Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 19, 1991 TAG: 9103190408
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELLEN GOODMAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
If you are among the millions suffering from Schwarzkopf-withdrawal, take heart. The war may be over, the daily briefings kaput, but the general is not going to fade away.
Norman Schwarzkopf, the certifiable (four-)star of Operation Desert Storm and subject of more profiles than Sting, is now in for a postwar wave of attention. He is being "mentioned" by political types who are always hunting for a new kid on the block. And he is listening.
"I have never considered any political aspirations," he said the other morning, but "you know somebody once said, `Never say never' . . . ." Do you hear the faint refrain of "I Like Ike"?
Why has a 6-foot-3-inch, balding, 240-pound member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians become the heartthrob of America? How did he become the bright new shining entry into the revised American pantheon of real men?
Schwarzkopf is not John Wayne, the late, lamented and lampooned role-model for an earlier generation of American men. Strong but silent doesn't hack it in the '90s. It gets a guy grief and an anniversary copy of "You Just Don't Understand."
Nor is Schwarzkopf another Alan Alda, resident stereotype of the New Sensitive Man of the '70s. The right to cry is fine, but sensitivity without self-confidence these days gets a man labeled a wimp.
Rambo, the brawny no-brainer of the '80s? Real men don't do it all alone in the desert.
Finally, this man bears little resemblance to that last military hero, Oliver North. North is the one who told the congressional hearing that he didn't question the reason for his assignment: " . . .I saluted smartly and charged up the hill . . . "
Can you imagine Schwarzkopf saying that? Here's the general on duty and morality: "If it ever came to a choice between compromising my moral principles and the performance of my duties, I know I'd go with my moral principles."
But Norman Schwarzkopf is not just The Thinking Woman's Oliver North. This complicated character seems to synthesize conflicting and changing male images. Introspective but decisive, caring yet competent, one of the guys and a leader? Not stuff that always comes in the same male package.
In many glimpses, we've seen a man who is on speaking terms with his emotions, willing to express his fears, but not paralyzed by them. Someone who isn't afraid of violence, but doesn't like it. An Army man who calls war "a profane thing."
The military was long one of the touchstones of maleness. Vietnam sullied the image of soldier with that of "baby killer." But Schwarzkopf, who had done much soul-searching about Vietnam, put it behind him. And maybe behind men.
Cast against type, as they say in Hollywood, the head of Desert Storm was also a bit too heavy and plain to look heroic. There is the sense of a man whose authority is hard-won through internal struggles, not just through stripes and stars. In the search for a new model of male leadership, he seems like the real thing.
As Ralph Whitehead of the University of Massachusetts notes with bemusement after some years of tracking changing American men: "I've had a sense that American men have been looking for a new optimal blend. But if someone had told me two years ago that it would come from a new style of military hero, that would have been the last place that I looked."
Me too.
To recognize Schwarzkopf as role model isn't to anoint him as politician, though it would be poetic justice if he turned out to be a Democrat. But it is intriguing to see a man who is caring emerge out of the fighting.
A good man, as they say, is hard to find. Set one more place at the table for a general of action and introspection. Make some room for men who are still strong but no longer silent. The Boston Globe
by CNB