Nobody looked the part of Army general quite like Norman Schwarzkopf.
Keep your jogging, flirting, fitness-freak generals of today. Give us “the Bear,” a burly, steak-eating man o’ war straight out of the 20th century. Give Norman Schwarzkopf a beard and mutton chops and he would have fit right in at a 19th-century wood-plank table with U.S. Grant and Admiral Farragut.
Gen. Schwarzkopf died yesterday at the age of 78. He led the U.S. and its allies to victory over Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, the one in 1991. If we took all the wrong lessons away from that war, it wasn’t Schwarzkopf’s fault.
Schwarzkopf enjoyed the limelight, of course. Here he grimaces as he tours Army installations in Saudi Arabia on November 22, 1990, with President George Bush the Elder riding shotgun. And he was a great one for a press conference:
Here he joins Gen. Colin Powell (left) and Paul Wolfowitz (right) as they listen to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney at a press conference in Saudi Arabia in 1991. Wolfowitz and Cheney are two of the guys who learned all the wrong lessons from that war, of course. But let it pass.
Schwarzkopf went out at the top, winning the war in 1991 and retiring in 1992. He published his autobiography, It Doesn’t Take a Hero, the same year.
See our full biography of Norman Schwarzkopf »