Notes Along the Way
Here is a nicely done adaptation of President John F. Kennedy’s Moon Shot speech, given 60 years ago today. Very inspiring.
Kennedy was a true visionary and a pragmatic idealist. He knew this nation could not lead the world into the future as a beacon of freedom, hope, and democracy if we did not, as a nation, strive to achieve the best, to show that “Man in his quest for knowledge and progress is determined and cannot be deterred.”
I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between Communism and Nazi-ism, I would choose Communism. I hope not to be called upon to survive in the world under a Government of either of those dispensations….It is not a question of opposing Nazi-ism or Communism; it is a question of opposing tyranny in whatever form it presents itself.
Bruce Catton:
He liked to say that he was in morals, not politics. From this the logical deduction was that people who opposed him, numerous though they undoubtedly were, must be willfully wrong. . . .
Yet angry words were about the only kind anyone cared about to use these days. Men seemed tired of the reasoning process. Instead of trying to convert one’s opponents it was simpler just to denounce them, no matter what unmeasured denunciation might lead to. . . . Men saw what they feared and hated, concentrated on its wide empty plains, and as they stared they were losing the ability to see virtue in compromise and conciliation. The man on the other side, whatever one’s vantage point, was beginning to look ominously alien. . . .
A philippic, as he had promised. No single vote had been changed by it; the Senate would decide, at last, precisely as it would have done if he had kept quiet. But he had not been trying to persuade. No one was, these days; a political leader addressed his own following, not the opposition. Summer had been trying to inflame, to arouse, to confirm the hatreds and angers that already existed. In the North there were men who from his words would draw a new enmity toward the South; in the South there were men who would see in this speaker and what he had said a final embodiment of the compelling reasons why it was good to think seriously about secession.
These excerpts are from Catton’s book, This Hallowed Ground. Though he is describing something that happened 165 years ago, it feels eerily contemporary.
In the opening pages of his book, a section aptly subtitled “Sowing the Wind,” Catton is describing the mood of the U.S. Senate (and the nation really) as Senator Charles Sumner prepared and delivered a speech on the Senate floor denouncing slavery and calling for the territory of Kansas to be admitted to the Union as a free state.
A few days later, on the Senate floor, as a result of that speech, Sumner was attacked and almost beat to death with a cane by Preston Brooks, a senator from South Carolina, and a strong advocate for slavery and states’ rights.
It was May, 1856. The nation was just 5 years from the opening shots of a bloody civil war.
I read Christopher Gilbert’s biography of the Duke of Wellington many years ago and remember thinking how the Duke’s campaign against Napoleon would make a great movie or historical novel.
It’s hard not to find some humor and fascination in a man who is confident enough—and then some—to criticize his boss with such oblique candor.
Here is an extract from a letter written by Wellington in Spain around 1810 to the Secretary of War, Lord Bradford:
My lord, if I attempted to answer the mass of futile correspondence that surrounds me, I should be debarred from all serious business of campaigning.
So long as I retain an independent position I shall see to it that no officer under my command is debarred, by attending to the futile drivelling of mere quil driving in your lordship’s officer, from attending to his first duty – which is, as always, to train the private men under his command.
Jeff Wills 