BY ADRIENNE FRANK AND MATT GETTY The passion for knowledge is like a living thing, with a history of its own. It starts small, in unexpected places. It may have its advent under the glow of a kerosene lamp or a television show about a dolphin. And it draws the curious on to journeys that may carry them from a wild boat ride on the high seas, where whales sing in the waves, to the deceptively staid confines of the classroom. A professor’s passion can inspire students to follow the uncharted paths of their own dreams. But in the beginning, that passion has its own story. Lure of the Ships
Eric Wertheim ’95 still has trouble understanding how he came to be regarded as a world expert on warships. “When they asked me to do this job, I thought, there’s no way I can do it,” he says, recalling the day three years ago when, at age 30, he was asked to become editor of The Naval Institute Guide to Combat Fleets of the World, a 1,000-page biennial publication recognized as an authority on the world’s naval forces. “I told them, ‘I may know a lot, but I’m not the world’s expert.’” Perhaps Wertheim’s quick rise in the ranks of naval experts remains difficult for him to fathom because tackling questions like “Why can’t you use antiship missiles to attack land targets?” grew from a childhood curiosity. “Some kids would debate who was a better pound-for-pound baseball player, Darryl Strawberry or Roger Clemens,” Wertheim recalls, “but I was more interested in which was a better warship, a Kirov class cruiser or an Iowa class battleship.” Reading every book about naval forces he could find from the time he was in grade school, Wertheim was 15 when he discovered the Naval Institute, an independent authority on national defense best known for launching Tom Clancy’s writing career by publishing The Hunt for Red October. When he learned of a Naval Institute conference on antisubmarine warfare in Washington, D.C., Wertheim begged his parents to take him. Impressed by the teenager’s inquisitiveness, experts at the conference like Fred Rainbow, editor and chief of the institute’s flagship monthly magazine Proceedings, and Norman Polmar ’65, author of more than 30 books on the military, became Wertheim’s mentors. “You’ve heard stories of people being raised by wolves,” Wertheim explains. “Well, I guess I was kind of raised by the Naval Institute.” While in high school he struck a deal with the institute that won him free copies of its books in exchange for his help at conferences. Later the relationship enabled him to coauthor The Dictionary of Military Abbreviations and pen a monthly column for Proceedings before graduating from AU. At AU, however, Wertheim struggled to balance his passion for the military with the well-rounded college experience he wanted. For him, the university—compared to the military academies he’d also considered—offered the chance to do everything. AU’s Washington location gave him access to Naval Institute internships, Navy League conferences, and Department of Defense press briefings, and the campus let him enjoy an active social life while earning his BA in history. As he juggled these separate worlds, however, Wertheim found that everything could sometimes be too much. “There was just so much going on. I remember being at a three-day Navy League conference, getting back at nine at night, and then trying to put together a paper for a class the next morning. Sometimes it was just overwhelming.” Being sometimes overwhelmed may have hurt Wertheim’s GPA, but managing the overflowing plate of responsibilities proved to be an invaluable experience for his present work keeping the tome Combat Fleets up to date on everything from a new Kiev class aircraft carrier purchased by India to the latest armament fits for destroyers in the Chinese navy. In fact, when Wertheim first balked at the job offer, the Naval Institute’s top brass ranked his ability to manage an intense workload even higher than his prodigious military knowledge. “They told me, ‘Don’t worry, we know you’re not going to start out as the world’s expert, but we need you to do this, because you’re one of the only people we know who can take a project this big from start to finish.’” Since taking the post in 2002, Wertheim, who also works as a speechwriter for senior Air Force officials and a consultant for best-selling authors, has managed the balancing act so well that Fred Rainbow refers to the AU graduate as one of the Naval Institute’s “greatest finds since Tom Clancy.” Yet the amateur moorings of his expertise have kept him humble enough to still worry about what his former history professor thinks of him. “I ran into Professor [Alan] Kraut at an event on campus a few months ago, and I just had to talk to him,” explains Wertheim. “I’d taken a Civil War class with him and done very poorly, because of everything I was doing then—I just didn’t have time to do all the readings . . . So I told him, ‘You know I did really terrible in your class, but I hung on to the syllabus and after I graduated I went back and I read all those books.’ Kraut said, ‘That’s great,’ and I thought, ‘Ah, good, he doesn’t think I’m an idiot.’” continued next page |
