1955-1956: A BOY SCOUT’S FANTASY

How We Won The Cold War: A Personal Account of the Greatest Adventure of Modern Times

Chapter Two

1955-1956:  A BOY SCOUT'S FANTASY

Strange things can happen when people make fun of you. 

On a Boy Scout camping trip in June, 1955, I sat in my tent which was pegged into the sands of Carpenteria Beach, California.  As a lowly Second Class Scout, the biggest goal in my life at the time was to become a First Class Scout.  How long would that take? I wondered, as I paged through the Boy Scout Handbook looking at the requirements.

I had become a Scout not long after turning 11 the previous November, the earliest age you could join, and it had taken me until the end of April to go from the lowest rung of Tenderfoot to the next-lowest, Second Class. 

The minimum time allowed between the normal ranks (Tenderfoot, Second Class, First Class, Star, and Life;  Eagle was in a class by itself) was three months.  So every three months, or quarterly, my local Council would hold a Board of Review to approve or deny an applicant for a higher rank.  The next one was in August.  Could I possibly make First Class by then?

I read through the pages of First Class requirements carefully.  When I got to the end, I thought, maybe I could do this.  Then, just out of curiosity, I turned the page, to gaze in wonder at what it took to be a Star Scout.  Wow… a Star Scout.  I kept reading.

When I finished, a ridiculous thought hit me.  If I made First Class in August, the next Board of Review was three months later in November.  Could I….?

I turned the page to where I had never even thought of going before, the requirements for Life Scout.  This was way out of reach.  Maybe one or two kids in my entire troop were Life, and they were really looked up to.  They were also much older, in high school.  For a kid in the sixth grade to think about soon being Life was really silly.  Yet I did think…

Well, if I made Star by November, then could I make Life by the next Board of Review in February?

I knew not to go farther.  The next page was about becoming an Eagle Scout.  That was sacred territory I dare not trod.  Dazed enough with the fantasies already before me, I crawled out of the tent with the handbook.  When some of the other Scouts saw me with this puzzled look, they asked, "What's with you, Wheeler?"

Still in a daze, I put my mouth in gear before engaging my brain, and mumbled, "Do you know that if I made First Class by August, I could make Star by November and Life by February?"

I wasn't ready for the torrent of derision.  "You idiot, Wheeler!"  "What a joke, Second Class!"  "In your dreams, Bozo!"  They walked away with sneers and laughs.

I stood there in the sand in shock.  Why had what I said made them so angry – really angry?   I didn't know why they were so mad, but I didn't care – for now I was mad, so mad I made a decision right there to turn this fantasy into reality.

On August 9, I made First Class, on November 17, I made Star. And sure enough, on February 20, 1956, I was a Life Scout.  No one laughed.

Now I dared to think about Eagle.      

Unlike the other ranks which had a three month minimum between them, there was a six month minimum between Life and Eagle.   You had to earn at least 21 Merit Badges plus meet all kinds of tests and requirements.  No one in my troop of some three dozen Scouts was an Eagle.  There had been a couple before but that was years ago.

August was six months away, I had all spring and summer… could I?  I went to talk with Skipper Hayes.

The Verdugo Hills Council offices were a few minutes' walk down Grandview Road from my home in Glendale.  Robert "Skipper" Hayes was the Council's Scout Executive, and he had been kind enough to give me some guidance in my quest for Star and Life. 

But when I asked him if he thought I could make Eagle in six months, he was clearly shocked and shook his head.  Then he saw I was serious, and agreed to help me work out a schedule that would be the most efficient way to do it.  I walked back home and stopped wasting any more time.

Those next six months were a blur.  School was boring anyway and I was still too young for girls.  So every waking moment I tried to devote to Scouting.  The insults and derision back at Carpenteria were long forgotten.   I had acquired a consuming passion for the ideals of Scouting and for what it took to fulfill their requirements.

Learning what it took to earn merit badges in first aid, lifesaving, athletics, geology, pathfinding, photography, masonry, public safety, civics, and on was way more interesting than what I was subjected to sitting in a school desk.

The best times, of course, were the camping trips, especially one in Kings Canyon of the California High Sierras with my Scout buddy Gary Olson and two college-age fellows at the Council office Skipper Hayes got to be our guides. 

We had to hike 65 miles in five days over a series of high mountain passes to qualify for a "Silver Moccasins" award.  To this day, my favorite breakfast is just-caught rainbow trout fried in butter and cornmeal on a campfire.

I passed the Board of Review, and made Eagle Scout on August 26, 1956.  I was 12 years, 9 months, and 17 days old (my birthday is November 9^th).

The Eagle award ceremony is called a Court of Honor, normally held at the Council office a few weeks after the Board of Review.  So when Skipper Hayes called me one day in mid-September to ask if I and my parents could come to see him, I thought that's what he wanted to talk about.

I could tell he was excited about something as we sat down in his office.  "Jack, I have extraordinary news for you.  The National Headquarters have just told us that according to their records, you are the youngest Eagle Scout in the history of the Boy Scouts.  You and your family have been invited to New Brunswick, New Jersey[1], for a Court of Honor at the National Headquarters.  Chief Scout Executive Arthur A. Shuck will personally present you with your Eagle Scout medal."

