During a visit to Kuwait some years ago, H. (for nothing) Norman Sehwarzkopf was given a set of Arab robes and tried them on, for the fun of it. This got him to thinking about one of his heroes, T. E. Lawrenee. ‘Tt was just like the seene in Lawrence of Arabia, ” Sehwarzkopf said later, “when the British offieer’s clothes are taken away and replaced by robes, and he waltzes into the desert, intrigued by their feel and grace. I stood in front of the mirror and did the same dance. It was wonderful.”
It may well come to pass that when the story of the gulf war is sifted and studied in military classrooms, the accomplishments of the four-star General Schwarzkopf, 56, will rank, if not with those of Lawrence, quite possibly with such World War II desert warriors as General Erwin Rommel and Field Marshal Montgomery. Schwarzkopf himself, not exactly a self-effacing man, might prefer to be lodged in the pantheon with Alexander the Great as well, but that is for the historians to decide. What no one will dispute or fail to marvel at is that Schwarzkopf is the very model of a major modern general: he conceived and executed the gulf-war battle plan with such brilliance and daring that it far outran even his own expectations. One major reason is that the man who commanded the vast armadas of the allied coalition had prepared for this role throughout his professional life.
By all accounts. Norm Schwarzkopf is a passionately engaged leader of considerable talents, and what’s more, of a
General H. Norman Schwarzkopf answers press questions during wrap-up briefing on the war.
Prophetic mind. As long ago as 1983, he foresaw the possibility that the U. S. might find itself fighting in the Middle East if an unfriendly nation succeeded in taking over a neighbor. More than two years ago, as chief of the U. S. Central Command (which covers the Middle East and South Asia), Schwarzkopf set out to design a full-fledged contingency plan. “He always believed 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.”
Late last July, just five days before Saddam Hussein launched his invasion, Schwarzkopf and his staff happened to be running a computer-simulated war game 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, and when the Shield became a Storm, it was Schwarzkopf who got the job of running the campaign as commander of the allied forces.
Throughout the war, he never had to worry about second-guessing or interference, either from Washington or from other leaders in the coalition. Some past Presidents, like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, have fancied themselves cunning battlefield tacticians, and liked to direct their generals hither and thither; George Bush, Dick Cheney and Schwarzkopfs immediate boss and old friend, Colin Powell, knew better. Desert Storm, said Cheney at the outset, “is basically Norm’s plan. It’s fundamentally Norm’s to execute.”
After directing—on perilously short notice—the biggest buildup of U. S. forces since Vietnam, Schwarzkopf orchestrated a complex logistical, tactical and strategic war machine comprising forces from 28 Western and Arab nations totaling 675,000 troops, hundreds of ships and thousands of airplanes and tanks, all fully equipped, and all operating right on schedule.
At the same time, he demonstrated the talents of a first-class diplomat, achieving cohesion not only among the traditionally rivalrous U. S. military services, but among the various Arab and Western allies, with all their conflicting interests. He was especially careful in his dealings with the sensitive Saudis. When King Fahd sent word that he was worried about the possibility of an attack on Riyadh, Schwarzkopf went to the palace to reassure him, advising 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.
That’s Schwarzkopfs way: subtlety and euphemism do not come easily to him. When Desert Shield began, he called Iraqi commanders a “bunch of thugs” and their troops “lousy.” He declared, “I don’t consider myself dovish, and I certainly don’t consider myself hawkish. Maybe I would describe myself as owlish-wise enough to understand that you want to do everything possible to avoid war; that once you’re committed to war, then be ferocious enough to do whatever is necessary to get it over with as quickly as possible in victory.”
His strategy, he explained, was to “suck [Saddam] into the desert as far as I could. Then I’d pound the living heck out of him. Finally, I’d engulf him and police him up.” The same straightforward approach characterized his style in the war room of his Riyadh compound. After developing his battle plans with the help of top allied commanders, Schwarzkopf delegated day-to-day operations to his four commanders. A resolute overseer, he ran his campaign 18 hours a day. “I started out with what I thought was going to be a very orderly schedule,” he told a Time reporter. “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 did not come off because everybody was up so late at night.”
