General’s Son Breaks Ranks With Tradition As Father Gives WSU Graduation Speech, Brant Shalikashvili Prepares For Civilian Job

For much of his 23 years, he has been the general’s son.

On Saturday, he was the commencement speaker’s son.

Today, having graduated with 2,800 other men and women at Washington State University, Brant Shalikashvili steps away from three generations of military service. It’s a family tradition that peaked two years ago when President Bill Clinton named his father, John, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, America’s top military officer.

“I’m finally to the point in my life where I can step out on my own and be my own person,” he said last week.

His father can worry about potential hot spots, such as Korea and Iraq, or the moral challenges of military involvement in Bosnia or Rwanda.

Brant Shalikashvili will walk to the beat of a different drummer.

A business administration graduate, he is bound for an apartment in Bothell and an internship in Kirkland at McCaw Cellular Communications Inc.

Military life was not an option.

“I don’t listen too well to authority,” he said. “That’s a big problem I have sometimes.”

He can’t get over the smell of the Pentagon, “a cross between a rundown hospital and a prison.” And those clothes? Forget it.

“Nasty green polyester uniforms are just not me,” he said, sporting shorts and a Jimmy Buffet “Air Margaritaville” T-shirt. “I mean on a good day they look just horrendously ugly.”

On top of that are the problems of having been the quintessential Army brat and, more seriously, of attention paid to the fact that his grandfather wore a Nazi uniform.

John Shalikashvili’s father was a Georgian patriot in the Polish Army. The implication that either man had any Nazi sympathies outraged Brant Shalikashvili.

“My father is I think probably the greatest patriot that we have seen in modern times,” he said. “He does what he does because he feels very deeply for his country.”

At the age of 8, John Shalikashvili (pronounced “shah-lee-kosh-VEElee”) fled with his family from Warsaw as the Soviet Army approached in 1944. The family later emigrated to Peoria, Ill., where John Shalikashvili learned English with the help of John Wayne movies.

The world is now a far more promising place, the general noted in his commencement speech Saturday. The United States is a rich, prosperous country filled with “ideas and principles and boundless opportunities.”

“Where else but here in this remarkable land could a refugee from Poland stand before you as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?” he asked, urging graduates to help build a better future for their own children.

The road to the Joint Chiefs chairmanship wound around the world. Brant Shalikashvili lived in South Korea, Italy, Germany, Fort Lewis, Wash. - where he attended two years of high school - and Fairfax, Va., “the one address in my life I can still remember.”

He could not wear grungy clothes for fear of affecting the way people looked at his dad.

He learned to adapt to things most kids would normally never encounter, like dinner with senators, United Nations ambassadors and congressmen.

“I realized I was always his son rather than me,” he said. “That’s why I don’t use my last name most of the time. I use Shali at best, if I use anything. Most of the time I say, ‘Hi, I’m Brant’ and that’s it.”

When people asked what it is like to have a famous father, he learned to say, “I don’t know. What was your dad like?”

“People are just people,” he said. “Some get more press than others.”

For the most part, his father has gotten good ink. He’s well-spoken, candid and personable. With the United States involved in no major military conflict, he remains in the background.

When he does get bad press, his son takes it personally.

Such was the case when the newsletter Defense Daily reported two years ago that the general’s father enlisted in a battalion of ethnic Georgians that later came under the Nazi Party’s military organization, the Waffen SS.

The story, repeated in national newspapers and on National Public Radio, had no effect on Shalikashvili’s Senate confirmation, but it made the younger Shalikashvili “phenomenally angry.”

“I knew that it would really disturb my father because family is very important to him. I knew that would be really difficult for him. … You’ve got to know that anytime you go and basically insult somebody’s father on a national level, it’s really going to tick him off.”

He accounted for his grandfather’s uniform by saying he was a Georgian nationalist concerned about Communist encroachment in his homeland. All allies of the Germans were ordered by Hitler to wear Nazi uniforms.

Personal issues aside, he does not particularly concern himself with the major international matters his father faces. He inhales thrillers like Tom Clancy’s “Hunt for Red October,” but does not subscribe to a newspaper.

“If anything really horrid happens I figure my parents will tell me,” he said.

He stays in especially close touch with his mother, sending her electronic mail several times a day.

Asked how his father’s approach to military involvement compares to Colin Powell, his predecessor, he said, “That’s a hard one to tackle, especially during finals.”

With no clear-cut answer on whether the U.S. should go into Bosnia, he begged off.

“About the only thing I can distinctly say on the subject,” he said, “is I would hate to be the one making any of those decisions.”