Introduction
“I had never been away very much in my life, and so this was a major excursion for me, away from my family. I went by train and my mind just raced with the possibilities of the life that awaited me there. A lot of young men had been away at prep schools and done a lot of traveling before they entered the Naval Academy, but I had never been on a boat. I was a land-lubber in every respect.”
-Jimmy Carter,
39th President of the United States
and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
What do all of these distinguished men: former Joint
Chiefs chairman 39th U.S. President Jimmy Carter, billionaire investment banker Jackson T. Stephens, Admiral William Crowe, former CIA Director Stansfield Turner, Medal of Honor winner Admiral James Stockdale, Medal of Honor winner Tom Hudner, former POW and U.S. Senator Jerry Denton, and Ambassador Vernon Weaver, have in common? They were all members of the United States Naval Academy Class of 1947.
Six of these men are in their early 80s, and Stockdale and Stephens each made it to their ninth decade. (Both died in July 2005 as this book was being written.) With the keen perspective of age, all of the men look back on their days at Annapolis as the most important years of their lives, essential for instilling in them the core values and discipline and sense of patriotism that guided them to such great achievements. The men don’t put forth the proposition that they were the greatest-ever American military class, because humility is one of the values they hold dear. But it is a question they’ve thought about from time to time, because, by any measure, this group-a collection of men who finished a four-year course of study in an accelerated three-year curriculum in preparation for a global war that they thought might last a decade-was exceptional.