The Fourth Star Read online

  An hour later, at the seventh hole, Beth was summoned to the telephone for another call from her husband, and this time he sounded a little sheepish. After learning that Chiarelli planned to get out, Major Ron Adams, the executive officer in his unit, had made a few hurried calls and an hour later had come back with a counteroffer, Pete told her. If he would withdraw his retirement, the Army would send him to graduate school, all expenses paid, and then to West Point to teach cadets as an instructor in the Department of Social Sciences. “It’s going to be fully funded and I’ll get paid the whole time. What do you think?” he asked. It was so sudden that Beth didn’t know what to think, except that her hopes for a simpler life in her hometown and summers along the coast were slipping away. That evening, Pete invited Adams over for Chinese takeout, and they talked over the Army offer. Pete could go to school full-time at the University of Washington while Beth got her wish to stay home with their growing family, they told her. At least they could stay in the Northwest near her family for two years. If they still wanted out of the Army later, he would have the advantage of experience teaching at the United States Military Academy. Finally it was agreed: he would stay in.

  As a ROTC graduate, Chiarelli knew little about West Point and next to nothing about the Department of Social Sciences, where he would be teaching after completing graduate school. He had no idea he was entering an elite and somewhat secretive tribe. The Army, lumbering and homogeneous to outsiders, was actually a collection of these tribes. The largest are built around weapons systems. Officers in the armor branch spent their careers thinking about tank warfare. Artillery officers swore allegiance to their fearsome cannons, which they referred to as the “King of Battle.” Then there were the Special Forces, which trained foreign armies and the special ops units that ran missions so secret they could not even be discussed.

  When he was assigned to the Department of Social Sciences, Chiarelli was moving into one of the few tribes not built around some aspect of warfare, one so exclusive that many officers didn’t even know it existed. For decades “Sosh,” as it was known inside West Point’s granite walls, recruited some of the best minds in the officer corps to join its rotating faculty of several dozen instructors. These young captains and majors taught economics, government, and international relations to cadets, and also formed a wellspring of unconventional thinking in a service not known for openness to new ideas. Sosh instructors were literally the longhairs—the guys whose haircuts tended to be a little less military and who called each other by first names. They saw themselves as intellectuals, or as close as you could get in a service with a deep anti-intellectual bent. It was the Army’s bias for action over argument and debate that made Sosh a dangerous place for officers. Stay too long in Sosh or appear to enjoy your time there too much and you ran the risk of being branded an elitist or an egghead, in either case not the right type to lead men in combat. For that reason, those inside the fraternity didn’t talk much to outsiders about the department, but to the initiated it was a special place.

  For most of Sosh’s history, it had drawn two types of soldiers—generals-in-waiting and dissidents. In the first category were officers who came to Sosh in the midst of stellar careers, for whom a few years in the department was another box to be checked on their way up the chain of command. In 2009, one-quarter of the Army’s four-star generals had taught in the Sosh department. In the second group were the officers who were too outspoken or just too different to ascend to the top of an organization that rewarded teamwork and fitting in above all. They wanted to puncture the Army’s conventional wisdom, its priorities, and its myths. Frequently they pushed their more career-oriented counterparts in the department to sharpen their ideas and take more daring positions.

  Chiarelli’s four years at Sosh were the defining time of his early career, turning him into an officer who decades later, when he made general, was willing to question almost everything about the way his Army was fighting in Iraq. A year after Chiarelli departed, David Petraeus arrived and had a similar experience.

  United States Military Academy

  West Point, New York

  June 1980

  When Pete and Beth Chiarelli arrived at West Point, it dawned on them almost immediately that they were joining a high-powered crowd. The department head, Colonel Lee Donne Olvey, stressed to every incoming instructor that they were the best minds the Army had to offer, and they were expected to show it during their three years there. Sosh had a mystique that Olvey was determined to preserve. “We followed a policy of unabashed elitism,” he recalled.

  The new crop of instructors arrived in June for a mandatory orientation session that began with a reception at Olvey’s elegant Tudor-style quarters. Built in 1908, it boasted dark wood-paneled walls and a stirring view of the Hudson River below. As they mingled, Chiarelli realized that he knew none of his fellow instructors and those he met seemed far more cultivated and accomplished than he was. Many were West Point graduates who had attended Princeton, Yale, Harvard, or other fancy East Coast schools. Another new arrival, Jeff McKitrick, who became one of Chiarelli’s closest friends, had spent two years working at the Pentagon and attending the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins. Olvey himself had graduated at the top of his West Point class in 1955, gone on to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and then earned a doctorate from Harvard. He was married to a fetching and sophisticated Brazilian who greeted the newcomers with him at the door.

  Once everyone was settled Olvey, speaking in his soft Georgia drawl, reminded the officers they were there because they were among the smartest and most capable in the Army. “You are the crème de la crème,” he said. The barely concealed intellectual snobbery bothered Beth. “I can’t imagine working with a bunch of men who have been told their whole lives that they are the cream of the crop,” she told Pete as they drove home that evening. “It’s like Lord of the Flies or something.”

