第53則：「…..General H. Norman Schwarzkopf對美國西點軍校的學生說：「我們從差勁的領導中所學到的，遠比從好的領導中所學到的要多得多。你學會了不該這樣去做，從而便知道應該怎樣去做。」--陳寬仁
『我還是個年輕軍官時，從一些很差勁的長官那裡學到很多領導方面的知識，我說的是那些道德絕對敗壞，完全沒有任何優點的長官。部下肯跟隨他們，純粹是出於好奇心，想知道他們下一步會做些什麼。
我們從差勁的領導所學到的東西，遠比從好的領導所學到的多。你學會了不要怎麼做，從而知道應該怎麼做。』
這是施瓦茨科夫將軍在美國軍事學院(The United States Military Academy) 演講中的一小段；這段演講揭示那些道德絕對敗壞，完全沒有任何優點的人也能身居要津，然而施瓦茨科夫將軍最終出來揭發並對部屬提出警告。.......Catherine Yen
Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, U.S. Commander in Gulf War, Dies at 78
David Longstreath/Associated Press
Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf answered questions during an interview in Riyadh in 1990. More Photos »
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Published: December 27, 2012
Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf,
who commanded the American-led forces that crushed Iraq in the 1991
Persian Gulf war and became the nation’s most acclaimed military hero
since the midcentury exploits of Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and
Douglas MacArthur, died on Thursday in Tampa, Fla. He was 78.
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The general, who retired soon after the gulf war and lived in Tampa,
died of complications arising from a recent bout of pneumonia, said his
sister Ruth Barenbaum. In 1993, he was found to have prostate cancer,
for which he was successfully treated.
In Operation Desert Storm, General Schwarzkopf orchestrated one of the
most lopsided victories in modern warfare, a six-week blitzkrieg by a
broad coalition of forces with overwhelming air superiority that
liberated tiny Kuwait from Iraqi occupation, routed Saddam Hussein’s
Republican Guard and virtually destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, all with
relatively light allied losses.
Winning the lightning war was never in doubt and in no way comparable to the traumas of World War II
and the Korean conflict, which made Eisenhower and MacArthur into
national heroes and presidential timber. But a divisive Vietnam conflict
and the cold war had produced no such heroes, and the little-known
General Schwarzkopf was wreathed in laurels as the victor in a popular
war against a brutal dictator.
A combat-tested, highly decorated career officer who had held many
commands, served two battlefield tours in Vietnam and coordinated
American landing forces in the 1983 invasion of Grenada, he came home to
a tumultuous welcome, including a glittering ticker-tape parade up
Broadway in the footsteps of Lindbergh, MacArthur and the moon-landing
Apollo astronauts.
“Stormin’ Norman,” as headlines proclaimed him, was lionized by millions
of euphoric Americans who, until weeks earlier, had never heard of him.
President George Bush, whose popularity soared with the war, gave him
the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Congress gave him standing ovations.
Queen Elizabeth II made him an honorary knight. European and Asian
nations conferred lavish honors.
In his desert fatigues, he was interviewed on television, featured on
magazine covers and feted at celebrations in Tampa, Washington and other
cities. He led the Pegasus Parade at the Kentucky Derby in Louisville
and was the superstar at the Indianapolis 500. Florida Republicans urged
him to run for the United States Senate.
Amid speculation about his future, a movement to draft him for president
arose. He insisted he had no presidential aspirations, but Time
magazine quoted him as saying he someday “might be able to find a sense
of self-fulfillment serving my country in the political arena,” and he
told Barbara Walters on the ABC News program “20/20” that he would not
rule out a White House run.
Within weeks, the four-star general had become a media and marketing
phenomenon. Three months after the war, he signed a $5 million contract
with Bantam Books for the world rights to his memoirs, “It Doesn’t Take a
Hero,” written with Peter Petre and published in 1992. Herbert Mitgang,
reviewing the book for The New York Times,
called it a serviceable first draft of history. “General Schwarzkopf,”
he wrote, “comes across as a strong professional soldier, a Patton with a
conscience.”
