Faith of My Fathers (14 page)

Alfred Thayer Mahan, the great naval historian, author of the seminal work on the importance of naval expansion,
The Influence of Sea Power upon History,
was my father's inspiration and his passion. He quoted from Mahan's book often and at length, not only in his seapower lectures but to almost anyone he thought could profit from Mahan's wisdom. He talked about Mahan to me quite often, during his occasional attempts to help steer me toward a successful naval career.

My paternal grandmother was a well-educated woman of gifted intellect and refined manner. She had been an instructor of Latin and Greek at the University of Mississippi, where she taught my grandfather. Bookish and eight years his senior, she won the devotion of the much coarser but widely read naval officer. Throughout their union, they indulged together their shared love of literature, reading aloud to each other whenever time allowed. That my father was well versed in the classics is undoubtedly a tribute to both his parents: his mother, the scholarly taskmaster; his father, the rough adventurer who in glamour resembled the fictional heroes who had enlivened the provincial world of his Mississippi childhood. Together they instilled in my father their love of literature and learning, encouraged his imagination, gave him responsibilities early in life, and fortified him with their values. As a schoolboy, he got in trouble once for telling his classmates a tall tale about having seen a bear on the way to school. His mother excused the lapse, remarking, “All little boys must have an imagination. Don't worry, he'll know about honesty and the truth.”

It was while I was in my grandmother's care that I began to develop my own interest in literature. I spent the summer of 1946 with my widowed grandmother and her daughter, my Aunt Katherine, at their house in Coronado. My grandmother was a composed, straight-laced woman who kept a formal house. I still recall quite vividly their maid summoning me to tea and supper every day, at precisely four and seven, by ringing a bell. If I lingered too long at whatever activity I was preoccupied with and arrived a minute or two past the appointed hour, my grandmother would dismiss me very politely from her presence. She would observe that she had looked forward to dining with me, but as I had failed to arrive promptly, she would have to forgo the pleasure of my company until the next meal. She never yielded to any of the elaborate excuses I devised to coax her into allowing an exception to her daily routine.

The room I occupied in my grandmother's house was furnished with my father's boyhood belongings. It contained a substantial collection of the authors he had favored as a boy. I spent most of the summer reading one volume after another. Among the authors who most impressed me in that summer of unsupervised study were Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Booth Tarkington. I was also taken with the tales of King Arthur's court. These works instilled in me a lifelong love of reading. And, with their straightforward moral lessons, they reinforced my sense of right and wrong and impressed upon me the virtue of treating people fairly.

Among the Stevenson volumes was a collection of his poetry. It included the poem he wrote for his own epitaph, “Requiem.”

Under the wide and starry sky

Dig the grave and let me lie:

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

In his brief life, Stevenson had been quite an adventurer, wandering the continent of Europe, and later the Americas and the South Pacific. He had lived in the capitals of Europe, in the Adirondacks of upstate New York, and in Monterey, California. He spent the last years of his life in a house he had built in Western Samoa, a location as remote from the cold austerity of his native Scotland as could be imagined. He is buried there on a low hill overlooking the Pacific.

Stevenson is recalled in biographies as a restless, striving man. Crediting a tropical grave as the place “he longed to be” struck me as a brave declaration of self-determination. I thought the poem the perfect motto for all who lived a life according to their own lights, and a moving tribute to the lives of strong-willed, valorous men like my grandfather and father. I read it as an exhortation to “be your own man.” It influenced my childhood aspiration to find adventures, pursue each one avidly, and, when it had run its course, find another.

Like my father and grandfather, I lacked as a boy the physical size to appear imposing on first acquaintance. Together with the challenges of my transient childhood, my small stature motivated me to prove quickly to new schoolmates that I could stand up for myself. The quickest way to do so was to fight the first kid who provoked me.

Whether I won or lost those fights wasn't as important as establishing myself as someone who could adapt to the challenges of a new environment without betraying apprehension. I foolishly believed that fighting, as well as challenging school authorities and ignoring school regulations, was indispensable to my self-esteem and helped me to form new friendships.

The repeated farewells to friends rank among the saddest regrets of a childhood constantly disrupted by the demands of my father's career. I would arrive at a new school, go to considerable lengths to make new friends, and, shortly thereafter, be transplanted to a new town to begin the process all over again. Seldom if ever did I see again the friends I left behind. If you have never known any other life, these experiences seem a natural part of existence. You come to expect friendships to last but a short time. I believe this breeds in a child a desire to make the most of friendships while they last. The relationships make up with intensity what they lack in length. That's one of the benefits of an itinerant childhood.

On the other hand, you never lose the expectation that friendships come and go and should not be expected to do otherwise. That fatalistic expectation is reinforced later in life when war imposes a sad finality on relationships grown extremely close under difficult conditions. Even when you are an adult, when passing time and changing circumstances separate you from old friends, their absence seems unremarkable and in accord with the normal course of things.

This is not to say that I value my friends less than other people value theirs. On the contrary, I have made friends with many people over the years, and whether I see them or not, whether they are still living or not, their friendship honored me, and honors me still. Many of my friendships exist only in memory. But they are memories I cherish for the lessons they taught me and the values they imparted to me, gifts that proved invaluable in later years.

