Copyright © 1997 [Chase Family -Houston, TX USA]. All rights reserved.
Revised: March 02, 2003 .
Forrestal Lecture Series 2001 Speaker, 24 January, U.S.Naval Academy, Mr. George F. Will
EMCEE: Good evening. It's my pleasure tonight to welcome Mr. George
Will to the United States Naval Academy Forrestal Lecture Series. Mr. Will
was born in Champaign, Illinois, and attended Trinity College in Hartford,
Connecticut, Oxford and Princeton where he earned his Ph.D. He has
served on the faculty at Michigan State and Harvard. Since 1974, Mr. Will's
columns have been syndicated by The Washington Post. Now, they are
syndicated in almost five hundred newspapers in the United States and Europe.
In 1976, he became a contributing editor for Newsweek magazine and in 1977 won
the Pulitzer Prize for his work in newspaper columns. Recently, the topics
of some of Mr. Will's columns have been: cloning, the drug war, and the
presidential election. Mr. Will is also an avid baseball fan. Ladies
and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Mr. George Will. <applause>.
MR. WILL: Thank you, thank you very much. It is true that I only write
about politics to support my baseball habit, and during the questioning period
questions on baseball are welcomed. Tonight, however, I have escaped from
Washington, which, as you know, is an enclave surrounded on four sides by
reality, and come here to talk to you about the nature of the military and the
nature of its relationship with the changing, not all together for the good,
American culture.
I want to read you something said by several of our leaders recently. The
first is from a graduate of this fine institution, Senator John McCain.
"It is," said the Senator, "a fundamental proposition that armed
services can truly serve a democracy only if they are a reflection of that
society and are impacted by the same social trends." What I wish to
do tonight is respectfully disagree with that. A recent Secretary of the
Navy said something very similar. "As American society changes,"
he said, "the naval service changes with it. That's not bad.
That's the way it's supposed to be." Again, I respectfully, but
emphatically, disagree.
We're told all the time that there is a large and growing problem and that there
is a need to close the gap between the military and civilian society."
I think that the gap is healthy and the gap is necessary, that the gap must
exist in any society and, in a sense, especially in a democratic society.
That is because the military must be an exemplar of certain virtues that will,
at any given time, seem anachronistic and it is a function of the military to be
exemplars. I was noticing the other day -- I don't know if I'm allowed to
speak ill of the Army <laughter> -- I was noticing the other day The New
York Times ran a story about a new Army recruiting campaign. Now, I
thought it was bad enough when the recruiting slogan for the Army was,
"Today's Army wants to join you!" This is the lead paragraph in
The New York Times the other day, "In the most sweeping revision of its
marketing practices in two decades, the Army this week will scrap its memorable
advertising slogan 'Be all that you can be,' and replace it with one intended to
appeal to the individualism and independence of today's youth. An 'An Army of
One.'" They adopted this, they say in the story, because people thought the
military was dehumanizing. And the Army has decided to stop advertising so
much during professional football games and advertise more on Friends, The
Simpsons and something called Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. <laughter>
Now, I don't know what this "Army of One," is going to do for our
country, drawing from that particular audience, but I had thought that one of
the points of the military was to counter the somewhat excessive individualism
of our society, to preach and teach and practice selflessness. I seem to
recall something important about unit cohesion. Instead, we now have even
the military talking the new-age language of self-actualization. We live,
it is said, in a "me, now" age. "I want things for me, and
I want it right now," and it is said the military must close the gap
between the "me, now " society and itself.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have a simple thought for you, and I believe every
public speaker should have one emphatic clear point, and you are about to hear
mine. I should tell you, as a matter of digression, that my model as a public
speaker is the late Conrad Hilton, the hotel magnate who, late in his life,
appeared on The Tonight Show, then with Johnny Carson, and Carson said,
"Mr. Hilton, you are a giant of American attainment, a legend in your time,
you've built hotels all over the world, turn to that camera right over there,
look your fellow countrymen in the eye and tell them the one thing, based on
your life's work, that you would like your fellow countrymen to know."Like a great trooper, Conrad Hilton turned to the camera, looked America in the
eye and said, "Please, put the curtain inside the tub." <laughter and applause> It was a practical and eminently sensible thought and mine for
you is similarly practical, eminently sensible, and even, I should say, banal.
