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An Old Soldier Who Hasn’t Faded

Recently the poster advertisement at the bus stop on 8th and Pennsylvania Avenue, SE, a mile from the Capitol, had a spring make-over. Bye-bye went one of the mysterious city-wide tributes to Nancy Pelosi. ("Congratulations, Madame Speaker” read the slogan above the over-stretched visage of the underprivileged daughter of the late mayor of Baltimore. There was no attribution to the ad’s benefactor, a mystery pondered to no avail by Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, among others.). In its place appears a more ambiguous...tribute?

“You’ve worked hard to where you’ve gotten,” reads the ad, which depicts a macho-preppy black male straddling a moped and wearing earrings, a coy smile, and tight jeans. “So why settle for an HIV medication that you take twice a day?”

The ad promotes Truvada, the leading anti-HIV drug, manufactured by Gilead. If their prospective customers didn’t “work” so “hard” to get where they’ve gotten themselves, Gilead’s bottom line might take a hit.

A pat on the bum for moral turpitude? Definitely. An intentionally comical advertisement? Likely not, given the type of manufacturer, the dead seriousness of its product, and the clientele it caters to—a clientele whose lack of lightheartedness about their group identify (in the face of criticism, anyway) further perverts the word they adopted as their label. It’s a hearty old English word meaning mirthful, but its original application seems permanently destined for the dustbin of dictionaries.

But enough of misdirected moped boys scooting into ruts, appearing virile while viral. Consider a true man: an old soldier who wouldn’t be caught dead working hard toward a dead end. He’s a man in common with the heroes commemorated in L. Cort Kirkwood’s praiseworthy book, Real Men: Ten Courageous Americans to Know and Admire.

“Old soldiers never die,” this man’s famous mentor said in his farewell address. “They just fade away.” But even in their twilight years, they are men to be recognized for their courage and devotion to country. And it’s not everyday that a 29-year-old meets an 89-year-old retired general who planned an invasion for Douglas MacArthur, made choppers the cliché of the Vietnam War, and was the confidant of five presidents but the good friend of one: Ronald Reagan, whom he taught how to play the harmonica one night at his ranch.

“The first time I was here was in ‘41, for Roosevelt’s inauguration,” Lt. Gen. Edward Rowny reminisced as we walked through the lobby of a hotel in Northwest Washington. The blind man’s hand was on my shoulder as I escorted him into a gray afternoon brightened by several glasses of wine over a lunch that was a bracing brush with history.

I had met General Rowny in February at a birthday party for the German-born journalist and playwright Viola Drath, a Georgetown matron whose annual VE Day commemoration party I’d helped host week at the Foreign Service Club. (The club is housed in an early 19th century mansion near the White House. Maybe I haven’t been around much, but aside from movies, I had never before seen actual candles lighting the chandeliers.)

But back to General Rowny, a Cold Warrior with medals to match his academic degrees.

He had been invited to attend FDR’s inauguration with fellow West Point cadets. And he had some funny tales to tell about the Academy, which I myself would have attended hadn’t the Defense Department rejected me on account of a weak left eye. But they would have rejected Alexander the Great for dipsomania and Julius Caesar for epilepsy. Not bad company. But no regrets here: Instead of dining in an upscale hotel in Washington, I could have been dodging mortars in some canteen in Iraq.

Rowny, class of ‘41, had already graduated from Johns Hopkins before winning a nomination to the U.S. Military Academy. A strange trajectory, perhaps. But a tour of Europe during his final year at Hopkins convinced him that a military career might be appropriate. In ‘36, he attended the Olympic games at Berlin, where Hitler surveyed many a nation upon whom he would have poured more than a stein of mineral water (more like canisters of Zyklon-B), especially the nation of Jesse Owens. After witnessing the martial bravado of the torch-light parade that capped off the Olympics, Rowny, the son of Polish immigrants, foresaw a bad moon rising: “I was shocked by the stridency and militancy of the Nazis,” he said. And the Army would become his home for the next thirty-odd years.

With the lucidity of the elderly upon recalling the past, Rowny looked straight at me as he talked. (Though he lost his sight several years ago, he retains the dignified bearing of a general.) A Google search will reveal articles about this man who served his country long and well, but a few anecdotes are worth recounting, several of which evidently haven’t been printed before:

*** On General MacArthur, “a man of high character, integrity and vanity whose greatest failure was loyalty to unworthy subordinates,” namely in World War II.

Rowny’s path to MacArthur was roundabout. Having commanded a regiment of black soldiers in North Africa and then Italy, Rowny ended up commanding additional troops after most of the officers in his outfit were killed or wounded during the invasion of Mussolini Land. During the remainder of the campaign, he won two Silver Stars and one Bronze Star. (How many American families owe their very existence to him? That’s a question that real heroes don’t ponder. Some good can, indeed, come of war.) After victory was declared in Europe, he served under George Marshall in Washington—a “military man of the highest caliber"—then earned a master’s degree from Yale before transferring to Japan at the onset of the Korean War.

