Worcestor Native Leaves Marks on Washington as Major General
GENERAL
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
Sarah Gantz
Boston University Washington News Service
04/10/09
WASHINGTON – The president and the general shared a brief exchange moments after laying a wreath with two elderly Medal of Honor recipients at the foot of the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington Cemetery. But that was not the highlight of the day for Maj. Gen. Richard J. Rowe Jr.
Earlier, the Army general, a Worcester native, had signed the promotion application of a young soldier. She had recently completed a bachelor’s degree in biology while on active duty, but her heart was set on driving the president’s limousine, a job that required the rank of sergeant.
Gen. Rowe took out one of his personalized notes, embellished with the two stars of his rank, he recalled, and wrote, “Best wishes for success.”
It is people like the young woman who wants to be a sergeant instead of a biologist who most impress the general—people who, like himself, serve their country not because it is their only choice, but because they feel compelled to military service.
“What a great candidate to become an officer,” Gen. Rowe said of the sergeant-to-be. “She doesn’t have to be. But it’s an option that’s available and it’s a challenge she wants to pick up.”
As the commander of Joint Force Headquarters National Capital Region and the U.S. Army Military District of Washington, which he has been since 2007, Gen. Rowe is responsible for the safety of Washington. He sits on local emergency response boards and oversees military operations. If the capital should ever come under attack, he would be in charge of its defense.
His ceremonial duties include participating in medal ceremonies and funerals of fallen soldiers. He is also escort to the president—on Inauguration Day, he got a kiss on the cheek from Michelle Obama while walking the First Family down the Capitol steps to the stage.
Gen. Rowe did not become a soldier for the power and the glory—although his father is a World War II veteran and his ancestors fought under George Washington in the Revolutionary War. He had other options after graduating from St. Lawrence University in upstate New York with an economics degree and later earning a master’s degree in business from Boston University while stationed in Germany. Gen. Rowe does what he does by free will.
His military career, 40 years this summer, is a mix of abroad and homeland assignments—including three tours to Korea and homeland commanding positions—that set an example of the lesson with which his conversations with young soldiers often culminate: America is a land of choice; what are your options?
Gen. Rowe, born in Worcester on Aug. 30, 1951, and raised in Franklin and Cheshire, recounted another meeting with a young soldier standing guard at the edge of a ceremony at Arlington Cemetery. The general strolled over after it was over, said hello, and asked how things were going. Then he got to the nut of the conversation.
“I told him, ‘What are you doing, you should be in college,’ ” Gen. Rowe recalled. “He said he’d been in college—graduated in three years, tests off the walls. But he wants to be an officer, he said, and he wanted to do it by going through infantry.”
Gen. Rowe said he never expected to be where he is today, a high-profile homeland security officer, saluting the president at his inauguration, making frequent public appearances and knowing everyone.
Despite the confidence in his voice and crinkles at the corners of his eyes when he smiles and the ease with which he holds conversations, his duties require an aptitude for socialization that the major general says does not come naturally to him.
“I’m an introvert,” he said. “When I’m on my own, I’ll sit in a corner with a book,” mostly biographies and military tactics, usually more than one at a time. At home after a long day, he sits quietly with a newspaper or book or talks with his wife, Dale, about the people he met.
He says his people skills are learned and practiced, like any other military skill. He talks to everyone. He can recall in great detail the burdens and business of each conversation.
While making the rounds through Fort Myer a few weeks ago, he stopped to chat with a military police company commander. “She was telling me she had a new lieutenant arrive yesterday and another one coming in a couple of weeks and she was excited because she was going to get to do leadership development…. These are lieutenants who graduated from college last spring, now they’re coming to their first unit, and for a captain who’s already been through this, it’s pretty exciting…. I would have liked to have been a lieutenant coming to that company.”
What he and his soldiers do in Washington is incredibly important, he said, and perhaps even underrated. It is one thing to learn how to be social. But the invaluable leadership skills needed for the job he learned in Korea, where he has been deployed three times.
“The best job I ever had,” Gen. Rowe said, was as an infantry battalion commander in Korea during the 1990s. He called it “the one which in terms of growing as an Army officer really was a culminating point.”
His previous assignments include joint plans officer for Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and assistant division commander of operations for the 82d Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina. He has previously been stationed at Fort Bliss in Texas and Fort Stewart in Georgia, and most recently held commanding positions at Fort Monroe, Va., and Peterson Air Force Base, Colo.
In Korea, he commanded more than 800 soldiers, he said. Many of his officers have been promoted to colonel and his enlisted men and women to sergeant, but he keeps the memory of all of them—even those he hasn’t heard from in years—close.
“Those were all my units,” he said, pointing out a frame hanging in his office at Fort McNair. Tanks, intelligence, air defense, infantry companies, and 100 Korean soldiers are each represented by a flag the size of a business card. The small flags are behind him as he describes the challenges of the job—train and communicate with the soldiers, demystify the Korean terrain, decide, decide, decide.
“You’re really in charge,” he said. “What that battalion does well and doesn’t, you and your people make happen. You own it.”
Gen. Rowe has received many medals and distinctions—Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Expert Infantryman Badge, Master Parachutist Badge and Ranger Tab, to name a few. But it was the lessons about leadership he learned from his troops in Korea that have helped him accomplish his tasks as a general.
“Lord knows how they picked me to be here. I thought to be in this unit you had to be tall and you had to be a good marcher,” the major general said, jokingly.
The soldiers now under his command cite Gen. Rowe’s personal support for his unit.
“You can’t separate the personal from the professional in the Army,” Col. Daniel Baggio, the general’s press secretary, said of his boss. “Our family members and the support you get from them correlates to the professional side, and you can see that in him. You can see the values he was raised with—he wears it on his sleeve.”
The oldest of 10 children, Gen. Rowe spent four years at boarding school in New Hampshire before enrolling in the Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at St. Lawrence University.
His father has devoted his life to education—first as a college professor in Massachusetts, then at local and federal departments of higher education. He later returned to teaching at Montgomery College in suburban Washington, where, after celebrating his 85th birthday a few weeks ago, he still works as an adjunct business professor.
“My dad is my mentor,” Gen. Rowe said. So when his dad suggested ROTC, he complied.
The general has four daughters, one who recently took her ROTC entrance exam at Clark University and one who returned from Iraq in February.
“He’s very hard-working and expects the same from other people,” Army 1st Lt. Natalie Rowe, 24, said of her father.
But, she said, “He’s the same everywhere.” If she were to place second in a race, her father might gibe that she was the second-place loser, said Lt. Rowe, who had delayed an afternoon run to talk about her father, also a runner.
Gen. Rowe is, of course, proud of Lt. Rowe—he said he thought of her, in Iraq, as he participated in the inauguration ceremony—but he is proud of all his children.
His other two daughters, Hannah French and Therese Van Antwerp, decided against a military career. Hannah, a school teacher in Lynn, “took one look and decided, ‘This isn’t for me,’” Gen. Rowe said. “I’m supportive. I’m a cheerleader.”
On March 25, Gen. Rowe was at the National Medal of Honor Day ceremony, where he displayed another kind of support and respect for the service. President Obama was descending the marble steps to the wreath propped up before the Tomb of the Unknowns. Gen. Rowe was holding on tight to the crook of the arm of an elderly Medal of Honor recipient. They did not miss a step.
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