Medal Of Honor Recipients

"On August 30, Lindbergh visited Tarawa, recalled the terrible casualties there, and told of a naval officer who lined up the few Japanese captured, kept those who could speak English for questioning, and had the rest killed. In early September, he noted that on some islands Marines actually dug up dead bodies in their search for gold teeth. Elsewhere they collected noses as well as ears, teeth, and skulls. When Lindbergh finally left the Pacific islands and cleared customs in Hawaii, he was asked if he had any bones in his baggage. It was, he was told, a routine question."

"On May 18, 1944, about two weeks after Lindbergh had tied in with a Marine unit, he recorded that the camps were full of reports of Japanese torture and the beheading of captured American pilots. A month later, on June 21, he summarized the conversation of an American general who told how an unsuspecting Japanese prisoner was given a cigarette and then seized from behind and had his throat "slit from ear to ear" as a demonstration of how to kill Japanese. Lindbergh's objections were met with tolerant scorn and pity."

"No source, however, captures the war hates and war crimes of this merciless struggle more soberly than Charles Lindbergh's diary. For over four months in mid-1944, Lindbergh lived and flew as a civilian observer with U.S. forces based in New Guinea, and as the weeks passed he became deeply troubled, not by the willingness to kill on the part of the soldiers, which he accepted as an inherent part of the war, but by the utter contempt in which Allied fighting men held their Japanese adversaries. The famous "Lone Eagle," whose isolationist sentiments had placed him among the conservative opponents of President Roosevelt's policies, really hearkened back to what [J. Glenn Gray] has called the more chivalrous tradition of the professional militarist, who accepts the necessity of war while maintaining respect for his adversaries, recognizing courage as courage and duty as duty, irrespective of the uniform worn. Lindbergh found no such sentiments among the Allied forces in the Pacific, where officers and enlisted men alike saw the enemy simply as animals and "yellow sons of bitches," and his detailed journal may be the most forthright firsthand account available of the "other" side of the Pacific War."

"Lindbergh believed all the elements of the earth and heavens are connected, through space and time. The configurations of molecules in each moment help create the next. Thus he considered his defining moment just another step in the development of aviation and exploration — a summit built on all those that preceded it and a springboard to all those that would follow. Only by looking back, Lindbergh believed, could mankind move forward. "In some future incarnation from our life stream," he wrote in later years, "we may understand the reason for our existence in forms of earthly life.""

"As the first American airman to exhibit "the right stuff," Lindbergh inspired his country's first astronauts by sheer example. But more than that, he was — unknown to the public — the man most responsible for securing the funding that underwrote the research of Dr. Robert H. Goddard, the inventor of the modern rocket. A friend of the first man to fly an airplane, Lindbergh lived long enough in a fast-moving world to befriend the first man to walk on the moon."

"Lindbergh's arrival in Paris became the defining moment of his life, that event on which all his future actions hinged — as though they were but a predestined series of equal but opposite reactions, fraught with irony... In the spring of 1927, Lindbergh had been too consumed by what he called "the single objective of landing my plane at Paris" to have considered its aftermath. "To plan beyond that had seemed an act of arrogance I could not afford," he would later write. Even if he had thought farther ahead, however, he could never have predicted the unprecedented global response to his arrival. By that year, radio, telephones, radiographs, and the Bartlane Cable Process could transmit images and voices around the world within seconds. What was more, motion pictures had just mastered the synchronization of sound, allowing dramatic moments to be preserved in all their glory and distributed worldwide. For the first time all of civilization could share as one the sights and sounds of an event — almost instantaneously and simultaneously. And in this unusually good-looking, young aviator — of apparently impeccable character — the new technology found its first superstar. The reception in Paris was only a harbinger of the unprecedented worship people would pay Lindbergh for years. Without either belittling or aggrandizing the importance of his flight, he considered it part of the continuum of human endeavor, and that he was, after all, only a man. The public saw more than that... Universally admired, Charles Lindbergh became the most celebrated living person ever to walk the earth."

