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The American Enterprise, 1999

“This is a very sentimental place,” says Colonel Charles F. Brower IV (Class of 1969), professor and head of the Behavioral Sciences and Leadership Department at West Point. “It’s hard to figure that out, but things have profound meaning when they’re built upon so much experience and tradition.”

Over six months I asked dozens of West Pointers, “What is your favorite spot?” on these 16,000 acres, and no one who answered “the cemetery” did so without a halt, a swallow, a dab at moistening eyes. No matter if our chat had been starchy or informal, acronym-clotted or fluid: mere mention of the West Point Cemetery carried an emotional charge like a bolt off nearby (and ominously named) Storm King Mountain.

The dead (7,000) outnumber the cadets (4,000) at West Point. Pennies and pebbles rest on the grave markers: tokens of remembrance, many left by strangers, for the families of the departed are often far away. As if sent by central casting, deer lope past the white headstones at dusk. Some of the inhumed died in war (George Armstrong Custer, tourist favorite), others in peace (Army coach Red Blaik, whose football-shaped stone bears the legend, “On Brave Old Army Team”), one on the launching pad (Ed White, who was incinerated aboard Apollo 1). But in the end, their loyalties lie with West Point, as they lie under West Point.

What is it about the U.S. Military Academy that inspires fealty unto the grave? Its business, after all, is death. It can be “a place of bleak emotions, a great orphanage, chill in its appearance, rigid in its demands. There was occasional kindness but little love,” as writer James Salter (1945) recalls. Yet he adds, “In its place was comradeship and a standard that seemed as high as anyone could know. It included self-reliance and death if need be. West Point did not make character, it extolled it. It taught one to believe in difficulty, the hard way, and to sleep, as it were, on bare ground.”

I came to West Point not with starry eyes but with a suspicious mind, as the song goes. I expected a grey, unrelievedly martial world. That is not what I found. (Indeed, at my first stop, the West Point Club restaurant, I was serenaded in the men’s room by the piped-in sounds not of Wagner or Sousa but of Michael Bolton and James Taylor—which made me, at least, want to kill kill kill.)

There is, inevitably, a Potemkin-village quality to any tour of what is, after all, a military installation and government operation. The Public Affairs Office was exceptionally cooperative over the many months of this story’s gestation, but even our heroically indefatigable guide, Deb DeGraw, could not comply with a request to meet with “disgruntled cadets.” We saw, for the most part, the best West Point has to offer—and one need not be a worshiper at the Church of the Pentagon to appreciate the Academy’s virtues, notably an honor code that demands truthfulness in our age of Big Lies.

Philosophy professor Louis Pojman is, at first glance, an unlikely defender of West Point. He is no Sergeant Stryker or military wannabe who gets weak-kneed at the sight of a man in a uniform. “You might say I’ve been a convert to West Point,” he says. Pojman has led the peripatetic life typical of an academic (or a soldier) and has found amidst the Gothic Gray “a kind of idealistic commitment that reminds me of Notre Dame. I’ve seen so much debauchery and decadence at American colleges; this is really an oasis. There are few academic settings where character and moral values are taken so seriously, where discipline and integrity are valued as highly, where young people are learning to accept stress in their youth. If our nation is to survive its shallow hedonism, it will be because of training like that of West Point.” (This, mind you, from the greenish author of the standard text Environmental Ethics, and a man who notes proudly that “almost my whole class became vegetarians” after one semester’s course. He is dedicating his next book to his cadets—“who will give new significance to the green uniforms.” The implication—that West Point is training tomorrow’s officers for a military of pollution-fighters—explains why most of the Academy’s critics today are firing from the right flank at what they see as a feminized casualty of the sensitivity wars.)

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For its first century of existence, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point was an institution both revered and reviled. It produced Robert E. Lee, who never collected a single demerit and went on to serve as its superintendent, and Ulysses S. Grant, who said the happiest day of his life was “the day I left West Point.” The Academy is credited with preserving the Union and with destroying the Founders’ ideal of a citizen-army. Abolition of the Academy was a live issue in Congress until the twentieth century, whose wars made heroes and celebrities of West Pointers like Douglas MacArthur (1903), Dwight Eisenhower (’15), and Omar Bradley (’15).

Gradually, West Point became enveloped in a romantic haze: It was a place of dashing cadets, of smart parades across the Plain, of Saturday football games along a resplendent Hudson River. Young boys devoured Red Reeder’s novels of cadet life; reverential movies were made, from The Long Gray Line to the ineffable West Point Story (1950), in which James Cagney and Virginia Mayo dance and wisecrack their way into the hearts of some really swell cadets.

Then came Vietnam. Linebacker-halfback Sam Bartholomew (’66) remembers the war’s first obvious impact on the Academy as comical: “The football team had the ‘Chinese bandits’—defensive specialists. Whenever the bandits would go in the cadets would put on coolie hats”—until the Secretaries of the Army and Defense banished the coolies and their commie imagery.

But as the war expanded, West Point grew grimmer. Graduates were coming home as corpses. Thirty of Bartholomew’s classmates died in Southeast Asia; more than 100 were wounded.

The cadet buzz-cut became the symbol of a myrmidon who was willing to kill and die for Robert McNamara and Lyndon Johnson. Current Commandant John Abizaid (’73) bitterly recalls going to Boston College for a football game and “being saluted with ‘Sieg Heil.’” West Point lost its allure; the once-choosy Academy had to admit every single qualified applicant to fill the entering class in 1968.