At each new school I arrived eager to make, by means of my insolent attitude, new friends to compensate for the loss of others. At each new school I grew more determined to assert my crude individualism. At each new school I became a more unrepentant pain in the neck.

These are the attitudes I brought to Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, when I enrolled there, Class of '54. My parents had resolved to put an end to our haphazard education and arranged for my sister, my brother, and me to attend private boarding schools. I was sent to Episcopal to prepare for my unavoidable appointment to the United States Naval Academy three years later.

I liked EHS more than I liked my previous schools. No doubt my memory of it has softened over time as it became mixed with nostalgia for the pleasurable vanities of youth—vanities that the Naval Academy worked hard to suppress in its resolve to make a man of me. I did not at first acquaintance recognize Episcopal and its antique traditions as hospitable. Unlike my classmates, I arrived without any allegiance to those traditions, having had no share of them in my roving childhood. The traditions in which I was raised were peculiar to military families, and the dimensions of my small Navy world had mapped the limits of experience for most of my earliest friends.

When I entered Episcopal I encountered another small world, but one so unfamiliar to me that I thought it exotic. The Episcopal High School Class of 1954 was all male and all white. But more than the racial bigotry and gender segregation of the times distinguished the class from the rest of our generation. Most of the students came from families who lived south of the Mason-Dixon line and east of the Mississippi River, and their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers had preceded them at the school. Almost all were sons of wealthy men. None but me were sons of professional officers in the armed services.

The Navy has, of course, its own aristocracy, but not one that seemed to me as exclusive, mannered, and fixed as the aristocracy from which EHS drew its ranks. Most of my classmates were so settled in their society that they had an air of serenity uncommon in the young. They were not snobs. But they had envisaged the whole of their futures before they came to EHS, and what they had foreseen was so pleasant an existence that the certainty of it made them very self-assured young men.

After graduation, about half of my class would enroll in the University of Virginia, an arcadia of genteel Southern learning. The other half would venture north to one or another Ivy League school where wealthy children from North and South mixed and the friction of differing regional cultures was eased by their common appreciation for refined living. When they had completed their education, many of my classmates returned to their families and settled into careers in their fathers' businesses, law firms, and medical practices.

I, too, had a clear sense of how my life would unfold after I left Episcopal. I, too, was destined to join my father's business. But I knew my life would diverge from those of my classmates as sharply as my childhood had differed from theirs. I was on leave from the Navy while I attended high school. And the Navy expected me to return when I graduated.

I cannot recall any other student at EHS who expected to enter military service. Some would be drafted into the Army. I am sure they accepted that responsibility without complaint, and served honorably. But no one in the Class of '54 except me anticipated a career in the armed forces.

The most pervasive military influence at the school was the heroic legends taken from the annals of Civil War history. More precisely, they were the stories of Confederate heroes. There is a memorial at the school that commemorates those students who were among the fallen in the Civil War. It's a long list. You would be hard-pressed to find among those honored dead the name of anyone who gave his last full measure of devotion to the Union. More Episcopal graduates died in the Civil War than in any subsequent war in our nation's history.

EHS gave me a sense of what life could be like were I somehow to elude a Navy career. On a school holiday, some friends and I visited Princeton University. Long afterward, I would daydream about enrolling at Princeton, joining one of its stately eating clubs, and sharing in the romance of a place that seemed to me to offer equal parts of scholastic excellence and gracious leisure. But I was never so enthralled by the attraction of such a life that I deluded myself into sincerely believing it would be mine. I was bound for the Naval Academy, and while I seldom discussed with my high school friends the fate that awaited me, I knew that were we ever to meet again, they would find me in uniform.

My father never ordered me to attend the Naval Academy. Although I am sure we must have talked about it from time to time, I cannot recall the conversations. There are no scenes in my memory of sitting in my father's study listening to him expound on the virtues of an Academy education, or explain the reasons why I must follow him to Annapolis as he had followed his father. Neither do I recall any arguments with my parents about my wanting to consider an alternative future. I remember simply recognizing my eventual enrollment at the Academy as an immutable fact of life, and accepting it without comment.

I remember my parents frequently commenting on it to their friends. “He's going to the Naval Academy,” they would casually remark, not with the evident satisfaction one derives from a welcome discovery of a child's potential, but as if they were discussing an inheritance that had been marked for my eventual possession. It was as if they were saying, “Someday this house will be Johnny's”—which, in a way, was what they meant.

My father and grandfather believed they had discovered the perfect life for a man. To them, the Navy was the most accommodating profession for good men who craved adventure. They never imagined possessing a greater treasure than a life at sea, and they regarded it as a legacy they were proud to bestow on their descendants, who, they assumed, would be appropriately grateful.

EHS offered me more than a glimpse at a different culture. It shared certain aspects of service academies. Life there was regimented. Jackets and ties were worn at all times. Students attended chapel every morning. On Sundays, we held morning services at the church on Seminary Hill and evening services at the chapel. The academics were superb and serious. But athletics were accorded equal importance in our education. Classes were held in the morning, including Saturday morning. We broke for lunch at twelve-thirty. The afternoons were devoted to athletic training.