography, and other disciplines over his eighteen months in residence. Making a particular impression was an international relations class, one in which guest lecturers would come up from Washington, DC each week.94
Scowcroft joined a close-knit group that included half a dozen other Army officers in his public law and government classes, but he didn’t spend much time with the other graduate students. He recognized that the Army graduate students were “sort of a different species.” “We knew where we were going,” he said, both “more focused” and “probably a little older.” And he generally preferred to study at home. As a serious student and newlywed, he had little cause to join his classmates in the coffeehouses or taverns in Morningside Heights or elsewhere in the city.95
Scowcroft loved graduate school. For the first time, he found learning enjoyable, even fascinating. Whereas West Point had been mostly rote learning, his graduate classes challenged him to think in much broader terms and engage on a more abstract level. Scowcroft was now more mature, more motivated, more receptive to new ideas, and better able to appreciate the broader relevance of his studies.96
Graduate school exposed Scowcroft to a sophisticated realm of ideas and a larger intellectual universe; it challenged him. What’s more, his classes and teachers provided him with the tools to think about the development of the remarkable events that the nation had just lived through: the origins and outcomes of the Second World War, the new international order arising from Bretton Woods, the establishment of the United Nations, the Korean War, and the emergence of the Cold War. Especially compelling for Scowcroft was thinking about the potential for and dangers of nuclear weapons and figuring out the logic of their use. While he had always kept up with current events and closely followed the news, now he was learning the history and theory to make sense of it all.97
Professor William T. R. Fox, a prominent member of the Public Law and Government Department, took Scowcroft under his wing. Fox, a reserved but friendly man, had studied under Hans Morgenthau, one of the founders of the new academic discipline of international relations at the University of Chicago. Fox had edited World Politics for several years, helped establish the Yale Institute of International Studies (whose faculty included such notable scholars as Nicholas Spykman, Arnold Wolfers, and Ted Dunn), and had coined the term superpower.98
Fox was a prominent member of the realist school of foreign policy, a philosophy with which Scowcroft would later be associated. Realism, according to E. H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau, its two founders, is about the survival of states in a fundamentally anarchic world—one in which no overarching authority exists to enforce international agreements. Realism focuses on how states gain power, acquire wealth, and otherwise improve their position in a world of ambitious rival states, each of which must forge its own path in order to survive and further its interests. Scowcroft’s years in graduate school gave him his first extended exposure to this important school of thought, which would help shape his approach to foreign policy challenges for decades to come.
Scowcroft also took classes with Professor Frank Tannenbaum, a renowned scholar of Latin American history and labor movements and a student of liberalism. He would invite Scowcroft and six or seven of his other students to his home, where they would talk over drinks. Whereas Fox was a realist, Tannenbaum focused on “the threads of human history,” the importance of emotion, and the fact that people did not simply pursue their narrowest interests. He exposed the young graduate student to a more humanistic world.99
Although he described himself as “80 percent realist,” Scowcroft didn’t necessarily identify himself as a realist as such.100 He never believed that realism wholly captured the history of American foreign policy or the motivations for US foreign policy decisions, nor did he think the prescriptions derived from realism were always the ones to follow.
Providing another perspective was Leland Goodrich, who taught international law. Goodrich wrote on the United Nations Charter, UN policies, and the UN’s global role. Like Tannenbaum, Goodrich was something of an idealist and provided Scowcroft with a “fundamentally different outlook” on international relations—one that stayed with him, alongside Morgenthau’s and Fox’s realism and Tannenbaum’s humanitarianism.101
But it was Professor Fox who supervised Scowcroft’s MA thesis, “The Struggle for Trieste,” which he described as “workmanlike” and “well written.” Fox observed perceptively that the thesis’s relative analytical weakness (as compared with its strength on the descriptive side) was the product of Scowcroft’s regimented undergraduate training at the USMA and not an indicator of Brent’s ability or promise. On the contrary, Fox regarded him as a serious student capable of further graduate study should he so choose.102
Scowcroft received his master’s degree in June 1953, and in July he returned to his alma mater, first as an instructor in the Department of Social Sciences (1953–1954) and then an assistant professor (1954–1957).
Scowcroft’s new path in life, shaped by the near-fatal crash he’d survived, now seemed clear. Instead of being in the cockpit, he’d be in the classroom.