It is, as I say, that as American society becomes more individualistic, more
self-absorbed, more whiney, in a sense, more of a crybaby nation, as I am bound
to say on occasion, it becomes doubly important that the gap between the
military and society remain substantial. We've just gone through a very
interesting presidential election. It was said it was bitter. Ladies
and gentlemen, that was not bitter. A hundred and fifty years ago we were
arguing about slavery. That was bitter and divisive. Fifty years ago the names
of royal American politics were, Douglas MacArthur, Joe McCarthy, Alger Hiss,
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Treason was in the air. That was bitter
politics. Thirty-five years ago, we argued over whether African-Americans should
be allowed to vote and enter restaurants. Those were bitter politics.
Thirty years ago, we argued about a ground war of attrition in the mainland of
Asia. Those were bitter politics. Twenty years ago, a man who
described the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" was inaugurated
president, replacing a man whose Secretary of State said Leonid Brezhnev, the
head of the Soviet Union, "shares our dreams and aspirations."
Those were bitter elections. There's no bitterness to speak of in America today.
There's only an astonishingly low pain threshold. <laughter>
We just went through a Christmas retailing season, and all the papers said we
had a bad, disappointing, sad, terrible Christmas retailing season. The
Christmas retailing season this year was slightly better than last year, and
last year's Christmas season was the best in ten years. You heard NASDAQ had the
worst year in its twenty-nine year history. After that worst year in its
twenty-nine history, the NASDQ is sixteen percent higher than it was two years
ago. It is said that one day last fall, October 12th, the stock market lost
three hundred and seventy-nine points--3.6 percent of its of value gone in one
day! The sell off started minutes after Home Depot, great retailing chain,
announced that its growth would be four percent instead of seven percent.
Now, I don't know when four percent growth became a national calamity.
Well, the trouble is expectations were for seven percent! Well, who sets
expectations? Stock analysts. What do stock analysts sell?
Stocks! They sell expectations. The country is becoming slightly
neurotic. <laughter> Last summer, you may recall, we had a slight up tick
in a gallon of gasoline's price. Why, at one point, the price of a gallon
of gasoline in America soared to about forty percent of what it is in Europe.
<laughter> So, the government of the United States, that exists to
"feel our pain," tapped the strategic petroleum reserve, which exists
to protect this country against a major interruption of supplies, but was used
instead to knock a nickel off a price of a gallon gasoline. Think of this
country, Americans driving around in their Lincoln Navigators, lurching, barely
making it from one gas station to another <laughter>, sipping designer
water that costs a lot more than gasoline <laughter> and talking on their
cellphones to one another about how they are suffering. <laughter> This is
a country, ladies and gentlemen, in which the number of households with a net
worth of a million dollars has doubled in the last five years. One in
fourteen American households now has a net worth of a million dollars! Think of
the changes this country has gone through. In 1939, '40 and '41, when the clouds
of war began lowering over Europe, Congress passed conscription and had to
stipulate the physical requirements for a young man to be eligible to be taken
in to the armed services. Three of them were: a young man had to be
a minimum of five feet tall, had to weigh a minimum of one hundred and five
pounds and had to have twelve of his original complement of thirty-two teeth.
A commentary, let me tell you, on nutrition and dentistry during the depression.
As recently as 1951, and '53, Americans lived in homes with outdoor plumbing.
As recently as 1975, eighty percent of the American people had never, not once,
traveled by air. In 1975, an IBM mainframe computer cost 3.4 million dollars.
Your fifteen-hundred dollar laptop is about a thousand times more powerful.
If there had been a comparable improvement in the price and performance of an
automobile, an automobile today would cost two dollars and would go six hundred
miles on a thimble full of gasoline. <laughter> And we
would all be on our cellphones complaining about the thimble full price.
<laughter> This is a country that is spoiled...badly spoiled.
