Free All In by Paula Broadwell

“Much of the history we teach was made by people we taught.” Many of those heroes he had studied in his military history classes—MacArthur, Eisenhower, Ridgway and Galvin among them—came from the infantry. Infantrymen often rose to the top of the Army. At the time his class selected their branch choice and assignment, he knew he wanted to earn a Ranger tab, become an Airborne trooper and serve abroad. He knew his place at the top of the class would allow him to begin his career on the most likely path to the top. In time, Petraeus would be first in his Ranger School class and would command multiple airborne units.
    White was prophetic in the description he wrote of Petraeus for the 1974 West Point yearbook, using the nickname that had stuck with Petraeus since Little League: “Peaches came to the Mil Acad with high ambitions, but unlike most, he accomplished his goals. A striver to the Max, Dave was always ‘going for it’ in sport, academics, leadership, even his social life. This attitude will surely lead to success in the future, Army or otherwise.”
    The reference to his social life was a nod to his engagement to Hollister Knowlton, the daughter of West Point’s superintendent, a military intellectual who had distinguished himself on the battlefield in World War II and Vietnam. In the fall of 1973, “Holly” Knowlton was a senior at Dickinson College, a beautiful, smart and witty young woman who wrote her senior honors dissertation on François Mauriac, a French novelist who had been awarded the Nobel Prize. On a visit to West Point one football weekend, a friend of the family hoped to fix her up with a certain cadet to take her to the game. But when he was otherwise engaged, a call was placed to the cadet brigade headquarters to find a replacement, the assistant brigade adjutant on duty: David Petraeus. Not knowing who his blind date was, he agreed to take on this potentially sensitive mission. Soon, the two would find themselves commuting to each other’s colleges whenever time allowed, sometimes braving fierce New York snowstorms to spend time together. Petraeus would sneak in the side door of the superintendent’s home aside the Plain, the academy’s parade field, to visit Holly when she made the trip back to West Point. Both maintained their first priorities of graduating at the top of their classes, and both did: Petraeus graduated fortieth in his class, a “star man,” signifying top 5 percent, cadet captain and varsity letterman, while Holly was summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with honors in both French and English. The two were married on July 6, 1974, at the Cadet Chapel on West Point’s campus a month after Petraeus received his commission from Lieutenant General Knowlton as a 2nd lieutenant in the infantry.
    David’s roots stood in sharp contrast to his bride’s patrician-military upbringing. To Petraeus, the stature of Holly’s family was intoxicating. He loved becoming a part of it. Holly’s well-connected and accomplished grandparents had a large compound in West Springfield, New Hampshire, with a boathouse on a nearby lake that they would visit often. Holly’s father, Lieutenant General Knowlton, came from a prominent and well-to-do Massachusetts family and had graduated seventh in his class at West Point. He fought in four campaigns during World War II, beginning in Normandy. In the last weeks of the war, he was awarded a Silver Star for leading a reconnaissance mission deep behind German lines to make one of the first contacts with the Soviet forces north of Berlin. After the war, as the Cold War lines hardened, he was one of a handful of officers selected to help General Eisenhower establish the new NATO headquarters in Paris. Knowlton later served two years under General Westmoreland in Vietnam, where he visited every province as a senior official in the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development