All but drowned out in the surge of approbation, critics noted that the
general’s enormous air, sea and land forces had overwhelmed a country
with a gross national product equivalent to North Dakota’s, and that
while Iraq’s bridges, dams and power plants had been all but obliterated
and tens of thousands of its troops killed (compared with a few hundred
allied casualties), Saddam Hussein had been left in power.
Postwar books, news reports and documentaries — a flood of information
the general had restricted during the war — showed that most of Iraq’s
elite Republican Guard, whose destruction had been a goal of war
planners, had escaped from an ill-coordinated Marine and Army assault,
and had not been pursued because of President Bush’s decision to halt
the ground war after 100 hours.
“The Generals’ War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf”
(1995), by Michael R. Gordon of The New York Times and the retired
general Bernard E. Trainor, portrayed a White House rushed into ending
the war prematurely by unrealistic fears of being criticized for killing
too many Iraqis and by ignorance of events on the ground. It cast
General Schwarzkopf as a second-rate commander who took credit for
allied successes, blamed others for his mistakes and shouted at, but did
not effectively control, his field commanders as the Republican Guard
slipped away.
He was depicted more sympathetically in other books, including “In the
Eye of the Storm” (1991), by Roger Cohen and Claudio Gatti. “His swift
triumph over Iraq in the 1991 gulf war came as a shock to a nation that
had been battered, by failing industries and festering economic
problems, into a sense that the century of its power was at an end,”
they wrote. “Schwarzkopf appeared abruptly as an intensely human
messenger of hope, however illusory or fragile.”
Old official photographs show a medaled military mannequin, a
6-foot-3-inch 240-pounder with grim determined eyes. But they miss the
gentler man who listened to Pavarotti, Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan; who
loved hunting, fishing and ballet; and, like any soldier, called home
twice a week from the war zone.
Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. was born on Aug. 22, 1934, in Trenton,
one of three children of the man whose name he shared and the former
Ruth Bowman. At 18, he dropped the Jr. and his first name but kept the
initial. His father, New Jersey’s first state police superintendent,
investigated the 1932 Lindbergh kidnapping; he was also a West Point
graduate, fought in World Wars I and II, became a major general and
trained Iran’s national police in the 1940s.
As a boy, General Schwarzkopf attended Bordentown Military Institute
near Trenton. But from 1946 to 1950 he lived in Iran, Switzerland,
Germany and Italy with his father. Fluent in French and German at 17, he
enrolled at Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pa., played
football and was a champion debater.
At West Point, he was on the football and wrestling teams and sang in
the choir. He loved history and dreamed of leading men in battle. “He
saw himself as Alexander the Great,” recalled Gen. Leroy Suddath, his
old roommate, “and we didn’t laugh when he said it.” In 1956, he
graduated 43rd in a class of 480.
After infantry and airborne training at Fort Benning, Ga., he served two
years with airborne units in America and Europe, took a two-year
assignment in Berlin and a career-officer course at Fort Benning, then
earned a master’s in guided-missile engineering in 1964 from the
University of Southern California.
Captain Schwarzkopf went to Vietnam as an adviser to a South Vietnamese
airborne division in 1965 and once withstood a 10-day enemy siege. He
returned a major in 1966, taught at West Point for two years, and as a
lieutenant colonel attended the Command and General Staff College at
Fort Leavenworth, Kan.
In 1968 he married Brenda Holsinger. They had three children: Cynthia, Jessica and Christian.
A battalion commander in his second Vietnam tour, in 1969-70, he was
wounded twice and won three Silver Stars for bravery. Men in his command
were killed in two 1970 actions that deeply affected him.
