As I was leaving the hotel this morning, a
doorman asked me, "Where are you headed 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 to honor a personality, but to symbolize a great moral code -
a code of conduct and chivalry of those who guard this beloved land of culture and ancient descent.
For all hours 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 point 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 actions, 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 to 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
the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of
the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of an appetite for
adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of
what next, and 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 battlefield 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 in 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 20 campaigns, on a hundred battlefields,
around a thousand camp fires, 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, 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 the 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 we sought the
way and the light and the truth. And 20 years after, on the other side of the globe, again the filth of
murky foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping dugouts, those boiling suns of
relentless heat, those torrential rains of devastating storms, the loneliness and utter desolation of
jungle trails, the bitterness of long separation from those they loved and cherished, the deadly
pestilence of tropical 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 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 law and will stand the test of
any ethics or philosophies ever promulgated 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
greater strength can take the place of the divine help which alone can sustain him. However hard 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 marks a beginning of another epoch in the long story of mankind. 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 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 of synthetic materials to supplement or even replace our old standard basics; to
purify 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 spaceships 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 times.
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 purposes, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or
small, will find others for their accomplishment; 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 guardian, as its lifeguard from the raging tides of
international conflict, as its gladiator 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 thorough 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 ten-fold 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
tint. 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
vainly, 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 always I come back to West Point. Always there
echoes and reechoes: 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.