Paul's Perambulations a personal blog

May 17, 1948
“I’ll admit that it is rather difficult for me to look upon a conscientious objector with patience…While your four sons and my three nephews were risking their lives to save our government, and the things for which we stand, these people were virtually shooting them in the back.   I ran across one conscientious objector (Desmond Doss) that I really believe is all man…I decorated him with a Congressional Medal of Honor….the majority with whom I came in contact were just plain cowards and shirkers.”

(from   Eleanor and Harry, The Correspondence. 2002)

This letter was addressed to Eleanor Roosevelt in response to her request that he reconsider pardons for COs. Letter was saved but not sent, and he later mailed Eleanor a copy of the Attorney General’s statement regarding the report in question, including a personal note that there would be no review because the report was complete and he approved it

Doss was generally reviled during most of his military service as a medic because of his religious conscientious objection to killing. Even though there is absolutely no evidence that he ever failed to pursue his duties, he was generally considered cowardly simply on the basis of his anti-war beliefs. When he happened to be assigned a position of great danger and responded bravely, he became the public “exception.”   Had his assignments kept him shipboard, he would surely have remained one of Truman’s assumed cowards.

It could be said that to  hold to your principles when the world is against you is what requires the greatest bravery.

The following is a copy of my post on the Times website in response to R.O.T.C. Dilemma:

This article is heavily biased and in some cases badly misinformed. Please go back to some original sources of the period (not other newspaper articles). Most significantly, R.O.T.C. was never “banned” on most campuses in the 60’s. The requirement was that if R.O.T.C. was to give grades and academic credit, it must function under the academic regulations that applied to all the other academic programs of the University. Their alternative was to continue as they had been doing, but not for academic credit. This the military adamantly refused. They are a law unto themselves in higher education, and this is what we must question. My heartfelt concern is insuring educational integrity. Note that one cadet says “I have no personal opinion,” in response to a question about R.O.T.C., and the article’s author confirms that cadets are not free to express an opinion. Do we believe that this accords with the true purpose of a University education and is something we should encourage?

p.s. In my experience the folks I knew well in R.O.T.C. were fine individuals and had “chosen” to enter R.O.T.C. because they needed the scholarship money. Is this a good basis for a volunteer army? And what does it say about the value we place on education in this country?

I once thought that Secretary of Defense McNamara was simply amoral, but after hearing him speak in the 90’s at Swarthmore, I know it’s something far worse. He claims to recognize the Vietnam War as a moral issue and “feels” for people’s loss and is “sorry” for what happened, but offers no apology for sending thousands to their death for what he knew was a lost and mistaken cause. See material below from the NYTimes obituary of July 7, 2009 and “The Fog of War” interviews of 2003. (more…)