Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(61)
In recent years it has been battered. The defeat in Vietnam, humiliating to the Army, was especially stinging to those who provided the ethos for it, led it, and were its most devoted and ambitious servants. The demoralization came to a climax in 1970 when the then superintendent, General Koster, stood on a stone balcony in the mess hall and announced his resignation. He had been implicated in the cover-up after My Lai. Koster was never tried but his career was ruined.
The corps of cadets had gradually been increased in size from 2,500 to 4,400, and commensurate with these larger numbers, in 1976 came the greatest cheating scandal ever. One hundred and fifty-two cadets were found guilty of collaboration on a take-home problem in electrical engineering and dismissed—ninety-eight were later allowed to return—and cheating, it was agreed, had been far more widespread. In the same year, over strenuous and deeply felt objections, women were admitted for the first time. In 1977 a highly critical report mentioned among other things West Point’s negative attitudes and resistance to change. Added to all this, the football team was moribund. It could not beat Navy and had not been of national prominence for almost twenty years.
The problems West Point was facing seemed to call for something other than the stewardship of another career-minded general. As it had in 1919 when MacArthur was sent in to straighten out things after the war and made a dazzling, unmilitary entrance in grommetless cap and worn puttees, the Army reached far, this time to the retired list. The man chosen had made his way to the top as White House staff secretary to Eisenhower and adviser to Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon on defense and foreign policy. This was General Andrew Goodpaster. He had retired in 1974 after a career that just missed chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs but included Vietnam and five years as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. From there he went to the Citadel to teach.
Goodpaster is not a typical general. He is tall, white-haired, and reserved. He’s a grandfather and drives a white Mercedes. There is something pedagogic in his manner and he is exact in his speech, as befits a man who often gave advice to the powerful. When he was first asked, at Christmas in 1976, what he thought of selecting a superintendent with greater than usual academic qualifications, someone who might remain longer than the usual three years, he replied that he was in favor of it.
“Let me ask you a funny question,” the chief of staff then said. “Would you consider it?”
That spring, taking off one of his four stars, he returned to active duty as the Supe. Although it was only one of the areas to which he had to give his attention, honor—and related matters—was the most important to him. It was the determining issue on which he was prepared to come back, Goodpaster says.
The honor system is as old as the school. Originally it derived from the officer’s code, the aristocratic idea that an officer was a gentleman and as good as his word. Over the years the corps was so intimate and its notion of honor so close to society’s that not until MacArthur’s reign was there an invincible definition: a cadet does not lie, cheat, or steal. To this, unwritten at first, was added the clause: nor tolerate those who do.
The honor committee, vaguely secret, with its unobserved trials and chairman’s book passed down from hand to hand, enforced the code. If a cadet was found guilty, he was expected to resign. If he refused and there were no military charges on which he could be dismissed, the tradition was to silence him—he lived and ate alone, no one speaking to him except on official matters. In the eyes of the corps he had ceased to exist. The silence lasted for life. This harsh but thrilling bit of schoolboy justice was struck down in 1973. By then, though the authorities were unwilling to recognize it, a different kind of young man had begun to enter the academy, in fact all the academies. At Air Force things were so bad that during the 1970 graduation ceremonies the new superintendent could hear groaning as certain cadets received their diplomas.
West Point failed to pick up the warning signs: earlier cheating outbreaks, changing attitudes expressed by cadets, even rumors of bribery on the honor committee. The dishonesty and cover-up in Vietnam and Washington, the years of permissiveness and protest had an effect. Like a dam breaking, the scandal of 1976 swept through company after company, in some nearly wiping out an entire class.
The most difficult part of the honor code is the toleration clause, the obligation of one cadet to report another. Although truthfulness may not be foreign to American values, informing is. MacArthur himself ironically claimed to have lived according to his parents’ admonition: never lie, never tattle. The Naval Academy has no toleration clause, but at West Point a cadet who observes an honor violation and does not report it has committed a violation himself.
This is not the only problem. The code is simple, but the workings of the system are more involved and must be scrupulously taught. A cadet may not lie but neither may he quibble—tell a partial truth. Of a disheveled cadet who had reported late for duty, an officer demanded, “Where have you been?”
“Sir, I’ve been to the library,” was the reply. It was true, but he neglected to say that was where he’d met his girl and they then spent two hours out in a field. He was tried for honor.
Nor is the question of stealing as clear-cut as it seems. Someone who sees money drop out of another’s pocket and does not return it is guilty of a violation. A cadet who was at Eisenhower Hall, the social center, found that someone had taken his raincoat from the cloakroom. Raincoats are identical. He took someone else’s. He was found guilty.