I mean, think of the changes in health care in our lifetime, in our last
century. It has been commonly said, and not untruly, that it was not until
about 1910 that the average visit to a doctor did more good than harm. At
about that time, Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great supreme court justice, said,
"I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica could be sunk to
the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the
worse for the fishes." <laughter> At the turn of the last century,
one in four American children died before age fourteen. And if your child
got diabetes, you watched the child go blind and die. We live in a
wonderful, wonderful time to be alive. And we use our leisure time
to complain. You would think we would have learned from the terrors of the
last century: not to complain, and, on the other hand, not to be complacent
about the world in which we live, which holds a good many terrors and furies
worse than the high price for a gallon of gasoline.
In 1910, forty years after the Franco-Prussian War, forty years of remarkable
peace in Europe, a book published by a man named Norman Angell became an
international bestseller, one of the first such. It was called The Great
Illusion. His argument was that the "great illusion"--that we
now recognize was an illusion--was that nations could not benefit from war.
Therefore, he said there would never ever be another war. That was 1910.
President David Jordan of Stanford University said, and I quote, "The great
war of Europe, ever threatening...will never come.... The bankers will not
find the money for such a fight, the industries will not maintain it, the
statesmen cannot.... There will be no general war." Mr. Jordan
said that in 1913, one year before the Guns of August that began what was,
essentially, a thirty-year European war.
Today you may have noticed, there are similar predictions of eternal peace.
And against those making those predictions, some people must stand and say that
great nations are always living in the war years or the inter-war years.
Now, I know the American people generally tend to say, "Well, so far,
so good...so far, so good." "We're getting along just
fine." "Don't really need much of a military anymore, don't
need weapons systems ... so far, so good." It reminds me, as almost
everything does, of a wonderful baseball story -- it's true, too. In 1951, there
was a pitcher named Warren Spahn. Some of us are old enough to remember
Warren Spahn. He is the winningest left-handed pitcher in the history of
baseball. He was pitching in 1951 one day for the then-Boston Braves
against the then-New York Giants in the then-Polo Grounds. And the Giants
sent up to the plate a rookie who was 0-for-13. It was clear the kid could
never hit big-league pitching...it was a little kid named, Willie Mays.
Spahn stood on the mound, sixty-feet six-inches from home plate, fired the ball
and Mays crushed it. First hit, first home run! After the game the
sports writers went up to Spahn in the clubhouse and said, "Spahnie, what
happened?" Spahn said, "Gentlemen, for the first sixty feet that
was a hell of a pitch!" <laughter>
Trouble is, in the life of nations, as in the life of a baseball game, it's not
good enough. "So far, so good" is not a prudent way to conduct
your life as a nation. We are a nation that has to be constantly reminded
of what George Orwell said, "We sleep safe in our beds because rough men
stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm."
We are not a nation that likes to hear that. We are a pacific nation
conditioned by broad oceans between us and dangers and two peaceful neighbors.
All the more reason why we have to be reminded that the world remains a
dangerous place. There was a recent poll -- I do hate to keep picking on the
Army, but I must. There was a recent poll that showed that thirty-two
percent of the men in the Army and fifty-five percent of the women in the Army
disagreed with the Army's focus on war fighting. <laughter> And
that's before it became "An Army of One." <laughter> Well,
that's what happens, I suggest to you, when you have a society in which very few
people have much experience with the military. At one point during the last
administration, we had a president, a director of the Central Intelligence
Agency, a Secretary of Defense, a Secretary of State and a National Security
Advisor of the president--all five had zero military experience. There are
fewer and fewer veterans in Congress today. The veterans of our foreign conflicts
are aging. The average World War II veteran is about seventy-eight today,
and there are thousands of World War veterans who die every day. The
average age of a Korean veteran is sixty-eight. Vietnam veteran,
fifty-three. Think of something else. Harvard, in the four years of the
Second World War, lost six hundred and ninety-one of its students. Harvard,
during the twelve years of the Vietnam War, the Class of '61 through the Class
of '72, those twelve classes, lost twelve people combined.
We are developing, in a sense, a society that is strange to the military and the
military is strange to it. Well, we were told after all, the title of a
famous book published recently, that we have reached the end of history.
