COMMAND: The Airborne Grenadier

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For the next three years the 82nd's war diary read like a history of the development of airborne operations. Ridgway and his staff, with few precedents to go by, wrote their own field manuals as they went along. Ridgway jumped into battle with the division at Normandy, later led XVIII Corps at Nijmegen and the Ardennes. He had helped make airborne operations one of the Army's finest weapons.

A fellow officer says: "It makes him personally offended to be shot at." In Normandy, Ridgway and an aide were surprised by a German tank which rumbled up from the rear. The aide dived into a hole. Ridgway whipped his rifle to his shoulder and fired. For some inexplicable reason, the tank turned and clanked away. "I got him," bellowed Ridgway.

There was none of this recklessness about Ridgway's planning. He has been known to discuss nine different ways in which the enemy might react to a given move. He ruthlessly drove his subordinates. Once, after decorating a division commander for bravery, he dressed him down for not advancing quickly enough. After one of his best staff officers had made a rough landing during the Normandy jump, Ridgway sent for him. Flattered, the colonel expected congratulations on his safe arrival. Instead, Ridgway, noticing that he had lost his helmet, snapped, "Where the hell's your equipment?"

The Air Was Tense. After the war, Ridgway took off his jump boots to become again a military diplomat as U.S. representative on the U.N. Military Staff Committee and chairman of the Inter-American Defense Board in Washington. There, in 1946, he met a pretty, black-eyed widow of 30 named Mary ("Penny") Anthony, secretary to a Navy committeeman. After a year's courtship, they were married.

It was Ridgway's third marriage. The first two ended in divorce; with neither of his ex-wives is Ridgway on speaking terms.

In August 1949, after a tour as commander of the Caribbean area, Ridgway was brought back to the Pentagon to become deputy chief of staff for administration. (For a long time, Pentagon insiders have predicted that Ridgway will be Chief of Staff one of these days.) Paratrooper Ridgway pushed hard for building up the "vertical envelopment" war.

His aides at the Pentagon had no easier job than his officers in Europe. He would pound the desk with rage when someone gave him an evasive answer. Asked what it was like to work for Ridgway, an aide said, "Tense." "Ridgway tense?" "No," said the officer, "we're tense."

Out of the office, Ridgway could relax. He likes small dinner parties, has a reputation as a conversationalist, compounds drinks with a generous hand.

But even the tidy Ridgway house (Quarters No. 7) at Fort Myer has the breath of military austerity. The living room looks like a room a man had decorated. There is not a paper or a letter showing in the pigeonholes of the desk. Until Christmas week, one of the sights of the post was the general and 21-month old Matt Jr. standing together on their porch at dusk, stiff as ramrods, saluting the colors.