For serpentine nautical yarns, the Ancient Mariner has little on Bill Crowe. His career in the U.S. Navy began as a cadet at Annapolis during World War II and ended as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under two Republican presidents. In September 1992, three years after retirement from the Navy, Crowe stepped up to a microphone to endorse the presidential candidacy of Democrat Bill Clinton, who had assiduously avoided military service during Vietnam. Crowe says he was "quite upset" by GOP campaign rhetoric that implied the military shouldn't serve under Clinton if he became commander in chief. Crowe's endorsement had "enormous impact," recalls Paul Begala, a senior strategist for Clinton in 1992.
Clinton obviously thought so, too. In 1994, he appointed Crowe, MA '56, to the plum posting of ambassador to the United Kingdom. It is a position rich in history and tradition. In the formative years of the United States, the ministry to Great Britain was the grooming spot for presidents (five) and secretaries of state (nine). In this century, the job has been more about patronage, and men named Mellon and Kennedy, Whitney and Annenberg have held it.
Crowe has been a popular choice. British audiences have delighted in his sense of humor, his frankness, his intelligence. At a gathering of U.K. business leaders, Crowe was berated by a man who believed the United States didn't completely support the inclusion of Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. Finally, the man played his trump card: "How would you feel if Mexico took back Texas?"
Without missing a beat, Crowe replied: "I'm from Oklahoma. We've been trying to give Texas back to Mexico for a hundred years." Crowe is 72 and encumbered by arthritic knees. But for a man who is slow to his feet, he is remarkably quick once on them.
From his embassy office overlooking tree-lined Grosvenor Square in the city's fashionable Mayfair district, Crowe has overseen the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. His job is to convey the U.S. position on global events to the British and to serve as what the New York Times has called a "transmission belt in the other direction," letting the administration know the European view on current events. He disarms listeners with his sense of humor and frequent citations of Winston Churchill and fellow Oklahoman Will Rogers. But beyond the one-liners--"I'm not sure what the new world order is, but it's long on new and short on order"--Crowe can offer, when appropriate, a penetrating analysis of American foreign policy. As a Navy officer, he had commands in the Persian Gulf, Southern Europe and the Pacific. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he was principal military adviser to the president, the National Security Council and the secretary of defense, and was intimately involved with security issues around the world.
As ambassador, Crowe's chief concerns are the "Irish problem," the situation in Bosnia, the future of NATO and, most importantly, the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. "There are many, many British people who worry about whether they still have as tight a tie with America as they used to," says Crowe, who will leave the post this fall. "It's dynamic; it changes. But it's still unique."
"He was a good choice," says Karen Curry, the London bureau chief for NBC News. "He's a very charming guy in a different way than the typical career diplomat. He's a wonderful raconteur. He always goes out of his way to make people feel very welcome. He is very honest without being undiplomatic. And he's a really smart man."
By dint of his academic bent (a master's in education from Stanford and a master's and doctorate in politics from Princeton), his centrist politics and his polished speaking abilities, Crowe has proved a good fit as an ambassador at the Court of St. James's. That he passes muster as a diplomat should hardly come as a surprise. What is surprising, if not mystifying, is how this articulate individualist survived and, in the end, thrived during nearly half a century in a Navy known for generally being conservative and, some say, anti-intellectual. Curiously, the answer seems to lie in the very contrarian streak that made his ascent so unlikely.
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Crowe's rise to success is a study in contradictions. He is the maverick who rose to the top of the military with a succession of jobs in Washington rather than a string of commands at sea; the career officer who endorsed the "draft-dodging" Clinton for president; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who appeared (as himself) on the television sitcom "Cheers." He was the rumpled sailor in the wrinkle-free Navy. The Washington Post said "there is something vaguely untucked about his appearance."
Crowe was born in Kentucky in 1925. Four years later, just before the teeth of the Depression started to bite, his father, who was a lawyer, moved the family back to Oklahoma. "My father was an Okie who came back, rather than an Okie who left," says Crowe, answering the question of which parent gave him the contrarian genes.
"My father was a very strong influence on my life," Crowe says, "on the intellectual side of my life. He believed strongly in education and in the importance of words. He felt very strongly about the importance of books and politics and particularly the ability to express yourself."
Those interests--in education, politics and eloquence--have clearly become the mainstay of Crowe's intellectual framework.
"My father believed in oratory," Crowe says. "When I got to high school, the only thing he absolutely, dictatorially declared was you had to debate as an extracurricular activity. And it was the most important singular educational experience I had." In his junior year at Oklahoma City's Classen High, Crowe and his teammates won the national debate title.