The author of that book, a very intelligent man, did not mean there would be no
more events, but he did mean that we had reached the end of history in the sense
that there were no more fundamental arguments. That the American model had
been accepted around the world, the dispersal of decision making, free
markets, pluralism--we heard that before, remember, from Mr. Angel in 1910 and
President Jordan in 1913. Well, it was part of the belief. It is a
recurring American belief, a belief really born with the 20th Century. A hundred
years ago, science was in the air: Marconi, the Wright Brothers, Edison, Henry
Ford. And there was a belief then that you could have political science as
well. And if you just get the experts that we have scientific
politics...well, you would not have any conflicts anymore. You would be at
the end of history. In 1912, we elected, as president, a man who, nine years
earlier, was a founding member of the American Political Science Association,
Professor Thomas Woodrow Wilson. We are hearing the same thing, again,
today. Except instead of confidence in science, it's confidence in the new
information technologies. The theory being that everyone will either be so
busy playing video games on the WEB, or do whatever you people do, that we will
get to know one another, and once we get to know one another, the world will get
along. Of course, that's what they said in the thirties, and once we got
to know Hitler, we knew we had to go to war. <laughter> The fact is,
very intelligent and prudent and sober men and women now look at the world and
see a coming clash of civilizations. They see that what Marx predicted,
which was that all the post-industrial forces in the world, particularly
religion and ethnicity, would lose their salience in the modern world--Marx, as
usual, was a hundred percent wrong. Religion and ethnicity convulsed the
world almost more than ever before. And this time, some of the clashes
will be well-armed with weapons of mass destruction. Which means it is dangerous
for a country like ours to have an extremely low-pain threshold, an extremely
sentimental view of the relations between nations, an extremely delusional view
of the dangers of the world being drained away, and, I must tell you, an
extraordinary squeamishness with regard to the fact that the military exists to
engage in violence. That is a particularly important squeamishness in an
age of graphic journalism. Let me tell you a story. September 17, 1862, is
to this day the bloodiest day in American history. It was the Battle of Antietam,
not far from here. About two days after the Battle of Antietam, a couple
of men walked across the field carrying what was at that time a strange device.
It was a camera. These were men from the Mathew Brady Studio in New York.
They recorded what they saw on that field in Northern Maryland, went back
to New York and, in a few weeks, had put on an exhibit called "The Dead of
Antietam." The nation was never quite the same. The war had
been a distant thing then and suddenly graphic journalism made the reality of
war real. Do you know that in the First World War, the worse carnage the world
has ever seen, during the entire four years of carnage, not one photograph of a
dead British, French, or German soldier appeared in a British, French or German
newspaper? It was not until about 1943, and after a nine-month wait by the
War Department, as it then was called, did Life Magazine publish the first
photograph of a dead American soldier. Vietnam, as is well known, was the
first television war, and it was not a good experience.
Now, the rule is, it is sort of the Colin Powell Doctrine, that the only time
the United States can use its military is when it can be over quickly,
"quickly" defined as before Sam Donaldson gets there with a camera.
<laughter> This does not bode well for a country dealing with a still
dangerous world. And the problem is that there are aspects of democracy,
systemic problems with a society organized around the premises of democracy that
tend to make it soft. A French officer once said, "Democracy is the
best system of government yet devised but it suffers from one grave defect.
It does not encourage those military virtues on which, in an envious world, it
must frequently depend on for survival." Think of what the democratic
ethos has become. It is materialist. It is individualistic. Its
language is "rights" talk, the constant minting of new rights and the
casting of every conflict as a collision of absolute rights, which means it is a
litigious society govern by lawyers. When this year's freshman class in
America's law schools graduates we will--at last--have, and aren't we proud, a
million lawyers in this country.
