A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  By the end of 1916, Elizabeth had had enough of waiting for the war to end and her husband to come home. Holland was neutral during the First World War. She booked passage to New York for herself and her two boys out of Rotterdam. They left in January 1917 on the Dutch liner Noordam. The English Channel was closed to neutral shipping because of the war and they had to sail north around Scotland. It took them more than two weeks. The North Atlantic was rough sailing in this winter season. Looking at the heaving waves, Schriever remembered thinking that the ocean must be a series of mountains. His mother had a scare when a British gunboat hailed the ship and an inspection party came aboard. She was afraid they would be seized as German nationals and taken off, but fortunately Gerhard had the mumps, a dangerous disease for an adult. When the Dutch crew warned the British sailors, the boarding party avoided the Schrievers’ cabin. The next fright came in the intimidating immensity of the Great Hall at Ellis Island. It was a cavernous structure, 189 feet long and 102 feet wide with a 60-foot-high vaulted ceiling. Thousands of immigrants off the ships lined up within it each day to be processed, either accepted as physically fit and freed to go ashore or rejected and sent back to wherever they had come from with now vanished hope. Elizabeth spoke English well, with merely a slight accent, but her boys had only German. Anti-German feeling was reaching war pitch in much of the United States. She feared that if the immigration officials overheard a word of German, she and the boys might be turned away. “Be quiet,” Schriever remembered her whispering, taking them by the hand. “Don’t say anything.” They were cleared and released as landed immigrants on February 1, 1917. Elizabeth Schriever had given her sons an American future just in time. The United States declared war on Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany only two months later.

  Adolph was allowed to join his family. Before leaving the ship, he and the rest of his engineering crew, patriotic German men, had done their best to wreck the engines of the vessel they knew was soon to be confiscated. Schriever remembered learning of it because his father appeared with a bandaged thumb, injured while smashing machinery. (The wrecking was to no avail. The George Washington was repaired and converted into a troopship to haul American soldiers to France to kill Germans and, after the Armistice of November 11, 1918, had the honor of carrying President Woodrow Wilson to and from the peace conference at Versailles. It survived through the next two decades to again serve as a troop transport during the Second World War.)

  To escape the anti-German hysteria of the Northeast, the family moved to the Texas Hill Country between Austin and San Antonio on the advice of John Schriever, another of Adolph’s brothers, who had immigrated there years earlier and made his living at cattle ranching and speculating in land and oil properties. The region had been heavily settled by Germans since the wave of exiles created by the failure of the liberal revolutions in Germany in 1848. Adolph found work as superintendent of the machinery in the local brewery at New Braunfels, still a German-speaking community in 1917. School was taught in English and Bernhard and Gerhard learned the language quickly, but they had less trouble than they otherwise might have had because the teacher could always translate when they encountered a problem. With the United States now in the war and its industries going full bore, there was a demand for engineering talent. Adolph took a job as quality control engineer at a factory in San Antonio that was making large gasoline-driven engines. The Schrievers shifted to the city. One day in September 1918, Adolph had his head down inspecting an engine. Someone accidentally flipped the starter. The flywheel fractured his skull in two places. He never recovered consciousness and died on September 17, 1918, sixteen days after his thirty-fifth birthday.

  2.

  A BENEFACTOR AND THE HOUSE ON THE TWELFTH GREEN

  Elizabeth Schriever and her two boys suddenly confronted a stark existence. There was no compensation for an accident like this in those years and she was a widow with a modicum of education and no particular skills she could call upon to support her sons. They were taken in by an uncle of Bernhard’s father, Magnus Klattenhoff, who had immigrated a generation earlier and gone into ranching at Slaton, near Lubbock in West Texas. Schriever got a start on a nickname and Americanization there. A Klattenhoff cousin of his age had been baptized with a good Texas first name—Ben. When another boy of the same age arrived at school with the Klattenhoffs, the teacher decided she was not going to be bothered addressing him by his German first name of Bernhard. She dubbed the cousin Ben One and the arrival Ben Two. The locals also had trouble pronouncing Gerhard for some reason, and so he gradually acquired the nickname of Gerry. Life was mostly outdoors and healthy—helping with the cattle, picking cotton—but the trauma of their father’s loss was always with them and charity is not a livelihood. After a year they moved back to New Braunfels, where friends rented them a small house and their mother worked part-time in a butcher shop and at a minor housekeeping job.

