
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, July 26, 1993                   TAG: 9307260025
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

BOOK PUTS WAR HERO IN NEW LIGHT

In a new history of the Persian Gulf War that redraws the public portrait of its field commander, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf is described by key subordinates as a man of profane and dysfunctional rages who turned his headquarters into "a dispirited bunker" and had little to do with the crucial air campaign against Iraq.

Former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, the book says, was offended enough by Schwarzkopf's "imperial trappings" and fits of fury that he considered firing him as commander of allied forces in the months before the war. Instead, the book says, he dispatched a three-star general as Schwarzkopf's deputy to be a buffer for the staff and "sweep up the . . . broken crockery."

The book describes numerous vivid scenes in which the new deputy, Army Lt. Gen. Calvin A.H. Waller, tried to calm Schwarzkopf with corny jokes and shield the cowed and humiliated staff. But even with those intercessions, the book says, Schwarzkopf threatened to fire or court-martial in succession his senior Army commander, Navy commander, Air Force commander, chief air targeteer and the commanders of both Army corps in the desert.

In "Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War," author Rick Atkinson of The Washington Post discloses scores of new details about the planning and conduct of the war fought in January and February 1991 and the diplomatic struggles that led up to it. Atkinson interviewed every senior American decision-maker on the war except former President Bush, many of them repeatedly. Houghton Mifflin, which plans to publish the 504-page book in October, will begin circulating review copies this week.

Among the book's disclosures are that U.S. missiles flew secret routes over Iran en route to Iraq, that Washington accepted special equipment from Israel and used an ultimatum to keep Israel out of the war, that senior generals twice proposed to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons, that military briefers including Schwarzkopf sometimes knew they had made false public statements but did not correct them, and that the destruction of the Amiriyah bunker in Baghdad, which killed 204 civilians, was based in part on an urgent report from an Iraqi spy.

Though critical of many decisions and episodes, Atkinson's book is almost uniformly complimentary of Schwarzkopf's subordinate commanders and portrays the war as the broadly successful result of a campaign to rebuild the spirit and competence of the U.S. military after Vietnam. "For Norman Schwarzkopf and his lieutenants, this war had lasted not six weeks but twenty years," Atkinson writes. interests.

by CNB