Tom Keaney

A tribute to one of the most wonderful men I have known

There was a funeral today for my colleague and friend Tom Keaney: I was honored to be asked to say a few words. I am attaching them, but just wanted to add two things.

First, before Tom became a teacher he was a hero - a real hero. A B-52 pilot he became a Forward Air Controller in Vietnam, flying a one engine Cessna at treetop hight armed with nothing other than some smoke rockets. Extremely dangerous work, which he didn’t have to do. He had 29 years in the Air Force, as the top B-52 squadron commander, base commander at Guam, and a senior Air Force planner, among other things. And then he had a second career at Johns Hopkins SAIS, where we worked together for over two decades.

Second, Tom was not the kind of guy you hear about in the newspapers. Funny, unflappable, a wonderful husband, father, and grandfather, a terrific teacher (he was grading papers until a day or two before he passed away in hospice care). He was unassuming, kind, patriotic, and totally responsible in every aspect of his life. We need Americans like him more than ever, and as I reflect on his life and passing, I tend to believe that they are out there. Let’s look for them, and value them for the jewels they are.

And for all you SAIS students, alumni, staff and faculty who get this Substack, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Here it is:

Tom Keaney, 1940-1985

I knew Tom Keaney for nearly half of my life; and for considerably more than half of my professional life we worked together.

Tom was, as they say in the Air Force, my wingman.

Tom was my colleague and partner.

Tom was my counselor and my inspiration.

Above all, Tom was my dear, dear friend.

We first met in the late 1980’s when I was teaching at the Naval War College, and he was at the National War College. But we really began to work together when he agreed to join me in conducting the Air Force’s study of the 1991 Gulf War.

Within months, I knew that he was a gem. It was intense, difficult work, particularly for someone like me who had had no extensive prior contact with airmen, no deep knowledge of air power, and for sure, no knowledge of Air Force culture. We had two years to create a pickup team of officers, analysts, professors, and experts to generate ten book length reports, and we succeeded in large part because Tom was there.

He researched and wrote, because despite his claims that he was a slow learner Tom was a formidable scholar, having earned his Ph.D. under two of the most demanding military historians of his time, Gerhard Weinberg and John Shy. But no less important, he coached me, the project’s young and rather nervous director.

I learned then that when things got difficult – for example, when we slammed into the menacing green door of over-classification, or when impossible deadlines began to loom, or we learned that a prominent general who was overly protective of his reputation declared that he intended to shut us down and thereafter wanted to see my name only in an obituary – you would know because Tom’s grin would get bigger. As so often in the years to come, Tom would listen to my tale of woe, crack a joke, and say “let me take care of that.” And he always did.

We had already bonded by then, as native Bostonians, reminiscing about Nantasket Beach, or Durgin Park, or that great Boston novel, Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah.

A few years later, in my best managerial move ever, I lured Tom, who was retiring from National War College, to Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, where together we built the best strategic studies program in the world.

So many of our alumni, and staff too, have written to me since Tom’s passing, saying how fondly they remembered him being there in difficult times, including times of personal crisis, a pillar for others as he always was for me.

At SAIS, with other colleagues, above all the wonderful John McLaughlin, we formed a merry band, which may seem odd given how grim our academic subject could be. We built a great curriculum, reaching out to the best teachers we could find, but we did so much more – simulations, field trips, our Basin Harbor workshops, and above all our staff rides, several multi-day trips every year to study military campaigns past and present.

That is where Tom did some of his best teaching. Some of it would be asking the students a pointed question with a perplexed look (but a twinkling eye), some of it would be chatting at a morning campfire, drinking muddy coffee to stay warm. Together we marched Pickett’s charge, and we walked the now silent airstrip at Khe Sanh, climbed the steep slopes of Monte Cassino, sang Lili Marlene in a Sicilian restaurant, strolled the streets of Ypres, explored the Colombian jungle hideouts of the FARC, wandered around the bomb craters in the high ground above Omaha Beach, visited the former headquarters of the Stasi secret police in East Berlin, and stood stock still on the moonlit hills overlooking Prague.

At the end of each of these adventures, as the students headed off for an evening of celebration into which we chose not to look too carefully, we would drink a toast to one another, and to the students – the plucky young Japanese woman who did her level best to put on a cheesy French accent as she explained the layout of a Maginot fort, or the perfectly pleasant young man, right out of college, who more than fifteen years ago channeled an angry and vengeful Vladimir Putin sending a chill down our spines. We talked not about what the students knew, but how they were learning to communicate, to imagine, to build, to organize, to follow, and to lead. And one of their best teachers in that was Tom, with his acutely listening ear and sensitive heart, and invariably wise advice

At times I had to go away on government service for weeks or even years, and whenever that happened, Tom would give that grin again and say, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.” So he did.

One might think Tom’s career was split in two parts – the first as an airman, the second as a teacher. But that would miss the point. Tom was such a remarkable man because all of him fit together – the pilot, the commander, the teacher, the scholar, the son, the brother, the husband, the father, the grandfather – these were a united whole. Tom was a man of exceptional integrity, meaning that word not just in the sense of honesty, but of being complete. The inner man and the outer man were the same; the public man and the private man were one.

I saw Tom lose his composure only once. It was at the end of our Battle of Britain staff ride. We had visited Bletchley Park, where the British broke German ciphers, the RAF Museum at Hendon where we got a close look at British and German wartime airplanes, we had spoken with one of the few surviving pilots who had flown Spitfires during the war, and most spectacularly of all, we had clambered down to the underground bunker at Uxbridge, from where the leaders of RAF Fighter Group No. 11 orchestrated the defense of the Southeast of England and London itself.

As always we concluded the staff ride with a dinner, at the end of which each faculty member would get up and offer some final reflections.

Tom stood and began talking about the crucial shortage of pilots Britain that faced in that summer of 1940, and how some of the very young men going up against the Luftwaffe had as little as two weeks of training on their planes and only nine or ten hours actual flying time before entering battle with a far more experienced enemy.

Suddenly, he stopped. His eyes filled with tears, and his voice choked. “Those poor kids. Those poor kids.” He couldn’t go on any further.

At that moment we heard Tom the professional airman, who volunteered to be a forward air controller in Vietnam because he didn’t think the Air Force was adequately training those who took that dangerous mission. We heard Tom the caring leader. We heard Tom the teacher, too, because you bet the students never forgot the implications of that moment.

Those pilots were often absurdly young. One of them, John Gillespie Magee, Jr., was killed in 1941 at age nineteen. But he left behind a poem full of joy that captures for me Tom Keaney’s spirit. I will always think of Tom when I read it, as I will now.

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air ....

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or even eagle flew—

And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.