THE BOOT ST O R I E S F R O M T H E T E X A S H I L L C O U N T RY
D R A W N BY L EG ACY, A FO U R-STA R G E N E R A L RETURNS HOME
F R E D E R I C K S B U R G’ S RO B U ST J U N I O R G O L F P RO G R A M
E X P LO R E O N E O F T H E F I R ST W I N E R I ES I N T H E T E X A S H I L L CO U N T RY
2020 | ISSUE 1
ABOVE: General Hagee in front of the oak tree near the site of his family home, now part of Boot Ranch.
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THE GENERAL COMES HOME STORY BY JOHN KOENIG
From his humble beginnings in Fredericksburg, Mike Hagee rose to become the nation’s highest ranking Marine.
M
ike Hagee never actually met Admiral Chester Nimitz, although as a boy he did once see Fredericksburg’s most revered native son from a distance when Nimitz came back to town for a brief visit. Hagee also once wrote a letter to Nimitz. That was in early 1963, when he was a senior at Fredericksburg High School. He hoped to go to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, after graduation and become a Navy officer. Would the man who had commanded the U.S. Pacific fleet during World War II help him get in?
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General Hagee presents medals he was awarded while in the Marine Corps.
When the foundation’s executive director, Chuck Grojean, died in late 2008, the board offered Hagee the job. It took a little coaxing to persuade his wife to leave Annapolis, but she finally agreed. And so, in early 2009, General Hagee came home. At 75, Hagee remains tall, lean, and energetic. He looks as if he could still march twenty miles with a rifle and fifty-pound pack strapped on his back. He enjoys telling stories about his hardscrabble upbringing. The land on which he grew up is five miles north of Fredericksburg, just off the road to Enchanted Rock. His father and uncle jointly owned five hundred acres there. His aunt had an adjoining six hundred acres. The combined properties constituted the family ranch. “We ran sheep and goats, and some cattle. All on horseback,” he recalls. “We had zero money. I mean zero.” A devastating spring ice storm in 1948 killed many of their newborn lambs and kids, and left the family destitute. His WWII-veteran father re-enlisted in the Navy to make ends meet and the family moved with him, first to Washington state and then to Corpus Christi. They didn’t return to their Fredericksburg ranch until Hagee’s eighth grade year. The house he occupied with his parents and six younger siblings was little larger than a two-car garage. The upstairs bedroom he shared with his two brothers was unheated. His mother warmed kettles of water on the kitchen wood stove for their Saturday night
Photo courtesy of Mike Hagee
He got back a handwritten note. The admiral congratulated him on finishing high school and encouraged him to pursue a Navy career. But for help, all he offered was this: “If you want to go to the Naval Academy, contact your senators and congressman. Best wishes. Nimitz.” “It was the right advice,” Hagee recalls with a sigh, “but I was really disappointed.” Disappointed, but not discouraged—not even when he was passed over for an Academy appointment that year and had to settle for his second choice, attending the University of Texas on a Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship. He tried again for Annapolis the next year. This time, he got in. Hagee graduated from Annapolis in 1968, two years after Nimitz’s death, but chose to serve in the Marine Corps rather than the Navy. The Marine officers on the faculty seemed more dynamic to him. “I wanted to be like those guys,” he says, grinning. It turned out to be a good decision. He excelled in the Corps. Over the next 39 years, he climbed to the very top of its ranks, becoming a four-star general and Corps commandant, with the entire force of 185,000 Marines serving under him. And he joined his counterparts from the Army, Air Force, and Navy as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When Hagee retired from the Corps in early 2007, he and his wife, Silke (pronounced Silk-ah), settled in Annapolis, with no plans to return to Fredericksburg except for occasional visits. But then the spirit of Admiral Nimitz intervened. While Hagee had been off studying at the Academy and soldiering around the world, the National Museum of the Pacific War had opened in Fredericksburg to honor Nimitz. Hagee was invited to join the board of directors of the Nimitz Foundation, which oversees the museum. He did so shortly after retiring. In his trips back for board meetings, he became a fervent fan of the museum and its educational mission. He also became enamored of the town that Fredericksburg had become in his absence. Tourism and a burgeoning wine industry had made it far more prosperous and cosmopolitan. He liked its historic Main Street, lined with thriving shops and restaurants. Most of all, he liked the people, whom he found to be warm, gracious, and clearly devoted to their community.
