Military
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In his last address to the Corps of Cadets on 12 May 1962, General Douglas MacArthur centered his message on the words “Duty, Honor, Country,” calling them the guiding ideals that build courage, restore faith, and create hope. He told the cadets that they were the leaven binding together the nation’s system of defense and that from their ranks would come the military leaders who would hold the nation’s destiny when war came. Declaring that the long gray line had never failed, he warned that if it ever did, a million ghosts would rise from their white crosses thundering those same words. Reflecting on his own life as its twilight approached, he said his memories always returned to West Point and to the echoes of “Duty, Honor, Country,” which for him expressed the story of the American man at arms on weary marches and in grim attacks. He said the cadets’ mission remained fixed and inviolable: to win the nation’s wars, because in war there is no substitute for victory.
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West Point, New York · United States
