The elder Schwarzkopf was the founding commander of the New Jersey State Police and was in charge of the investigation that led to the 1934 arrest of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, who was convicted and later executed for kidnapping and killing the toddler son of aviation hero Charles Lindbergh.
From the age of 4, the younger Schwarzkopf determined that he would follow his father to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and pursue a career as a soldier. He attended a military school in New Jersey, then spent time overseas with his family from 1946 to 1951.
He spent a year in Iran, where his father trained a national police force and advised the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, then lived in Switzerland, Germany and Italy. He spoke conversational German and French throughout his life.
After returning to the United States, he spent a year at the Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pa., before entering West Point, where he played football, wrestled and sang in the choir. Gen. Schwarzkopf, who directed a chapel choir of cadets at West Point — one of his first command positions — had a lifelong love of opera and music.
He graduated in the upper 10th of his class and entered the Army infantry. Between field assignments with airborne and infantry units, he received a master’s degree in missile engineering from University of Southern California in 1964.
After a teaching stint at West Point, he went to Vietnam in 1965 as an adviser to Vietnamese airborne troops. He returned for a second tour in 1969 commanding an infantry battalion.
He received a Silver Star and won the respect of his troops for his courageous efforts to rescue soldiers wounded by land mines. In one case, he covered a writhing soldier with his own body, reportedly saying, “Take it easy, son. It’s only broken.”
In 1970, an errant artillery shell killed a sergeant under Gen. Schwarzkopf’s command. The soldier’s parents launched an investigation, which later become the inspiration for C.D.B. Bryan’s 1976 book “Friendly Fire,” which later became a movie. The parents held Gen. Schwarzkopf responsible at first, but Bryan portrayed him as an officer of honor and compassion and concluded that the killing was accidental.
“He’s a good mud soldier,” Lt. Gen. William S. Carpenter Jr., who served with Gen. Schwarzkopf in Vietnam, told the New York Times in 1991. “The most important thing is that he cares about ground troops and he’s not about to get them chewed up.”
He received his first star as a brigadier general in 1978, then won widespread respect among military brass as deputy commander of the invasion of Grenada in 1983. He held several more high-profile jobs, became a four-star general in 1988 and was named commander of the U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.
In the late 1980s, with the Soviet empire collapsing, Gen. Schwarzkopf studied the likelihood of future wars and concluded that the Middle East would be the next hot spot. He planned for the possibility that the United States could become embroiled in regional disputes that crossed the borders of U.S. allies.
In July 1990, he led military troops in elaborate war games built around a theoretical invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. Less than a week later, real Iraqi forces marched across the Kuwaiti border.
Gen. Schwarzkopf’s survivors include his wife of 44 years, Brenda Holsinger Schwarzkopf; three children; and his sister.
Considered a master battlefield tactician who didn’t wilt under fire, Gen. Schwarzkopf admitted that he felt fear in combat and didn’t trust any soldier who didn’t.
“Yes, I am antiwar,” he told U.S. News & World Report in 1991. “All you have to do is hold your first soldier who is dying in your arms, and have that terribly futile feeling that I can’t do anything about it. . . . Then you understand the horror of war.”
Vernon Loeb contributed to this report.
