“General, you will be remembered as one of the finest and most dedicated soldiers in a long and storied history of the United States military, no question about it,” the president said after describing Keane’s distinguished 38-year Army career stretching from his time as a cadet in the Fordham ROTC program to the Vietnam War to the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East.

Among other achievements, Trump said, Keane “designed new training methods to ensure that military leaders would always be extremely well prepared for the intensity of combat command,” and also designed “state-of-the-art” counterinsurgency combat training for both urban and rugged environments.

In his own remarks, Keane said he was “deeply honored by this extraordinary award.”

“To receive it here in the White House, surrounded by family, by friends, and by senior government officials, is really quite overwhelming, and you can hear it in my voice,” he said. “I thank God for guiding me in the journey of life,” he said, also mentioning his “two great loves”—his wife Theresa, or Terry, who died in 2016, and the political commentator and author Angela McGlowan, “who I will love for the remainder of my life.”

“With all honesty, I wouldn’t be standing here without their love and their devotion,” he said.

Fordham Ties

Keane is the sixth Fordham graduate to receive the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. The most recent alumni recipient was sportscaster Vin Sully, FCRH ’49, awarded the medal by President Barack Obama in 2016.

Keane has advised President Trump and has often provided expert testimony to Congress since retiring as vice chief of staff of the Army in 2003. He is a Fordham trustee fellow and a 2004 recipient of the Fordham Founder’s Award.

Keane grew up in a housing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and was the first member of his family to attend college. He had 16 years of Catholic education, including his time at Fordham, where there was a prevailing idea that “you should have a sense of giving things back, and finding ways to do that,” he said in an interview last week on Fox News Radio’s Guy Benson Show.

Six other Fordham alumni, including some who were his contemporaries at Fordham, attended the ceremony. One of them, Joe Jordan, GABELLI ’74, said he’s impressed with how Keane, on television, “can say so much in such a short time that makes sense.”

“He attributes a lot of it to the philosophy courses he took at Fordham,” said Jordan, an author and speaker specializing in financial services who met Keane about 15 years ago, when he was a senior executive at MetLife and Keane was on the board. “He’s a guy who’s extremely successful, extremely humble, has a common touch, and always remembers his friends and attributes a lot of his success not to himself but to the people around him, and the people who helped form him.”

Also in attendance was retired General Keith Alexander, former director of the National Security Agency, who has appeared at Fordham events, including the International Conference on Cyber Security.

Turning Points

Keane earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1966. He became a career paratrooper, going to Vietnam to serve with the 101st Airborne Division, which he later commanded.

He was decorated for valor in Vietnam, which was a turning point for him, with its close combat in which “death was always a silent companion,” he said.

“It was there I truly learned the value of life, the value of human life—to treasure it, to protect it,” he said in his White House remarks. “The experience crystallized for me the critical importance of our soldiers to be properly prepared with necessary skill and the appropriate amount of will to succeed in combat.”

He said he spent his Army career “among heroes who inspired me, and I’m still in awe of them today.”

“My sergeants, my fellow officers, and my mentors shaped me significantly, and several times they saved me from myself,” he said. “That’s the truth of it.”

The 9/11 attacks were a second major turning point for him, he said. He was in the Pentagon when it was attacked, and helped evacuate the injured. He lost 85 Army teammates, he said, and two days later was dispatched to New York City to take part in the response to the World Trade Center attacks.

“It was personal, and I was angry,” he said. “I could not have imagined that I would stay so involved in national security and foreign policy” after leaving the Army, he said. “My motivation is pretty simple: Do whatever I can, even in a small way, to keep America and the American people safe.”

Watch the ceremony honoring General Keane

Several Fordham alumni attended a reception honoring General Keane on March 10. From left: Scott Hartshorn, GABELLI ’98; Phil Crotty, FCRH ’64; the Rev. Charles Gallagher, FCRH ’06; Paul Decker, GABELLI ’65; Laurie Crotty, GSE ’77; General Jack Keane, GABELLI ’66; and Joe Jordan, GABELLI ’74. On the right is Roger A. Milici, Jr., vice president for development and university relations at Fordham.

That was the consensus of a panel convened on July 27 by veteran journalist Ted Koppel at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

“Lights Out: The Critical Infrastructure of the Power Grid,” was the final panel of the second day of the 2016 International Conference on Cyber Security (ICCS). In addition to Koppel, it featured Keith Alexander, former director of the National Security Agency, and Steve Hill, political counsellor for the United Kingdom’s Mission the United Nations.

Koppel, who delved into the issue in Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath (Crown, 2015), lamented that in the aftermath of 9/11, the country spent close to $3 trillion and started two wars, with the goal of defeating terrorism. But even after the 2003 Northeast blackout, which showed how much damage a major blackout could cause, and blackouts in the Ukraine and Estonia in 2007, which demonstrated how they could be caused by hackers, it’s barely a topic of conversation.

“There are 3,200 companies in this country, and the largest, biggest and wealthiest have extraordinary defensive capabilities. They are immune to cyber attack though. Quite the contrary. The problem is that all of these 3,200 companies are linked,” he said, noting that a successful attack on the weakest could allow a hacker to infiltrate larger systems.

“You can take out an entire grid, with hundreds of companies, affecting tens of millions of people over a period potentially of weeks or even months.”

At the moment, the best defense against attacks on the infrastructure such as the power grid is the ability to identify the perpetrator, and Alexander said the good news is that the United States improved it’s attribution capabilities by an order of ten times between 2006 to 2014.

“Now, the issue is, it wasn’t at network speed attribution. We can attribute who the offensive player is, but it takes time, and sometimes it can take weeks or a month,” he said.

Concerns about privacy and profits have made power companies resistant to working with the government, and Koppel pointed out that none that were invited to the conference chose to attend.

Alexander illustrated the conundrum by polling the audience, a mix of representatives from the private sector, academia and law enforcement, on whether it is the government’s responsibility to protect privately owned computer networks, the way it would defend against a missile attack, or whether companies should defend themselves. After some consternation, several members piped up that it should be both, a notion that Alexander seconded.

“If you believe it’s both, and that government and industry have to work together for defense, where industry has to reach a certain standard, and government has to have the ability to respond, you also say that they have to share information at network speed.

“We’re not discussing that, but that’s the issue that’s on the table. We have to go further, and the government and industry have to work together.”