Reagan at West Point

Two score and three years ago, Hollywood brought forth on this continent a new movie conceived in high spirits and dedicated to the proposition that if a military cadet thinks he's better than his buddies he should be bullied and badgered into learning different.

The movie was called 'Brother Rat' and it introduced its foreign audiences to an American institution that has been a custom, I should imagine, since time began, in the navies of the world. The custom called 'hazing' which, in the navy, meant harassing a man with overwork. In America, it has long been the word used in colleges as well as military academies to describe an actual system of bullying and badgering through prescribed rituals undergraduates and cadets who got out of line.

One of the characters in 'Brother Rat' who learned the lessons of hazing was played by Ronald Reagan, who impersonated a young cadet at the Virginia Military Institute.

On Wednesday President Reagan, suddenly elevated last November by fame and the popular vote to become the commander-in-chief of all United States military forces, found himself at the first and foremost of all American military colleges, the United States Military Academy at West Point, up on the towering west bank of the Hudson River. President Reagan was there to give the annual speech to the graduating class. He's only the tenth president to do so.

Only a month or two after the Americans started their War of Independence, a committee of the revolutionary Congress met to consider having an official national military school but the prejudice against standing armies was so strong that the plans for starting one were abandoned. It took the revolutionaries who, as revolutionaries will, became the statesmen of the new nation, it took them a quarter of a century to decide that what with Indian uprisings and the threat of a French invasion from Canada, they had better have an army after all.

West Point was opened on Independence Day in 1802 with a superintendent and ten cadets. In the intervening 180 years, it has educated many famous and some unlikely soldiers, Lee, Grant – who became the opposing commanders in the Civil War – Jackson, Sheridan, Jefferson Davis, General 'Black Jack' Pershing, the commander of the American armies in the First World War and Eisenhower, Bradley, MacArthur from the Second.

Edgar Allan Poe was a cadet but even hazing didn't tame him and after eight months he was dismissed for insubordination. Whistler, the great Victorian painter, was a brilliant student who entered the academy when he was 16. Not surprisingly, he was a fine draughtsman but chemistry was his Waterloo. He left at the end of his third year and he said, later, 'If silicone had been a gas, I would have been a major general'.

More than most universities, I should guess, West Point quickly developed customs and hardened them into traditions which became almost sacred down the decades. The discipline is most strict, not to say humbling, on first-year cadets who are known as plebes, an abbreviation for plebeians. Senior cadets are not supposed even to recognise their existence, except under instruction. Plebes must take their caps off when they enter mess hall, they are routinely detailed as gunners, which means they carve the fowl. Fowl today can mean, of course, a frozen television bird on the wing. Coffee corporals, naturally, serve the coffee. But it must have been a great day for the plebes last Wednesday when, before the graduation parade, they were officially recognised by the graduating seniors. 'Hallo there Sanderson! Where have you been all my life?'.

There are all sorts of quaint traditions, like the top of the graduating class ceremonially placing a ring on his finger and making a secret wish and the class cup presented to the first son born to a member of the graduating class. These have been abandoned. I suppose the most famous tradition of West Point is the so-called 'honour code' which obliges the cadets not to lie or steal or cheat and to cut those who do.

Well, in 1977, there was a whopping scandal when over one hundred cadets were dismissed from the academy for cheating in examinations. This shook more institutions than the army. A new superintendent was appointed, a man brought out of retirement in his early sixties, one General Goodpaster. He was chosen to take command not because it was thought that a tough, old general would be the best man to enforce the old code, General Goodpaster is nothing like George C. Patton – he looks and behaves more like a very gentle, retired bishop and has been affectionately known to the cadets as 'Grandpa'. He was appointed for personal qualities of patience and tolerance and because his prestige as a combat commander in the Second War might make these qualities effective.

