Welcome The Unknown Soldier

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No one seems to know for sure whether General Norman Schwarzkopf leans right or left, Republican or Democratic, so forcefully does he assert that he's an independent. Few have the least idea of what he thinks about monetary policy or school choice or quotas or global warming. Chances are, he favors a strong defense, though he has called war a "profane thing." What is most interesting is not that no one knows, but that hardly anyone cares.

The virtue in Schwarzkopf's mystery is that the general can be anything to anybody. Corporations look at him and see a take-charge CEO; universities envision a powerhouse chancellor; publishers perceive the author of a best- selling book. Above all, much of the public is enraptured by a new leader whose very appeal is that he has no platform, no party and no intention, at least so far, of running for office. Such political virginity lets people believe that Schwarzkopf, in his big, bold way, could do the heavy work of democracy without being chewed into small pieces by its machinery.

When Schwarzkopf came home from the war zone last week, a crowd gathered before dawn to foil his attempt to sneak quietly back into the country at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. The band played a victory march and the national anthem, and the fans wearing STORMIN' NORMAN FOR PRESIDENT T shirts waved flags and yellow balloons as sea gulls wheeled overhead. "I can't describe to you the emotion that's in all our hearts," he said, with his first words on American soil in 239 days. "It's a great day to be a soldier. It's a great day to be an American."

Then he disappeared -- though not completely. "After 39 years," he explained in an interview with TIME, "I owe the family and myself a little time." There were steaks to eat (thick and rare), ice cream to scarf down (Breyers mint chocolate chip), family members and pets with whom to get reacquainted (wife Brenda, son Christian, 13, daughters Jessica, 19, and Cynthia, 20, and a black Lab named Bear). He could catch up with Jeopardy and Cheers. Come Sunday, he could go to a real church and sit in a pew without sand in his boots. And while he savored his privacy, Norman Schwarzkopf could lean back and let the rest of America ponder his future.

He says he plans to retire in August, an utterly tantalizing prospect for pundits, pollsters, politicos, agents and headhunters. "I'll try and write a book," he muses. "I don't have the first line. Maybe, 'I was born at a very early age . . .' How's that?" He will play grand marshal at the Kentucky Derby next month, and talks of becoming a first-class salmon fisherman and improving his sporting-clays shooting.