Free The General's President by John Dalmas

But General Cromwell declined; he felt that the country might not accept a general as president, and that at any rate a civilian viewpoint was preferable."
    He leaned forward now, forearms on the lectern, peering at the audience as if in confidence. "So now you have Arne Haugen as president," he continued. "Why me? Why was I asked to serve? I don't know all the thinking on that, but I can tell you a little about myself that may have influenced the decision.
    "I'm an electrical engineer, which reflects enough personal discipline and enough organized intelligence to get through a tough, not much nonsense set of university courses. I'm also a highly successful inventor, which reflects a considerable ability to apply what I know to the solution of previously unsolved problems."
    Haugen paused and straightened. "And to ignore standard ways of doing things, when they aren't working. That's been important in the way I work. It may prove important on this job too.
    "I'm a self-made multi-millionaire who started out with very little. Which does not make me holier than thou. But I did it by manufacturing useful things that I, and people who work with me, invented or improved. And not by the greed-oriented financial gamesmanship that many others have gotten rich by.
    "I also did it by living frugally, with minimal borrowing, and working lots of hours, in order to get started and establish a well-developed operation."
    He paused again, then grinned unexpectedly. "Incidentally, I'm the first president in more than a century to have been born and raised in a log house. People can use that information someday in playing Trivial Pursuit. And I personally know something about poverty. Though in important respects, farm poverty during the 1920s and 30s was a much less demoralizing experience than urban poverty in the 80s and 90s. Perhaps nothing helps morale more than production does, and we did a lot of that. As a matter of fact, I didn't know we were poor, and I doubt that my parents thought of us that way. We just had very little money. And there was no television, no full-color commercials, to show or tell the Haugen family what it didn't have, what it wasn't able to buy. As far as that's concerned, there wasn't even electricity in our part of the country. And our neighbors were hardscrabble backwoods settlers just as we were.
    "I'm also the first American president ever who grew up in a foreign language household—three foreign languages, actually. My mother knew almost no English when I was small; her native language was Finnish, but she could also speak, somewhat, a Swedish dialect. Which was close enough to my father's Norwegian that they could converse effectively. Also each of my grandmothers, one Finnish and one Norwegian, lived with us much of the time, neither speaking English. So I grew up speaking Finnish and a sort of Swedified Norwegian.
    "Finnish, incidentally, is utterly different from Norwegian, and learning both at once, I developed a very flexible subconscious program for learning languages. Since then I've found languages both interesting, and easy to learn, and I speak and read a number of them. Which should prove useful in foreign relations."
    The president looked up at the video cameras. "And as far as war is concerned," he went on, "I have firsthand experience. Incidentally, the information that found its way to the media was not entirely correct. I trained with the independent 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment and fought with it in New Guinea and on Noemfoor Island where I was wounded. After rehabilitation, I was then assigned to the Eleventh Airborne's 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment, and later wounded on Leyte. After that I fought in southern Luzon and took part in the Los Baños drop. I lost both my brothers to combat, one in Normandy and the other on Peliliu, not Okinawa as reported.
    "I do not look on war as something desirable."
    He scanned the chamber then, the congressmen. "And now for some things I am