  Chiarelli was a little intimidated. Asked to fill out a questionnaire during orientation week, he had felt a twinge of embarrassment about leaving blank a section asking him to list the scholarly articles and books he had published. His middling grades at Seattle University and a poor score on the admission test had caused him to abandon plans for law school. Studying relentlessly in graduate school, he had earned a master’s degree in political science with honors and completed all the course work necessary for a doctorate. But “U-Dub,” as Chiarelli called the University of Washington, wasn’t Princeton or Yale. His master’s thesis on the CIA-backed 1953 coup in Iran had never been published. Nor had he ever stood in front of a classroom and lectured on the intricacies of American government. Beth, Pete, and their two young children were assigned run-down World War II-era family housing at Stewart Airfield, fifteen miles away from campus. More-senior instructors received swanky quarters on the West Point grounds.

  Thayer Hall, where Sosh was located, had once housed the indoor riding ring in the era when cadets were taught horsemanship. The basement had long since been subdivided into classrooms and windowless offices for junior faculty. On each desk in the morning was a fresh copy of that day’s New York Times. For the first time in his Army career, Chiarelli was expected to know what was happening in the wider world, not just in the narrow confines of whatever Army base he happened to be assigned to at the time. Used to peppering his conversations with “sir” and “ma’am,” he had to remind himself that the custom at Sosh was to use first names.

  Weekday mornings at six-thirty, Chiarelli and two fellow instructors living at Stewart carpooled over to campus. Chiarelli grabbed a cup of coffee and thumbed through the paper in the faculty lounge before heading off to teach his first section of the day. Often he’d find himself embroiled in a coffeepot debate on some aspect of national security that would continue until he had to leave for class. He’d come back hours later to find a new crop of officers chewing over another topic. Officers met over lunch to vet papers they were preparing for political science conventions or dis
cuss their doctoral research. Gradually Chiarelli’s nerves settled down, and he began to actually enjoy standing in front of a room of cadets. He taught a course on government and politics of the Soviet Union; his booming voice echoed down hallways and into adjacent classrooms, becoming background music in the department.

  Throwing together freethinkers and ambitious young officers in one place had been the Sosh way for decades, thanks largely to George “Abe” Lincoln, the founder of the modern-day Social Sciences Department. Lincoln was a legend in the history of the Army and of West Point. Graduating from the military academy in 1929, Lincoln had won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford University before beginning his glittering Army career. In the middle of World War II, while serving in London as a planner for the Normandy invasion, Lincoln was transferred to the Pentagon, where he became deeply involved in the most sensitive debates of the war, including the decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan. Promoted to brigadier general at age thirty-eight, he stayed in Washington until 1947, when he accepted a job as the deputy head of West Point’s Department of Economics, Government, and History, shortly to be renamed the Department of Social Sciences. On his departure, General Dwight Eisenhower, then Army chief of staff, wrote him a note that read: “I attribute in very great part to you a noticeable growth in the soundness and clarity of military policy… I personally have leaned heavily on your advice.” Returning to West Point meant accepting a two-rank demotion to colonel, but there were compensations. He was going to be reunited with one of his mentors, Herman Beukema, the department head, and together they would work to redefine the role of the modern officer.

  The Army that had entered World War II had been, in General George Marshall’s words, that of a “third-rate power.” West Point wasn’t much better. For years it had staffed its teaching posts with recent academy graduates who sometimes had only passing familiarity with the subjects they were teaching. After World War II Lincoln and Marshall believed that the Army had to change if it was going to meet its obligations as a global power. To keep the peace in this era dominated by atomic weapons, Lincoln envisioned a new breed of officer, schooled in disciplines beyond just blunt killing. They needed to understand politics, economics, and international relations. To staff his department he demanded the brightest captains and majors he could get, men (they were all men then) who could get into and excel in top civilian national security studies programs at places such as Harvard and Princeton and then take on teaching assignments at Sosh that would convert the department into an intellectual powerhouse.

  Sosh, unlike some other departments at West Point, wanted its instructors to be provocative and versed in the latest scholarship. Not only cadets would benefit, argued Lincoln, the department’s founder. The chosen officers would mature as much as or more than their students by taking a break from the regimented life of a soldier and spending a few years in an academic environment where they would be encouraged to think broadly and publish scholarly articles before heading back to combat units. In short, Lincoln had in mind an elite corps of officers whose talents and schooling would prepare them for major roles in the postwar Army.

  As he began his teaching duties, Chiarelli discovered his University of Washington education was not as much of a handicap as he had imagined. He had read William Appleman Williams and other revisionist historians who argued that the United States deserved more blame for starting the Cold War than the Soviet Union. Assigning readings from Williams kindled lively debate in a class of patriotic cadets. Pacing back and forth with arms waving, Chiarelli enthusiastically held forth on how the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had been a justifiable response to the encirclement it was facing in Asia from the United States. “I thought all this stuff was absolutely ludicrous,” Chiarelli said, “but I loved walking into a classroom and pretending like I believed it.”