Democratic society is hostile to hierarchies, hostile to authority. Hostile, in short, to the essence of the military
organization, which is why democracies are ambivalent about the very idea of leadership. You know the word "leader" appears in
the Federalist Papers, the great documents arguing for the ratification of
our Constitution, eleven times--it was a derogatory term. Democracies tend to
think leaders are bad things because they reflect poorly on the people who need to be lead. Well, we know in our heart of hearts that the common man is fine. As Lincoln said, "God must have loved
the common man, he made so many of them, but it is uncommon men and women,
uncommon men and women who, when nations get in danger, as they invariably do, must come to the fore and
lead." And, again, it is hard for society to accept when society has decided that the worst possible sin is to be judgmental. It is hard
for a society to understand that when it believes that the Ten Commandments are really the "ten suggestions." It is hard for a society
to believe, when it starts speaking as ours does entirely, the language of extenuation--the language that explains why people behave
badly and why they should not be judged harshly for that.
We are becoming a society
that revels in victim hood, that practices identity politics, that we should act in politics by our ethnic or sexual group, and that our group should be grievance groups explaining
why we are victims and why we are owed something. It is said that the danger we face in our society is that Americans will begin to
feel that some Americans are morally superior to others. Well, I have a news bulletin for you: Some Americans are morally superior to others and, frankly, that is why you are here, on the
banks of the Chesapeake Bay. Because you are training to be leaders. You are training to exercise judgment. You are training to be a
hierarchy. You are training to be more than individualists. You are not here because you are materialists. And you are here to
acquire a moral superiority. We recognize it in sports
in our society, and that's a good thing. But, we have to recognize it elsewhere. And I will tell,
if I may, the greatest baseball story ever told, and it's true. <laughter> About 1924 Rogers Hornsby, the greatest
right-hand hitter in the history of baseball, was at the plate. There was a rookie pitcher on the mound, and the rookie was quite
reasonably petrified. The rookie threw three pitches that he thought were strikes, right on the edge of the plate,
but the umpire said, "ball one, ball two, ball three." The
rookie got flustered and shouted in, "Ump, those were strikes." The
umpire took off his mask, looked out at the pitcher and said, "Young man, when you throw a strike, Mr. Hornsby will let you know. <laughter> It is a
good habit of our society to recognize excellence. In the Hornsby case, if he didn't swing it was not a strike. It was that simple.
Hornsby had become the standard. And I trust what we try to do in the military academies is to produce men and women who want to be, as
Hornsby was, the standard. Well, we certainly better.
Now, there are some very
good signs that America is hungry for what this institution specializes in:
hungry for honor, hungry for sacrifice, hungry for something larger than individualism and materialism. Look
at the reception given to the movie Saving Private Ryan. Look at the astonishing success of Tom Brokaw's book The Greatest
Generation. Look at the astonishing hunger for the books of Stephen Ambrose, about D-Day and the rest. A hunger, a palpable
hunger, and that is healthy. Because in its heart of hearts, this nation knows how much it has depended in the past, and will one
day again depend upon you. And how much, even in peacetime, it depends, not just on the military to keep the peace, but to deterring
the envious and the aggressive. The country, in its heart of hearts, knows that it needs its society leavened by the small numbers in the
military who hold up a sense of the way you honor a country. I want to read you something. This is a story told by a foreign
diplomat who was in his own country overseas, and he had occasion to visit the United States Embassy in the capital of his country. This
is the story he tells: I arrived a quarter to six, after official office hours, and was met by the Marine on guard at the entrance to
the Chancery. He asked me if I would mind waiting while he lowered the two American flags at the
embassy. What I witnessed over the next ten minutes so impressed me,
that I am now lead to make this occurrence of part of any ongoing record of this
distressing era. The Marine was dressed in a uniform, which was spotless and neat, he walked with a measured tread from the
entrance of the Chancery to the stainless steel flagpole before the Embassy and,
almost reverently, lowered the flag to the level of his reach where he began to fold it in a military fashion. He then released the flag from
the clasp attached to it, stepped back from the pole, and made an about face and carried the flag between his hands, one above, one below, and
placed it securely on a stand before the Chancery. He then marched
over to the second flagpole and repeated the same lonesome ceremony. After
completing his task, he apologized for the delay, out of pure courtesy,
as nothing less than incapacity would have prevented him from completing that task, the simplicity of which made the might, the power and the
glory of the United States of America stand forth in a way that a mighty wave of a military aircraft or the passage of a super carrier, or a
parade of then thousand men and women, could never have made manifest.
