Book Review: 'The Long Gray Line:The American Journey of West Point's Class of 1966'

(C) 2009 Picador Books

In 1989, when Rick Atkinson was on a leave of absence from his job as  a staff writer at the Washington Post, Houghton Mifflin published his first work of military history, The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of the West Point Class of 1966. Based on a series of interviews with three West Point graduates of the titular Class of ’66, The Long Gray Line earned rave reviews for its intimate and often painful account of a handful of American boys who entered the U.S. Military Academy, endured the brutal hazing and harsh discipline of cadet life, and graduated during the Johnson Administration’s rapid escalation of the Vietnam War.

James Salter, the Post’s book critic at the time, hailed The Long Gray Line as being “enormously rich in detail and written with a novelist’s brilliance.” Another contemporary reviewer, writing in Business Week, called Atkinson’s first major work of military history “the best book out of Vietnam to date."

Two decades later, after Atkinson left the Post to become a full-time historian and earned – in 2002 – a Pulitzer Prize for the first book of his best-selling Liberation Trilogy,  An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, Picador Books reissued The Long Gray Line in a 20^th Anniversary paperback edition.

A classic of its kind, The Long Gray Line is the twenty-five-year saga of the West Point class of 1966. With a novelist’s eye for detail, Rick Atkinson illuminates this powerful story through the lives of three classmates and the women they loved—from the boisterous cadet years, to the fires of Vietnam, to the hard peace and internal struggles that followed the war. The rich cast of characters also includes Douglas MacArthur, William C. Westmoreland, and a score of other memorable figures. The class of 1966 straddled a fault line in American history, and Atkinson’s masterly book speaks for a generation of American men and women about innocence, patriotism, and the price we pay for our dreams. – Publisher’s back cover blurb, The Long Gray Line.

The book follows the experiences of three young American men – John P. Wheeler III, Thomas H. Carhart III, and George A. Crocker – from the last full year of President John F. Kennedy’s Administration to the last years of the Reagan Administration in the late 1980s. They enter West Point for various reasons; Jack Wheeler went to the Academy to please his father, an Army officer and West Point grad in his own right. Tom Carhart lacked that pedigree but was inspired to go to America’s oldest military academy by a TV series called The West Point Story – Clint Eastwood and Leonard Nimoy were among its cast members – and wanted to be a cadet like those he saw on television. George Crocker was a 19-year-old from Arkansas who earned an appointment from his district’s Congressman; he, too, went to the Point to please his dad, an engineer who had been rejected by the Army due to his high blood pressure.

When The Long Gray Line begins, Wheeler, Carhart, and Crocker begin their four-year odyssey at West Point at a crossroads in U.S. history. On that June day in 1962, JFK is still alive and dealing with challenges at home – the simmering conflict of civil rights in a still-segregated South and the upcoming midterm elections – and abroad, including tensions with America’s Cold War rival, the Soviet Union. The two superpowers, at odds since the end of World War II, are facing off in various places around the world: Berlin, Cuba, and a place that is still not widely talked about by the American public – Vietnam.

On the day that Wheeler, Carhart, and Crocker arrive at West Point, the Superintendent is a young two-star general named William C. Westmoreland. In his late 40s, Westmoreland is the epitome of a 1960s-era “modern major general”: a West Point grad, decorated veteran of World War II and Korea, and former commander of the storied 101^st Airborne (the “Screaming Eagles”), “Westy” is a confident and “take charge” type who is bound for higher command. And even though he himself doesn’t know it, Westy’s destiny – and place in U.S. military history – will be inextricably linked with that of many of the members of the Class of ’66.

There are, of course, many other cadets in the Class of 1966, and some of them are supporting characters in the saga of The Long Gray Line’s three protagonists. Their stories, including those of Matthew C. Harrison (who would later be a prominent interviewee in Ken Burns’ 2017 documentary The Vietnam War) and Arthur G. Bonifas, are also a big part of Atkinson’s inspirational but often tragic account of boys who took to heart the words of the West Point motto “Duty, Honor, Country” – and often paid a high price as a result of their convictions and love of country.

 EVEN ON the Sabbath dawn Penn Station was a busy place. Redcaps hurried across the concourse on crepe soles, pushing carts piled high with luggage. Vendors began to unshutter their kiosks, and the garble of arrivals and departures droned from the public address system. Although it was a gray beginning to what would be a gray day, the huge waiting room was awash with a hazy luminance. Light seeped through the windows high overhead and filtered down through the intricate ironwork. Chandeliers, each with eight yellow globes, dangled from the girders. This was the year before the station — which had been modeled on the Baths of Caracalla — would be razed for a new Madison Square Garden and a monstrously ugly depot. Now, though, the building was magnificent, with its arches and trusses and vaulting space as vast as the nave of St. Peter’s.