On Feb. 18, an artillery shell aimed at the enemy roared over a hill
where one of his companies was dug in. It hit a treetop and exploded,
killing Sgt. Michael E. Mullen. Form letters sent over the colonel’s
name seemed to implicate him, and the sergeant’s parents held him partly
responsible as they crusaded to expose military callousness. The case
became an antiwar cause célèbre and tarnished the colonel’s record,
perhaps unjustly. A 1976 book, “Friendly Fire,” by C. D. B. Bryan,
called the death accidental, but a 1995 memoir by the sergeant’s mother,
“Unfriendly Fire,” blamed the military.
On May 28, the colonel ordered his helicopter down to rescue troops who
had wandered into a minefield. Some were airlifted out, but he stayed
behind with his troops. A soldier tripped a mine, shattering his leg and
wounding the colonel, who crawled atop the thrashing victim to stop him
from setting off more mines. Three other troopers were killed by an
exploding mine, but the colonel led the survivors to safety. The episode
sealed his reputation as a commander willing to risk his life for his
men.
He came home dismayed at the Army’s leadership and convinced that the
peace movement and the news media were prolonging the war. One of his
sisters, Ms. Barenbaum, had become a peace activist, and for years they
did not speak. He later concluded that politicians had lost the war, and
the failure, at a cost of 58,000 American lives, left him devastated.
For a time, he considered resigning his commission.
His decision to stay in the service came at a military nadir for
America. As historians have noted, the Army during and after Vietnam
fell into decay — a conscript force rife with racial antagonisms, drug
abuse and disciplinary failures. Soldiers were disillusioned, the
uniform seemed tarnished in a nation that no longer cared, and once
proud traditions had given way to progress measured by infamous “body
counts.” But in the late ‘70s and the ‘80s, reforms in recruitment,
living conditions, planning, training and leadership restored much of
what had been lost: self-respect and professionalism in an all-volunteer
service.
He became a colonel in 1975, a brigadier general in 1978, a major
general in 1982 and a lieutenant general in 1986. He moved from
personnel and planning to brigade posts in Alaska and Washington State,
from the Pacific Command in Hawaii to a division in Europe and back to
Washington in charge of personnel.
In 1983, while assigned to an elite tank division at Fort Stewart, Ga.,
he was tapped to coordinate the task force that invaded Grenada.
Revolutionaries had staged a coup, killed the prime minister and, with
Cuban aid, were building an airfield, purportedly to supply Latin
American insurgents. It was also feared that American medical students
on the island might become hostages. Operation Urgent Fury suppressed
the rebels, restored order and brought the students home safely.
In 1988, General Schwarzkopf was given his fourth star and named
commander of the United States Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base
in Tampa, supervising military activities in 19 countries in the Middle
East, the Horn of Africa and the Persian Gulf. He developed contingency
plans for war in Iraq, and two years later they were needed.
On Aug. 2, 1990, Iraqi forces occupied Kuwait. General Schwarzkopf moved
his headquarters to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and amassed hundreds of
ships, thousands of aircraft and 765,000 allied troops, including
540,000 Americans and large Arab contingents under Prince Khaled bin
Sultan of Saudi Arabia, who was co-commander in the gulf war. A trade
embargo and warnings failed to force an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait,
and after a deadline passed on Jan. 15, 1991, the world’s first heavily
televised war began.
Audiences saw live missiles striking targets and fighters taking off
from aircraft carriers. Cable news delivered continuous reports, and
networks anchored newscasts from Baghdad. In Riyadh, General Schwarzkopf
controlled the flow of information in briefings. Some reporters were
allowed into the field, subject to military supervision and censorship.
The result was a dramatic war — and a highly visible commander in
fatigues.
The ground war was over in a few days, thanks to what he called his
“left hook” strategy, in which he placed forces behind enemy lines for a
swift, decisive strike.
The general supported Mr. Bush’s presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2004
and Senator John McCain’s 2008 race against Senator Barack Obama, but
he never ran for political office.
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