THE NATION: Trouble at West Point

The nation, which already had its fill of scandal and corruption, was shocked, sorry and puzzled by the news from West Point. Ninety of the Academy’s 2,500 cadets, among them the bulk of Army’s disciplined and magnificent football team, faced dismissal for a breach of the Cadet Corps’ sacrosanct honor system.

At first glance, the mass dismissal seemed a severe, regrettable but eminently clear-cut and righteous act of disciplinary surgery, performed in the interests of the Army’s loftiest ideals. The facts, as announced, were few and terse. The Academy’s honor code—by which every cadet is not only duty-bound to shun lying, cheating and stealing, but to report his own transgressions and those of his fellows —had been broken. Academy officials had learned, from one cadet’s report, of wholesale cribbing for examinations. Concerned for the Academy’s integrity, the Army then arranged for an investigation by a three-man board headed by the famed, 79-year-old jurist, Judge Learned Hand.

“Painful Decision.” Hand called it one of the most “painful” decisions of his life. The morality of the country, the three-man board felt, would be endangered if it allowed any compromise of the honor of men who were to lead their fellow citizens to battle. And a breach of the cadet code also involved a fundamental consideration —a cadet’s place on the graduation list determines his place in the Army hierarchy; one who cheats gains a lifelong advantage over those who do not. The board’s recommendation: dismissal.

The news, handed out at West Point in a mimeographed, flatly worded communique made even the college basketball gambling scandals pale in comparison. The honor code had been set up in 1817 by the “Father of West Point,” stern Sylvanus Thayer, given its final shape during the tour of General Douglas MacArthur in the ’20s, and came to occupy in a West Pointer’s mind, Ike Eisenhower once said, a position “akin to the virtue of his mother or sister.”

But within a few hours the Academy’s troubles, like most human difficulty, began to seem less one-sided. The Academy named no names, but some of the 90 identified themselves to newsmen. It quickly became apparent that the temptation to crib for exams had been intensified by the Army’s emphasis on football.

Repeated Questions. Players, faced with bruising schedules against the best college teams in the country, still had to maintain the iron scholastic requirements of the Academy. They were helped, with the Army’s full approval, by upper-class tutors. One of these, Cadet Ronald Clough, said that when players he was helping gave him problems to do, he often got the same problems the next day in his own classes.

The Army sometimes gave exactly the same test to different classes, giving cadets a chance to pass on questions.

According to the honor system, such incidents should have been reported. Accused cadets charged, however, that such cribbing had been going on at the Academy for years among men who have since served in Korea, where some of them have died in battle. Academy officials replied starchily that once a West Pointer graduates and is commissioned, he starts with a clean slate, is considered “an officer and a gentleman.” But if such cheating had gone on before, unchecked and unpunished, the 90 were being sharply punished, while others, equally guilty, went free. The cadets also angrily insisted that scores more of their classmates had cribbed, denied it and escaped punishment.

At week’s end, the West Point affair seemed less like a scandal than a cause for self-searching on the part of both the nation and the Army. Angry voices were raised in Congress. Arkansas’ Senator J. William Fulbright, an ex-football player himself, demanded that football at West Point be suspended. Michigan’s Congressman Charles E. Potter pictured the 90 as “victims of athletic commercialism.”*

None of this seemed to invalidate the regretful conclusions of the board. But it made it difficult not to feel that the fault rested as much with the Army as with the grey-clad youths who faced dismissal. The Army’s botched handling of the dismissal itself left cadets confused about their status and their future. Technically, their dismissal was “under honorable conditions,” though in fact they were branded otherwise. The cadets’ case was best put by Harold Loehlein, honor cadet, captain-elect of the 1951 football team, arid president of the first class. Said he:

“I would have been higher in the standings had I not helped the others. Sure, I cribbed at times, but a lot of the boys thought it was justified because we gave a lot of time to the football team. In. some cases, friendship comes above the honor system . . . The full attack has been directed against us and yet no one has questioned the honor system itself.”

* Soon after the story broke, one football player said he received offers from four or five colleges to play for them.