Hagee stands in front of the Admiral Nimitz Gallery at the National Museum of the Pacific War; Hagee and his wife, Silke, at their home in Fredericksburg; Hagee’s childhood home, the site of which is now part of Boot Ranch. CLOCKWISE:
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Childhood photo courtesy of Mike Hagee
ABOVE: The front of the guesthouse where materials from Hagee’s boyhood home have been incorporated. RIGHT: Hagee as a young boy (left) and his oldest sister, Barbara (right). BELOW: Hagee sitting next to President George W. Bush at the opening ceremony of the National Museum of the Marine Corps in November 2006.
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baths. “We ate mostly venison, because beef was too expensive,” he recalls. “All venison cost was one bullet. We hunted all year round.” The entire family—his father, siblings, uncle, and cousins—worked the ranch, building and repairing fences, shearing the sheep, baling alfalfa in the fields below their house, and herding the livestock on horseback. Sometimes, Hagee even rode his horse to school in Fredericksburg, tying it up behind the gymnasium. Theirs was a hard life, but almost everyone Hagee knew around Fredericksburg lived the same way. Much has changed since then. The Hagee family land is now part of Boot Ranch, a 2,000-acre private club community. The pastures have been replaced by a manicured, 18-hole golf course. More than one hundred multi-million-dollar estate homes dot the ridges surrounding it. The longest road in Boot Ranch is named Hagee Drive. Named for him? “No,” the general answers. “It’s named for my family.” One of the new Boot Ranch homes stands on the site of his boyhood home. Some of the stone and flooring from his humble dwelling was re-used in the construction of a guest cabin there. From the cabin porch, Hagee points out traces of his years on the land. The family well, still standing on the property. The hillside where a pipe from the family toilet emptied out. “I think that’s why it’s still so green down there,” he jokes. One of his monthly jobs was shoveling lime down the hill to mask the smell. He points to an oak tree, grown tall since his years there. And to the place beyond it where their barn was. Across the road rises the highest hill on the land, the one on which the Boot Ranch clubhouse now stands. Seeing it brings forth another memory. One day in the spring of his sophomore year of high school, Hagee raced his father on horseback down a dirt road back toward the barn. Trying to stay in the lead, he yanked the reins hard to cut across a sharp curve. The reins snapped, and he was left dangling off the galloping horse’s side. His left arm slammed into a tree, shattering the bone below the elbow. “You hear the story that if you die, you see your entire life flash in front of you,” he says. “I can still remember seeing that. Whoosh. All the memories just flashed before me. Then, I hit the ground, unconscious.”
Doctors at Fredericksburg’s hospital inserted a six-inch stainless steel screw to fasten the bone back together and encased the arm in a plaster cast. When the cast was removed, Hagee couldn’t straighten the arm. The doctors said it might remain bent for the rest of his life. His father refused to accept that. “Dad believed everything could be cured if you just got out in the daylight and worked,” Hagee says, laughing. When they got home, his father handed him a double-bladed axe and pointed to the side of that highest hill. It was covered with cedar trees, hundreds of them. “Clear it,” his father commanded. Every day that summer, from dawn to dusk, Hagee chopped. It took months. But by the time all the trees were gone, Hagee could, as his father had predicted, straighten his arm again.
