Word: lear
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Beefy Senator Bennett Champ Clark, isolationist from Missouri who voted against the extension of Selective Service four months before Pearl Harbor, paid a token installment on a political grudge against a top-flight soldier last week. He got the Senate to postpone its confirmation of Lieut. General Ben Lear's rank...
Clark said he still resented the "yoo-hoo" incident of two years ago, when Lear disciplined the 35th Division's (Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska) Quartermaster regiment. But there was more to the grudge. After the 1941 maneuvers Lear had the thankless job of overhauling his command, and one of the heads to roll was that of 61-year-old Major General Ralph E. Truman of Missouri, cousin of Missouri's junior Senator Harry Truman. Statesman Clark denounced Ben Lear from the Senate floor...
Like his close friend Ben Lear (whom he was slated to succeed when he was pulled away from his corps command last October), cocky, Wyoming-born, West Point-educated Lloyd Fredendall is a spit-&-polish disciplinarian, a top-notch administrator, a stern critic of incompetent commanders. At one maneuver critique last summer he cracked: "The opposing commanders got their lines so far extended it would have taken a week to send a postcard from one end to the other...
...commander of the Second Army (see col. 2), Lieut. General Ben Lear's duty has been to transform hundreds of thousands of young civilians into soldiers. Last week, flat-bellied and fit but pushing 64, Disciplinarian Lear announced that he would retire next month as a field officer. (His probable assignment: a desk job on onetime Chief of Staff Malin Craig's general promotion board...
Near the close of the command he has held for two and a half years, blunt Ben Lear gave his estimate of the young men the U.S. has sent him for training: essentially all right, but badly brought up. In a speech prepared for Army Day this week, General Lear gave civilian America an insight into the Spartan philosophy he has sought to instill. He also handed out a soldier's estimate of the old U.S. way of life...