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Authors: Pat Conroy
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distinction in international affairs. Seventeen nations had honored him; fourteen universities had granted him honorary degrees. The museum of the Institute on the third floor of the library overflowed with mementoes that traced the course of his exploits in the Second World War and the Korean conflict. Some considered him the greatest South Carolinian since John C. Calhoun. The Bear had once confided to me that Durrell’s ego could fit snugly in the basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome but in very few other public places. This runaway megalomania marked him as a blood member of the fraternity of generals.
If looks alone could make generals, Durrell would have been a cinch. He was built lean and slim and dark, like a Doberman. A man of breeding and refrigerated intelligence, he ordered his life like a table of logarithms. Normally, he spoke slowly and his modulation had an icy control to it, but I had witnessed many times when he had caught fire and when he did, when he arrived at a subject that consumed him, then you could see the eyes change, not the color, but the light behind the eyes, which flared whenever an article of his unwavering faith arose in a speech or a conversation. During speeches to the Corps, the indisputable power of his own rhetoric would affect him so viscerally that he would dance along a thin, precarious edge of control in constant danger of plunging headlong into much darker and more radical passions. When praising the nation or the nobility of the founding fathers’ vision, we had known him to break down almost completely, not to weep of course, but to falter, his voice breaking, his emotions poised unsteadily in a miraculous duet between virility and tears. It was the only hint that there was fury beneath the form.
Otherwise he possessed the markings of the military thoroughbred. His hair was a distinguished gray of that special silver that only seems to grow on the heads of powerful, supremely confident men. It was close-cropped and stayed in place even in high winds. His nose was long and finely shaped; generals are a long-nosed, strong-jawed race. He was bred to wear the stars. The Presidency of the Institute was a fitting destiny for a man who had received his grandfather’s cavalry sword as a christening gift. He wore the sword whenever he reviewed the troops at Friday afternoon parade. He had kept it on his wall when he was a cadet officer at the Institute. Though he had had a congressional appointment to West Point, he had chosen to attend the Institute instead, in affirmation of his belief in the South and in Southern ways. By spurning the Point, he was following in the footsteps of both his father and grandfather. He had graduated from the Institute with extraordinary distinction and, crowning a brilliant Army career, became the first four-star general who had ever graduated from The College. As the most famous and successful of all graduates of the Institute, he offered an example to all of us of the hope and promise and possibility that life offered on the other side of graduation. And the administration constantly reminded us that Bentley Durrell had once entered the Gates of Legrand as a freshman, had once marched anonymously in the ranks of plebes, had once slept beneath the arches of second battalion. There had been a time when Bentley Durrell had been recognizably human before he walked off campus and into the history of his times. It was thought that after he returned from World War II, he would become either President of the Institute or President of the United States. He waited for his country and the Republican party to call him from his South Carolina plantation, but both decided to call Dwight David Eisenhower instead. General Durrell, it is said, never quite forgave either for their bad judgment or inferior taste. And when the Board of Visitors asked him to assume the Presidency of the Institute, he accepted with magnanimity and a certain desperation.
When I entered his
If looks alone could make generals, Durrell would have been a cinch. He was built lean and slim and dark, like a Doberman. A man of breeding and refrigerated intelligence, he ordered his life like a table of logarithms. Normally, he spoke slowly and his modulation had an icy control to it, but I had witnessed many times when he had caught fire and when he did, when he arrived at a subject that consumed him, then you could see the eyes change, not the color, but the light behind the eyes, which flared whenever an article of his unwavering faith arose in a speech or a conversation. During speeches to the Corps, the indisputable power of his own rhetoric would affect him so viscerally that he would dance along a thin, precarious edge of control in constant danger of plunging headlong into much darker and more radical passions. When praising the nation or the nobility of the founding fathers’ vision, we had known him to break down almost completely, not to weep of course, but to falter, his voice breaking, his emotions poised unsteadily in a miraculous duet between virility and tears. It was the only hint that there was fury beneath the form.
Otherwise he possessed the markings of the military thoroughbred. His hair was a distinguished gray of that special silver that only seems to grow on the heads of powerful, supremely confident men. It was close-cropped and stayed in place even in high winds. His nose was long and finely shaped; generals are a long-nosed, strong-jawed race. He was bred to wear the stars. The Presidency of the Institute was a fitting destiny for a man who had received his grandfather’s cavalry sword as a christening gift. He wore the sword whenever he reviewed the troops at Friday afternoon parade. He had kept it on his wall when he was a cadet officer at the Institute. Though he had had a congressional appointment to West Point, he had chosen to attend the Institute instead, in affirmation of his belief in the South and in Southern ways. By spurning the Point, he was following in the footsteps of both his father and grandfather. He had graduated from the Institute with extraordinary distinction and, crowning a brilliant Army career, became the first four-star general who had ever graduated from The College. As the most famous and successful of all graduates of the Institute, he offered an example to all of us of the hope and promise and possibility that life offered on the other side of graduation. And the administration constantly reminded us that Bentley Durrell had once entered the Gates of Legrand as a freshman, had once marched anonymously in the ranks of plebes, had once slept beneath the arches of second battalion. There had been a time when Bentley Durrell had been recognizably human before he walked off campus and into the history of his times. It was thought that after he returned from World War II, he would become either President of the Institute or President of the United States. He waited for his country and the Republican party to call him from his South Carolina plantation, but both decided to call Dwight David Eisenhower instead. General Durrell, it is said, never quite forgave either for their bad judgment or inferior taste. And when the Board of Visitors asked him to assume the Presidency of the Institute, he accepted with magnanimity and a certain desperation.
When I entered his
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