  Neither brought in enough to sustain herself and her boys and so Elizabeth Schriever made a grim decision. She put her sons in an orphanage in San Antonio while she set about finding a housekeeping position in the city that paid a respectable wage. The next six months were desolate ones for her children. They were at an age, approximately ten and eight, when boys need their mother. In the span of just a few years, they had also been taken from a solid, familiar place to a strange land where they had lost their father and been repeatedly uprooted. “We never felt we’d been abandoned,” Schriever said later, because Elizabeth visited often and explained why she’d had to put them in the orphanage. The staff also treated them well and the hardship was mitigated for Gerry because he had an older brother to give him support. But Schriever had no one to whom he could turn. Nothing could compensate for the loneliness. He did not complain. Ever since his father’s death he had felt a sense of responsibility not to make things harder for his mother than they already were. In the end what sustained the boys’ faith in their eventual rescue was, as Schriever put it, “the great confidence we had in our mother.”

  Even after she found a job and took them out of the orphanage, there was still the bar to acceptance for two German boys when all things German were unpopular in the hangover animosity from the war. Felix McKnight, who grew up to become a prominent Texas newspaperman—co-publisher and editor of the Dallas Times Herald— met Schriever in the third grade. Elizabeth took to McKnight when Schriever brought him home to the house she had rented and became a kind of second mother to him. The two boys began a close and lifelong friendship. McKnight remembered how hard the other boys were on the German kid who spoke with a bit of a guttural accent. He was taller than his schoolmates and so they were afraid to take him on individually, but they would ring him around in a gang, ragging him and yelling that he was Kaiser Wilhelm. Most of the time he kept his temper and endured the taunts, but every once in a while he would make for a couple of the taunters and McKnight would restrain him, afraid that Schriever would get into deeper trouble by being blamed for fist-fighting by a teacher who also had an animus toward Germans. His thirst to be adopted by this new land, however, gradually won over the other boys. Every day the class would stand at attention, put their right hands over their hearts, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Schriever recited the pledge with far more emotion than any of his schoolmates and it was not long before his voice was the one leading the daily recital. The German accent faded and so did the ragging.

  The job Elizabeth finally found also soon transformed their lives. A wealthy and elderly mortgage banker, Edward Chandler, and his wife had a three-story, sixteen-room, gray brick mansion on West French Place in Laurel Heights, at the time the most fashionable section of San Antonio. The mansion required a staff of about half a dozen. The Chandlers recognized in Elizabeth Schriever an efficient, take-charge woman who could run the place for them—supervising the other servants, making the household purchases, relieving them of any worries as head housekeeper.

  Within a year Chandler built her a home for herself in which to raise he
r boys on a lot he owned at 217 Terry Court on the edge of the Brackenridge Park Golf Course, then within the residential section of a San Antonio of roughly 160,000 persons and now at the center of a city of approximately 1,150,000. The house was a small but adequate wood-frame affair with a white clapboard exterior, set under the immense spreading branches of one of the lot’s four antique live oak trees, said by local legend to date from the original Spanish settlement in the early eighteenth century. It had two bedrooms, a large dining-living room area, a kitchen and pantry, and a screened-in porch off to one side. Elizabeth occupied one of the bedrooms; her mother, who had come over from Germany to look after the boys while Elizabeth worked (they called her “Oma,” the German equivalent of “Grandma” or “Granny”), slept in the other; and the two young men had their beds out on the porch. In winter they slept under heavy, old-fashioned eiderdown comforters from Germany, the sort that were common before central heating. Neither remembers ever being cold.