One day it is my hope to
visit one of our embassies in a far away place and to see a soldier fold our flag and turn to a stranger
and say, "I am sorry for the delay, sir. I had to honor my
country." In a time not hospitable to the military virtues, a time not hospitable
to identifying virtues, let me tell you: You honor your country by being here and going where you will go next. And you honor me, by
allowing me to return twenty years after my first visit for a Forrestal lecture to pay what, I hope, is a compliment that many others will
pay you.
Thank you for hearing me out. <applause> I know there are microphones
around here. So, anyone who can proceed to them, just speak up.
QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION:
Q
Sir --
A
Yes?
Q
Thank you. First Class Harrington (phon. sp.) 3rd
Company. Sir, I have two questions for you. The first one is
really
important. Do you think the Red Sox will ever win the World Series?
<laughter, applause> And the second one is, out of all time,
all the
baseball teams, who would you pick as your starting best nine of all
time? <laughter, applause>
A
At last, something I know something about. <laughter,
applause> First of all--look, I grew up in central Illinois. I am
a
Cubs fan. <cheers, applause> And I have no patience with the
Red Sox
fans because the Red Sox, as you may know, won the World Series as
recently as 1918. <laughter> The Chicago Cubs last won the World
Series
in 1908, which is two years before Tolstoy died. <laughter> Of
course,
what that means is, the Cubs are in the ninety-second year of the
rebuilding effort <laughter>. Actually, if you go to Wrigley
Field,
ou
can buy a T-shirt that says, "Any team can have a bad century."
<laughter>
The answer about the Red
Sox is no. And very quickly, catcher,
Bench, pitcher, Koufax or Walter Johnson. First base, Gehrig, second
base, Joe Morgan, shortstop, Honus Wagner, third base, Mike Schmidt.
<cheers, applause> Outfielders, Ruth, Mays and Aaron.
<applause>
Q
Sir, First Class Doderal (phon. sp.) 25th Company. I
just had a question, another one about baseball. Do you think that
the
expediential rise in home runs over the last few years has detracted
A
Well, yes, in a sense, but it is not because the ball
is juiced or that the ball is livelier. It is that the players our
livelier. If you stood Mickey Mantle, all five foot-eleven of him, or
Willy Mays next to Mark McGwire, he would look like the clubhouse boy.
The players are bigger, the bats go through the strike zone faster, the
pitchers are worse, and the parks are smaller. <laughter> And
we call
that "progress."
Q
Sir, I have another baseball question. <laughter> I'm
second class Massy from 6th Company. If you can please comment on the
recent free-agent signings, the Alex Rodriguez contract with Texas.
Do
you think that's good for the game, and do you think that, at some
point in the future, the fans are going to say "enough is enough," with
increasing salaries?
A Alex Rodriguez signed a ten-year
contract for a quarter of a
billion dollars, and that's before the incentives kick in. Now, you
are going to have to explain to me why someone who is making a quarter of a
billion dollars needs an incentive on top of that. <laughter> But,
anyway, what is peculiar about the salary is the Texas Rangers paid him
that and there was no second bidder in this auction. I mean, how do
you do that? No one was bidding against the Rangers at that point.
Yes,
it is bad for baseball. Someone has to pay for it, and the people who
pay
it are the people who walk through the turnstiles. I just spent
eighteen months with Paul Volker, former Senator George Mitchell, Rick Levin,
the president of Yale, writing a report on revenue disparities and what
they are doing to competitive balance in baseball. Enjoy this opening day,
because there may not be one in the year 2001 when the players and the
owners start to argue about this.
