He is a familiar face to Americans—a distinguished television journalist and moderator of CBS’ Face the Nation—but few people know Bob Shieffer spent three years in the U.S. Air Force—a stint he says taught him a lot about himself and what he could accomplish. Here’s his story.
I enrolled in Air Force ROTC when I was a freshman at Texas Christian University in my home town of Fort Worth, Texas, and it was probably the best thing I ever did.
But I should be honest about why I joined. It wasn’t to be noble or patriotic. It was because there was a draft in those days, and the way I saw it, spending three years on active duty as an Air Force officer was probably better than spending two years as an Army grunt. I also thought it would be fun to learn to fly an airplane.
I never got to flight school. I played baseball at TCU, and during my freshman year the nephew of immortal pitcher Dizzy Dean hit me in the eye with a ball. I didn’t lose the eye, but my baseball career was over. Even worse, I failed the eye exam for flight school. So after graduation, when I reported to Travis Air Force Base in California to begin three years on active duty, it was not as a fighter pilot, but instead flying an LSD—or Large Steel Desk.
The second day on the job, my boss, Captain Jim Howell, told me to take over the base newspaper, the Global Ranger. There had been some problems, not the least of which were the complaints the base commander had been receiving about the newspaper’s coverage of the Officers’ Wives Club.
I was no stranger to work, but I’d never been put in charge of anything. I learned fast; you had to. Mind you, no one was shooting at me. My problems were officers’ wives who were irate because we’d misspelled their names or published the wrong dates for their meetings. Lucky for me, I had a fine young master sergeant named Jack Cross to show me how the world worked. The first thing was that the person in charge takes the blame. When the newspaper got something wrong, the offended parties complained directly to me—or, even worse, to the base commander.
One day, when a delegation from the OWC showed up at the base commander’s office to complain, he called me.
“Schieffer,” he said, “I am tired of this! Fix it.”
I called the president of the OWC and asked for an appointment. “Ma’am,” I told her, “no one can report on the activities of your club better than you or someone of your choosing. So here’s what I propose: Appoint one of your members as the official club reporter, and have her bring me a report each week of what you consider the most important activities. I’ll personally edit it, and we’ll put it in the paper with her byline right on top!” I did—and I never changed a word.
I’m not sure I’d use that method to cover Congress or City Hall, but for that particular situation it worked just fine. One day the base commander called me and said, “Schieffer, I haven’t had a complaint from those people in weeks. You may amount to something after all.”
Not long after I arrived at Travis, we got word that then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson would be stopping at the base to refuel en route to Pakistan. I went down to the tarmac to see Air Force Two. To our surprise, the Vice President decided to stretch his legs, got off the plane, and headed straight to a group of us who were standing near the passenger terminal. When he walked up to me, I told him I had been born in Austin, the Texas city he had represented during his early congressional career, and he said, “Well, let’s get a picture.”
I wasn’t about to let it stop there. I tracked down the photographer and ordered 12 copies of that photo. Then I took one copy and inscribed it “To Bob, a good friend and a fine officer, LBJ.” I found a tasteful frame and put it in a prominent place on my desk. For the rest of my time on active duty, virtually every person I outranked who came to my office mentioned it, and most of them seemed in awe. Not surprisingly, not one officer who outranked me ever said a word. I’d catch them eyeing it, but they never mentioned it. I now offer a full confession: I shouldn’t have done that, but I did.
Even when I include such questionable behavior, what I learned managing that base newspaper at Travis would serve me well for the rest of my life. After a couple of years I was sent north to Tacoma, Washington, where I became the information officer for the 62nd Air Transport Wing at McChord Air Force Base, a part of the old Military Air Transport Service (MATS).
I was at McChord during the World’s Fair of 1962 when the Space Needle opened in Seattle, and I had considerable dealings with the city’s media. My boss, a genial transport pilot named Allison Brooks, was very interested in maintaining good relations with the local communities and liked to see our people written up in the local papers. One day I came up with a bold plan to raise not only the base profile but that of Colonel Brooks as well.
“Colonel, I talk to these reporters every day,” I said, “and I always tell them to quote me as ‘a base spokesman’ because frankly no one cares who I am. But here’s the deal: if I tell them to quote you, people will get to know who you are, and it will add credibility to our message.”
The plan worked remarkably well. Stuff that normally wouldn’t make the papers was showing up with increasing regularity because it was the wing commander who was saying it. But one day I got a call from Colonel Brooks’ secretary, who said “Lieutenant, you better get up here—the boss has a problem.”
I arrived to find Colonel Brooks pacing around his desk, waving a copy of the paper. The previous week he’d gone on a mission across the Pacific, and his wife picked up the paper and saw him quoted in a conversation with a local reporter here. Now she wanted to know what had been going on. Had he been in Asia or in Tacoma? After that, before I told reporters to quote Colonel Brooks, I checked to make sure he actually was in town.
I’m sure I got more out of the Air Force than it got from me, but I look back on those years as more than just a transition from college to adulthood. They were truly formative years, where I learned more than just the skills that would serve me well for the rest of my life. Most of all, I learned more about myself, who I was, and what I was capable of doing.
It was the first time in my life that I was part of something bigger than I was. I was lucky in that I served in a time between wars, but even today I take pride in the three years I was in uniform. At formal banquets in Washington, when the band plays the anthems of each military service, those of us who served in the Air Force still stand when we hear “The Wild Blue Yonder.”
Serving in the Air Force was one of the best things I ever did. I learned more in those three years than in any other three years of my life. But as I put down these words, it reminds me that even if I had learned nothing, it was still a great way to spend three years. It was just so much fun.