Robert Leahy Fair
United States Army field commander
Died when: 60 years 113 days (723 months)Star Sign: Taurus
Robert Leahy Fair (May 18, 1923 – September 14, 1983) was a United States Army lieutenant general and a field commander in Germany during the Cold War.
Fair commanded V Corps from August 25, 1975, until January 4, 1976.After 32 years in the U.S.Army and service in three wars, Fair concluded his career in 1976, and died in 1983.
Fair received a Bachelor of Science degree from The University of Maryland in 1961, and a Master of Arts from George Washington University in 1963.
He also attended the University of Michigan, where he studied the Japanese language in preparation for an assignment on General MacArthur's Staff. "Fair's approach won plaudits.
Novelist Josiah Bunting (The Lionheads), an ex-major himself, praised Fair's leathery style in a Playboy article last fall, describing the general as ‘an admirable soldier’ who is ‘always in bristling motion.’ But other officers, whose palms sweat when Fair raked them over with abrasive questions, disliked him intensely.
To some enlisted men, Fair was a bush-league General Patton." One member of the Lancer Brigade said, "The colonel is a doer.
When he decides something, that means we're gonna have some action." A 1976 Time magazine article quoted an admiring captain as saying, "I'd have followed him into the jaws of hell—and had a hard time catching up with him."
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