Free All In by Paula Broadwell Page A

Support program and commanded combat forces in the Mekong Delta. When he returned to the Pentagon, Knowlton pushed to conduct a serious investigation of the My Lai massacre. Promoted to three stars at West Point, he retired three tours later as a four-star general. He would become Petraeus’s “military father,” according to Knowlton’s wife, Peggy. Petraeus would be their “fourth son,” and General Knowlton would pass on to him tales of his fights against the Nazis and the Vietcong after Petraeus had proven himself as a cadet.
    Petraeus was eager to fight and win the kinds of wars Knowlton described during dinners at the superintendent’s house, Quarters 100—one of the most distinctive buildings at West Point. Sitting at the long rectangular dinner table in the historic supe’s house was an honor afforded to the academy’s rising stars. The dinner was always a cut above the mess hall. Petraeus’s early interest in the topic of “uncomfortable wars” began at West Point—at these dinners. There were no mandatory classes on counterinsurgency warfare at West Point at that time.
    Life at the academy generally shielded cadets from the antiwar sentiment that prevailed at the time, and Knowlton tried to inculcate in the cadets the virtues of the profession of arms, even while the Army was approaching its post-Vietnam nadir. In his oral history, Knowlton later reflected that he was the “commander of a stockade surrounded by attacking Indians.”
    Knowlton served as the academy’s forty-ninth superintendent. He was involuntarily ordered to West Point on twenty-four hours’ notice by Westmoreland after the departure of Major General Sam Koster, whose record was tainted because of his association with My Lai. Westmoreland wanted Knowlton to establish some “consistency” and improve communications between the Pentagon and the nation’s oldest military academy, especially as the Army began to resurrect itself after the morass of Vietnam. The rapid turnover in superintendents and the frequent personality clashes between them and the Army chiefs of staff had not been healthy for the Corps of Cadets; Westmoreland thought that if Knowlton stayed for four years, he could help stabilize important leadership initiatives in this time of transition for the academy. Westmoreland himself had served as superintendent and had a soft spot for the Corps and a burning interest in everything that went on at West Point.
    Knowlton was determined to run West Point differently from his predecessors. From the time he arrived, he would write long memorandums to the Pentagon, sometimes every day. In the memos, he didn’t ask for permission to conduct affairs the way he saw fit. Rather, he explained the critical issues facing the school and described how he planned to deal with them. Petraeus began drafting the same sort of “commander’s update” for his boss when he was in Bosnia and carried the tradition with him to Iraq, Central Command and Afghanistan.
    Knowlton buffered the cadets from the negativity surrounding Vietnam in part by sharing stories about his own positive experiences there. The Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) initiative was the main U.S. pacification program. The mission of CORDS was threefold: providing security for the local population, destroying insurgent infrastructure and building Vietnamese government capacity—and doing all of this on a scale large enough to be decisive. These concepts would later become part of Petraeus’s strategy for the surge in Iraq.
    While on Westmoreland’s staff, Knowlton had made it a goal to visit as many of the districts in Vietnam as he could, to gather local knowledge and perspectives from the detachment teams. He went into the countryside to show the interest of the central government in the life of his teams and the people in the area. These teams would gather