The fault, he said, was mainly his own. “I just can’t drag my body out of bed at 7 in the morning, given the lack of sleep I’ve had. So sometimes that first meeting was at 8 or 9.1 think it was a great military leader. Norm Schwarzkopf, who once said one of the principles of war is never to miss the opportunity to take a nap. I learned that in Vietnam. There have been a couple of occasions [recently] when I arrived at the fuzzy-headed stage and literally took myself out of action because I realized I was getting a little bit punchy and shouldn’t be making decisions.”
His admiring colleagues found it easy to forgive him. “Initially,” said a British commander, “we were somewhat 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 came as no surprise' to Schwarzkopf’s old friends, who seem to regard him with unalloyed admiration, if not outright idolatry. Retired Army General Ward LeHardy, who was Schwarzkopf’s West Point classmate, says, with not a little hyperbole, 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 lighthearted and amiable, but he can also display the ego—and petulance—of a held marshal. He has been known to pore ov'er his press clippings, underlining criticisms or perceived slights, and flogging memos about them to his subordinates. He has had epic temper tantrums. When these erupted, said a senior Joint Chiefs of Staff officer, Schwarzkopf would start “yelling and cursing and throwing things." What is most striking about him is a familiar characteristic often found in militaiy' leaders eveiA'where: an abiding certitude, a bristling self-assurance. Many Army brats acquire this with their hrst pair of long pants, and they nurture it into adulthood. Schwarzkopf's father, Herbert Norman Sr., the son of German immigrants, was also a West Pointer who became a general. In the straitened period between world wars. Norm Sr. left the Army to enter civic life. As head of the New Jersey state police, he led the investigation into the sensational kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's baby son in 1932. For a time, Schwarzkopf even became a radio star, narrating the popular Gangbiisters, a semi-documentar)' shoot-’em-up series about the fbi.
At the outbreak of World War II, he rejoined the Army and from 1942 to 1948 led a mission to Tehran, where he organized Iran’s imperial police force. According to U. S. and Iranian historians, he returned to Tehran in 1953 to play a key role in the cia operation that overthrew nationalist Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and re-established the Shah on his throne.
Norm Jr., who was born in Trenton, N. J., began looking to his father’s stars at an early age. When photos were taken for the yearbook at Borden town Military Institute, near Trenton, 10-year-oId cadet Norman posed for two pictures, one smiling, the other grim faced. His mother preferred the smiling version, but little Norm hung tough. “Someday, when I become a general,” he said, “I want people to know that I’m serious.” He wasn’t kidding.
His first overseas posting, at age 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 developed a fluency in German and French and dreamed all the while of a military career.
At West Point, the young plebe was known variously as Norm Jr., Schwarzie, the Bear and, in deference to his short-fused temper. Stormin’ Norman. Nobody ever called him Herb; Norm’s father, who detested Herbert, refused to inflict the name on his son but gave him the H.
Looking back on the West Point years, Schwarzkopf's old friends still marvel at his single-minded, unapologetic ambition. “He read widely on war," says Retired General Leroy Suddath, a former roommate who remains no less enthralled than General Lei lardy. “1 le saw himself as a successor to Alexander the Great, and we didn’t laugh when he said it. He just assumed he would be an outstanding success."
Norm’s favorite battle was Cannae, in which 1 lanni-bal crushed the forces of Rome in 216 B. C. “Cannae,” says Suddath, “was the first real war of annihilation, the kind Norman wanted to fight." He desperately wanted to take 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 IQ 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, played a bit of. soccer, tennis and football, and on weekends slipped down to New York City to see Broadway shows. 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 Ovc/'m/c—“the sort that makes you feel on top of the world.”