I stared at him without comprehension while he walked around his desk, held out his hand, and said, "Congratulations, son."  As I reached out mechanically to shake it, I felt my Dad's hand on my shoulder and my Mom kiss my cheek.

"The youngest?  In Boy Scout history?  How can that be?"  was all I could mumble.  It had never occurred to me for this to be a goal.  I ran the numbers in my head. 

If a kid joined the Scouts on his 11^th birthday, the earliest he could, and went from Tenderfoot to Second to First to Star to Life in the minimum of three months each, that's 12 months; adding six more from Life to Eagle makes 18, so the youngest anyone could possibly make Eagle was 12 years, 6 months old. 

It had taken me 21½  months, 3½  more than the absolute minimum.  But I was still in a daze.  "Really?" I asked Skipper in wonder, and he nodded his head with a reassuring smile.

**********

It was my first airplane flight, with my Mom and Dad and my sister Judy, from Los Angeles to New York, arriving on a beautiful mid-October day.  After going to the top of the Empire State Building, out to the Statue of Liberty, and on a cruise along the Hudson River, we drove to Scout Headquarters in New Brunswick. 

Just like Skipper said he would, in the office of the Chief Scout Executive, Arthur Shuck pinned the Eagle medal on my uniform.  Then he said he had a surprise for me.

I had been invited to the White House to meet President Dwight Eisenhower.

My father hastily arranged for us to fly to Washington.  As we got out of the taxi at the Southwest Gate of the White House, I couldn't believe where I was.  I had on my full Scout uniform, with a sash of 22 Merit Badges and Eagle medal proudly pinned on. 

When we were ushered into the Oval Office by presidential assistant Earle Chesney, there stood the President of the United States.  There was no one else.  We sat down, and he asked me about Scouting. 

He told us stories about his son John's Scouting days, how Mamie (his wife) and he once brought sandwiches to him on a Scout hike to John's great embarrassment, how happy he was when John made Eagle – "although not nearly as young as you, Jack" – and how important Scouting was for the young men of America.

He was completely at ease, a grandfatherly gentleman who made you welcome in his home, with no pretense or even a hint of superiority, who made you feel you were the complete center of his attention, that he had nothing more important to do than swap Scouting stories with a 12 year-old boy. 

He couldn't have been more gracious to my mother and father, and even took time to ask a question or two of my 9 year-old sister Judy, encouraging her to join the Girl Scouts.

It was Wednesday, October 24, 1956.  You would never know that he was in the crescendo of his re-election campaign with election day less than two weeks away (November 6), that a major war was impending between England and France allied against a Soviet-armed Egypt over the Suez Canal, that Soviet troops had entered Budapest this very day to suppress protests against Soviet rule in Hungary, that he was the most powerful man in the world and the weight of that world was on his shoulders.

Instead, when our meeting was over, he got up to stand above me and put his hands on my shoulders.  It was the memory of a lifetime.  The President of the United States put his hands on the shoulders of a 12 year-old boy, looked him right in the eye, and said, "I am proud to have met you, Jack."

**********

Several weeks later, back home in Glendale, I received a letter addressed to me with a return address that simply said, "The White House."  It was from President Eisenhower, signed by him personally, telling me how much he "greatly enjoyed my meeting with you and your family," and ending with "congratulations on being the youngest Eagle Scout."

The letter was dated November 23, 1956.  In the month since my meeting with the president and that day, a lot of history had happened.  I'd had tunnel vision over the past year in my sole focus on Scouting, paying little attention to the outside world. 

Yes, I'd become a fan of Elvis Presley like every other kid since he came out with his first hit in February – Heartbreak Hotel.  I had noticed a few things, like Grace Kelly marrying Prince Rainier of Monaco in April. 

And I was sure not to miss watching the Yankees win the World Series, especially Game 5 on October 8 when Don Larsen pitched a perfect game.  (We were big Yankees fans because coach Casey Stengel was our neighbor whose home was near ours.)

I never watched much television, although every Sunday night we all watched the Ed Sullivan show, and Tuesday nights Milton Berle.  I didn't pay much attention to the news – until I happened to see the news clips of what was happening in Hungary.

I knew about the Iron Curtain, how after World War II, Stalin had the Red Army of the Soviet Union march into the countries of Eastern Europe and take them over.  Hungary was one of them.  Now crowds in Budapest were demanding free elections, independence from Soviet colonial rule, and that Soviet troops leave the country.

I watched the TV news every night, listened to radio broadcasts, read newspapers and magazines.  I learned that the demonstrations had begun on October 23, with 20,000 protestors toppling a 30 foot-high statue of Stalin in Budapest's Blaha Lujza Square.  Protests spread so fast that within days they couldn't be contained by the initial contingents of troops from Soviet Russia, the puppet Communist leader resigned, and a Hungarian patriot named Imre Nagy became Prime Minister.

Nagy emptied the prisons of political prisoners, dissolved the secret police (the Hungarian KGB or AVH), abolished Communist Party monopoly rule, called for multiparty democratic elections, and made a formal demand that all Soviet Russian troops depart Hungary.

