Book Excerpt: 'Generally Speaking'

ByABC News via logo
October 10, 2001, 4:26 PM

Oct. 11 -- Claudia J. Kennedy made history by becoming the U.S> Army's first woman three-star general. The highest-ranking female officer of her time, she served as deputy chief of staff for intelligence, overseeing policy and resources affecting 45,000 soldiers worldwide. In her new book, Generally Speaking, Kennedy recalls her career. Read an excerpt below.

Chapter One: 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 grand-mothers. 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.