  The rear of the house lot bordered the green of the twelfth hole. Chandler, who had no children of his own, became a bighearted uncle to the Schriever boys. He had a refreshment stand built under the enveloping tent of the branches of another of the live oak trees so that they could earn pocket money by selling lemonade and Cokes and the like to passing golfers. When Chandler and his wife died in the early 1920s, Elizabeth struck out on her own. She transformed the soda pop stand at the twelfth green, which the boys had never made much of, into a business profitable enough to support her family. She had a small white structure built with serving windows on one side and in front set wooden benches next to picnic tables. She called her stand, appropriately, “The Oaks,” in gratitude for the shade the venerable trees provided her little building and the bench seats and picnic tables, and she featured homemade sandwiches and cookies, along with lemonade and other soft drinks. She charged fifteen cents for a sandwich and a nickel for a glass of lemonade. Several nights a week she would bake hams to slice for the sandwiches. She soon had a flourishing business not only from the many golfers but also from other locals seeking a hearty bite and out-of-towners who had heard about her stand.

  Elizabeth Schriever kept her boys under a strict regimen. Even when in high school, they had their homework done and were in bed by 9:00 P.M. Yet she did so with persuasion and self-control. Schriever could not recall her ever striking them, nor did she shout when they crossed her. “She talked you into it,” he said. “She reasoned with you.” Without health one had nothing, she would tell them, and eating well and sleeping well were vital to maintaining health. Not that they caused her much trouble. They could see how hard she was working to give them a good life and the sense of responsibility that had descended on Schriever with his father’s death never left him. Gerry later suspected that her total devotion to raising her sons was the principal reason she did not remarry until she was past sixty. She made certain that they went to catechism class at a church in the Lutheran faith of their father, Friedens Evangelical. She was not a churchgoer herself. She was a lapsed Catholic who had rebelled at harsh discipline from the nuns at a convent school in Germany as a girl. She also had no time for church, as weekends were her busiest days at the stand.

  3.

  THE VIRTUES OF GOLF

  The boys settled into the not unpleasant task of growing up in San Antonio, Texas, in the 1920s and 1930s. Schriever was the star pitcher on the Friedens Evangelical baseball team, yet the all-American game did not attract him as much as it did most other boys. Golf became his passion. His obsession with it first brought out the relentless competitiveness, the fierce desire to emerge as number one that was behind the friendly, restrained exterior of his personality. The generosity of Edward Chandler was responsible for getting him started. An enthusiastic golfer himself, Chandler had decided that Schriever and Gerry should be taught the game. After Elizabeth had gone to work for him, he took them out to the San Antonio Country Club (he was its president), and instructed the golf pro there to shorten some clubs (golf clubs had wooden shafts in those days) and to give them lessons. The boys had a ready supply of golf balls from the San Antonio River, then a relatively shallow, free-flowing stream that ran through the middle of Brackenridge Park Golf Course, where they could play for a minimal fee because it was public. They would simply wade in and fish stray balls from the river bottom. Gerry became a quite competent golfer, but never the dazzler on the links his older brother, Bernard, was to become. Schriever was off on his first quest.

  Golf is a social game and yet it is also an intensely solitary one. A golfer plays on the course alongside others, but he wins or loses on his own performance. There is virtually no margin for error. A tournament can be won or lost by a single stroke. The game requires enormous and sustained powers of concentration and self-control, because it is as much mental as it is physical.

  Much later in life, after the immigrant boy from Bremerhaven wore stars in the U.S. Air Force and was charged with creating America’s intercontinental ballistic missile force, Schriever was renowned for his staunchness under stress and the deliberate fashion in which he would thread his way through multiple obstacles to a solution. When test missiles exploded in flames and thunder on the launching pads, fizzled out and crashed back to earth, or strayed wildly off course and had to be blown up in midair by the range safety officer—to ridicule in the press and irritation and impatience at the Pentagon and the White House—others would begin to lose their nerve. Not Schriever. He would remain calm and press on with the searching and questioning, he and his people learning from each failure until the rocket flew straight and true.

