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General News: General Petraeus Talks About History, Family
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| Cornwall-on-Hudson Elementary School |
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| Gen. Petraeus in Baghdad earlier this year |
September 24, 2007
AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW FROM THE FRONTLINE IN BAGHDAD
Part 2 of 4
In an exclusive phone interview on Friday, General David Petraeus took time to talk about growing up in Cornwall-on-Hudson, the village he calls home. Here’s the second of four-parts of a story of the values and the people who helped shape the person he is today.
General David Petraeus, the U.S. commander of the multi-national task force in Iraq, has been a paratrooper, a professor, and a counterinsurgency specialist. But before he left the village of Cornwall-on-Hudson to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, David Petraeus was a competitive athlete and an academic achiever.
As we talked on the phone, it became evident that not only the community but his parents influenced the man he is today. His father, a Dutch merchant marine settled here after roaming the world and worked at the Danskammer energy plant north of Newburgh. His mother taught, he said, and worked at the public library.
“They both loved reading and they loved history and biographies,” General Petraeus said.
The Cornwall environment, the general noted, is a great place to soak up American history, “You have a wonderful sense of history there with West Point and Washington’s headquarters and in New Windsor,” he said, “there is so much just sitting there.”
He has great memories of summer trips to historic places like Lexington and Concord. Petraeus noted later in the conversation that a trip like this “both exposes you to the roots of the nation and how it evolved and it exposes you to the debates about how the structures of our democratic system emerged.”
As Petraeus speaks, his own love of history comes through as he finds relevance between government-building in Iraq and the turmoil of the power struggle at the end of Washington’s presidency more than 200 years ago.
But in our conversation, General Petraeus prefers to plumb the depths of more recent history, that of only decades ago. He remembers picturesque scenes, like the Christmas Eve when everyone tramped through the snow to the Cornwall Presbyterian Church. The power knocked out by the storm and no cars moving, the Christmas service was held under candlelight.
And in his mind he walks next door to the Cornwall-on-Hudson elementary school and remembers his teachers, including town historian Janet Dempsey, who taught him in the sixth grade.
Laughing, General Petraeus told the story of how he was having dinner at the Canterbury Brook Inn on Main Street in Cornwall just before he was deployed with the 101st Airborne to Iraq.
“I remember I was sitting in there and who comes in but my fifth grade teacher, you know, a legendary teacher, Mrs. Sciple,” the general recounted. “To Mrs Sciple I am still a fifth grade student and she is my fifth grade teacher and I am ready to do the row races that she used to have when she taught math, which is a great, very successful way to teach math.”
The truth, the general said, is that when he talks or communicates with people from that era, adults like current elementary school teachers Irene Pons and Heather O’Dell who were teenagers with him, he reverts back decades. “Inside,” he said, “ I’m still Peaches and that, that’s great. I still feel like that on some days., maybe with a few creaks here or there.”
(This is the second of a four-part series on General Petraeus’s recollections of growing up in Cornwall-on-Hudson. In part three, he talks about the impact of the Depression and World War Two on his parents and their backyard vegetable garden. In part four, he talks about his experiences at West Point. Read part one here.)
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