The Academy has recovered nicely. Once more it is among the nation’s best math and engineering schools. The cadets are top-notch, their leaders are impressive men, hazing is verboten, no one ever skips class, and the cadets call you “sir” whether they mean it or not. Yet in some respects, this is not the West Point of MacArthur and Eisenhower, let alone Lee. Although all graduates receive a B.S., English majors roam the grounds. Women parade across the Plain—and live in the co-ed barracks. (Don’t you dare call them dorms!) For $300 million a year, West Point graduates 900 second lieutenants every May, and as the USMA approaches its bicentennial in 2002, we ought to ask again the most fundamental questions: What is West Point? And why is West Point?

“SOMETHING LARGER THAN MYSELF”

“Of the river scenery of America, the Hudson, at West Point, is doubtless the boldest and most beautiful,” said nineteenth-century poet Nathaniel Parker Willis. The British coveted this strategically vital bend in the Hudson; had they captured the batteries at West Point they could have severed the link between New York City and the interior of the country—a severance that might have pleased later Americans, but that would have disrupted communications and supplies and perhaps proved fatal to the Revolutionary cause.

In April 1778, a 500-yard-long iron chain was stretched across the Hudson at West Point; the English could not pass, although their wily treachery is recalled in the Old Cadet Chapel, built in 1837, which borders the cemetery. The chapel’s walls are studded with black marble tablets memorializing the generals of the Revolution. The most eloquent, for its stark omission, gives only rank and birthdate—the name, Benedict Arnold, has been left off. Arnold took command at West Point in August 1780; perfidiously, he had planned to betray the patriot cause by turning the post over to the king’s men.

As early as 1776 the Continental Congress debated the creation of a “Military Academy for the Army,” so that we would not have to rely on foreign engineers in the unlikely event of future wars. In 1782 a “Corps of Invalids”—surely a name to frighten off potential aggressors!—was established at West Point whereby lame veterans would teach mathematics to younger officers.

Henry Knox and Alexander Hamilton convinced George Washington of the necessity for a national military academy; two days before his death at Mount Vernon, the ex-President took quill in hand and endorsed “a Military Academy” as being “of primary importance to this country.”

Hamilton’s arch-foe, Thomas Jefferson, had opposed such an academy on the grounds that it was “unauthorized by the Constitution.” As was so often the case, President Jefferson disagreed with citizen Jefferson, and in March 1802, he signed into law the legislation creating the United States Military Academy. The USMA was a ramshackle affair for fifteen years. In 1812, the corps consisted of a single cadet, for Jeffersonians led by Secretary of War William Eustis stinted the Academy on grounds of parsimony in government and a belief in the citizen militia as opposed to the dreaded standing army.

A humorless New England martinet named Sylvanus Thayer, the thirty-third cadet to be graduated from West Point, saved the Academy when he was appointed Superintendent in 1817. Thayer instituted summer encampments, which persist to this day, as well as daily grading, the ranking of cadets, and rules so strict as to invite disbelief, if not open rebellion: Cadets were not permitted to read novels, play musical instruments, possess cooking utensils, or send unauthorized letters to loved ones. Thayer also turned West Point into the best engineering and science school in the country—and, in ways not much acknowledged anymore, fundamentally altered the Academy’s mission.

For as Stephen Ambrose wrote in Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point, “Graduates of the Academy would not even be expected to remain in the Army, where there probably would be no room for them in any case, but they were expected upon their return to civil life to join the local militia company and direct its training and, in war, its fighting.” Thus the Academy was intended to reinforce the militia system and not become the heart and mind of that entity the Founders feared above all others: the standing army. Yet by 1838 Congress had imposed an obligation of four years’ service on graduating cadets, and it has fluctuated thereabouts ever since.

There was an engaging casualness to West Point in its infancy. Twelve-year-old boys were appointed cadets, as were married men who left the grounds at night on conjugal visits. Suffused with the spirit of ’76, men took no guff from officers if they believed them to be scoundrels or bullies. Sylvanus Thayer insisted that “Gentlemen must learn it is only their province to listen and obey,” but typical was the cheeky cadet who cut off a Thayer adjuration with the remark, “Major Thayer, when I want your advice I’ll ask you for it!”

Abolition of the Academy was a live issue in the 1830s and 1840s. (Congressman Davy Crockett called it “not only aristocratic, but a downright invasion of the rights of the citizen, and a violation of the civil compact called ‘the Constitution.’”) But the Mexican War saved its bacon, as several graduates performed with distinction.

Although three-quarters of the West Point grads who fought in the Civil War wore the Union blue, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was of the class of 1828, and the Confederate generalship was dominated by products of this school for soldiers. Senate Republicans took up where Crockett had left off: Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan demanded abolition of this viper’s nest that had produced more traitors “within the last fifty years than all the institutions of learning and education that have existed since Judas Iscariot’s time.” Moreover, Northern West Point generals like George McClellan (1846) seemed shy of carnage; one Republican politician charged that the Union army was riddled with “scores of luke warm, half secession [West Point] officers in command who cannot bear to strike a vigorous blow lest it hurt their rebel friends or jeopardize the precious protectors of slavery.” (Bloodthirsty politicos chastising military men for their caution is not uncommon; recall Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s immortal—immoral?—question to General Colin Powell: “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”)

The bitterness of Union veterans over their treatment by haughty West Pointers made the Academy’s very existence an issue until the last of the vets had died off. (“What’s the meanest kind of dog?” went a joke told by Civil War soliders. “A Pointer.” “What’s the meanest kind of Pointer?” “A West Pointer.”) Illinois Senator John Logan, Republican candidate for vice president in 1884, wrote The Volunteer Soldier of America, a defense of “citizen-soldiers” against the “hostility of West Point,” which exists “to crush . . . the volunteer and his aspirations for recognition.” (Try to imagine a major political figure today calling for the abolition of West Point. This sacred cow took about a century to raise.)