  Chiarelli began to think that he might want to spend the rest of his career teaching at Sosh. Most instructors spent three years in the department before returning to the regular Army, but he decided to stay a fourth year to help edit a book on reforming the Defense Department that had grown out of the department’s annual summer national security conference. He also hoped that staying the extra year would help him win one of the half-dozen permanent teaching positions there—a job that would have meant an end to leading soldiers. The teaching job, however, went to another officer who had already finished his doctorate, had authored a well-received book on Lebanon, and wrote pieces for the New York Times and Los Angeles Times critiquing U.S. foreign policy. Chiarelli’s gamble put him in a hole. After two years at graduate school and four years in Sosh, he had been away from the regular Army a long time. The armor branch personnel managers responsible for Chiarelli’s next assignment had all but given up on him. In their eyes, going to Sosh was, at best, a dilettantish diversion from real soldiering. “I am going to take your file and I am going to keep it upside down so I won’t see your name. And when this is all over with, your career is finished,” Chiarelli remembered his personnel officer saying.

  In reality, getting promoted depended at least as much on having good connections, which Sosh had. When he took over as head of the department in 1954, Lincoln began identifying bright young cadets who one day might make good Sosh professors. If they expressed interest in returning to teach, he tracked their early Army careers. Every year, after winnowing down the list to the most promising candidates, he sent a dozen or so names to the Army personnel office, asking them to be assigned to his department. After three years of teaching, Lincoln used his connections to place them throughout the Army. Over time they started thinking of themselves as members of a special group of thinkers and achievers, and others did, too. Often they were drafted by the Army’s senior generals to deal with Congress, the White House, and other Washington types. Sosh officers served as trusted aides, speechwriters, and senior strategists. At least to each other, these officers began referring to their tight little fraternity as the “Lincoln Brigade.”

  Olvey, who carried on Lincoln’s traditions, told his instructors when they returned to the regular Army: “A member of the department is always a member of the department.” In other words, there would be someone looking out for them. He lobbied Sosh department alumni to get Chiarelli a job at a tank unit in Germany that would put him back in the running for command of a battalion, the next step on the career ladder. Jeff McKitrick, his close friend in the department, bucked up his spirits, predicting he’d be a three-star general someday.

  “Why not a four-star?” Chiarelli’s wife, Beth, interjected.

  “Pete’s not political enough,” McKitrick replied.

  Chiarelli was amused by the conversation. If he couldn’t be one of the Sosh department’s provocateurs, maybe he could be a general. But before that could happen, he knew, he had to prove himself as a conventional Cold Warrior to the Army’s armor branch, his once and future tribe.

  When Donne Olvey offered to send Dave Petraeus to graduate school in return for three years at Sosh, Petraeus had misgivings. At the time he was a student at Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, where the Army schools its top officers on strategy and doctrine. He was on his way to finishing first in his class, ahead of more than a thousand other officers, most of them already majors. The program at Leavenworth ate up a year. If he took two years more in graduate school and then went to Sosh, it would mean being away from the real Army for six years, a risky proposition for any officer, but especially for one with Petraeus’s intense ambition. But General Jack Galvin, Petraeus’s most influential mentor, urged him to take the detour, telling him that if he wanted to rise to the top of his profession, he needed to broaden himself. Galvin could be stiff and even a bit awkward around soldiers, but he also had a reputation as one of the Army’s sharpest minds. Petraeus, who admired him immensely, decided to take the gamble.

  In the fall of 1984, Petraeus entered Princeton University, joining the master’s program at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public
and International Affairs. He and Holly and their young daughter lived in a small townhouse not far from campus. She had been hopeful for a relaxed break from Army life, but Petraeus had planned out his two years at Princeton as if it were a military campaign. Every morning, he made the drive to campus and spent most of the day in class or in the library. He discovered it was just possible to cram the coursework for both a master’s degree and a doctorate into his two years, though it meant taking on a punishing academic load. With his usual gusto, he convinced John Duffield, a former Peace Corps volunteer also in the master’s program, to go for a Ph.D. as well. Sitting in adjoining carrels at the library, Petraeus and Duffield studied in the mornings, then took grueling runs around the Princeton campus before returning to their books for a few more hours of work.

  His foray into civilian graduate school had its humbling moments. Used to top grades and glowing reviews, Petraeus received a D on his first exam in advanced microeconomics. A seminar paper in his second semester came back marked with a B. “Though the paper is reasonably well-written and has some merit, it is relatively simplistic and I am left feeling that the whole is less than the sum of the parts,” his professor, Dr. Richard Ullman, had written on the cover sheet. Petraeus had worked hard on the paper, and Ullman’s blasé reaction had taken him down a peg. “I had been the number one guy in my class at Leavenworth and a few other things over the years. I wanted to prove to myself that I could really measure up,” he recalled. A chastened Petraeus asked if he could take a shot at writing a new seminar paper that looked at how the Vietnam War influenced the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations’ calculus on using military force. He threw himself into the project, even volunteering to shuttle Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had been national security advisor during the Carter administration, back to Washington following a speaking engagement at Princeton so that he could interview him during the four-hour drive. Ullman gave the paper an A, and Petraeus decided to write his doctoral thesis on Vietnam’s impact on the American military. He crammed in as much research as he could before leaving Princeton, and then wrote his dissertation while teaching at Sosh.