Q
Sir, Midshipman, Bobbie Rashad (phon. sp.) Jones, 30th
Company. I want to switch gears for a second and ask a couple of
questions. First of all, I'd like to say I really enjoy watching you
on TV on ABC. I watched you when I was real little, with David Brinkley,
not really understanding what you were talking about, but I was
watching it. <laughter> Well, my question is I remember at the beginning of
your
lecture talking about the former Secretary of the Navy saying that
there should be society reflected within the military, and you saying that
you disagree. Now, I respect everything you said tonight, but I disagree
with some of that because of the fact that if society didn't reflect on
the military, I wouldn't be standing here a hundred and twenty days
away on a ship serving hash browns, smothered and covered and, quite
frankly, I think graduating from here is a lot cooler, <laughter> and I think
that has to do with a lot of pioneering efforts of people in the
military and society pushing for change within the military, and I was
wondering where you do think the line should be drawn between society's
influence on the military and the gap that needs to take place in order
for us to remain effective? <applause>
A
Well, that's a good question. You could, however, have
gone to a lot of institutions of higher education that were a lot less
demanding than this one, and that promise, perhaps, more lucrative
careers immediately after graduation than this one does. But, you
came
here for other reasons, and you came here, I dare say, because some of
the values of today's society are not yours. Yours are better, and
you
should not be afraid to say that, at least to yourself. Obviously, you
cannot draw a hard and fast line. You do not want society and the
military to grow so far apart in their experiences and their values
that they cannot talk to one another because, after all, the larger society
has to pay the bills at the end of the day. But, the fact is, that
society wants a military that is more rigorous, more selfless, more
sacrificing, more full of certain values--some people consider
anachronistic, such as patriotism than the rest of society. They want
it that way, and all I am saying is, that democratic society inevitably
is individualist and materialistic and opposed to hierarchies.
But, a democratic society, like any other society, cannot live without
those things that are the reverse of that: solidarity, selflessness and
hierarchy. The values of democracy are wonderful values but they are
not sufficient. They are necessary. I assume you come to a military
academy in part to get what is sufficient. <applause>
A
Thank you, sir.
Q
Sir, Second Class, Jeff Hottenstein (phon. sp.).
Referring to your belief about the potential for warfare throughout
history, I was wondering if you were troubled by President Bush's
campaign promises for greater isolationism over the previous
administration, especially referring to Kosovo?
A
No, I was not. I would not characterize what President
Bush, as a candidate, advocated as isolationism. Isolationism is the
belief that the United States has no significant role beyond its
shores.
That is not his position. His position is that only the United States
has the power, including the power to project power, which is what the
United States Navy is about, only the United States is sufficient to
handle certain very large growing dangers, and that lesser
problems--such as Haiti and Kosovo--should be handled regionally, if
possible, by lesser nations with lesser reach so that the United States
can economize its men and women, and military assets. That is not
isolationism; that is just prudence. And, I do not think that you will
find from President Bush anything other than the following. He is
worried that as the services have become smaller, the tempo of
operations has increased and that this puts strains on military men and
women, and their families, not to mention their equipment and morale
that are, in the long run, sustainable. It is not, for example,
isolationist that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has said that it
is "nonsense," actually his word, to use the United States
military to
fight the problem of drugs in Columbia, because the problem of drugs in
Columbia is actually a hundred billion dollar demand from the streets
of America's cities. That is not a military problem, and that is not why
young men and women join the military and are trained. That is police
work, it is dignified, and it is fine. It certainly is the case that
it is peace time now, and the military services offer travel, they offer
education, they offer job training, and some people will join for those
reasons and they are not bad reasons but, again, they are not
sufficient. And, with regards to curriculum here, behind all the
necessary math and engineering, there has to be history, and there has
to be political science, there has to be those disciplines that teach
you that the world is a dangerous place, always has been, always will
be. And there has to be an ethos beyond the classroom, beyond even
the
playing fields. An ethos that reminds young men and women in the
military academies daily that their business is to be ready to inflict
violence. Society does not want to hear that, does not want to see
pictures of it, and would prefer not to talk about it. All the more
reason why, as Orwell said, a few people must face those facts. Thank
you, very much. <applause>
EMCEE: Mr. Will, on
behalf of the brigade of midshipmen, and
all of our guests here this evening, I'd like to present to you a small
token of our appreciation for your remarks tonight. Not only did you
layout a pretty good starting lineup, but you also gave all of us an
important reminder that we must continue to be leaders who seek a
higher standard to protect our country in a still dangerous world.
Thank you
very much, sir.
| Jay R. Chase Copyright © 1997 [Chase Family -Houston, TX USA]. All rights reserved. Revised: March 02, 2003 . |
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