○  thayer award acceptance address  ○

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; 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 hundreds 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 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 th

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