  At school and on the links of Brackenridge Park Golf Course, he made a small number of close friends like McKnight and he had casual friendships as well, but beneath the affable surface he was a loner. He did not consciously try to distance himself from others or to set himself apart, yet he noticed that others always seemed to sense a distance and to treat him accordingly. His casual friends, for example, usually addressed him as “Schriever,” rather than as Ben or Bennie. Others sensed a distance because the distance was there. There was a kind of Teutonic quality about him. Reserve was his most natural state. He was little given to small talk and the jocular exchanges that make for easy friendships. His conversations usually focused on what interested him, and what interested him he took seriously. Part of this introverted personality was undoubtedly in his genes, but whatever his genes gave him had clearly been magnified by the uprooting from Germany, the bolt-from-the-sky death of his father, the striving to be accepted as an American, and the painful, uncertain years before his mother found her position with the Chandlers. The experiences had taught him that to deal with adversity he had to look for strength within himself, a lesson he also learned from his mother, who set an example and of whom he was in awe. In the complexity that is the human personality this introverted side did not diminish in the least his drive to compete and to prevail, initially in golf and then in matters of greater moment later in life. He was insightful enough to be conscious of the need. As he would put it with his wry sense of humor, “I hate to lose.”

  Right after graduation in June of 1927, still sixteen, he demonstrated that he was a youngster to watch in the sport. The first Texas state championship tournament for juniors was held at the difficult Willow Springs course right outside San Antonio. The dark horse of the tournament, as one local newspaper put it, led the field of fifty-four in the qualifying round to win a pair of golfing shoes from the Broadway Sporting Goods Store and a silver medal from the Light, a San Antonio newspaper that was one of the sponsors of the tournament. He was defeated in the semifinal round by another sixteen-year-old, from Dallas, but not before winning more praise from the local press as the “courageous” young golfer who “made a powerful comeback on the last nine holes as the count stood against him.” The self-control Schriever displayed in tournaments did not mean that he lacked a temper. When he was playing badly for some reason, he would curse vehemently and fling
whatever club he happened to have in his hands a remarkable distance.

  His failure to attain the starting lineup on the freshman baseball team at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, popularly known as Texas A&M, which he entered that fall of 1927, confirmed him in his focus on golf. As always, it was Elizabeth who made it possible for him to go to college, paying the approximately $1,000 a year cost for his room, board, and tuition with the accumulated nickels and dimes from her sandwich stand and with some help from Uncle George back in Union City, New Jersey, who had branched out from the bakery and delicatessen business to acquire a local bus company as well. A shoulder broken the next year in a sophomore touch football game ironically helped. He had always been relentless about practice. Gerry remembered how his brother would spend an hour working on a single stroke. He bore down harder in the course of rebuilding the shoulder muscles after the bone had healed. His golf score went from the low 80s into the low 70s. By his senior year at A&M, again captain of the golf team, he was a scratch player: he had to maintain a consistent average of playing up to par. He gained a mention in Ripley’s Believe It or Not for three times driving more than 300 yards to the same green on the Brackenridge course and one-putting for an eagle. The year he graduated, 1931, he won the Texas state junior amateur championship and the city championship in San Antonio, where he had become a local golf celebrity.

  Now approaching his full adult height of six feet, three inches, but still trimmer than the 180 pounds of muscle and bone he was eventually to weigh, he was a figure of angular elegance on the course, wavy dark brown hair over slim, well-cut features with the bright blue eyes he had inherited from his mother. Most young Texas golfers played in slacks. They considered the British-style golf outfit that the pros then favored as sissified. Bennie, who had a sense of style, did not. The light tan or gray plus fours he wore above long socks, two-tone brown and white golf shoes, a fancy cloth and leather belt at the waist, and a white short-sleeve shirt worked well on his frame and made him stand out still more from the pack.