Crowe's father, William Sr., influenced his son in another important way. When the younger Crowe was growing up, two pictures of the battleship Pennsylvania, the ship his father had served on at the end of World War I, hung over the boy's bed. "I wanted to go to the Naval Academy since I was 8 or 9 years old," Crowe says.
In 1943, after a year at the University of Oklahoma, Crowe headed east to Annapolis. He was in the same wartime class as Jimmy Carter, Vice Admiral Jim Stockdale, MA '62, and Stansfield Turner, the future director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Although he chafed under the academy's regimentation, he flourished academically. Crowe led the Navy debate team to victory in the Eastern Intercollegiates, defeating the host team from West Point in the finals on the question of whether there should be "compulsory military training." Fittingly, Crowe argued the negative.
In the Navy, the quickest, surest path to a chest full of medals and a drawer full of promotions is to go to sea. The quickest way to founder is to go to Washington. The water-walkers, the fair-haired junior officers who slide onto the fast track, are commanding ships or flying planes.
Ever the contrarian, Crowe spent much of his career landlocked inside the Beltway or in the classroom. He wasn't a total landlubber; he served as the executive officer of the USS Wahoo (1956-58) and was the commander of the USS Trout (1960-62), each a 287-foot diesel submarine. In 1970 and '71, he spent 10 months in Vietnam in charge of the "brown-water navy"--the riverine forces that patrolled the Mekong Delta. But he found himself returning time and again to the Pentagon or other Beltway assignments.
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In 1954, Crowe marrid Shirley Grennel, a flight attendant from Okeene, Okla. A year later, the newlyweds came to Stanford, where Crowe, as part of his naval education, enrolled in a master's program in personnel administration at the school of education. He and Shirley loved the Bay Area, and Crowe says he hoped that someday he could come back to teach. "I heard that schools don't like to hire their own PhDs," he says. "That's one of the reasons I got my doctorate at Princeton."
Crowe's decision to go to Princeton in 1962 was perhaps the defining moment of his naval career. The Navy generally encouraged its officers to take graduate degrees in engineering, but Crowe, then a lieutenant commander, was among the few to go into the social sciences. His doctoral program in politics combined elements of political science and international relations. Shortly after being accepted to Princeton, he received a call from the Navy's submarine detail desk telling him that Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy, wanted him to come to Washington for an interview. Crowe had applied to the nuclear program nearly a decade earlier, and no one was admitted without Rickover's personal stamp of approval.
After a week of thought, Crowe did the unthinkable: He called back and said he couldn't come down for an interview. He wasn't prepared to accept an offer at that time because he was intent on beginning his studies. A year later, the desk called again and said that this time his attendance was mandatory. He went to Washington and was keelhauled by the autocratic Rickover, who at one stage in the interview called him a "stupid bastard." In his 1993 memoirs, The Line of Fire, Crowe wrote: "When I left Rickover's office, I was distraught. My prospects for a submarine career suddenly looked dismal."
Crowe buried himself in his studies, writing his dissertation on "The Policy Roots of the Modern Royal Navy, 1946-1953." Though his research took Crowe to London for four months, it was the classroom experience at Princeton that truly shaped his thinking.
"It really tore me apart and rebuilt me," Crowe says. "As I studied political science at Princeton, I began to learn that things aren't black and white, they're usually gray. And what you hear is not always what's the truth." When Crowe pulled his uniform back on in 1965, doctorate in hand, he was met with more brickbats than bouquets. "There has historically been a very strong anti- intellectual bias in the Navy," Crowe notes.
"I got ripped one day very badly by my superior in the Pentagon when I had written something that suggested we do something differently," Crowe recalls. "He called me in and said, 'We didn't send you to graduate school to come back here with a lot of ideas on how to run the Navy. What we sent you to graduate school for is to come back here and help us perfect and articulate what we want better. But we're not interested in your original thinking.' "
Crowe, understandably, was shaken. "I considered quitting right then," he says.
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Crowe periodically wondered whether his naval career was dead in the water. After returning from Vietnam in 1971 and being given an office rather than a ship, he felt his prospects were so bleak that he polled his wife and three children about where they wanted to move when he was discharged. Instead, with strong support from Admiral Thomas Moorer, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Crowe made rear admiral in 1973 and was surprised to find that there were those in the Navy who were proud of his education. He also found that his ability to see both sides of an issue made him well suited to what he calls the "joint bidness." From 1977 to 1985, he worked exclusively on joint-service assignments--the intersection of several branches of the armed forces.