Four years ago, he started to make large reforms. First, he allowed the cheating cadets to come back into the academy after one year. Why? He said the individuals failed because the institution failed. He revamped the honour code and there has been no cheating scandal since. General Goodpaster has had a year or two out of the army in which to look around at the modern world and to decide that too many of the West Point traditions had petrified in a vacuum. He reshaped the academic curriculum. Of course, mathematics, science and engineering are paramount but he expanded the humanities courses to include the arts and political science.

I was up there a winter ago and attended some American history classes because, I suppose, I shared the outsider's patronising ignorance of what goes on in a military college. I was surprised. The classes were at least as imaginative and far-ranging about such things as Teddy Roosevelt's attack on the financial trusts, Franklin Roosevelt's crusade against the Great Depression, as far ranging as any I have attended at older universities here, like Yale or Columbia.

A few years ago, also, the country had received another shock when it was announced that appointment to West Point was now open to women. First they were a shock, then they were a curiosity, now they are taken for granted. Last Wednesday, the academy counted a total registration of just over 4,000 cadets, including 330 women. The graduating class consisted of 847 men and 58 women. General Goodpaster's plans call for the women's enrolment to go as high as 15 per cent of the whole and there's no effort, no need it seems, to bait or entice women into the service. Because there are fewer places for them, the ones who are taken in have a higher academic standing than the males and in the last two years, they have not only maintained it, they've performed the unexpected service, as one officer put it, of setting a standard for the men to aim at.

It still seems odd to the Western world that intelligent and attractive women should want to be soldiers but once they are absorbed in the daily routine, what strikes an outsider again is the question of why anyone at all should want to be a soldier. Soldiering has never been a popular profession in the United States and today it is especially despised by morally superior people, even though their sense of moral superiority is, in a pinch, a luxury made possible by the soldiers' existence.

The United States is one of the few of 50-odd nations, many of them allied with this country, that does not have a system of military conscription and yet the volunteer army is not working. There aren't enough volunteers. A year ago, too, the chief of naval operations confided to the joint chiefs of staff that the pay of skilled petty officers is stripping the navy of enough men to run its ships. The air force has an acute problem even beginning to try and match the pilots' pay of the commercial airlines.

So quite a chunk of the increased military budget of the Reagan administration is going to raise rates of pay throughout all the services. If it fails to do this, then it's likely that the United States will have to revert to the draft, which is a fearsome possibility in a nation that has a very vocal population of young people who equate a strong military with an invitation to war.

This mood is due, I think, to the vast disillusion of Vietnam, which is not unlike the very green memory of the First World War that stimulated in millions of Europeans in the 1930s a longing for peace at any price. This disillusion suppressed the recognition that there have always been some things that have to be fought for. The feeling was so strong then that it crystallised in a popular slogan, 'Against war and fascism' which, looking back on it now, sounds about as sensible as 'Against hospitals and disease'.

Today, the cadets at West Point know as well as anybody that the prospect of a thermonuclear war is a prospect of a planet annihilated, but they're beginning to learn that precisely because the use of the bomb is unthinkable. There have been more conventional wars in the past quarter-century than in all of the nineteenth century and, in the past 30 years, the United States has become woefully unequipped to fight even a conventional war.

What concerned some of the West Pointers when I was there was, however, a profounder question. When a free society is hit by Depression and/or by uncontrollable inflation, no citizen is confronted by such an ordeal of conscience as the soldier. Is he committed to restore a kind of order that accords with his belief in freedom or is he sworn to restore order at all costs, as we've seen him do in so many countries of South and Central America, of Africa and Eastern Europe?

In 1931, I knew some Prussian officers of the best type who, finding Hitler too contemptible to live with, retreated into the technicalities of their profession. They were following the professional conviction that Herman Melville's Captain Vere expressed to the naval court in 'Billy Budd': 'In receiving our commissions, we, in the most important regard, cease to be natural free agents. We fight at command. If our judgements approve the war, that is only coincidence.'

It's a tragic dilemma that has plagued soldiers, ancient and modern from Brutus to Billy Budd's commander, from Billy Mitchell to Erwin Rommel.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.