"I grow aware of various forms of man and of myself. I am form and I am formless, I am life and I am matter, mortal and immortal. I am one and many — myself and humanity in flux. I extend a multiple of ways in experience in space. I am myself now, lying on my back in the jungle grass, passing through the ether between satellites and stars. My aging body transmits an ageless life stream. Molecular and atomic replacement change life's composition. Molecules take part in structure and in training, countless trillions of them. After my death, the molecules of my being will return to the earth and sky. They came from the stars. I am of the stars."

"I know myself as mortal, but this raises the question: "What is I?" Am I an individual, or am I an evolving life stream composed of countless selves? ... As one identity, I was born in AD 1902. But as AD twentieth-century man, I am billions of years old. The life I consider as myself has existed though past eons with unbroken continuity. Individuals are custodians of the life stream — temporal manifestations of far greater being, forming from and returning to their essence like so many dreams. ... I recall standing on the edge of a deep valley in the Hawaiian island of Maui, thinking that the life stream is like a mountain river — springing from hidden sources, born out of the earth, touched by stars, merging, blending, evolving in the shape momentarily seen. It is molecules probing through time, found smooth-flowing, adjusted to shaped and shaping banks, roiled by rocks and tree trunks — composed again. Now it ends, apparently, at a lava brink, a precipitous fall. Near the fall's brink, I saw death as death cannot be seen. I stared at the very end of life, and at life that forms beyond, at the fact of immortality. Dark water bent, broke, disintegrated, transformed to apparition — a tall, stately ghost soul emerged from body, and the finite individuality of the whole becomes the infinite individuality of particles. Mist drifted, disappeared in air, a vanishing of spirit. Far below in the valley, I saw another river, reincarnated from the first, its particles reorganized to form a second body. It carried the same name. It was similar in appearance. It also ended at a lava brink. Flow followed fall, and fall followed flow as I descended the mountainside. The river was mortal and immortal as life, as becoming."

"In some future incarnation from our life stream, we may even understand the reason for our existence in forms of earthly life. The growing knowledge of science does not refute man's intuition of the mystical. Whether outwardly or inwardly, whether in space or in time, the farther we penetrate the unknown, the vaster and more marvelous it becomes. Only in the twentieth century do we realize that space is not empty, that it is packed with energy; it may be existence's source. Then, if space has produced existence and the form of man, can we deduce from it a form for God?"

"Our civilization depends on peace among Western nations, and therefore on united strength, for Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection. We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races. We need peace to let our best men live to work out those more subtle, but equally dangerous, problems brought by this new environment in which we dwell, to give us time to turn this materialistic trend, to stop prostrating ourselves before this modern idol of mechanical efficiency, to find means of combining freedom, spirit, and beauty with industrial life — a peace which will bring character, strength, and security back to Western peoples."

"The forces of Hannibal, Drake and Napoleon moved at best with the horses' gallop or the speed of wind on sail. Now, aviation brings a new concept of time and distance to the affairs of men. It demands adaptability to change, places a premium on quickness of thought and speed of action. Military strength has become more dynamic and less tangible. A new alignment of power has taken place, and there is no adequate peacetime measure for its effect on the influence of nations. There seems no way to agree on the rights it brings to some and takes from others."

"Air power is new to all our countries. It brings advantages to some and weakens others; it calls for readjustment everywhere. If only there were some way to measure the changing character of men, some yardstick to reapportion influence among the nations, some way to demonstrate in peace the strength of arms in war. But with all of its dimensions, its clocks, and weights, and figures, science fails us when we ask a measure for the rights of men. They cannot be judged by numbers, by distance, weight, or time; or by counting heads without a thought of what may lie within. Those intangible qualities of character, such as courage, faith, and skill, evade all systems, slip through the bars of every cage. They can be recognized, but not measured."

"A great industrial nation may conquer the world in the span of a single life, but its Achilles' heel is time. Its children, what of them? The second and third generations, of what numbers and stuff will they be? How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life. This is our modern danger — one of the waxen wings of flight. It may cause our civilization to fall unless we act quickly to counteract it, unless we realize that human character is more important than efficiency, that education consists of more than the mere accumulation of knowledge."