“You hear the story that if you die, you see your entire life flash in front of you,” he says. “I can still remember seeing that. Whoosh. All the memories just flashed before me. Then, I hit the ground, unconscious.” Looking back on his arduous childhood, Hagee says, “Parts of it I didn’t like, but I was very fortunate. I learned how to work. And I learned the meaning of responsibility.” It helped make him tough enough and mature enough to lead Marines. “John Wayne with brains.” That’s how John Deutch, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and deputy secretary of defense, once described Hagee. The “John Wayne” part comes across in Hagee’s tales of leading a platoon in combat in Vietnam as a fledgling officer. The “brains” are evident in the fact that he led the team that wrote the battle plan for the Marines’ invasion of Iraq in 2003. His brains were also evident in another assignment. In the mid-1990s, the Naval Academy was rocked by a massive cheating scandal that led to 24 midshipmen being expelled and
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another 64 being punished. Hagee, then a colonel, was sent in to deal with the situation. “The reason they sent a Marine was they thought, ‘A Marine will go down there and set up a disciplinary process and he’ll fix it,’” Hagee says. Rather than go in with guns blazing, however, Hagee spent his first month on the job reading about character development. He returned to his superiors with a proposal: a character-development program that would stretch across all four years of the midshipmen’s Academy education. It would include monthly sessions in which the midshipmen would be asked to discuss and come up with their own answers to difficult moral dilemmas. Hagee told his superiors, “I don’t know if this will prevent us from having another cheating incident. But if we don’t do it, I can virtually guarantee we will.” The Academy adopted the program he conceived, and it’s still in place today. As Marine commandant from 2003 to November 2006, Hagee and his wife were quartered in a three-story historic brick mansion in Washington, D.C. (It was the only Washington dwelling the invading British didn’t burn during the War of 1812.) He traveled the world in a Gulfstream G5 executive jet. “That was nice,” he says, chuckling. But what he enjoyed most was getting out to talk with his Marines. Three-fourths of his time was spent jetting to wherever Marines were deployed: Afghanistan, Iraq, other parts of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. From privates on up, he was eager to meet with all of them in groups large and small. “I wouldn’t talk very long. I was more interested in hearing their questions,” he says. He found that the four stars on his uniform rarely intimidated them. “They will ask you anything. They’re unafraid. They’re interested in what’s going on, and they want to be involved. To me, standing in a group of Marines like that . . . boy, you get exhilarated.” The title “General” doesn’t appear on Hagee’s current business cards. He’s just Mike Hagee. And if people address him by his first name, rather than “General,” he’s just fine with that. “I loved being a Marine,” he says by way of explanation. “I was very surprised and very proud of being the commandant. But in my mind neither of those defined me.”
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He’s no less proud of being president of the Nimitz Foundation and of his role overseeing the Pacific War Museum. When the museum opened in 1967, its meager collection consisted primarily of memorabilia donated by local veterans, including Hagee’s father. All of that fit into what had once been Nimitz’s grandfather’s hotel. Today, the museum boasts hundreds of thousands of objects in its collection, ranging from items as small as campaign ribbons and rifle shell casings to things as large as a B-25 bomber and a reconstructed PT boat. Its displays and interpretive galleries span six acres and take the better part of a day for visitors to fully explore. Now, instead of talking with Marines on the front lines around the world, Hagee relishes the time he gets to spend with schoolchildren touring the museum. He tells another story. This one also involves Admiral Nimitz. Nimitz lost his ring finger in an accident while he was in the Navy. The museum’s collection includes a photograph of him, in which the hand with the missing finger is clearly visible. Last year, a class of elementary school students toured the museum. A boy of eight or nine stopped in front of the picture and studied it closely. Then he held up his own hand and proudly exclaimed, “Admiral Nimitz is just like me!” The boy, too, had lost his ring finger, but he had found a role model. Hagee tells that story with a proud smile on his face, knowing that his hometown hero was proving to be an inspiration for yet another generation. Hagee standing with Admiral Nimitz’s portrait.
Childhood photo courtesy of Mike Hagee
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Hagee as a young boy at his childhood home. BOTTOM: Hagee in front of the National Museum of the Pacific War. ISSUE 1
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