42 years ago a decent man passed away
Here are just a few of the things he said:
There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs
When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war. War settles nothing.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.
If you think those are the words of a someone who has not know war, you are very wrong. They are the words of a man who knew war as well as anyone.
Perhaps the next quote will help you realize who the speaker was:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
That last quote is from a speech in April 1953 before the American Society of Newspapers Editors by the President of the United State, Dwight David Eisenhower.
On this day in 1969 he passed away, in Washington DC, at Walter Reed, of congestive heart failure.
I choose to take today to remind us of a decent man.