The Soviet Russian ambassador to Hungary, Yuri Andropov, agreed.  On November 1, not only had the Soviet troops and tank divisions not left, but Nagy learned that, on orders from the Soviet Politburo in the Kremlin led by Stalin's successor (Stalin died in 1953) Nikita Khrushchev, new Red Army armored divisions were set to invade.

In response, Nagy went on the radio that day and announced Hungary's formal withdrawal from the "Warsaw Pact" (the forced "alliance" between Moscow and its puppet governments in the Soviet "satellites" of Eastern Europe). He appealed to the United Nations and Western powers – especially America – to protect Hungary from Soviet Russian imperialism.

But the Western powers – France and Britain in particular – had joined with Israel, and with perfectly perverse timing, decided the day before Nagy's plea – October 31 – to start a war with Egypt, whose leader, Gamel Nasser (with support from Moscow) had seized and nationalized the British-leased Suez Canal.  Nasser had been heavily armed by Moscow and promised to block the ships of anyone he didn't like, such as those of Western nations and hated Israel, through the canal.

With France and Britain so distracted in Egypt, Moscow launched its attack in Hungary.  In the pre-dawn darkness of November 4, over a thousand Soviet tanks and over a hundred thousand Soviet soldiers marched into Budapest and began slaughtering any Hungarian – man, woman, and child – who dared stand in their way.

The Hungarians fought back with incredible bravery, using homemade weapons like Molotov cocktails to destroy hundreds of Soviet tanks. Their heroism was thrilling and I cheered them on.  But it was hopeless.  They were crushed.  The sight of their bodies butchered in the streets of Budapest, the sight of Soviet Russian troops and tanks parading through those streets that I saw in the news clips on television overwhelmed me with revulsion.

President Eisenhower's reaction also overwhelmed me – with disappointment. He did exactly the opposite of what I thought a hero should do.  Instead of supporting our allies – the British, French, and Israelis – against a pro-Soviet madman in Egypt, he stabbed them in the back and angrily demanded that they retreat! 

And even more incredibly, instead of supporting the Hungarian "freedom fighters" as everyone in America was calling them now, he stabbed them in the back too by not sending them any supplies or weapons, while assuring Khrushchev that America wouldn't do anything to prevent the crushing of the Hungarian revolt!

By the day President Eisenhower was re-elected, November 6, thousands of Hungarians had been killed.  By the day I got that letter from him, hundreds of thousands of Hungarians had fled as refugees into neighboring Austria, and Soviet Communist tyranny in Hungary was more entrenched and worse than ever.  I stopped watching the news.  Instead, I retreated into a comic-book fantasy.

It started with realizing that Moscow was able to crush Hungary because it was alone – only it had rebelled.  Moscow's Communists could crush any of their colonies one at a time.  So I concluded the way to defeat Moscow, then, was obvious:  create a simultaneous rebellion of several or all of its colonies at the same time. 

If most or all of them in Eastern Europe – Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Albania – had a freedom fighter revolution against Soviet rule all at once, there would be no way Moscow could win.

With this realization, I started fantasizing about leading such a rebellion to liberate Eastern Europe.  Obviously it would have to wait until I was much older – say 18.  Every night as I lay in bed before falling asleep, I imagined myself leading teams of guerrillas across the mountains and forests of Eastern Europe.  I even imagined someone would invent and I would acquire a thin suit of protective clothing that would make me as bulletproof as Superman.

I never breathed a word of this to anyone, not my Mom and Dad, not to any friend – for a part of me realized that this was pretty childish even for a kid just turned 13.

Slowly the fantasy faded, as I got back into Scouting and poured my physical energy into tennis, the sport I loved but had neglected during my race to be Eagle.  I also discovered that girls were getting more interesting.

What didn't fade was the sights I had seen on our black-and-white television of Soviet tanks in the streets of Budapest and those streets littered with bodies of brave people who had been killed because they asked for freedom.

What never faded was the conclusion I drew from this, and a mystery that came from it.  Communists were just as evil as Nazis.  The Soviets were moral monsters as were the Nazis.  That was obvious, for I had seen an example of it with my own eyes.  So had the entire world.  Thus the mystery:  if the world could see it, why didn't the world admit it? 

Why didn't the world – including the President of the United States – regard the Soviets with the same moral disgust as they did the Nazis?

As General of all American and Allied forces, Dwight Eisenhower had fought to rid the world of Nazi evil.  As President of America, he didn't do the same with Soviet evil – not even coming to the defense of people begging us to help them.  Not even daring to say the words that compared Soviets to Nazis.

Maybe someday there would be such a president, I hoped.  Maybe someday my comic-book fantasy might come true, if only a little bit.  Maybe someday.  But right now, I decided, I should simply be grateful for the amazing experiences I had had. 

Being the Youngest Eagle Scout and meeting the President in the White House were things that I never planned, never even dreamed.  Suddenly I felt like a deer in the headlights of all that attention.  I had better get off the highway, I thought, forget dreams and fantasies, and just be one of the kids in the 8^th grade. 

[1]   National Boy Scouts of America Headquarters moved to Irving, Texas in 1979.