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Baxter was sure that Kemper could run Andover. At first Kemper guffawed. All he knew about Andover was that girls at nearby Abbot Academy, where his wife and his mother went, were once called "Fem-Sems" by Andover boys. For a career military man, his war had been cruelly pacific, but he had won the Legion of Merit twice and had high hopes for promotion.
Baxter kept talking, and in 1947 the peacetime Army began looking drabber. One day Kemper found himself being asked point-blank by Episcopal Bishop Henry W. Hobson, president of the board: "What do you think you could do for Andover if you were headmaster?" Said Kemper: "Isn't the question, Bishop, what I could get others to do with me to help the school?" Team Player Kemper got the job.
Officers & Ladies. "I never would have resigned had I known Korea was coming," says Kemper. "I loved the Army with a passion." Well he might, being descended from eleven straight Army generations going back to the Pequot Indian Wars. Kemper was born at Wyoming's Fort D. A. Russell, followed his officer-father from post to post, attending eight public schools from Texas to the Philippines.
"Father expected all of us to be officers and gentlemen," says Kemper, "which was hard for my sisters, but not for me." The colonel tried and failed to make Johnny a star athlete, but his upright New England mother made him something better. "He is a good man," says his sister Peg. "Anything cheap or second-rate has never been in his mind."
Hoofing & History. When it came time for West Point, lazy Student Kemper crammed hard, came out sixth in a field of some 100 candidates for presidential appointment. At the Point, he was a good leader—manager of varsity lacrosse, superintendent of the post Sunday school, captain of his regiment and class president. He did well in history, a fact that counted later. An avid dancer, he hoofed in the annual Hundredth Night Show, loved to go out shagging with Peg at nearby Vassar.
His other girl was Sylvia Pratt, warm-spirited daughter of a noted Boston doctor, and Kemper married her soon after he graduated in 1935—132nd in a class of 275. A "sand-rat lieutenant," he was soon running a cram school for getting enlisted men into West Point, did so well that in 1939 the Point yanked him out of the infantry to teach history. He dutifully earned a Columbia master's degree in 1942 while itching to go to war. In its wisdom, the Army put him in G-2 with the prickly job of organizing U.S. historians to tell the big story.
A task for Talleyrand, the job involved Kemper in global negotiations with staff officers to get clearance to see generals to allow soldiers to speak to scholars—if they could or would. Result: twelve sound monographs produced by a 500-man team under command of a major general who, in the words of Historian Baxter, "treasured John Kemper as one would a jewel."