of war lies in remembrance. i would suggest that the beginning of wisdom lies in remembrance. remembering what we got right, remembering what we got wrong. if you walk on the mall in washington, you have monuments, both the world war ii monument and the vietnam monument, two very different conflicts and we shouldn t lose that. we should not overly sentimentalize the past. these were controversial wars in real time. we forget that we didn t declare war on germany until germany declared war on us. five days after pearl harbor. we were an isolationist country heading into the great cataclysm of the middle of the 20th century. vietnam divide ? some ways in some ways divides us there, the conflict there. understanding the panoply of history and remembering the debates we v the debates on the the newspapers and now
each other. again, i don t want to be nostalgic about it. then you cut to vietnam and you have people getting their way out. remember the great john fogerty song fortunate son. there were people who could buy their way out. fogerty wrote that song because he was watching julie nixon marrying david eisenhauer. he realized eisenhower wouldn t be affected by this. that was the ambient reality of the time. my own family story is fairly representative. my both my grand fathers fought in the second world war, my father fought in vietnam and i didn t serve. that s a fairly common story. yeah. as we mark this very important day, memorial day, a major milestone has been reached at west point. this year the u.s. military academy graduated a record-setting number of african-american women cadets.
of vietnam. world war ii was far more commonly shared and led to a peace time or a cold war draft where one of the reasons we re so divided right now, i would argue, is that we don t know each other very well. we live in that s correct. we live in very secure silos and so you have to look back and think, what was that. my old boss charlie peters, has written a lot about this and thought about it. john kennedy, when he was on pt 109, was on there with a plumber from the bronx, a truck driver from iowa. people that john kennedy would never have encountered as the sion of massachusetts immigrant family and yet he understood, because he served with them, he understood that people were more complex and he knew, they knew