WEST POINT: America's Power Fraternity

by ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1973

While Annapolis men and other sundry non-West Pointers might jokingly refer to the Army's principal educational institution as South Hudson Institute of Technology (or S.H.I.T.), generally speaking the Point has enjoyed an adulatory press, being fabled in book, film, and song. But these are muckraking days and there remain few sacred cows which have not yet been cut up and sold as cheap stewing beef. The authors, one a graduate of the academy, charge that the military-industrial complex, of which a more famous graduate spoke when retiring from the U.S. presidency, is a threat to the nation and that West Point is the military-industrial complex; ipso facto, the Point is a threat to the nation. Since World War II, men from W.P. have been insidiously undermining the constitutional imperative of civilian control of the military via infiltration of the governmental bureaucracy -- Galloway and Johnson find them ""tucked away in the bowels of America's vast intelligence network"" by the dozens; about two thousand retired colonels and up are employed by defense Contractors; others have sneaked into the communications industry; the Long Gray Line has ""laid siege"" to Nixon's White House; in Latin America academy graduates are legion, aiding and abetting dictatorial regimes (""Like a Johnny Appleseed of militarism, the United States has sprinkled West Point seedlings in Latin America""). Names -- many, many names -- are provided. What gives this expose its special claim to our attention, however, is the description of the West Point course of study -- a curriculum designed, if we choose to believe the authors, to produce a Prussian-style military elite, a system that ""offers an ideology, not an education,"" one which ""crushes the individual's moral development by denying to him the indispensable ingredient of that development -- freedom."" West Pointers are ""dangerous"" men, men ""whose personal code is identical to the one that appears again and again in the ideology of fascism."" This is hyper-excited stuff, which is not to dismiss it out of hand but simply to place it in the right market.

Pub Date: April 1, 1973

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1973

Categories: NONFICTION