"Aviation seems almost a gift from heaven to those Western nations who were already the leaders of their era, strengthening their leadership, their confidence, their dominance over other peoples. It is a tool specially shaped for Western hands, a scientific art which others only copy in a mediocre fashion; another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe — one of those priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown."

"Aviation has struck a delicately balanced world, a world where stability was already giving way to the pressure of new dynamic forces, a world dominated by a mechanical, materialist, Western European civilization."

"Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance."

"What kind of man would live where there is no danger? I don't believe in taking foolish chances. But nothing can be accomplished by not taking a chance at all."

"Is he alone who has courage on his right hand and faith on his left hand?"

"Real freedom lies in wildness, not in civilization."

"Living in dreams of yesterday, we find ourselves still dreaming of impossible future conquest..."

"I owned the world that hour as I rode over it... free of the earth, free of the mountains, free of the clouds, but how inseparably I was bound to them."

"I realized that the future of aviation, to which I had devoted so much of my life, depended less on the perfection of aircraft than on preserving the epoch-evolved environment of life, and that this was true of all technological progress."

"Man must feel the earth to know himself and recognize his values... God made life simple. It is man who complicates it."

"Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation, in turn, becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on to the future."

"I feel transported from the modern to a Mesozoic era, freed from the blindness caused by our clocked environment of time. Ages turn to seconds as I voyage back and forth. Man becomes a recent advent among Earth's contending forms, and civilization but a flash in evolutionary progress. Surrounded by wildness I become less aware of my individuality than the life stream individuals manifest: that tenuous, immortal quality probing an unknown future and trailing, unbroken, beyond the vaguest past. Thus stripped of my culture's armor, I am an animal among various others, emerged to represent my species' progress, the momentary form and outlook of mankind. Whether in Florida's Everglades, Tanzania's Serengeti, or Java's Udjung Kulon, I see animals about me as earthly experiments with life; and so I feel myself. Each of us represents a life stream attempting to survive, to take advantage of every opportunity arising. The heron lengthens its legs to wade. The lion sharpens its teeth to kill. The rhinoceros thickens its skin for protection. Man develops his intellect to gain domination of the Earth, and by comparison, the speed with which he has gained this domination is astounding–another of those exponential curves that mount like an explosion. In civilization's sky-scraping cities I feel my superiority to lower animals confirmed by man's unchallenged rule. I view other creatures with a god's aloofness; for I have intellect, and they, no more than instinct. But surrounded by wildness, representing the human life stream with diverse competing life streams close at hand, I start doubting my superiority. I am struck by the physical perfection of other species in contrast to my own, amazed at the beauty, health and balance nature has achieved through instinct's influence. I ask myself what the intellect has done to warrant its prestige. As Earth's most messy, destructive and defective animal, man's record gives him little cause for pride. Our present intellectual superiority is no guarantee of great wisdom or survival power in our genes. Anthropologists often warn that Homo sapiens may be only an overspecialized branch on the trunk of evolution."

"My dear Roosevelt You have established a record as the best herder of Emperors since Napoleon. I should long ago have written you my gratitude had not men — and women — taught me to hold my tongue before my betters. On public affairs I am still a scholar, not a professor; and when I think I know enough to help you, I will do it ... You have taught us how to herd Emperors, but also you have shown that, of all cattle, Emperors are most easily herded."

"In the 50 years since caricature became a feature of American journalism," I pointed out, "no man has been the subject of so many cartoons as Roosevelt. A cartoon composite of him would include Don Quixote, Tamerlane, Napoleon, Ananias, Cromwell, Wallenstein, Peter the Great, the Wild Horse of Tartary, Dr. Dowie, a prize-fighter, Savonarola, a circus performer, a hyena, a snapping turtle, the Angel of Peace, Ivan the Terrible, Mohammed, and Moses."