After he was graduated in 1956, Schwaizkopf earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Southern California, then began a measured training program that took him from post to post, command to command. He and Colin Powell became fast friends when both, for a period, were assigned Washington duty (their daughters appeared in the same high school play).
Schwarzkopf served two tours in Vietnam, first as an accomplished paratrooper advising Vietname. se airborne troops, then as commander of an infantry battalion. Twice he was wounded, and three times he won the Silver Star, as well as three Bronze Stars and the Distinguished Service Medal. On one occasion he tiptoed into a minefield to rescue a wounded soldier (“Scared me to death,” he said later). As a result of another occasion, the family of a slain G. I. accused Schwarzkopf of negligence. Though he was exonerated, the experience was devastating. Says his sister Sally: “He went off to Vietnam as the heroic captain. He came back having lost his youth.”
What he did gain was the conviction that the Vietnam debacle resulted from a failure of domestic public and political support for the military. Bitterly, he deter-
Mined that the U. S. should never again engage in a limited war of ill-defined aims.
He had no such reservations about the gulf war; he wanted only to win it fast and suffer the fewest casualties possible. His chief worry was that the Iraqis would unleash their chemical weapons. “A nasty shock,” he said before the ground war got under way, “would be if Saddam were somehow to launch a surprise attack against our forces, blanket them with chemical weapons and kill large numbers of Americans and our allies. We’ve got a strategy to defeat that. We are not letting down our guard at all. One of the biggest errors a commander can make is to assume away the capabilities of his adversaries. I think we have made that mistake in the past. I’m not going to make that mistake.”
Apart from that concern, Schwarzkopf fretted because his long hours in the Riyadh war room prevented him from visiting his troops as often as he wanted. When he did venture out, he was always accompanied by a sergeant lugging a 60-lb. backpack containing the general’s satellite relay hookup for instant communication to his headquarters or to the Pentagon. Also in the entourage: four military bodyguards in civilian clothes and armed with AR-15 assault rifles. On one of his infrequent tours before the unleashing of Desert Storm, 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 who took command: 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 alike were as devoted to Schwarzkopf as were his officers. None seemed overly intimidated by his gruffness, his size (6 ft. 3 in., 240 lbs.), his rank, his aggressive challenges or even his tempestuous flare-ups. He was, after all, the Bear, whom some described as only part grizzly and the rest Teddy.
His wife Brenda and his three children, ages 13, 18 and 20, know him mainly as the latter. He helps the kids with their homework, entertains them with magic tricks. He is a devotee of mint chocolate-chip ice cream, and he is a cookie muncher (on hearing that he described himself as owlish, his sister sent him owl-shaped cookies). He loves fried rice, hates Brussels sprouts. He is a music fan who lulls himself to sleep listening to tapes of Pavarotti or the sounds of honking geese and rushing mountain streams. He is also addicted to Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood movies. He gets grizzly only when the family sits down to play board games. In fact, says Brenda, “we really don’t particularly like to play with him... because he is a sore loser.”
Schwarzkopf also hunts, fishes, skis and shoots clay pigeons. He has camped out alone in the Alaskan wilderness for days at a time. His wife once drove out to fetch him at a prearranged meeting place after one of his Alaskan hikes. “It had rained all weekend,” she recalls. “I found him sitting alongside the road with this smile on his face. His feet were bloody and his socks were wet.”
The truth about the man, says Colonel Burwell B. Bell, Schwarzkopf’s executive officer, 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 throws his arms around their shoulders and tells them what a great job they’re doing.”
Asked at the end of the war to evaluate the man he had just defeated, Schwarzkopf burst out with the exclamation “Ha!” Then he went on: “He is neither a strategist, nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general, nor is he a soldier. Other than that, he’s a great military man, I want you to know that.” Taking out all those nors and nots, Schwarzkopf had just defined much of himself.
The general and his troops: “He can get very, very angry,” says an aide, “but it's never personal.”
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