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There are fresh graves to decorate across
this land this Memorial Day, more than 800
of them, though none yet, so far, in this place.
There are 3,000 more men and women to
honor this day who have returned with the wounds
of war. All of them join the many
who already rest under these trees and in countless
other graveyards who served this
nation in past wars and conflicts.
One of those earlier soldiers was Archibald
MacLeish. He was born in nearby
Glencoe, Illinois, and he served in World War I,
beginning as an ambulance driver and
rising to the rank of captain of Field Artillery.
Though he lived to be 90 and went on to a
distinguished career as Librarian of Congress,
advisor to Presidents, diplomat, architect
of the United Nations Charter and a Pulitzer-Prize-winning
poet and playwright, he never
forgot his comrades who had died so young for the sake of
a free society. In one of his
poems he wrote:
This is, for one thing, a day of patriotic pride
when we remember the best of our
national soul. "There are those," MacLeish once
wrote, "who say that the liberation of
humanity, the freedom of man and mind is
nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the
American Dream." At our best, people have
responded to that Dream. In another time,
when our nation was locked in bitter
Civil War, Ralph Waldo Emerson described that call
to higher duty:
But here is another matter to remember
today, the awful other face of war. War
call us to honor not only the best and highest
values of duty, courage and freedom. War
also tries to level all human values and
deeds to the lowest expectations. There is always
the danger that, confronted by some terrible
evil, we shall adopt evil's own methods as
our own. It is so easy to justify the horrors of war,
to slip into easy acquiescence. "I was
only following orders," has been the common
plea of Adolph Eichmann to justify
Auschwitz and the guards at Abu Graib Prison
in Iraq. But then there is someone like
Spec. Joseph Darby, a reservist in the 372nd
Military Police Company. Darby is the one
who reported the sexual and physical abuse
of Iraqi detainees by some members of his
own unit. Someone who grew up with Darby
said of him, "Like the rest of us might, I
thought maybe he would just turn and forget
about it." But for whatever reason, he
answered to a higher duty, allegiance to that American
Dream that respects the dignity of
all human beings. The greatness of the American
Dream, Archibald MacLeish once
wrote, rests upon such dissenters. "The
dissenter," he said, "is every human being at
those times of his life when he resigns
momentarily from the herd and thinks for
himself." That we remember today as well.
As the American Civil War was drawing
to an end with Union victory in sight,
Abraham Lincoln called on America to see both
our patriotic valor and our national
intentions as judged by a Higher Power and Purpose.
In his Second Inaugural Address,
he said, "Both (sides in this conflict) pray
to the same God; and each invokes His aid
against the other...The prayers of both
could not be answered; that of neither has been
answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.
'Woe unto the world because of
offences! For it must needs be that offences
come; but woe to that man by whom the
offence cometh!' As we are once again
engaged in a great conflict, we remember today
to submit our worst deeds and our best intentions
to that Higher Power. As Lincoln put
it, "with firmness in the right,
as God gives us to see the right,
let us strive on to finish
the work we are in."
That is how best we shall remember today -
honoring the best of the American
Dream, resisting that Dream's contamination,
setting our national life under the judgment
of God's own purpose. That is our task
today, Archibald MacLeish reminds us:
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