The day after MacArthur’s press relations officer “fell facedown drunk” at an official dinner in Tokyo, MacArthur asked Rowny to take the job. But he was no mere functionary. After Mao’s horde poured into Korea, MacArthur demanded an effective response to the catastrophic turn in events. Rowny, in turn, presented a plan for what would become the Inchon invasion. The Joint Chiefs of Staff thought it too risky, so MacArthur had the generals flown to Tokyo for a conference. MacArthur upbraided those who opposed Rowny’s plan of going straight at ‘em behind enemy lines, accusing them of being “pusillanimous, pusillanimous!” After heated deliberations, the generals agreed to Rowny’s plan, which truly was the “cakewalk” some people expected in Iraq. And, as MacArthur always insisted on accountability, Rowny went during the first wave.

*** On Truman’s dismissal of MacArthur. “Technically, MacArthur was asking for it. But given the general’s record, he should have been allowed his way. Truman, whom I admired, behaved petty and out of pride.”

*** On Vietnam. Rowny was posted to South Vietnam in the early Sixties. Recognizing the challenge of fighting a jungle war, he drove hard for integrating helicopters into infantry tactics. Though his recommendation initially was nixed because of inter-service rivalries—the Air Force and Navy didn’t want to share their virtual monopoly on airpower with the Army—they later were adopted as part of the strategy called “Airmobile.”

*** On Nixon, under whom he served as the representative for the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). “He would have prevented the fall of South Vietnam,” Rowny said, referring to Nixon’s threat to send in the B-52s if the Communists ever invaded the South again. “But Ford bowed out to political pressure” and kept the birds at bay.

*** On Reagan, under whom he served as chief negotiator at the START talks with the rank of ambassador, and then as a special advisor. “He was very deceptive ... and he was my hero. He’d be half-asleep during these long policy discussions, but then make the right decision afterward. And he didn’t care what The New York Times thought of him,” Rowny said of the Gipper.

He first met Reagan in a Washington hotel room in 1979, shortly after retiring from the Army in disgust at President Carter’s ratification of the SALT II treaty, which Rowny perceived as a cave-in to the Soviets. Reagan asked to meet him for a half-hour meeting. Three hours quickly passed, during which Rowny was surprised at the foreign-policy acumen of a man whom he had considered a mere right-wing conservative reactionary. (I didn’t press Rowny on this point. Frankly, who cares what a military man thinks of social policies?) He joined Reagan’s presidential campaign and served him throughout his administration.

His most memorable anecdote about Reagan was standing outside the “throne” of the Commander-in-Chief during the Reykjavik summit with in 1986. The only “bubble” (i.e., room not under obvious surveillance) was the men’s room, so Reagan’s inner circle held their policy discussion there at six in the morning on the second day of the summit. On one side of Reagan’s stall were nuclear-arms negotiator Paul Nitze, Secretary of State George Shultz, and the now infamous Richard Perle, all pushing a conciliatory line; on the other, Rowny, who advised playing hardball with the Soviets. Later that day, Reagan pushed for the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"), which angered Gorbachev and abruptly ended the conference. A minor PR setback at the time, but it was a principled stand that helped hasten the demise of the Evil Empire. 

Rowny, who long taught a class at George Washington University and continues to mentor up-and-coming analysts, serves on the Iran Policy Committee, a high-level group discussing options to thwart the Iranian threat. I didn’t ask him his opinion of the looming crisis with Iran for three reasons. First, because prudent counsel doesn’t seem ever to have made a dent in this administration’s ideological “thinking.” Second, because it is more satisfying to learn about the past, which is written in stone, versus drawing imaginary lines in the sands of the mysterious future. Third, and more importantly, because our lunch hour was up, this was not an interview, and General Rowny invited me to meet with him again. I’ll have new questions for the old soldier.

*****

Since writing about General Rowny, I encountered another example of sacrifice, but on a sad and anonymous note.

This past Memorial Day, the White House Commission on Remembrance hosted a ceremony on the Mall honoring those who gave their last full measure of devotion. Before the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Marine Corps Commandant directed their remarks toward the fallen of the current war, the Commission vicariously honored heroes of yore as a brace of each man’s relatives walked across the stage: from Nathan Hale to Stonewall Jackson to Vietnam’s Humbert “Rocky” Versace. (If you’ve never heard of Versace, you should read about him in Kirkwood’s book. It’s a shame the name is associated with Sylvester Stallone, who went MIA during Vietnam, but later went on to play a sham hero of that war.) The ceremony’s focus, however, was upon those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of their relatives were in attendance, and their children were awarded special medals.

But there was one sight at that ceremony that few, if any, noticed amidst all the pomp and over the stirring music of the Army Band. And it brought tears to my eyes. On my way to the ceremony, I passed a Marine slowly making his way down Constitution Avenue, accompanied by a Marine on either side. He hobbled with a cane, his left arm was in a brace, and the scars on his face were still red. He couldn’t have been more than twenty. He obviously was in pain, but he bore his wounds with dignity. And there is nothing so impressive as a Marine in dress uniform. I later saw this Marine at the ceremony as he lined up to go across the stage with several other current servicemen, none of whom were disabled. And as he began making his way up the side ramp, he let his cane drop, struggled up the ramp using the hand rail with his good arm, and uneasily walked across the stage. One of his comrades discreetly gave him a hand.

It takes a small and poignant scene like this to bring home the awfulness of war and those sacrifices silently endured long after a war has passed from minds and into history books.

Matthew Rarey writes from Washington. Send email to

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