The Corps

The excellent article by Thomas Fleming on West Point in your April issue will no doubt serve as a valuable source of information for many of those who will visit the United States Military Academy this summer and in years to follow.

I hope they will all understand, however, that pregnant paratroopers encountered anywhere on the grounds are not members of the Corps of Cadets. The officer to whom Mr. Fleming refers may have been a member of the West Point faculty or its supporting staff or perhaps a visitor herself. She may also have been a graduate of West Point. But, as a captain, she could not have been a member of the Corps.

Speaking of the Corps, Mrs. Douglas MacArthur has made it known to the superintendent of the Military Academy that she has never remarked to anyone that she heard her husband’s Thayer Award acceptance speech twenty-nine times before he delivered it here before the Corps of Cadets. That anecdote, in various forms, has been widely repeated since 1962 but is, according to the one who knows best, without basis in fact.