A Fair Deal For Old Hardnose?

"I'd have followed him into the jaws of hell--and had a hard time catching up with him," said an admiring captain. Lieut. General Robert L. Fair is headed for a more prosaic destination, however, and defenders of a tough, nononsense, old-style Army are dismayed. As of next week Fair, 52, will retire for "personal reasons"--the most important being that he and his commanding officer hated each other's guts.

When Fair became commander of the Army's 50,000-man V Corps in West Germany last August, it was only a matter of time before he clashed with his boss, General George S. Blanchard, the U.S. Army's European commander. Both men had won their commissions in the same year--1944--but Blanchard got his from West Point, and Fair was a tough, up-from-the-ranks infantryman who had gone on to officers' school.

Though he was an expert in as sophisticated a field as electronic data processing, Fair preferred being known by nicknames like "Old Hardnose" and "Iron General" and demonstrated a fanatic's hatred of long hair, badly pressed uniforms and off-center name tags. Fair told the Army paper Stars and Stripes: "You have to reward and punish to get what you want done."

Tough Guy. With some officers, Fair's approach won plaudits. Novelist Josiah Bunting (The Lionheads), an ex-major himself, praised Fair's leathery style in a Playboy article last fall, describing the general as "an admirable soldier" who is "always in bristling motion." But other officers, whose palms sweat when Fair raked them over with abrasive questions, disliked him intensely. To some enlisted men, Fair was a bush-league General Patton.

Blanchard fretted that Fair's tough-guy approach might reverse the gradual improvement of morale from its post-Viet Nam nadir of racial conflict, drug abuse, alcoholism and boredom. A former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, Blanchard, 55, is no cream puff either. But by contrast with Fair, he adopted a more relaxed attitude toward his forces, encouraging his troops to take time off, learn German and meet local people. He approached enlisted men as citizens in uniform.

Fair was abruptly relieved of his command early this month--though many corps veterans still believe the wrong general was sacked. Initially, Fair was to have retired with a three-star general's pension--roughly $38,000 including various emoluments. But some Congressmen raised objections, and the Army retired him at his permanent two-star (major general) rank instead. That will cost the 32-year veteran as much as $3,000 a year.

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