Generally Speaking (2 page)

I noted that “I believe in reform, not revolution. But just as we would not have a democratic society today had it not been for the Revolutionary War, I would not be retiring as a three-star general had it not been for those women and men who, for decades, worked from within for change and for improvements. This is often the greatest act of loyalty to a large institution—to help it improve and modernize.”

Acknowledging that the progress of military women had been “measured and steady,” I noted it had also occurred within the context of societal change since the 1960s, decades during which the position of women in politics, sports, religion, academia, and corporate America had dramatically expanded.

Although I was the first of the Army's women to reach three-star rank, I predicted I certainly would not be the last. “These days the sound you hear overhead, in the Army and at the Pentagon, isn't an airplane breaking the sound barrier. It's the sound of a glass ceiling being shattered. And the Army and the Pentagon are the better because of it.”

I was leaving the Army that had fought and won the seemingly endless Cold War. But as a senior professional intelligence officer, I took this opportunity to note the dangers our country faced in this uncertain world. A new generation of soldiers had to be trained and ready to confront and defeat a wide variety of threats: “terrorists, nonstate actors, weapons of mass destruction, cyber-bandits, transnational crime, near-peer competitors [Beltway code for China, other emerging military powers, and possible coalitions], ethnic and religious strife, narcotraffickers, and illegal technology transfers, which threaten our economic future. These are in addition to our need to be prepared for major regional conflicts.”

Given the challenging nature of these new threats, many of which involve complex and evolving information technology, I knew military women would play a vital role in defending our country in the coming years and decades. Thinking of the next generation of women military leaders, I spoke of the “first woman to break the four-star barrier, the first woman to be the Sergeant Major of the Army, and the first woman to be Secretary of the Department of Defense.”

There were probably some in the audience who did not accept the idea of a woman four-star general or Defense Secretary, and certainly not the Sergeant Major of the Army. But I knew my prediction would be borne out. And I prefaced my comments by noting:

“One of my favorite quotes is by the French author Emile Zola, who said: ‘If you asked me what I came into this world to do, I will tell you—I came to live out loud.’”

As I spoke, I glanced down at my family members. My cousin Valerie Haygood Thompson's husband, Larry, beamed back at me. Larry joined the Army the same year I did, even though he could have avoided service through a deferment. He served as a young enlisted engineer in Vietnam, then, in the tradition of Cincinnatus, returned to his civilian business and raised a family. Valerie and Larry and their four daughters had attended all of my promotions since I received my first star.

Tommie Jean Kennedy, my mother, also sat proudly in the front row, a position that reflected her place in my life. Although no longer married to my father, for thirty-one years she had been an Army wife in the most traditional sense. My mother made a home for her husband and four children under the most trying conditions, which Army wives of her day all faced (some of which persist today): frequent moves, very little money, resettling children in school, scouts, and church every year or two, finding homes for a surprise litter of kittens, the hours working as volunteers in the post thrift shop (which supported Army scholarships), and leadership of wives clubs, obligations expected of an officer's wife. Then there were the months when my father was away on unaccompanied assignments in Korea and Vietnam, during which she had to shepherd the family through crises ranging from a child's asthma attacks to hurricanes to packing household goods for ocean crossings. But to her, this was the life she had chosen. She loved her children, her husband, and the Army adventure.

Looking at my mother from the speaker's Pentagon rostrum, the three decades separating my commissioning as a second lieutenant in 1969 and my retirement as a lieutenant general in 2000 seemed to dissolve. For a moment I was a young woman on a sunny June day back in Memphis again.

But how had I changed in those years? What had I learned about myself as a leader and about the nature of leadership? What attributes had I acquired during thirty years as a soldier as I advanced to become the Army's first woman three-star general? What specific human lessons had I learned in my career that I could pass on to other women working in professions traditionally led by men, to other women and men in uniform, and to parents of talented daughters considering their future? And what of value had I also learned in my years as a military leader that could benefit everyone both in uniform and the private sector who wishes to understand our promising and dynamic human environment?

At a dinner in the fall of 1999 for women prominent in their career fields, I first met Betty Friedan, the founder of modern feminism. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, and journalist Eleanor Clift were in attendance. I was in uniform. Ms. Friedan discovered I was the highest-ranking woman ever in the U.S. Army. “You must write a book,” she said. “But don't write about abstract ideas. Write about the concrete events in your life that brought you to this point.” Later, retired General Jack Merritt, president emeritus of the Association of the U.S. Army, suggested I tell my readers why I wrote this book. I want to explain how important the Army has been in forming me as a person and as a leader. Despite times of personal sacrifice, the experience has been overwhelmingly positive. The Army is more than a job; it's a life, a community of soldiers who become permanent friends. But perhaps most significantly, the Army is a team in which the leadership values of honor and selfless service have endured.

1

A Soldier's Daughter

I
was born into the Army.

My father, Cary A. Kennedy, was a Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) cadet in his senior year at the University of Tennessee at Nashville when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Infantry and spent World War II in the European Theater of Operations. In 1946 he came home to Memphis, married my mother, Tommie Jean Haygood, and the young couple soon embarked—literally—on an Army career, taking a troopship to Germany.

As Daddy would later wryly tell us, he decided to stay in the Army because he was energetic enough to walk up stairs to a processing station on the second floor. When the war was over, officers were given the choice of applying for a regular commission or mustering out. The line for immediate discharge, he said, formed on the first floor of an administration building, while there was another line of officers who wanted to stay in the service on the second floor. Daddy was a major. He liked the Army, but, given the option of remaining in the Infantry or selecting another branch, he chose the Transportation Corps.

