Welcome The Unknown Soldier

By NANCY GIBBS

No one seems to know for sure whether General Norman Schwarzkopf leans right or left, Republican or Democratic, so forcefully does he assert that he's an independent. Few have the least idea of what he thinks about monetary policy or school choice or quotas or global warming. Chances are, he favors a strong defense, though he has called war a "profane thing." What is most interesting is not that no one knows, but that hardly anyone cares.

The virtue in Schwarzkopf's mystery is that the general can be anything to anybody. Corporations look at him and see a take-charge CEO; universities envision a powerhouse chancellor; publishers perceive the author of a best- selling book. Above all, much of the public is enraptured by a new leader whose very appeal is that he has no platform, no party and no intention, at least so far, of running for office. Such political virginity lets people believe that Schwarzkopf, in his big, bold way, could do the heavy work of democracy without being chewed into small pieces by its machinery.

When Schwarzkopf came home from the war zone last week, a crowd gathered before dawn to foil his attempt to sneak quietly back into the country at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. The band played a victory march and the national anthem, and the fans wearing STORMIN' NORMAN FOR PRESIDENT T shirts waved flags and yellow balloons as sea gulls wheeled overhead. "I can't describe to you the emotion that's in all our hearts," he said, with his first words on American soil in 239 days. "It's a great day to be a soldier. It's a great day to be an American."

Then he disappeared -- though not completely. "After 39 years," he explained in an interview with TIME, "I owe the family and myself a little time." There were steaks to eat (thick and rare), ice cream to scarf down (Breyers mint chocolate chip), family members and pets with whom to get reacquainted (wife Brenda, son Christian, 13, daughters Jessica, 19, and Cynthia, 20, and a black Lab named Bear). He could catch up with Jeopardy and Cheers. Come Sunday, he could go to a real church and sit in a pew without sand in his boots. And while he savored his privacy, Norman Schwarzkopf could lean back and let the rest of America ponder his future.

He says he plans to retire in August, an utterly tantalizing prospect for pundits, pollsters, politicos, agents and headhunters. "I'll try and write a book," he muses. "I don't have the first line. Maybe, 'I was born at a very early age . . .' How's that?" He will play grand marshal at the Kentucky Derby next month, and talks of becoming a first-class salmon fisherman and improving his sporting-clays shooting.

Meanwhile the offers ring in like a cash register. His memoirs could fetch seven figures, his speeches $30,000 a pop. He has been mentioned as an ideal football coach (the Philadelphia Eagles) or university chancellor (Texas A&M) or business leader (Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca is batting his eyes). Van Poole, chief of the Republican Party in Schwarzkopf's home state of Florida, is exercising monumental restraint. "I thought I'd give him a couple of weeks," he says. The hope is to persuade the general to run against popular Democratic Senator Bob Graham. "I've not talked to Schwarzkopf directly, but through a third party," says Poole. "He's not said no." Others would let him skip the legislative spring training and go straight to the majors. Former state G.O.P. chairman Henry Sayler, a fellow West Pointer, launched a Draft General Schwarzkopf 1992 Committee this month.

All this may be wishful thinking, since Schwarzkopf insists he is an independent with no political aspirations. "I will admit that I have voted for people from both parties for President," he says. But it is not easy fending off suitors these days. "I do not envision myself as a political candidate. I have said that at some point in the future, perhaps -- and that's a very big perhaps -- I might be able to find a sense of self-fulfillment serving my country in the political arena. But that's not what I plan to do at the present time, nor do I seek it, nor do I honestly deep down in my heart think it will ever happen."

The general is battling powerful forces here, for he has been cast as a savior by a public that longs for shiny heroes. "It's sort of overwhelming," he says, blinking in the limelight. "I didn't have a sense of how completely spontaneous it would be." His incandescent televised briefing after the liberation of Kuwait sent a powerful message: here at last was a leader who was blunt, not glib; passionate, not packaged, with the carriage of a man of courage and principle. Even then, it was hard to imagine that he would willingly trade the high challenges of the Saudi desert for the sandbox that is American politics.

The battlefield has always been a fruitful scouting ground for kingmakers. George Washington was eager to retire after his years as a soldier, but there were some who urged him to become a military despot, if not an absolute monarch. Andrew Jackson, the hero of New Orleans, rode into the White House with two bullets in his body and a white scar across his face. When South Carolina tried to annul new federal tariffs, Jackson sent soldiers to Charleston harbor and muttered about marching south with 50,000 men. William Henry Harrison was the hero of Tippecanoe; Ulysses Grant served under Zachary Taylor in the Mexican War, before going on to glory at Vicksburg and Appomattox; and Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt, mustache bristling, charged up San Juan Hill and into American mythology. In Eisenhower, one of the century's greatest generals, America found one of its better Presidents.

Clean wars produce clean heroes; Vietnam's graduates into office have tended to be former prisoners of war instead of generals. The gulf war is the first in a generation to produce a bumper crop of political recruits, with Schwarzkopf looming largest of all. "He represents a revival of the golden days of America and all that Americans are looking for," says Dom Bonafede, assistant professor of government at American University. "He's not your typical media figure with his hair coiffed and with spin doctors and media consultants swirling around him." Says Sherry Jeffe, a senior associate at the Center for Politics and Policy at the Claremont Graduate School: "He embodies what Americans dream our country can be and what it should be."

Though its feelings are understandable, there is something scary about a country that aches for heroes and leaders in this way. America came through a frightening war with a great victory and owes its soldiers a natural debt of gratitude. Like Eisenhower and other soldiers before him, Schwarzkopf was the right man in the right place at the right time, commanding loyalty from his troops, respect from his peers and deference even from his superiors in Washington. As if that were not enough, some people now want him to dispel, almost single-handedly, the cynicism that hangs over government at every level.

"He's commanding, quotable, and has a great personality," says Ken Khachigian, a former Reagan speechwriter and now a political consultant. "He's got all the makings of a natural candidate." It is easier to be commanding, however, when there are disciplined troops to command -- hardly a description of Congress or the federal bureaucracy. It was good sport to cut reporters off at the knees and to swat their questions into the big black box of national security. But the campaign press corps has some artillery of its own and takes delight in bringing out the dark side of a candidate. Schwarzkopf's explosive temper would make him vulnerable. "Long before he becomes President, the halo will be stripped away," says Amitai Etzioni, professor of government at George Washington University. "In the end, we can't stomach a real hero. We're happy to have heroes for a week, but we have to tear them down."

In the shadow of 1992, it is not really Norman Schwarzkopf who deserves the close scrutiny of voters, but the process that seeks to loft him into the political firmament and could just as easily bring him crashing down. "Somebody said the other day I'd make a lousy politician because I say what I think," Schwarzkopf says. "That's a sad commentary, when we say that the representatives of the American people can't say what they believe." In fact, it is the very absence of known beliefs that makes Schwarzkopf unassailable as a candidate. "The tremendous mythology surrounding him makes him even more attractive in a society that is unwilling to make sacrifices and hard choices," argues UCLA lecturer Hyman Frankel. Once the myth is punctured by real information, what, if anything, would be left? Boldness and candor, to be sure, but these qualities can be lethal for a politician.

The general is not naive about his opportunities or the obstacles that await him if he rides into the political battlefield. "There's a great expression I've always believed," Schwarzkopf observes. " 'The higher the monkey gets up the flagpole, the more opportunity he has to show his ass.' Or I should say his rear end." Perhaps even a public desperate for a plainspoken hero will give him some time off to collect his thoughts.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Miami, Sally B. Donnelly/Los Angeles and Bruce van Voorst/Washington