"Teddy had been far to the left for a Republican-but still right of center as far as the Democrats were concerned-and had put into effect a lot of liberal ideas such as conservation of natural resources and the checking of 'malefactors of great wealth.' Taft was an ultra-conservative and partial to the special interests. He was not willing to use the full power of the presidency."

"The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their place again."

"I felt at the time Mr. Roosevelt had a good deal of the usual conviction of the powerful man in public life that correction should be left to him, a little resentment that a profession outside his own should be stealing his thunder."

"He hammered at the effects of privilege, pursued "malefactors of great wealth," but was not willing to do the hard studying of the causes which produced the malefactors."

"Must be President some day. A man you can't cajole, can't frighten, can't buy."

"You must always remember that the president is about six."

"If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. When it comes to Wall Street reform, that must be our bottom line. This is true not just because of the risk to our economy of another collapse and another bailout; it is also true because the current extreme concentration of ownership in the financial industry allows a very small number of huge financial institutions to have far too much economic and political power over this country. If Teddy Roosevelt, the Republican trustbuster, were alive today, he would say, "Break 'em up." And he would be right."

"More than a century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt recognized the danger of massive wealth and income inequality and what it meant to the economic and political well-being of the country. In addition to busting up the big trusts of his time, he fought for the creation of a progressive estate tax to reduce the enormous concentration of wealth that existed during the Gilded Age. "The absence of effective state, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power," the Republican president said. "The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is passed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in.. a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate." Roosevelt spoke those words on August 31, 1910. They are even more relevant today."

"Roosevelt himself typified the weaknesses of the middle class fight against trustifying capitalism. After this investigation of the Meat Trust, it was clear that Theodore Roosevelt's talk about "trust-busting" was a mere gesture. He saw the popular demand for reform and took it up as a political maneuver. He played up to the small capitalists with a few prosecutions under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. He was violent in denouncing Big Business and the "malefactors of great wealth," as he called them. But he did nothing to stop Morgan's U. S. Steel Corporation when it took over the Tennessee Coal & Iron Co. in the panic of 1907. No one took his anti-trust talk very seriously. He was an imperialist employing "dollar diplomacy" to build up American colonies."

"Theodore was the first president in the distinctively modern mold: he had a sense of drama and timing and a natural grasp of how to exploit the press to create a persona for himself in the eyes of the people. Beyond that, TR, as he was commonly known, had a rare ability to make personal use of popular causes and resentments. It was the age of "progressivism," a vague term, but one that connoted a new readiness to use the power of government for all sorts of grand things. H.L. Mencken, the great libertarian journalist and close observer and critic of presidents, compared him to the German kaiser, Wilhelm II, and shrewdly summed him up: "The America that [Theodore] Roosevelt dreamed of was always a sort of swollen Prussia, truculent without and regimented within.""

"This was a period of confusion. The ancient concepts of the rights of man was in conflict with the expansion and needs of big business and mass production. ...[O]ur emotions were inevitably attracted by the dynamic quality of Theodore Roosevelt (whose attachments to the principles of social justice has never been sufficiently developed by his biographers) and by the qualities of leadership in social reform... being demonstrated on the political plane by Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson."

"Like many people, I was an ardent admirer of Theodore Roosevelt. ...He had recommended to the people 's book How the Other Half Lives. I had read it, and Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural address of 1905, and had straightaway felt that the pursuit of social justice would be my vocation."

"(Would you have taken the same position against the Republicans if that party had been in power in 1914?) AP: Of course. You see, we tried very hard in 1916—wasn’t it [[Charles Evans Hughes|[Charles Evans] Hughes]] running against Wilson that year?—to get the Republicans to put federal suffrage in their platform, and we failed. We also failed with the Democrats. Then we tried to get the support of Mr. Hughes himself. Our New York State committee worked very hard on Mr. Hughes, and they couldn’t budge him. So we went to see former President [Theodore] Roosevelt at his home at Oyster Bay to see if he could influence Mr. Hughes. And I remember so vividly what Mr. Roosevelt said. He said, “You know, in political life you must always remember that you not only must be on the right side of a measure, but you must be on the right side at the right time.” He told us that that was the great trouble with Mr. Hughes, that Mr. Hughes is certainly for suffrage, but he can’t seem to know that he must do it in time. So Mr. Hughes started on his campaign around the country, and when he came to Wyoming, where women were already voting, he wouldn’t say he was for the suffrage amendment. And he went on and on, all around the country. Finally, when he came to make his final speech of the campaign in New York, he had made up his mind, and he came out strongly for the federal suffrage amendment. So it was true what Mr. Roosevelt had said about him."