Beneath the large sign proclaiming INCOMING TRAINS, five young men climbed the stairs from the grimy warren of tracks below. Each carried a small bag containing a shaving kit, a change of clothes, and, as instructed, “one pair of black low-quarter, plain-toe shoes.” They had boarded the train in Newport News and traveled north, through the pine forests of southern Virginia, through darkened Washington and Baltimore. Without much success, they had tried to nap as the train rocked through Maryland and the slumbering villages of southern New Jersey, silent except for the hysterical dinging of crossing gates. Now, a bit rumpled but excited by their arrival in Manhattan, the five chattered like schoolboys set loose on a great adventure.

They walked quickly across the waiting room toward Eighth Avenue. In front of a newsstand, the day’s edition of The New York Times had just arrived in a thick bundle. Under the paper’s name and the date — July i, 1962 — the front page offered a remarkable snapshot of an America that was about to vanish and the America that was about to replace it.

LEADERS OF U.S. AND MEXICO HAIL NEW ERA OF AMITY, the lead Story proclaimed. A large photo showed the president ignoring his Secret Service agents to grasp the hand of a boy on his father’s shoulders in Mexico City as a huge crowd — more than a million — roared, “Viva Kennedy!”

On the opposite side of the page, the Times reported that the federal deficit topped $7 billion as fiscal 1962 ended, with “the virtual certainty of another deficit” in the new fiscal year. Other articles reported that former President Eisenhower, speaking from his Gettysburg farm, had declared that Republicans represented the party of business and were “proud of the label”; Dodger southpaw Sandy Koufax had notched thirteen strikeouts in pitching a no-hitter against the Mets; and an article from Detroit — ’63 AUTOS TO ACCENT STYLING OVER THRIFT — noted that car makers were about to offer more chrome, automobiles two to seven inches longer than the previous year’s models, and ninety varieties of bucket seats. The Times also documented developments in Algerian politics, Saskatchewan health care, and a call by Nikita Khrushchev for the Soviet people to diversify their diets by eating more corn flakes. “Americans and Englishmen,” Khrushchev observed, “are masters of preparing corn in the form of flakes.” The missile gap had been succeeded by the cereal gap.

Tucked into the lower right-hand corner of page 1 were two nettlesome articles with an exotic dateline: Saigon. The first reported that the South Vietnamese government “charged today that new weapons from Communist China had been given to Communist guerrillas. It demanded action against these ‘flagrant violations’ of the Geneva agreement.” The second article said that “a massive combined operation against ‘hardcore’ Communist guerrillas along the Cambodian border has resulted in the discovery of two training camps for insurgents and the capture of enemy documents.” A related story on page 22 reported that “the most avidly read book in Saigon is Bend With the Wind, a breezy tract put out by the United States Embassy for the big American colony here.” The book contained advice on riots, invasions, coups, typhoons, and earthquakes; it also explained a sequence of alerts known as Conditions White, Gray, and Yellow. In the event of Condition Red — the most serious gradation — Americans were to “remain calm and prepare for evacuation.”

The five young men stepped onto Eighth Avenue. The overcast sky threatened drizzle; New York City looked hard and scruffy, as though it too had been shortchanged on sleep. They turned north and walked six blocks to the West Side bus terminal. A ticket agent directed them to the proper bus, whose sign above the windshield advised in block capitals WEST POINT. They climbed aboard.

My Take

I’ve been a fan of Rick Atkinson’s writing since I read Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War, a vivid and almost novelistic account of Operation Desert Storm. I’d read other accounts of America’s largest military operation since the end of the Vietnam War, but none of them has captured my attention as Atkinson’s 1993 book. Based on interviews with over 500 participants, including Gens. Colin Powell, H. Norman Schwarzkopf, and Fred Franks – as well as lower-ranking Gulf War veterans such as Air Force pilot David Eberly and future general (and National Security Adviser) H.R. McMaster, Crusade was a history book that read like a Tom Clancy novel.  And, of course, I was blown away by his best-selling Liberation Trilogy, which tells the story of the U.S. Army’s epic struggle against the Axis from the deserts of North Africa to the plethora of battlefields in Sicily, Italy, Normandy, and beyond.

The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of West Point’s Class of 1966 is, perhaps, Atkinson’s most cathartic work. Because it deals with a conflict that is both divisive and controversial – the Vietnam War – and the dark, lean years that the Army endured during the aftermath, the paths followed by its three main protagonists and their classmates are often full of sad twists and even lethal changes of fortune. Some of the cadets who enter West Point on that June day in 1962 will experience life-changing traumas even before graduation, while others will survive the futile and bloody struggles in Vietnam – only to lose their lives in another land far from home. Some Class of 1966 grads will stay in the Army – the big Green Machine – and see its resurgence in the 1980s, while some will look back at their time in the service with disillusion and bitterness.

As is the case with Atkinson’s other books, The Long Gray Line is definitely worth reading. He is not only a meticulous researcher and a dogged interviewer, but he’s also a great storyteller. I give this book four out of four stars and a “must read” recommendation.