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Brigadier General
Jesse C. Gatlin Jr.
Permanent Professor 1966–1977
B.S., United States Military Academy
M.A., University of North Carolina
Ph.D., University of Denver
Jesse Gatlin, the Academy’s 17th Permanent Professor, was born in Creswell, North Carolina, in 1923. He attended Oak Ridge Military Institute, NC, 1941–1942, preparatory to entering the United States Military Academy. He completed pilot training while a cadet at West Point, which was a requirement at that time for those aiming for the Air Corps. He graduated from USMA in 1945 and began his career flying the B-25 and B-17. Later he was stationed in Austria and Germany as a P-47 Thunderbolt pilot. During his flying career, Jesse also flew the B-26 and C-47. His experiences include duty as a Radiological Survey Officer during three atomic bomb tests at the Nevada Test Site, 1950–1953. From 1954 to 1955 Jesse was an exchange officer with the Royal Canadian Air Force in Ottawa, where he flew his only jet, the T-33. Following his exchange assignment, Jesse was sent to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in preparation for a teaching assignment at the Air Force Academy. He earned his Master’s degree in English in 1957 and joined the Academy’s Department of English. From 1959 to 1961 Jesse worked on his doctorate at the University of Denver, completing the PhD degree in two years before returning to the Academy. He was made Tenure Associate Professor in 1964, then Permanent Professor and Department Head in 1966. For a two-month period in 1968, he was on temporary duty in Vietnam and Thailand supporting the Air Force’s Contemporary Historical Evaluation of Combat Operations (CHECO) project. Jesse’s literary publications include discussions of honor and the treatment of the US military and Air Force in fiction. In his article “The Role of the Humanities in Educating the Professional Officer,” published in Air University Review in 1968, he makes a compelling case that the humanities are an indispensable part of an Academy education, concluding with the belief that “[it] is this sort of attitude—this widened perspective on past, present, and future—that the humanities can do much to promote.” This belief is enduring, and it still guides the Academy’s curriculum design. Jesse retired as a brigadier general in 1977.
After Jesse retired, he taught at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs for eight years and for 27 years led a weekly literature class at the Colorado Springs Senior Center. He died in Colorado Springs in 2016 and is buried in the Air Force Academy Cemetery. Jesse’s creativity was present at almost every Permanent Professor retirement dinner as well as Past Permanent Professors dinners for nearly four decades, usually composing on the spot and reading a clever poem (doggerel) to commemorate the event.