Tom Carhart ‘66 Featured in Michigan Today

Tom Carhart '66 remembers the day he and his wife drove their Volkswagen into Ann Arbor for the first time. It was the fall of 1970. He’d spent months in combat in Vietnam. After leaving the Army he’d put in a year of digging ditches, washing dishes, and selling adding machines. He needed a clear path to a decent future. And he thought: “What the hell? I’ll be a lawyer.” He heard the three best law schools in the U.S. were Harvard, Yale, and Michigan. The last of those three accepted him. The son of a career officer in the Air Force, Carhart '66 had been a celebrated cadet at the U.S. Military Academy, a brilliant rogue who would become one of the main characters in a nonfiction bestseller by the journalist Rick Atkinson, The Long Gray Line: The American Journey of the West Point Class of 1966. Among his brethren, Carhart '66 was renowned for engineering a historic heist — the theft of the Naval Academy’s mascot goat from its guarded pen at Annapolis. Read more.