It was in the last of these postings, as the commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, that Crowe made a lasting impression on President Reagan and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. The two men stopped in Honolulu for a briefing on their way to China in 1984. For 90 minutes, Crowe spoke without notes, charts or maps. In the middle of the seamless presentation, Reagan, according to newspaper accounts, leaned over to Weinberger and said, "If we're ever going to need a new chairman of the Joint Chiefs, here's our man."
When Crowe was named chairman the following summer, it represented a sea change at the Pentagon, and one that was not necessarily welcome in all corners. The Byzantine politics in the halls of the Pentagon are hard to capture, though Newsweek came close recently when it noted that "bureaucratic intrigue [at the Pentagon] is practiced at a level matched only by university faculties and 15th-century popes." Crowe's predisposition to see and understand both sides of a question made him ideal for his joint-service postings; it did not, however, make him loved by all his naval brethren, some of whom thought it scandalous that Crowe didn't always put the Navy first. "This may sound strange to you, [but] when I became chairman, I had strong support from the Army and Air Force, probably a little stronger than I had from the Navy," Crowe says, putting it in the politest of terms.
But Crowe represented the very model of the modern four-star admiral. In the age of annual budget battles and an evolving U.S. military role, combat ribbons had given way to political savvy. The ability to accommodate and collaborate, rather than to divide and conquer, had become the ticket to the top of the military.
Early in Crowe's four years as chairman, Congress passed legislation that significantly bolstered his authority. With his enhanced position, Crowe changed the armed forces' complex rules of engagement and also initiated an extraordinary series of personal meetings with Soviet military brass.
The low point of his tenure came in July 1988, when the U.S. warship Vincennes fired a missile at an Iranian Airbus and killed all 290 people on board. Before TV cameras and throngs of reporters, Crowe apologized for the mistake and the loss of life. His forthright handling of the incident kept charges of a government cover-up largely at bay. In 1989, President Bush asked Crowe to stay on for a third two-year term, but he declined.
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After Crowe stepped down, the New York Times praised his work: "Admiral Crowe has been a gem. He managed the difficult U.S. naval presence in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war and opened an invaluable dialogue with his Soviet counterparts."
It is hardly surprising that the newly retired Crowe chose to return once again to the classroom. He taught a course on geopolitics at the University of Oklahoma. But his retreat from the public eye didn't last long. The tumultuous press conference in 1992, when Crowe endorsed Clinton for president, placed him once again in the limelight. Though he was criticized by many who had worked with him under Presidents Reagan and Bush, Crowe felt compelled to speak out.
"I was quite upset by the thrust of the campaign rhetoric, particularly regarding the military," Crowe says. "While the Republicans never said it explicitly, implicit in what they were saying was 'if this guy's elected, the military shouldn't serve.' I thought that was dangerous. You don't want to pursue that too heavily because somebody might start believing it. In the military I grew up in, it was our job to get along with the president, not the president's job to get along with us."
The Clinton campaign was in desperate need of this kind of support from such a distinguished military man. "First off, in the primaries and in the general election, Clinton was running against real war heroes in John Kerrey and George Bush," says Paul Begala. "And Gov. Clinton didn't have any military experience. Having the most important military figure in America getting up and saying Clinton could be an effective commander in chief . . . undermined the Republicans' fundamental argument.
"Basically, elections are won by dictating the terrain of the conflict. If you're Clinton, you wanted the election to be about the economy, not about military issues." Crowe helped candidate Clinton to do just that.
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When Crowe returns home this fall, he'll leave behind a spacious office, which he decorated with helmets, kepis and shakos from his personal collection of roughly 1,100 pieces of headgear. London, he knows, is an enviable place to hang your hat, whether you have one or one thousand.
In The Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defines diplomacy as "the patriotic art of lying for one's country." Crowe jokes: "Diplomacy is one job in which a good tailor can overcome a lack of talent." But trying to explain a country's foreign policy, let alone its culture, even to a staunch ally, is not easy. Despite his formidable intellect, winning debate skills and, yes, Savile Row tailor, Crowe has found diplomacy confounding. According to him, there are things he simply hasn't been able to explain to the British: the O.J. trial; U.S. politics; the gun control debate; American football.
Crowe diplomatically avoids the least explicable phenomenon of all, which is, of course, how a Beltway-bound desk jockey with arthritic knees and a wallful of academic diplomas came to lead the most powerful military machine on earth, affect presidential politics and present his credentials to Queen Elizabeth II at the Court of St. James's.
Bruce Anderson, '79, is the former editor of Stanford magazine.
