Content area
Full Text
On Brave Old Army Team: The Cheating Scandal that Rocked the Nation, West Point, 1951. By James A. Blackwell. Novato, Calif.: Presidio, 1996. 410 pages. $27.50. Reviewed by Dr. Lewis Sorley.
James Blackwell has written a troubling, saddening, and necessary book. In it he recounts in telling detail the widespread violations of West Point's honor code, centered in organized cheating by football players, that surfaced in the spring of 1951.
Blackwell, a West Point graduate who spent more than a dozen years in military service, describes the accidental way he became interested in this topic when a business acquaintance named William Jackomis revealed that as a youth he had been involved in the scandal and resigned from West Point. Building on what he learned from that encounter, Blackwell researched the whole sorry business.
His narrative, beginning with Jackomis's entry into West Point as a plebe in the summer of 1949, is dramatic. According to Blackwell, Jackomis was standing in ranks with his new classmates when he heard John Trent, captain of the football team, say to the man standing next to him: "You look like a dumb football player, kid-if you have any trouble in academics, remember that the people in the other regiment have instruction before you do. Get the poop. Then you'll get by."
If that is an accurate account, it is astounding. In public, on virtually the first day the new cadets are at West Point, the football captain revealed the basis for the widespread cheating that later came to light. The essence of it was West Point's practice of giving the same written examinations to both regiments of cadets, even though one regiment took the exam one day and the other regiment not until the following day. This meant that on any given occasion half the class had the answers to the exams the other half was yet to take, and it was this knowledge that was dishonestly passed.
Given the implications of this system's being revealed, and the predictably devastating consequences of such revelations for the football team (as was demonstrated when the scandal finally did break, nearly two years after this episode), it...