In the fall of 1959 Bill Carpenter, West Point's Lonesome End,
was named captain of the Army football team. As the story
goes, Carpenter, upon hearing the news, climbed to the top
of Lusk Reservoir on the West Point campus and began
removing his shoes. When
asked what he was doing, Carpenter said, "They want me
to follow in Pete Dawkins's footsteps. I have to learn how
to walk on
water."
Technically speaking, Dawkins never walked on water, but he
did everything else as a senior at West Point. Not only was
he a Heisman Trophy-winning halfback for Army's undefeated
team of 1958 who landed on our cover
(far
left), but he was also class president, first captain of cadets
and graduated in the top 5% of his class. After three years
at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, Dawkins spent 24 years
in the Army, serving in Korea and Vietnam. In 1981, at 43,
he became the
Army's then youngest brigadier general. Along the way he earned
a Ph.D. in public policy from Princeton and became a White
House fellow while playing a mean jazz trumpet, piano,
guitar, clarinet, trombone and French horn. Walk on water?
Who has time?
"I was,
uh, sort of intense," the 59-year-old Dawkins says
sheepishly. Indeed, when Dawkins arrived at West Point in
1955, football players were told not to train with weights
because the extra muscle was thought to be too cumbersome.
So he hid barbells under
his mattress and a bar under his bunk and lifted in the dark
following
taps.
After retiring from the Army in '83, he worked as an
investment banker on Wall Street and was soon a
millionaire. In 1988 he was handpicked by New Jersey
governor Tom Kean to run as the state's Republican nominee
for the U.S. Senate. Though he lost to
incumbent Frank Lautenberg in a bitterly contested race,
Dawkins treasured his time on the campaign trail. "I
would have hated to have gone to my grave without having
taken a shot at it," he says, "but it's a
full-contact sport. My daughter [Noël] said,
'You did great, Dad. You got the silver
medal.'"
Today Dawkins lives in Rumson, N.J., with Judi, his wife of
36 years, and is the chairman and CEO of the
direct-marketing subsidiary of the Travelers Group, a
financial services conglomerate. He doesn't plan to run
again for public office, but he still
seems, uh, sort of intense. "You're a fool if you don't
realize there comes a time when you slow down, but I
haven't seen that coming yet," he says. "I still
get up every morning at 4:50, lace up my shoes and feel
like there's important work to be done."
—by Seth Davis
photograph by Hy Peskin
Issue date: August 25, 1997
Past Editions of Catching Up With...
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