I was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1947. A year later, my father sent Mother and me home to Memphis because the Cold War seemed about to flare into open conflict. The Soviets had cut off Allied ground access to Berlin. The West responded with the Berlin Airlift. Although tensions remained high for eleven months, the Soviets eventually relented and opened the land corridor to the Allied sectors of Berlin. But the Iron Curtain now divided Europe.

My father was reassigned to Fort Eustis, Virginia, on the James River near Williamsburg, headquarters of the Transportation Corps. Over the coming years, we would repeatedly return to this post. That's where my brother, Andy, and my sisters, Nancy and Elizabeth, were born, between assignments that took the family back to Germany, to Japan, and later even to Israel, where my father served as an assistant Army attaché.

Both my parents were strong influences on my character. Obviously, my father, a career soldier, formed my model of a professional officer. But my mother, Jean, has also always been a strong individual. She taught me that a woman could have independent political and social opinions at a time when
Father Knows Best
was as much a national ethos as popular entertainment. Almost fifty years later, I clearly remember an afternoon when she first made me aware that women could hold independent views on important issues.

It was early fall 1952, and the presidential election race between Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson and Republican candidate Dwight Eisenhower was heating up. I was skipping rope in the yard and came inside to find Mama ironing and watching the grainy black-and-white image on the large screen of our light oak television set. It was Mr. Stevenson giving a speech.

“Who are we for, Mama?” I asked.

“Well,
we're
for Stevenson,” my mother said, nodding toward the man on the TV. “But don't tell your father.”

This was exciting stuff for a kid of five. Mama was talking to me like a grown-up. Daddy was a politically conservative Army officer who would naturally vote for General Eisenhower. But Mama had independent political views, which were more liberal than my father's.

Both my parents, however, taught their children that their personal lives had to be disciplined, whatever individual social views they held. They also taught us to examine our own motives and not accept the opinions of others whole cloth. I can't think of a better preparation in childhood for the character of a future leader.

Like most Army children, I learned to make friends fast, not be surprised when we had to move after a year or two, and to endure the isolation of being the new kid when I was put into the middle of a strange class at a new school. And I also experienced some wonderful educational opportunities that civilians rarely had. As a second-grader at the Yoyogi School for military dependents in Tokyo in the mid-1950s, for example, I practiced the dances that all young Japanese girls were taught and even took a class in making traditional silk dolls. At the post school in Boeblingen, Germany, a few years later, I began to practice the polysyllabic mysteries of German.

When we went to Israel in 1962, Daddy was assigned to the embassy. I started tenth grade at Tabeetha School, run by the Church of Scotland. The curriculum was demanding, particularly the English and Latin courses, but I enjoyed the challenge because I had decided three years earlier that I wanted to be a doctor. I had reached that decision in an unusual way. When I was in seventh grade, there simply were not many professions open to women other than teaching and nursing. So I had decided I would be a nurse.

But one evening in Williamsburg, I had told Daddy of my ambition.

“Why not be a doctor?” he responded. I saw he was serious.

I chose my eighth- and ninth-grade courses, including algebra and Latin, based on that ambition. In Israel, I learned mammalian anatomy quite well by dissecting a dead rabbit. But, in the process, I also discovered that I had no further interest in becoming either a doctor or a nurse.

In 1964, we got news that my father, who had been promoted to full colonel, had been assigned to command the Brooklyn Army Terminal. We would live at nearby Fort Hamilton. I had become attached to my friends in Israel. I did
not
want to go to a third high school.

“I'll stay in Israel and finish my senior year,” I told my father. I was eager to be independent, to be an adult.

We were at dinner. That evening Father was tired but patient. “You can't support yourself. You're sixteen.”

“I'll get a job and pay board. There won't be any problem.”

“You need a work permit, and you're not Jewish. It's not going to work, Claudia.”

Naturally, I went home with the family. And I was unhappy that year. Fort Hamilton High was a civilian school near the post. The seismic shock waves of the 1960s counterculture hadn't hit yet, and the social scene was still frozen in a 1950s teenage time warp. Belonging to the right clique, whether it was centered on student government, sports, or neighborhoods, seemed a matter of dire importance.

With four children and an Army salary, my parents were saving every dime they had for our college education. The trendy pleated skirts from Neiman Marcus were out of the question. Nobody asked me to the prom. In fact, I didn't have a single date that last year of high school. For some girls, that would have been a tragedy. I decided to concentrate on my classes. And I read a lot for fun, mostly biography, which I'd enjoyed since grade school, then branched into Ayn Rand and Dostoyevsky.

We had already decided that I would attend my mother's alma mater, Southwestern at Memphis, a small co-ed liberal arts college founded by the Presbyterian Church in 1843. My mother's family had a long association with the school. Both aunts and one uncle had attended, and my grandfather had taught math and coached football there. Another advantage of attending Southwestern was I could live with one of my grandmothers. Daddy had promised all the children four years of college, but after that, as he always reminded us, “You graduate from college in four years, get a job, pack your bags, and live on your own. You'll always be welcome home for brief, pleasant visits.” His emphasis was on brief. That was the Army colonel speaking.

The start of my freshman year in August 1965 coincided with the true beginning of the “sixties,” the social cataclysm that shook the Western world for the next decade. Even though Southwestern was a Southern campus where weekly chapel attendance was mandatory, it was viewed as liberal in comparison with the local state college. Anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and protests over dorm rules and fraternity and sorority culture became commonplace during my college years. But in Memphis, retaining its Old South civility, these events lacked the strident tone or violence found on larger, more radical campuses. And many of the students simply remained aloof, preferring traditional college pursuits and confining their probing of deeper issues such as the civil rights movement or the war in Vietnam to intellectual expression, rather than taking the debate to the streets.