"The peace the President had made possible at Portsmouth was the result of just such an inexplicable ability to impose his singular charge upon plural power. By sheer force of moral purpose, by clarity of perception, by mastery of detail and benign manipulation of men, he had become, as Henry Adams admiringly wrote him, "the best herder of Emperors since Napoleon.""

"In America, we have a figure from history from 1897 named Teddy Roosevelt. He was a wealthy man, who grew up in a privileged situation and who fought on the front lines. He put together his own men — hand chose them — and went to battle. You are like the Middle East version of Teddy Roosevelt."

"A crucial embellishment of the origin myth and key element of the national identity has been the myth of the frontier, analyzed in Richard Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation (1992), the last volume of a fascinating trilogy. He describes Theodore Roosevelt's belief that the West was won thanks to American arms, "the means by which progress and nationality will be achieved." That success, Roosevelt continued, "depends on the heroism of men who impose on the course of events the latent virtues of their 'race."" Roosevelt saw conflict on the frontier producing a species of virile "fighters and breeders" who would eventually generate a new leadership class. Militarism thus went hand in hand with the racialization of history's protagonists. No slouch as an imperialist, Roosevelt soon took the frontier myth abroad, seeing Asians as Apaches and the Philippines as Sam Huston's Texas in the process of being seized from Mexico. For Roosevelt, Slotkin writes, "racial violence [was] the principle around which both individual character and social organization develop.""

"Death had to take him in his sleep, for if he was awake there'd have been a fight."

"He was a great patriot, a great man; above all, a great American. His country was the ruling, mastering passion of his life from the beginning even unto the end."

"[A] great American statesman whose vision and superb courage I had always admired—Theodore Roosevelt."

"From Ulysses Grant to William McKinley, the prevailing conservative doctrine was a severe and self defeating laissez faire that left the big fish to eat the little fish while preaching the merits of social Darwinism and the survival of the fittest. Good presidents like Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were those who dared risk the power of government to challenge this."

"The Republican Party, then as always, was more economically and ethnically homogenous than the Democratic Party, but it too, in the manner of mass-based, ‘‘catch-all’’ American parties, contained its own conflicting elements. Under Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership in the century’s first decade, the Republicans had bid for a brief season to recapture their birthright claim to be the party of reform. But TR had shepherded his progressive followers out of the Republican fold and into the third-party ‘‘Bull Moose’’ schism of 1912. He thereby ensured the election of Wilson and contributed as well to the consolidation of conservative rule in the GOP. Some former Bull Moosers, like Chicago reformer and future New Deal secretary of the interior Harold Ickes, became Democrats in all but name; others, like Nebraska’s Senator George Norris, were relegated to an impotent minority in party councils during the triumphal conservative ascendancy of the 1920s."

"There was something about him which frightened the timid and the conventional and the men who in their walks, never stray from the well-trodden and dusty paths of party platitudes. The commonplace thought him violent, the pedantic thought him unprincipled, the correct thought him undignified, the kind of stern party men that treat the party headquarters as if they were the temple of their faith thought him simply wicked. But the common people heard him gladly, and they thronged to greet him and to listen to his speeches."

"My own state of New York has given men like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Stimson, Elihu Root, Charles Evan Hughes, and Thomas Dewey. These were men whose credos as 'progressive conservatives,' to use Stimson's own description, were built on their conviction, first, that the primary and overriding requirement of all government is that it should not infringe upon the essential liberties of the individual, and, second, that within this limitation government could and must be made a powerful instrument for the enhancement of individual citizens by group action."