Deceased at Walter Reed Hospital, 5 April 1964 (buried at MacArthur
Memorial, Norfolk, VA)
General Westmoreland, General Groves, distinguished guests, and
gentlemen of the Corps. As I was leaving the hotel this morning, a doorman
asked me, "Where are you bound for, General?" and when I replied,
"West Point," he remarked, "Beautiful place, have you ever been
there before?"
No human being could fail to be deeply moved by such a tribute as
this, coming from a profession I have served so long and a people I have loved
so well. It fills me with an emotion I cannot express. But this award is not
intended primarily for a personality, but to symbolize a great moral code - the
code of conduct and chivalry of those who guard this beloved land of culture
and ancient descent. That is the meaning of this medallion. For all eyes and
for all time, it is an expression of the ethics of the American soldier. That I
should be integrated in this way with so noble an ideal arouses a sense of
pride and yet of humility which will be with me always.
Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate
what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying
points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there
seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.
Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of
imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.
The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a
flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite,
every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely
different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery
and ridicule.
But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic
character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the
nation's defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and
brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.
They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble
and gentle in success; not to substitute words for action; not to seek the path
of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to
learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to
master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is
clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to
reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never
take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the
simplicity of true greatness; the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of
true strength.
They give you a temperate will, a quality of imagination, a vigor of
the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental
predominance of courage over timidity, an appetite for adventure over love of
ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what
next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an
officer and a gentleman.
And what sort of soldiers are those you are to lead? Are they
reliable? Are they brave? Are they capable of victory?
Their story is known to all of you. It is the story of the American
man at arms. My estimate of him was formed on the battlefields many, many years
ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then, as I regard him now, as one of
the world's noblest figures; not only as one of the finest military characters,
but also as one of the most stainless.
His name and fame are the birthright of every American citizen. In his
youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give.
He needs no eulogy from me, or from any other man. He has written his own
history and written it in red on his enemy's breast.
But when I think of his patience under adversity, of his courage under
fire, and of his modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion of admiration
I cannot put into words. He belongs to history as furnishing one of the
greatest examples of successful patriotism. He belongs to posterity as the
instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. He
belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and by his achievements.
In twenty campaigns, on a hundred battlefields, around a thousand
campfires, I have witnessed that enduring fortitude, that patriotic
self-abnegation, and that invincible determination which have carved his statue
in the hearts of his people.
From one end of the world to the other, he has drained deep the
chalice of courage. As I listened to those songs of the glee club, in memory's
eye I could see those staggering columns of the First World War, bending under
soggy packs on many a weary march, from dripping dusk to drizzling dawn,
slogging ankle deep through mire of shell-pocked roads; to form grimly for the
attack, blue-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain,
driving home to their objective, and for many, to the judgment seat of God.
I do not know the dignity of their birth, but I do know the glory of
their death. They died unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in their
hearts, and on their lips the hope that we would go on to victory. Always for
them: Duty, Honor, Country. Always their blood, and sweat, and tears, as they
saw the way and the light.
And twenty years after, on the other side of the globe, against the
filth of dirty foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping
dugouts, those boiling suns of the relentless heat, those torrential rains of
devastating storms, the loneliness and utter desolation of jungle trails, the
bitterness of long separation of those they loved and cherished, the deadly
pestilence of tropic disease, the horror of stricken areas of war.
Their resolute and determined defense, their swift and sure attack,
their indomitable purpose, their complete and decisive victory - always
victory, always through the bloody haze of their last reverberating shot, the
vision of gaunt, ghastly men, reverently following your password of Duty,
Honor, Country.
The code which those words perpetuate embraces the highest moral laws
and will stand the test of any ethics or philosophies ever promulgated for the
uplift of mankind. Its requirements are for the things that are right, and its
restraints are from the things that are wrong. The soldier, above all other
men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training -
sacrifice. In battle and in the face of danger and death, he discloses those divine
attributes which his Maker gave when he created man in his own image. No
physical courage and no brute instinct can take the place of the Divine help
which alone can sustain him. However horrible the incidents of war may be, the
soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country, is
the noblest development of mankind.
You now face a new world, a world of change. The thrust into outer
space of the satellite, spheres and missiles marked the beginning of another
epoch in the long story of mankind - the chapter of the space age. In the five
or more billions of years the scientists tell us it has taken to form the
earth, in the three or more billion years of development of the human race,
there has never been a greater, a more abrupt or staggering evolution. We deal
now not with things of this world alone, but with the illimitable distances and
as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe. We are reaching out for a new and
boundless frontier. We speak in strange terms: of harnessing the cosmic energy;
of making winds and tides work for us; of creating unheard synthetic materials
to supplement or even replace our old standard basics; of purifying sea water
for our drink; of mining ocean floors for new fields of wealth and food; of
disease preventatives to expand life into the hundred of years; of controlling
the weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold, of rain and
shine; of space ships to the moon; of the primary target in war, no longer
limited to the armed forces of an enemy, but instead to include his civil
populations; of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister
forces of some other planetary galaxy; of such dreams and fantasies as to make
life the most exciting of all time.
And through all this welter of change and development your mission
remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars. Everything else
in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication. All
other public purpose, all other public projects, all other public needs, great
or small, will find others for their accomplishments; but you are the ones who
are trained to fight.
Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge
that in war there is no substitute for victory, that if you lose, the Nation
will be destroyed, that the very obsession of your public service must be Duty,
Honor, Country.
Others will debate the controversial issues, national and
international, which divide men's minds. But serene, calm, aloof, you stand as
the Nation's war guardians, as its lifeguards from the raging tides of
international conflict, as its gladiators in the arena of battle. For a century
and a half you have defended, guarded and protected its hallowed traditions of
liberty and freedom, of right and justice.
Let civilian voices argue the merits or demerits of our processes of
government. Whether our strength is being sapped by deficit financing indulged
in too long, by federal paternalism grown too mighty, by power groups grown too
arrogant, by politics grown too corrupt, by crime grown too rampant, by morals
grown too low, by taxes grown too high, by extremists grown too violent;
whether our personal liberties are as firm and complete as they should be.
These great national problems are not for your professional
participation or military solution. Your guidepost stands out like a tenfold
beacon in the night: Duty, Honor, Country.
You are the leaven which binds together the entire fabric of our
national system of defense. From your ranks come the great captains who hold
the Nation's destiny in their hands the moment the war tocsin sounds.
The long gray line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million
ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their
white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty, Honor, Country.
This does not mean that you are warmongers. On the contrary, the
soldier above all other people prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the
deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words
of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: "Only the dead have seen the
end of war."
The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of
old have vanished - tone and tints. They have gone glimmering through the
dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by
tears and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen then, but
with thirsty ear, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of
far drums beating the long roll.
In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry,
the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my
memory I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty,
Honor, Country.
Today marks my final roll call with you. But I want you to know that
when I cross the river, my last conscious thoughts will be of the Corps, and
the Corps, and the Corps.
I bid you farewell.
