sent to various schools, lasting long at none of them. From an early age, Mustafa felt himself to be special and unique, and he held himself apart from others his age. Described as having formulated an inflated self-concept as a defense against childhood deprivations and trauma, he made few friends and participated little in the games of other youths. Finally his mother acquiesced to his wishes and sent him to a military secondary school, where he flourished. Upon graduation, he immediately went to the War College in Constantinople, where he began his formal officer training.
At the War College, Kemal, along with many other young officers and trainees, became involved in Turkish politics. In decline, the Ottoman Empire was ruled by a corrupt Sultan and subject to the same European powers who had bowed before Ottoman might several centuries earlier. Like many others, Kemal felt that the Turks should adopt the Western ways of Europe in order to prevent the final disintegration of Turkey. Although it began in the 1870s with the adoption of a constitution, Sultan Abdul Hamid II halted liberal progression by suspending the constitution. Reformers were forced to discuss liberal politics in secrecy and Kemal was once reprimanded at the War College for publishing an underground newspaper sympathetic to liberal reform. Much of the college administration was sympathetic to reform, however, and Kemal was graduated and sent to the Staff College, after which he was commissioned as a captain.
In 1908, the Committee of Union and Progress (C.U.P.), also known as the "Young Turks," entered into a power-sharing arrangement with the Sultan and eventually overthrew him. A member of a parallel reform group which had been absorbed into the C.U.P., Kemal played only a small part in the 1908 revolution. The leader and hero of this revolution was a young officer named Enver, who later became one of Mustafa's primary antagonists. The C.U.P....